LONDON'S AGONY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 91, 18 April 1941, Page 6

LONDON'S AGONY.

As we read the description of the German raid on London on Wednesday night we may see, more clearly than ever before, the kind of enemy we are fighting. He will stop at nothing. He believes that terroristic air bombing is not only legitimate, but useful from the military point of view. In that he differs from the Royal Air Force, which believes that the sole object should be to hit the enemy where it hurts him most, and always with a view to damaging his war machine. But the Germans have never given up hope that what they were able to do to Rotterdam they can some night do to London, and that their onslaught will have results upon the morale of the people similar to those seen in Holland. They have failed to achieve such results in any city of the United Kingdom, and they will not achieve them in London. Nevertheless they will continue to try, without regard to humanitarian feeling, which they avowedly despise. It is hard —and it must be infinitely harder in London—to accept the view that the Royal Air Force is doing greater damage to Germany's war machines by raids on, say, Kiel, than the Germans are doing to Britain by such raids a= London has now experienced, but that is the view of those best qualified to judge. The heroic people of London are, in truth, receiving in their city, and on their houses and bodies, bombs which, if they fell on aircraft factories and munition works, would most seriously retard Britain's war effort. That reflection may be the coldest of comfort, but it must prevail. If it should not —if the anger of the public should result in irresistible demands ; for reprisals and counter-reprisals, then the policy of the R.A.F. will, in effect, be dictated by the enemy, with lamentable consequences.