TERRIFIC POWER

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 108, 8 May 1943, Page 5

TERRIFIC POWER

ALLIED AIR BLOWS Heaviest Any Army Has Ever Had To Suffer British Official Wireless Rec. 2 p.m. ■ RUGBY, May 7. The Air Under-Secretary, Captain H. H. Balfour, and Air-Marshal Coningham, commanding the Tactical Air Force, watched from a hilltop the greatest air assault that any army has ever had to withstand, with all the bombing concentrated into an area of four miles by 1000 yards. This was the assault which blasted the way for the big Allied push in Tunisia on Thursday. ylt was a gigantic peppering of bombs, with explosions planted so tightly together that there could not have been many yai»ds of surface untouched, says the Air Ministry News Service. R.A.F. and American flyers of the Tactical Air Force had the biggest day on record. British soldiers have never seen anything like it. , , One R.A.F. officer watched the effect of this field of fire from a hill just west of Massicault, while wave after wave of bombers went over. He said, "The ground troops, unable to restrain their enthusiasm, came running across from their trucks to shake me by the hand and say, 'By God what a show.' " The hill on which this R.A.F. officer stood was three or four miles west of the Germans. The airman saw bombers go over while the British Army advanced without the slightest hindrance from hostile aircraft "From the first, light until in the morning the sky was densely mottled with bombers," he said. "Each formation had a tremendous fighter escort. Bombers came from the west, sweeping over the hill into a haze. The whole battlefield was covered with dust."