BERLIN RUINS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 164, 13 July 1945, Page 5

BERLIN RUINS

AWFUL DEVASTATION

After Final Bombing Arict Two

Weeks Of Fighting

LONDON;". July &

Take : Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide, and squeeze them together compactly Within . a circle of parkland, writes Osmar White, Melbourne Herald war correspondent in Germany.

Destroy Sydney completely, so that only a few tottering walls are left down George, Pitt and Castlereagh Streets. Take' off every roof in Melbourne and burn half of it. '■•'•'

Break every window and blow a few holes in every wall iri Brisbane.

Leave Adelaide intact, rearranging it'in appropriate districts. ' ■/■'

Then you will have something like Berlin as it is now—particularly if you blast and strip' 'every tree, and dynamite every .'square yard of lawn in the Sydney Botanical Gardens and put it where Berlin's Tiergarten ought to be.

This is what the Allied Air Forces' 64,600 tons of bombs and the fortnight's street fighting by the Red Army did to the administrative and industrial' heart of Hitler's Reich.

I spent six or seven hours yesterday driving through Berlin and its suburbs. Only once or twice did I see any Considerable area where buildings were unscarred or only slightly damaged.

The streets are still littered with burned, shot-up motor cars, trucks and Array transports, : and one repeatedly comes on the wreckage of dug-in tanks in the streets. Berlin was the greatest single target in Germany—a densely populated area of 30 square miles, where one-tenth of all the industry of major military importance in Germany was located. . , When the devastation caused by the Russians is added, the area of complete destruction will probably be shown to be between■ 6000 and 7000 acres, out of the city's total built Up area of 19,500 acres, j Another 6000 t0.7000 acres have been so badly damaged that they will require complete demolition. Thus only one-third of the city can be repaired. The rest must be rebuilt. . • . "'