ENTIRELY DUE TO WEATHER

Dominion, Volume 34, Issue 112, 5 February 1941, Page 9

ENTIRELY DUE TO WEATHER

Luftwaffe Inactivity OFFICER COMMENTS f ON AIR WAR Effective British Plan (British Official Wireless.) (Received February 4, 7 p.m.) RUGBY, February 3. A high Air Force officer in London today stated that there was no doubt in his mind or in that of the Commander-in-Chief of the Bomber Command that the present inactivity of the Luftwaffe over Britain was entirely due to the unusually bad weather conditions spread over the whole of north-eastern Europe. Referring in general to the Royal Air Force attacks, the officer said that so far the German air defences had caused the Royal Air Force bombers no undue worry. He remarked that the Nazi air chief, General Milch, in his recent speech, had found it necessary to explain to the. German public that, far from being able to give immunity from the British bombers, the nightraiders were “very difficult to find. Speaking of the damage done by the R.A.F. attacks, the officer said the pilots’ reports contained an accurate account which was supported in the second place by subsequent photos and, thirdly, by information received from independent sources. He instanced the raid made on Mannheim in December, in which information received established that some nine direct hits were obtained on the railways, causing damage which took three weeks to repair, while 248 industrial premises were destroyed besides considerable damage done to the inland port. The German railways communications had been strained to capacity, he said, and any loss of time would never be made up—hence the value of raids which caused dislocation of the communications. Though the weather had interfered with a great many raid programmes, all the attacks had conformed to the general plan of concentrating the greatest force at the weak spots in the German war economy. Many of. the targets were selected by the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and at present the Achilles heel of Nazi war economy was the synthetic oil production.