DUE TO THE WEATHER

Evening Post, Volume CXXXI, Issue 30, 5 February 1941, Page 7

DUE TO THE WEATHER

PRESENT INACTIVITY

EVIDENCE OF RAID DAMAGE

IN REICH

(British Official Wireless.)

RUGBY, February 3

A high Air Force officer in London stated today that there was no doubt in his mind or in that of the Comman-der-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 northeastern 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 British bombers, night raiders were "very difficult to find." Speaking of the damage done by the R.A.F. attacks, the officer said that 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 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 to the inland port.

The German railway 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 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.