Evening Post FRIDAY, MARCH 12, 1943. THE AIR FRONT

Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 60, 12 March 1943, Page 4

Evening Post FRIDAY, MARCH 12, 1943. THE AIR FRONT

To nations which have not undergone air attack on a large scale and suffered accordingly, accounts of air raids are apt to become the least interesting items in the day's news. There is such a sameness about the phraseology of the official narratives that one raid is made to appear like any other, and the public, seeing from the rest of the war news that places are being lost and won, battles fought on sea and land with definite results and progress made, may be excused for doubting a little whether air power makes all the difference in modern warfare attributed to it by the experts. It is only when, say, Berlin is bombed or a Japanese convoy is destroyed by aircraft that the general public begin to take notice. The failure of the Gex-man air blitz of 1940-41—the sequel to the • Battle of Britain—to subdue the people of Britain is often used as an argument that air power cannot succeed in crushing the enemy or, indeed, in very greatly influencing the course of war. This is, of course, the opposite extreme to the theory promulgated by the Italian General Douhet long before the present war and since revived by fervid advocates of all-in air war, like the American Major Seversky, that a complete concentration on air power \ can win a war without intervention : on land. ; The truth will almost ■ certainly be ; found in the middle—that air power is an absolutely vital factor in modern war, but that it cannot win victory alone without the other arms, the army and the navy. What air power has done and can do is revealed in today's news by Britain's Air Minister, Sir' Archibald Sinclair, in speaking on the Air Estimates in the House of Commons. The R.A.F.'s raids throughout last year and mounting in a crescendo this year on western Europe have wrought immense havoc on Germany's war machine. The Air Minister described the "devastation of a long row of German cities" by heavy night raids and the new development of daylight raids "carried into the heart of Germany." A long list of figures showed the "shattering effect of Bomber Command's attacks on the Axis war machine." It is known that Bomber Command insists on the most careful search for legitimate military targets before bombs are dropped, with the result that they reckon that the raids have destroyed or damaged 2000 works or factories in Germany alone. Last Friday's attack on Essen he described as "probably the heaviest blow ever struck at German war industry." The figures for the other cities mentioned are equally impressive, and the raids are now stretching to cover Nuremberg and Munich not with just a few bombs, but with the "cascade" of 500 tons poured on Munich, heavier than anything dropped on Britain in a single raid. <• But the Minister is not one of those who believe the Air Force can do the whole job. To destroy the enemy's power of resistance—the aim of any war —it is necessary to invade the territory he occupies and defeat him ,in the field. The news states that he "gave a hint of the preparations for the invasion of Europe," observing that "the lessons of the combined air, land, and sea operations in Africa J were being learnt in this country." These lessons, sometimes taught by hard experience, as in Greece and Crete, have been studied with the utmost care and, no doubt, new methods will have been devised and practised to surprise the enemy, who has been shown before now that he j has not a monopoly of ingenuity and resourcefulness. One of the most deadly processes in preparation for a "second front in Europe" has been the destruction of rail communications in western Europe by which reinforcements could be "rushed" by the enemy to any threatened point. This process includes not only the pounding of rail junctions and marshalling yards, but also the "shooting up" of trains and locomotives—"train-busting" as the R.A.F. calls it. Many hundreds of locomotives have been damaged or destroyed by this process, with the result that the German Transport Ministry last year declared: "Railway transport has become the greatest of our problems, as we have learnt from bitter experience." All these, almost daily, attacks by the R.A.F.'s light squadrons on every means of transport, by road, rail, sea, canal, or air, are a "softening" process by which air power eases the path for invasion. There can be every confidence that air power will play its full part in the achievement of victory.