LIKE BIG NAVAL BATTLE

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 11, 14 January 1944, Page 5

LIKE BIG NAVAL BATTLE

U.S.A.A.F. RAID ON GERMANY

LONDON, January 12. The British United Press correspondent at a U.S.A.A.F. bomber base says that yesterday's great air battle over Germany seemed like a great naval engagement to the men engaged in it. German fighters flying in line abreast against the bomber formations fired broadsides of rocket shells.

The Germans even used "destroyer" smoke screens. Some crews admitted that they never expected to return home when the German attacks were fully developed.

The huge air battle over Germany yesterday inflicted one of the hardest blows yet struck against the German air force, at a cost of approximately five per cent, of the American planes, said General Arnold, Chief of the United States Army Air Force, in a statement released in the United States. He added "that three important fighter plane factories were smashed, their production being wiped out altogether for months.

The United States European headquarters states that the U.S.A.A.F. fighters escorting the bombers flew farther into Germany than on any previous mission, and knocked out 28 enemy planes. One group of longdistance fighters, without loss, destroyed 14 enemy planes and damaged over a score. This group has now raised its score to 32 planes destroyed without loss in three missions.

The group flew over 400 miles to the target and then engaged rocket-firing enemy planes in violent combat while bombers were dropping their explosives. The heaviest cost of a U.S.A.A.F. daylight attack was the loss of 60 bombers in the raid against the Schweinfurt ball-bearing works on October 14. Other heavy bomber losses were 59 against Schweinfurt and Regensburg on August 17, and 45 against Stuttgart on September 6. The highest total of German fighters shot down in an American raid was 307 in the Schweinfurt and Regensburg attack on August

17. A Luftwaffe pilot, Lieutenant Westmann, broadcasting over Berlin radio said: "The Allied air offensive is a veritable steam-roller rolling over us day and night. Our pilots are undergoing the same experience as the German infantry in 1917 when the first British tanks appeared. The' German air defence in the past 12 months has undergone its hardest test. We had to develop a-jnew system of elastic defence. Our pilots have to wait to the very last minute for the leader to decide whether it pays better to go against the enemy fighters or against the bombers."