BOMBS ON GERMANY

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 50, Issue 3056, 31 March 1941, Page 7

BOMBS ON GERMANY

ACHIEVEMENT OF R.A.F.

600 VISITS IN 3 MONTHS ENEMY MILITARY TARGETS (From the Official War Correspondent in Britain) With the coming of spring -in Europe the air wai’ has livened and already heavy air raids have been made on German centres of military importance. In some quarters there have been demands that Germany’s civil population should be bombed in reprisal; but few realise that up to the end of last year the Royal Air Force had bombed targets in Germany more than 1,500 times.

At the end of September the raids on Germany numbered 900, so that in the following three months the bombers visited the Nazi targets more than 600 times, an indication of the increased might of the Royal Air Force. The number of individual towns in Germany subjected to raids up to the end of December was 270.

The pattern traced by the record of falling bombs follows faithfully the pattern of the industrial frame-

work on which the Nazi. war effort depends. As the heart of Germany’s munitions organism—despite frantic efforts to move it eastwards —is the Ruhr, it is the Ruhr which has received the severest attention, over 500 raids. Coal, steel, arms factories, chemical works, oil plants, are crowded in this area, and the ac-curately-aimed bombs of the R.A.F. have done heavy damage there. Goering’s Boast This is noteworthy in view of Goering’s boast before the war:— “I have convinced myself personally of the measures taken to protect the Ruhr against air attack. We will not expose the Ruhr to a single bomb dropped by enemy aircraft.” Not one bomb, but thousands have wrought havoc in the Ruhr and the smashing of the Nazi war machine goes on with growing intensity. A hundred miles higher up the Rhine and stretching from Frank-furtam-Main to Stuttgart, with Mannheim as its centre, is another industrialised Region, important also for chemical works and oil refineries.

Mannheim up to December 31 had suffered 34 raids, paralleled in the Ruhr by Duisborg-Ruhrort (35), Cologne (55), and Gelsenkirchen (40). Germany’s other centre of munitions activity and oil plants is in the Leipzig area, 200 miles east of the Ruhr. The great hydrogenation plant at Leuna, near Leipzig, had a production capacity of 500,000 tons of synthetic oil per annum. Naturally, it has received some of the heaviest attacks. Berlin, up Ao the end of last year, had been raided 35 times. v

Disruption of communications is hardly less important than the destructon of war materials. Hamm, the great railway centre, was raided 80 times up to December 31. On that date the score for Hamburg was ©l, and for Bremen 52. Since the New Year both have been visited many times by the R.A.F. bombers. Naval Raids Germany’s naval ports have also received attention. At the beginning of this year the R.A.F. could report raids on these as follows:—Kiel 32, Wilhelmshaven 36, Emden 27. The figures refer only to German territory and take no account of aids on invasion ports or on aerodromes and other military targets in German occupied regions. Photographic records have confimed reports of the heavy damage done and reveal that this form of “reprisal” for the German bombing of _ civilians is seriously hampering the Nazi effort to produce munitions. It is also destroying much of the Luftwaffe fuel supplies.

But the worst feature, from the German- viewpoint, is that the raids are growing heavier and more frequent.