Hamburg Faces Ruin As Result of Bombing

Manawatu Times, Volume 66, Issue 17, 21 January 1941, Page 6

Hamburg Faces Ruin As Result of Bombing

GREAT R.A.F. RAIDS LONDON, Dec; 22. Hamburg faces bankruptcy. Every report reaching; London emphasises the growing effects of Royal Air Force bombing on this one great seaport, the second largest •ity in Germany and the horn# of mwe than 1,150,000 people. New ships under construction there have been smashed. At one period five submarines out of 26 then building in the Hamburg yards were damaged beyond repair. Sections of the workshops at Blohm and Voss’s shipyards have been turned over to aircraft construction. They have bee/i heavily bombed, and aircraft nearly completed have been burned out. Shipyards and Oil Tanks. The Vulcan shipyards have also been hit repeatedly, while to the west m Finkenwarder the big yards of the Deutsche Werft have been heavily damaged. They were laid down in 1918 to build new ships to crush British sea power. So many Hamburg ships have been sunk or damaged in harbour, .or mined off the mouth of the Elbe and in Baltic waters, that shortage of tonnage is becoming an acute problem. To try to offset these losses, Swedish ships are being used to the fullest extent in the Baltic trade. But Germany must pay freightage in these ships. The huge market halls near the docks, which handle the entire fruit and vegetable supply for the city, were destroyed in early attacks on Hamburg, and the trade is still dislocated. Any oil tanks in the petrol harbour which have not been burned out are useless, because tankers cannot run the blockade and keep them supplied. Across the Elbe, the biggest vegetable oil works in Germany stand blackened and gutted; the Phoenix works, making rubber tyre plant, have been demolished; the enormous Rhenanla Ossag refineries are extensively damaged. Transfer of Industries. Damage to factories daily becomes more serious. More and more industries are being transferred to eastern cities or to occupied Poland. Each new week swells the ranks of the workless and adds to depression and discontent. The docks no longer bustle with the rich trade which brought prosperity; the burned-out shells of warehouses, the smashed wharves, tell the tale of Hamburg’s ruin. Damage to railways is so extensive that goods traffic must always be given preference. Travellers from Berlin to Hamburg report that the journey now takes 24 hours instead of the usual four hours, and involves at least five changes •it either direction. All reports agree that the damage in Hamburg is confined to the docks and industrial districts and that the city itself has been hardly affected. This is a striking tribute to the accuracy of the British bombing.