WAR IN THE AIR

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 79, 11 January 1944, Page 6

WAR IN THE AIR

THE ALLIED OFFENSIVE CHIEF FEATURES OF 1943 The tremendous increase in the tonnage of bombs dropped on Germany was undoubtedly the chief feature of the air war in 1943. Havoc was wrought in all her principal industrial cities and 17 of them, it was recently stated, have been put definitely out of commission. Six others needed only one more largescale raid to make them also liabilities on Germany’s war industries account. Most of the damage was done in the last seven months of the year, when over 100,000 tons of bombs were dropped by the R.A.F. alone, the bomb load on the largest raids being over 2000 tons. Dove-tailing neatly with the British night bombing in the European theatre has been the steadily increasing American effort by day. The United Stales Army Eighth Air Force in England held to its theory of precision bombing, pinpointing key targets in a series of daylight raids that culminated in the 1200ton raid on Bremen on 20th December. Estimates of the damage thus jointly caused during the year have placed the loss of German war potential as high as 30 per cent. The official English estimate of about 25 per cent, should be more nearly correct (comments the “N.Z. Herald”). CO-OPERATION WITH ARMIES Close support for the Allied armies in the campaign in North Africa was another feature of the air war. At every stage of the attack the Allied troops had overwhelming air superiority. In the campaign for the Italian mainland and its islands Pantcllaria surrendered after two days’ pounding from air and sea, and an even swifter victory was secured in the 24 hour assault on Lampedusa. When the attack on Sicil.y opened Flying Fortresses eliminated all but about 3.0 of the airfields on the island, materially aiding the invasion forces.

Spitfires landed in Sicily only a lew hours after troops had secured the airfields, and from then on they and other aircraft played havoc with German and Italian installations and troops and took heavy toll of the enemy in the Messina Strait. Methods ol‘ co-ordinat-ing the air arm with the others, worked out in Africa, have since been applied to every branch of Allied activity with increasing success. Not the least was the use of aircraft in the Battle of the Atlantic. > operations in pacific The same story, although on a much smaller scale, was told in the Pacific war against tlu? Japanese. Smashing blows were dealt at successive concentrations of materials in their bases at Rabaul and elsewhere, thousands of tons of naval and merchant shipping being sunk in different attacks. Twentytwo ships carrying 15,000 assault troops were sunk in the one action in the Bismarck Sea in March and hundreds of smaller Japanese ships, barges and aircraft were destroyed in raids by fighters and bombers along the whole perimeter of the Allied attack.

Apart from desultory raids on Britain, in which they dropped in retaliation only about 3 per cent, of the British bomb tonnage, the Germans’ only air offensive was in the seizure of the Aegean islands of Leros. Kos and Samos, which were beyond the range of Allied fighters’ effective intervention. The enemy’s aircraft production was increasingly changed from .bombers to fighters as the Allied hammering mountea in fury. In many cases bombers were' converted for fighter use in the desperate attempt to check the offensive. NO REAL SHIELD AGAINST BOMBERS Germdn flak became heavier and higher both by night and day and other defensive measures were tried. At night the Germans flare-lighted the path of British bombers running in on the target to guide their fighters and guns and also marked the path followed from the target area. No method adopted proved an adequate shield against the crushing blows of the Allied bombAs the Allies increased the tempo of their offensive, emphasis on the technical side was increasingly placed on the bombers. Few changes were mad£ to the well-tried English “heavies,” Lancaster, Halifax and Stirling, but extensive modifications were made to the Boeing Fortress and some to the Liberator. These were mainly in the bomb load, originally little more than that of an English medium bomber, and in the defensive armament. TOLL OF GERMAN FIGHTERS The effect of the changes was to reduce the speed below that of the 300-miles-an-hour Lancaster, but without much loss of range, and to make the Fortresses an even more thorny problem for German defence. Some huge scores against German fighters were reported by Fortress and Liberator crews, their success at one time giving rise to the English comment that fighter escort appeared hardly necessary. A fact which emerged was that by holding closely to their formations the bombers were making fighter interception extremely costly to the Germans, who were forced to adopt other weapons, notably the rocket-gun fighter.

These were machines armed with a special gun which fired a string of 12 or 15 rocket projectiles with several pounds of explosive charge. The method was for the interceptors to attack the bombers’ escorting fighters while the rocket fighters fired their projectiles from 1000 to 1500 yards away—out of the effective range of the Americans’ concentrated fire.

Following what is now established Allied practice, many single-purpose machines were converted for other duties. The illustrious Spitfire, still the world’s best and fastest single-engined fighter at all heights, became a fighterbomber; the Beaufighter appeared as a torpedo-plane; and the North American Mustang, designed with British aid as a first-line fighter, became a dive-bomber.

1940 was less needed in 1943, and the emphasis changed imperceptibly from quality to quantity. However, technical improvements, big and small, substantially enhanced performances.

.The biggest single improvement was probably the introduction by Rolls Royce of the two-speecl, two-stage supercharger in the Merlin 61, fitted to the Spitfire IX. and, probably, to spe-cial-duty Mosquitoes. At one stage wrongly attributed to Packard engineers, this engine and supercharger was Britain’s answer to the high-flying Junkers 86P and the new Messerschmitt 109 G.

Other British innovations included, a fighter-bomber version of the Mosquito, the fastest aircraft in the world, while the Americans produced the Grumman Hellcat and the Vought-Sikorsky Corsair. Both the latter made their debut in the Pacific, where their 2000 horsepower engines and superior performance further emphasised Allied air superiority. A notable feat was the extension of single-engine fighter escort of the American bombers to 350-mile ranges, at least in the European zone. Every indication during the year was that the Allies had not only gained numerical but maintained, technical superiority over the enemy. With better weather in the European spring even heavier Allied bombing is to be expected. Any estimate of its further effect on German war capacity would be problematical, but a more reasonably accurate forecast can be made of the effect on the Luftwaffe. Never designed for defence uses, its days as a major arm are numbered. Out-produced four to one and losing at the overall rate of two for every Allied aircraft lost as well as having its factories obliterated one by one, the Luftwaffe is being slowly, irrevocably crushed.