THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES Thursday, January 6, 1944. THE BOMBING OFFENSIVE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25426, 6 January 1944, Page 2

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES Thursday, January 6, 1944. THE BOMBING OFFENSIVE

At the present moment Goering should be a thoroughly discredited figure in Germany. The German people are not likely to have forgotten that he had told them that they had no reason to fear the bombing of their country. He had in fact assured them that not one enemy bomb would fall upon it. They might, he undertook, rely on the protection that would be afforded to them by the Luftwaffe, the branch of the Nazi war machine in which he exercised special authority. At the time at which he gave this assurance the Luftwaffe was overwhelmingly powerful. There was no other air force that had the machines or the trained personnel that were possessed by it. Hitler may, therefore, have had his own reasons for believing, even if he had not had Goering’s guarantee to confirm them, that his threat that the Luftwaffe would raze British cities to the ground when it began its long series of attacks on the United Kingdom in 1940 would be fulfilled. If the air raids on Great Britain had achieved their object—that of vindicating Germany’s claim to mastery in the air, of destroying the morale of the British people, and of preparing the way for an invasion by German troops—there might have been a justification for the Nazis’ reliance on the air force which their country had at its command. But tremendously outnumbered as it was, the Royal Air Force tirelessly fought back against day raids and against night raids and, with ‘Supreme courage and superb tenacity, inflicted losses upon the enemy so. severe as to drive him out of the skies and compel him to relinquish this form of attack. The Luftwaffe had encountered more than its match. In two successive weeks nearly 800 of itsmiachines were shot down for certain —185 of them in one night. The tribute which Mr Churchill paid to the Royal Air Force in a speech in the House of Commons found an echo in countless hearts, not exclusively British. “ Never in the history of human conflict have so many owed so much to so few.” Not usually troubled with reticence, Goering seems to have had no public explanation to make — there is none that is recorded —of the failure of the prolonged raids on Great Britain to accomplish their purpose. And, as the factories in the United States, operating to execute British orders, as well as those in the United Kingdom increased their production of warplanes, and as the strength of the Royal Air Force steadily improved, there were other occurrences (to demand his consideration. It was long before the production from the German works could possibly be equalled, but numerically inferior though the Royal Air Force was, it began to turn the tables on the Nazis. British airmen dropped bombs on industrial plants in the Ruhr in a degree that was highly disconcerting to the Nazis, and their operations were gradually extended to other military objectives in the Reich. The air war was being carried into Germany itself. And then, through one of those gross blunders which have characterised his conduct of the war, Hitler brought another enemy into the conflict. He must often have rued the day when he ordered the invasion of Russia and brought down upon himself a foe who needed time only to marshal forces of overwhelming strength. But the opening of the campaign with Russia at least gave Goering an excuse for' not resuming large-scale air attacks upon; Great Britain. He pleaded that, while the Luftwaffe was concentrated in the East, he could not, with the vigour that he would like, reply to the onslaughts by British airmen upon Germany.-At the same time he made another plea of a different nature. “How senseless,” he cried, “is the destruction of cultural monuments! If this fool, the British bomber chief, would only think how great German culture is and how important it is not only for Germany but for the whole world, then this alone should stop him from destroying German cultural monuments.” Of the quality of German culture of the present time an estimate may justly be based on the experiences of the peoples of the countries which the Nazis have over-run. It is rather nauseating to have an appeal made to this culture as though it were something that was rare and worthy of admiration. For in the light of the history of the past three or four years “ this fool, the British bomber chief,” is provided with ample reason.for the fact that the proud city of Berlin now lies in ruins. Berlin has met with the fate which Goering designed for London. Nemesis has overtaken Germany.