RAIDS ON GERMANY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 November 1941, Page 7

RAIDS ON GERMANY

COMPUTATION OF COSTS SOME IMPRESSIVE ITEMS. TOTAL OF ABOUT £300,000 A NIGHT. (By Noel Barber.) When your city or town, wherever it may be in the British Empire, sends another donation to help Britain’s war effort —what happens to the money? We all know the high cost of war — battleships at £8,000,000 each, hundreds of bombers at £20,000 each, and so on. But now I will tell you the way in which money is going in actual fighting over Germany. In this article I have worked out just what it costs the R.A.F. to deliver one of their big attacks over enemy territory. . For weeks now, we have been smashing up Hitler’s factories in the Ruhr, and his shipyards in Western Germany. The damage we inflict must run into millions of pounds. What does it cost us in the money that is so often collected in pennies or rupees or dollars all over the world?

We can quite easily make an estimate. Supposing we work out the cost of a raid over the Ruhr. First of all, how many planes? Let us assume that 300 planes—say our Wellington bombers —were engaged on the particular raid we are discussing. £lBO,OOO DROPPED OVER GERMANY. How much petrol would 300 Wellingtons use? Each one uses half a pound of petrol per horse power per hour. Supposing they fly for four hours on their 700 mile journey. Wellingtons have two engines which develop just over a thousand horse power each. When they are cruising the horse power is much less. Over the whole trip it would probably work out at about an average of '3OO h.p. per engine. So each plane would use SOOlbs. of petrol am hour, or 960,0001b5. of petrol for the Armada. There are seven pounds of petrol to the gallon, we can say 137,134 gallons. Pre-war bulk price of petrol was 4Jd a gallon—that makes approximately £2,570. Each plane will use anything up to 50 gallons of oil—and 15,000 gallons of oil would cost about £750. I base the cost on the pre-war bulk price of £l2 a ton, with 245 gallons to a ton. We mustn’t forget losses. A bomber costs £20,000, and we’ll assume that on this raid we lost three. That is another £60,000. Now what about bombs? Suppose each plane carried two tons. An assorted cargo of bombs would cost something like £6oo—a figure made up of several kinds of bombs, varying from the incendiary at a few shillings, through,the normal 2501 b. bomb costing £5O, to the half-ton special arm-our-piercing bomb, which might cost anything up to £5OO. This means that the whole raiding fleet of 300 Wellingtons might drop a bomb load worth £lBO,OOO. THE TOTAL FOR THE RAID.

Lastly we come to the difficult problem of maintenance and depreciation, of ground crews, radio communication and so on. In fact, all the hundred and one odds and ends that form the background overheads of a gigantic organisation like the R.A.F. To get this figure I asked one of Britain's leading civil air companies what it cost them to put one of their large planes into the air. Note that I say to put it into the air, not the figure to run it once it is in the air. They gave me a figure of 5s a mile. That is the cost before the plane rises off the ground, just as you have to reckon the cost of the insurance and licence and depreciation on your car. Our bombers going to the Ruhr and back do an average of at least 700 miles for the raid, so that their overhead costs per machine work out at approximately £175, or £52,500 for the whole fieet of 300.

So now you see how your war savings go when the planes of the R.A.F. wing their way over German cities. Let’s take a look at the total:— £ Petrol 2,570 Oil 750 Losses 60,000 Bombs 180,000 Overheads 52,500 £295,820