Bombers v. Battleships

Before dawn one morning last week a bomber of the Royal Air Force glided in over the Stavanger airport, only big field in craggy Norway's west. Down went a magnesium flare and, in a few moments, up in a great bang and blaze went chunks of concrete runways, hangars and transport planes. For 80 minutes an undetermined number of ships of the British Fleet several miles off shore hurled an infernal amount of steel and high explosive onto the Stavanger field, while Allied bombers attacked at Trondheim to ground Nazi planes there. The British ships got away before full daylight, said the British Admiralty, under a shower of 115 German bombs of which only one was a hit, on a cruiser which was able to reach home port.

Except for this one brief, explosive appearance, the British Royal Navy and its French and Polish allies made themselves as scarce last week as they were conspicuous the week before. Reason: they were busy convoying Allied Expeditionary Forces as obscurely as possible to Norway. At this job they were sought more fiercely than ever by the German Air Force and what remained of the German Navy. Against a wall of silence raised by the British Admiralty, the German High Command hurled a steady barrage of claims in the struggle of Air Power to prove itself the master of Sea Power.

Addressing an audience of 20,000 (including 2,000 Red Cross nurses) in Berlin's Sportspalast, Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels recited a two-day score as follows: two British cruisers sunk, two heavily damaged, a battleship damaged, a heavy destroyer and a submarine sunk, a large transport bombed with severe loss of life near Narvik. Preceding and succeeding Nazi claims would have accounted for 61 units of the British Fleet in the past fortnight. Of this list, the British admitted losing only four destroyers and one submarine.

In the middle of a fight, no good fighter admits he is being hurt. Undoubtedly there was some minimizing of damage in British statements. Undoubtedly, too, the North Sea, with its curtains of fog and blankets of cloud, is not a good place for Air Power to prove itself better than Sea Power. But the fact that the British risked their heavy ships within gunshot of Stavanger gave strong evidence of Allied confidence after a week of testing against Marshal Goering's sky terror. The safe landing in Norway of most of three divisions of Allied land forces added proof to confidence.

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