Britain's Vulnerable Midlands

Pennsylvania, New Jersey and the lower half of New England are not the U. S. But the first two with their steel mills, coal mines, munitions works, the other with its brass industry, machine shops and airplane-engine factories, play a vital part in U. S. industrial defense. If the industrial plants, railroads and highways of these regions should be progressively destroyed by systematic bombing, or if they should be seized by an invading army, any war effort of the U. S. thereafter would be crippled. The Midlands of England--which TIME maps on the following two pages--mean the same thing to Britain that Pennsylvania, New Jersey and lower New England mean to the U. S.

For almost two centuries the English Midlands have borne the scars of another struggle, the Industrial Revolution, which made them one of the world's first great workshops. Here, within an area of 21,000 square miles, were fused the resources, the energy, the ingenuity which built an empire covering one-quarter of the earth. Here were created the sinews with which Britain dominated world trade and international politics for 125 years. Here excess capital derived from the exploitation of India was combined with wool from the highlands, cotton from the U. S. and Egypt, coal and iron from Britain, Sweden and Spain, to make trade goods for an expanding world.

In time, part of the textile industry of the region was ruined because India, Japan and the U. S. set up their own looms. But the Midlands remained a world armory and utensil centre; cutlery, precision instruments, cannon, armor plate, ammunition and ship machinery from Sheffield; locomotives, buttons, wedding rings, machine guns, brass bedsteads, safety pins, tires, automobiles from Birmingham; everything in pottery and porcelain from the six towns comprising Stoke-on-Trent; ocean-going hulls from yards at Barrow, Birkenhead and Liverpool.

The fertile plains toward the east coast grew a lot of Britain's food. And into the east coast ports was brought a large bulk of the enormous fish haul with which Britain pieced out her imported food supply. But it was of the industrial Midlands that Adolf Hitler thought when he swore he would destroy Great Britain. They not only symbolized, they constituted, the Britain which dominated world trade. They built and supported the British Fleet, protected the empire. London is where warlike Winston Churchill lives and leads the British people. But Birmingham is where tradesman-like Neville Chamberlain was born and bred to honor, multiply and defend the pound sterling.

The Midlands industries dwell in & along the Pennine Range, which are old Paleozoic uplands winding north & south, cut in two by a gap between Manchester and Leeds. Through this gap a canal was dug in the early 19th Century to connect the Mersey River with Aire River and the Humber Estuary which flows past Hull. In deep pockets on both flanks of the Pennines lie coal and iron (the min ing regions are shown on the map by tipples) near which the great industrial centres grew -- Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham, Derby, Birmingham, Manchester. Around these cities lies "black country," shrouded in smoke, lurid at night with the red belch of blast furnaces, so ugly and acrid that a tough people grew tougher to endure it. Rail roads and narrow motor highways, with varied surfacing, tie the Midlands cities together.

This region became a prime target last June when Hitler began his air siege of Britain. Bombers flying overhead could hardly fail to find some industrial mark that was worth demolition, some spot on the network of railroads, rivers and canals where the flow of munitions could be tied up by well-placed explosive.

Here, besides the London area, is the home of Britain's aircraft industry. Leeds is the nest of the Blackburn Skua (naval dive bomber) and Roc (fighter). From near Birmingham come Fairey Battles (medium bombers). A plant of Fairey Aviation Co. is at Stockport in Lancashire, turns out the torpedo-launch ing Swordfish. The big Vickers long-range bombers, Wellesley and Wellington, are built at Chester on the Dee; the Avro Anson (coastal reconnaissance) at Manchester and Failsworth; Rolls-Royce engines at Derby.

Liverpool and Hull, as the seaward ventricle and auricle of the region, are prime targets of Britain's midsection. York, Derby, Peterborough, Spalding, Stafford, Shrewsbury, Chester are especially vulnerable railroad junctions. Great Grimsby on the Humber, normally a fishing port, became with the onset of war the home of a minesweeping fleet and a big oil depot. (Near it stands the radio station to Australia.) Leeds is the centre of Britain's meat (and leather) industry. At York is the G. H. Q. of the British Army's northern command.

These were among the major military marks which Nazi bombers had to shoot at in this area. The inhabitants of these places were, of all Britons, perhaps best prepared to take it. As the late Novelist D. H. Lawrence's heroine, Lady Chatterly, discovered in the Midlands: "This country had a grim will of its own, and the people had guts. . . . There was something in their deep-mouthed slurring of the dialect, and the thresh-thresh of their hobnailed pit-boots as they trailed home in gangs on the asphalt from work, that was terrible and a bit mysterious." But if people are strong, factories are still vulnerable to high explosive.

From the standpoint of actual invasion as opposed to air bombardment the area offers a somewhat different picture. The Irish seacoast is a long way round for any attack from the Continent by a power which does not have command of the sea. The eastern coast is far more vulnerable but still not easy to attack.

Along the southern part of the east coast there is a great deal of shallow water making the approach difficult for large ships at many places, but this condition is not uniform. Farther north, the coast above Bridlington is naturally defended by sheer blue cliffs as high as 600 feet. But south of the Humber, the cliffs, here grey-yellow, are lower, the sand beaches uniformly ten to 20 yards wide.

The Humber is well mined and otherwise defended by its hard-bitten Danish-looking sea folk. The Wash with miles of goose-hunted sand flats at low tide, is too shallow an estuary for good landings. The Fenlands south of the Wash--which resemble The Netherlands even to their stocky, fair-haired inhabitants, their windmills and tulips --are lands reclaimed by dikes. The "broads" nearer the sea, though laced by canals, are firm and level, leading back to the low East Anglian ridge. So Germany's famed Banse invasion plan called for boats to beach between unpopulous seaside resorts like Wells, Cromer and Lowestoft. As many as 1,500 ships have lain in Yarmouth roadstead at one time. The invaders would quickly occupy and consolidate a position east of the Ouse from which mechanized columns could strike southwest at London, northwest into the Midlands.

But the British could not count on the Germans confining their attempts to land to this area. They had to count not only on many landings, but on landings from the air as well as the sea. The farming country between the cathedral towns of York and Lincoln, although it offers relatively few marks for bombing, provides easy landings for troops from the air. To such troops it is no more difficult than the plains of Poland (or Ohio), only cut up by more hedgerows and orchards. Troops landing from the air in this region might quickly cut communications of defenders making a stand on the back of the coast.

R. A. F. and commercial airfields (shown by windsocks) dot the Midlands for offense as well as defense and antiaircraft batteries ring the teeming cities. Furthermore the steep slopes of the Pennine hills are no country for planes to land on. The tops of the Pennines are desolate moors, partly pastures, partly covered with gorse and heather. But they offer alighting ground and assembling cover for parachute troops, who could descend to cut communications in the valleys. Britain recognized early this summer that one of her prime defense problems was to police these desolate areas, traversed only by narrow winding tracks and fenced by grey stone walls.

In modern warfare fought with the aid of air forces, Panzer divisions and long-range artillery, the zone of devastation on each side of a battle line is often 30 or 40 miles deep, and Britain in its Midlands is a very narrow country. The entire distance from Hull to Liverpool is only no miles. Unless an enemy army can be prevented from gaining a foothold on the land, Britain's Midlands cannot call themselves secure.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.