Fall Planting

We were now going through wooded mountains, which must appear wild and sad to one coming from a gorgeous fruitful country; attractive only for the inner content of their womb.

So wrote the great Goethe in his poetic memoirs, describing a trip through the forest which Germans call Black. Last week other travelers saw this forest, travelers from the fruitful fields of Kent, from tight little hills of the Cotswolds, from the broad sweep of Devon and Yorkshire moors. To these men the forests had a grisly attraction. These travelers were R. A. F. bomber crews, flying on one of the most extraordinary missions of World War II.

One of the things which the sleepy British intelligence service does profess to know is that Germany has vast stores of ammunition, explosives and other vital material tucked away in her wooded hills. Last week the R. A. F. got its orders to go after those stores ruthlessly.

Over not only the Black Forest, but also the bosky Harz Mountains, the Grunewald near Berlin, woods in Thuringia, ranged bombers heavy with incendiaries. The crews could not be certain of exact objectives, but peppered certain marked areas with "nice little patches of fire." At least one crew knew it was near an objective, for Germans paid it the compliment of aiming Archies at its plane. Said the pilot: "You wouldn't normally expect a lot of guns to be cracking off at you from the middle of a forest."

Pilots described the fires they had set--visible for scores of miles, burning for days on end. (German forests are hatched with fire lanes, so that blazes did not spread indefinitely.) Some explosives were apparently set afire. Observers testified to great flashes of light above the fires' glow, as if a huge trolley were sputtering across the sky.

One flier recognized a mountain in the Harz range where he had spent a carefree vacation. "There is a legend about that mountain--something about a giant living on top of it--and I was telling the other chaps in my plane about it," he said. The chaps dropped bombs on the railroad which had carried him to his vacation.

The R. A. F. did not neglect other objectives. Like farmers at their fall planting of death, pilots plowed the fields of Nazi airmen at Schiphol and Ypenburg in the Netherlands, around Calais, at Dunkirk, Abbeville, Antwerp; sowed seeds in the fertile congestion of Berlin; weeded out Channel gun emplacements near Boulogne; fertilized with grimness barges on the coast, oil tanks and rail sidings throughout the German areas, and special objectives like the Bosch spark-plug factory at Stuttgart, the docks at Hamburg, Marelli magneto plant near Turin, an aluminum factory at Bitterfeld, huge power plants at Genoa.

New wrinkles of defense showed themselves. Berlin admitted the efficacy of British barrage balloons by raising a circle of its own. R. A. F. pilots report a new type of antiaircraft: strange, fitful spirals of red which were dubbed "googly fire." Googly bowling in cricket corresponds to screwball pitching in baseball.

Britain's defense devolved almost wholly on the R. A. F.'s fighter squadrons, which last week wrote themselves a paragraph of history which will go down with the best in Britain's past. With deception to match the enemy's--letting them get past the ring of anti-aircraft one day, meeting them over the Channel the next--they did the best they could against superior odds. One of the heroes among this lot was Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh C. T. ("Stuffy") Dowding, in charge of the Fighter Command. He it was who supervised and coordinated the various layers of defense: fighters, antiaircraft, searchlights, barrage balloons, more fighters.

It was a week of answers. In reply to Herr Hitler's threats (see p. 28), bombers hit Berlin--Tiergarten Park, warehouses, freight yards, a police station, the Moabit Criminal Court Building, Charlottenburg power station, apartments and slums. The Luftwaffe replied with bitter mass attacks on London (see p. 20). Then the R. A. F. spoke again in another smash at the German capital's power, oil, communications, and once again at the woods which Ger mans love. Luftwaffe retorted on London, and R. A. F. answered yet again. Because of exigencies of geography and numbers, the cruel conversation of war took on a one-sidedness much like that of talks be tween Hitler and British statesmen -- strident shouts against quiet stubbornness.

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