Verdun of World War II

Liverpool, Bristol, Southampton, Ports mouth, Plymouth, London.

The roll of British ports bombed last week sounded more like a train announce ment than a report of one of the great battles of history. Accounts of what happened night after night did not sound so impressive as the great air battles of last September, when hundreds of planes were shot down from the air before men's eyes.

They did not sound nearly so grim as the Battle of Verdun, when hundreds of thou sands of men were blown to bits.

But this battle was more serious than either. At Verdun men died, but 20 miles behind the lines others tilled fields, worked in factories, traveled in trains. Civilized life then came to an end at No Man's Land, a civilized country was eaten away at the edges. But except at the edge its body remained almost untouched. Now the whole broad body of a civilized country was under attack.

Worse still from the standpoint of the British was another fact. In the daylight battles over London last September, attackers as well as defenders died in scores.

At Verdun attackers as well as defenders died in thousands. Such mutual slaughter captured men's imaginations and the head lines. Last week's battle was far more ominous from a military standpoint.

The attackers hardly suffered. Four a night was the average kill for the defense.

Against night bombing there was still practically no defense at all. Losses were almost all upon one side. Although they amounted to only a few hundred people killed and maimed nightly, they also included the houses in which men slept, the factories in which they worked, the shops at which they got the necessities of life, the docks at which the sinews of war were delivered, the railroads by which commerce moved.

The British maintained, morning after morning, that in spite of civilian suffering, damage to industrial targets and shipping facilities was not serious in view of the heaviness of the raids. But people who saw Bristol after its third major dose said that, while ships were still loading and unloading there, wide sections of the town (pop. 415,000) looked worse than the shattered heart of Coventry. It was reliably reported that big Southampton was again out of action as a port of ingress.

After 44 raidless hours, London got one of the heaviest raids she had felt.

All this made the Battle of Britain last week a greater and more ominous Verdun.

The only effective reply which the defenders could make was to night-bomb the enemy in return. R. A. F. did blast Duesseldorf, large coal, steel & freight centre, submarine bases in France, air bases everywhere in the conquered countries, the Fiat works and Royal Arsenal in Turin. But the R. A. F. was still outnumbered and the damage done was probably not equal to the damage Britain received.

Casualties. Two German deaths acknowledged were Major General Wolff von Stutterheim, 47, survivor of 17 wounds in World War I, who succumbed at last to wounds received aloft last June; and Major Helmuth Wick, 25, commander of the Richthofen Squadron of fighters. This young man, credited with shooting down 56 Polish, French and British planes in 15 months, was one of four Nazi fliers who had been given the Oak Leaves on the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. On his last foray he and his flight of Me 110s met a force of Hurricanes and Spitfires near the Isle of Wight. While Major Wick got one Briton, another swooped on his tail and got him, only to be shot down in turn by another German. According to the British story, 20 of the Germans perished, all ten of the British, leaving none to say who killed Major Wick.

Observer. Last week Major General James E. Chaney of the U. S. Army Air Corps unsealed his lips to U. S. reporters after telling his superiors in Washington what he saw as an official observer in Britain between Oct. 10 and Nov. 20. He low-rated U. S. and British warplanes in engines, armament and fire power, compared to German planes. His assay of Britain's chances sounded optimistic because he credited Britain with winning the early stages of the air war by wide margins. But of the air war's latest industry-and port-blasting phase he said nothing except to list as Britain's urgent needs: 100 more destroyers, bases in Eire, merchant ships, credits--the things of which Britain must have more & more as her own production is reduced.

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