Stroke at the Root

When Air Marshal Sir Charles Frederick Algernon Portal was made Chief of Air Staff last October, the choice was hailed as an indication that Britain was preparing to take the offensive against the Luftwaffe. For Sir Charles was previously head of the Bomber Command--an expert in carrying the fight to the enemy.

Last week the R. A. F. did turn on an offensive. This was not the famous Portal Master Plan--bombing industrial bottlenecks all over Germany and Italy. This was an offensive with an immediate military aim: disrupting German preparations for invasion of the British Isles.

In a week when German planes appeared over Britain only in small numbers for reconnaissance and nuisance missions, the R. A. F.'s activities clearly constituted a determined offensive. For one thing, raids were by day, in contrast to previous night work. They were in mass, and the flights of bombers were protected by overwhelming escorts of fighters, indicating that the British had well observed the German losses when the Luftwaffe risked thinly guarded bombers. Their targets were, over & over, the invasion ports and communications. The British did not have long-range fighters to accompany bombers on distant daylight raids into Germany. Nor did they let their African successes blind them to the dangers of invasion. "We must all be prepared," said Winston Churchill, "to meet gas attacks, parachute attacks and glider attacks with constancy, forethought and practiced skill."

Last September the projected German invasion was broken up primarily because the R. A. F. would not yield air superiority over Britain to the Luftwaffe, secondarily because the R. A. F. tangled Nazi invasion plans by bombing invasion ports. Now it appeared that the British were determined to reverse the process: try to make invasion impossible at its starting point rather than on the receiving end, to cut its root rather than pick its leaves.

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