"Strained to the Limits"

The main British air effort over Europe last week was directed against that awesome new thing, German sea might.

With the German radio-detector station near Le Havre brilliantly eliminated (see p. 24), R.A.F. flyers reconnoitered and raided German sea bases again & again, in good weather and filthy. They found, photographed and bombed the Gneisenau at Kiel, the Scharnhorst at Wilhelmshaven.

The Prinz Eugen, a fast and tough 10,000-ton cruiser, had slipped out of Brest with the battleships. She could be a scourge to Atlantic convoys. Last week First Lord of the Admiralty A. V. Alexander announced that a 10,000-ton German cruiser, apparently the Eugen, had taken a torpedo in the North Sea from a British submarine. The Eugen has multi-compartment torpedo protection: but, like the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, she was laid up for a while.

Even aside from the threat of surface raiders, the battle of the Atlantic was going badly. German torpedoes sent to the bottom a Canadian corvette and a Free French corvette, damaged a U.S. Coast Guard cutter so severely that it turned over while being towed to port and had to be sunk. Storm and high seas wrecked a U.S. destroyer and supply ship off Newfoundland (see p. 24). Tankers in U.S. coastal waters took a beating (see col. 2). The Germans claimed that seven ships totaling 52,000 tons had been destroyed in a running attack on one convoy --a claim brutally confirmed when in survivors landed in Canada. They estimated that six to nine ships had been lost, said their listening devices indicated a pack of at least five U-boats.

Secretary of the Navy Knox announced that in 54 days (Jan. 1-Feb. 23) Nazi submarines attacked 114 Allied ships in the Atlantic; the rate of attack in the western Atlantic was going up. In the same costly days only three U-boats were announced sunk, four probably damaged.

Said Prime Minister Churchill to the House of Commons: "In the last two months there has been a most serious increase in shipping losses, as our anti-U-boat flotilla and naval light forces have been, and are, strained to the limits."

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