Second Aerial Front

Blimp-built Hermann Goering, who used to boast about how fast his Luftwaffe was going to flatten England, was walking on his heels last week. Increasingly it appeared that the bully boys of his Air Force were in no position to tangle with the R.A.F. on its vast sweeps across the Channel. While the Luftwaffe husbanded its strength, the R.A.F. slugged Nazi bases from Le Havre on up to the Baltic. They also reached 700 miles to Pilsen, Bohemia, where they bombed the huge Skoda works.

They slugged with a new pattern. Now, instead of dispersing each night over a vast area, they dropped almost all their eggs into one industrial basket. And now they came in repeated raids on the same target, re-Coventrizing their Coventries.

Most pulverizing British air attack since the R.A.F. punished the Baltic port of Luebeck in March occurred at another Baltic port, Rostock, 60 miles away. In one hour one night British airmen dropped the "greatest weight of bombs" ever delivered in one package by the R.A.F. The following night the British were back again. The night after that, and the night after that, they were back yet again & again. When they left they were certain that it would be a long time before Rostock, staggering under the weight of 800 tons of bombs, would function efficiently as a supply port for the Nazi armies in Norway, Finland and northern Russia. They were certain too that the Heinkel Airplane Works near by, to which they had given special attention, would be out of commission for months.

Everywhere--and the R.A.F. was striking out in daylight sweeps as well as in night bombings all over western Europe--there was a singular lack of opposition. A year ago it was heralded as a feat if three R.A.F. flyers scooted over Occupied France, but last week they were over the Continent by the hundreds.

Where was the opposition? Where was the Luftwaffe? Probably most of it was in Central Europe, ready to be thrown at Russia or the Middle East, or both. And yet the R.A.F. was convinced that 40% of Germany's fighter strength was on the Western Front. Said a well-informed R.A.F.man last week: "The number of fighters against us on the Western Front today is more than it was two or three months ago. We still retain against ourselves and Malta a greater number of fighters--both single and twin-engined--than are distributed on the whole Russian Front."

Fighter pilots on sweeps noticed that German fighters avoided combat whenever possible, hanging on to flanks, hoping for stragglers with engine trouble. Luftwaffe fighters seemed to be under orders to fight only when necessary. The Nazis were apparently nursing their supplies and their flyers for an all-out assault on the Middle East and Russia. But with the R.A.F. hitting harder & harder, it looked as if Goering would have to get off his heels and do some fancy toe dancing to prevent the British from wrecking Nazi plans, throwing Hitler's timetable out of kilter again.

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