Until They Cry "Enough"

Britain was not brought to her knees by German bombers, but Germany can be brought down by Allied bombers. This is the belief of an airman with a gentle face and a furious tongue--Air Marshal Arthur Travers ("Ginger") Harris.

Air Marshal Harris is in command of Britain's mass raids. Until last February he was chief of Britain's air mission to the U.S., and he made himself highly unpopular in Washington by saying that: 1) scattered and sporadic bombing is futile; 2) concentrated striking forces can obliterate concentrated targets. Now he is practicing what he then preached.

Present. The striking forces which Air Marshal Harris sends into battle are so concentrated as to change, not only the scale, but the nature of aerial warfare--just as the Greek phalanx changed the nature of foot warfare in its day. Last week Air Marshal Harris' forces were unprecedented. After the Cologne raid (1,130 planes), the R.A.F. swept France (1,000), struck Essen (1,036), swept France (200), bombed Bremen (200), swept the Channel coast (500), revisited the Ruhr (about 200), hit Emden (perhaps 200), and fanned out to smaller objectives (over 2,000). Altogether Air Marshal Harris sent between 6,000 and 7,000 planes over the Continent in eight days' time.

Past. To Air Marshal Harris, as to all Britons, this was sweet magnitude. To Britons who remembered the nightmare of Coventry there was savage satisfaction in hearing the Berlin radio say: "The nightmare of Sunday still is weighing on the Cologne population." To those who had seen the hell of Plymouth it was good to hear Brooklyn-born R.C.A.F. Pilot Charles Honychurch say of Cologne: "It was like looking down the mouth of hell." To those whose kids had been taken from them and evacuated to the country it was good to hear of mass evacuations from Cologne, Aachen, Duesseldorf, Wuppertal, Mainz. To those who had seen their St. Martin-in-the-Fields smashed it was sad but good to hear of Jerry's St. Maria im Capitol being pocked.

British in ancient, now desecrated towns heard some bitterly welcome news from the Koelnische Zeitung: "Those who survived . . . were fully aware that they had bade farewell forever to their Cologne, because the damage is enormous and because the integral part of the character, and even the traditions, of the city is gone forever."

Future. But the satisfaction was not mere vindictiveness. It was partly an awakening to the dread possibilities of air warfare. This kind of thing, if it were sustained and even increased, was changing the war. It might even win the war.

The German propaganda machine, perhaps remembering how the German blitz petered out, assured its people that the British could not afford to keep up their mass raids. But Air Marshal Harris thinks differently. By coincidence--or was it coincidence?--Lieut. General Henry H. Arnold of the U.S. Army Air Forces was in London during these raids. With the accretion of U.S. planes flown by U.S. crews, Air Marshal Harris can increase the intensity of his raids. Though it would probably take a while to repeat often such raids as those on Cologne and Essen, an R.A.F. spokesman said last week: "A thousand planes nightly is not the ultimate peak. There is no reason why another thousand should not attack a second target in Germany at the same time, or follow the first thousand on to the same target."

"People are asking," said the London Daily Mail, "whether we can win the war with this devastating weapon alone. . . . The war will not be won so long as the German Army is in being. We have to destroy that mighty instrument. It is possible to do it by air action. The Army could be disintegrated by smashing civilian morale, or by destroying supplies at their source."

This was Britain's new hope. Air Marshal Harris, of the gentle face and furious tongue, put it more bluntly: "We will not cease our efforts until Hitler's Germany cries 'Enough!' "

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