Threat or Promise?

You have no chance. Soon we will be coming over every night, every day--rain, flood or snow--we and the Americans.

The words that came from the radio wherever Germans listened on contraband frequencies were German. But the accent was British, the voice pleasantly impersonal. Burly Air Marshal Sir Arthur Travers Harris, chief of the R.A.F.'s Bomber Command, had gone on the air to promise that his bombers (and the Americans') would "scourge the Third Reich from end to end."

The Germans had heard such threats from other sources before. They had heard them with most foreboding after the two 1,000-plane raids in late May. They had seen and felt no more such scourging. But within a week of Sir Arthur's broadcast their foreboding was revived.

Duesseldorf. Never before had the factories and communications of Germany and France taken such thumpings so closely repeated. There were no more 1,000-plane raids on single objectives. But there were times when 1,000 planes were banging at different Axis targets. And on the main objectives, the concentration of power was greater than ever before. In a raid on Duesseldorf, less than 700 bombers, by the British account, hammered the Rhineland's great (pop. 539,905) heavy-industry workshop (steel, tools, big guns). But the percentage of four-motored bombers, and probably their over-all total, was greater than Cologne had felt in its devastating 1,130-plane raid. The Air Ministry announced that a greater weight of bombs had been dropped on a more concentrated target. Delighted Britons could consider a few comparative statistics. Cologne was hit by 3,000 tons of bombs. Coventry was devastated by one-tenth that total. And the greatest weight of explosive dropped on London in a 24-hour period during the great Blitz was less than 500 tons.

Hamburg. Duesseldorf was the capstone in the week's grim monument of destruction. The bombers' first target was Hamburg. On that factory of submarines and other war machines more than 600 bombers dumped their loads--first tens of thousands of fire bombs, then high explosives shatteringly climaxed by 4,000-lb. "block busters." Two nights later the bombers gave Hamburg more of the horrible same in the pit that was still burning from the first raid.

Saarbruecken. Next night it was Saarbruecken, steel and coal center in the lower Saar basin, 300 miles from Britain's coast. The raid was lighter than the searing blows struck on Hamburg, but the Air Ministry put the bombers in the hundreds.

Double Threat. While the big bombers were busy, and while they squatted at their dispersal stations, lighter planes of the R.A.F.--two-engined bombers and fighter bombers--ranged continuously over the occupied areas in swarms of from half a dozen to 200 at a time. Before big bombing raids they smashed at anti-aircraft installations, sucked German pursuits into fights. At other times they worked on transportation, blew up trains, cannoned locomotives, flipped bombs into railroad yards.

The Luftwaffe fought stoutly back. Night fighters, with the help of pursuit, shot down 29 bombers at Hamburg in the first raid, 32 in the second, 30 at Duesseldorf. But the British over-all loss was kept below the marginal 5%. And the Germans had their losses, too: nine Focke-Wulf 1905 here, six or seven there.

The Germans also made attacks on England, and Britons, free of air raids for months, dragged dusty gas masks from under beds. But the blow was not heavy. The most the Germans mustered during the week (in which London had five alerts) was 60 to 75 planes which bombed Birmingham.

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