Birds of Destruction

While Allied fortunes in North Africa were in suspense, the European air offensive rattled on in high gear. From The Netherlands to the Mediterranean, Allied planes pounded at Hitler's continental fortress.

> U.S. four-motored bombers, escorted by some 300 Allied fighter planes, soared in a day-long procession across the Channel, bombed and strafed a Nazi-held airfield and supply lines in Holland and France.

> Four miles up, R.A.F. raiders circled over northern Italy. Static electricity in the sub-zero night sky flashed brilliantly around their ships. Inches of snow gathered inside one plane's front-gun turret. Again & again the bombers struck at Turin, which had already suffered 23 raids since Mussolini made the error of going to war. Early in the week the bombers lit King Vittorio Emanuele's Royal Arsenal with flames that licked so high that the crimson reflection shimmered on the snowy peaks of the Alps. Back again the next night, they dropped more two-ton bombs into the smoldering ruins. At week's end they returned again, to make their 26th raid on stricken Turin.

> From the Middle East, where Allied bombers pounded Hitler's African outpost at El Agheila, U.S. Liberators set out for the second time in two weeks to batter Naples. Since the crippling of Genoa the Axis depot for supplies to Tunisia has been the city of the superstitious Neapolitans. The Italian High Command admitted "heavy damage in the harbor area and in the center of the town," reported 57 dead, 138 injured.

Axis anti-aircraft defense could not spread a net wide enough to catch Allied birds of destruction which shifted and shuttled over thousands of square miles. Hermann Goring might be saving his Luftwaffe for another purpose, but so far he had not even attempted to launch a reprisal.

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