Deeper and Harder

Sergeant Clyde Keeling stepeed out of a huge Liberator bomber last with a question on his lips: "What's next? Rumania and now Austria--and we are based in North Africa!"

It was a question that troubled the defenders of all Axis Europe. Sergeant Keeling had just returned from a 2,500-mile round trip to Wiener-Neustadt in Austria, 27 miles south of Vienna. The attack on Austria had required the longest flight over enemy territory ever made by planes of the Middle East Command, one of the longest for any theater in this war. It caught the defenders completely by surprise. Bomb bursts blanketed the sprawling plant where an estimated 400 Messerschmitts were hatched each month. Scores of hits were seen among some 400 finished fighters parked in neat rows on fields adjacent to the plant. The crews of the last bombers over the target reported flames gushing 500 feet into the air and smoke thousands of feet above the ruined buildings. During the entire twelve-hour flight the Liberators encountered no more than 15 enemy fighters, one of which was shot down. Over the target anti-aircraft fire was slight. Delighted U.S. air officials announced "every plane accounted for," though one was reported to have made an emergency landing in eastern Switzerland.

The raid on Wiener-Neustadt climaxed a week of diversified air attacks over Greater Germany. As the nights grew longer the offensive arc expanded steadily. Early in the week British and Canadian heavy bombers gave the twin Rhineland industrial cities of Mannheim and Ludwigshafen their 57th aerial pounding of the war. On the same night fast Mosquito bombers struck at the Ruhr and the Fighter Command jabbed at airfields and railways in France and the Low Countries.

The Britain-based U.S. Eighth Air Force, after several days' respite, returned to battle with heavy daylight attacks on synthetic oil plants at Gelsenkirchen and Wesseling, other industrial targets in the famed university city of Bonn. The raid was expensive: Twenty-five bombers were lost, mostly over Gelsenkirchen. Apparently the Germans were no longer able to defend more than one city at a time. To the Heart. R.A.F. bombers struck in force at Nuremberg, shrine of the Nazi party. Two large diesel-engine factories, two trunk railway junctions and other targets felt the weight of more than 1,500 tons of bombs, including thousands of incendiaries. Returning pilots reported the Germans using Dornier-217 bombers as night fighters, indicating the Nazi shortage of fighter aircraft. Pesky Mosquito bombers flying at 400 m.p.h. gave Berlin its 68th and 69th aerial pastings of the war. This week allied planes hit again at Paris' Le Bourget, six other French fields.

Balancing an R.A.F. announcement that 136,000 tons of bombs had been dropped on Germany since the war started (more than half of the amount this year), Nazi officials estimated that 400.000 German workers had been bombed into unemployment in the last few months, added that this number would probably increase by 100,000 per month. As the evacuation of Berlin * and other large cities was speeded, the German news agency, with convenient loss of memory, broadcast a lengthy appeal that Berlin should not be bombed because "Berlin is no more important to German industry than London is to Great Britain."

* In Russia the evacuees of six embassies and legations returned to Moscow after 23 months in Kuibyshev.

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