End of a Cycle

Britain, until now the main base of the air offensive against Germany, may soon be a secondary base. North Africa, Sicily, Italy will soon loom large in strategic bombing of Germany, and they may well overshadow Britain.

At first this dawning realization was a bitter pill for the R.A.F. Bomber Command and the U.S. Eighth Air Force. Every shift of bombers to the Mediterranean was a "diversion," a threat to the use of independent air power. By last week the pill was becoming an acceptable if not yet welcomed dose of reason and fact. Bomber men began to see that southern Europe offered better flying weather, bases increasingly near to central and southern Germany. They also began to see that "tactical" front-line bombing and "strategic" rear-line bombing were part & parcel of the same war.

_ Britain was not going to drop out of the air war. The big planes based there were going to join a vastly intensified air offensive from the south and the west, bringing to Germany a hell of bombing worse than any it had known.

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