Losing Game

The bare statistics were awesome. From the beginning of U.S. air operations in Europe through the end of this October, the heavy bombers of the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces had dropped 638,880 tons of explosives on German targets; more than half of the total had gone to the Reich homeland. Bombers and fighters together had destroyed 15,210 German planes. And all this was entirely apart from the operations of the Ninth and Twelfth (Tactical) U.S. Air Forces, or of the R.A.F., which flexed its muscles this week with a smashing 3,088 ton assault on oil refineries near Harburg.

Thick weather has not hampered the big bombers much this year, for with their new instruments they can take off from and land on fields which are completely "socked in" (ceiling zero), and they can hit targets entirely invisible from the air. Those targets are concentrated in a smaller area than ever before; the defenders often have no warning. With all of liberated France to land in, crews of crippled Allied bombers no longer face capture if they cannot make it back to England.

Scatter Technique. Last February the Anglo-U.S. heavies smashed German airplane production so flat that the Nazis began to disperse and hide their assembly points in small shops, hangars, garages. The Allies then promoted the German synthetic oil plants, which cannot be dispersed, to No. 1 target priority. The result, plus the loss of oilfields in Poland and Rumania, so parched the Nazis for oil that the Battle of France found them making heavy use of bicycles and horses. But the target switch gave German air production a chance to stage a slow, steady comeback. Allied experts now place it at well over 1,000 planes a month, but the Nazis still hoard their fighter strength.

In October, British-based heavies had a record month of 100,000 tons of bombs dropped, almost all of it on Germany proper. The U.S. Fifteenth Air Force based in Italy unloaded 13,100 more tons on northern Italy, Austria, Bavaria, Czechoslovakia. The Luftwaffe rode out the storm on the ground, and Allied losses were light, less than 1%.

Try, Try Again. Last fortnight the Germans picked a day to fight--putting up 500 fighters over one target alone, the Merseburg oil plants in central Germany--and they knocked down 40 U.S. bombers, 19 escorts. But they lost 208 planes of their own. Since then, they have made only occasional, feeble feints.

With fleets of 450 to 2,000 Allied heavies out on eleven of the first 13 days in November, destruction this month was likely to be bigger than last. The Luftwaffe may fight again, but it will be beaten again, for it can never catch up. Whether it chooses to fight or stay aground, the Luftwaffe is playing out its string in a losing game.

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