Coventrizing

Moonlight and roses were Britain's lot last week. The roses were burning industrial cities; the moonlight a pallid, accursed illumination for bearers of death and destruction. Last fortnight's blasting of Coventry was followed last week by the "coventrizing" of Birmingham and by other blastings at Liverpool, Bristol, Southampton. Coventry's known victims rose to 422 when a mass burial of 172 unidentifiable corpses in a common grave (see cut) was followed three days later by a second mass burial of 250.

Having failed to knock out the R. A. F., or to terrorize London into surrender, or to storm across the Channel with a land invasion, it appeared that in the early autumn Germany had begun training masses of airmen in night bombing, a slower but safer method of attrition from the air. The Nazis' new, long-range grand strategy was to exhaust Britain's munitions--her machines, ships, guns, shells, bombs--by three kinds of action of which city blasting was only one. The other two were: 1) intensified attack over & under the sea on British merchant convoys bringing munitions (and food) from the Empire and the Americas; 2) extension of the war to new fronts from Gibraltar to Aden, to force greater British outlays of materiel, money, men and effort. But the city blasting, because it was in their midst, seemed to the British the most oppressive.

Chamberlain's Town. Birmingham has a population of 1,055,000 and is Britain's Pittsburgh. Third city in the British Isles, it is the centre of the iron & steel industry. Down upon Birmingham three evenings last week and again this week swept German bombers in waves of hundreds like those that shattered Coventry. As at that tragic town, they began soon after dusk by dropping fire bombs to set fires to guide the explosive carriers. These came in wide waves that converged from all angles, at many levels, upon the heart of the city, where the Town Hall (once inhabited by the late Neville Chamberlain as Lord Mayor) made a splendid landmark.

Birmingham's anti-aircraft batteries far outnumber Coventry's, yet they could do little to drive off the great swarming bats of death. But Birmingham covers four times the area of Coventry, so the concentration of damage was not so great. The German pilots evidently had orders to try for various specific arms and chemical and explosives factories. To strike at these some of the new Junkers 88s (improved from the Ju. 87 Stukas, these carry two tons of bombs, can bomb either dive or level) screamed in low. The British would not admit that they had scored any high percentage of hits on important factories. They even missed Birmingham's huge central railroad station, not far from the downtown office-building section where damage was most appalling. As in Coventry, residential sections suffered the greatest loss of life and--so far as industrial production went--the most upsetting effects, in dislodging workmen. Unlike more compact Coventry's, Birmingham's light, water and gas services were not knocked out, even temporarily.

But the mere fact that Birmingham, heart of the whirring Midlands, could be lambasted at will by the Luftwaffe again put a cold clench on the pit of British stomachs. They had to contemplate the prospect of scores more of lesser, but equally vital, centres in the Midlands catching their hell in turn.

Brave but Beseeching. How serious their outlook was, how necessary all possible aid from the vast industrial resources of the U. S., was made clear by the Ministers of the Crown last week when they put into King George VI's mouth, in his speech opening a new session in Parliament, these brave but beseeching words:

"The relations of my Government with that of the United States of America could not be more cordial, and I learn, with utmost satisfaction, of an ever increasing volume of munitions of war which is arriving from that country."

Plugging R. A. F. While the Midlands and the south coast reverberated and flames leaped high, the R. A. F. plugged dutifully on with retaliation. Besides crippling German industry. Britain still has invasion and submarines to think about and last week saw the usual heavy diversion of short-range British bombers to smack at Lorient, Ostend and other tidewater bases. One R. A. F. outfit got in some good licks at the warplane base in Arras. Others tried to silence the big cross-Channel guns at Cap Gris Nez and Calais,* which spoke up often but did little damage to Dover. Others swooped on the air base at Merignac, near Bordeaux, whence German spotters fly far to sea to spy out convoys for the U-boats. Finding Merignac defenses weak, the R. A. F. made "a hideous mess" of the place.

For their larger, internal targets of the week, R. A. F. bombers were given the synthetic oil works at Leuna (Germany's largest), the vital Rhine port of Duisburg-Ruhrort, Berlin's rail junctions, through which all rail-shipped war production in eastern Germany must pass to the Battle of Britain, and the Skoda arms factories clear across Germany at Pilsen in erstwhile Czecho-Slovakia. They also smacked the royal arsenal and Fiat works in Turin. The French complained, but the British denied, that R. A. F. bombs fell also upon Marseille, killing four women. The Coastal Command sent a surprise party to Stavanger, still the main Nazi air base in Norway, and reported success in firing buildings all around the field, excavating the runways.

The British made no claim (comparable to the proved German performance) of "coventrizing" any of these places. With bombs and planes they did what damage they could, laying store by dogged repetition rather than terrific concentration, for which they did not yet have the air resources.

*London last week, reported the disposition of these guns as follows: eight guns, at least four of which are 25O-mm. calibre, to the east of the lighthouse at Cap Gris Nez; on the cliffs a little farther forward, four more guns; on the rising ground west of Calais, two others; a total of 24 in all placed between Calais and Boulogne, all believed to have been brought over from the Maginot Line.

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