Under the Cynical Moon

As London's Big Ben boomed midnight on September's last day, marking the city's two-month holiday from raid warnings, German planes made their fiercest onslaught of many weeks on other British cities.

The Luftwaffe picked out Britain's east coast invasion ports, Aberdeen, Newcastle, Hull, Dover, Ramsgate. Under a cynical harvest moon bombers dropped high explosives and incendiaries, raked streets with cannon fire. For good measure they repeated the performance two nights later.

Hastening to explain the raids in view of Winston Churchill's statement about Germany's "serious shortage" in the air (see p. 25), the Air Ministry assured correspondents that only 30 to 40 planes had come over to bomb. At least three bombers were downed, a theoretical 10% of the striking force, which would make the raids unprofitable. Whether the Luftwaffe was satisfied with this test of strength, or whether it had merely switched four or five bomber squadrons from the Eastern Front to make the attacks, the raids were not repeated.

Britain gave more than it took. In bombing sweeps over the Continent, Wellington, Hampden, Whitley bombers dropped miniature earthquakes on Stuttgart, Stettin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Nantes, Saint-Nazaire and other towns. A British raid on Boulogne was so heavy that it shook and boomed across the Channel, could be heard plainly in British coastal towns. Air Minister Sir Archibald Sinclair dreamily heralded a British blitz "to prepare the way for advance of the Allied Armies into Germany."

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