Open Season

"We must take Germany by the throat," Sir Archibald Sinclair had said, "and shake the life out of her." Those were big words from the British Secretary for Air, but R.A.F. attacks on the Continent last week were too big to be called diversions or nuisances. Britain was starting a spring offensive on German war industry.

Douglas attack bombers and other air weapons were flowing in from the U.S.; Wright-powered Vultee Vengeance dive-bombers were on the way. All through a winter of dirty flying weather -too dirty for big-scale raiding--British airpower had been swelling, bristling, waiting. Now the open season was on.

One night a force of more than 100 British heavy bombers bore down on Cologne (chemicals, munitions, transportation). The raiders saw scores of fierce fires knitting a red blanket for the city. Some planes dropped what an R.A.F. official called "beautiful big bombs" with terrific blast--probably 4,000-pounders. British Stirlings and Halifaxes can carry two such monsters apiece. On two successive nights equally devastating attacks were made on Essen (home of the vast Krupp works). Still another night Kiel (berth of the Gneisenau) was heavily hit. At Kiel the British met unusual night-fighter resistance, a sign that they were especially unwelcome there. They lost only 23 bombers in the four raids.

With fighter protection, R.A.F. day raiders in their mottled war paint hammered Calais and Boulogne, factories and rail yards in northern France, Nazi airdromes in France, Holland and Belgium. Famed Squadron Leader Brendan ("Paddy") Finucane, his leg wounds swiftly mended (TIME, March 2), returned to action, downed two more Nazis, raising his score to 26. The British fighter escorts tangled with Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs in a raid on Hazebrouck rail junction, lost six planes to eight Germans.

Another R.A.F. squadron had better luck. It spotted ten Messerschmitts skimming the Channel, dived on them with all cannons barking and knocked eight into the water. The other two Messerschmitts were also hit, but managed to limp away. Not a British fighter pilot was scratched.

Word leaked out of Occupied France last week that the crushing British raid on the Renault plant outside Paris (TIME, March 16) had forced a complete shut down, throwing 30,000 men out of work. For saying just that during a press conference, Vichy's Ambassador to Paris Fernand de Brinon was supposed to have had his ear pulled by the angry Nazis. Jittery propagandists still tried to combine an impression of negligible damage with one of stupendous "civilian casualties."

The British said they would strike again, and they did--in a small daylight raid on a truck factory at Poissy, ten miles from Paris. Plenty of other targets in the Paris factory belt waited their turn. The Farman and Salmson works had been hit--but the Citroen. Peugeot, Delahaye and Hispano-Suiza works, also humming away on war materials for Germany, had not. Near Paris, French optical firms are making tank periscopes, range finders, telescopic gun sights and other fire-control equipment for the Germans. At Levallois-Perret and La Courneuve, French armorers are making 25-and 47-mm. guns. The big Schneider plant at Le Creusot makes machine-gun barrels, jackets, breech blocks and screws. Before the surprise raid on Renault, the Germans used to brag that 80% of French production was helping the Axis war effort.

The Germans would have preferred to ignore the British air front--if they could. One lone Nazi plane threaded its way eastward past the swarms of eastbound Britishers, dropped a stick of bombs on southeast England, hurt one person. Casualties in Britain from German bombs for all of February: 22 dead, 21 injured.

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