A Night to be Above

Duesseldorf's turn came on a moonless night last week. Three nights later it was Bremen's. Simultaneously Soviet bombers ranged over eastern Europe, attacking Koenigsberg in East Prussia, Bucharest and Rumania's Ploesti oil fields.

The air offensive of the United Nations seemed to be gaining in coordination, as well as in force and frequency. The Bremen raid involved perhaps 400 to 500 planes. The force which plastered Duesseldorf and its great steel works was closer to the 1,000-plane figure than any which had hit the Continent since June 1, when Cologne took a knockout blow.

For the R.A.F., which lost 31 planes, Duesseldorf was a tougher nut than on previous raids because fighter-plane and other defenses had been stepped up. But for the 540,000 inhabitants of the city it was far, far worse. That could be seen even by a red-thatched, 22-year-old Scottish pilot from far above:

"We saw the fighter flares sent up by the Germans over the Dutch coast to help their night fighters, but we didn't see anything else until we were about 50 miles from Duesseldorf. Then we saw the flares dropped by our pathfinders and the searchlights and Flak ahead of us working on previous kites [planes]. When we got closer we saw that the town was loaded with searchlights, hundreds of them. There was almost a wall of searchlights in front of the target, but there were plenty of big fires to be seen already.

"We got over the target right on time and spent 20 minutes before dropping all our eggs. Several times we got caught in the lights, but I managed to sideslip out of them each time. . . . The Flak was relatively light. I guess the Jerries must have been holding it for the poor fellows caught in the lights. We saw one Halifax caught in a cone of about 50 lights with the Jerries pumping streams into the apex until it exploded and slowly spiraled down. . . .

"There were some big naval guns exploding shells near by with a loud whoosh and bouncing my kite up and down. When we unloaded everything, my crew started tossing out whiskey bottles with sticks in their necks, screamers which sound hellishly like big bombs and make searchlight crews scramble for cover. On the way home we could still see the fires 150 miles away. I was glad that night I was one of the people above and not one below."

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