Whipsaw

If they needed it, Hitler and Mussolini got a reminder last week of their weaknesses.

While Hitler poured air strength into Africa, the Allies whipsawed him by unleashing the war's biggest daylight air raid on northern Europe. On a Sabbath dawn the first of an armada of some 600 planes streaked across the Dover Straits into France. Targets for heavy, high-flying U.S. bombers were the Abbeville-Drucat airfield and the Fives-Lille locomotive works. The target for British light bombers was the vital Philips wireless valve and radio plant in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Flying so low that one gunner saw the sun glint on the belt buckle of a Nazi antiaircraft man, the R.A.F. pilots turned the Philips works into a scene of devastation.

Fighter pilots of the United Nations escorted the big bombers, made their own offensive sweeps over Brittany, Holland and parts of the Reich. Fourteen Allied bombers and three fighters were downed. Seven enemy planes were destroyed.

Early in the week more than a score of U.S. Liberators flew from eastern North Africa to Naples to make the first U.S. attack against Italian soil in the long history of wars. While anti-aircraft guns barked wildly, pilots flying so high that Vesuvius looked like a golf tee dropped 100,000 pounds of explosives, sank a cruiser, damaged a battleship and a second cruiser, left munition dumps and the waterfront shrouded in smoke and flames. Hermann Goring, chief of Hitler's Air Force, making a tour of Italy, was reported in the city. If he was, he saw a vital depot for African supply visited with destruction that would take a long time to repair.

This week the Allies struck again at Italy by staging a night assault on Karlsruhe and Pforzheim in Germany. Karlsruhe is a junction on the rail line which carries German coal to Italy's industrial north. Pforzheim is a subsidiary point which might be used if Karlsruhe were knocked out. Mussolini, explaining his reverses to his people (see p. 45), was made acutely aware this week of the Allies' determination to knock him out of the war.

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