Power & Purpose

BATTLE OF EUROPE

It might have been the herald of invasion. It might have been practice for invasion. Or it might have been a calculated blow at some Nazi threat to coming invaders--or to England. Nazi propagandists and London censors, alike interested in concealing the precise nature of any such threat, encouraged the report that the target was a concentration of cross-Channel rocket guns.

Whatever lay hidden on Pas-de-Calais, for five days and two nights the mightiest air force ever assembled thudded at the chosen targets.

Seemingly endless streams of U.S. and British medium bombers, protected by snarling fighters, whipped across the Channel from rain-soaked English airfields. In one 36-hour period, 4,000 Allied planes dropped their bombloads, came back without a single loss in combat. Some formations took 45 minutes to pass over Dover. Window-jarring explosions swept across the narrow waters. For the first time since the Eighth Air Force and the R.A.F. staged a practice preliminary around Boulonge (TIME, Sept. 20), heavy day and night bombers shifted from the strategic assault on Germany to tactical assault on the invasion coast of France.

The airmen worked with deadly, purposeful persistence. They had been told exactly what to aim at, reported that they hit the target again & again. For its part of the attacks, the Eighth put up the biggest force of heavies it had ever sent over the Channel (biggest previous force in one raid: 750 Fortresses and Liberators).

Medium bombers and fighters baited the Luftwaffe's coastal fields. But few German fighters appeared: in the five days, the Allies lost only 14 fighters, one bomber.

The Inner Target. From the Mediterranean, Jimmy Doolittle's Fifteenth U.S. Air Force sent planes "in force" to Innsbruck and Augsburg in southwest Germany. The Augsburg raid dramatized the enormous growth of Allied air power and air techniques: not so long ago (April 17, 1942) the R.A.F. could spare only twelve Lancasters for a costly, experimental daylight raid on Augsburg from Britain.

Interwoven in pulverizing succession came heavy raids, on Bremen (1,200 tons) by the Eighth, on Berlin (1,120 tons) and Frankfurt (2,250 tons) by the R.A.F. Before the Frankfurt raid, Canadian squadrons in a whip-smart feint slashed at nearby Mannheim, drawing the Luftwaffe into the skies. By the time the main attack on Frankfurt developed, the Luftwaffe realized its mistake, sent its harassed night fighters racing northward. They arrived too late. By then 800 R.A.F. planes had loosed their 2,250 tons of bombs in 35 minutes, gone home.

Half hour later, Britain's busy Mosquitoes stung Frankfurt again, demoralized its weary firefighters. That pattern, by night and by day, will flower into bloody bloom in many another German city before spring.

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