City in Torment

Berlin caught another dreadful week. Four nights the heavy bombers of the R.A.F. visited the doomed city. Lowest tonnage in a single night, 1,210; highest, 2,400. Weather and artful feinting by the raiders thwarted the defenses; British losses were low.

In synchronized day-bombing offensive, targets along the French "rocket-gun coast" and in Germany itself were blasted. Two records were set in a day: 1) some 1,500 U.S. bombers and fighters, biggest U.S. air fleet ever sent to battle, struck 556 miles into southwestern Germany; 2) during that 24-hour period a stunning total of 3,000 Allied warplanes attacked German targets in the heartland and in France.

Omens of the End. Swedish travelers, from Berlin, dazed and awestruck, described a city of cavedwellers, told of destruction on the Hamburg scale, of extreme suffering from the bitter cold and the total disruption of fuel and food distribution. Fresh bombs were falling into old fires still burning; stiff winds spread the flames.

A Swiss eyewitness said that the remaining population was being fed chiefly from army field kitchens at street corners. Bombed-out Germans who could get to a police station and register could claim an issue of six cigarets, a packet of sandwiches, 200 marks in emergency cash, new ration cards.

Early this week the R.A.F. was back at work, boring through freezing gales and heavy opposition. Stockholm heard that Adolf Hitler's proud Chancellery was wrecked, hundreds of Berliners trapped in the vast shelter built underneath the block-long, grey stone building.

But to overenthusiastic suggestions that Berlin was "finished," the Air Ministry in London returned a cautious answer. The "omens" were definitely "favorable," but the Battle of Berlin is still in progress and has not reached its final phase. Since the massive raids on the Nazi capital began in November, some 15,000 tons of bombs have been dropped--about one-fourth of what the R.A.F. is prepared to allot for the city's destruction.

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At 1943's end, top Allied airmen reported to their principals. Main points for the year:

>The R.A.F. dropped more than 135,000 long tons of bombs on Germany, and 19,000 tons on Nazi-occupied Europe.

>The U.S. Eighth Air Force dropped 55,000 tons of bombs and destroyed 4,100 Nazi planes; lost some 1,000 bombers, 150 fighters.

>General Doolittle's strategic (heavy bombing) arm of the Northwest African Air Forces dropped 74,000 tons of bombs on Axis targets in the Mediterranean area, shot down 3,146 enemy planes and destroyed 2,426 more on the ground, actually topped the Eighth in both categories. It lost 819 planes.

The Eighth Air Force also announced that it had licked the problem of precision bombing through an overcast; Flying Fortresses and Liberators were smacking their German targets even on days when cloud cover made those targets invisible. No details of the device which made this feat possible were revealed, but from neutral Sweden came what seemed at least a plausible layman's description: "Scientists have developed an infra-red television camera capable of piercing the thickest cloud or fog. They have clearly perfected a specially sensitized screen made up of millions of photocells, all sensitive to infra-red rays, enclosed in a cathode-ray tube and enabling aviators flying above the cloud to read the target as though through binoculars."

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