Target: Oil

Germany's fast-evaporating oil supply had become a top-priority target. The Allied Air Forces in Europe hammered at that target with everything from rocket-firing fighter planes to heavy bombers--which last week completed an unprecedented three-way shuttle-bombing mission from England to Russia to Italy and back.

German performance on the battlefields, German lack of performance in the air, had suddenly made it clear that the long drive on Germany's oil had been more effective than the most optimistic airmen had hoped it could be. Now the" blistering attack reached everything from refineries and plants, deep in Germany and the Balkans, to oil dumps behind the fighting lines and tank trucks on the roads of Normandy and Italy.

Again the Luftwaffe. U.S. medium bombers hit oil dumps in France near Chartres. Argentan and Cerences. The R.A.F.'s new Typhoons, firing rockets that hit with the wallop of a six-inch naval shell, blasted storage tanks southwest of Rouen. The biggest European air combat since D-day was stirred up late in the week when 1,100 U.S. heavy bombers and 750 fighter escorts flew over Central Germany and attacked a string of industrial targets, including eleven refineries and synthetic oil plants grouped around Leipzig.

This time the reluctant Luftwaffe went up to battle; a big enemy fighter force rose to the attack. In the desperate fight that followed, the Americans lost 36 bombers and six fighters. But the Nazis paid their own heavy price: 114 planes.

On the same morning, 200 miles to the east, another U.S. fleet of more than 500 heavyweights, sent out from the Italian bases of the Fifteenth Air Force, pounded three more synthetic oil plants southeast of Breslau and not far from the old Polish border.

Three-Way Squeeze. The triple-shuttle operation, launched from England on June 21, hit oil installations on two legs of the route. On the way out the Fortresses (accompanied all the way by Mustang fighters) bombed the Ruhland oil plant south of Berlin, landed in Russia. Five days later they flew to Italy, bombing the synthetic oil plant at Drohobycz in Nazi-occupied Poland on the way.

While in Italy the shuttle bombers made two missions with the Fifteenth Air Force--an oil refinery at Budapest, railway freight yards in Rumania. They flew back to England, on the way bombed the Beziers railway yard near Montpellier in southern France. On this swing the shuttlers met spotty and confused Nazi air resistance. They shot down at least 45 German planes, lost only three Mustangs, not a single Fortress.

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