The Bay Of Plenty Beacon Published Tuesdays and Fridays. FRIDAY, MAY 21, 1943 RETRIBUTION

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 6, Issue 74, 21 May 1943, Page 4

The Bay Of Plenty Beacon Published Tuesdays and Fridays. FRIDAY, MAY 21, 1943 RETRIBUTION

THE spectacular smashing of the: Mohne and Eder dams, the greatest sources of power supply for the intensely industrialised Ruhr Valley has temporarily detracted from all other war theatres and fastens world attention upon the growing weight of the British air war upon industiial Germany. 'A wall of water, thirty foot high swept down the valley' states a correspondent citing an eyewitness from one of the bombing aircraft. Think of it from the viewpoint of utter destructiveness it would.be hard to picture a more potent force than that of angry waters unleashed over a countryside. Were we not at-war such a visitation must have been viewed as a world-rocking major % disaster; but now that it has occurred in the very heart of our enemies munition and war production areas we cannot but feel satisfaction, at the crippling blow which has been dealt at Naziisms immediate home and industrial front; Time was v when with complacent assurance HermannGoering invited journalists to witness the spectacle of the ages —the invasion of Britain. 'By the pressing of a button' he is reported to have said, 'I will release over the British Isles a wave of devastation from the air, the like, of which has'never before been contemplated or imagined.. History has recorded the signal failure of this threat and subsequent ones, and. history has further recorded the falsity of the same egotistical prophet when he assured the German people that the Fatherland was so well guarded that they need never fear an attack from the air. To-day is being fulfilled the grim promise of Winston Churchill after the 2000 bomber raid on Cologne—"This is but a beginning. The same fate awaits all other leading industrial centres. One by one they will be attacked and bombed, until finally destroyed unless the fanatical Hitler calls oft the mad war he has provoked and allows his country to regain its soul." How different to-day is the German reaction to the latest blow. Four years ago with the nations of Europe passing one by one beneath the brutal Nazi jag" gernaut of war the confident boasting voice of Goebbels* could be heard over the Nazi radio, challenging, threatening, bragging and intimidating. Now under the testing period of retribution; in the face of defeat in Africa, in the torture of the Russian debacle and in the suffering of civilian Germany under the repeated air raids; the only reaction is to cringe back to the old fashionable ruse of blaming an imaginary Jew. Nazi Germany is indeed reaping as she has sown and the present harvest of bitterness is but the reflection -of her own dark deeds in the days of her pitiless triumph and conquest.