The Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Tuesdays and Fridays. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1943 AIR POWER

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 7, Issue 22, 9 November 1943, Page 4

The Bay of Plenty Beacon Published Tuesdays and Fridays. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1943 AIR POWER

IT is probable that the reprisal raids which the Germans made on London were launched not with any hope of evening the score but for the purpose of providing a propaganda story to tell to the German people. From the time that Hitler's' attack on Russia called for a wider dispersal of the power of the German air force the comparative and actual growth of Allied air power compared with that of the Axis has been emphasised by the increasing frequency of Allied air raids of all kinds to a point where, for all practical purposes, they became as much a monopoly as were the German raids on Britain* in the earlier days of the war. Side by side with this growth in capacity to bomb, which, in itself, just reversed the position that had obtained earlier, there was the new development of day bombing, a field into which the Germans had once ventured, only to be quickly driven out again. The advent in mass production of the Lancaster led to the 'hedge-hopping" day raids that the Germans found extremely destructive and difficult to counter, and, about the same time, the appearance in numbers of American Flying Fortresses and Liberators ushered in a period of daylight precision bombing from high altitudes. It was in these raids that the Flying Fortresses first demonstrated their capacity to deal with the German fightters. Since then the British have largely specialised in night bombing, using bombs up to eight thousand pounds in weight combined with incendiary bombs of much greater efficiency than formerly, while the Americans have largely had the field to themselves in daytime precision bombing. Germany's early advantage in dive-bombers was wiped out as soon as the Allies had sufficient machines available to demonstrate the extreme vulnerability of the divebombers to modern fighters, and, in North Africa particularly, the German dive-bombers were literally blown from the skies. Germany's lack of any alternative has been demonstrated by the Aliied air superiority over the North African and Italian battlefields; and her hope of regaining ascendancy by the development of the: Junkers 86P, which can attain a height of 40,000 feet, and the much-vaunted Focke Wulf 190 fighter w r as dashed when the double-super-charged engines of the new Spitfires raised them to heights where the Germans could no longer escape.