R.A.F. DAMAGE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 7, Issue 41, 18 January 1944, Page 6

R.A.F. DAMAGE

GERMANY'S DEAD ACRES

ESCAPEE'S STORY RLVEALED

Though the. train windovfs were •overcd, some British prisoners of xav lately returned lo England maniged to glimpse a good deal of Germany while on their way. One of them, a sailor from Liverpool,, has described in a BBC Radio News Reel what he saw through a slit in a blind. They passed through Duisburg. Dusseldorf, Essen and Cologne, which they recognised liecause the names were on the stations.- It was one vast industrial area. The railway goes through the busiest industrial part of those towns, and naturally that had been the target of the R.A.F. In the sailor's Words: 'There- was no life —the place was dead /ight through the centre. City after" city was the. same." Most of it Avas Hat, he said,, but it Avas obvious that the biggest damage had come, from lires. No attempt had been made to clear it up. Bomb craters still gaped in the streets; masonry and rubble, lifter-, ed everywhere. He could see whole factories deserted, and beyond hope of repair. The speaker had been ashore during the. Battle of Britain in 1940 and went through the worst of the Merscysid-c raids, but he said that, bad as: they were, the damage in Liverpool and in London was nothing approaching what he had observed, in the Ruhr. ''Acre upon acre is dead" was his final comment.