“WILL END WAR BY BOMBING”

Press, Volume LXXIX, Issue 23964, 3 June 1943, Page 5

“WILL END WAR BY BOMBING”

VIEW OF AMERICAN AIR CHIEF ALLIES DETERMINED TO CONTINUE RAIDS (N.2. Press Association —Copyright) (Rec. 10 ptm.) LONDON, June 1. Allied leaders on both sides of the Atlantic have reaffirmed the Allied resolve to continue the bombing campaign against Germany and Italy. “We are going to end the war < ana end it soon, by bombing military objectives,” said the Chief of the United States Army Air Forces (LieutenantGeneral H. H. Arnold), speaking to a graduating class at the United States Military Academy, West Point. He said that such operations would in the end cut down casualties and save hundreds of thousands of lives. “The enemy cannot take such a terrifying and destructive day and night hammering,” he said. “They are crying for us to stop. Their morale is already beginning to crack. We are now ready for the decisive year. The handwriting for the Germans, Italians, and Japanese is on the wall, but they are still well-equipped and brilliantly commanded, and they are desperate, which always makes a dangerous foe.” Lieutenant-General Arnold said that now that the Axis was at the receiving end, its propaganda was trying to whip up sentiment against bombing. This, he declared, could achieve nothing. The Axis had started the bombing of civilians. The Allies would continue their attacks on enemy communications, factories, and U-boat yards. Lieutenant General Arnold said that 1800 aeroplanes had been sent across the Atlantic and the Pacific last month. In a statement on the bombing of Germany, the British Home Secretary (Mr Herbert Morrison) said there had always been an official German pretence that the bombing attacks on British cities were reprisals for the Royal Air Force attacks on military objectives in the Rhineland after the German attack on Holland, Belgium, and France. This ignored the terrible German air onslaught on Polish cities, and the cold-blooded daylight attack on defenceless civilian quarters of Rotterdam. with the object of forcing Holland to surrender. The whole of German air activity showed that Germany’s policy was the unrestricted bombing of cities whenever it suited German plans, and to suggest that Britain started it was typical Nazi humbug.