Increasing Signs of Luftwaffe’s Weakness

Manawatu Times, Volume 69, Issue 54, 7 March 1944, Page 5

Increasing Signs of Luftwaffe’s Weakness

(British Official Wireless.) Received Monday, 9.20 p.m. RUGBY, March 5. Detailed study of reconnaissance pictures has confirmed earlier reports that the Liberators knocked out the current production of the big Messcrschmitt 110 aircraft plant at Gotha, Germany, in the attack of February 24. At the time of the attack more than 100 aircraft were on the airfield, and 25 of them received direct hits or near misses. A total of 23 works and assembly shops, including major build ings, hangars, stores, administrative offices, sheds, a railway warehouse and an unidentified industrial building, were destroyed or almost completely destroyed. Thirteen others were from one-third to three-quarters destroyed, 12 others were severely damaged, ancl eight received damage from direct hits or fire. Hardly a building in the entire plant escaped damage from either direct hits or blast, and a number were gutted in addition to the great number demolished by exploding bombs. American airmen in recent raids have been impressed by increasing signs of the Luftwaffe’s shortage of trained crows, in addition to planes, says the British United Press correspondent at U.S.A.A.F. bomber headquarters in Britain. Americans have observed that several twin-engined German fighters, which normally carry a pilot and a gunner, were manned by only a pilot, who had to rely on his forward guns alone. Photographs of the Gnome-Rhone aero-engine factory at Limoges which have been published in London show the terrific damage inflicted by the new 12,0001 b. bombs. Row upon row of workshops are flattened heaps of debris. An Australian pilot who took part in the raid said: “When you drop the bombs the aircraft jumps on losing such a tremendous weight in a split second. Even many thousands of feet up the blast is sufficient to rock the aircraft. The whole sky is lit up as though you had created a new sun. The blast, seems to linger a while and spread out. The damage looks like that of a concentrated attack by numbers of aircraft with the small-type bombs we used in the early days of the war.” A rear-gunner said: “The effect is the same as when hitting a big petrol store dump. The terrific flash lingers a while, far longer than even the flash from an 8000-pounder, and then slowly spreads out. When you release the bomb it feels like pressing the button of a lift and finding yourself ten storeys up before you can take your finger off the button.” “The grimmest sight I have ever seen,” is how Miss Ellen Wilkinson, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Home Security, to-day described a collection of photographs in the House of Commons showing the devastation caused by the bombing of Germany. She was driving home at a London Labour Party meeting her argument that the second front, about which so many people were asking, had already begun.

“There is an idea in the minds of a great many people in this country,” she said, “that the only way to invade a country is by an army of soldiers marching in. But bombing is the beginning of the second front, and if we do not realise that in England, Germany does. There has been an appalling amount of devastation in Germany, and it has done greater damage to the country than any army in the world could do.” Miss Wilkinson said that bombing was the biggest weapon in the second front.