ACHILLES HEEL

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 February 1941, Page 5

ACHILLES HEEL

OF NAZI WAR ECONOMY

SYNTHETIC OIL PLANTS.

BRITISH OFFICERS SURVEY OF AIR OPERATIONS. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY. February 3. A high Air Force officer in London today stated that there was no doubt in his mind or in that of the Com-niander-in-Chief of the Bomber Command that the present inactivity of the Luftwaffe over Britain was entirely due to ilia unusually bad weather conditions spread over the whole of norlh-easi-ern Europe.

Referring in general to the Royal I Air Force attacks, the officer said that iso far the German air defences had I caused the Royal Air Force bombers ' no undue worry. He remarked that the I Nazi air chief. General Milch, in his recent speech, had found it necessary to explain to the German public that, far from being able to give immunity from the British bombers, (he nightraiders were "very difficult to find." Speaking of the damage done by the R AF. attacks, the officer said the pilots' reports contained an accurate account which was supported in the second place by subsequent photos and. thirdly, by information received from independent sources. He instanced the raid made on Mannheim in December, in which information received established that some nine direct hit* were obtained on the railways, causing damage which took three weeks to repair, while 248 industrial premises were destroyed besides considerable damage done to the inland port. The German railways communications had been strained to capacity, he said, and any loss of time would never be made up —hence the value of raids which caused dislocation of the communications. Though the weather had interfered with n great many raid programmes, all the attacks had conformed to the general plan of concentrating the greatest force nt the weak spots in the German war economy Many of the targets were selected by the Ministry <>{ Economic Warfare, and at present the Achilles hi-el of Nazi war economy was the synthetic ojl production.

It is estimated by the economist. Mr J. M Keynes the BBC states, that the whole of the bomb damage done in Britain does not exceed one year’s building capacity in that country