HITLER’S WALL

Wairarapa Times-Age, 25 August 1942, Page 4

HITLER’S WALL

WILL NOT KEEP ALLIES OUT Of EUROPE LUFTWAFFE IN SIGHT OF DISASTER. LESSONS OF THE DIEPPE RAID. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) LONDON, August 23. Mr John Gordon, writing in the “Sunday Express,’’ says: "Dieppe has proved that no wall that HitlGr has built round Europe will keep us out when we decide to go in. Dieppe was probably the strongest point of all the coastal defences. Dieppe brought Hitler’s fighters up in the clouds, with the result that we destroyed about one-third of the German air strength in the west, "If we could force a week of a fortnight of air fighting on such a scale as at Dieppe we might deal the Luftwaffe its death blow, and the moment Germany loses her air strength she is done wherever her land forces are. “Slowly, but with inevitable certainty, those who have been forecasting supreme domination by air power are seeing the vision become a fact. Hitler can never again see equality with the R.A.F.. far less hold overwhelming superiority. The Luftwaffe can no longer face two campaigns at once. It cannot bomb Britain and support an army in Russia at the same time.” Lierman eyewitnesses of the raid on Dieppe, speaking over the Paris radio, expressed surprise that the Allied forces used tanks. “The beach fortifications were powerful, and there W’as not a single road from the beach to the town accessible to tanks, but some of the British tanks attempted the seemingly impossible,” one said. “These tanks advanced a little but, finding the position hopeless, they turned back and ran into the full blast of the German anti-tank guns. The eyewitnesses added that the raiders fought with amazing stubbornness and stuck to their posts till their last cartridge was spent or till they drew their last breath.