AIR ASSAULT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 22 June 1943, Page 4

AIR ASSAULT

ON RUHR WAR' INDUSTRIES

DETAILS OF DEVASTATION. BARMEN VIRTUALLY WIPED OUT. (British Official Wireless.) (Received This Day, 10.40 a.m.) RUGBY, June 21. Wuppertal, of which 1000 acres were devastated on the R.A.F.’s attack in the night of May 29, is really two towns —Barmen and Eberfeld —which were amalgamated for convenience of administration in 1929. The whole weight of the attack was directed on Barmen. The two towns together have a population of 411,000, and are about equal in size. A thousand acres of devastation in a town of 200.000 inhabitants means that., to all intents and purposes, the town has disappeared. There is almost as much destruction as in Dusseldorf, a town more than twice as large. No industrial town in Germany to date has been so completely wiped off the map. Barmen and Eberfeld are closelypacked towns in the deep valley of the River Wupper. At the narrowest part, between Barmen and Eberfeld, the valley is only 11 miles wide. The place is so congested" that, like New York, it has an elevated railway. Among its dense buildings, fires must have spread unchecked.

Night photographs taken during the attack showed volumes of smoke such as have hardly ever been seen before, and it was obvious that the raid must have been calamitous. A lucky break in the weather allowed a reconnaissance pilot after many attempts to get excellent subsequent photographs, on which photographic interpreters are now working. In addition to armament works, Wuppertal contained many textile factories, and the shortage of textiles in Germany is now very serious.

The Air Ministry also gives the latest information regarding the results of the other R.A.F. triumphs in the great air offensive. Photographs which showed 1000 to 1500 acres of Dusseldorf devastated, in the attack on June 11, did not completely cover all the city. A new survey shows a further hundred acres of devastation. Within this comparatively small space were many of Dusseldorf's most important factories. Among key buildings damaged is Germany's biggest works for the manufacture of machine tools. Evidence now shows new and very severe damage in the Ruhr itself, as well as in towns just outside, in close economic relation with the district, and the latest photographs reveal further damage at Bochum and Gberhause, and also at Le Creusot, in France, where fires were still burning yesterday, and where they revealed that over thirty works were damaged.