Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, JULY 21, 1943. AN AXIS AIR FAILURE.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 July 1943, Page 2

Wairarapa Times-Age WEDNESDAY, JULY 21, 1943. AN AXIS AIR FAILURE.

♦ “QNE of the greatest mysteries in the Sicilian campaign,” it has been said by a correspondent representing the combined American Press, ‘‘is the failure of the Axis planes to attack in strength.” This failure has been made apparent in a. number of ways. A large and efficient enemy air force obviously would have been able to do far more than was attempted to check the initial Allied landings on the Sicilian beaches and also to hinder the rapid extension of these landings into the occupation of a wide area of territory, including airfields from which Allied planes are now operating.

Even at the stage the campaign has now reached, it mighthave been expected that a strong enemy air force would have been capable at least of setting limits to the naval supportwhich is being given so boldly and effectively to the Allied land forces and also of checking the activities of the airborne troops which are playing so gallant and successful a part in opening new lines of advance to the Allies in operations dwarfing and outclassing anything of a similar kind attempted by the enemy in past campaigns in Crete and elsewhere.

Some comments on the Axis air weakness in Sicily, including that of the correspondent quoted above, might be read as suggesting that this weakness is local and that- it may be due in part to the enemy reserving air strength for the defence of areas not yet invaded by the Allies. These suggestions are not altogether convincing. It has to be considered that in Russia, as well as in the Mediterranean, the enemy is showing himself relatively much weaker in the air than in earlier stages and phases of the war.

Relative German air weakness is nowhere more strikingly apparent than in Western Europe. It is true that large numbers of German fighters are still opposing Allied night and day bombers in their attacks on the Reich and occupied territory, but Germany is no longer able to reply, save by minor hit and run raids, to the devastating blows that are being struck at her war industries and transport in home and occupied territory. Against the view that Germany is neglecting the air defence of Sicily in order to reserve strength for the defence of areas nearer lioine it has to be considered that the Allied invasion of Sicily is an important step towards the invasion of mainland Italy, and that from bases in Italy the Allies will be able to increase enormously the weight and effect of their air attack on German and other areas now relatively immune from intensive bombing. There is already a good deal to support an opinion that the weakening of the Axis air power made manifest in Sicily is not so much local, and due to forces being reserved for action in other areas, as symptomatic of an all-round decline in the effective strength of the Luftwaffe in relation to the expanding strength of the Allies, ft has been contended by some wellinformed observers overseas (although admittedly there is some diversity of opinion on the subject) that the Luftwaffe is not only finding its strength unequal to the increasing and conflicting demands that are being made upon it in various areas of conflict, but is further weakened by the hurried and ineffective training of pilots and other airmen and by defects of organisation. The British and American systems of air training are extremely painstaking and thorough and have been described as designed ‘‘to evolve individualists with a well-developed team sense, rather than airmen cut to a pattern like soldiers and handled impersonally as are military replacements or reinforcements.” It is claimed that the Luftwaffe is weakened by mass production methods of training, involving a failure to develop individual initiative and resiliency and by undue regimentation, as well as by being increasingly outnumbered by the air forces of the Allies. The record of a long list of air battles, great and small, definitely supports these claims and obviously they have a very vital bearing on the coni inning course of the war.