TRANSPORT WRECKED

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21280, 26 November 1940, Page 7

TRANSPORT WRECKED

BOMBING OF BERLIN WORKERS HAVE TO WALK (Times Air Mail Service) LONDON, Sept. 27 Many thousand of Berlin city and factory workers have to walk into town to their offices and workshops if they want to get there at all, owing to the Royal Air Force bombing of Schoeneberg junction and the Westgreuz junction—the Clapham and Wellesden junctions of Berlin, writes Sefton Delmer, in the Daily Express. Owing to the petrol famine in Germany and the severe rationing, the buses available in Berlin are few and badly overcrowded. Schoeneberg junction which is also an extensive marshalling yard for goods traffic, serves the whole of the rail traffic from the southern and south-eastern suburbs of Berlin. Westkreuz, just outside Charlottenburg, serves the west, south-west and north-west of Berlin’s surroundings. The bombing of Tempelhof airfield—the Croydon of Berlin and Germany’s best-equipped and most important air traffic centre—will have upset many of Marshal Goering’s airforce men and Air Ministry workers, who live in great barracks just near the airfield. Transport Wrecked And the bombing of the railway sidings at Tempelhof will have destroyed the transport facilities of the many important forctories in this district, including the skyscraper of Dr. Goebbels’ main propaganda publishing plant in the former Ullstein Printing Works. Berlin factories must be badly hampered anyhow in their production. Again and again the Royal Air Force has set on fire the two main power stations in the Berlin grid system on which they rely for electricity, the Klingenberg station and the West power station on the Tegel lake. We might call Tegel the Kingston of Berlin.

Ruedersdorf—on the eastern factory-strewn fringe, the Dagenham of Berlin, had a fireworks display. Berliners, as neutral reports have shown, have lost confidence in their cellar shelters. For many people sheltering in cellars under flimsy blocks of flats have been buried alive, according to these reports, when blast from heavy British bombs caused rows of these buildings to crash. And they can’t go to the Berlin underground. For in Beilin the underground is a shallow affair, only a few feet deep, because ol the high level of surface water. It is not comparable for protection with the London Tube. Even if safety were the only consideration, I would much rather take my bumbuig m Loudon.