TARGET

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 79, 27 December 1940, Page 2

TARGET

LTHOUGH they have lately been concentrating their most fierce attention on Midlands manufacturing towns, for the German Air Force London has been and will be the best target of all. Since the days when Spitfires and Hurricanes made such easy play with their cumbersome big bombers, the Germans have concentrated on the use of faster, lighter aircraft, many of them converted fighters, carrying light bomb loads, but making almost as much noise and enforcing the continued use of air raid warnings as long as if really heavy squadrons were used. The "Ack-Ack" barrage still forces them to keep high, and they must scatter their bombs almost without aim. But what a target they have: London spreads, because its clay sub-soil will not take the skyscrapers that push New York upwards from Manhattan Island. It covers 692 square miles. Berlin is only half as large in area, Paris less than a third. New York, Philadelphia and Chicago would not together cover the same area of ground. A bomb dropped within a 15-mile radius of Charing Cross hits an area with an average population of 11,855 per square mile. For more than three miles round the centre of the City the population is 37,580 persons to the square mile. All along the easily found river are hundreds of factories, dock storage buildings, power plants. While the R.A.F. hammers in reply to German raids, the Air Ministry must remember that nowhere in enemy territory is there any city so large as this, so easily reached. We might smash Berlin. The "reprisal" effect would be moral only. The R.A.F. must aim all its bombs. Everyone must pay for itself. Only recently has the order been countermanded requiring pilots to bring back all bombs for which no military target has been found. But R.A.F. pilots are good at finding targets, even after 1,500 miles of flying, over the Rhine or the Alps, or into the headwaters of the Danube; and every trip they make tells. The policy will pay in the end. The "Nation of Shopkeepers" is getting value for its money.