R.A.F. AT HAMM

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 85, 7 February 1941, Page 3

R.A.F. AT HAMM

The Dislocation Spreads A BBC expert recently explained why the famous railway marshalling yards at Hamm have been singled out for special attention by the R.A.F. in their bombing attacks in Western Germany. Hamm, at the time of going to press, has just been. bombed for the eightieth time. According to Herr Karl Baedeker, who is the standby of every good peacetime tourist in Germany, Hamm is a town of 53,500 people, with ironworks and coal mines. There is also, says Baedeker, the inevitable Hotel Kaiserhof, with 42 beds at 214 to 3 marks a night, and even this is not a "starred" hotel. And that is just about the amount of interest Hamm holds for the tourist. But to the R.A.F., Hamm is the nérvecentre of German rail transport, and consequently, one of the most important targets in Nazi Germany. The vast marshalling yards-you and I called them "goods" yards before Air Ministry communiques taught us the technical namecan receive 10,000 railway trucks and make them into trains every twenty-four hours, and a train of sixty trucks can be broken up and sorted for unloading in less than seven minutes, and that’s pretty good going. Through the yards pass-or did before the R.A.F. began its nightly bombing raids-almost all the minerals from the rich Ruhr mines to all the rest of Germany, and most of the manufactured steel from the steel and engineering works of the area, as well as the incoming raw materials for the factories, You can get some idea of the importance of the yards from their vast size. They cover an area about four miles long by nearly a mile wide. Seen from the air, two enormously wide sets of parallel tracks, one at either end of the yard, converge to a waspwaist. There are about forty tracks on one side of the waist, and fifteen on the other. Of these, all but about four tracks converge to pass through the middle of the waist on two lines occupying a width of only about twenty-five feet at one point. It is not only the destruction of these huge yards that is the object of the R.A.F,’s_ nightly bombing. Obviously, raids on an enormous scale would be necessary to put it completely out of action, and even then they could be fairly quickly repaired. What the R.A.F, raids aim at is nightly dislocation of traffic, A single night raid is sufficient to jam up traffic for a time, and the resulting damage to tracks, points, signals and sidings, is enough to hold up the turnround of the waggons for hours. And the dislocation doesn’t end at Hamm. If a train is held up at the yards, it holds up another train farther away, and so the dislocation spreads out along the already heavily over-worked German railway system eastward into industrial Germany, and westward to occupied France and the "invasion ports" from Flushing to Le Havre. Tae ‘