Ducks and Woodpeckers

To men on little tossing trawlers in the raw North Sea, who can scarcely defend themselves with rifles when Nazi bombers dive at them from the storm scud, Germany's air war on British shipping is a very real and horrid thing. Machine-gun fire sweeps the deck, bombs blow the ship apart, men are hurled mangled and stunned into the combers, the ship goes down leaving survivors to flounder and gasp and freeze until help comes, if it does.

But the fact remained last week, after more German air raids over the North Sea, one of which ended with a lone Heinkel bomber being brought down like a shot duck near the mouth of the Firth of Forth, that Germany's winter campaign of harassment affects the mass of Britain's shipping about as much as a woodpecker tapping on a bank vault. Because of the small bombs used and the difficulty of sighting for enough lethal hits, most of the ships claimed as "sunk" by Nazi pilots are only damaged. They limp into port with their wounded groaning under sea-drenched blankets. Of eight ships claimed by Nazis in one day last week, the British admitted the actual loss of only two, one of them shattered by a torpedo launched from the air.

> When an enemy submarine is sunk, the British Admiralty usually delays announcement of it, to withhold information and increase worry for the German High Command. Last week the Admiralty departed from this custom, announced the sinking in one day of two U-boats by one British destroyer. Emphasized--to encourage neutrals--was the fact that these U-boats had attacked a convoy off Ireland. Additional fact: they sank at least one of the convoyed ships (the Canadian Beaverburn). And another ship, the Chagres, was lost to a mine.

> Again last week Berlin and London engaged in a claiming argument about total merchant tonnage sunk since September. Berlin claimed 409 victims, Allied and neutral, totaling 1,493,431 tons. London reported that the real figures were 274 ships, 925,044 tons. Lloyd's Shipping Gazette appeared to umpire the debate by listing as lost, from its authoritative sources, 281 Allied and neutral ships of 977,790 tons.

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