U.S. Strikes a Blow

The headlines proclaimed that the U.S. Army Air Forces had opened "a new American front," the first on which U.S. crews in U.S. planes could strike directly at Hitler. The fact was that U.S. airmen, flying from R.A.F. bases in North Africa, were in position to peck at the Axis anywhere from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. But there were not yet enough men and planes in evidence to do much more.

Somewhere west of Cairo, about two weeks ago, a few U.S. airmen and bombers appeared at an R.A.F. airdrome. Under Colonel Harry A. Halverson of Boone, Iowa they moved into stone quarters in the desert, shared an R.A.F. mess, labored mightily in the heat to prepare for their forays. First their long-range, four-engined B-24s (Liberators) struck across the Mediterranean and Turkey at Rumania's oilfields, possibly at other targets in the Black Sea (TIME, June 22). Last week eight U.S. B-24s (including one flown by an R.A.F. crew) attacked an Italian Fleet which set out to raid British Mediterranean convoys.

The Mediterranean attack was part of a larger sea & air action. By heavily escorted convoys from Gibraltar and Alexandria, the British tried to get supplies into battered Malta and to the retreating Eighth Army at Tobruk (see p. 20). Italo-German warships, planes, submarines and torpedo boats grabbed their chance, tried to knock out the bulk of Britain's remaining Mediterranean Fleet. Thanks partly to Colonel Halverson's roving bombers, the Axis failed in its main objective. But the British lost heavily, were able to claim only a limited success in getting the convoy through.

The B-24s caught two Italian battleships and a heavy cruiser in their bomb-sights, proved that those secret U.S. instruments work superbly. Twenty bombs plastered one of the battleships, 15 the other. Said the flight commander, Major Alfred F. Kalberer, of LaFayette, Ind.: "It was like shooting fish in a barrel." Unhappily, the fish refused to die. Later an R.A.F. torpedo slowed one of the battleships, sank the bombed cruiser.

Colonel Halverson's squadron is the first of many special, roving units which the Army Air Forces can send wherever the enemy is in reach. Operations with this one squadron are bound to be limited. But, from North Africa, the U.S. flyers can range over the Near East, Russia's southern front, the Axis fringe of Mediterranean Europe. The bombs on Ploesti, the blows at Italy's shrinking fleet, can well be the heralds of a major U.S. air offensive.

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