Seat of Trouble

Attacking Bremen four nights in eight, the R.A.F. went die-straight to two sources of Nazi troublemaking: the U-boat yards and plane factories of Germany's second port. British authorities described the ancient Hanseatic city, after its four-raid treatment, as in the same rubble-heaped condition as Rostock, Luebeck and Cologne, pocked by huge craters, smudged by long-burning fires.

Highly important to the U.S. was the fact that Bremen sheltered one of Germany's greatest U-boat building yards, the Deschimag works. Also important to second front possibilities was the fact that Bremen's sprawling docks funnel most of the German Army's supplies to Norway. It is a funnel that must be plugged if Norway should be the site of a frontal assault. Bremen, too, was the home of commerce-raiding, long-range Condor planes and the Focke-Wulf aircraft plant, where some of Hitler's deadliest fighter planes were built. Aerial photographs showed that Focke-Wulf machine and pressing shops had sustained a heavy bomb hit, destroying a quarter of the buildings and extensively damaging the rest. The British believed that Focke-Wulf fighter output had suffered a crippling cut, enough to repay them for the 85 British planes lost in the four Bremen raids.

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