Lancasters

Night raids on Germany were not enough. The R.A.F. had found daylight raids both necessary and feasible. Necessary because the wait for light cloud-covered bombing nights grew too long while the sands of the Red army trickled away and shipping off the U.S. took a terrible licking. Feasible because Britain's newest four-motored bombers, snub-nosed Lancasters, could get up enough speed, carrying several tons of bombs, to raid Germany and return with conservative losses. On three successive days last week Lancasters and slower, longer-ranged Sterlings swept over the Ruhr to paste steel mills, factories, electric plants and other industries that feed Hitler's armies. Bombers flying singly made the first two raids; a mass of bombers in formation made the third.

The industrial wellsprings that supply the German army in Russia were targets; but the raids were part & parcel of the Battle of the Atlantic. Since March, when U-boat marauding in the western Atlantic grew intense, the R.A.F had blasted a pattern of destruction through German submarine-building cities, seeking to choke off U-boats at their source. Among them were Augsburg and Cologne (diesel engines), Essen (plates and torpedo tubes), Emden and Bremen (assembly yards), Warnemuende (U-boat training base), Wilhelmshaven and St. Nazaire, France (operational bases).

The Nazis were known to have dispersed their U-boat industry throughout the Reich and occupied territory to evade the R.A.F., breaking up such pre-war building centers as Hamburg, Kiel, Bremen. Relentlessly the R.A.F. has searched out new plants and plastered them with explosives.

But the U-boat problem still was far, far from licked.

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