1940s

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Daily Express, 1 May 1942, 1

This news has been coming for the last few days: Lashio has fallen to the Japanese. As the Daily Express reports, the town was 'pounded by artillery and dive-bombers before the final assault' (1):

Then large numbers of tanks and armoured cars rumbled forward into the inferno as a battering ram for the enemy.

General Stillwell's defending [Chinese] army was overwhelmed by the superior numbers and weight of metal in the Jap attack.

A spokesman for Marshal Chiang Kai-shek did little to disguise the seriousness of the situation, saying that 'the Chinese will be be compelled to abandon positional warfare and resort to mobile war' in Burma. He continued:

The enemy columns now at Lashio and Hsipaw could continue to advance northwards, cutting off first the Chinese forces in Burma from China, and, secondly, Chinese land communications with India by way of upper Burma, or they could turn westward with the aim of encircling the Chinese now fighting on the Mandalay and Irrawaddy fronts.

He paid tribute to the 'outnumbered' British forces defending Burma, saying they have 'heroically held out, winning the praise and admiration of their Allies'.
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The Times, 30 April 1942, 4

Most newspapers in my sample today lead with the further grim news from Burma (the Japanese army has now reached the suburbs of Lashio) but The Times chooses to go with the latest Bomber Command raids on Kiel and, for the second night running, Trondheim, both the locations of key German warships (4):

The heavier force was directed against the strongly defended naval base of Kiel, where the Scharnhorst is believed to still be in dock after her dash from Brest. The Tirpitz, Scheer, and Prinz Eugen are thought to be based on Trondheim, while a cruiser of the Hipper class has been in the locality, though she may not be there now.

These latter ships are 'a definite threat to our communications with north Russia and in the Atlantic'. While 'the Air Ministry makes no definite claim to have damaged the ships', in the case of Trondheim stronger than usual explosions were heard on the Swedish frontier, which suggests 'a bomb must have hit some explosive target; the explosion of even the biggest bomb could not in itself have caused such an effect'.
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Daily Mirror, 29 April 1942, 1

The situation in Burma is getting worse, as the Daily Mirror (above, 1) and most other papers note in their lead stories.

The whole length of the vital Lashio-Mandalay railway is in grave danger as five Japanese divisions, totalling 100,000 men, supported by panzers and bombers, are storming the southern edge of the Upper Burma plateau.

With Japanese ground forces only 110 miles away, Lashio itself is being evacuated of civilians and supplies; it is burning following a raid by twenty-seven Japanese bombers (eleven of their escorts were shot down by the Allied defenders). Writing in the Daily Express, 'Military Reporter' Morley Richards writes (4) that 'The Battle for the Burma Road seems at the point of being lost':

If the Japanese reach Lashio and subsequently force the British north of Mandalay they will have achieved one of their major strategical objects: the temporary isolation of China.

The omens are not good: dispatches from the American Volunteer Group, for example, are coming from Kunming, indicating that its headquarters (and presumably the bulk of its aircraft) has moved back north into China.
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Yorkshire Post, 28 April 1942, 1

The Yorkshire Post, (above, 1), again leads with Rostock, which has been bombed by the RAF for the fourth consecutive night. The city 'is a heap of smouldering ruins, crushed by nearly 800 tons of British bombs. Its population is fleeing in panic. Its war production has ceased':

PHOTOGRAPHS taken after the third night's raid show swarms of people flocking towards the battered station to join crowds already waiting there for trains to take them away from what Berlin describes as 'terror raids.'

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Yorkshire Post, 27 April 1942, 1

Just at the moment, this war seems mainly to be an air war. The main news today is that Rostock has been bombed for the third night in a row. In addition Stirling bombers carried out a low-level raid on the Skoda works in Czechoslovakia, and six targets in northern France were were attacked by bombers with strong fighter escorts. As the Yorkshire Post reports on its front page:

ROSTOCK has become symbolic of our new air offensive. On Saturday night and yesterday morning the harbour and aircraft works were attacked for the third successive night, by a strong force of bombers, with great results. That was not all. The famous Skoda armament works in Czechoslovakia were the target for the R.A.F. on an all-round flight of 1,400 miles.

Yesterday more attacking flights crossed the Channel for various destinations in this great opening of the Allied offensive.

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Observer, 26 April 1942, 5

The Observer's lead story (5) is about Japan's continuing advance in Burma. It's very hard to work out what exactly is going on based on the summary report: there are at least three fronts, their relation to each other is not stated, and the map provided is too small-scale to be of much use. The analysis by the Observer's military correspondent is much more helpful:

The Japanese are practising the advantages of mobility which they enjoyed in Malaya, and getting full benefit of the lead which it gives them over our more cumbersomely equipped forces. They have been switching their attack from the east to the west and back again to the east, looking all the time for our weak spots. They found one at Taunggyi, ninety-five miles south-east of Mandalay, and they are now throwing their heavy forces into this railway terminus, which gives them a valuable springboard for the decisive attack on Mandalay.

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Daily Mirror, 25 April 1942, 1

Lots of interesting things in today's papers about the campaign in Burma, the future of India, Anzac Day, and so on -- but there's also a lot on bombing, so I'm going to talk about that. The predominant theme is, as the Daily Mirror's front page headlines above claim, that Bomber Command is now delivering exceptionally heavy blows against enemy-held cities (one, Flushing or rather Vlissingen, is actually in the Netherlands, not Germany, though the Mirror doesn't mention this):

THE RAF have opened a new era in aerial warfare. Within the past twenty-four hours they have launched the two most destructive and furious raids of the war.

While Rostock, the German Baltic supply base for the Russian front, was still burning following one hour of concentrated bombing in the early morning, Fighter Command yesterday carried out their biggest ever single offensive.

In this day attack swarms of Spitfires took a force of Boston bombers to smash the docks at Flushing.

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Yorkshire Post, 24 April 1942, 1

Yesterday's muted announcement of a British retreat in Burma is followed today by more prominent headlines of a further withdrawal, albeit this time in the Taungdwingyi sector. But while the front page of the Yorkshire Post (above) grimly declares that

OUR retirement through Central Burma is bringing us nearer the plains of Mandalay and the defence of Northern Burma

it immediately goes on to find hope in yesterday's revelation that US Army troops were already in India. It is suggested that this may in time develop into one of America's major fronts against Japan. In the meantime, though, hard fighting will be necessary to protect the Burma Road which is threatened by 'a Japanese force of tanks, guns and infantry', though on the Post's analysis this is to stop Chinese reinforcements reaching Burma rather than Allied supplies reaching China. Further withdrawals are likely British troops will likely have to fall back on Meiktila.

Present policy is to deny the enemy the high ground in the North and keep him on the lower flats until the rain breaks and floods the river valleys.

The Times notes that Japan has been aided by 'traitorous Burmese' (5) and has the advantage of being able to use two good roads from the east, whereas communications between India and Burma are poor. Still,

In difficult circumstances our troops have never weakened, whatever the strain. Whenever the call has come, fatigue has been forgotten. Gurkhas, Baluchis, Frontier Force Rifles have vied with British units in courage and resolution. No finer fighting has been seen in this war. Coolness allied with determination has extricated the force or portions of it from many ugly situations, though not always without regrettable loss in men and material.

It's probably easier to forget the fatigue of the troops in Burma from the vantage point of London than it would be on the spot!
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Daily Mirror, 23 April 1942, 1

Most newspapers today lead with the story of a successful Commando raid on the French coast near Boulogne early yesterday morning -- though only the Daily Mirror (above), rather bizarrely, focuses on the fact that 'All wore gym shoes' (1) (apart from the ex-Limehouse police inspector who wore slippers). More colour is provided by the dashing Lord Lovat who led the raid wearing 'the bonnet of his own Lovat Scouts, a body of Highland deerstalkers [...] whose training is ideal for Commando work'. The purpose of the raid is not clear -- the official communique only says it was a reconnaissance mission -- so it's hard to say if it achieved its objective. Perhaps the aim was to tie up German cement supplies:

SO greatly do the Germans fear Commando raids and invasion that they have earmarked more than half the French production of cement -- about one and a quarter million tons a year -- for use on new defence works along the coast.

But in purely operational terms the raid seems to have been a success (8):

Remarkable from the military point of view was that, after spending two hours on enemy-occupied territory, every man was withdrawn with arms. Our casualties were negligible.

The Navy, which delivered and retrieved the Commandos, also got away largely unscathed, and damaged two armed German trawlers in the process.
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10 April 1940 has remained in history as "the great panic day". The reason for this designation is the panic that spread through the population of Oslo, after the rumors of the British bombing of the capital had spread. Here you can see how the Oslo people rush out of town on foot, on bicycles, in trucks and buses. The clip is without audio.

From NRK via the excellent RealTimeWWII. (The caption has been run through Google Translate and tweaked by me so it makes more sense, so I can't vouch for its accuracy.)

This one of the many things I didn't know before. I can't find much about it on the web in English; Wikipedia says:

The same day [10 April 1940], panic broke out in German-occupied Oslo, following rumours of incoming British bombers. In what has since been known as "the panic day" the city's population fled to the surrounding countryside, not returning until late the same evening or the next day. Similar rumours led to mass panic in Egersund and other occupied coastal cities. The origins of the rumours have never been uncovered.

It's interesting that the rumours named Britain as the aggressor. Of course Germany bombing a city it already occupied wasn't particularly plausible, so given that the rumour existed it would have to attach itself to Britain. The Altmark incident (and the planned mining of Norwegian waters, though I assume that was not publicly known as it was interrupted by the German invasion which was publicised shortly before the panic) might have suggested that the British were prepared to go further and attack Norway to achieve their own ends. I don't know much about airmindedness in Norway before the war (apart from the ghost flyers) either but in recent months civilians in two small, nearby nations had already suffered aerial bombardment, namely Poland and Finland (and let's not forget China and Spain in 1938) so to that extent the panic was not unreasonable.