Saturday’s bombing of London isn’t quite as prominent on the front page of the Daily Mail as one might expect. There are a few small items about it (e.g. a panorama of London ablaze, taken from the top of Northcliffe House; a report from Italian radio that Londoners are ‘absolutely terrified’ by the raids) but […]
‘[T]he great daylight attack on London’ (7) yesterday evening came at an awkward time for the Observer. It was too late to do the opinion page over, and so it features editor J. L. Garvin’s thoughts on the destroyer deal and the battle of wills between Hitler and Churchill. So there is less than half
Today’s New Statesman and Nation has little to say about a German invasion or aerial strategy, unlike the Spectator yesterday, aside from a brief paragraph in the editorial comments (221) noting that German bombers now have an equal number of fighters as escorts: The primary object of these attacks has been to engage and destroy
This week’s issue of the Spectator, an influential commentary from the right, has a number of editorial comments and columns about the course of the war. The leading paragraph, on page 234, discusses Hitler’s recent speech (‘bombast […] lies […] threats’), focusing on one of his statements which suggests that ‘the German Air Force is
Bomber Command has been busy bombing German forests, among other targets: the Black Forest on Monday night, the Hartz [sic] in north-west Germany and the Grunewald north of Berlin on Tuesday night. According to the Air Ministry communique, issued last night and reported here in The Times (4), ‘military targets [were] concealed’ in these forests;
The big news in the Manchester Guardian today (5) has nothing to do with the air war but a deal with the United States, which will transfer fifty elderly destroyers to Britain in exchange for 99-year leases on bases in the Western Hemisphere. (It seems that Roosevelt meant what he said at Newfound Gap.) The
Yesterday was another big day for aerial warfare (these headlines are from The Times, 4). Six hundred and fifty German aircraft attacked RAF aerodromes in south-east England; forty-six were shot down and the raids repulsed. Only thirteen British aircraft were lost. London had more air-raid warnings during the day but suffered nothing worse than that.
The Manchester Guardian sums up the weekend’s raids above (5). Eighty-five enemy aircraft were shot down on Saturday, and another twenty-five yesterday. British losses on those days were thirty-seven and fifteen, respectively. The headlines make for reassuring reading: ‘Raiders baffled in attacks on aerodromes’, ‘Raiders scattered on way to London’, ‘Nazis lose 700 airmen in
The New Statesman was a little off in its belief that the Germans have given up ‘blitzkrieg’ tactics, as yesterday they renewed their heavy daylight assaults against RAF aerodromes. According to the Observer (above, 7) they also targeted ‘women shoppers’ in two places near or in London. On page 8, there’s a handy map to
Saturday is the day that the new New Statesman and Nation comes out. (The Spectator comes out on Friday, but I missed that yesterday. Not to worry; there’s always next week.) It’s a ‘week-end review’, not a newspaper, but inevitably has much commentary on the war, generally from a left-wing perspective. Indeed, this week it
