Air defence

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Daily Mirror, 19 November 1940, 1

Some inconsistencies in the Daily Mirror's message today. Liverpool was bombed heavily last night in 'One of the most severe raids in the air blitz' (1):

Fire bombs damaged a boys' college and caused casualties; a secondary school was hit by an oil bomb and incendiaries; numbers of houses were destroyed; gas and water mains were fractured. There were no reports of any vital damage to industrial undertakings.

This last statement is presumably the basis for the statement that the raid had 'failed'. However, the Mirror suggests that Liverpool, along the recent lessening of attacks on London and the Coventry raid, 'is a clear indication that Goering is copying the R.A.F. and aiming blows at the production centres and military objectives of the provinces'.

Henceforth, the Germans are expected to copy our devastating raids on military objectives in Germany.

But will they be too late?

In the view of the air experts, they would have achieved considerable success if they had started at the beginning on our military objectives instead of foolishly attempting to break London's morale and win a short war.

Which is the opposite of what actually happened back in August and September, but never mind.
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Daily Express, 16 November 1940, 1

News of Coventry's tragedy -- Hilde Marchant, writing on the front page of the Daily Express, above, says the city was 'Guernicaed' all Thursday night -- has reached the morning press (though it was announced by the government yesterday and would have been reported on the BBC and in the evening papers). Initial reports are that casualties amount to about a thousand people, killed or wounded. It is clearly a great shock to the nation: the Manchester Guardian's London correspondent says that the news 'has hit Londoners, I believe, harder than any of the attacks on themselves' (6). It's the first time an urban centre outside the capital has been blitzed in this way. Those who have already experienced London's intense bombardment can imagine how much harder to cope it would have been for the much smaller city of Coventry. For the rest of us, Marchant gives a sense of the devastation:

The shopping centre of Coventry is one choking mass of ruins, fire, and people who, by some miracle, have emerged alive.

They walk through this skeleton of the city centre with faces stained black, breathing the smoke of their homes, trying to find their families and friends, not sure of the way through their own streets.

The front page features a photograph of the suddenly ruined Coventry Cathedral.
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Daily Mail, 5 October 1940, 1

The Daily Mail today leads with changes at the top of the RAF. The Chief of the Air Staff, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Cyril Newall, has been kicked upstairs to the Governor-Generalship of New Zealand. His replacement, Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal, has come from commanding Bomber Command; and his replacement there will be Air Marshal Sir Richard Peirse. Noel Monks emphasises the relative youth -- 47 and 48 respectively -- and experience of both Portal and Peirse, and is confident that they are the right men for the job (1):

Both men are great believers in offensive operations. Both strongly maintain that the winning of the war will be greatly assisted by large-scale bombing offensives against the Nazis in their own territory

Newall's retirement should not be seen as a disgrace, as it comes 'at the moment when the R.A.F. are universally acclaimed the saviours of Britain'.
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Daily Mai, 28 September 1940, 1

The Luftwaffe launched mass daylight raids against London and Bristol yesterday, 'the most widespread of the war' according to the Daily Mail (1), and with the largest losses since 15 September, too. German losses are reported to be 130 aircraft and about 300 aircrew, while the British lost 34 fighters and 19 pilots. Many people watched the battles from the ground, and 'cheered as raider after raider fell'.
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Daily Mail, 27 September 1940, 1

The Daily Mail has some good news to splash on its front page today. (The Times dourly leads with the story of yet another record air raid on Berlin.) Another 46 survivors have been rescued from the lost liner SS City of Benares, which was reported as sunk last Monday. They drifted in the Atlantic for eight days before being spotted by a Sunderland flying boat. As well as 'British and Lascar seamen' there were six boys, aged between 9 and 16, along with two adult minders, who were being evacuated to Canada but are doubtless quite happy to have fetched up in Scotland instead. That still leaves 77 dead child evacuees.
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Daily Mail, 13 September 1940, 1

For the last two nights Bomber Command has been hitting hard at both the invasion ports -- 'their heaviest blows yet' -- as well as Hamburg and Berlin, says the front page of the Daily Mail:

The Anhalter railway terminus was severely damaged following the previous day's attack on the Potsdam stations. These stations are the King's Cross, St. Pancras, and Euston of Berlin.

A.A. guns in the Tiergarten, the city's Hyde Park, were bombed, and the Templehof [sic] aerodrome, its Croydon, was damaged.

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The Listener, 12 September 1940

Today I'll take a break from the press and look at The Listener. This was a weekly publication of the BBC, a higher-brow companion to the Radio Times. Both carried listings of the week's radio programmes, but whereas these are the main focus of the Radio Times, The Listener confines them to half a page towards the back. The bulk of the magazine consists of the texts of some of the previous week's more intellectual broadcasts, as well as original articles, book reviews, recipes (I'll spare you the one for sheep's head curry) and a famously difficult crossword.
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The Times, 10 September 1940, 4

As with the Daily Mail yesterday, The Times doesn't give the bombing of London the biggest headlines (4). Those are reserved for the RAF's bombing of enemy shipping in the Channel ports, which the Germans are concentrating in readiness for the invasion, and this is the lead story along with Bomber Command's raid on Hamburg. There is, however, a column of news on the air war overhead: the Air Ministry reports that 47 enemy aircraft were shot down yesterday (2 by anti-aircraft fire, the rest by fighters), with 13 British losses. There was a daylight raid on London, beginning at about 5.10pm; there are gratifying accounts of bombers crashing onto roads or exploding in midair, as well as less happy ones of civilians killed by their deadly cargo. Part of the reticence to give over the main news page to the bombing may be explained by the leading article on page 4, which tries to downplay the extent of the raids somewhat:

Certainly the material damage done on Sunday was again extensive and the loss of life severe: but again this may be described as not serious when measured by the grand scale of the war [...] the raiders seem to have come over in small numbers at a time, and there was never a concentrated attack by so large a force upon a single localized objective as on Saturday had caused such damage by fire in the area of the Docks.

It is however accepted that 'these attacks will continue nightly for some time to come', and that London must therefore 'steel itself'.
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Manchester Guardian, 2 September 1940, 8

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 a week'. And 'More bombs on Berlin'. On behalf of the War Cabinet, Churchill has written a letter to the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command to congratulate his force on its work in bombing Germany and Italy. He made special mention of the fact that on the first raids on Berlin, 'the great majority of pilots brought their bombs home, rather than loose them under weather conditions which made it difficult to hit the precise military objectives in their orders'.

This is in marked contrast with the wanton cruelty exhibited by the German flyers who, for example, have vented their spite upon the defenceless watering place and town of Ramsgate in which nearly a thousand dwellings and shops, mostly of a modest character, have been wrecked.

Churchill thinks the accurate marksmanship of Bomber Command is a sign that the 'command of the air' is slowly being 'wrested from the Nazi criminals who hoped by this means to terrorise and dominate European civilisation'.
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Times, 30 August 1940, 4

Interestingly, after yesterday's coordinated pro-bombing campaign, today's headlines in The Times (4) emphasise the efforts of Bomber Command over those of Fighter Command. In particular, a raid on Berlin on Wednesday night (or Thursday morning) is described in some detail. A 'large number of bombs, high explosive and incendiary' were dropped 'on a series of carefully selected military objectives and on works vital to war production', including a power station and railway yards. A pair of squadrons made a 'special attack' on an (unspecified) objective just four miles from Berlin's centre. A number of the aircrew (all of whom returned safely) gave accounts of the mission, including this 'young pilot officer':

We bombed at 24.00 hours -- dead on midnight (he said). Somebody had been there before us. When we arrived we found the target well on fire. We could see it when we were 25 minutes' flying time away from the target. We came in more or less North to South and put our stick of bombs down just to the left of this big fire. Then four more fires started. They were burning with very bright white lights. Altogether we were cruising round over Berlin for about half an hour.

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