Post-blogging 1940-2

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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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Times, 26 September 1940, 4

Page 4 of The Times:

For the second night in succession heavy bombers of the R.A.F. have attacked military objectives in the heart of Berlin. During the raid, which lasted over two and a half hours, two factories making electrical equipment, a power station, a foundry, and a canal bridge were all bombed.

Page 1 of the Daily Mail:

GERMANY, thanks to the R.A.F., is at last tasting the bitter medicine her Air Force administered to the defenceless Poles, Dutch, Belgians, and the French. From many neutral sources yesterday came unimpeachable evidence of the shock with which the R.A.F.'s latest raids on Berlin came to a population that was always taught to regard itself as secure. The life of Berlin, like the life of London, is being painfully revolutionised by bombs. Whole areas have had to be evacuated because of time bombs; hours of work have been advanced. And still the R.A.F. have the bombers to spare for the punishment of the would-be invading armies across the Channel.

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Manchester Guardian, 25 September 1940, 5

Berlin has had its longest and heaviest raid of the war so far (the lengthening nights would be making it easier for the RAF to get there and back under cover of darkness). The Air Ministry reported the raid as follows (as reported by the Manchester Guardian on page 5):

Throughout last night [Monday] strong bomber forces of the R.A.F. delivered a heavy attack on military objectives in and around Berlin. This attack was on a much larger scale than any yet carried out, and preliminary reports show that extensive damage was done.

Among the targets selected by our aircraft and heavily bombed were Rangsdorf railway station and several goods yards, including that at Grünewald; the west tower of Wilmersdorf electric power station; gasworks at Dantzigerstrasse and Neukölln; factories at Charlottenburg and Spandau, including Brandenburg motor works, and other objectives.

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The Times, 24 September 1940, 4

Things are on the move again, at least in French West Africa. De Gaulle's Free French, assisted by the Royal Navy, are attempting to wrest control of Dakar from their Vichy brethren. A naval battle was raging there yesterday afternoon, though presumably it is over now. According to the Ministry of Information, this action was necessary because the 'Germans were making were making persistent efforts to bring Dakar under their control' (4). According to the Vichy foreign minister, M. Baudoin, this is worse than Mers-el-Kebir, as it is 'not simply a question simply of ships, which might be taken by Germans or Italians, but of a British desire for French property'.
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Daily Mail, 23 September 1940, 1

There is tragic news today. Not that there has been any shortage of that lately, but this is on a different scale, at least qualitatively. A British passenger liner has been sunk by a U-boat in the Atlantic, with heavy loss of life. The ship -- its name has not yet been published -- was evacuating children to safety in Canada: eighty-three are reported lost, and only seven rescued. Two hundred and eleven others also perished, including seven other children not part of the official evacuation programme. The Daily Mail reports (1) that:

Some of the children were trapped in the ship or killed by the explosion.

Others suffered from exposure in life-boats and on rafts, which were swept by wind, waves, rain, and hail for hours before they could be picked up by a British warship.

A full list of the lost children is given on page 5, and stories from the survivors on page 6.
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Observer, 22 September 1940, 7

The big headlines of the day in today's Observer aren't about warfighting at all, whether it's overhead or overseas. Perhaps this is because of the 'lull in the air battle yesterday' (7), or maybe reporting raid after air-raid is getting monotonous. But as with the last time this happened, the news is that the United States is sending more aid to Britain. Or at least it is promising 'a very rapid stepping up, in the very near future' of aircraft deliveries to Britain, currently running at 200 machines a month. This is due to 'the complete recovery of American faith in British chances against Nazi Germany':

For instance, the British are now being "cut in" on future production of the huge Flying Fortress type of American bomber. The showing made by the much-praised R.A.F. furnishes the grounds for this step adopted by the army authorities

Hitherto these authorities, recalling how American planes destined for France had fallen by the hundreds into Nazi hands, were reluctant to make any concession. Moreover, it is now felt that Britain's stern resistance is giving the United States the needed time to perfect its own defences.

But a separate article on this page reports from Burbank, California that 'The new twin-engined Lockheed P-38 interceptor plane' has been undergoing flight tests. It is expected to be capable of '500 miles an hour' (with a rate of climb of 4000 feet per minute), but Britain will not be able to order it. Instead it is getting a down-rated export variant which can only do 'over 400 miles an hour'. So American support for Britain is not quite unqualified.
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Illustrated London News, 21 September 1940, 357

On the inside cover of this week's Illustrated London News -- the outside cover has advertisements on it -- is a photograph taken by Cecil Beaton at the Great Ormond Street Hospital. The subject is Eileen Dunne, an air-raid victim aged 3. The caption reads:

BOMBERS' PREY.
GOERING'S ATTACKS ON LONDON ACHIEVE LITTLE BUT THE MAIMING AND SLAUGHTERING OF CHILDREN.

This pretty much sets the tone for the whole issue -- but I'll try to quote around those parts.
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Lots of good stuff in the Spectator this week, so let's get into it. The 'News of the week' section starts out on page 281 with a paragraph on the speech Churchill gave last Tuesday. Noting that 'some 1,600 civilians have been killed [in London] and some 6,500 injured in the first half of September', the Spectator goes on to argue that

a civilian's life is not more intrinsically valuable than a soldier's, and in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 British casualties were over 400,000. And distressing though the devastation of some London streets is, it is in no way comparable with the destruction of scores of towns and cities in France -- for example Reims -- in the last war. When London is in the battle-line that it should suffer battle-line experience is inevitable.

There's also a paragraph on 'The War in the Air': 'The week that has passed has been one of air warfare such as the world has never before experienced'. On the one side, there is 'ruthless indiscriminate bombing' and on the other 'persistent attacks on military objectives' -- see if you can guess which refers to the RAF and which the Luftwaffe! The daylight air battles, especially the 'amazing result' of last Sunday, 'have given the measure of the real fighting quality of the two forces in legitimate warfare' -- in the week ending 15 September, Germany lost 471 aircraft and Britain only 96.
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The Listener, 19 September 1940

I wasn't planning to return to The Listener quite so soon, but I can't resist the cover of today's issue. Such perfect symbolism. Take your pick: Britain under siege, the defence of ancient freedoms -- or the wartime suppression of liberty. (Another symbolic photo appears on page 414, of the bomb crater in front of Buckingham Palace. The caption is entitled 'Democracy of Bombs'.)
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Manchester Guardian, 18 September 1940, 5

The Prime Minister gave a speech on the war situation to the House of Commons yesterday, which I'll come back to. The Manchester Guardian has a lot on the air war, of course (5). A big wave of enemy raiders, consisting of 'more than 200 Messerschmitt and Heinkel fighters' was broken up over Kent yesterday afternoon, getting no farther than Maidstone. Losses were small on both sides, however (possibly due to the heavy clouds and the '100-mile-an-hour gale' they fought in): seven German aeroplanes were shot down, and three British. Unusually, the defenders' record was nearly as good at night: anti-aircraft guns accounted for four enemy aircraft before midnight, and fighters one. The Luftwaffe dropped bombs central London, including the West End ('There was considerable aerial activity near Green Park'), and also on 'a South-East England village':

One dropped in a roadway, making a crater and causing considerable damage to houses and a number of casualties, some of them fatal. A couple and their four children had a remarkable escape when their house collapsed and they were buried in the wreckage.

So it's not just the big cities which are having to 'take it'.
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