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 […]
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
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
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
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
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
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’,
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
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
Sunday wasn’t just Fighter Command’s day — Bomber Command was also hard at work, bombing targets in Berlin and western Germany and along the invasion coast, sinking three ships and losing no aircraft. And not just Bomber Command, either: The Times prints a message from the Air Minister to Coastal Command (4): I have been
