MORE LARGE-SCALE NAZI AIR RAIDS. The Associated Press says 400 German planes assaulted some 300 miles of England’s coasts Sunday. Radio reports this morning say over 500 Nazi planes attacked on Monday, and an undisclosed number have struck at Britain’s shores so far today. With air combat now in "higher gear," C. Brooks Peters writes in Monday’s New York Times that "the war appears to have entered its final and decisive stage." C.B.S. correspondent William Shirer said in last night’s broadcast that the Sunday air attacks had three objectives -- the naval base at Portland, a set of barrage balloons protecting Dover, and a convoy of ships east of Harwich. This morning’s reports say Dover has been hit again, along with the naval bases at Portsmouth and Southampton. The Nazis now claim to control the airspace over the English Channel.
Mr. Peters says in his Times story that "informed quarters in Berlin incline to the belief that the attempted invasion of Britain will not be long in coming. When it will come is any man’s guess. There are perhaps hardly more than a handful of men in the Third Reich who know. But it is almost the middle of August and the weather in the Channel is not usually good between October and March, when gales are common. Flying conditions over the British Isles, moreover, are unsatisfactory in the Fall, so neutral quarters here are awaiting with anxious expectation the events of the immediate future."
But there’s also some question whether the stepped-up air campaign is a prelude to an invasion or a substitute for it. Sigrid Schultz writes from Berlin in Monday’s Chicago Tribune that "Germany plans to force England to her knees thru the crippling of British shipping by submarines, speedboats, and bombers, rather than thru an invasion of the British Isles." She cites an article in Sunday’s Frankfurter Zeitung, an influential German paper "frequently used as the mouthpiece of the Wilhelmstrasse." Mr. Shirer also mentioned the Frankfurter Zeitung article, and wondered whether its message is that "the air force alone can do the job." If the Nazis really are starting to think this way, then something completely unprecedented in the history of warfare might be on the horizon. We will find out whether a country can be subjugated, or perhaps completely destroyed, by means of air attack. The answer could be terrible beyond words -- but fortunately for now, the British still have the means to fight back.
HOW TO SIFT THE WAR NEWS. In yesterday’s aerial fighting, the Germans claimed to have shot down eighty-nine British planes, while losing seventeen of their own. The British, by contrast, report to have destroyed sixty German planes, while losing twenty-six. The Luftwaffe also says it has wrecked the Portland naval base, and the British deny that in full. There were similar disparities in the reporting on last Thursday’s air attacks, and a Monday New York Times editorial offers some tips on how to make sense of these contradictions --
"What is the poor newspaper reader to believe as he reads the wildly conflicting claims of the British and German air forces? Yesterday’s furious air battles over the English Channel coast have produced official communiques which, at first sight, look misleading to the point of absurdity....One must not conclude, however, that the communiques of the two sides are wholly useless, mendacious and uninformative. The size of the rival claims gives some clue to the scale of the raids; a day when each side claims that it destroyed sixty or more planes, when the British admit that the raiders came in waves of 150 or more at a time, is obviously a day of intense warfare in the air. When the Germans announce attacks on British convoys in the Channel, it reveals to us that the British are still using the Channel for merchant shipping, in spite of all the German attempts to close it as a British waterway....We do not have to believe the semi-official British boast that Hamburg is in ‘ruins,’ or to credit the German claims that only a few chickens were killed at this place or that."
The editors close with a grim assumption -- "We can at least assume, with good reason, that both Britain and Germany are suffering severe damage; that millions of civilians on both sides are suffering mental terrors never before experienced in warfare, and that the worst is still to come." Tragically, that sounds like a pretty good guess.
EYEWITNESSES TO THE RAIDS. Monday's New York Herald Tribune offers side-by-side first-person accounts of the latest German raids --
Robert E. Bunnelle -- "From a balcony spattered with machine-gun fire and jarred by deafening bombardment I saw a new chapter in the battle of Britain written today in a sky thick with airplanes and spotted with mushroom puffs from anti-aircraft shells. Between attacks I rushed with other onlookers to gather shell fragment souvenirs. We found machine-gun bullets imbedded in the concrete a few feet from where we stood. Anti-aircraft guns thundered one hundred feet away. The raiders screamed down -- sometimes from 15,000 feet up -- pouncing on coastal barrage balloons. But from the ground and in the air the British gave them a hot reception....The raid began as a surprise attack on the balloons, but developed soon into fierce dogfights, and was followed by repeated attacks by larger and larger waves, finally attacking the town as well as the waterfront."
Dan Campbell – "All day long the sky has been filled with Nazi planes. It seemed that they would never stop coming over. Anti-aircraft guns threw hundreds and hundreds of shells at them, and British fighters fought with them in the powder-blue sky. I was told that ten raiders had been shot down. From a hotel roof I watched the first four raiders come from over the sea. The sun struck their black and silver bodies. As they roared in at 400 miles an hour anti-aircraft guns began firing at them....The raiders ran the gauntlet of fire for ten or fifteen minutes and then streaked back towards the French coast. For thirty minutes there was quiet and then the air gunners went into action against a new batch of Nazi raiders. The fire rose like a symphony of kettledrums interspersed with the trap-drum rattle of machine-gun blasts. Tracer bullets flashed upward, making pink splashes against the blue sky."
THE ELECTION WILL BE CLOSE. James A. Hagerty passes along in Sunday’s New York Times an analysis of the electoral vote by "one well-informed political leader." It shows President Roosevelt as being able to count on 167 "safe" electoral votes, and Wendell Willkie as having a good expectation of getting 212 electoral votes, which are considered to be "safe" or "probable" for him A total of 152 electoral votes from eleven states are considered "doubtful". They are -- Illinois (29), Kentucky (11), Maryland (8), Missouri (15), Montana (4), New York (47), Nevada (3), Oklahoma (11), Utah (4), West Virginia (8), and Wisconsin (12).
Surprisingly, the President’s supporters fear that national defense could be the issue that defeats the Democrats this time -- "[Party leaders] have little doubt of Mr. Roosevelt’s re-election if the people can be shown by October that a good beginning has been made in the manufacture of airplanes, warships, artillery, tanks, armored cars and rifles necessary for the defense of the United States and the Western Hemisphere. Failure to get a reasonably good start on production would be damaging to the President." Mr. Hagerty doesn’t point it out, but the early signs aren’t good -- such as War Secretary Stimson’s admission to Congress that the government has only contracted for 33 warplanes so far out of over 4,000 budgeted two months ago. A few more stories like this fall could well sink the Roosevelt campaign.
Dr. Gallup didn’t have anything new on the presidential race in Sunday’s Washington Post, but his survey one week ago did show a race as close as humanly possible -- Roosevelt over Willkie in the popular vote, 51% to 49%, but Willkie ahead in electoral votes, 304 to 227. If the election were held now, Gallup says, Willkie would win 24 states, and Roosevelt would win 24 states.
This is going to be a bitter campaign.
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