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First Targets. Airfields of the Coastal Command, oil stores along the Thames estuary, aircraft factories, the docks of London, Harwich and Hull were preliminary targets for Nazi night raiders. Incendiary bombs were showered down after demolition charges to start fires. But the impression was that last week's German raids were chiefly to familiarize squadron leaders with the course and to test Britain's defenses. When unrestricted air bombing begins, with destruction raining down by hundreds of tons, last week's raids by comparison will seem like flea bites.
Judged by the scanty number of Germans shot down, the British defenses were weak. But correspondingly few British ships were lost in heavy retaliatory raids, night after night, over the Ruhr, Bremen, Hamburg, as far east as Berlin. So upsetting to the Germans were these attacks that children were evacuated from western Germany and Air Marshal Göring was reported visiting there to calm the populace. Fact is, as frankly acknowledged by the authoritative British weekly The Aeroplane: "There is no real defense against night bombing." At the coast and around London and other populous centres, Britain has balloon barrages which force enemy bombers above 20,000 ft. Inside these, searchlights and anti-aircraft batteries take up the job. The British have found, as have others, that sending up more than two or three fighters against a night-bomber attack is as likely to result in fighter collisions as in destruction of the enemy.
Against anti-aircraft fire, bombers can coldly figure their probability of hits and simply bring in enough planes from different angles and altitudes, to insure the desired result. Great Britain was believed by last week to have seven anti-aircraft divisions totaling some 960 guns, mostly 3.7 in., electro-automatically sighted and firing 15 shots per minute.
The quality of Britain's airmen & equipment is higher and their numbers (according to Aircraft Production Minister Lord Beaverbrook last week) greater than ever before. But they are still woefully few compared to the Luftwaffe, which last week, by its comparative inaction, appeared to be gathering itself for its greatest lethal swoop of all. R. A. F. sought to hamper those preparations by seeking out German planes upon the ground—a technique at which the Germans excel and a cardinal practice of the U. S. Air Corps' doctrine: "Find 'em, fix 'em and fight 'em." At Rouen, Merville and Schiphol (Amsterdam), concentrations of German aircraft were destroyed, including troop-carrying groups. At Borkum, Brunsbiittel and Norderney, the Fleet Air Arm joined in trying to disperse the tornado that is coming Britain's way.
Sir Hugh Elles, Britain's civil defense chief, exhorted his countrymen: "As sure as God made little apples, we are going to get a lot more bombing. . . . It's the noise that frightens. . . . Don't be frightened. Be angry. It's a good cure." And Alfred Duff Cooper, the propaganda chief, quoted on the radio 42 lines of Poet Thomas Babington Macaulay's Armada, to remind the British how, with bonfires instead of blackout, they reacted to invasion once before.