(2 of 3)
In the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe faced its first really tough test. German pilots learned at Dunkirk, where R. A. F. definitely established local control, that they and their machines were individually inferior to the British. But the British had not enough planes to maintain superiority all over Britain if the Germans came over in thousands.
A map of Luftwaffe's, preliminary "educational" bombings of Britain, from June 18 to last weekend (see p. 17), shows some of the targets which Germany considered most important. The bombed towns are those mentioned in German communiques (the British do not name exact sites). In some cases the Germans may not have hit where they thought, but, other places have also been bombed, by accident, by bombers in a hurry to unload and start for home. In these bombings according to British admission 336 civilians were killed and 476 seriously wounded, less than a normal month's toll in traffic accidents.
The pattern shows that Britain's vast industrial Midlands section, from Birmingham and Coventry north to Leeds and York, had been molested only lightly. Her west-coast ports north of the Bristol Channel were untouched. Only a few of her aircraft factories had been attacked. R. A. F.'s widely scattered bases had received attention but nothing like concentrated attack. Chief targets were naval bases, commercial ports, oil dumps on the southwest, south and east coasts, and munitions plants in the north (Middlesbrough, Billingham, Greenock). London was bombed only around its fringes, suggesting the efficacy of its balloon barrage. Remarkable was the Germans' failure to attack Sheffield, where many of Britain's biggest guns are forged.
German strategy would be to draw defenders away from Britain's airfields by intolerable attacks on other targets, if need be on heavily populated areas. A threatened destruction of London, such as the destruction of Rotterdam (in which 54 German planes killed 30,000 people and reduced the centre of the city to rubble in 7^ minutes, according to official Dutch announcement), might force the R. A. F. to come to the metropolis' defense. But if British airfields were left undefended, their shops, hangars and planes on the ground would be destroyed and in a short time the R. A. F. would cease to be a factor in the fighting.
Big difference between Rotterdam on May 14, and all large British cities last week was that the latter were heavily ringed with well-manned, well-munitioned anti-aircraft batteries. On the other hand, Germany was prepared to send bombers in flights of 540 instead of 54, if needed, to destroy London, Liverpool, Hull, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, etc., simultaneously, at whatever expenditure of her own lives might be necessary to annihilate British lives. Prospects were that the 10,000 or 15.000 attackers Germany was prepared to send and spend might well knock out Britain's 7,000 (at most, all types) defense planes sooner or later, and probably sooner.