When France crumbled, amateur tacticians who had been doping the war by counting airplanes, calipering tank armor and timing inundations awoke with a nasty start to the realization that morale is more than a mere word in patriotic orations, that morale is often the simple and terrible difference between victory and defeat. They remembered that lesson as they breathlessly watched bombed Britain, weighed its morale, found it good.
Last week their attention was abruptly called to Berlin by three significant symptoms:
1) The first of a new batch of 75 trainloads of Berlin children, expected ultimately to total 30,000, chuffed out to the safety of the eastern provinces to join the 60,000-odd Berlin youngsters, 42,000 little Hamburgers, mixed thousands of tots from other bombed cities already there.
2) Nazi spokesmen burst into howls of rage at being strafed, shrieked that the nocturnal raiders were "night gangsters," their bombings "organized terrorism."
3) The censorship betrayed a certain nervousness by establishing a "cable curfew" barring the transmission of any military news between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. (bombing hours).
As Berliners learned from sleeplessness and air-raid-shelter misery that two can play a cruel game, the world pricked up its ears, wondered: the Nazis can give it; but can they take it?
After the fall of France, when they realized that it would not be long until Hitler began to bomb Britain, the British began to bomb Germany seriously. The first bombing (as distinct from pamphlet) raid on Berlin occurred Aug. 25. Of the 23 bombing raids on Berlin up to this week, nine have taken place since Oct. 1, when lengthening nights made it easy to make the 1,100-odd-mile round-trip flight in darkness. Then R. A. F. raids on Berlin left the "manifestation" stage, began to work up toward the deadly thoroughness that long ago forced evacuation of thousands of nonessential inhabitants of the industrial Rhineland and Ruhr, some to as far as the country districts around German-held Paris. Berlin "the unbombable" reeled under bombs. It hurt. And Adolf Hitler, who has always claimed it was the German home front and not the Army which collapsed in 1918, knew that danger well.
Berlin is no more Germany than London is Britain; but many German industrial and commercial towns suffered worse than Berlin. (The British estimated that 20% of Germany's productive capacity had been destroyed and Hamburg's plight was revealed by advertisements for workmen to help rebuild the city.) Yet southern and eastern Germany was largely unbombed and weighers of German morale found that, on the credit side, Germany had other offsetting good news: