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The Silent Passengers. Actual damage to the Nazis' precariously balanced economy (see p. 27) has never been reliably assessed. Back from a visit to Germany last summer, a Swiss correspondent reported that he had found little damage to the Krupp works at Essen or to other German armament industries.
Since June 1, Allied raiders have visited Europe on an average of almost every other night. Most of these were 200-300 plane raids. The London Times claimed that the battering of such important railway towns as Kassel, Nürnberg, Osnabrück and Mainz, of such rail centers as Cologne, has forced the Germans to use barge canals and coastal waters. Last month, announcing that R.A.F. bombers were dropping 8,000-lb. blockbusters, the Air Ministry declared that photographs showed 270 acres of Karlsruhe and 370 acres of Düsseldorf laid waste. Other cities have been blasted just as intensively. Armament factories, shipbuilding yards and U-boat yards are known to have suffered.
But inevitably the chief victims have been the dwellers on Vesuvius. By the end of August 1,000,000 Germans were said to be homeless, a total of five and a half square miles of German cities wiped off the map. The same Swiss correspondent wrote in the Zurich Volksrecht:
"The thickly populated working-class districts of Germany are reported to have suffered the most. ... [In Cologne] everywhere burnt-out ruins were outlined against the sky. Whole streets had been annihilated. People told me that 20% to 25% of Cologne's houses had been destroyed and 200,000 inhabitants were homeless.... In trains there is, for Germany, the unusual aspect of silent passengers wrapped in their own thoughts."
Until last week the German High Command kept from the people the fact that U.S. bombers were in action over France. After the Lille raid it told them out of the corner of its mouth: "A number of bombers equipped with several motors, including such of American make, were shot down with only one of our planes lost." There was much left unsaid which the silent passengers would learn about.
*A curious statistic, explained by the fact that Axis planes avoided the 500 Allied fighters concentrated on the bombers, and by the fact that the bombers got seperated from their escort in bad weather. None of the Allied fighters was destroyed.