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Meanwhile, as the word battle raged over what had happened at Sylt, Danes noticed that day that no trains moved across the Hindenburg Damm (normal schedule: two in the morning, two in the afternoon). They said one of the Damm's four anti-aircraft fire towers was missing. Two R. A. F. reconnaissance planes reported wrecked hangars, burning oil dumps, bomb-pocked slipways, hits on the causeway and on the islands' narrow-gauge supply railways. But the British Air Ministry would not publish the scouts' pictures.
The Germans claimed three British bombers shot down. After 36 hours, Field Marshal Göring had his personal plane, the Manfred von Richthofen, fly three U. S. correspondents to the mainland end of the Hindenburg Damm. Thence they were taken by special train across the causeway and down to Hörnum. Their dispatches said that the air base appeared unscathed except for a building used as an infirmary (25 patients were unhurt in its cellar), a target storehouse, and numbers of bomb craters in the base's extensive grounds and fringing sand dunes. Hangars appeared intact except for shattered windows. One incendiary bomb had sputtered out on a big steel crane used to hoist seaplanes out of the water. On the Hindenburg Damm the correspondents reported no sign of hits. But they may not have been shown the worst parts of the island. Experienced observers concluded that the truth about Sylt lay about midway between the British claims and the accounts of Herr Göring's eyewitnesses.
Sylt is by no means a major German bomber base. Much nearer R. A. F.'s home and overseas fields lie much bigger bases, around Wilhelmshaven, Cuxhaven, Kiel (see map). To reach these, R. A. F. must fly around the neutral barrier of Belgium and The Netherlands, run a hot gantlet either over the Frisian Islands into Helgoland Bight, or over the Siegfried Position. If the object was, as avowed, to wipe out a prime nest of aerial sea raiders at Sylt, perhaps it also was to start opening the clearest course to those other nests of undersea raiders: Kiel and Swinemünde, Germany's two prime submarine bases, both on a beeline from Britain, through Sylt, to the Baltic.