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Aviation History
1944
1944 - 0113.PDF
JANUARY 20TH, 1944 A Coastal Command Fortress on an airfield in the Azores. With Newfoundland, Iceland and Great Britain, the Azores air bases complete the Atlantic U-boat box. \ WAR in the AlR Two Lines of Bombing Policy : Attack on Fighter Production and Attack on the Balkans : Sofia in Flames TWO definite lines of bombing policy have lately become dis cernible. One is the singling out of German factories which make fighter aircraft, and these have been assailed by the Americans both from the area of the Mediterranean and from Great Britain. The other is a growing concentration on. centres in the Balkans and the .ZEgean Sea. Both of these are additional to the Battle of Berlin and other more general bombing of production centres in Germany. The raid on January nth by U.S. Fortresses and Liberators on the Focke-Wulf factory at Oschersleben, the Junkers plant at Halberstadt, and the Messerschmitt works at Brunswick was.carried out by 700 machines and was furiously attacked all the way by German fighters, whose pilots evi dently knew what vital interests were at stake. The escort of American fighters kept with the raiders for a ireater distance than ever before, but could not go the whole way. It would seem from the first reports of losses on both sides that the escort fighters, with their long-range tanks, were not highly successful in holding the swarms of German fighters away from the bombers, though they fought hard so long as they were able to stay with the bombers. Over 60 of the heavy bombers did not return, while the losses of American fighters came out at less than half a dozen. These figures suggest that the problem of providing efficient escorts for bombing raids has not yet been satisfactorily solved. Bombing Through Cloud f\S- that raid some of the Americans ^-^ used the new device for bombing blind through clouds, while others could see their targets clearly. Though the Americans have made public mention of the said device, while Bomber Com mand has maintained silence, it is obvious that British Pathfinders are no whit behind our Allies in the ability to find targets which are obscured by clouds. All the same, nobody denies that it is an advantage to be able to see the target. While the advancing Russian armies are beginning to think about crossing the frontier of Rumania—as they have crossed that of Poland—the Balkans have become the focus of Allied air attacks from both Italy and tht Middle East. The latter Command, where Air Marshal Sir Keith Park has just succeeded Air Chief Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas, has been hammering away at Rhodes and the other Dode canese Islands, while heavy bombers of the N.W. Africa Air Forces have been paying constant visits to the im- portant airfields round Athens and the port of the Piraeus, as well as crossing the Adriatic to bomb the Germans in Yugoslavia. The important railway centre of Sofia has also been subjected to a series of very heavy raids. On January nth, while the U.S. Eighth Air Force was raiding the German fighter factories, Sofia also suffered severely. A correspondent there has reported that next day parts of the *
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