World: Tactician on Top

• Share

(See Cover)

In England tactical air force men examined a piece of paper and grinned. It was a captured German instruction sheet for towing strings of bicycles behind trucks. It told them nothing new. But it was an intimate proof of how well the greatest tactical air operation in history was working.

U.S. and British flyers, under a unified command, had not only cut off the battle field of northwestern France from the rest of Europe. They had also made it a place where the Germans' rolling stock could move only by night, where by day tanks, trucks and railroad trains were so efficiently spotted and bombed that no rapid movement could be attempted, no threatened spot reinforced.

Tactical airmen, whose task is to blaze the way for troops on the ground, knew by now that they had done a job which would be a textbook model for all time. This pleased none of them more than their commander, big, brisk, breezy Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham, R.A.F. For three years Air Marshal Coningham had set the pace for the trade.

He was the first to break from the tight, rigid pattern set by the Germans in Poland and the first French campaign. With his U.S. opposite numbers he had widened and deepened the art of making openings for the infantry and supporting troops until it also insured them against any substantial interference from enemy air operation.

Now in France ground soldiers' eyes popped at the perfection of the job that was being done for them.

Now the Germans were learning, as their fellow sufferers had learned on the Eastern Front, that retreat for an army without air cover is an inferno, that no devils in hell could be worse than the pursuer's ground-hugging planes, stabbing and jabbing with cannon, rockets, frag mentation bombs and machine guns.

On one road a mile-long column of German vehicles traveling bumper to bump er was caught by Allied attack planes, which smashed or burned nearly every one. In Washington, Secretary Stimson declared that the amount of wrecked or abandoned German transport in some places was actually hampering Allied prog ress. Mr. Stimson added with a twinkle in his eye that this was a kind of delay "to which our ground forces could be easily reconciled."

Bow to the Heavies. The Luftwaffe was almost down & out. For that, Air Marshal Coningham and his tactical flyers were glad to yield most of the credit to Lieut. General Carl ("Tooey") Spaatz's strategic heavy bombers and their fighter escorts. The strategic crews had taken on the Luftwaffe in the air and smashed it in its factories on the ground. They had cut it down — at considerable cost to themselves — to the point where it could only rise intermittently and over the most vital objectives.