14.5.43 No, 47

Rip Ministry Nows service Air Ministry Bulletin No. 1q2.67

MOTHER BLOH TO' THE RUHR.

ONE MORE RECORD BROKEN

Smoke was still rising from firc-s burning in Bochum - the main

of - tarpot Bomber Command last night when a reconnaissance pilot flew over the Ruhr this afternoon.

with this attack, and the others made last night, Bomber command broke tho record which had been-set up only 24 hours before for the. hiprest tonnage of bombs over carried on a sin;dc night.

Bochum lies towards the Eastern end of the Central Ruhr,.where there is rather more -open country than in the west. Dortmund, at the extreme has past, already had many of'its industrial plants smashed in the raid of

the - 4th May, when very he avy damage was done in all ports of the town of one area purely industrial devastation covers IR-g- acres.

Bochum is a rather smaller town than Dortmund, hut it is a bin transport centre end of particular importance to the -whole war production of the Ruhr. 4

/It It has several great plants for the production of high-grade steel used in guns, aircraft and machine tools. The three steelwrorks of the Bochumer and Cerein make one of the most important units of the huge Verinigte Stahlwerke combine which has plants in many parts of the Ruhr, including Duisburg, where it is now known that widespread damage was done on the night of May 12, There are also many coke oven plants in and around Bochum - which is in the centre of the most prolific part of the Ruhr coal basin - as well as by-product, plants, chemical factories and synthetic oil plants.

At the present stage of our offensive against tho Ruhr, ’.with the important new damage at Dortmund and Duisburg, with Krupps out of action for the time, and with the .molybdenum necessary for some special high grade steels unobtainable from the bombed mine at Knaben, an effective to of raid against Bochum must be a serious blow tho whole economy the district.

Crews reported a Migtitp-ooncentrated raid, with a continuous rain of at bombs throughout three-quarters of an hour starting 2 a,m, One Stirling ere?; "brought hack concrete evidence of the concentration of the attaok. YJhen the aircraft landed the tails of three incendiary "bombs dropped from aircraft above -were found embedded in the wings. By the end of the raid there was heavy smoko over the town, a thick blanket with some columns of smoke rising thousands of feet. Crews returning from Czechoslovakia saw immense fires in Bochum as they passed the Ruhr,

/Reports the of the Reports on intensity flak vary, but all agree on the of extraordinary number searchlights both in the Ruhr and on the way to it, Wing-Commander D.C. Smith, a Halifax captain, said that there were more searchlights than he had ever seen in the Ruhr,

’’They were everywhere, in some places unbroken walls of them," he said, "We were in the early part of the raid, and it was obvious by the way the searchlights waved about at Cologne, Duisburg and Dusseldorf that they had no idea where the attack was going to develop. It was as light as day and the whole Ruhr valley seemed to be lit up by the moon and the searchlights, When v/e flew through them they almost blinded us. Near Bochum it-self there must have been about 15 large cones with between 30 and 40 beams in each. The lights would wave about until they found somebody, Then all the beams in the area would fasten on to that aircraft and shells Would be pumped up the cone. We could see bombers held like that a long way ahead".

/When When another Halifax was caught in one of the cones the pilot weaved so vigorously that the aricraft shot up vertically for a .few seconds, "We stood on our tail", the pilot said, "all four-engines stopped, we dived, and the engines came on again,"■

The Stirlings reported a number of combats and at least three fighters - F.W190, a Me, 110, and an unidentified single engine fighter - v/ere seen' to burst into flames and crash on the ground. Another Stirling, which had been hit over the target by flak, was,attacked eight times by fighters on the way aircraft back but on each occasion.the out-fought the enemy.

Berlin was raided soon after midnight. In the moonlight and in the many lakes around the capital made useful landmarks spite of some ground haze, bombs were seen to burst on objectives in the west and south west of the city.

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