Het dagboek van dr. G.H.C. Hart
(1976)–G.H.C. Hart–
Auteursrechtelijk beschermdTales for children:Londoners will know just what to think about an Air Ministry bulletin printed in some of to-day's morning papers, concerning British bomb damage in Germany and German occupied territory. Because they sincerely admire the Bomber Command of the R.A.F., and believe that their aim, especially at night, is more accurate than that of the Luftwaffe, they will be all the angrier at this rather childish document. In Havre, the Air Ministry proudly reports, ‘people all go to ground as soon as night falls’ - just as in the London tube stations. One night there was ‘a gigantic conflagration lasting five hours’. How nice-but surely a really gigantic conflagration is one that lasts a week or two. Next the Air Ministry turns to evacuation as a symptom which ‘points emphatically to conditions in the bombed areas’. From Berlin and Hamburg 220.000 children had been evacuated by the middle of November - fully half as many as had been evacuated from London. There follows the story of the devastation of Berlin ‘One witness himself saw two big fires’ - fancy a single person seeing two whole fires. Two streets, the Neue Wilhelmstrasse and the Dorotheenstrasse, were closed by the police for several days - a piece of news which will not deeply impress Londoners who probably know of cases in which delayedaction bombs have taken more than a couple of hours to deal with. Moreover, ‘there is now a marked shortage of coal in Berlin - think of that’. We have had our own coal troubles, due to muddles, not to bombs. So the artless tale goes on. London can take it straighter than this. We welcome unvarnished reports of our growingly successful raids on Germany, but let there be none of this Goebbels-style pap for the civilians at home. Don't tell it to London; tell it to the marines. |
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