During the first month of the air offensive (8 August–7 September), the Germans mainly attacked the London–Dover–Portland triangle, paving the way for an invasion. Their plan failed.

During the next two months (after 7 September) they attacked London, striving to undermine the morale of the major centre of the British Empire. That failed, too.

Since 14 November, the Germans have been employing new tactics: they have been executing focused air raids against important industrial centres and ports in the provinces (Coventry, Birmingham, Bristol and Southampton). London is also being bombed, but it is not the main target.

Air raids in this recent phase look more or less the same everywhere.

The Germans attack at night, sending several hundred bombers every time (500 to Coventry; 250 to Southampton two nights running, i.e. once again 500; 300 to Birmingham; and 300 to Bristol). First they drop incendiary bombs. When, as a result, fires illuminate the city, explosive bombs of various calibre are dropped and the so-called land mines are parachuted down. Accuracy is rather poor, just as before, because the British anti-aircraft batteries force the German machines to fly very high and retreat quickly. However, the mass dropping of bombs onto relatively small areas creates great damage. The centre of the city is usually bombed, and if industrial and other military targets are located there, they are also damaged, but this occurs by chance rather than design. Plants and factories located on the outskirts usually remain intact.

As for the destructive power of the new type of raids, this proves to be directly proportional to the number of bombers per square metre of the area attacked. Here is an example. Coventry, with a population of 175,000, was attacked by 500 bombers and great destruction was caused. To have an equivalent effect while bombing Birmingham (with a population of more than 1 million), the Germans would have had to send 2,500 bombers, but they engaged 300 machines and the damage was relatively small. In order to turn London into Coventry, then, at least 20,000 bombers would have been needed – an obviously fantastical figure, at least for the current phase of the war. That is why I am relatively calm about London.

The question arises: why don’t the Germans throw larger forces into the attack? Why don’t they bomb one and the same city systematically night after night with hundreds of planes? Because they don’t want to or because they can’t?

I have no clear answer to this question as yet.

Neither, it seems, does the British government.

One thing is clear, though: the new type of German air offensive is as incapable of decisively altering the course of the war as the previous one. It does, of course, cause difficulties and complications, but it cannot bring England to its knees. The morale of the population and government remains firm.

It seems to me that the Germans are not setting themselves such a goal at present. They have abandoned the idea of taking the British fortress by storm. They are trying to lay siege to it from the air and from the sea (the sinking of ships has increased sharply of late). Should the Germans manage to weaken England in this way and undermine its morale, they would of course come back to the idea of invading. Will they succeed? I don’t think so. Not in the near future at any rate. We shall see.