Dortmund Bombing Raid

The Daily Sketch dated Tuesday May 25th 1943

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Seven days after the famous Dambusters Raid, Bomber Command dispatched 826 aircraft on the night of 23^rd/24^th May 1943. Their target was the heavily industrialised town of Dortmund and it was the largest raid of the Battle of the Ruhr. The operation comprised: 343 Lancasters, 199 Halifaxes, 151 Wellingtons, 120 Stirlings and 13 Mosquitoes.  38 aircraft - 18 Halifaxes, 8 Lancasters, 6 Stirlings, 6 Wellingtons – didn’t return.   There were at least 654 ground fatalities.

The Second World War had been going on for 3 years and 8 months when this issue of The Daily Sketch was dropped through letterboxes to be read over heavily rationed breakfasts.  For most British people it would have been seen as good news – our lads giving the Nazis a good thrashing – but with the safety of hindsight I can’t help but feel depressed that people, on all sides, should have been put into a situation where blowing the smithereens out of other people was good news. 

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I believe that this is a picture of Bournemouth’s Hotel Metropole, which stood at the junction of Old Christchurch Road and Holdenhurst Road.  It was being used to billet mostly American and Canadian Airmen and 21 were killed in the bombing on the 24^th May.

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This letter suggesting that if Hitler’s Deputy, Rudolf Hess, who was in prison in Britain, was getting a £10000 per annum payment from the British Government, people would not be best pleased, is ‘signed’ by Sax Rohmer. Is this the Sax Rohmer?  Creator of the criminal mastermind Fu Manchu?  I see no reason why not – he was 60 years old in 1943 and was still actively writing.  He penned 30 novels of which 14 were about stiff upper-lip English hero Nayland Smith and his nemesis Doctor Fu Manchu.

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The bazuka had actually been in development since 1918.

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Some humour does not age well. This strip relies entirely on knowing what the word ‘boiked’ means and I don’t.  I tried Google and 'boiked' seems to be modern slang for high on drugs, which gives the strip an unlikely punch-line.  Chambers Concise Dictionary has no entry for the word.

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Language develops and words change their meaning, possibly few more emphatically than ‘gay’.  In 1943 it meant ‘happily carefree’ so there was no reason for Disgusted of Godalming to get hot under the starched collar about a breakfast time BBC Home Service programme called ‘Let Us Be Gay’.

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Kia-Ora conjures up memories of cinema adverts followed by intervals between the ‘B’ picture and the main feature, when a lady at the bottom of the centre aisle would dispense ice-creams and these exotically named orange drinks from a tray.  I’m not sure the nostalgia would be the same for ‘SDI’, which is too close to ‘STD’ for my liking.