6 SEPTEMBER 1940, Page 5

We are allowed to know so few details about air-raid

damage in this country that a message by the well-known American journalist, H. R. Knickerbocker, to his New York papers, quoted in Wednesday's Daily Express, is of particular value. Mr. Knickerbocker wrote that within the past forty-eight hours he had visited every port round the coast from Margate to Portsmouth, and found that in the eight principal ports in that area, " after three weeks of the fiercest pounding," there had been just over 15o dead and under 50o injured. Portsmouth, where " the Germans had the devilish luck to land direct hits on a cinema and on an ill-protected surface air-raid shelter," accounted for a oo of the dead, but the harbour "has not been impeded in the least." Most astonishingly, Dover's total of dead was six. It is singularly valuable to have facts like these, not circulated by a Government Department, but established by a particularly independent-minded American journalist as the result of diligent personal investigation. JANUS.