The offensive plan of the Bomber Command may thus be described as largely a plan of blockade, but of a form unique in history, in that it does not depend solely upon the arrest of vital supplies before ihey reach the enemy but is capable of reaching right into the heart of the enemy's territory and snatching vital resources away from him, In the result, there is no distinctión between stopping ihe supply of a raw material and destroying that material while it is being processed or held in storage, Applied to the oil resources of the enemy countries, as our bomber -|squadrons have so effectively been applying it in recent months, this plan of aerial blockade has already proved itself one of the greatest weapons in our offensive armoury.
Vast quantities of oil, stored in Germany against the outbreak of war or since captured in invaded countries, have been systematically wiped out by bomber forces which have ranged the length and breadth of Germany and even scoured the occupied territories to seek out and destroy each major oil store in the enemy's hands.
Fresh oil supplies can, it is true, be brought into Germany with only such interruption as we can cause by attacks on the means of s But it will profit the enemy nothing it Roumanian oil, safely delivered, is then attacked by the RAF. and blown up with the wreckage of a Hamburg storage, tank; "There is in Germany, too, a vast synthetic fuel industry and -though that industry cannot be blockaded in the old sense of the word, because the basic materials required for synthetic fuel production are already to be found within Germany, air power still enables our bombers to reach those plants and set them ablaze,
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