Softer, Softer, Softer

The parts of London which almost made a poet of that restless German dullard, Karl Baedeker, last week fell under a blanket of wrath. Buildings which were standing two centuries before Berlin was even founded were cracked, gutted, undermined. Names of heroes and works of great memory were trampled.

Somerset House, where wills going back to 1382--including those of Shakespeare, Nelson, Gladstone--are filed, lost its lovely staircase. John Nash's nobly curving Regent Street was ripped by a time bomb. A German squadron boasted it had toasted victory in champagne in the sky, and then dropped the empty bottles on the palace which was bought from the Duke of Buckingham by one of Britain's German Kings, George III. Rougher ammunition blasted the palace five times, and tore at the spot where millions have watched the changing of the guard. Hit was the paneled house in Chiswick where William Hogarth retired during the summers to draw. So was the Gothic House of Lords--by an incendiary bomb, the fire from which was doused by Members of Parliament. Dingy Whitehall, the administrative hub of the Empire, and Downing Street, a famous address of power, were targets. So was the Tate gallery. Madame Tussaud's waxworks were shaken, and though Admiral Beatty lost the nose which survived Jutland, Hitler and Mussolini stared on uncrumbled. The slums whose names are nevertheless music to the Empire's poverty-stricken--Limehouse (after ancient limekilns), The Minories (pronounced minneries, after Nuns Minoresses), Elephant & Castle (after an old tavern) --were pulverized.

Fleet Street's newspaper row got its share one night. The Herald, which was bombed by a Zeppelin in World War I, was hit again. Minister for Aircraft Production Lord Beaverbrook's Standard, in Shoe Lane just off Fleet Street, was flooded when a tank on its roof burst. Next morning the Standard carried a David Low cartoon showing Goring and Goebbels peddling a newspaper called Der Berlin Liar with headlines: "British Press Wiped Out"--and regarding with pained surprise a Cockney newsboy hawking: "Bomb severely damaged in Shoe Lane!"

Old churches, many of them flimsy as eggshells, suffered badly. A soo-pound bomb embedded itself deep in the street near St. Paul's Cathedral, which sits unsteadily on foundations of wet sand. The delayed action of such bombs as this and the first one which damaged Buckingham Palace was regulated not by a timing mechanism, which would not survive the bomb's fall, but by the slow action of acid eating through a metal plate. After four days the St. Paul's bomb was finally removed by a "suicide squad" and exploded in a marsh outside the city. But the windows of St. Mary-le-Bow near by, commemorating John Milton with the expulsion scene from Paradise Lost, were shattered. And St. Giles Cripplegate, where Milton's remains lie, did not survive the bombings as it did the fire of 1666. It was here that Ralph Waldo Emerson asked: "Do many persons come to look at Milton's grave?" The reply: "Americans, sir." Other churches which suffered: St. Stephens Walbrook, one of the most admired of the works of Christopher Wren, St. Mary-at-Hill, St. Dunstan-in-the-East, and the Church of Our Lady of Victories.

In Proper Perspective. Londoners were heartbroken to have the past bombed out of their lives. They were, as well, dog-tired from night after night without sufficient sleep. Many were homeless, many hungry, many bereaved, many injured. Death mounted to over 1,000 at week's end. Nevertheless, all accounts continued to report Londoners' chins and thumbs up, their spirits unbroken. But although bad civilian morale has lost many a war in the past, good civilian morale has won very few. What were the concrete military results of Germany's first week of all-out bombings against the world's greatest city?

They were drastic. It was admitted that the city's docks, which previously carried one-third of Britain's overseas trade, were mangled beyond use. It was further apparent that railroads, which in default of London's docks would have to carry goods to & from other ports, were occasionally badly snarled. Disease and evacuation would not help this communication problem. Many of London's 14,000 factories, which before the war accounted for one-fifth of Britain's total output and employed one-quarter of her 7,500,000 workers, were knocked out. Within the city water mains were so often broken that the London Metropolitan Water Board had to urge extreme economy. Gas was knocked out so that in many areas hot meals were hard to get. Now that the Jerries meant business, internal communications broke down: during raids the big red busses pulled to the curb and the high black quacking taxis stopped short and their cabbies ducked.

Worst of all, London's anti-raid defenses, though magnificent in their stubbornness, were strained to the very limit. No defense has ever been designed which can stop night air attacks. Last week Britain did the best it could with what it had. What it had were three fluid fortresses: the R. A. F., the balloon barrage, antiaircraft batteries.

In a glass-enclosed bridge looking down on a huge map at the R. A. F.'s Fighter Command GHQ, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Caswall Tremenheere Dowding last week kept tabs on these three aerial barriers. Below on the action grid, intelligence officers in earphones sat like croupiers raking little planes back & forth across squares ruled on the map, following the progress of air battles. This efficient control system was the centre of a complicated network of telephones, teletypewriters and visual signals which with extraordinary speed coordinated airfields all over Britain. In from observer posts on the coasts to various control centres, then to this GHQ grid, from there to fighter stations' operating rooms, and finally to planes in the air flowed a steady stream of instructions.

Last week Britain admitted that certain airfields near the coast--along Hell's Corridor, that hot narrow path along which most raiders flew--were knocked out cold. But the R. A. F. maintained that Britain was still a tight little isle, and that fighters could rise to the defense from the London area and inland just as well as from the coast. If plane casualties were mounting, the R. A. F. replied that plane production was also mounting, and pilots could now fly their machines up to the hilt of action, then bail out if necessary.

Still Up. From all the parks, many of the squares, some of the streets and rivers of the London area fat gentlemen named Goring, Tommy Farr, Lord Castlerosse, Puddin' Pie, Beefeater and many hundreds of others were still flying on wire leashes last week. The balloon barrage had proved its mettle. Not intended to bring planes down, but to worry them, to keep them up high enough for anti-aircraft fire and too high for accurate bombing, the balloons have won German respect to the extent that whole squadrons concentrate on shooting them down, and Berlin itself has begun to fly a barrage.

Britons last week were thankful to the man they had once laughed down on the balloon idea: a brilliant Oxford professor named Frederick Alexander Lindemann. One of Winston Churchill's closest buddies, who last spring used to give the Prime Minister relaxation by beating him at Monopoly and Lexicon, Dr. Lindemann has proposed many weird but useful theories of war. Fellow student of Einstein, such a wizard with figures that he can instantly square or cube root any large figure, he once worked out a mathematical formula for taking planes out of spins--which worked. He was thought to have something to do with the R. A. F.'s inflammable calling cards (see col. 2).

The last ditch of defense, the one on which London relied most heavily by night, was anti-aircraft fire. The organizer of London's anti-aircraft defenses is Lieut. General Sir Frederick Alfred ("Tim") Pile, a short, dapper, witty, sporty Irishman who can speak Persian and Hindustani. He won the D. S. O. in 1918 for outstanding artillery work near Arras, a decade later helped devise Britain's first practical light tank. His personnel is an entirely civilian group from territorial regiments.

Last week Tim Pile was told that his men must bear a heavier burden of defense. One night air-raid wardens circulated through their districts, saying: "There'll be a hell of a racket tonight, but don't worry, it's something our boys are putting up." When the enemy came over, the noise broke out, like dozens of summer storms. It was Tim Pile's new tactic. Instead of trying to hold enemy planes in the long fingers of searchlights and aiming at them, AA defenses set up a box barrage, all the guns firing at the same time into the darkness according to prescribed directions, forming a curtain of flying shrapnel. Splinters clattered like hail over 200 square miles of London.

Tim Pile's box barrage was a measure of desperation. Such heavy fire could not be long maintained. The average anti-aircraft gun of the 3.7-and 4.5-inch types used by Britain can fire about 300 rounds, then it must be dismantled and its liner shrunk, removed, replaced. London could not possibly muster more than 5,000 antiaircraft guns (including machine guns), and if the 400,000 rounds claimed in one night were actually fired, the Tommies were shooting the guts out of their guns. Neutral observers thought the slackening of German attack in the face of this barrage was coincidence.

On the hopeful side, Britons argued that defenses had forced the Germans to try one tactic after another. First they tried to crush the Air Force by daylight dive-bombing attacks on airports; that failed. Then they went after communications and industries; that failed. Next they tried indiscriminate daylight mass bombings of London; that only stiffened morale. Last week they resorted to late afternoon bombings with incendiaries to light beacons for all-night mass bombings. Whether or not that was a failure remained to be seen this week. From all accounts, it seemed not to be.

Another hope--this one was supported, as the other was not, by neutral observers --was that the Germans might run out of competent pilots. By this week the R. A. F. had claimed roughly 5,000 pilots. Since the war's beginning, said the British, they had knocked down 2,158 Nazi ships, the biggest single day's bag being last Sunday, when 185 out of the 600 that came over were destroyed.

German pilots shot down last week admitted they had had as little as 45 hours of solo flying, and men with 100 hours considered themselves seasoned fighters. But there was an ominous interpretation even for this hope: poorly trained men were being deliberately used for short-hop, preliminary suicide bombing, the veterans being saved for something fiercer. So far as anyone knew, Hermann Goring, who was reported this week to have piloted a Junkers bomber over London, had not yet this week taken the wraps off a great big package: the Fourth Air Army.

Whatever the little eddies and whirlpools of battle, the main tide was unmistakable. London was getting ripe for evacuation. Evacuation would fill Britain's roads and rail lines with refugees. Britain's rear would then be meat for total war. The censors permitted the New York Herald Tribune's Edward Angly to cable at week's end: "It would be a poor observer or propagandist who would now ask America to believe that London is still doing business as usual."

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