Retaliation

Wir haben unsere Bomben gerade dortin geschmissen wo wir sie haben wollten. ("We dropped our bombs just where we intended to.") Thus Captain Schumann of the Luftwaffe described for German radio listeners the daytime air attack on London last week. Perhaps Captain Schumann did not know when he made his boast that 42 children (aged six to 16) and six teachers had been killed by a bomb which crashed through the roof of a four-story schoolhouse.

The raid, small in comparison with day & night attacks on England in 1940 and 1941, was by way of retaliation for the two poundings the R.A.F. had given Berlin. About 125 fighter-bombers and fighters, mostly Focke-Wulf 1905 and Messerschmitt 190Fs, crossed the coast at Beachy Head and roared at mast level up the Thames Estuary. The R.A.F. shot down 16, of which five fell before the cannon and machine guns of the Hawker Typhoon, one of Britain's newest and fastest (over 400 m.p.h.) fighters. Only six German planes penetrated the outer defenses of the capital, but one of them carried the bomb which caused the worst London school disaster of the war.

The bomb was dropped at noon, when the students were lunching in the school cafeteria. (Charges were made that the alert was not sounded until afterward.) Ordinarily many of the children would have gone home for their noonday meal, but on this day they had stayed to see a performance of Midsummer Night's Dream.

Eyewitnesses said the building seemed to fold up like a pack of cards, trapping most of the children under the wreckage and blasting others against a brick wall. Fires broke out. For the next few days Civil Defense workers, fathers & mothers of the victims and American and British soldiers labored to recover the dead and wounded. Many mothers learned the worst from the little shoes and blue hats & coats laid out neatly in a nearby church.

The morning after the raid some of the survivors turned up bright & early, well scrubbed and ready for classes.

Britain's air forces were not idle. Twice during the week bombers smashed western Germany's industries, not neglecting the Ruhr. But bomber strength more frequently was swung on the German submarine base at Lorient, which had four raids in ten days. Light bombers and fighters swept day & night over occupied territory, shooting up trains, bombing light-industrial targets.

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