Tippers & Runners

TIME Correspondent Wilmott Ragsdale cabled this account of Luftwaffe tip-&-run raids which have done little military damage but have made village life both dangerous and exciting:

Twenty-five German planes swept out of the sea mist, their guns wide open. They came in so low that they had to bank to avoid church steeples. While their machine guns and cannon sprayed indiscriminately over the town, they dumped high explosive and incendiary bombs. In less than 60 seconds it was over.

The church steeple crashed to the ground. Children walking home from Sunday school were carried from the streets with pulverized glass and cement ground into their cheeks. A department store was in flames. Housewives caught table-setting were driven to emergency wards to have chunks of their own glass and dishes dug from their flesh. Nineteen hours later the town's raid squads, plus soldiers and ATS girls on leave, were still digging for bodies, live & dead, in the debris.

Mrs. Badcock could talk after 19 hours of hearing diggers work carefully down to her. She complained only that it was "so hot." Another woman dug out of a hotel said: "I am sorry to have given you all this trouble," and added: "I do want my dinner, though."

This raid was only one of many hundreds of tip-&-run raids. The same day another coastal town was hit. England's Atlantic City, Brighton, had nearly a hundred raids. The Germans choose misty days and they swoop out of the clouds, sometimes with their engines switched off, spray the town with bullets, dump their bombs and are off before the ack-ack is effective.

Random Sowing. Bombs and bullets do strange things when dropped and fired at random. In Brighton an army eleven was playing cricket against the local police. Lieut. G. W. Wood was bowling when a bomb hit the playing green. "I found myself blown some distance away," he said. The chief constable, waiting to bat, threw himself down and an iron girder fell across his neck.

Murille Grieve of Cobham and Violet May Nicholson of Kingston-upon-Thames arrived at Brighton for a brief vacation. They stepped into a shop and were blown up to the next floor and buried in the debris, unable to move, not knowing whether they were dying or not. Eight hours later they were dug out. In a week they were ready to leave the hospital.

In an East Anglia town Joan Smee was sitting in a municipal office "when a tracer bullet came through the window and went through my hair, setting it on fire." Somebody in the office put the fire out.

Planned Defense. The Air Ministry does its best to beat off the irritating raids. An elaborate watch and signaling system can at best only hope to give ground gunners 50 seconds' warning, so sharpshooter gunners are being trained by special diet and physical exercises to quicken their perceptions. They must be able to range, sight and destroy targets within five seconds. Sharpshooters must agree to live a monastic regime. On duty the gunners are not allowed to stoop even to pick up a dropped coin.

None of the towns raided is industrially important. The raids are annoying, but usually upset the town little, since the raiders are gone before anybody can close shop. They seldom kill many people and complaints are few. When some of the south coast mayors telegraphed the Air Ministry asking for more protection, other mayors of the area hastened to repudiate the requests. Said Mayor Briant of Brighton: "For God's sake, let us be thankful for our present mercies. Stop this misery and moaning."

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