Threat of Vengeance

THE ENEMY

Informed Britons believed last week that the Nazis may have a long-range rocket gun, aimed generally at England, particularly at London and British morale.

Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels threatened a "terrible reply from Germany" to Allied air raids, said that fear of German retaliation "hangs like a nightmare over the British masses." The British masses, long accustomed to secret-weapon bogies, smiled tolerantly when London papers put his outcry on Page One. Labor's Daily Herald and Beaver-brook's Sunday Express condescendingly mentioned the report as pure propaganda.

But Britons heard that intelligence from several occupied countries confirmed the weapon's existence across the Channel, thorough German preparations for its use. The Cabinet neither viewed the report with undue alarm nor took it with undue levity.

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