Receiving End

The worst that one V-1 flying bomb could do was done in London last week. It streaked down during the noonday rush on a shop-lined street. Its 2,240 lbs. of TNT blew apart a crowded restaurant, filled the air with knife-edged shards of splintered glass. The blast wrenched off the top deck of a bus, tore apart another bus. Passengers were dazed, their clothing afire.

Hours later rescuers still dug for the dead and trapped in the wreckage of the restaurant. The toll was high.

But by now most Londoners were convinced that they were in for something infernally worse: a rocket-propelled robomb whose deadly war head might be ten times the size of V-1s, with explosive force far greater than even the R.A.F.'s six-ton factory-buster (see below).

Defense in Part. The seventh week of V-1 assault was bad enough. The Things came over in increasing salvos. The number of robombs destroyed in southern England's elaborate and still-growing system of defense rose; but more & more got through. Londoners learned a few items of their defense-in-depth, heard that R.A.F. fighter pilots, as they had in the bomb blitzes, were again doing a legendary job.

London's defense was triple-decked, but most of its details were under strong censorship lock. The system goes to work almost at the instant of the robot bomb's launching. The course of each missile is plotted, its flight checked to the end.

If the bomb reaches the English coast (many are reported crashing a few hundred yards from their take-off platforms), they are first attacked by a record concentration of ack-ack guns.

A Job for Fighters. If the robomb gets through, it runs into a wide belt of fighter planes--Spitfires, Mustangs, Mosquitoes, Tempests. Pilots of the day force are in readiness from an hour before dawn to an hour after dark. It is a dangerous business: the R.A.F. rewards it by giving Distinguished Flying Crosses for every ten robombs downed. The highest individual score last week was 27 shot down, credited to Rene van Lierde, a Belgian.

Fighters chase the Things to the edges of a balloon barrage that would scare off a bomber pilot. But many a pilotless bomber gets through.

They got through last week upon a hospital, upon a family of six in a backyard shelter, upon apartment houses, upon more shops and busses. Londoners, shaken but still full of understatement, talked mostly about the lucky misses. One bomb sailed close over a crowd at a band concert in Hyde Park, landed a scant 500 yards away, killed only two. The band went on playing On Steps of Glory.

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