Into the Heart

London has had four catastrophes in nine centuries. The first was a fire in 1087, which took St. Paul's and most of the primitive city around it. The second and third came in two successive years -- the terrible plague of 1665 (70,000 dead) and the Great Fire of 1666, which left only one-fifth of the walled city standing. The fourth came last week. Perhaps not in physical damage but certainly in its imprint on the human mind, last week's was the worst. The first three were impersonal. This was the work of man.

Relentlessly last week and this the planes came -- Stukas, Jaguars, "flying pencils," "Jitterschmitts" -- the whole array, not once a day but almost incessantly. They came from different angles, feinting at other targets, then sheering in on the city; at different heights and different speeds; in waves, but on staggered schedules to confuse the defense.

This methodical craftiness was nothing new : it was the old story of Prussian military precision. The new element which was injected into last week's raids was the fury of Adolf Hitler. There was no more "armed reconnaissance" last week -- the raids were to destroy, kill, retaliate a thousandfold. Night raids were no longer designed for insomnia -- they were designed for the sleep of death.

The week began badly enough, with raids lasting as long as seven and a half hours, with as many as six alarms a day. But when Winston Churchill verbally thumbed his nose in answer to Herr Hitler's dire speech of warning, and when the R. A. F. lashed out at German targets harder than ever, the Fuhrer's temper broke. He ordered the works.

Pattern. No matter what its mission beyond London, each plane flew up a lane roughly parallel to the Thames Estuary, roared over London to keep citizens awake or in cellars, branched out on its job, then flew back by the same route. Because many planes which had not found or had been driven away from their objectives jettisoned their bombs at random in this lane, and because there were plenty of targets there anyhow, it was dubbed Hell's Corridor.

There had been two main epicentres of bombing: a large arc in the thickly populated western suburbs of London running through Uxbridge, Staines, Weybridge; and the coastal airports, which the Germans had to render untenable before an invasion would be anything more than a dream. Early in the week the Nazis claimed that three of these airports--Manston, Lympne, Hawkinge--had been blasted out of service. Stories leaked through from London confirming this claim, but were later stoutly denied.

When Adolf Hitler lost his temper, the plan did not disappear, it merely grew on itself until it seemed not to be a plan. The result was the grimmest series of raids in history. On the first day and fiery night, as many as 1,500 planes (counting each shuttle) dropped a vaunted 4,400,000 pounds of bombs on London in eight terrible hours. An Air Ministry official, confessed that even if the R. A. F. had four times as many fighters, it could not have kept all the raiders from the city. London admitted 400 deaths (one to each five and one half tons of bombs) and three times as many injuries; damage to docks, warehouses, arsenals, oil tanks, communications, gas, water, electric systems. Fires sprang up which made a mockery of blackout. Fire squads raced through the streets, but often found fires too big to handle, and water mains cracked.

It could not be said that Londoners received these raids with classic calm. First they were scared, then they were black angry. They gaped as the first planes screamed down the sky like giant auto brakes, but soon the people realized that this was different from previous air shows, and scuttled. Bombs sought some of them out in their shelters, caught some after the all-clear. One bomb by a million-to-one chance went down the ventilator of a shelter containing 1,000 people, reportedly killed only 14. In the second day of raids, 200 were killed, 800 injured. The worst damage was suffered in the tenement section known as Elephant & Castle, and in the slums near the East End docks. Thousands lost their homes. Soon the smart hotels of central London were receiving refugees from the slums. Ballrooms and bars became grim memorials of gaiety as they filled with smoke-smudged old ladies carrying bundles, burnt children, men with the drawn look of poverty and a new look of helpless anger.

Londoners' minds were taxed to their limits. In the glow of fires the city took on a fantastic medieval appearance. The squeezed lanes of the City looked like the streets of a canton in the dark ages. The Tower seemed to be a feudal castle. Centuries were obliterated, time whirled in the heads of victims. The wheeling searchlights, the constant roar and intermittent thud, the unreality of pain--all the punctuation of confusion gave the people sensations of losing consciousness, of going under ether for some life-or-death operation.

This was just what Adolf Hitler wanted --for Adolf Hitler knows the meaning of war. To the Fuehrer political objectives are just as important as gas works and docks. Bombs on civilians have never--not in Chungking, not in Barcelona, not in Warsaw--decided campaigns, but if Adolf Hitler could so much as get a foot inside the tight door of British political morale, his battle would be half won. By accident or design his fliers bombed slums far more than other residential districts. Adolf Hitler well knows that the only crack in Britain's armor of morale is the thin one between the old school of Baldwin and Chamberlain and the new one of Churchill, Beaverbrook and Bevin, between the people with BBC accents and those who talk with a burr. The corresponding military weakness is the clash between command and rank, so marked in the French Army. Adolf Hitler's obvious tactic in last week's bombings: to keep the classes complacent and sure of themselves, to shake the faith of the masses, no matter how little.

This week Hermann Goering moved up to take direct command. "In this historic hour," he said as the raids intensified, "the German Air Force for the first time has struck into the heart of the foe."

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