New Pattern

On a bit of raised ground near the estuary of the Plym River is the promenade called the Hoe, where Sir Francis Drake was playing bowls when news came of the Spanish Armada's approach. Last week that episode was reproduced in ironic miniature; but last week the aftermath was a dreadful tragedy.

This time the heroine was Viscountess Astor. As acting mayor of Plymouth town, the trigger-tongued Lady from Virginia had spent the day showing King George and Queen Elizabeth around the city. She sat in the dining room of her house on the Hoe with Australia's Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies, with her 17-year-old dock-working nephew, James Brand (son of the distinguished banker Robert Henry Brand, who was last week in the U. S. buying food for Britain), and with an American correspondent. It was 8:30 p.m. Nancy Astor was tired, but she kept up a patter of light talk.

The sirens sounded. Lady Astor and her guests stepped outside and watched what she had to admit was "a magnificent sight": flares falling from an armada of Nazi planes, then incendiary bombs planting their fateful beacons, then murder in high explosives. Calm as a Drake, Nancy Astor took note of something which dawned on all Britain last week. The air raids had become part of the Battle of the Atlantic.

With her windows looking out over Plymouth Sound, Lady Astor could not help knowing that a convoy had just arrived. The port was ship-filled, and the freighters were freshly warped in to un load their instruments of defense. It was these ships and the docks and the warehouses after which the bombers had come, and were to come another night. This was part of the new German pattern.

The Germans now had their reconnaissance planes report where each convoy arriving in Britain anchored, and then sent bombers to try to annihilate it. This was the mission of recent raids (many of them two nights in a row) on Swansea and Cardiff in Wales, Glasgow in Scotland, and Hull, Liverpool, Bristol, Southampton in England. Even in London, which last week received its worst raid in six months, the primary target was the docks. In each port the Germans did not mind if there was tremendous ancillary damage to houses, lives, communications and morale. (In the second night's raid on Plymouth, a shelter was hit with 250 people in it; most were casualties.) Apparently Adolf Hitler had given over the battle of production, now that the Lend-Lease Bill was passed, in favor of the battle of transportation.

Lady Astor watched the explosions; James Brand watched his dockyards pasted. Then, without warning, a high explosive went off near by. Every window in the Astor house blew out; Lady Astor's clothes were covered with powdered glass. Incendiaries landed on the roof. She and her guests ran up and doused them with sand. The going got thick; for a time they went into the cellar. Later they came out to douse more incendiaries. Early in the morning, when the all-clear sounded, Nancy Astor dragged herself upstairs and fell into bed in her windowless room.

Just after 9 the next morning, Lady Astor, once so-called leader of the so-called "Cliveden Set," called up United Press and asked if she might send the U. S. a message. Her experience on the Hoe had given her an idea that the dilatory Drake was wrong. U. P. said she could say whatever she wished.

"Well," she said, "tell them to hurry up and come in. It is not the kind of war that will wait for you. It will come to you."

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