One-Man Blitzkrieg

Calm hung over the quiet west London suburbs of Acton, Chiswick and Ealing. Housewives popped in & out of neighborhood stores with hardly a glance at the sky. They felt perfectly safe; the Germans hadn't been over London for months. It was a few minutes after nine on Armistice Day morning.

Suddenly a submachine gun chattered. Leslie Ernest Ludford, a crippled lawyer who had paused to buy an Armistice Day poppy, crumpled to the sidewalk moaning. A dark sedan roared away. Later the sedan halted outside the home of two elderly women, Mrs. Annie New and Mrs. Emily Crisp. The doorbell rang.

Both women answered the summons. The gunman dropped them in their tracks.

Word that a mad killer was loose spread through the district. Police mobilized the largest force of. the war for the man hunt. Newspapers pushed war news aside to make way for a running account of the terror. Ambulances from the Air Raid Precautions services were dispatched to the suburbs. As the day grew older, the list of victims mounted.

Three hours passed before a police car overtook the sedan and rammed it. Out of the sedan the police dragged the driver, middle-aged Philip Joseph War, a Royal Artillery gunner on leave. The score of his marksmanship: one man, two women dead; four women wounded.

Babbled Gunner War, when arraigned on the charge of murdering Lawyer Ludford: "Who is he? I don't know him, do you? Why are you keeping me here?"

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