Blind Bombardment

Sooner or later it had to happen. In the third week of Germany's "harassing fire" with winged robot bombs on southern England, one of the missiles hit a nursery home in which 26 tiny war orphans were sleeping. The first body recovered from the welter of wreckage was a dead, dark-haired little boy in a blue bed jacket; the second, a dead, blonde little girl in a pink nightdress.

Other bombs hit a hotel annex, hospitals, an office building, a dentist's office, shops, homes, crowded streets. These targets were all singled out by blind chance. Presumably chance also singled out some military targets--war factories, docks, warehouses, railroads--as well-as some open fields. But the Ministry of Information disclosed no such industrial or military damage, nor did it announce any casualty totals.

The Ministry continued to mention hits on "southern England," although everyone took it for granted that "southern

England" meant the London area.* One M.P. denounced the censorship as "a complete farce"; others demanded that the casualty totals be published--on the grounds that rumor was magnifying them unduly. Thousands of Britons watched the buzz-bombs winging toward their targets. Among the watchers: Winston Churchill, his wife and daughter Mary (see cut),

There was much less derision of the haphazard robots, much more serious talk of their destructive potentiality if their flight could be closely controlled (see-SCIENCE). And those who continued to insist that the robots were exclusively aimed at civilian morale missed an important point.

British Intelligence and reconnaissance had pried out the Nazis' secret long agor and for five months before invasion Allied air fleets had peppered the launching installations in a tremendous aerial offensive. The total effort represented a considerable diversion of Allied air power that might otherwise have been directed against German industry and communications. Last week the air commanders threw everything in the book at the launching platforms--and still the robots came over.

* Correspondents who examined captured captured launching platforms near Cherbourg, one of which was a concrete structure 750 feet long, found them pointed straight at London.

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