The Cornered Becst

Not since the blitz had London taken so savage a beating. At dawn, at dusk, in fog, sunlight and darkness the robombs roared across the Channel, streaked through ack-ack and balloon cable defenses, pounded more of the city into debris.

Between salvos, weary, grimy A.R.P. squads cleared rubble, fought fires, dug out the dead and the living in the worst seven days of the robomb terror. Statisticians totted up averages: each day 108 one-ton robombs were mauling southern England (which meant mostly London), each day they destroyed or damaged 17,000 houses. Only half as many civilians (2,441 a month) were being killed as in the blitz's bloodiest days, but the proportion of seriously injured stood higher. At week's end the capital had a 30-hour respite, broken when a fresh wave of robombs buzzed from new directions.

Britons had never hated the enemy as they did now, or lived in a more ironical compound of hope & fear. Anyone could see that Jerry was licked. But though he could not win by it, he was slamming over every flying bomb he had on hand before the Allied troops swept him out of France, took his launching sites. Soon he might be sending over even bigger, deadlier robombs from sites in the Low Countries or Germany. Said Health Minister Henry U. Willink, standing amid ruins:

"We have to expect that these dangers will continue for some time--cornered beasts are vicious."

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