Epilogue

In September, . harassed London breathed a great sigh and shook hands with itself. The Canadian Army had overrun the robomb coast across the Channel: the hellish Things had stopped diving on the city and its environs. A week of blessed peace and quiet followed. Then the Things started coming again.

Where from? The alert defenders of southern England quickly found out. The Germans were mounting the robots pickaback on old Heinkels and other obsolete bombers, whose pilots took off from bases in north Holland and Germany, launched the robots at sea, at night. British night fighters, guided from radar stations on the ground, went to work against both bombers and robots, and not many of the missiles got through. It was a feeble echo of last summer's terror; but last week the attacks increased and the flow of evacuees back to London slowed down.

The British have not disclosed whether or not intact stocks of V-1 were captured in France--but they now know all they need to know about it (see SCIENCE). One in every ten of the missiles launched from the ramps of the Channel coast was equipped with a radio transmitter so that its course could be followed, corrections made accordingly for direction and range. Result: the Germans, without much information on the winds over England, were still able to aim the flying bombs with disconcerting precision. Once the course of the radio-equipped pilot bombs had been charted, the crews could send off more, with fair assurance that they could hit any neighborhood of London.

As an expedient for rescuing Germany from defeat, V-1 was too little and too late. But as a weapon of war, crude but improvable, it made its mark. The Allied war planners could fabricate enormous quantities of flying bombs for the final knockout of Japan, launch them against the heart of the Empire from carriers.

Meanwhile England watched warily for the appearance of Germany's long-promised V2, reputedly a rocket bomb of vast destructive powers and far greater range than V1. Considering Germany's industrial plight, V-2 might seem a forlorn hope to the soberer Herrenvolk. But after the V-1 blitz, Britons were not discounting anything. England would not be entirely safe until Germany was out of the war.

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