The Mcdowell Times

THE WAR:
London Battered

In the fifty-third week of the war, Nazi air power began the long-proclaimed action which it declared would end in British surrender or the destruction of the world's largest city.
Previous raids and previous bombings were as nothing. Reichmarshal Hermann W. Goering, from a safe seat in France, personally took charge of the Luftwaffe's operations.
Thousands of gigantic bombers were sent across the channel in waves at 30 minute intervals. All were aimed at London, seat of the British empire.
Alarms continued from dusk until dawn. Even in daylight, while air precaution wardens were digging helpless from the debris left the night before, new planes arrived.
They dropped incendiary bombs, which set great fires and led the night fliers to their targets through blackouts.
Gone now was raiding only of defense points and industries. Except for German propaganda sources, none challenged the announcement that purely residential areas were being subjected to devastating explosions.
In world-famous Fleet street, home of the greatest British newspapers, some of the largest buildings in the city were wrecked.
Hospitals were wrecked, subways demoralized, gas mains broken and set afire. In a two-day period the British admitted 600 killed and 2,500 maimed.
Even as they made the announcement the bombardments grew worse.

KING GEORGE VI

Strain of almost constant air raids on England are telling on the boyish face of Britain's monarch, pictured here as he chatted with a workman at aircraft factory which he visited recently.

Morale

A delayed action bomb struck a section of Buckingham palace, the royal residence.
No one was injured.
Objective of the terror was to undermine the morale of the ordinary citizen. Berlin said when this was accomplished, the Churchill cabinet would fall and a new cabinet willing to deal with the Reich would take its place.
In the battered, shell-torn city, however, the first day of the raids showed no loss of determination to hold out. The king visited a slum section where bombs had ripped great craters in the street, where homes of hundreds had been torn to bits. Out of the window of a house still standing, a woman shouted:
"Are we downhearted?"
And the crowd gathered around the king cried,
"No."
The king smiled.
That night there were worse bombings.

Retaliation

British fliers, reported by the German air arm to be reduced to ineffective operation, were still able to get into the air and fight. Moreover they went visiting on their own.
Docks at Hamburg, ports along the channel coast, in Denmark and Norway were given a treatment of aerial bombardments. The British air ministry said the retaliation was so severe that the areas could not be used by the Germans to launch a land invasion.
Nightly there were air raid alarms in Berlin, too. At least one bomb was dropped on the Reichstag building, seat of Hitler's rubber-stamp parliament.