World War: IN THE AIR: Teeth for Two

A carefully selected group of workers, children and bomb-shocked neurotics huddled wide-eyed in a dark, cold bomb vault. Noises began — sirens seeming to shriek for help, bombs and ack-ack conversing terribly.

A flashlight beam swung around the room onto the pale faces. No one was crying out. No one was fainting.

The noises increased — louder percussions, trimmed with human screams, wardens’ and firefighters’ shouts, fire-engine clangs, the crackle of flames. Finally the pandemonium faded; the pale people were led out. They said that the thing was terrifying, but they were glad to have been through it.

What they had been through was fake — a recorded A.R.P psychological test to see whether familiarity with the noises of air raids would make air raids themselves seem less terrifying to sensitive people. But even A.R.P. did not think that the raids these people would go through this year would be easier to take than last year’s.

This year there is a difference.

A year ago this week, after several weeks’ gradual buildup, the Luftwaffe let hell loose over London and poured it on day after day.

Last week the British were able to report that there had not been a single alarm over London in the month of August. During the week only two British towns, Hull and Newcastle, were bombed. But over Germany, day and night, the R.A.F. stung scores of cities with hundreds of planes at a time. Berlin suffered what the censor agreed was “one of the liveliest raids of the war.” This week the British gave Berlin what they said was the heaviest. Such heavy raids could not be without cost. And this week London reported two Flying Fortresses missing —the first lost since they went into action.

Would this new tooth-for-toothness any big marks on the balance sheet of war? Militarily, economically, perhaps not. The sound London Economist last week estimated from insurance figures only 2% of British real estate — and therefore certainly not much industry — had been lost in German Blitzes. The British would not be able to do much better that against the Germans, at least for a long time. But the important thing this year was that both protagonists, just one of them, are now learning the meaning of ouch.