HOME FRONT: Terrible Bombings

It was not a total blackout; in the streets the blue beam of air-raid wardens’ flashlights showed up occasional pedestrians; a traffic light was still on. A squad car with two policemen, wearing tin hats, rolled into the square.

The alert let go its giant banshee wail—”Woo-oo-oo-oo-oo!”—a dreadful, penetrating warble, like no other sound on earth. A boy’s voice said: “Don’t worry, sis, I’ll look after you. We’ll get in the air-raid shelter just like the practice at school.”

In a few seconds the wardens had the streets clear. Soon, far and high, but nearer & nearer, came the drone of planes. Antiaircraft fire began to slam. Tearing down through the night sky, a far-off whistle rising hysterically into a splitting scream, came the first bombs. Soon the whole sky was screaming with bombs, while the city-target below bumped and shook in the bursts, and incendiary bombs spluttered.

The two tin-hatted policemen in the squad car flashed a radio call. In a few minutes the square was full of the businesslike bustle of men going into action. First they put out the incendiaries, squirting chemicals on them and flinging sand. The bomb-removal squad swung picks to dig up the still-unexploded bombs and hauled them away. The decontamination squad, dressed in rubber suits and gloves, went after the gas bombs, sprinkling chloride of lime everywhere.

A big, green emergency squad wagon from the Police Department drove up when a bomb made a direct hit on a one-story brick house, setting it on fire. Up drove a “catastrophe” ambulance from Bellevue with interns and nurses; up drove a red Consolidated Edison truck to fix broken gas mains and cables; a station wagon with “Mobile Blood Plasma Unit No. i” on the side.

At the “all-clear,” the wardens twirled their big rattles; the Red Cross set up tables and distributed coffee and groceries.

This half-hour mock air raid furnished the wow-at-the-finish of the Fifth Annual Police Show last week in Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden. It also scared the whey out of the 50,000-odd New Yorkers who bought tickets to it. The cast consisted of more than 700 New York cops and units from the city’s new corps of 100,000 air-raid wardens. Sound effects were rebroadcast British recordings of one of last September’s air blitzes, described by the excited cop announcer as “the London terrible bombings.”

Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who is also U.S. Director of Civilian Defense, told the first-night audience that New York has enough anti-air raid equipment to cover but a small part of the city. That day he wrote to Congress asking adequate equipment for “every police department in every city” in the U.S.