AIR: Wings Over Manhattan

At dawn one morning last week, from fire towers in Massachusetts, from skyscrapers in Manhattan, on lonely farms in Pennsylvania, on sandy knolls along the Virginia coast, from 1,600 posts along the Atlantic seaboard, 40,000 pairs of civilian eyes peered at the sky. These volunteer watchers were inaugurating the biggest rehearsal for air-raid defense ever undertaken in the U.S. They were watching for a sight of 150 planes headed for an “attack” on New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, other East Coast cities. Spotted at five-mile intervals throughout the endangered territory, which cut inland 150 miles, they were haphazardly equipped with everything from scythes and squirrel rifles to radios and binoculars. But their chief defensive weapon was the telephone.

Observers in this week-long rehearsal were never more than 15 seconds away from a telephone. The cry “Army, flash,” immediately cleared a line to one of the four Information Centers (Boston, Manhattan, Philadelphia, Norfolk). Last week in Manhattan’s center, supposedly the best-equipped in the world, 60 Army officers, 100 enlisted men and 600 women volunteers were kept hopping.

The Center’s whereabouts is a military secret—except that it is on the seventh floor of a brick, steel and concrete building, a spot immune to any bomb. Supervised by Army officers, its girl volunteers take flashes from the outposts, maneuver discs and blocks about huge table maps, like croupiers at a roulette game. First map is in the Filter Center, where each aircraft is checked and charted—by white discs when its allegiance is unknown, by colored blocks when it is discovered to be hostile. Flight directions are plotted by arrows.

When the Filter Center has filtered out false alarms and corrected errors, the information is relayed to the Main Operations Board, where each plane is charted on a 30-ft. table map, from the moment of its discovery until the “All Clear” sounds. Brooding over the Main Operations Board, from a perch in a glass-enclosed balcony, is the controller, key man of the setup, who determines the best way to head off the enemy. With him are officers in charge of antiaircraft, balloon barrages, searchlights and air-raid warnings. The controller, whatever his military rank, is supreme in his area. He shuttles planes about at will, cannot be gainsaid by officers in the field.

Last week, while planes dropped flares in Manhattan’s North River, parachutists attacked Long Island’s Floyd Bennett Field, and mock invaders stormed and took Fort Tilden (near Coney Island), the Information Center moved with precision and dispatch. Its instructions guided the operations of 250 pursuit ships, batteries of 800,000,000-candle-power searchlights, five anti-aircraft regiments. Although at first as much as six minutes elapsed between a flash and the allocation of a disc, the Center soon got its timing close to the 40 seconds which the Army thinks adequate. The Army had high praise for the Bell System which arranged the location of observation posts. Only fault some Army officers had to find with the setup: it was operated by the Office of Civilian Defense instead of by the American Legion, which first tried it last winter. They prefer the Legion, on the grounds that it understands the military better than OCD operatives, has permanent headquarters in almost every town.