The industrial hives of northern England had all but demobilized their air-raid defenses. The people, reading of buzz-bombings in southern England, felt safe and snug in their rows of smoke-smudged brick houses 150 miles and more beyond the usual V-1 and V-2 targets.
Suddenly that comfortable feeling vanished. V-bombs, British authorities admitted last week, had landed in northern England. German authorities identified the target as Manchester, 189 miles northwest of London. Men, women & children had died under cascading piles of brick; Christmas trees, wearing their tinsel and ornaments, had stood exposed in the wreckage.
How the Germans had reached so far was...