ALL KINDS OF CURIOUS THINGS HAPPEN

New Zealand Herald, Volume 81, Issue 25054, 18 November 1944, Page 10

ALL KINDS OF CURIOUS THINGS HAPPEN

The people of "southern England, including London" (as the target area of Germany's V weapons has been called), automatically move away from windows when they hear the sputter of a flying tomb, just as they reach for an umbrella when they leave home on a cloudy day, writes the London correspondent of the New York Herald-Tribune. Glass splinters from windows panes have been driven inch deep in hard mahogany dining room tables by blast. Wallpaper, curiously, has been ripped off walls by blast. Several weeks ago a Canadian soldier and his girl were strolling together in a square. Blast stripped them both of their clothing but left them uninjured. A cockney policeman was riding home from his beat on his bicycle the other

day soon after the sirens had sounded. "I couldn't hear any aircraft," he said later, "aqd 1 was absorbed in watching a big, noisy convoy of military vehicles going in. the other direction. Suddenly, without any warning, I found myself shooting forward like a human cannon ball. I swear I went past a 'bus at fifty miles an hour. When I came to my senses there I was, still pedalling along on the old bike as steadily as you please. That was a doodle-bug, and I hadn't even heard it." Blast recently knocked a house down. Kitchen walls and ceiling fell in. Glass

BLAST FROM DEADLY FLYING BOMBS

doors of a cupboard were smashed, along with all the crockery inside. But four eggs, lying in a glass bowl in the cupboard, survived. Nor were the eggs or the bowl cracked.

During the November, 1940 ; blitz, | when the Cafe de Paris was hit, men were killed while dancing, their women partners escaping, and vice-versa. Blast has tied knots in window curtains. Doors have been wrenched off shelters, but candles burning inside the shelters were not even blown out. Blast sometimes kills people without leaving any sign of visible injury. There is the example of the man who was found in a bombed pub still standing at the counter, his glass of beer raised in his right hand, his left hand clown on a shilling on the counter. The man was dead. Me had 110 external injuries. He was buried to the waist in debris, which kept him erect. The two reactions of the explosion, the quick, hard blast and the slightly lower, longer-lasting suction, sometimes come so closely together that a window which is blasted inward is sucked out into the street by vacuum. Generally speaking, windows within a hundred yards of an exploding flying bomb will break inward. Outside the 100-vard radius the glass will generally be pulled out into the street.

All kinds of curious things happen. Gla ; that the first blast does not shatter U frequently broken by the more prolonged pressure of the vacuum. Sometimes blasts of the ensuing vacuum will ricochet in a zig-zag up a narrow street, leaving alternate patches of whole and broken glass. With experiences like these taking place around them as part of their everyday life, the British people quite naturally have learned something about blast. They have learned that ordinarily glass from windows blows in at right angles to the face of the window. They have learned that if they duck behind a stone wall, even if it is only two feet high, or behind a tree, they are generally safe from blast. They have learned that it is far safer to be horizontal than vertical when a bomb is coming your way.