Duds

The sirens wailed. An air raid.

Los Angeles citizens crawled out of beds and goggled at the moon. The city had been blacked out. Suddenly, from dozens of Army anti-aircraft posts, searchlights lanced the dark. Orange bursts blossomed in the sky. The city shook with the concussion of ack-ack guns. For almost two hours, except for one 15-minute interval of scary silence, batteries coughed steadily, spewed 1,430 rounds of ammunition into the night.

Los Angelenos had no doubt that they were being attacked. Early morning extras confirmed the fact. Said the Los Angeles Times: "Roaring out of a brilliant moonlit western sky, foreign aircraft flying both in large formation and singly, flew over Southern California. ... At 5 a.m. the police reported that an airplane had been shot down near 185th St."

There were casualties--but not from bombs. Three citizens had been killed in auto crashes. An air-raid warden had died of a heart attack. Windows had been smashed and several skygazers struck by falling shell fragments. Someone threw a garbage pail through a jewelry-store window to black-out a neon sign. One woman was yanked out of bed by police, and hauled off to jail for failing to black-out her house. She sobbed: "One of the officers slapped my face. I'm going to tell that to the judge." Stalled for almost five hours, traffic choked the streets, caused the worst jam in the city's history.

No one found any shot-down plane; no one reported any bombed-out home. Rumors were thick as flack: that the Army had shot its 1,430 rounds at an escaped barrage balloon; that enemy planes had been reconnoitering; that the target was a lone U.S. plane trying to land; that the Army was staging a show to wake people up. The Western Defense Command said: "Unidentified aircraft were reported in the Los Angeles area."

In Washington, Navy's Secretary Knox smiled indulgently and cracked: "Just a false alarm." Army's Secretary Stimson challenged him by reading to newsmen a report from Chief of Staff Marshall stating flatly: "As many as 15 planes may have been involved." One Army theory was that the planes came from commercial fields, were operated by enemy agents to locate gun positions and to slow up production by causing a blackout. The ships, said the report, were flying at heights ranging from 9,000 to 18,000 feet.

Practiced observers (newsmen, officers, soldiers) on the scene backed up the Army report. The planes which they swore they had seen had moved slowly across the night sky, evidently circling. Observers also reported that anti-aircraft bursts were considerably short of the point where searchlights converged, despite the theoretical longer range of the ack-ack guns; only about half of the shells burst at all, indicating lots of duds.

A foreign correspondent recently returned from London (where he endured the blitzes of 1940 and 1941) commented:

"Until there is a danger that Los Angeles--or any other American city- will be bombed continually by large numbers of planes, it will be better to forget all about blackouts, air raid warnings, and anti-aircraft barrages. The damage that 15 or 20 planes could do at night is nothing compared with the loss of man hours, discomfort and general turmoil.

"Moscow lifted its blackout a few days after the Luftwaffe stopped mass raids; that during the 'nuisance raids' on London the British didn't shoot off a single antiaircraft gun."

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