Seattle Washington 10/31/46 – 0455.

Jack Dawson heard the planes, but there were always planes in the area around the aircraft plants. He rolled over to go back to sleep. In an hour he would have to be up to go to work on the B-17SG line. Just as he dozed off he was awakened again by a whistling sound he had heard only once before on a practice bombing range. A bomb was falling, he was sure of that. He shook his wife out of bed, they grabbed the children and headed for the basement stairway. The bomb hit and exploded about a block away as they stared down the stairs. He moved them into the one corner of the basement and they huddled there together.

The bombs continued to fall. Jack could hear them explode around them. One hit the house next door and their house was damaged by the blast. They could hear sirens all around them. When the noise of the planes faded Jack put down his five year old son and made his way up the steps. The house was a shambles, there was no electricity. He found a flashlight and went back for his family. He moved them to the kitchen at the top of the steps then found a second flashlight and gave it to his wife.

He went outside. In the darkness he could see little but the Edward’s house was obviously nothing but a pile of rubble. He ran to it and began to look for signs of life. He found Mark Edwards and his wife, both were alive but badly injured. As he dug for their children several neighbors joined the search. Neither was alive when they reached them. He returned to tell Mark and his wife to find they had expired. The whole family had been wiped out. Their efforts had all been for nothing.

The men of the neighborhood began searching one damaged house after another, looking for injured. No help came, they later learned that there were just not enough firemen to go around. They were too busy fighting fires to help dig for the wounded. The residential areas of the city were hard hit. There were twenty dead on just their block. One night shift worker returned home to find his home destroyed and his family dead. He just sat on the curb and cried.

New York City 10/31/46 0300 local time

Sixteen explosions rocked the city within an hour. At first the source of the explosions was a mystery. Within an hour a Naval officer who had been in London a year earlier and had seen the V-2 rocket attacks notified the Naval authorities there. Patrol aircraft were sent out to see if they could find the source. It was totally unexpected. They caught four very large German submarines each with two rockets on the deck ready for firing. Before they could press an attack, the rockets were launched and the subs vanished beneath the sea. Nobody knew how many more there would be. One thing for sure, the V-2 had a range of over a hundred fifty miles, any city within that distance of the coast was at risk. The patrol aircraft along the coast were put on full alert, they must at the worst keep the submarines from having enough time to surface and fire. Ideally they could sink them.