None of those older Londoners who lived through Hitler's bombardment of the capital with pilot-less V1 and V2 rockets in the closing stages of the Second World War can have forgotten the terror sewn by those horrendous weapons lobbed indiscriminately against the civilian population. They will have had a sharp reminder of it lately with events in Israel. Wartime historians noted the huge drop in the morale of Londoners under this kind of bombardment compared with the unity of purpose displayed during the Blitz. Even though preparations were well advanced for the Allied invasion of Europe, Churchill ordered the RAF to hit the rocket sites and the Americans joined in, with many thousands of tons of far from accurate bombs being poured into northern France and never mind who got killed in the process. Tragically the victims also included hundreds of forced labourers brought from the concentration camps to build the launch sites. But despite the almost ceaseless bombardment, the rocketing was never stopped completely until Allied forces liberated those parts of France and Holland from which they were being launched. Australian science writer Karl S. Kruszelnick has commented that the lesson from the V-2 rocket attack was that a relatively small number of attacks by missiles could have major military, strategic and psychological effects on the country being attacked - even if the missiles were primitive, unreliable and inaccurate. The folks in Sderot know all about that.

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