"I was born in Milwaukee in 1936 and raised by my grandparents (parents divorced in 37). In WW II I was only old enough to walk block warden duty with my grandmother during air raid drills in case the Germans took Condors over the Polar route from Norway to hit Milwaukee (where I lived), St. Paul or Chicago. My grandmother was the block warden during WW II and during "Black Outs" (air raid drills), she would put on her arm band, shut off all the lights and then patrol the two blocks she was assigned to make sure everyone else had their lights out as well. Naturally, she couldn't leave me home alone (my grandfather often worked late hours on the Milwaukee Road) so she took me along. My "job" was since I was shorter than her (grade school age only) was to check the basement windows to make sure the basement lights were also off.
"The only long range German bomber we knew about at the time was the Condor. Well, that's the only one talked about. Maybe people liked the sinister sound of the name instead of Griffen. Looking at a globe, I wondered how a German plane could fly all the way from Germany to bomb us, but our planes couldn't do it the other way. My grandfather explained the Polar route that German planes could take from Norway that would be much shorter in distance.
"Milwaukee was (and still is) a prominent industrial city (with 6 major breweries as well). Allis Chalmers was just a mile south of our house and we could see the fires at the top of their smokestack from their annealing ovens and hear (and feel) the huge drop hammer that forged blooms of steel (24" X 24" X 20ft long bars) for armor production elsewhere. Milwaukee also had the central plants for Faulk foundries, Cutler-Hammer electrical components and (of course) Harley-Davidson motorcycles. So, if the Germans could fly over the North Pole and Canada, Milwaukee would have showed up in the bombadier's sights 90 miles before they got to Chicago and the railroad hub there.
"No German aircraft ever made it to the States (except in the Disney movie THE ROCKETEER where a dirigible flies over Hollywood. But that's Hollywood). But, at the time we were unaware of the restrictions of long range bomber production that Hitler imposed as he favored massive numbers of faster built medium range numbers. So, the fear was still there."

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