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The text below is a transcript from images supplied by the Public Records Office of a document, reference code AIR 20/4870. It is Crown Copyright but licenced as above.
This is from the last draft version as amended on 6 May 1945.
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CHAPTER X
Long before this, if all the dreams of inventors that come true, the night war would have been over. And perhaps in the middle of this grim and dramatic story it may not be entirely out of place to consider a few of the devices, some ludicrous, some Wellsian, some scientifically possible but operationally impossible, some tried and some never tried, which the night interception experts had placed before them. The fact that many of them, though are highly problematical and extremely difficult to put into practice, were seriously considered at all is a sign of the desperation of the times. In the long hard task of seeking a solution to the problem through radiolocation, a task that had been going on for six years, the experts must often have longed for one of these inventors’ schemes to prove itself a cheap and simple miracle.
In the last war, when the zeppelin was the menace to Great Britain, the situation had been very much the same.. Suggestions were received and considered by the experts in night defence. One was that a vast system of flood lighting should be set up over the South of England. Pilots could, by flying high, see the raiders silhouetted against the illumination. Unfortunately London and the South of England cover large areas, and it was finally decided it would be cheaper to move London.
Another suggestion advocated the blowing of carborundum powder into the air in large quantities to stop the engines of raiders. Even this fantastic suggestion got as far as experiment. An engine was set a revolving on a bench and carborundum was blown at it. The more the engine got the better it liked it.
Another scheme was of diabolical simplicity. We simply flew above the enemy and sprinkled sulphuric acid on him. The inventor did not say what happened when the acid reached the ground. Another was equally charming and vicious. Here we flew in front of the enemy having first found him and blue clouds of poison gas in his path. These schemes did not, perhaps fortunately, mature.
In the present war the air was full, in its early days, of stories of death rays, invisible belts of defence that would stop the engines of aircraft and cars, strange air mines, curious barrages of electrified or knife-edge wire that would cut aircraft to pieces. Secret weapons of one kind or another were threatened from both ourselves and the enemy. The threat of the secret weapon seems, in fact, to have been one way of keeping up morale. The few successful secret weapons now in use are, for obvious reasons, still secret, and will probably remain so. Others were tried, failed and are now museum pieces.
Many of these experiments in night interception concentrated on the problems of illumination. They sought to turn night into day. One of them would have had a large aircraft spraying the air with luminous paint. This would, it was held, form a screen through which attacking aircraft would fly. They would emerge covered with paint, the glow from which would subsequently act as a guide for fighter pilots. A.A. shells could also eject paint on bursting. There is no record of this problematical scheme of night-painting ever being tried; but it indicates the lines on which many minds were working.
Some sort of applied illumination seemed for a long time, indeed, to hold the solution. An aircraft carrying a powerful searchlight, working in conjunction with a night fighter, seemed a promising idea. The weight of searchlight apparatus, and particularly of batteries, appeared prohibitive, but light-weight batteries were at last provided so that the scheme could be put into practice. It was regarded for some time as being of the highest possible promise, was guarded with great secrecy and its trials finally abandoned. Yet the controlled illumination of an interception zone would clearly be a considerable aid to night-fighters, and we now see, in fact, that the enemy himself is using concentrations of powerful flares in areas of interception at night. The area needed for such concentrations is, however, generally enormous. To cover an area about the size of London would mean illuminating a zone of about 4,000 square miles. If searchlights were used it has been calculated that upwards of 2,000,000 of them would be needed; if flares were used than 50,000 flares an hour would be necessary. To illuminate several areas in one night would be enormously costly in equipment and manpower.
If it was not possible to turn night into day successfully it seemed possible to turn night Into hell. Night-flying, both for attacker and defender, clearly offers more dangers than flying by day. To increase these dangers to the attacker would be one way of discouraging his activities. Accordingly we tried,for some time, an aerial mine. It consisted of some thousands of feet of wire to one end of which was attached a small bomb and to the other a towing parachute. The whole was attached to a parachute of such design that the mine could fall about 1,000 feet per minute. On Impact with an aircraft the supporting parachute broke away and the towing parachute pulled the bomb up to the wing to detonate on its surface.
The mine was used in the form of a curtain laid across the path of the enemy bomber. Controlled from the ground, the curtain was laid across the enemy’s path about four miles ahead and some 2,000 to 3,000 feet above. The fundamental difficulties of operating such a mine were to some extent the fundamental difficulties of all night-interception. Before the mine could do its work the enemy had to be found in an enormous area of sky. It became obvious, after trials, that such a mine could only be a supplementary form of defence and that it might even be a danger to the primary form of defence, the fighter itself. After one or two mines had unfortunately landed in the back-yards of innocent citizens it was abandoned.
There were several other experiments, suggested experiments and wlld surmises that the night interception experts had to consider. That they did consider them, often seriously and with prolonged trial, sometimes with the most enthusiastic encouragement of the Prime Minister himself, only shows the gravity of the danger it was hoped they might overcome. It would be pointless to describe them in detail here. It is enough to say that their fantasies, half forgotten now, were part of the monstrous and tragic fantasy of the time.
CHAPTER XI
In early March the Blitz flared up again. It was concentrated, and was to be concentrated for the next two months, on the ports. The situation at sea was now very bad; the U-boat Menace was great and it is clear that the attack on the ports was part, and an extremely dangerous part, of the German strategy of counter blockade. What cargoes the U-boats could not destroy at sea the Luftwaffe would destroy at the ports. A published picture of Hull, after raids on the 7th, 8th and 9th of May, shows how deeply these raids could strike down to the raw bone of the nation’s life. In that picture thousands of tons of grain - daily bread for millions of people - is seen sliding down in huge burning avalanches into the river below. But not only was grain coming into the ports, but aircraft, tanks and guns, and these too, if possible, had to be denied us. We had endured attacks on aerodromes, arms cities, coast towns, and spectacular propaganda attacks on London. Though serious, they had disrupted rather than menaced life. But now the attacks on ports, used together with the power of destruction at sea, aimed to crush the life out of us. We see how long the Germans held their faith in this strategy - and therefore how considerable their hope of its success was - by the fact that in the whole of 1941 only six raids outside London, itself the greatest port in the world, were not concentrated on ports. And of these three were on industrial Bristol, adjoining one of the oldest ports in the country.
If the U-boat and the night bombers could have kept up their combined strategy for a whole year the consequences might well have been fatal to the country. “What is to happen,” asked Mr. Churchill in the House on April 27, 1941, “if so many of our merchant ships are sunk that we cannot bring in the food we need to nourish our brave people? What if the supplies of war materials and war weapons which the United States are seeking to send us in such enormous quantities should in large part be sunk on the way? What is to happen then?” The answer was so obvious that the Prime Minister did not attempt to elaborate it to an already severely tried and battered people.
The attack of this “two-handed engine at the door” placed a double demand on the Air Force. The evacuation of Dunkirk had left us very depleted in fast escort ships. The evacuation of Crete, in the spring of 1941, was to weaken us still further. The task of convoying ships, together with the task of spotting, attacking and destroying U-boats, stretched the resources of Coastal Command to the limits. Aircraft production was still slow, and had not been helped by the attacks on arms towns. It was an unenviable task trying to satisfy the needs of the three offensive Commands: to decide whether Wellingtons might be better used over Germany or over the Atlantic, or if Beaufighters were of more use on sea-patrol than as night-fighters. Our defensive lines were in fact stretched very thinly across the sea and sky of the world.
Figures for the tonnage of shipping destroyed at sea during the winter and spring of 1941 are not available. German planes were always grimly and frighteningly large. But the details of the attacks on ports have long been public. They too are grim. From March 10 to May 10, there were 34 very heavy night raids outside London: an average of about one every two nights. All but three of these - two big raids on Coventry, and one on Birmingham - were on ports. Merseyside, Bristol, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Belfast, Hull, Clydeside: the concentration on them was continuous. Liverpool had nine raids, including what was probably the worst sequence - seven consecutive nights from 1st to 7th of May - in the whole country. No other provincial target, with the exception of Plymouth, which had five big night raids in nine nights in late April, had ever had such a savage battering. On the 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 27th, 28th and 29th of April a total force of 750 aircraft did their best to smash the port which is probably more famous than any other in England for its expression, through Drake, of English understatement and imperturbability.
We have only to look at the map to see the dangerous significance of these raids. With the exception of Hull, none of these targets was on the east coast of the country. Leith, Tyneside, South Shields, Sunderland, Grimsby: none of these had the significance of ports in the West. Always it was farther and farther West, to Cardiff, then Swansea, to Clydeside, then Belfast, that the Luftwaffe pressed its attacks, until it might almost be said that it was going out, towards the Atlantic, to meet the cargoes we needed.
All this was a reversal of earlier tactics. it showed unmistakably how determined the enemy was to break the country’s line of supply. In the earlier part of the war South Wales had been considered a safe reception area. On the Clyde there had long been a conviction, almost a superstition, that the great shipping centre could not be raided. But in three nights in February, as we have seen, Swansea was struck a terrible blow: and on two moonlight nights in March, Clydeside was attacked by such masses of incendiaries that they have been described as “like locusts settling on ripe grain”. Fires raged with immense fierceness, so that the glow from them could be seen far away, a hundred miles distant, over the grim moors of Rannoch and the Grampians, at Aberdeen. In these two raids 40,000 houses were damaged - so that a quarter of the city's population could not, in the following days, give its full attention to the work of the port. Greenock and Clydebank were raided in the same way.
The effect of these raids on ports in the West, into which American help was more rapidly flowing, was like savage pressure on the main arteries of a human body. Unless the pressure could be released, the body would die. And in May, as Mr. Churchill again pointed out, the pressure had not been relaxed. The U-boat and the night bomber, operating hundreds and even thousands of miles apart and yet together, as part of the same purpose, had their hands on the life-line of the country. The winter, a very severe, cold and dark winter, was over. But now, with Spring, the real crisis had come.
Now let us see how, at last, this crisis began to be defeated.