A Summer Bright and Terrible (8 page)

Seven

In the scheme of things, the bombing of
England in the First World War was little more than a nuisance. The economic
damage, far from crippling the nation as the German leaders had hoped, was less
than that done by rats every year. People were killed, yes, and every death is
a tragedy, but they were not killed in sufficient numbers to affect the outcome
of the war in the slightest.

Nevertheless, the bombing was an ill omen of
things to come. Particularly fearsome was the spectre of the wholesale gassing
of civilian populations from the air. The use of poison gas in artillery shells
had been outlawed by international agreement early in the century, but the
Germans had found a loophole. Instead of shooting gas shells at the Allies,
they brought gas canisters into the frontline trenches and just opened the
valves, letting the gas drift over into the British and French trenches. There
was nothing in the letter of the law to prohibit this; the tactic’s only flaw
was that the dispersal of the gas depended on the uncontrollable wind, and as
it turned out, the prevailing winds were west to east, blowing most of the gas
back onto their own troops.

So gas, horrible as it was, turned out to be
rather useless in trench warfare. Dropping it on cities, however, was a
different matter. Fleets of bombers loaded with gas canisters would sow untold horror
in the crowded streets of London. Of course it would seem to have been a simple
matter for the League of Nations to remove the loophole and simply ban poison
gas, no matter how it was delivered, by artillery shell or windblown or aerial
bomb. But the League—deprived of the world’s most powerful nation, the United
States—was proving to be incapable of any real action.

The outlook was indeed terrible. In February
1918, a dozen German Gothas bombed London on three consecutive nights, dropping
three hundred tons of explosives and killing thirty-eight people. Reporting on
this, an air commodore wrote that “the foreign folk in the crowded East End
district were singularly liable to an unreasoning panic. . . . In the shelter
of the tube stations the distress of Jewish mothers and children was very
difficult to soothe. They would scream loudly. . . while bands, shedding every
vestige of manhood, would behave like animals of the wild, sometimes brutally
trampling people to death in a mad, insensate rush for safety.”

A dozen bombers, three hundred tons of bombs,
and insensate panic. Imagine the impact of hundreds of bombers dropping poison
gas and incendiary bombs as well as high explosives: It was a Dantean vision of
hell on earth. The prospect was so horrible that it led to a push for world
disarmament, which, given the helplessness of the League of Nations, was a
retreat from reality. At any event, events themselves were moving in a
different direction.

In England the pivotal events were
connected with the far-flung empire. In 1920 Winston Churchill was Colonial
Secretary when a rebellion against British occupation suddenly erupted in the
Euphrates valley. A bomber squadron was sent from Egypt, and the rain of bombs
from the air soon squelched the rebellion. Churchill was so impressed that he
asked Trenchard if the air force couldn’t all by themselves keep the peace in
Iraq, a traditional trouble spot then as it is now. Trenchard sent four
squadrons to Baghdad under the command of Dowding to replace the British ground
troops there, and they were immediately successful.

Dowding initiated a strict but workable plan.
As soon as any trouble developed, he would warn the offending villages first,
and then, if they didn’t surrender, he would send a few planes and drop a few
bombs, which served to clear things up. The British were able to maintain order
there for the next fifteen years, at a considerable savings in both money and
lives over the previous strategy of maintaining infantry and cavalry to wage
full-scale war against the rebellious tribes.

In Germany the impetus was the failure of the
Weimar Republic—a democracy forced on the people by the conquering powers of
the First World War and bitterly resented. It could not bring the people
together under the disheartening restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles, and
conditions disintegrated into armed conflict between the forces of the left and
the right, the communists and the Nazis. When Hitler won out, the possibility
of universal disarmament was no longer viable. The question then became, in
England and France, which of the armed services should form the fulcrum of defence,
and in Germany, which should form the fulcrum of offense.

France reined itself in behind the Maginot Line,
as America did behind its oceans. In neither case was this a fortunate course
of action. Germany decided on mechanized ground warfare, with tanks replacing
horses and with small bombers acting as mobile artillery in support of the
tanks. England embraced the Douhet theory, fearing the bombardment of its
cities, and in consequence established Bomber Command of the RAF as its prime
deterrent throughout the 1920s and early 1930s.

In 1929, Dowding came back from the Near East
and within a year assumed the role of Air Member for Research and Development,
and everything began to change. So. Here comes Dowding, and naturally he views
his new position as having to do with the research and development of better
bombers. He’s just come back from bombing the Iraqis and he knows how effective
that was. What’s more, the general mind-set among the Air Staff is based on
Trenchard’s view that the bomber is the backbone of the air force. This is
reinforced by all the research developments of the past two decades, for since
the Great War, the bomber has become faster than the biplane fighters. It is
better armed since its machine guns don’t have to fire through propellers and
therefore are not restricted to fire only intermittently, and it is now capable
of carrying several thousand pounds of bombs. It is truly an awesome weapon.

In a sense, this is good news; if the bomber is
terrible enough, perhaps no one will ever want to start a war. On the other
hand, over there in Germany, Hitler doesn’t look as if he’s worrying too much
about bombing women and children. So Dowding, who always takes his job quite
seriously, begins to wonder if perhaps there isn’t some way to defend against
the bomber.

There were three problems. First, the new
bombers were faster than the fighters, so how could they be caught? Second, the
fighters’ armament was limited to two machine guns firing through the
propeller, and this wasn’t enough to shoot down a bomber, even if by some
chance the fighter caught up to it. And third, the bombers flew so high that
they would reach their target before the fighters could even climb up to their
altitude.

But the possibilities of new technologies were
hanging in the wind. If you could detect the bombers before they reached
England, you might be able to have the fighters waiting for them. Detection by
sound, that was the key. Dowding was not talking of sneak attacks by individual
aircraft, but large masses of them, aerial armadas crossing the Channel to lay
waste the cities of England. Hundreds and hundreds of two- and four-engine
monsters, filling the very sky with their noise.

Indeed, if you see an old war movie, one made
in the early stages of the battle, you’re likely to see searchlights daubing
the sky and soldiers seated below a group of immense horns, turning wheels to
rotate the horns, earpieces affixed, searching the sky for the noise of the
invaders. This was thought to be the very picture of modern technology, and for
a time, people thought that something like it might work.

In southeast England they built a large wall,
into which they placed a multitude of sensitive microphones. This was much less
sophisticated than the Hollywood version, for the wall was fixed in place and
could “look” in only one direction. But in 1934 it was the best they could do.
Those building it faced it toward England’s traditional enemy, France, rather
than the more modern threat, Germany—just another instance of how far behind
the times they were. And when it was completed, they invited the Air Member for
Research and Development to view a test.

Again the similarity to Star Wars: When the
first Star Wars test was undertaken—and subsequently triumphantly announced as
a success—the incoming missile’s path was known to the defenders, and it was
just one missile instead of hundreds. In 1934, a bomber was to come in
conveniently on a line leading directly to the wall, and Dowding was told that
they would hear it long before it came into view.

They sat down to wait, but before any aircraft
engines could be heard over the loudspeakers, there came instead a weird sort
of jingle-jangling. Those in attendance looked around, puzzled, until suddenly
one of them saw the problem and jumped up to race off and fix it. He had seen
in the distance a milkman making his early-morning rounds, and the clanking of
his bottles was overwhelming the sound of the incoming bomber.

And that was that, Dowding thought.
Conceivably, with further research funds, they might construct a movable wall
to detect aircraft coming in from any direction, but how to quiet the ambient sounds
of the country? The technique was bound to pick up any sounds—motorcars as well
as milkmen, birds twittering and cows mooing, the rumble of distant thunder.
There was no way to distinguish the sounds of airplane engines from any other
noise.

Dowding marked down a large X on the group’s
request for further research funds, and turned his attention reluctantly to the
death ray.

A death ray? Well, why not? The death ray
was a staple of scientific and horror fiction during the 1920s and 1930s, and
wasn’t fact stranger than fiction? It had been only a few decades since
Heinrich Hertz had discovered radio waves, which turned out to be
electromagnetic radiation invisible to the human eye. Since then, X-rays and
radioactivity, with its alpha, beta, and gamma rays (the last of which can
penetrate human skin and concrete walls), had sprung out of nowhere within the
lifetimes of most people, and so it was easy to imagine even deadlier forms of
radiation as yet undetected and even more powerful. Of course, it was all
nonsense, although it is amusing to recollect that an unnoticed paper by
Einstein had already shown the realities of laser technology, which could lead
to a real sort of death ray. But at the time it was all smoke and mirrors.

At which Grindell Matthews was an expert.

In 1924, he claimed to have developed an
electromagnetic beam that could “kill vermin at a distance of 64 feet, explode
dynamite, and stop internal combustion engines.” The press descended on him for
proof and came away with a bit less; a reporter from the
London Daily Mail
asked the inventor whether he could verify the claims. “Matthews smiled, and I
found confirmation in that,” he wrote. Apparently, a knowing smile was enough,
and the subsequent
Daily Mail
story was reprinted around the world, each
reprint adding something new, until the War Office was forced to ask for a
demonstration.

There being neither vermin nor dynamite in
Matthews’s laboratory on the specified day, he announced that he would put out
an electric light with his deadly ray And indeed he did: He switched on the
ray, and the light died out. But when he turned to discuss the matter with the
attendees, one of them quickly darted in the path of the supposed death-ray
beam and stood there, unharmed and grinning ferociously

The death ray was a hoax, but neither Matthews
nor the press gave up, and for the next twenty years, there was a succession of
such devices loudly heralded in the papers. As Dowding took up the post of Air
Member for Research, he was forced to evaluate a number of—shall we say,
creative—proposals: a device to firm up clouds for use as floating aerodromes,
liquid nitrogen to freeze the waters of the Channel to trap an invading armada,
and, of course, death rays of every conceivable and inconceivable type. They
all had to be carefully looked into, for no one was forgetting the history of
the tank, which had been submitted to the War Office in 1914 and dismissed with
the scribbled comment: “The man’s mad!”

The War Office, hounded by the press, offered a
reward of one thousand pounds—double what the average man earned in a year—for
a real death ray, one that could be shown to kill a sheep at a distance of a
mile. This, of course, brought out every nut case and con man in the kingdom,
each of whom had to be honestly evaluated. Dowding was kept busy working nights
and weekends without respite, for with Germany rearming, the pressure was
building to do something, anything that would provide some hope. The death ray,
as it turned out, offered none.

Nor did anything else. Although Trenchard tried
to reassure Parliament that his bomber force would deter any attack, it was
becoming clear that England was particularly susceptible to this new kind of
warfare. In reply to Trenchard, one parliamentarian pointed out the simple
observation that the Thames River provided a beacon for bombers, shining in the
dark by moonlight and leading them directly from the Channel into the heart of
London. Another member of Parliament focused on the incendiary bombs that had
been developed since the last war, and described data indicating that even a
small force of bombers could turn Britain’s cities into raging infernos.

When Trenchard replied that it was within
England’s power to visit the same destruction on any enemy who dared to attack,
both Parliament and the general population winced. It was England alone that
had all its population crammed into a small island with no place of escape.
London epitomized the problem. The capital was the centre of England’s
political, shipping, trading, economic, cultural, and historical life. London
was the very soul of the country, and there it was, stuck at the south-eastern
corner of the island. Placed there as if inviting attack from any continental
power, the city was too close to the coast for any effective defence to be
mounted. It was “the greatest target in the world, a kind of tremendous fat
cow, a valuable fat cow tied up to attract the beasts of prey,” as Winston
Churchill sadly described the capital.