Alchemical Weapons In The War Of The Wizards
Whilst the basic recipe for victory in Europe in World War 2 was well understood ( land a shed load of troops somewhere on the mainland, proceed to Berlin ), the devil very much tends to be in the detail with these matters. June 6th is the anniversary of D-Day, when Eisenhower, after a last nervous glance at the weather (changeable), gave the order to begin Operation Neptune, the landing-a-shed-load-of-troops part of the Allied invasion plan.
As he sat down to write a speech explaining why the invasion had gone so badly wrong (”our landings have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops”<1>), and thanking all concerned for trying, some 7,000 <2> vessels set off for France. One of them carried a Swiss Roll (experimental), of which more later.
The British had already had a Damn Good Go at landing a shed load of troops somewhere on mainland Europe and proceeding to Berlin, back in 1940. It resulted in “the whole root, the core, and brain of the British Army”<3> proceeding disappointingly Backwards Through France to the exact point where Backwards Through France meets the deep wet stuff at Dunkirk.
Nervous Evacuations & Proper Wiping.
The British learnt a couple of things from the experience of shifting 338,226 men home to England through the medium of 850 fishing boats and pleasure craft whilst being relentlessly strafed and shelled. Firstly, they learnt that Britain was full of ingenious folk who could come up with astonishingly creative solutions to seemingly impossible problems. And secondly, they learnt that Britain was full of wide-eyed lunatics who really just weren’t taking this whole World War thing at all seriously.
The problem for those charged with winning the war was that these two sets of people often seemed to be posing as one another. Witness at Dunkirk, for example, the eyebrow-raising fact that of the 850 largely defenceless vessels that sailed into and out of the heavily mined seas of the port, only 2 were actually lost to mines. The reason for this was that most of the vessels in the hastily assembled “bathtub navy” had had an electrified copper cable passed over them before they left, which temporarily “wiped” their steel hulls of their magnetic charge . With their structures successfully demagnetised in this manner, they no longer triggered the thousands of German “magnetic mines” which lay, packed with 1,000 lb explosive charges, on the sea bed in the Channel.
This brilliantly simple technique was developed by Charles Frederick Goodeve, and tested amidst the toy boats that children were playing with on a “Canoe Lake” in Portsmouth. The importance of the breakthrough was not, of course, lost on the top brass at Whitehall, but as a native Canadian Goodeve understandably failed to spot the subtle British irony in the gracious and congratulatory reply they sent to him:
“You should discontinue any research on the lines you have indicated in your latest report. It is clear to me that the method you suggest will prove self-cancelling, and cannot work. “<4>
(It may be worth noting in passing that the British seemed to have had almost no working knowledge of magnetic mines until they captured a German example intact from the Thames in 1940. In all the excitement, it seems the British Military forgot that they actually invented the magnetic mine, in 1917<5>).
Wake-Walker’s Fish-Flingers.
So, clever work, bravo on the mine-defence business. Witness also, however, the alternative plan for dealing with the mines “forwarded officially to the Admiralty by an influential member of one of the Navy’s most famous shore establishments” <6> :
“It has been suggested that a means of causing magnetic mines to explode harmlessly may be found by attaching small but strong permanent magnets to flat fish, and distributing these fish over the sea bottom. The fish, moving in search of food, would, at short range, bring mines under the influence of a magnetic field and consequently cause explosion. The questions are
(a) Whether the influence of a magnet which could be carried by a fish would be effective; and
(b) Whether the scheme is possible from the ‘fish’ point of view”.<7>
In terms of “the ‘fish’ point of view”, all of the fish consulted were equally stoical with regard to their proposed suicide missions, but it transpired skates and rays were the cat’s pyjamas and the bee’s knees respectively for this kind of operation.
The First Lord Of The Admiralty at the time, Rear-Admiral Wake-Walker, wrote back with the following :
“1. The suggestion contained in your 191 /D 478 is considered of great value.
2. As a first step in the development of this idea it is proposed to establish a School for Flat Fish at the R.N. College, Dartmouth. Candidates for this course should be entered in the first place as Probationary Flat Fish, and these poor fish would be confirmed in their rank on showing their proficiency by exploding a mine.
3. A very suitable source of candidates to tap would be the Angel Fish of Bermuda, which, though flat, swim in a vertical plane.
4. With the success of this scheme it may be necessary to control fried-fish shops.
5. It is requested that you will forward, through the usual channels, proposals as to the necessary accommodation, and a suggested syllabus of the Course.” <8>
It was clear that a new department was required to sift some of these “out there” ideas before somebody accidentally agreed to one of them, and so the Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapon Development was born.
Surprising The Enemy By Not Being Entirely Sure What You’re Doing Yourself.
Known colloquially as “the Wheezers and Dodgers” the Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapon Development were charged with winning what Churchill called “The Wizard War”<9>. The inventions that poured forth from the Wheezers and Dodgers included several that would later help ensure that the D-Day landings were successful - much of the development of the floating “Mulberry Harbours”, and rocket-propelled grappling hooks to name but two.
The Wheezers & Dodgers also played their part in ensuring that the Germans were taken totally by surprise on D-Day (Rommel was in Germany to celebrate his wife’s 50th birthday, many key officers were playing war games in Rouen, and the commander of the 21st Panzer Division, the sole armoured formation in the area, was in Paris invading the only lightly-defended channel port of his mistress<10>). Much of their surprise was the result of “Operation Fortitude”, the Allied plan to trick Germany into believing that they would land at Pas-de-Calais, rather than Normandy. A phantom army, The First US Army Group, was created, complete with inflatable tanks.<11>
Even with the element of surprise, at Normandy “hundreds of bodies floated in the blood-red surf”<12> and the American operational commander General Omar Bradley sent Eisenhower a desperate message requesting permission to evacuate the beachhead and withdraw. The message was delayed due to the intense radio traffic, and by the time Eisenhower received it the remaining men of Bradley’s force had bravely, if somewhat accidentally, fought their way ashore.
One of the innovations successfully employed by the Admiralty in the following days and weeks was the aforementioned “Swiss Roll”, a device which they used to get tons of supplies from the ships onto the beaches. This “floating road” across the sea was invented by an ex-school teacher who, along with his wife, had occupied the bombed out remains of The Grosvenor Hotel in London<13>. Despite having a withered right hand, the man in question built, in one of the deserted hotel corridors, a 200 foot long water tank made from “a vast expanse of linoleum and a double row of old bricks”<14>, in order to test his invention. His name was Ronald Marsden Hamilton.
And there we must end this part of our story. Because, frankly, Mr Ronald Marsden Hamilton deserves, at the very least, a post of his own.
This is the truth. Handle with care.
References & Sources:
<1>The speech text was apparently recovered from a waste paper bin by one of Eisenhower’s aides - quote source : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3732417.stm
<2> Other sources cite the figure 5,000, but anyway, “lots”.
<3> Churchill, quoted in “The English Reader”, Michael Ravitch, Oxford University Press (2006), p.468.
<4>”The Secret War 1939-45″, Gerald Pawle, George Harrap (1956) p.25.
<5> “The European Powers in the First World War” By Spencer Tucker, Laura Matysek Wood & Justin D. Murphy, Taylor & Francis (1999) p.491.
<6> Pawle, p.19
<7> Ibid. p.19
<8> Ibid p.20
<9> Ibid p.17
<10> Sunday Times, June 6th 2004 - online at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article441875.ece
<11> This force did indeed invade on June 6that exactly the spot the Germans had anticipated, and losses amidst the assortment of radio-controlled planes, pieces of tin-foil and kites were distressingly high.
<12> BBC, online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/dday_beachhead_05.shtml
<13> Just off Buckingham Palace Road, current home of Google UK. June 6th 2009 is being commemorated there as the 25th anniversary of the birth of Tetris.
<14> Pawle, p. 200. (N.B. “Bricks” : maiden name “House”, married “Blitz”, 1940).