Foreign News: Last Trumpet

“I hate having to write this book. Air raids are not only wrong. They are loathsome and disgusting. If you had ever seen a child smashed by a bomb into some-thing like a mixture of dirty rags and cat’s meat you would realize this fact as intensely as I do.”

With this piece of gruesome candor, Britain’s popular writer on science and warfare, Professor J. B. S. Haldane of University College, London, opens his new book A. R. P.* (Gollancz, London, 78 6d), which thousands of Britons were reading last week. They knew for certain that fleets of German bombers were already being prepared in the Reich for quick takeoffs (see p. 15). Digging through Professor Haldane’s 296 pages to learn what Science thought would be their fate and what Science advised could be done about it, Britons found crumbs of comfort only in the belief of Professor Haldane that no new and unprecedented weapons such as “death rays” or “germ bombs” are likely at present to be held in reserve by any country for widespread use.

Based on his own researches of several months in war-torn Spain, Professor Haldane writes: “The best way to avoid being bombed is to avoid war. . . . Many of the questions which are asked concerning Air Raid Precautions are unanswerable in the form in which they are put. If I am asked ‘Does any gas mask give complete protection against phosgene?’ the only literally true answer is ‘No’. . . . But one would be safe in a phosgene concentration of one part per thousand, of which a single breath would probably kill an unprotected man. Hence in practice such a mask is a very nearly complete protection. It is the same with shelters. … A single four-ton bomb . . . aimed exactly right . . . would no doubt destroy a shelter which was safe against bombs weighing one ton. Nevertheless, I shall call a shelter bombproof if it will stand up to a one-ton bomb. … A one-ton [gas] bomb will poison 120 million cubic feet of air, for example a layer [of air] twelve feet high and covering nearly half a square mile.”

10,000%. To drive home how enormously more horrible the next World War will be than its predecessor, Professor Haldane cited cold figures: “Between January 1917 and November 1918, German aeroplanes dropped 71 tons of bombs on England. These killed 837 people. . . . On March 16-19, 1938, 41 tons of bombs were dropped on Barcelona by German and Italian aeroplanes. They killed about 1,300 people.”

Thus, had the bombing of Barcelona continued at this maximum intensity for even one full week, both the total weight of bombs dropped and the total casualties in this city would have considerably exceeded what all England suffered in its worst 95 weeks of actual war. Measured thus coldly, the “horrors of bombing” have increased in 20 years nearly 10,000%.

Although his book is just off the press, Professor Haldane. when writing it a few weeks ago, thought there was yet time for London to start on a two-year program of digging 1,000 miles of brick-lined tunnels at a depth of 60 feet in which the entire metropolitan population of 8,000,000 could be sheltered. Estimated cost: $2,000,000,000. The professor, while noting that many Britons have told him they would rather die than live thus under conditions which would make them part-time moles, resolutely insisted that Spain has proved the fallacy of attempting to “evacuate and diffuse” the populations of great cities to “safer regions.”

“The first air raids may not be on Central London at all but on the traffic jams around it,” warns Professor Haldane. “In Spain, at any rate, the German airmen seem to prefer to attack concentrated traffic, whether on wheel or on foot, rather than to bomb buildings, when they have the choice. … In Barcelona one dives for the nearest shelter, leaving one’s car in the street with the ignition key in place, so that it may be used by officials if necessary. … I would far rather be in Central London during a big air raid than in a traffic jam on the Barnet Bye-Pass or the Great West Road.”

40,000,000 Gas Masks. Both the French and British Governments this week were rushing the final stages of their long-announced plans to evacuate millions from Paris and London at the outbreak of war. Giving the British Government credit for its work in providing the 40,000,000 gas masks, which this week are ready, Professor Haldane insists that, while these are all to the good, evacuation is all wrong. Every park, garden and open space in London and other British cities should immediately be dug up in a system of twisting trenches, he declares. After puting on their gas masks, millions of Londoners should then crouch in these trenches (which would be covered with timbers and green sod to disguise them from the enemy) every time an air raid warning sounds. Meanwhile, 100,000 unemployed British miners would “win the war” by digging hundreds of miles of tunnels 60 feet below ground.

In the Spanish town of Castellon de la Plana, reports Professor Haldane, the clay consistency of the soil is such that a refuge could quickly be dug 40 feet beneath nearly every house, and these refuges were connected by tunnels. In the end, Castellon was captured by the Rightists (TIME, June 20), but meanwhile Leftist inhabitants made perhaps the best civilian score to date in avoiding death from the air.

“Flattens Everything!” An ardent Leftist, Professor Haldane says that “a British Labor or Popular Front Government” might have ordered taken long ago the precautions he now recommends. He ignores the fact that Moscow has not taken them, that the French Popular Front, after studying the reports of its many-agents in Spain, adopted the same “evacuation strategy” as British Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare. Apart from his plunge into politics and recriminations, Scientist Haldane gives many objective, personal accounts of his sensations under bombing in Spain:

“I was running toward a medium-sized bomb when it burst. My mouth was open and the shock was so violent that I was unable to breathe for some seconds, and indeed thought that my throat had been torn away, and that I had only another half-minute or so to live. I did not notice that I had been wounded until I felt that my throat was intact, and managed to start breathing again. . . .

“A man standing within ten yards of a large bomb will be torn to pieces, and the pieces thrown for hundreds of yards. A brick wall is not merely knocked down. It is shattered into a hail of projectiles which may kill people at a great distance. At a still greater distance the blast is translated into a wave of sound, but a sound like that of the last trumpet which literally flattens out everything in front of it. … It is the last sound that many people ever hear, even if they are not killed, because their eardrums are burst in and they are deafened for life. It occasionally kills people outright without any obvious wound. . . .

“A great many more people can be killed by a given weight of high explosive bombs than by the same weight of gas bombs. . . . Gas was not used against the towns [in Spain] for this reason. . . .

At the present time motorcars kill 5,000-6,000 people per year, and measles 2,000-3,000. And in view of the fact that people tolerate fast motorcars, and readily preventable diseases, their great objection to being bombed from the air is an interesting psychological fact.”

“Large Hole.” By what Professor Haldane believes to be scientific standards, King George and Queen Elizabeth last week were taking pathetically inadequate precautions, which will leave them just about at ground level in case of an air raid, not 60 feet down under. Read a United Press dispatch from London: “A bomb and gas-proof shelter is being built in the basement of Buckingham Palace for the King and Queen. It consists of two rooms which formerly were the maids’ resting rooms. … A large hole has been knocked in the wall of the Palace near the shelter to enable the King and Queen to escape to the Palace gardens.”

*Air Raid Precautions.