Air Raids of the Future BOOKS OF THE DAY
By Dr. A. L. RAWLINGS
Fon many months everyone has been talking of air raids. The retail shop of His Majesty's Stationery Office in Kingsway is doing a thriving trade in the sale of the little yellow booklets issued by the Air Raids Precautions Department. Even so, much of the discussion that one hears is surprisingly ill-informed with regard to the rudiments of the question, and experts themselves disagree on fundamental facts.
In a club smoking-room recently a professional chemist who had served as a Major in the Great War was pooh-poohing the dangers of mustard-gas. He knew all its properties and gave figures showing that the liquid from which the gas is derived has a very high boiling point and a low vapour tension. Consequently the vapour could only get into the air in dangerous proportions in warm weather. " I wouldn't mind if there were a bucket full of it standing on the floor there now," he said, " though if I had to sit by it for many hours I might take the precaution of dusting my body all over with face powder. All the defence you need against mustard-gas is a powder puff."
• This was hotly disputed by another man, a well-known bacteriologist who had served as a medical officer in Flanders and made post-mortem examinations of mustard-gas victims. " If there were a teaspoonful of mustard-gas in this room," said he, " I'd run like Hell out of it. You can't powder your eyeballs or the inside of your windpipe, and it is the moist mucous surfaces that are most affected by the gas." The chemist admitted that he had rather exaggerated the efficacy of face powder, but went on to argue that the principal danger in a future air raid would not be from gas itself but from panic, and that the danger would only be magnified by publicly emphasising the menace of gas, or the vulnerability of London to air raids of all kinds. This seems to be on the whole the attitude of our Government, which issues from time to time reassuring statements about the impregnable defences of London and the millions of gas masks accumulated for the use of the populace when these defences have been penetrated. It has been said, with good show of reason, that the millions of gas masks already made are about as useful for protection against the worse kinds of poison gas as so many bowler hats. Whether this be so or not, the " soothing syrup " policy, as it may be called, is not likely to have many supporters in this country. Panic is mueh more likely to be caused by the unexpected than by the expected, and it is no idle boast to say that the people of this country have shown that they are not easily panic stricken. In all the air raids in London in the last War there was only one serious, case of panic, and the people involved in that case were mostly aliens from the East End.
This is one of the facts of history contained in Mr. Frank Morison's new book, which deals with the menace of modern war to London and other large towns. Mr. Morison is an ex-officer of the R.A.F. who, having been instructor in aerial bombing to the old Royal Flying Corps, was attached to the Directorate of Air Intelligence at the Air Ministry in London, and he is evidently no believer in the suppression of facts. His book gives a detailed and documented account of all the air raids made during the War in the Administrative County of London. He gives the times and positions of all the casualties and supplements the information available from domestic sources by quotations from published German War on Great Cities. By Frank Morison. (Fabz.r and Faber. 8.s. ed.) memoirs and his own post-War conversations with ex-enemy airmen. Of sixty excellent full-page reproductions of photo- graphs in his book a considerable number are included by per- mission of Dr. Eckener and the Zeppelin Company. The rest are mostly pictures of bombed streets and premises taken within a few hours of the disaster ; and there are a dozen maps and diagrams of London streets which show the purpose behind what seemed a haphazard broadcasting of bombs. - Mr. Morison is no mere compiler of statistics. The tables of statistics are there, but most of the book is an engrossing narrative, chiefly tragic but at times amusing. He has written in a background to his story which some may object to as padding but which will increase its value as a historical document. Our children are already wondering how Lon- doners were spending their time at the period of the Air Raids. They may learn from this book that at the time of the first Zeppelin raid on May 31st, 1915, there was as yet no shortage of coal ; a tram strike was in progress and children were going to school on scooters. Eighteen theatres and music- halls were doing good business in London and George Robey was starring at the Coliseum when the first bomb fell at Stoke Newington.
But how was London behaving at the time of the fifth Zeppelin raid the following October when 60 people had already been bombed to death, 200 injured and over half a million pounds' worth of property destroyed ? About 9.30 on the evening of the 13th of the month a Zeppelin over the National Gallery released a number of bombs intended to destroy the Admiralty. They missed their objective, for one fell at the stage door of the Lyceum theatre, one near the Gaiety theatre, and one each in front of the Strand and Aldwych theatres. All these theatres were full, and in all except one the audience remained till the end of the per- formance. In the Strand theatre, where Julia Neilson and Fred Terry were doing The Scarlet Pimpernel, the sound of the explosions caused one of the orchestra, a Russian, to fall on the floor crying, " My God, I'm died ! " Terry got the audience to cheer, and after that they finished the play.
Mr. Morison has comparatively little to say about poison gas, which was not used on London in the last War. He gives four good reasons for thinking that the wholesale and indis- criminate use of gas against large cities in the future is im- probable. The danger from incendiary bombs seems to him more imminent. It may surprise many to learn that more than half the bombs dropped on London by the Germans were incendiaries, and that we owe it chiefly to the London Fire Brigade that the results were not more serious. They won, however, by a very narrow margin, and Mr. Morison urges the need of plans to make use of the river and the under- ground railways for reaching fires in congested districts.
The largest explosive bomb dropped on London during the last War weighed about a ton. A modern bomb weighs 5,000 lb. and can cause destruction over an area of half a mile• in diameter. The total distance from the corner of Bridge Street, Westminster, to Trafalgar Square is less than half a
mile. These facts now, published by Mr. Morison justify the Government in pausing, as announced last week, in the plan for a great new block of Administrative offices in Whitehall..
The book makes other valuable suggestions not only for the authorities but for the general public, and- it ought to be read as a matter both of interest and of duty by every house-
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