She taught me how to speak to death inside

[sovay]

Rabbit, rabbit! It turns out that if you have a migraine for five days straight, the day after it breaks you are not magically restored to feeling wonderful and in fact feel rather as though someone has hit you several times with a bag full of freight trains; in other words yesterday was terrible. I spoke to way too many doctors and sent some necessary e-mails and finally in the evening read Nevil Shute's Landfall (1940), which I loved and whose film adaptation I realize I am wary of tracking down despite its attractive supporting cast for fear it should diminish the heroism of the novel's co-protagonist, the barmaid who is not just the love interest but the one person in the story who's in a position to put together the pieces of what really happened to HMS Caranx on December 3, 1939. "Not quite from the top drawer, you know. But she's got a very nice mind." Trying to figure out afterward if the obliquely electrified secret weapon which the other protagonist is dangerously testing for the Navy was the sort of thing that could have come out of the Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development led to me trying not to corpse while reading spatch descriptions of the Panjandrum epically not working. Honestly, this discovery was the best part of the day. Even the Wikipedia page is funny. I am vaguely amazed I never saw any of the test footage during the Oops! portions of Square One TV (1987–92). I did observe the claim that the entire device might have been a hoax per Operation Fortitude, but I can't help but wonder if that's just less embarrassing than admitting that for four months the Admiralty seriously investigated the military capabilities of a gigantic unsteerable Catherine wheel that in full view of seaside civilians got chased by dogs, fell over in the surf, and/or almost blew the top brass up.

Comments

[choco_frosh]

"For testing, engineers packed the drum with sand instead of explosives, which may be the smartest thing anyone involved in this project ever did."
GREAT LINE.
(I had known about the Panjandrum, but had temporarily forgotten its existence. To be fair to its designers, a lot of the other things that the British came up with during the war - the bouncing bomb, Hobart's Funnies, everything connected with the Mulberry harbours - sounded just about as ridiculous, but ended up working.)

I am now imagining the obliquely electrified secret weapon as ASDIC.

[sovay]

(I had known about the Panjandrum, but had temporarily forgotten its existence. To be fair to its designers, a lot of the other things that the British came up with during the war - the bouncing bomb, Hobart's Funnies, everything connected with the Mulberry harbours - sounded just about as ridiculous, but ended up working.)

And the DMWD did important work with anti-submarine weapons and degaussing! But they also tried to develop a system for guiding airdrops by retro-rockets instead of parachutes and that was how they scored a direct hit on their testing facility!

(I must thank you for the link to Hobart's Funnies, because I am still cracking up over the Churchill Double Onion.)

I am now imagining the obliquely electrified secret weapon as ASDIC.

It isn't ASDIC because it's operated from a plane, directed at a ship, and if the milliammeter readings go outside of a certain range it will blow up the plane instead! There are explosives involved, so we're not talking death rays, but I can't tell if the weapon itself is worked up from the real-life state of radar guidance or if it's just classic technobabble deployed with sufficient conviction. Excuse the textdump:

Captain Burnaby sat in conference in his office in the Dockyard. He sat at the head of the long green table, his massive, iron-grey eyebrows knitted in a frown as he battled stubbornly with unfamiliar problems. A stern pride had made him master every technicality that had come to him in a long career. It was bad luck that electronic theory should have crossed his path so late in life.

He turned to the civilian on his right. "If you can calibrate the circuit in the trial runs, that's good enough," he said. "I don't see where the difficulty arises."

The professor cleared his throat. He was a grey-haired, serious man of fifty, dressed in a dark grey suit. He was not yet at home in the naval atmosphere to which his work had led him. He did not understand their processes of thought, and he was ill at ease.

"We can calibrate for any given frequency," he said. "The difficulty lies in assessing the conditions as the aircraft nears the ship."

"But as I understand it, every ship has its own frequency."

"Yes—every ship of the same class has similar characteristics."

"And the frequency is always the same, from month to month and year to year."

"That is so. But of course, it will be modulated by the direction of the ship relative to the meridian."

"Oh . . ." The captain stared at the blotting pad before him in a giant effort of concentration. It was impossible for him to admit that once again he was out of his depth. The wing commander on his left came to his aid.

"The course corrector deals with that, sir. The pilot sets the course of the target ship upon the dial, you remember."

"Yes—yes," said Burnaby. "I see that." Now that his memory was refreshed, he could recall that point.

The professor said, "But that's a relative correction, not an absolute one. It has no bearing on our difficulty."

There was a short silence.

Burnaby turned to the civilian. "You say it's going to take three months to do these calculations."

"At least that, I'm afraid. It means we've got to plot the influence round several known ships, in three dimensions. From that we can construct the diagrams for any other ship."

The naval officer cut through the difficulty with a swift question.

"Suppose we haven't got the time for that," he said. "Suppose I tell you that this thing has got to be in service in three months from now? I understand there's no production difficulty."

The wing commander nodded. "It could be used in three months' time," he said. "Deliveries will be starting in a week or two."

The professor of physics looked helplessly from one to the other. "We must find out the conditions before we can make it work at all," he said.

The captain looked at him. "Can't we fly it over a known ship and poop it off?" he said. "Poop off half a dozen of them, each with a different setting?"

The wing commander said, "Surely we can bracket it like that?"

The civilian said slowly, "I don't think you can go at it in that way. You see, you have to have a bursting charge to free the satellites. You can't do it with a dummy."

Burnaby said, "I'm afraid I don't quite get that point."

"Well, if in fact the frequency is lower than the setting, it probably won't work at all. If the frequency is high, then there's a danger that the bomb will go off in the aeroplane. We can't take out the bursting charge, you see."

The naval officer said slowly, "I see that."

There was a short silence. Burnaby sat marshalling his rather scanty knowledge of the subject that they were discussing. Not for the first time, he cursed these newfangled weapons. Things had been easier in the last war. You got a bomb and stuck a simple fuse in the end of it. If you hit it with a hammer, it went off. It was as simple as that. But things were very different now.

He said, "I suppose if the bomb exploded in the aeroplane we'd lose both the machine and the pilot."

The wing commander nodded. "We mustn't let that happen." He paused and then he said, "But I don't think it need. We can go at this from the low-frequency end, and work up gently. It should be all right that way so long as we don't make any mistakes."

Burnaby said, "That seems all right, so long as we go carefully."

The civilian listened uneasily. For fifteen years he had worked in the seclusion of a Cambridge laboratory upon the research that war had switched to a new weapon. He was a practical man, and fully understood the urgency with which the Navy drove on the development. But with that understanding he had other understandings of his own. He knew that they knew so little of the influences round a ship. Such things had never been plotted or explored. He had made estimates, and if his estimates were right the weapon would work. If not, either it wouldn't work at all, or else it would be set off prematurely in the aeroplane.

He said, "I don't think we could possibly do that."

Burnaby stared at him. "Why not?"

"Well, think of the risk."

The wing commander said, "If we get it wrong, of course, we lose the aeroplane. But I don't see any reason why we should go wrong."

The civilian said stubbornly, "It seems to me that we'll be taking very great risks if we go at it that way."

Burnaby laid his arms down on the table and stared straight ahead of him. "Let me get this quite clear in my mind," he said. "This is the last stage of our development, isn't it? When these calibration trials are done—however they are done—it can be used against the enemy. That is right?"

Professor Legge said, "That's quite right."

The captain raised his head. "Mr. Winston Churchill was talking to the Admiral about this yesterday," he said. "It's very important that this thing should be in service in the spring. He wants three squadrons fitted up with it."

The wing commander said, "We could do that all right."

Burnaby turned to the civilian. "In time of war one has to take certain risks," he said. "One has to rush through experimental work in a way that one would never do in time of peace. I grant you, we may lose the aeroplane in these trials. But we should save three months."

Legge nodded. "Well, that's outside my sphere, of course. If you go at it this way, we shall learn a great deal very quickly. But we may have accidents."

The wing commander turned to Burnaby. "I agree with you, sir. I think there's a case here for taking a bit of a chance."

The naval officer said, "Well, we'll take that as a decision then." He swung round on the paymaster lieutenant at the desk behind. "Put that into the minutes."

The young man nodded without speaking.

Professor Legge said, "The pilot must be very well instructed before anything is done."

The naval captain nodded. "You must have a good, steady pilot for the work."

The wing commander said, "The pilot came down yesterday, from Market Stanton. I had a talk with him this morning. He seems quite all right."

"Good. Of course, you'll do whatever can be done to safeguard him, if there should be an accident."

The wing commander made a grimace. "Not very much," he said. "But I don't think it's so bad. There is some risk in it—we all know that. But if he was bombing ships in Heligoland Bight he'd have to take risks of the same order. It's a different sort of risk. That's all."

Burnaby straightened up in his chair. "That's settled, then. Now for the programme. I take it that you want to calibrate upon a battleship first?"

The civilian nodded. "We shall have to have the biggest ship you've got, lying across the meridian. That's the least sensitive combination. A big ship, going east or west."

"I can't let you have a battleship before Tuesday of next week."

Legge said, "The more time I can have for computation between now and the first trial, the safer we shall be."

They began to discuss the details of the programme.

Later on we get some vague details about vacuum tubes and circuitry; we witness a trial described in such a way that we can't actually tell what happened at the crucial moment except that after the first successful test run, one onlooker mutters, "There wouldn’t have been much left of her if that stuff had been loaded." My best guess is some kind of targeting by electromagnetic fields, but I have no idea if that's scientifically feasible, or at least in the ship-by-ship fashion set out in the novel. So I went looking to see if Shute had ever worked on an analogous project during the war and ended up reading about hilarious failures in rocketry instead.