WAR INVENTIVENESS

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 90, 12 October 1940, Page 11

WAR INVENTIVENESS

SUGGESTIONS FOR

WINNING

POSSIBLE AND IMPOSSIBLE

(British Official Wireless.)

RUGBY, October 10.

British citizens, from peers and Cabinet Ministers to working men. are sending weekly to the Scientific Research Directorate of the Ministry of Supply more than 400 indention suggestions towards winning the war. While many of the suggestions are impossible in practice and some fantastic, others, according to Professor Andrade, scientific advisor to the directorate, are adopted and may prove of industrial value after the war.

Proposals from which positive results have been obtained relate to searchlights, anti-aircraft gunnery by prediction, reinforced concrete, weld: ing armour-plate, and comforts for troops. Professor Andrade said that work is still proceeding on various lines in the hope of finding effective means of defeating the night bomber. There could be no general cure, but it might be possible to produce devices by which enemy casualties would be made so heavy that it would not be worth his while to continue this form of tei*rorism. Particular attention was being paid to improving " methods of location and obtaining greater accuracy from anti-aircraft shelling.

"Nothing has come in of a revolutionary nature, but we are glad to get these ideas and investigate them," he said.

The threatened invasion brought a | big crop of rather wild ideas. They included a bayonet attachment tosoldiers' boots for kicking purposes; nets stretched, presumably in the air, against parachutists, with pockets into which they would drop, causing a bell to ring: dropping of snakes, scorpions, and wild animals over Germany, as well as hungry rats; jumping tanks; and finally a compound which could be fired into the air to solidify into a kind of gelatine substance to set round enemy troop concentrations like a shell.

"We welcome suggestions from the public and wish to do nothing to discourage them. We are only too happy if we are rewarded by finding something which can be utilised for the war effort," said Professor Andrade.