Playing At War

Southland Times, Issue 23332, 16 October 1937, Page 13

Playing At War

PORTSMOUTH AT 3 o’clock in the afternoon a British submarine patrolling in the Atlantic flashed a wireless message to Portsmouth, 600 miles away, saying that enemy cruisers, aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines had left their base and were rushing to attack the great harbours of Plymouth, Portsmouth and Southampton. That message flung the south of England into a state of war. Air patrols of flying boats loaded with bombs and a squadron of 18 Anson bombers were immediately sent out over Land’s End to locate the enemy. The fixed defences of the harbours and fortresses of southern England were manned and the guns loaded. Trained men hurried to their listening and observation posts. Anti-aircraft guns and searchlight units were manned. Submarines were sent patrolling westward up the English Channel. Anti-sub-marine patrols were established off the ports. Mine-sweepers and destroyers stood by for immediate duty. The great bombers in the secret aerodromes of Wiltshire, Dorset and Hampshire were wheeled out of their hangars and loaded with bombs and warmed up. Radio and siren blasts warned several million people that when night fell no one must show a light of any kind. And finally, the anti-gas-attack squads were sent to their posts. Thus began the most ominously realistic mimic war these islands have ever seen. An imaginary “Blueland” in the Atlantic was attacking “Redland," England. The exercises were designed to test the defences of Plymouth, Portsmouth and Portland, to accustom the population of the south country to a black out of all lights at night, to train the volunteer forces in meeting gas and bomb attacks, and to study the handling of great forces of aircraft in meeting massed attack from the sea.

craft carrier Courageous and attendant destroyer.” These were hostile BTueland ships. Then came the exact bearing in code. “Rodney bearing 160 degrees, distance seven miles. My position 40 miles southwest of Scilly Isles. Am attacking.”

We sat there, almost excited, as, far out in-,the sea, the flying-boat patrol bomber attacked the aircraft carrier. She swung over the enemy at 400 feet. The pilot loaded a smoke-bomb cartridge into his pistcl. The Courageous was hit. But not before five of her seven Osprey fighters had taken the air to attack the attacker.

The flying-boat soared up to heaven. The enemy fighters outdistanced it and rose higher. They zoomed and banked and dived in violent mimic war high above the sea. Then a torpedo aeroplane swung down on the flying-boat from behind a bank of cloud. The green lamp in the rear cockpit flashed on. One of the Shark’s crew leaned out grinning and turned thumbs down. The flying boat, “shot down,” turned tail for home. I was at the nerve centre of the war —the headquarters of Redland at Lee-on-Solent near Portsmouth. I saw modem methods of communication keeping headquarters in touch with everything that happened all that day and night and the next day. By radio-telephone, telegraph, wireless and direct telephone the officer commanding the operations knew exactly what was happening at any minute. The war is now on. Sixteen Londontype flying-boats and one Singapore flying-boat are advancing up the Channel. A squadron of general reconnaissance aeroplanes have left their aerodrome in Dorset and are on their way to attack the first enemy aeroplanes sighted. “No. 206 squadron away,” comes the terse message. But five minutes later another flash announces that another aircraft carrier, five cruisers and four destroyers, has been sighted 30 miles southwest of Bishop’s Rock, and No. 206 squadron is diverted to attack them. “Get the aircraft carrier at all costs,” they are told. A few minutes later two more squadrons from Wiltshire aerodromes, each comprising 18 bombers of a new type

I had got permission to fly in a British bomber to attack enemy battleships west of the Scilly Isles, and been given a parachute, flying suit and lifebelt, with instructions to be ready to go up at 4 o’clock in the morning. But at 4 o’clock in the morning it was cold and stormy and I decided to wait till next time. I kept thinking of the last ride I had in a military aeroplane flying nearly 300 miles an hour. So I got up at a civilized hour, had bacon and eggs in the mess, and then went to the control room to watch the progress of the war.

Will enemy aircraft be able to blow Britain’s great ports and warehouses and naval bases to pieces soon after the outbreak of the next war? It looked partly like it from what we saw in this mimic fight. But mimic wars are valuable only as rehearsals. A bomber flies over an “enemy” battleship and drops a small smoke bomb. If several of these score direct hits, the ship is said by the umpires to have been sunk or put out of action. So it’s guesswork. When a fighting aeroplane attacks a bomber the pilot flashes a green light, which represents machine-gun fire; and the umpire scores a win. AN AIR ATTACK The war began, then, at 3 o’clock. The first unit 1i go into action was a flyingboat from Portsmouth which set out to locate the enemy battleships advancing towards 'the mouth of the English Channel. I was in the headquarters control room at Portsmouth as wireless reports came in from the flyingboat: 3.20 p.m.—“Flying over clouds at 1200 feet.” 3.45 p.m.—“Off Land’s End. Cruising southwest at 140 miles.” 4.05 p.m.—“South of the Scilly Isles. 4.14 p.m.—“Flying blind through fog. Too high to climb over it as would lose sight of the sea. Dropped down to 400 feet.” We knew it was a mimic war; but nevertheless there was a kind of thrill when the next message came: 4.26—“ Sighted four enemy destroyers abreast steaming east.” 4.2B—“Sighted H.M.S. Rodney, air-

which can do 275 miles an hour at 18,000 feet with 5000 pounds of bombs, goes out to the attack, and 90 seconds later an order goes out to No. 42 torpedo bombing squadron in Devonshire to attack the first enemy fleet. Within an hour the control headquarters are buzzing with news of battle and destruction. The Blueland aircraft carrier is blown out of the English Channel at 6.12, but not before its multiple-fire pom-pom guns, firing 1500 three-pound shells a minute, have brought down four Redland bombers. Portsmouth and Plymouth are shelled from Blueland battleships at sea and Blueland aeroplanes drop gas and incendiary bombs. The Sardonyx, a Redland destroyer, sinks a bold enemy submarine six miles off Spithead, and another is sunk off Portland. A great food warehouse and the Royal Naval Engineering College in Portsmouth are “blazing •"uriously.” Darkness slowly falls.

The second aircraft carrier, the Furious, has escaped destruction and at nightfall it launches a great attack on Southampton, that rich and populous port. Thousands of explosive, incendiary and mustard gas bombs are dropped on that city in the biggest mimic air raid ever staged in England, The black-out order goes out from headquarters; and it is a real black-out, not pretend. Even Southampton harbour lights are put out and the Empress of Britain, just arriving from Canada, is forced to anchor outside the port.

It seems frighteningly real as the war reports come in. “A large school on Bevois St., Southampton, badly contaminated with mustard gas.” Y.M.C.A. headquarters blown to pieces by high explosive. In the streets of the southern ports thousands of firemen, first aid and ambulance workers and anti-gas fighters are rehearsing their grim game. “We are trying to learn how the control system of a great city will work during a large-scale attack, and with the city in pitch darkness,” an officer told me. “The protection units weren’t told what exactly was going to happen. They were left to face an unknown emergency.”

I wondered how the war would progress if the elaborate headquarters where we sat was destroyed by bombs. I had noticed that the building was not well protected. They explained that this would not be the nerve centre in case of real war. The real control room is underground, under many feet of earth and concrete.

The battle continues, through the night. Searchlights sweep the sky for raiding aircraft. The searchlight engineers are good, and once they catch a hostile aeroplane in their beams it seldom gets away. Guns rumble in the distance to add to the reality of a practice war. Still in the control room after midnight, we hear that the defending submarine Oberon, patrolling 20 miles north of Guernsey, has sighted a third Blueland aircraft carrier, attacked her with six torpedoes and sunk her. “NO DEFENCE GOOD ENOUGH” Well, Britain has six aircraft carriers, built at a cost of about £12,000,000 each. If three of them were destroyed in the first night of a war . . . “It’s all right,” smiled an officer. “They don’t die as easily in real war as in mimic war!” But these operations had been very carefully staged. Nothing was declared hit by bomb or shell until obviously it was hit; nothing declared sunk or destroyed until it was reasonable to suppose it would have been sunk . . . Yes, and the experts are saying that the first three weeks of the next war will see the ports and cities of both sides in flames and confusion. is only partially destroyed after more than a year of war. But for every aeroplane in Spain there will be 50 in another big war. . . “Yes,” remarked a nonchalant flying officer, “it looks as if the world had let itself in for hell.” In the small hours of the morning there was a great attack on Portsmouth itself. It was preceded by air raids, and at'five in the morning four cruisers and three destroyers attacked the Spithead fortifications, the cruisers advancing under cover of a smoke screen made by the destroyers. The local defence flotilla rushed to attack and fire torpedoes before being forced to retire in a severely damaged condition. The shore batteries opened fire. The defending mine-sweepers Nightingale and Cedar were sunk. Then Blueland aircraft attacked again. “Bombs” were seen to fall on the gasworks and in the open streets. In the meantime, defending bombers were attacking an enemy aircraft carrier 12 miles south of the Isle of Wight. I was enlightened by the thoroughness with which the war was done. It wasn’t a joke; it was a serious business; a serious preparation for real war. “Bombs” were dropping in various parts of Portsmouth and Southampton and Plymouth, and people were dropping in the streets. They were trained volunteers, playing a carefully-thought-out game to enable the first-aid workers to get i real idea of emergency conditions.

Will invading aircraft “always get through?” They got through in these mimic attacks. “The barrage of searchlights at Plymouth,” ran the commanding officer’s report, “only detected a few of the hostile aircraft. Others, flying low and making clever use of banks of clouds, baffled the defence. The raiders’ work was thoroughly effective. Food depots, hospitals, railway viaducts and other buildings were ‘destroyed.’ ” I spoke to Sir John Burnett-Stuart, head of the Southern Command, and asked him what he thought of it all. “It showed that our defence mechanism works smoothly,” he said. “It also showed that no defence is good enough.” No defence on earth could stop a large proportion of the new British bombers from reaching enemy towns. . . It was fun, the mimic war. But try to imagine what it would have been like with real shells and real bombs and real poison gas. I have been in one real air raid. There were only seven attacking aeroplanes that day in Spain; they dropped only some 30 bombs. But it was like the end of the world in noise and horror; and it was a mere game of firecrackers to what this mimic war would have been—if it hadn’t been a mimic war.

By

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