Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War by Paul Kennedy

multiheaded grenade launcher that fired forward of the warship; usually the front 4-inch gun turret was taken out and this dreadful bombard installed in its place. It had several advantages over the depth charge, and Allied escort commanders welcomed its widespread introduction in 1943 with great enthusiasm, even if there were many early teething problems. It really reduced the time it took to fire at the foe. Unlike the proximity-fused depth charge, it exploded on contact—either one hit the submarine or onedidn’t—and, with a fusillade of twenty-four grenades raining down on the desperate U-boat, the chances of a hit were rather good. Moreover, it did not distort sonar readings. After the shot was delivered, its crew could observe with pride the rows of empty spigots, looking very like the bristling spines of a hedgehog. 32
    The incubator here was a small Admiralty unit called the Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development (DMWD), fondly known as the “Wheezers and Dodgers.” Its personnel, chiefly scientists, naval officers, and retired military men, was a most eccentric group of characters but also possessed a seriousness of purpose. By the summer of 1940 Britain’s strategic position was quite desperate, its resources low, its armed services battered. Under Churchill’s inspiration the nation planned to fight on, by whatever means possible. It was not surprising that a society brought up on H. G. Wells and Jules Verne novels, the
Boys’ Own Weekly,
and
Amateur Mechanics
should now produce a vast number of citizen-based concoctions intended to help beat Hitler. Most were truly farcical. Still, some of them might, conceivably and with much modification, turn out to be useful after all. Scrutinizing all such weird schemes, and adding its own, was the DMWD’s job. Those efforts fed into Britain’s war machine because a scientific-technological system existed to turn new ideas into reality. 33
    Among the DMWD’s staff was Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Blacker, by 1942 in his fifties but someone who had been interested in blowing things up since he was a schoolboy in Bedford. Blacker’s earliest success, when still in his early teens, was his attempt to emulate on a modest scale the mortars the Japanese army was using against Russian defenses during the 1904–6 war. Assembling a crude barrel (a circular downpipe) and “borrowing” some black powder, Blacker managed to send his projectile—a croquet ball—into the headmaster’s greenhouse 300 yards away. Thus was his career born. He served in the Royal Artillery during the First World War. By 1940 he had drafted the design for an electrically activated spigot to propel a grenade from a mortar. Further work by the DMWD expanded the weapon into a ring of multiple mortars. There then occurred all sorts of bureaucratic obstacles, plus the creation elsewhere of a rival but much less successful forward-firing mortar. By a stroke of good fortune, Churchill himself witnessed an early test during a visit to an experimental weapons base near his countryhouse, Chertwell, and breathed life into the scheme. f Delays still plagued the project, as did the lack of good training for this new and unorthodox weapon; in 1943 a large number of frightened crews had to be hauled back to Tobermory or Loch Fyne for “retraining.” Thus it was only in mid-1943 that “Blacker’s bombard” really came into its own.
    By the end of the war, Hedgehogs had destroyed close to fifty enemy U-boats; that was worth a greenhouse or two. Its more sophisticated replacements, the Squid and Limbo weapons systems (whose projectiles could go deeper and actually search for the submarine), added a dozen or more to that total. Unsurprisingly, Squids are still used, in vastly improved form, in today’s navies.
    The third improvement, on the Allied side, came in the form of detection of the enemy, especially through radar. At its simplest, detection meant a U-boat spotting an oncoming convoy (or its