A STRONG COUNTER-BLOAW.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LX, Issue 116, 15 April 1940, Page 6

A STRONG COUNTER-BLOAW.

Science and the British Navy have dealt a strong counter-blow to Nazi ruthlessness in their triumph over the magnetic mine, more information relating to which is slowly coming out, for in this achievement the Navy is maintaining its traditional silence. When the news of this fiendish invention, which as early as 193 S the Nazis had been perfecting, became known in Britain with the sowing of such mines from aeroplanes and submarines off the coast, the First Lord of the Admiralty calmly and confidently stated that a way would be found to deal with this menace. A method has been found, and its very simplicityrivals its effectiveness. It consists of a wire running round the ship like a girdle and electrified from the ship’s dynamos in such a way as to neutralise the magnetism of the vessel so that she would have no magnetic field and would not give off any magnetic impulse that would attract the delicately suspended needle of the magnetic mines and so operate the detonator. The great courage of a British torpedo expert who examined one of these mines that had been washed up in the Thames Estuary, plus the genius of the country’s scientists, whose names have yet to be revealed, led to the frustration of one of the Nazis’ fondest hopes of wholesale destruction —Hitler declared that the weapon had no counter-measure. Now a rapid programme of equipping every British ship with the anti-mag-netic girdle is being undertaken, and it is cheap to install and cheap to run —yet expert opinion declares that the cost to Germany in perfecting and manufacturing these mines must have been enormous. The British countermeasure might have remained a secret for much longer, with rigid control exercised by the censor, had not New York newspapermen noticed when the giant liner Queen Elizabeth arrived there on March 7 that she “had a queer wire round her upper bulwarks.” The demagnetising equipment is no longer a secret, but the fact does not detract from the great achievement it represents. This was unquestionably a case in which the censorship ban was justified, for the cost to the Nazis might have gone on mounting for months yet.