“BE PREPARED”

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21177, 29 July 1940, Page 5

“BE PREPARED”

A NATION AWAKE BRITAIN LOOKED AHEAD COUNTERING RAID MENACE “On board ship, both crew and passengers are instructed where to go and what to do, not when danger threatens, but beforehand. The captain considers it a matter of ! ordinary routine and everyday precaution that everything is in readiness for a shipwreck which he hopes will never happen. If the head of the house will consider himself as ‘the captain of the ship’ and put these air raid precautions into effect, the principal object of this book will have been achieved.” “That is the foreword to a booklet issued last year by the British Home Office as part of a scheme for educating the people of Great Britain in essential precautions against danger from air raids and, particularly, the use of gas by the enemy. In the light of recent developments, even a cursory glance through a set of handbooks is a revelation of the completeness of Britain’s preparedness in this respect and, incidentally, of a realisation that all of the efforts made to preserve peace were based on hope rather than on real expectation of success. Home Protection The set is extensive and encyclopaedic. An almost complete one was brought back to New Zealand by a Dunedin business man who spent seme time in England last year and returned to the Dominion soon after the outbreak of war, and it needs only a brief examination to suggest that any householder in England has only himself to blame if he is not thoroughly acquainted with means of protecting his home, his family, down to young children and babies, his animals—all of his most valued possessions in fact—against gas. Take any of the handbooks at rand ;m. Here, for example, is one entitled “The Protection of Your Home Against Air Raids,” in explanation of which Sir Samuel Hoare’s preface states that “If the emergency comes, the country will look for her safety not only to her sailors and soldiers and airmen, but also to the organised courage and foresight of every household. It is for the volunteers in the air raid precautions services to help every household for this purpose.” And the handbook goes on to discuss in clear, simple detail “Things To Do Now,” “Things to Do if There Should Ever be a War” (a premise strange to contemplate in retrospect), “Things to Do in an Air Raid,” “Extra Precautions,” and briefly, “What to Do if Anyone is Hurt.” It advises on the selection of a “re-fugee-room” and how to get it ready, simple and effective fire-fighting appliances, and a dozen and one other things. Respirators, of course, come in for a good deal of attention, and have other booklets written around them, but it is emphasised that they are a line of defence second to the employment of all the other precautions. Avoiding Casualties From this outline of elementary safeguards, the next step is to a study of respirators, which involves a straight-forward and easily-under-standable thesis on the nature and properties of war gases, methods ol' attack from the air, the detection of gases and, coming down to cases, a set of rules on “How to Avoid Becoming a Casualty.” The more one delves into these compendiums of information, the more fascinating they become. In this particular contribution, for example, one comes across lecturettes on adjusting the headharness and test for “gas-tightness” —another of the inevitable war contributions to the English language—and proceeds to an immersion in a series of “operations” designed to make John Citizen as snug and no doubt as safe as a bug in a rug, and able to thumb his rubberoid nose at the Chlor-acetophenone (non-per-sistent) or Ethyl-lodo-Aceate (persistent) or Bromo-Benzyl-Cyanide (also persistent) type of tear gases. Even the nose irritants with such “chatty” names as di-phenyl-chlor-arsine and similar compounds like diphenyl-amine-chlor-arsine and di-phenyl-cyano-arsine, little devils ol germs which can be liberated as smokes, like tobacco smoke, apparently cannot do anything about it when confronted with these facepieces of rubber sheet with their large windows of non-inflammable transparent material. All this might sound

highly technical; but that is only for those who like to know everything about that sort of thing. Essence of Simplicity The essence of the whole series is simplicity, and as one prowls, yet far away from the necessity of a more intimate study, through these little treatises, one must be impressed by the thoroughness with which the whole job of war has been tackled. There are more handbooks, plenty of them, about garden trenches, gas poisoning from immediate and more detailed first-aid points of view, decontamination with the organisation of decontamination services, the air raid warning system, “aids to the movement of traffic to be installed in roads and streets in the absence of street lighting,” bomb-resisting shelters, and even “structural defence” and “specifications, etc., in regard to permanent lining of trenches.” All are remarkable for their clarity, profusely illustrated and generally a splendid insurance against the sort of existence to which those at Home are now adjusting themselves. The whole series is reassuring evidence that Great Britain is prepared at home for anything that Hitler and his minions might care to undertake.