That is human nature, and you cannot alter that. “Where a great factory is warned of a possible air raid it is quite natural that some of the men should desire to go home to see if their own families are safe, and they do not return to work on that day. “To give a general warning in every case is a very serious responsibility, because it means the general stoppage of work, often for some hours, in some cases for the whole day,” said the Home Secretary. The human factorĪlongside the wish to avoid spreading panic, there were also practical objections to sounding general alarms, explained Cave. “In some of these towns where people have been repeatedly awakened up and disturbed needlessly by night alarms it has been found unsatisfactory,” said the cigar-smoking wartime leader in 1917. Pearce was supported by Sir Winston Churchill, unaware of the role that air-raid sirens would play in UK towns and cities less than a quarter of a century later. Sir William Pearce MP, however, was anxious about the “effect of constant warnings upon our working-class population… If I were managing Germany and I knew London was going to sound syrens and explode balloons every time hostile aircraft left the shores of Belgium I should send aeroplanes three times a week, and in a fortnight I should have London in such an extreme state of excitement that it would have disastrous effects.” The cost of such a system, argued Billing, would be minimal compared to the “distress and excitement that it would relieve.” Furthermore, the same approach could be rolled out across the country if the armed forces couldn’t protect people, it could at least warn them. “If a small red streamer were attached to the balloon it could be released electrically when the syren was sounded a second time, and that would indicate that the airmen were actually concentrating on the City, and that it was necessary to take shelter,” he said. Under those circumstances all a man would have to do would be to press a button, and within a minute 20 or 30 syrens, which would be distributed all over London and the suburbs, would send out one long or two long or three short blasts, as the case may be. “If the War Office, or the person in command of the air defences, gave warning to the Home Office that the raiding airmen were 15 miles off, the Home Office would know quite well that it would be 10 minutes before they could possibly be dropping their bombs here. Wells’s novel 'War in the Air' predicted the mounting threat of attack from the sky, four years before the first recorded air raid took place when Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti, fighting for Italy against the Turkish Ottoman empire in Libya, dropped grapefruit-sized bombs by hand from the open canopy of his aeroplane.īut there was no standardised format for these warnings, relayed by telephone to vital war infrastructure, prompting Noel Billing MP to suggest “that whatever you do by way of giving warning be sure that the warning will convey the same thing to all minds at the same time, and not be construed by one man as his lunch whistle blowing five minutes before it is time, and by another man as an underground train or something blowing off a whistle.”īilling proposed a system of six-horse power sirens suspended below hydrogen balloons that would float 1,500 feet above the ground. ( Related: see and hear harrowing stories of Ukraine's refugees.)Īs early as 1907, H.G. Since modern conflict and its technologies superseded the more confined practice of two armies squaring up across a battlefield, civilian populations have become victims of bombardment, everyday life menaced by the risk of an indiscriminate shell, mortar or bomb.įaced with his danger, the same rise-and-fall sirens that sent people scurrying for shelter during the Second World War are now echoing along the streets of Ukraine’s cities as the terrible conflict unfolds. THE SPINE-TINGLING WAIL of air-raid sirens has become one of the defining sounds of warfare, a waxing and waning alert to imminent aerial threat.
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