Free A Summer Bright and Terrible by David E. Fisher

pounds of bombs. It is truly an awesome weapon.
    In a sense, this is good news; if the bomber is
terrible enough, perhaps no one will ever want to start a war. On the other
hand, over there in Germany, Hitler doesn’t look as if he’s worrying too much
about bombing women and children. So Dowding, who always takes his job quite
seriously, begins to wonder if perhaps there isn’t some way to defend against
the bomber.
    There were three problems. First, the new
bombers were faster than the fighters, so how could they be caught? Second, the
fighters’ armament was limited to two machine guns firing through the
propeller, and this wasn’t enough to shoot down a bomber, even if by some
chance the fighter caught up to it. And third, the bombers flew so high that
they would reach their target before the fighters could even climb up to their
altitude.
    But the possibilities of new technologies were
hanging in the wind. If you could detect the bombers before they reached
England, you might be able to have the fighters waiting for them. Detection by
sound, that was the key. Dowding was not talking of sneak attacks by individual
aircraft, but large masses of them, aerial armadas crossing the Channel to lay
waste the cities of England. Hundreds and hundreds of two- and four-engine
monsters, filling the very sky with their noise.
    Indeed, if you see an old war movie, one made
in the early stages of the battle, you’re likely to see searchlights daubing
the sky and soldiers seated below a group of immense horns, turning wheels to
rotate the horns, earpieces affixed, searching the sky for the noise of the
invaders. This was thought to be the very picture of modern technology, and for
a time, people thought that something like it might work.
    In southeast England they built a large wall,
into which they placed a multitude of sensitive microphones. This was much less
sophisticated than the Hollywood version, for the wall was fixed in place and
could “look” in only one direction. But in 1934 it was the best they could do.
Those building it faced it toward England’s traditional enemy, France, rather
than the more modern threat, Germany—just another instance of how far behind
the times they were. And when it was completed, they invited the Air Member for
Research and Development to view a test.
    Again the similarity to Star Wars: When the
first Star Wars test was undertaken—and subsequently triumphantly announced as
a success—the incoming missile’s path was known to the defenders, and it was
just one missile instead of hundreds. In 1934, a bomber was to come in
conveniently on a line leading directly to the wall, and Dowding was told that
they would hear it long before it came into view.
    They sat down to wait, but before any aircraft
engines could be heard over the loudspeakers, there came instead a weird sort
of jingle-jangling. Those in attendance looked around, puzzled, until suddenly
one of them saw the problem and jumped up to race off and fix it. He had seen
in the distance a milkman making his early-morning rounds, and the clanking of
his bottles was overwhelming the sound of the incoming bomber.
    And that was that, Dowding thought.
Conceivably, with further research funds, they might construct a movable wall
to detect aircraft coming in from any direction, but how to quiet the ambient sounds
of the country? The technique was bound to pick up any sounds—motorcars as well
as milkmen, birds twittering and cows mooing, the rumble of distant thunder.
There was no way to distinguish the sounds of airplane engines from any other
noise.
    Dowding marked down a large X on the group’s
request for further research funds, and turned his attention reluctantly to the
death ray.
     
    A death ray? Well, why not? The death ray
was a staple of scientific and horror fiction during the 1920s and 1930s, and
wasn’t fact stranger than fiction? It had been only a few decades since
Heinrich Hertz had discovered radio waves, which turned