i read somewhere that the drop tanks in WW2 were made from paper. dont know if its fact or not
From the BBC WW2 People's War website/archive:
"THE WAR IN THE LIVING ROOMby Slowbutsure
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Contributed by Slowbutsure
Location of story: Wembley, Middlesex
Background to story: Civilian
Article ID: A6639140
Contributed on: 03 November 2005
Like many children born in London in the late 30’s and early 40’s I grew up with no understanding of the danger we were in. On nights when bombs were being dropped I felt completely safe with Mummy, Granny and the new baby snuggled in the Anderson shelter. On quiet nights in my lonely bedroom when the nightlight turned the shadows into monsters I was often terrified.
I also had misconceptions about the neighbourhood. I thought the bomb shelters on grass verges outside the houses were the norm and meant as resting places for tramps, they smelled of urine and I wasn’t allowed near them — perhaps the tramps were Germans. I thought the bunkers in the public golf course where we flew the kite on Sundays were just more bomb craters and didn’t understand why they were not filled in. I thought the camouflage covering the nearby Hoover building was a kind of hairnet for architecture that held it together after bomb damage. I thought barrage balloons were natural phenomena, like whales in the sky. I had a book called BIPPO THE BABY BLIMP and was slightly disappointed that there were only adult blimps over Wembley — perhaps the babies were kept somewhere safe, so they Germans wouldn’t hurt them. I thought there was a real place called BEFORE THE WAR and that germs was a shortened version of Germans - coughing and sneezing without a hanky held to your face meant they would get you.
As I grew older and restrictions on food eased there were disappointments. When bananas arrived I ate six and was so sick that I’ve never liked them since. I was disgusted by my first taste of butter but surprised and enchanted by Lyons ice-cream. It took me years to enjoy a boiled egg as Mummy made such a drama out of giving up to me her one egg per week assigned to each person. I felt the sacrifice too great and truly believed it caused her great anguish. I could hardly bear to eat it and have never liked the idea of sacrifice ever since.
Overshadowing these minor personal concerns was my father’s work.
It suddenly took on the seriousness and urgency which meant his fingers were almost black with tobacco and he no longer had time to play with me and the baby. I learned years afterwards when watching a BBC television history programme about World War II that it was in 1942. The De Havilland Aircraft Company needed to find a way to extend the flying range of the Mosquito. Mosquito aeroplanes were used to fly deep into Germany to take pictures of armaments and troop movements. The jettison tanks they used were made of metal. There was not enough material or skilled labour to manufacture these and an alternative had to be found.
Daddy was already working on radar for the War Office and was given the extra task of finding a solution to the tank shortage. Both his brothers were in the RAF. Alexander flew a Spitfire and Gideon worked on bomb disposal. Daddy joined the RAF too and was learning to be an observer. He was unhappy at becoming what he called, self-deprecatingly, a Back Room Boy and perhaps for that reason worked himself almost to death — feeling that what he was doing was somehow inferior to being in the RAF.
This feeling was compounded as our neighbours all had husbands, sons, sisters, uncles and aunts in the forces. Other adults too old for active service were Home Guards. They thought Daddy was a wide boy, a black marketer. He was often at home, not shirking, as they thought but wrestling with the problem of making a tank strong enough to hold fuel and light enough to be carried by a wooden aeroplane and big enough to hold enough fuel.
He made the tanks of paper and glue. Paper has a higher strength to weight capacity than steel. Daddy was inspired to use this material after reading CLIPPER OF THE CLOUDS by H G Wells. The airship in the book was made of a paper-like substance and gave him the idea for his tanks. After the war he developed the idea even further and manufactured a paper honeycomb for use in the aircraft industry. The honeycomb was made by using a silk screen process Daddy had originally made luminous signs with for use in the Blackout. He laminated sheets of paper together and then expanded them and set them with heat. Dufaylite — as it was called - was used in manufacturing radar scanners and also had commercial applications in the housing and packaging industries when the war was over.
The prototype tank was made on top of the Anderson shelter in our living room. The smell of the experimental glues he used to coat the layers of paper with which he covered the ‘former’ filled the house. I joined in the work by pasting bits of my Mickey Mouse comic between the layers as they were left to dry between coats. The smell of Urea-Formaldehyde evokes for me the same feelings as the madeleines did for Proust.
The history book says ‘Experimental work on the paper tank was completed, proto-typed, flown, approved and production started within a few weeks’. It gives no idea of the sleepless nights, the bleeding finger nails, the aching back and the final triumph of a workable prototype. It also omits the ceaseless journeys up and down the country, teaching people in their kitchens and garages to make the tanks. When somebody realised that the train journeys were difficult and irregular Daddy was given extra supplies of petrol — these enabled him to travel all over the country and started the myth in our street that he was a spiv, making money on the Black Market. Petrol was rationed and nobody could understand why Daddy had such an abundant supply — the work he was doing was secret and nobody in our neighbourhood had any idea that he was a Boffin and not a crook. The total war output was 102,000 tanks. By the end of it Daddy was exhausted and grief stricken by the death of his brother as he flew his Spitfire back from a mission on D-Day.
At the Victory Day celebrations it was hard to enjoy the brass bands, the parades, the cheering and general jubilation — as usual we were out of step with everybody else.
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