Museum Secrets (2011–…): Season 2, Episode 10 - Inside the Imperial War Museum - full transcript
- [Narrator] London, a city
of tradition and innovation.
And at its heart, a war museum
with secrets dark and strange.
A tortured spy.
A gun silenced by science.
A nuclear nightmare.
And the near-death
experience of Winston Churchill.
Secrets hidden in plain sight
inside the Imperial War Museum.
(dramatic instrumental music)
Down a garden path
guarded by naval artillery
is London's Imperial War Museum.
Dedicated to the history of Britain at war
from World War I to the present.
Since the museum was founded in 1917
its collection has grown to
more than half a million objects
exhibited in five locations across England.
Here in the shadow of
the parliament buildings
there is a branch of the museum
that is completely below street level.
Why would anyone build
a museum underground?
In 1940 Adolf Hitler threatened
England with invasion.
British forces were vastly outnumbered.
Britain's best asset
was her prime minister,
Winston Churchill.
He was a brilliant strategist
and morale booster,
and Hitler knew it.
Hitler targeted Churchill
for assassination,
and when his warplanes
pounded London in the Blitz
Number 10 Downing Street
became an unsafe place
for Churchill to live.
(munitions whistling and booming)
And that brings us back here.
The museum called the Churchill War Rooms
was originally an underground bunker.
During World War two
its location was top secret.
- I think the thing that really
hits you when you're here
is that this was such a secret location
right in the heart of London,
where there's crowds
of people passing nearby
within a stone's throw quite literally
of the core of government in war,
and they wouldn't have known it existed.
They wouldn't have known anything about it.
- [Narrator] At the foot of
these stairs we'll discover
how the British people ensured the safety
of their irreplaceable leader.
It's a secret that's stranger
than you might think.
Here we enter a wartime
nerve center, frozen in time.
These strategic maps are
the ones Churchill used.
This phone is the one he used to speak
to Air Defense Command.
And this was a favorite
brand of Cuban cigar.
Around this table as
bombs rained down above
Churchill met with his Chiefs of Staff.
- Invasion could happen any day.
He's faced with his Chiefs
of Staff, bang opposite him,
who to him never seemed to be doing things
quite as he wanted them to be done.
They never seemed to
be doing them fast enough.
And this is Churchill's chair.
You can see on it where
Churchill basically banged it constantly
with his signet ring on his right hand.
And then this side incredibly scratched it
with his fingernails to
the point it really made
an indentation in the woodwork.
Can hear and feel the
bombs dropping outside.
It would be an intense time,
and you know that you're
absolutely up against it,
you're with your backs to the walls.
- [Narrator] After late-night meetings,
Winston's staff urged
him to sleep in this room.
But he hated hiding from Hitler in a hole.
He complained that the
bunker had a bad smell
and he chafed at his staff's insistence
that his bodyguard sleep down here too.
- Churchill was a man who
was a very reluctant subterranean
if you like, and it was only really
the extreme of the bombing
raids that drove him down here.
(air raid sirens blaring)
- [Narrator] As the nightly
bombing raids got ever bigger
Churchill's staff worried the
bunker wouldn't protect him.
Engineers designed reinforcements
hidden in the existing structure
of the building overhead.
- Here you can see where
they put the slab in for his area
to make sure he was protected at least.
Has anybody ever estimated
how much concrete is in there
in tonnage terms.
- [Hugh] A lot.
- [Narrator] But no
bunker can protect a leader
who won't stay inside.
(explosion blasting)
Often after heavy raids Churchill wanted
a street level view of the devastation.
And he wanted to be with his
people in their darkest hours.
In photographs like these
you will often see this man
lurking in the shadows.
This is Churchill's 24/7 bodyguard,
Inspector Walter Thompson.
He had a tough assignment,
and not just because of Nazi assassins.
- The trouble with Churchill
was he probably had
very little concept of personal danger,
he was a huge risk-taker.
Now you can imagine trying
to protect someone like that.
It's almost like having a dog
that constantly runs off the leash.
- [Narrator] When Inspector
Thompson was sleeping
Churchill would sometimes
slip out of the bunker alone
for some fresh air in St. James's Park.
This kind of risky behavior
gave his bodyguard nightmares.
As German bombs got bigger,
Churchill's engineers had nightmares too.
(planes wailing) (bombs whistling)
- [Phil] Do you think it would
have withstood a direct hit
for a 500-pounder?
- Generally, anything bigger
than a 500-pound bomb
was going to devastate.
The shock transmitted
through to anybody inside
would have been fatal.
(bombs whistling)
- [Narrator] Cause of death
would have been asphyxiation
as the shockwave sucked out all the oxygen.
During the worst air raids
Churchill had the option
to descend to a deeper, safer level.
To take refuge behind airtight doors.
- Can tell we're in the sub-basement
'cause there's not much room.
- Absolutely, yeah, the mind your head
is everywhere down here isn't it?
- It's a steel frame.
Steel door with a rubber
seal around the edge.
The steel sheet is roughly 10-mil thick.
That's gonna stop quite a lot.
- Yeah.
- [Narrator] But instead of descending here
Churchill often went the other way.
In an air raid there is no
place less safe than the roof,
but that is where Churchill wanted to go.
- This is where Churchill used to come
to get his overview of what
was going on in London.
He could see the whole
of the city from here.
The good Inspector Thompson would have made
every effort he could to
stop Churchill coming up here
and being in such
danger, in such harm's way,
but he couldn't stop him,
and he was Prime Minister,
and he was Churchill.
You know, he did things I change the locks.
He tried to get Mrs.
Churchill to persuade him,
to stop him and everything,
and nobody could stop Churchill,
nothing could.
From up here you can have the impression
that the whole city was
on fire and see the flames.
You could smell the smoke.
The planes probably would have attacked
from that vantage point over
there because they'd be coming
basically straight at him.
And they'd be bombing strategic points
like the power station over there.
And he'd see all that from up here.
This is where he really got a sense
of what it was about in a way.
This is where he'd
quietly contemplate it all,
puffing on a cigar, sipping on a whiskey,
and wondering how long it would be
before it was all over probably.
- [Narrator] On May 10th,
1941 the last Nazi bomb
fell on London.
The Blitz was over.
And soon Britain and her
allies would go on the offensive.
In the struggle that followed,
Churchill's bold strategies
often helped win the day.
He prevailed because
he took risks in battle
just as he did in his own life.
And as for the secret
of ensuring the safety
of an irreplaceable leader,
perhaps it simply can't be done.
Because those who
play it safe don't win wars.
Next on Museum Secrets,
what it takes to stay cool at
Mach 1 over enemy territory.
An hour's drive north of London
near the sleepy village of Duxford
is the largest branch of
the Imperial War Museum
Within a complex of many buildings
is the world's most
beautiful airplane hangar.
Inside history hangs suspended in the air.
From this World War I SPAD fighter
to this Tornado jet,
these planes are here
because they went to war
and came back in one piece
along with the pilots who flew them.
What does it take to fly
into battle and survive?
That's a museum secret.
- Ah Shifty, it's a long time
since we've seen one of these.
- Oh, I know.
- [Les] It really brings back
memories doesn't it I suppose.
- [Narrator] Les Hendry
and Simon "Shifty" Young
know Tornado jets better than anyone.
- I haven't been up close to a Tornado
for best part of 10 to 12 years,
and instantly I know exactly
what to check, where to look.
- It's exactly the same.
- It's just exactly the same.
- [Narrator] Today they
don't look much like warriors,
but in January, 1991,
Les was a senior engineer
and Shifty a top gun pilot
with orders to travel to Saudi Arabia
and prepare for battle.
Several months before,
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein
had invaded Kuwait,
laying claim to the
country's rich oil fields.
A United Nations coalition
prepared to counterattack.
US and British forces
assembled on land and sea
determined to drive Saddam out of Kuwait.
The Tornado squadron was
tasked with a dangerous mission:
destroy Iraq's largest airfield
to prevent Saddam's
fighters from taking to the air.
They'd be going in while Iraqi air defenses
were still intact.
- We were going into the unknown,
and there was a tension
there but nobody talked about it.
- [Narrator] The weapon chosen
for the attack was the JP233,
a heavy cluster bomb specifically designed
to destroy runways.
- These things were very
smart, they would blast a hole
through very thick runway concrete
and then create an explosion
underneath the concrete
to heave it upwards.
Very difficult to repair when
concrete heaves upwards.
- [Narrator] Delivering
these bombs would require
a sturdy jet that could fly fast and low
over the enemy airfield.
Based on its proven abilities,
strategists decided the Tornado
was the best plane for the job.
It could fly 650 miles an hour
as low as 150 feet above the ground.
(jet engines roaring)
In the early hours of January 17th, 1991
eight Tornadoes from
Les and Shifty's squadron
idled on a desert tarmac, ready for battle.
- Leading up to the take-off was very much
just like a normal training
night, but with an edge.
And that edge was, you
know, that we were going to do
a combat for real.
(jet engines roaring)
- [Narrator] Shifty's Tornado
squadron was a small part
of a much larger armada.
- It's an image that will stay with me
for as long as I live.
There were just thousands
of aircraft in the sky
at the same time, all orchestrated
like a huge great big ballet.
- [Narrator] As the Tornado
squadron reached Iraqi airspace
they dropped below radar range.
- Now I'd be a liar to
say there wouldn't be
an element of fear, but you're just doing
what you've been trained to do,
fly low, fly on time, fly accurately.
And now, I have to be honest here,
now the tension really is in
the cockpit and I can feel it,
my navigator could feel it.
And then we delivered the weapons.
(munitions blasting)
It was almost like having a huge spotlight
suddenly lit up underneath the aircraft.
I'm only at about 160, 180 feet.
I can see the ground very
clearly, I can see the runway has,
I can even see people very very clearly.
(bombs rumbling)
The next thing I remember is the noise
and the vibration on the aircraft.
And it just suddenly pitches up,
and you suddenly find yourself
I'm not at 200 feet above
the runway anymore
I'm actually at 1500 feet over an airfield,
they have missiles they're
firing, I don't want to be here.
And bluntly it's about
survival, it's about making sure
you and your aircraft and your navigator
do the right thing, survive.
By the time we're flying back
at about five in the morning
the sun is beginning to
emerge on the horizon,
it was a nice sunrise.
- [Narrator] Saddam's
runways were destroyed.
The squadron had accomplished its mission.
- There's lots of
handshakes, pats on the back.
Shifty's a big hugger so
there was hugs going on
and it was just good to get
the eight of them back safely.
- [Narrator] So what
does it take to fly into battle
and survive?
- Yeah, fear is there,
but when you're delivering the
weapons you have a job to do.
That concentrates the mind,
pushes those fear things out.
You can't simulate it,
you can't practice for it,
you can't even mentally prepare for it,
it just happens and you deal with it.
- [Narrator] And as for the sturdy Tornado
that brought them back alive,
these top guns are not afraid
to show a little appreciation.
Next on Museum Secrets,
how a beautiful spy withstood Nazi torture.
- [Woman] Oh.
- [Narrator] The Imperial War Museum
is filled with heavy metal
and tales of men of steel.
And then there's this.
- Almost all visitors will
stop and look at these objects
because they're not the kind of things
you would immediately associate
with the Imperial War Museum.
- [Narrator] But as we'll see,
these dolls have every right to be here.
The reason why is a museum secret.
In the summer of 1941,
World War II was entering its third year.
France had been occupied by
Germany since June of 1940.
Allied forces were desperate to reclaim
the critical French coastline
and launch an invasion from the sea.
Between May and August of that year
more than 400 special British agents
were sent into occupied France.
Their mission was to encourage
and facilitate espionage,
sabotage, and reconnaissance
behind enemy lines.
To support these efforts,
the British Admiralty
asked the public to send in
any snapshots they might
have of the French coast.
A French housewife living in
London was sure she could help.
Odette Sansom sent in photos
from her childhood in France.
But she sent them to
the War Office by mistake.
When War Office intelligence
officers saw Odette's letter
they immediately realized
she would be perfect
for espionage in France.
She'd spent her childhood there.
She knew the language and the landscape.
When Odette was asked to become a spy
she decided to take on the mission.
- Her mother was still living in France,
her father had been killed in 1918,
towards the end of the First World War,
she'd been brought up in the expectation
that the Germans would come
again, and her time would come
when she would have to
do the right thing by France.
(suspenseful instrumental music)
- [Narrator] Agent Odette was
equipped with basic training,
a gun, and a cyanide pill.
She wasn't equipped to say goodbye.
- It was an incredibly
difficult decision for Odette
to leave her three young
daughters behind in the UK.
She put them in a boarding
school, she wrote lots of letters
which could be posted regular
intervals, she set it all up,
and then she went away.
- [Narrator] In November 1942,
Odette arrived in occupied France.
Operating under the codename Lise,
Odette's mission was the courier messages
to and from the French Resistance.
Six months into her
mission Odette was betrayed
by a double agent and
arrested by the Gestapo.
- When she's going to be
interrogated by the Gestapo
for the first time, she
goes into the office,
where most people would
be absolutely terrified,
and there's no doubt she was frightened.
She walks in tall,
holding her head up high.
It is not aggressive,
it's just very determined
that when she comes
across these agents of evil
she's gonna beat them.
The Gestapo wanted the
names of resistance fighters.
Odette refused to answer.
They bared her back
and applied a red-hot iron.
- When they were applying the heat,
what she said is they made a mistake
because they faced me with the window,
and so when the pain was
coming she looked out of the window
and focused on the leaves in the trees
and the movement and the greenery.
And what she did is she
projected out of her mind
a sense of the episodes
in life that kept her happy.
- [Narrator] The interrogators
pulled out her toenails
one by one.
- What she actually said about that is that
she left Britain with a broken heart.
She'd left behind everybody she loved,
and from then on it was
just a case of physical pain,
and she could deal with that.
- [Narrator] As a member
of a forced labor detail,
Odette was ordered to mend Nazi uniforms.
But she refused.
Instead she began to sew something else.
- So she was effectively
rubbing the nose of the Germans
in the fact that she was doing
what she wanted on her terms
when she wanted to do it.
I think it's very possible
that her separation
from her own children
was part of the reason
why she wanted to make
something for children.
- [Narrator] Throughout her ordeal
Odette steadfastly refused to
reveal any names or secrets.
Fed up with her refusal to cooperate
the Nazis sent her to
Ravensbruck concentration camp.
Even here Odette endured.
Later when asked why she
didn't take her cyanide pill
Odette said she couldn't give up on living
as long as there was the smallest chance
of seeing her children again.
But on May 1st, 1945,
when a guard ordered Odette
out of her cell at gunpoint
she was sure her life was over.
What Odette didn't know
was that the Nazis were
on the verge of defeat.
The camp commandant
was hoping to trade Odette
for lenient treatment for himself.
But Odette exposed the
commandant to the Americans
and demanded his arrest.
In a final act of defiance
she ordered him to surrender his gun.
- Even at that point, starving, bedraggled,
she is so superior that Fritz
Suhren picks up his pistol
and gives it to her.
There is this small little woman
who triumphs over this agent of evil.
- [Narrator] Free at last
Odette returned to England
to reunite with her children.
- How did it feel, you
were away from the children
for so long, Mrs. Sansom.
- Oh, heaven, this is
almost impossible to explain.
Only a mother would understand.
- [Narrator] Eventually her
dolls returned to England too,
displayed with pride by
the Imperial War Museum
in a room filled with Britain's
highest medals of valor.
This one's a George Cross.
Odette was the first woman to receive it.
- And she always was quite clear
that the George Cross which she received
was not really for her, it
was for all of the women
who went as agents undercover,
and she was simply the person
who lived to take the
recognition for all of them.
- [Narrator] Odette wasn't made of steel
but she had iron in her soul.
Next on Museum Secrets,
how a scientific soldier
silenced the kaiser's big guns.
The Imperial War Museum was not founded
during an era of peace
but in the midst of a tumultuous conflict.
The year was 1917,
the bloodiest year of the First World War.
Britain and her allies were
locked in a fierce struggle
with Germany that would
claim millions of lives.
Today, in a graveyard in Duxford,
a few of the English war dead lie buried
not far from the museum
that displays the weapon
that may have taken their lives,
the German FK 16.
- Despite what we might
imagine about the Great War,
the big killer in the conflict
is not the machine gun,
it certainly isn't the
rifle, it's not grenades,
it's this, it's the artillery.
People are mortally terrified of artillery
because unlike a bullet,
normally a single wound,
shell fragmentation could
simply tear men to pieces.
(artillery shells whistling and booming)
And what I've got here
is the standard shell
of the Great War.
Millions of these were fired
by the 18-pounder field gun.
(explosions blasting)
This is gonna send out
over 360 metallic balls
capable of piercing, well flesh and blood.
(munitions exploding)
- [Narrator] Worse
yet, the FK 16 could fire
five rounds a minute
and strike from as far
away as 10 kilometers.
- This field represents an
area behind the allied lines.
If you can imagine
that over that hill there
are the German gun positions,
somewhere in the middle
distance is going to be
no-man's land with it's
trenches on both sides,
and we're the area
where actually you'd have
British guns and positions.
- [Narrator] The German guns were invisible
behind their lines.
Until the way could be found
to pinpoint and destroy them,
Allied infantry would be cut down,
and the war could not be won.
Spotting planes were sometimes sent
to locate German batteries,
but planes were vulnerable to enemy fire.
And the traditional method
of spotting artillery by eye
was ineffective in bad weather,
or when German guns were far away.
As an experiment allied engineers
began exploring a new idea.
They attempted to use the sound of a gun
to calculate its position.
- That allows you to
then direct your artillery
onto the enemy.
You don't see them, all
you've got be able to do
is hear them and do the calculations.
- [Narrator] But the
battlefield was a noisy place.
No existing microphone
could isolate the sound
of a single gun.
The Allies were going to
need an entirely new technology
to pinpoint and destroy
the deadly German artillery.
To hunt for the secret, the British army
turned to a 25-year-old
soldier named Lawrence Bragg,
the youngest person to win
the Nobel Prize in Physics.
To demonstrate Bragg's work in the field
we've assembled some of the items he used,
and we're going to get
some help from scientist
William Van der Kloot.
- So what I've done Bill,
is I've brought these things along.
- Lovely. - I thought that was
the most important bit.
- [Bill] Well, certainly.
- Okay, rum jar complete
with the wire on top,
which is useful.
Some nice period cable, a loaner.
And then vitally
important bit of equipment,
the mallet for knocking the stakes in.
I mean, I think they use an ammunition box,
but I'm using a ration box.
- [Bill] Good.
- [Narrator] Bragg chose these objects
because of an inspiration that came to him
in an unlikely location.
He noticed that when German
artillery boomed in the distance
his bottom would elevate
slightly off the seat.
He realized that on the noisy battlefield
only the biggest guns
create this kind of jarring,
subsonic shockwave.
Bragg shared his discovery
with a member of his team,
Corporal William Tucker.
Tucker decided to try to
build a shockwave detector.
Tucker connected a rum jar, some thin wire,
and a recording device.
The idea is that when a big gun fires,
the shockwave causes a gust of air
to move over the top of the rum jar,
sending an impulse to the recording device
where the precise time of
the impulse is registered.
The crude shockwave detector worked.
- It's the movement of air that's doing it,
it's the hot wire Tucker microphone.
- Got it, got it.
You're in charge of staples...
- [Narrator] Bragg refined the device
by replacing the rum jar
with an ammunition box.
- Well should we just make
our holes in the box then
in that case, and get those in place.
That's through.
Okay, that's good.
Okay that's gone through.
Okay, is that right, Bill? - Yes, perfect.
- And then the lid goes back on again
because we're now using
the whole wire, aren't we?
- Right. - As I think, if I hold this...
- [Narrator] This second
generation shockwave detector
worked even better than the first.
- [Andy] Okay, we should have an exposed...
- [Narrator] But Bragg knew
one shockwave detector
would not be enough.
To triangulate on the German guns,
he built several detectors,
placed them at equal distances apart
and connected them by a long run of wire
to the shockwave recorder.
Would this system perform
with the accuracy required
to pinpoint the location
of German artillery?
The answer would come on
a battlefield in Amiens, France
on the morning of August 8th, 1918.
Fog rolled in, preventing the Allies
from pinpointing German artillery by eye.
But the fog was not all bad news.
The heavy mist meant that
the Germans couldn't see
what the Allies were up to either.
If they had they might have wondered
why some soldiers were stringing wire.
As allied infantry go over the top,
and German artillery
fires to cut them down,
Bragg's men turn on
the shockwave detectors.
From each German gun, a
shockwave radiates outward,
striking each detector
at a slightly different time.
The impulses are sent through the wires
to the shockwave recorder,
which registers the time
differences precisely.
Using a complex formula devised by Bragg
his men use the time differences
to triangulate the positions
of the German guns.
If they are even a fraction out,
the allied gunners will miss their targets
and the German guns will
slaughter the advancing infantry.
But as the coordinates are
relayed to the allied gunners,
and they fire toward the German lines,
one by one the German guns fall silent.
Allied forces advance with
surprisingly little resistance
right past the smoking
wreckage of German artillery.
- The Battle of a Amiens
is the beginning of the end
for the German army.
For the next hundred
days, the next three months,
the German army is on the back foot,
retreating and retreating
and retreating and retreating
until the 11th of November.
(men cheering)
What sound ranging does is it brings about
a whole era of technology,
science applied to warfare.
In the future you can now
kill opponents you can't see.
This is an amazingly
leap forward in warfare.
- [Narrator] Lawrence
Bragg and William Tucker
had changed the nature of war forever.
Up next, the secret
of hiding in plain sight.
Inside the Imperial War Museum
are some of history's
most powerful weapons.
Often victory goes to the
side with the biggest guns.
But sometimes wars are
won by cunning and deception.
In this building, not
accessible to the public,
are some of the sneakiest
weapons ever made.
In each box is an attempt
to discover an elusive secret:
how to make a soldier invisible.
- Well this is a
hand-improvised sniper's robe,
of the sort used by the British
army in the First World War.
And it comprises of a
cotton loose-fitting robe,
a button-over hood and mask,
with apertures to the
mouth and to the eyes.
And improvised and hand-painted
by the soldier that wore it.
Even on the quietest of
days, 18 men of any battalion
could be taken out of action by snipers.
So they were very very effective.
In this case he's actually
sewn some organic material,
as well as over-painted it
very much to his own design and taste.
This is a remarkable and unique object
in the museum's collection,
these are extremely rare.
(dramatic instrumental music)
- [Narrator] After World War I,
the German army provided
camouflage for all its troops,
using science to mimic nature.
- The fellows that designed
and developed it were artists
so they looked at the
plane tree for example,
they looked at the tree bark.
And when you look at some
German uniforms of that period
you can see that kind of influence.
You can see how that design developed.
- [Narrator] Since World
War II, the changing patterns
reveal how conflict zones
have moved around the globe.
From snowy Russia to the jungles of Vietnam
to the deserts of the Middle East.
- Well camouflage itself goes
back many many centuries,
back to primeval days.
When man was hunting for
food he had to act like an animal
so that he stalk his prey to eat.
- [Narrator] Though any of
these patterns might prevent
the hunter from becoming the hunted,
none provide complete invisibility.
And so designers keep trying new ideas.
- I've got to say one
of my all-time favorites,
it's lasted 40 years.
The scientific advancement
of this is that it had
this almost dazzle effect
to the eyes and to the brain.
This caused confusion
which is another element
of camouflage and concealment:
confusion, deception.
- [Narrator] But recently
even this cunning camouflage
has become obsolete.
To see why, we've come to
a British army science facility
where Lieutenant Colonel Toby Evans
is testing an updated version.
- Afghanistan is what really
concentrated our mind on this
because people were
operating from pure desert
into the green zone and
back again in one patrol
and clearly there's no way
you can change your clothing
in the middle of a patrol.
- [Narrator] Evans hopes the army's new
multi-terrain pattern
will solve this problem.
- What we're looking for
here today is two soldiers,
one wearing the old
woodland pattern camouflage
that we used to issue as
standard in this part of the world,
and one wearing the new
multi-terrain patterned camouflage
that you can see me wearing here.
- [Narrator] Two soldiers
are hidden in this field.
One in the old camouflage, one in the new.
So far so good.
Neither can be seen.
- Okay guys, if you stand up.
The woodland camouflage only blends in well
to its own background, it goes very dark
if you see it in any distance,
and the eye is drawn to areas of shadow.
The multi-terrain pattern has some high
and some low contrast, which
causes the eye to bounce off it
as being there's nothing
for me to look at there,
it's not a threat.
- [Narrator] But even the new camouflage
won't provide protection
if a soldier can't wear it in extreme heat.
- Three, two, one.
Okay, yeah?
- [Narrator] Scientists
use this enviro-chamber
to simulate the 40-degree
temperatures of the Middle East.
Evans and research scientist Rene Nevola
monitor the soldier's
heart rate and condition.
- So over all we can see
how hot this person's getting,
how hard they're working,
whether they're comfortable,
and what the effects
of that clothing system
actually is on him.
- If we don't know what this is going to do
to the guy's thermal
burden then could end up
with more people going
down with heat exhaustion.
- [Narrator] And even normal body heat
could make this soldier's
body visible to an enemy
equipped for thermal imaging goggles.
So new uniforms are
impregnated with anti-infrared dye.
But even that would not be
enough to camouflage the soldier
on today's battlefield.
- Every soldier now carries a radio,
so that's giving away a signal,
every soldier probably
has a GPS attached to him,
so that's constantly
signaling to a satellite.
The real challenge in the next 10 years
is going to be to mask
all that sort of signals.
So we have to make sure that all camouflage
that we are working on is camouflage
not only in the visible
spectrum but in the near-infrared,
and in every other spectrum
that is likely to become
a problem in the foreseeable future.
- We've seen predator that
ability to make the person
or the garments, or the
weapon system, the vehicle,
maybe the aircraft or even a battleship,
to make those invisible,
I'm sure that's just around the corner.
But from a curatorial
point of view that'll be
an absolute nightmare
because how would I ever find it?
Next on Museum Secrets, a
very British nuclear nightmare.
(bomb roaring)
The Imperial War Museum
exhibits many weapons
designed to strike fear
into the hearts of the enemy.
But there is one that stands alone
above all the others as it
creates its mushroom cloud.
(bomb blast roaring and rumbling)
The atomic bomb dropped on Japan in 1945
ushered in a terrifying nuclear age.
At first only the USA had the bomb.
Then Britain and the
Soviet Union joined the club,
and that's when the world went mad.
As in M-A-D for mutual assured destruction.
Weapons like this were
kept ready for instant launch
on both sides of the Iron Curtain,
poised to level cities
and spread clouds of poisonous radiation.
Britain's armed forces stood
ready in radar installations,
bombers, and submarines.
(air raid siren blaring)
Civilians practiced running for shelter
when they heard the air-raid siren.
And then there's this
man, Neville Cullingford.
By day Neville worked in an office,
but he had another secret job
as a civil defense volunteer
in the Royal Observer Corps.
Until recently his Cold
War mission was classified.
It was part of Britain's
secret civil defense plan.
Few knew the plan existed
until Freedom of Information
legislation forced its release
years after the Cold War ended.
Why the civil defense plan was hidden
from the British people is
our final museum secret.
- I would get a phone call from my,
it would be the group
commandant in my case,
to man up the group, and then
it would be my responsibility
to alert my four chief observers
who were in charge of the
four posts that I managed.
- [Narrator] After alerting
others Neville would race here,
one of many secret bunkers
scattered throughout Britain.
- And it was quite exciting times,
and that's sort of thing as well, you know,
because it was something
that none of my work colleagues
knew anything about, I
just said that if I disappear
out the door I shan't say where I'm going
and you may not see me for a while.
- [Narrator] Descending
six meters underground,
Neville and his fellow volunteers
prepared their bunker for war.
- They get it totally ready and
then they would be informed
by a codeword whether it was real,
you know, there really
was a nuclear attack on way,
or whether in fact it was an exercise.
- [Narrator] Today Neville
has returned to a bunker
in the company of historian Matthew Grant,
one of few people who has studied
the recently declassified
civil defense plan.
- There would have been
a dozen or more of these
around the country.
The Royal Observer Core
were part of a wider network
where they could
monitor radioactive fallout
and warn people if that was coming.
Yeah, right, yes.
Yeah, yeah of course, that's right, yes.
Yes indeed, yeah that's (mumbles).
- [Narrator] Matthew
hopes Neville can show him
exactly how the fallout warning
system was supposed to work.
- [Neville] Equipment we had in the post
basically was the bomb power indicator.
- [Matthew] And what would
it mean if you saw it flash up
to 20 on the scale, what would that mean?
- Well it could mean that a nuclear weapon
has been detonated.
- So that dial shooting up
would be the first indicator
that there was, been
an attack on the country,
for you in your bunker.
- It would indeed be, yes.
- [Narrator] 60 seconds
after the first shockwave,
a volunteer was expected to go outside
to assess the radiation.
- [Matthew] So now we're
at the top of this bunker,
what's this white cylinder here?
- Right, that's a ground zero indicator.
Right, so he would unscrew the lid,
and this you can see there
are four pinhole cameras.
Each of those corresponds
with a cardinal compass point
and against each cardinal compass point
there is a photosensitive
paper in each of these cassettes.
Number one observer
would take them each in turn
and for instance in this
one the size of the spot
would tell you how powerful the weapon was.
- [Narrator] Atomic explosions
that touch the ground
cause radioactive fallout.
A spot low on the paper
would indicate that an explosion
had touched the ground
and radiation was on its way.
That would be Neville's
cue to fire warning flares.
If he had not already succumbed
to acute radiation poisoning.
(man groaning)
- The whole system was very fragile
and it was always very debatable
whether it would have worked.
- [Narrator] The civil
defense plan predicted
that nuclear war would kill
nearly half of Britain's population
and cause a complete societal collapse
but the British people were
told something quite different.
Government films told the
British people they would survive
if they employed the same
pluck and determination
that had helped them survive the Blitz.
- Would have been a
big part of saving lives
in the Second World War.
The problem is, is that
defending Britain from attack
by the Luftwaffe and defending
it from nuclear weapons
was very different.
- [Narrator] In government
films this kind of real
nuclear blast footage was never shown.
(explosion booming)
The long-term effects of
radiation weren't shown either.
- [Man] The radiation
is at its greatest intensity
during the first two days,
but the danger decreases
rapidly as time passes.
- They downplayed the extent of radiation,
sometimes they downplayed
the nature of the blast,
to make people feel that it
was less dangerous than it was.
- [Narrator] Neville is well aware of this,
but he still believes that
all civil defense efforts
were vital.
- In some people's view it
may not have been adequate
or necessary but we were
doing something practical,
something we thought was important.
- [Narrator] It was hoped
that having a defense plan
would prevent scenes like this.
(people shouting)
- One of their fears was
that if people panicked,
what this might actually do
was encourage the Russians
to press harder, which might
actually end up causing the war
that the people who were
panicking wanted to avert.
- [Man] Finally, this is the All Clear.
It means that there is no
further threat of air attack
or fallout, and that you can
leave your place of shelter.
- It was a facade.
And yes, they lied.
But they lied for what they
thought were grander motives
that were designed to ensure that
British security was maintained
in the face of a menacing enemy.
- [Narrator] And so the final secret may be
that lying to an entire nation
is sometimes the right thing to do.
Perhaps when faced with
the madness of nuclear war
we just can't handle the truth.
(explosion roaring and crashing)
(quick dramatic music)
This vast museum bears
witness to the power of a nation
and its greatest sorrows.
For every secret we reveal,
far more must remain unspoken.
Soaring high above our heads,
buried deep beneath the ground,
hidden in plain sight,
inside the Imperial War Museum.
(gate squeaking and clattering)
(dramatic instrumental music)
of tradition and innovation.
And at its heart, a war museum
with secrets dark and strange.
A tortured spy.
A gun silenced by science.
A nuclear nightmare.
And the near-death
experience of Winston Churchill.
Secrets hidden in plain sight
inside the Imperial War Museum.
(dramatic instrumental music)
Down a garden path
guarded by naval artillery
is London's Imperial War Museum.
Dedicated to the history of Britain at war
from World War I to the present.
Since the museum was founded in 1917
its collection has grown to
more than half a million objects
exhibited in five locations across England.
Here in the shadow of
the parliament buildings
there is a branch of the museum
that is completely below street level.
Why would anyone build
a museum underground?
In 1940 Adolf Hitler threatened
England with invasion.
British forces were vastly outnumbered.
Britain's best asset
was her prime minister,
Winston Churchill.
He was a brilliant strategist
and morale booster,
and Hitler knew it.
Hitler targeted Churchill
for assassination,
and when his warplanes
pounded London in the Blitz
Number 10 Downing Street
became an unsafe place
for Churchill to live.
(munitions whistling and booming)
And that brings us back here.
The museum called the Churchill War Rooms
was originally an underground bunker.
During World War two
its location was top secret.
- I think the thing that really
hits you when you're here
is that this was such a secret location
right in the heart of London,
where there's crowds
of people passing nearby
within a stone's throw quite literally
of the core of government in war,
and they wouldn't have known it existed.
They wouldn't have known anything about it.
- [Narrator] At the foot of
these stairs we'll discover
how the British people ensured the safety
of their irreplaceable leader.
It's a secret that's stranger
than you might think.
Here we enter a wartime
nerve center, frozen in time.
These strategic maps are
the ones Churchill used.
This phone is the one he used to speak
to Air Defense Command.
And this was a favorite
brand of Cuban cigar.
Around this table as
bombs rained down above
Churchill met with his Chiefs of Staff.
- Invasion could happen any day.
He's faced with his Chiefs
of Staff, bang opposite him,
who to him never seemed to be doing things
quite as he wanted them to be done.
They never seemed to
be doing them fast enough.
And this is Churchill's chair.
You can see on it where
Churchill basically banged it constantly
with his signet ring on his right hand.
And then this side incredibly scratched it
with his fingernails to
the point it really made
an indentation in the woodwork.
Can hear and feel the
bombs dropping outside.
It would be an intense time,
and you know that you're
absolutely up against it,
you're with your backs to the walls.
- [Narrator] After late-night meetings,
Winston's staff urged
him to sleep in this room.
But he hated hiding from Hitler in a hole.
He complained that the
bunker had a bad smell
and he chafed at his staff's insistence
that his bodyguard sleep down here too.
- Churchill was a man who
was a very reluctant subterranean
if you like, and it was only really
the extreme of the bombing
raids that drove him down here.
(air raid sirens blaring)
- [Narrator] As the nightly
bombing raids got ever bigger
Churchill's staff worried the
bunker wouldn't protect him.
Engineers designed reinforcements
hidden in the existing structure
of the building overhead.
- Here you can see where
they put the slab in for his area
to make sure he was protected at least.
Has anybody ever estimated
how much concrete is in there
in tonnage terms.
- [Hugh] A lot.
- [Narrator] But no
bunker can protect a leader
who won't stay inside.
(explosion blasting)
Often after heavy raids Churchill wanted
a street level view of the devastation.
And he wanted to be with his
people in their darkest hours.
In photographs like these
you will often see this man
lurking in the shadows.
This is Churchill's 24/7 bodyguard,
Inspector Walter Thompson.
He had a tough assignment,
and not just because of Nazi assassins.
- The trouble with Churchill
was he probably had
very little concept of personal danger,
he was a huge risk-taker.
Now you can imagine trying
to protect someone like that.
It's almost like having a dog
that constantly runs off the leash.
- [Narrator] When Inspector
Thompson was sleeping
Churchill would sometimes
slip out of the bunker alone
for some fresh air in St. James's Park.
This kind of risky behavior
gave his bodyguard nightmares.
As German bombs got bigger,
Churchill's engineers had nightmares too.
(planes wailing) (bombs whistling)
- [Phil] Do you think it would
have withstood a direct hit
for a 500-pounder?
- Generally, anything bigger
than a 500-pound bomb
was going to devastate.
The shock transmitted
through to anybody inside
would have been fatal.
(bombs whistling)
- [Narrator] Cause of death
would have been asphyxiation
as the shockwave sucked out all the oxygen.
During the worst air raids
Churchill had the option
to descend to a deeper, safer level.
To take refuge behind airtight doors.
- Can tell we're in the sub-basement
'cause there's not much room.
- Absolutely, yeah, the mind your head
is everywhere down here isn't it?
- It's a steel frame.
Steel door with a rubber
seal around the edge.
The steel sheet is roughly 10-mil thick.
That's gonna stop quite a lot.
- Yeah.
- [Narrator] But instead of descending here
Churchill often went the other way.
In an air raid there is no
place less safe than the roof,
but that is where Churchill wanted to go.
- This is where Churchill used to come
to get his overview of what
was going on in London.
He could see the whole
of the city from here.
The good Inspector Thompson would have made
every effort he could to
stop Churchill coming up here
and being in such
danger, in such harm's way,
but he couldn't stop him,
and he was Prime Minister,
and he was Churchill.
You know, he did things I change the locks.
He tried to get Mrs.
Churchill to persuade him,
to stop him and everything,
and nobody could stop Churchill,
nothing could.
From up here you can have the impression
that the whole city was
on fire and see the flames.
You could smell the smoke.
The planes probably would have attacked
from that vantage point over
there because they'd be coming
basically straight at him.
And they'd be bombing strategic points
like the power station over there.
And he'd see all that from up here.
This is where he really got a sense
of what it was about in a way.
This is where he'd
quietly contemplate it all,
puffing on a cigar, sipping on a whiskey,
and wondering how long it would be
before it was all over probably.
- [Narrator] On May 10th,
1941 the last Nazi bomb
fell on London.
The Blitz was over.
And soon Britain and her
allies would go on the offensive.
In the struggle that followed,
Churchill's bold strategies
often helped win the day.
He prevailed because
he took risks in battle
just as he did in his own life.
And as for the secret
of ensuring the safety
of an irreplaceable leader,
perhaps it simply can't be done.
Because those who
play it safe don't win wars.
Next on Museum Secrets,
what it takes to stay cool at
Mach 1 over enemy territory.
An hour's drive north of London
near the sleepy village of Duxford
is the largest branch of
the Imperial War Museum
Within a complex of many buildings
is the world's most
beautiful airplane hangar.
Inside history hangs suspended in the air.
From this World War I SPAD fighter
to this Tornado jet,
these planes are here
because they went to war
and came back in one piece
along with the pilots who flew them.
What does it take to fly
into battle and survive?
That's a museum secret.
- Ah Shifty, it's a long time
since we've seen one of these.
- Oh, I know.
- [Les] It really brings back
memories doesn't it I suppose.
- [Narrator] Les Hendry
and Simon "Shifty" Young
know Tornado jets better than anyone.
- I haven't been up close to a Tornado
for best part of 10 to 12 years,
and instantly I know exactly
what to check, where to look.
- It's exactly the same.
- It's just exactly the same.
- [Narrator] Today they
don't look much like warriors,
but in January, 1991,
Les was a senior engineer
and Shifty a top gun pilot
with orders to travel to Saudi Arabia
and prepare for battle.
Several months before,
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein
had invaded Kuwait,
laying claim to the
country's rich oil fields.
A United Nations coalition
prepared to counterattack.
US and British forces
assembled on land and sea
determined to drive Saddam out of Kuwait.
The Tornado squadron was
tasked with a dangerous mission:
destroy Iraq's largest airfield
to prevent Saddam's
fighters from taking to the air.
They'd be going in while Iraqi air defenses
were still intact.
- We were going into the unknown,
and there was a tension
there but nobody talked about it.
- [Narrator] The weapon chosen
for the attack was the JP233,
a heavy cluster bomb specifically designed
to destroy runways.
- These things were very
smart, they would blast a hole
through very thick runway concrete
and then create an explosion
underneath the concrete
to heave it upwards.
Very difficult to repair when
concrete heaves upwards.
- [Narrator] Delivering
these bombs would require
a sturdy jet that could fly fast and low
over the enemy airfield.
Based on its proven abilities,
strategists decided the Tornado
was the best plane for the job.
It could fly 650 miles an hour
as low as 150 feet above the ground.
(jet engines roaring)
In the early hours of January 17th, 1991
eight Tornadoes from
Les and Shifty's squadron
idled on a desert tarmac, ready for battle.
- Leading up to the take-off was very much
just like a normal training
night, but with an edge.
And that edge was, you
know, that we were going to do
a combat for real.
(jet engines roaring)
- [Narrator] Shifty's Tornado
squadron was a small part
of a much larger armada.
- It's an image that will stay with me
for as long as I live.
There were just thousands
of aircraft in the sky
at the same time, all orchestrated
like a huge great big ballet.
- [Narrator] As the Tornado
squadron reached Iraqi airspace
they dropped below radar range.
- Now I'd be a liar to
say there wouldn't be
an element of fear, but you're just doing
what you've been trained to do,
fly low, fly on time, fly accurately.
And now, I have to be honest here,
now the tension really is in
the cockpit and I can feel it,
my navigator could feel it.
And then we delivered the weapons.
(munitions blasting)
It was almost like having a huge spotlight
suddenly lit up underneath the aircraft.
I'm only at about 160, 180 feet.
I can see the ground very
clearly, I can see the runway has,
I can even see people very very clearly.
(bombs rumbling)
The next thing I remember is the noise
and the vibration on the aircraft.
And it just suddenly pitches up,
and you suddenly find yourself
I'm not at 200 feet above
the runway anymore
I'm actually at 1500 feet over an airfield,
they have missiles they're
firing, I don't want to be here.
And bluntly it's about
survival, it's about making sure
you and your aircraft and your navigator
do the right thing, survive.
By the time we're flying back
at about five in the morning
the sun is beginning to
emerge on the horizon,
it was a nice sunrise.
- [Narrator] Saddam's
runways were destroyed.
The squadron had accomplished its mission.
- There's lots of
handshakes, pats on the back.
Shifty's a big hugger so
there was hugs going on
and it was just good to get
the eight of them back safely.
- [Narrator] So what
does it take to fly into battle
and survive?
- Yeah, fear is there,
but when you're delivering the
weapons you have a job to do.
That concentrates the mind,
pushes those fear things out.
You can't simulate it,
you can't practice for it,
you can't even mentally prepare for it,
it just happens and you deal with it.
- [Narrator] And as for the sturdy Tornado
that brought them back alive,
these top guns are not afraid
to show a little appreciation.
Next on Museum Secrets,
how a beautiful spy withstood Nazi torture.
- [Woman] Oh.
- [Narrator] The Imperial War Museum
is filled with heavy metal
and tales of men of steel.
And then there's this.
- Almost all visitors will
stop and look at these objects
because they're not the kind of things
you would immediately associate
with the Imperial War Museum.
- [Narrator] But as we'll see,
these dolls have every right to be here.
The reason why is a museum secret.
In the summer of 1941,
World War II was entering its third year.
France had been occupied by
Germany since June of 1940.
Allied forces were desperate to reclaim
the critical French coastline
and launch an invasion from the sea.
Between May and August of that year
more than 400 special British agents
were sent into occupied France.
Their mission was to encourage
and facilitate espionage,
sabotage, and reconnaissance
behind enemy lines.
To support these efforts,
the British Admiralty
asked the public to send in
any snapshots they might
have of the French coast.
A French housewife living in
London was sure she could help.
Odette Sansom sent in photos
from her childhood in France.
But she sent them to
the War Office by mistake.
When War Office intelligence
officers saw Odette's letter
they immediately realized
she would be perfect
for espionage in France.
She'd spent her childhood there.
She knew the language and the landscape.
When Odette was asked to become a spy
she decided to take on the mission.
- Her mother was still living in France,
her father had been killed in 1918,
towards the end of the First World War,
she'd been brought up in the expectation
that the Germans would come
again, and her time would come
when she would have to
do the right thing by France.
(suspenseful instrumental music)
- [Narrator] Agent Odette was
equipped with basic training,
a gun, and a cyanide pill.
She wasn't equipped to say goodbye.
- It was an incredibly
difficult decision for Odette
to leave her three young
daughters behind in the UK.
She put them in a boarding
school, she wrote lots of letters
which could be posted regular
intervals, she set it all up,
and then she went away.
- [Narrator] In November 1942,
Odette arrived in occupied France.
Operating under the codename Lise,
Odette's mission was the courier messages
to and from the French Resistance.
Six months into her
mission Odette was betrayed
by a double agent and
arrested by the Gestapo.
- When she's going to be
interrogated by the Gestapo
for the first time, she
goes into the office,
where most people would
be absolutely terrified,
and there's no doubt she was frightened.
She walks in tall,
holding her head up high.
It is not aggressive,
it's just very determined
that when she comes
across these agents of evil
she's gonna beat them.
The Gestapo wanted the
names of resistance fighters.
Odette refused to answer.
They bared her back
and applied a red-hot iron.
- When they were applying the heat,
what she said is they made a mistake
because they faced me with the window,
and so when the pain was
coming she looked out of the window
and focused on the leaves in the trees
and the movement and the greenery.
And what she did is she
projected out of her mind
a sense of the episodes
in life that kept her happy.
- [Narrator] The interrogators
pulled out her toenails
one by one.
- What she actually said about that is that
she left Britain with a broken heart.
She'd left behind everybody she loved,
and from then on it was
just a case of physical pain,
and she could deal with that.
- [Narrator] As a member
of a forced labor detail,
Odette was ordered to mend Nazi uniforms.
But she refused.
Instead she began to sew something else.
- So she was effectively
rubbing the nose of the Germans
in the fact that she was doing
what she wanted on her terms
when she wanted to do it.
I think it's very possible
that her separation
from her own children
was part of the reason
why she wanted to make
something for children.
- [Narrator] Throughout her ordeal
Odette steadfastly refused to
reveal any names or secrets.
Fed up with her refusal to cooperate
the Nazis sent her to
Ravensbruck concentration camp.
Even here Odette endured.
Later when asked why she
didn't take her cyanide pill
Odette said she couldn't give up on living
as long as there was the smallest chance
of seeing her children again.
But on May 1st, 1945,
when a guard ordered Odette
out of her cell at gunpoint
she was sure her life was over.
What Odette didn't know
was that the Nazis were
on the verge of defeat.
The camp commandant
was hoping to trade Odette
for lenient treatment for himself.
But Odette exposed the
commandant to the Americans
and demanded his arrest.
In a final act of defiance
she ordered him to surrender his gun.
- Even at that point, starving, bedraggled,
she is so superior that Fritz
Suhren picks up his pistol
and gives it to her.
There is this small little woman
who triumphs over this agent of evil.
- [Narrator] Free at last
Odette returned to England
to reunite with her children.
- How did it feel, you
were away from the children
for so long, Mrs. Sansom.
- Oh, heaven, this is
almost impossible to explain.
Only a mother would understand.
- [Narrator] Eventually her
dolls returned to England too,
displayed with pride by
the Imperial War Museum
in a room filled with Britain's
highest medals of valor.
This one's a George Cross.
Odette was the first woman to receive it.
- And she always was quite clear
that the George Cross which she received
was not really for her, it
was for all of the women
who went as agents undercover,
and she was simply the person
who lived to take the
recognition for all of them.
- [Narrator] Odette wasn't made of steel
but she had iron in her soul.
Next on Museum Secrets,
how a scientific soldier
silenced the kaiser's big guns.
The Imperial War Museum was not founded
during an era of peace
but in the midst of a tumultuous conflict.
The year was 1917,
the bloodiest year of the First World War.
Britain and her allies were
locked in a fierce struggle
with Germany that would
claim millions of lives.
Today, in a graveyard in Duxford,
a few of the English war dead lie buried
not far from the museum
that displays the weapon
that may have taken their lives,
the German FK 16.
- Despite what we might
imagine about the Great War,
the big killer in the conflict
is not the machine gun,
it certainly isn't the
rifle, it's not grenades,
it's this, it's the artillery.
People are mortally terrified of artillery
because unlike a bullet,
normally a single wound,
shell fragmentation could
simply tear men to pieces.
(artillery shells whistling and booming)
And what I've got here
is the standard shell
of the Great War.
Millions of these were fired
by the 18-pounder field gun.
(explosions blasting)
This is gonna send out
over 360 metallic balls
capable of piercing, well flesh and blood.
(munitions exploding)
- [Narrator] Worse
yet, the FK 16 could fire
five rounds a minute
and strike from as far
away as 10 kilometers.
- This field represents an
area behind the allied lines.
If you can imagine
that over that hill there
are the German gun positions,
somewhere in the middle
distance is going to be
no-man's land with it's
trenches on both sides,
and we're the area
where actually you'd have
British guns and positions.
- [Narrator] The German guns were invisible
behind their lines.
Until the way could be found
to pinpoint and destroy them,
Allied infantry would be cut down,
and the war could not be won.
Spotting planes were sometimes sent
to locate German batteries,
but planes were vulnerable to enemy fire.
And the traditional method
of spotting artillery by eye
was ineffective in bad weather,
or when German guns were far away.
As an experiment allied engineers
began exploring a new idea.
They attempted to use the sound of a gun
to calculate its position.
- That allows you to
then direct your artillery
onto the enemy.
You don't see them, all
you've got be able to do
is hear them and do the calculations.
- [Narrator] But the
battlefield was a noisy place.
No existing microphone
could isolate the sound
of a single gun.
The Allies were going to
need an entirely new technology
to pinpoint and destroy
the deadly German artillery.
To hunt for the secret, the British army
turned to a 25-year-old
soldier named Lawrence Bragg,
the youngest person to win
the Nobel Prize in Physics.
To demonstrate Bragg's work in the field
we've assembled some of the items he used,
and we're going to get
some help from scientist
William Van der Kloot.
- So what I've done Bill,
is I've brought these things along.
- Lovely. - I thought that was
the most important bit.
- [Bill] Well, certainly.
- Okay, rum jar complete
with the wire on top,
which is useful.
Some nice period cable, a loaner.
And then vitally
important bit of equipment,
the mallet for knocking the stakes in.
I mean, I think they use an ammunition box,
but I'm using a ration box.
- [Bill] Good.
- [Narrator] Bragg chose these objects
because of an inspiration that came to him
in an unlikely location.
He noticed that when German
artillery boomed in the distance
his bottom would elevate
slightly off the seat.
He realized that on the noisy battlefield
only the biggest guns
create this kind of jarring,
subsonic shockwave.
Bragg shared his discovery
with a member of his team,
Corporal William Tucker.
Tucker decided to try to
build a shockwave detector.
Tucker connected a rum jar, some thin wire,
and a recording device.
The idea is that when a big gun fires,
the shockwave causes a gust of air
to move over the top of the rum jar,
sending an impulse to the recording device
where the precise time of
the impulse is registered.
The crude shockwave detector worked.
- It's the movement of air that's doing it,
it's the hot wire Tucker microphone.
- Got it, got it.
You're in charge of staples...
- [Narrator] Bragg refined the device
by replacing the rum jar
with an ammunition box.
- Well should we just make
our holes in the box then
in that case, and get those in place.
That's through.
Okay, that's good.
Okay that's gone through.
Okay, is that right, Bill? - Yes, perfect.
- And then the lid goes back on again
because we're now using
the whole wire, aren't we?
- Right. - As I think, if I hold this...
- [Narrator] This second
generation shockwave detector
worked even better than the first.
- [Andy] Okay, we should have an exposed...
- [Narrator] But Bragg knew
one shockwave detector
would not be enough.
To triangulate on the German guns,
he built several detectors,
placed them at equal distances apart
and connected them by a long run of wire
to the shockwave recorder.
Would this system perform
with the accuracy required
to pinpoint the location
of German artillery?
The answer would come on
a battlefield in Amiens, France
on the morning of August 8th, 1918.
Fog rolled in, preventing the Allies
from pinpointing German artillery by eye.
But the fog was not all bad news.
The heavy mist meant that
the Germans couldn't see
what the Allies were up to either.
If they had they might have wondered
why some soldiers were stringing wire.
As allied infantry go over the top,
and German artillery
fires to cut them down,
Bragg's men turn on
the shockwave detectors.
From each German gun, a
shockwave radiates outward,
striking each detector
at a slightly different time.
The impulses are sent through the wires
to the shockwave recorder,
which registers the time
differences precisely.
Using a complex formula devised by Bragg
his men use the time differences
to triangulate the positions
of the German guns.
If they are even a fraction out,
the allied gunners will miss their targets
and the German guns will
slaughter the advancing infantry.
But as the coordinates are
relayed to the allied gunners,
and they fire toward the German lines,
one by one the German guns fall silent.
Allied forces advance with
surprisingly little resistance
right past the smoking
wreckage of German artillery.
- The Battle of a Amiens
is the beginning of the end
for the German army.
For the next hundred
days, the next three months,
the German army is on the back foot,
retreating and retreating
and retreating and retreating
until the 11th of November.
(men cheering)
What sound ranging does is it brings about
a whole era of technology,
science applied to warfare.
In the future you can now
kill opponents you can't see.
This is an amazingly
leap forward in warfare.
- [Narrator] Lawrence
Bragg and William Tucker
had changed the nature of war forever.
Up next, the secret
of hiding in plain sight.
Inside the Imperial War Museum
are some of history's
most powerful weapons.
Often victory goes to the
side with the biggest guns.
But sometimes wars are
won by cunning and deception.
In this building, not
accessible to the public,
are some of the sneakiest
weapons ever made.
In each box is an attempt
to discover an elusive secret:
how to make a soldier invisible.
- Well this is a
hand-improvised sniper's robe,
of the sort used by the British
army in the First World War.
And it comprises of a
cotton loose-fitting robe,
a button-over hood and mask,
with apertures to the
mouth and to the eyes.
And improvised and hand-painted
by the soldier that wore it.
Even on the quietest of
days, 18 men of any battalion
could be taken out of action by snipers.
So they were very very effective.
In this case he's actually
sewn some organic material,
as well as over-painted it
very much to his own design and taste.
This is a remarkable and unique object
in the museum's collection,
these are extremely rare.
(dramatic instrumental music)
- [Narrator] After World War I,
the German army provided
camouflage for all its troops,
using science to mimic nature.
- The fellows that designed
and developed it were artists
so they looked at the
plane tree for example,
they looked at the tree bark.
And when you look at some
German uniforms of that period
you can see that kind of influence.
You can see how that design developed.
- [Narrator] Since World
War II, the changing patterns
reveal how conflict zones
have moved around the globe.
From snowy Russia to the jungles of Vietnam
to the deserts of the Middle East.
- Well camouflage itself goes
back many many centuries,
back to primeval days.
When man was hunting for
food he had to act like an animal
so that he stalk his prey to eat.
- [Narrator] Though any of
these patterns might prevent
the hunter from becoming the hunted,
none provide complete invisibility.
And so designers keep trying new ideas.
- I've got to say one
of my all-time favorites,
it's lasted 40 years.
The scientific advancement
of this is that it had
this almost dazzle effect
to the eyes and to the brain.
This caused confusion
which is another element
of camouflage and concealment:
confusion, deception.
- [Narrator] But recently
even this cunning camouflage
has become obsolete.
To see why, we've come to
a British army science facility
where Lieutenant Colonel Toby Evans
is testing an updated version.
- Afghanistan is what really
concentrated our mind on this
because people were
operating from pure desert
into the green zone and
back again in one patrol
and clearly there's no way
you can change your clothing
in the middle of a patrol.
- [Narrator] Evans hopes the army's new
multi-terrain pattern
will solve this problem.
- What we're looking for
here today is two soldiers,
one wearing the old
woodland pattern camouflage
that we used to issue as
standard in this part of the world,
and one wearing the new
multi-terrain patterned camouflage
that you can see me wearing here.
- [Narrator] Two soldiers
are hidden in this field.
One in the old camouflage, one in the new.
So far so good.
Neither can be seen.
- Okay guys, if you stand up.
The woodland camouflage only blends in well
to its own background, it goes very dark
if you see it in any distance,
and the eye is drawn to areas of shadow.
The multi-terrain pattern has some high
and some low contrast, which
causes the eye to bounce off it
as being there's nothing
for me to look at there,
it's not a threat.
- [Narrator] But even the new camouflage
won't provide protection
if a soldier can't wear it in extreme heat.
- Three, two, one.
Okay, yeah?
- [Narrator] Scientists
use this enviro-chamber
to simulate the 40-degree
temperatures of the Middle East.
Evans and research scientist Rene Nevola
monitor the soldier's
heart rate and condition.
- So over all we can see
how hot this person's getting,
how hard they're working,
whether they're comfortable,
and what the effects
of that clothing system
actually is on him.
- If we don't know what this is going to do
to the guy's thermal
burden then could end up
with more people going
down with heat exhaustion.
- [Narrator] And even normal body heat
could make this soldier's
body visible to an enemy
equipped for thermal imaging goggles.
So new uniforms are
impregnated with anti-infrared dye.
But even that would not be
enough to camouflage the soldier
on today's battlefield.
- Every soldier now carries a radio,
so that's giving away a signal,
every soldier probably
has a GPS attached to him,
so that's constantly
signaling to a satellite.
The real challenge in the next 10 years
is going to be to mask
all that sort of signals.
So we have to make sure that all camouflage
that we are working on is camouflage
not only in the visible
spectrum but in the near-infrared,
and in every other spectrum
that is likely to become
a problem in the foreseeable future.
- We've seen predator that
ability to make the person
or the garments, or the
weapon system, the vehicle,
maybe the aircraft or even a battleship,
to make those invisible,
I'm sure that's just around the corner.
But from a curatorial
point of view that'll be
an absolute nightmare
because how would I ever find it?
Next on Museum Secrets, a
very British nuclear nightmare.
(bomb roaring)
The Imperial War Museum
exhibits many weapons
designed to strike fear
into the hearts of the enemy.
But there is one that stands alone
above all the others as it
creates its mushroom cloud.
(bomb blast roaring and rumbling)
The atomic bomb dropped on Japan in 1945
ushered in a terrifying nuclear age.
At first only the USA had the bomb.
Then Britain and the
Soviet Union joined the club,
and that's when the world went mad.
As in M-A-D for mutual assured destruction.
Weapons like this were
kept ready for instant launch
on both sides of the Iron Curtain,
poised to level cities
and spread clouds of poisonous radiation.
Britain's armed forces stood
ready in radar installations,
bombers, and submarines.
(air raid siren blaring)
Civilians practiced running for shelter
when they heard the air-raid siren.
And then there's this
man, Neville Cullingford.
By day Neville worked in an office,
but he had another secret job
as a civil defense volunteer
in the Royal Observer Corps.
Until recently his Cold
War mission was classified.
It was part of Britain's
secret civil defense plan.
Few knew the plan existed
until Freedom of Information
legislation forced its release
years after the Cold War ended.
Why the civil defense plan was hidden
from the British people is
our final museum secret.
- I would get a phone call from my,
it would be the group
commandant in my case,
to man up the group, and then
it would be my responsibility
to alert my four chief observers
who were in charge of the
four posts that I managed.
- [Narrator] After alerting
others Neville would race here,
one of many secret bunkers
scattered throughout Britain.
- And it was quite exciting times,
and that's sort of thing as well, you know,
because it was something
that none of my work colleagues
knew anything about, I
just said that if I disappear
out the door I shan't say where I'm going
and you may not see me for a while.
- [Narrator] Descending
six meters underground,
Neville and his fellow volunteers
prepared their bunker for war.
- They get it totally ready and
then they would be informed
by a codeword whether it was real,
you know, there really
was a nuclear attack on way,
or whether in fact it was an exercise.
- [Narrator] Today Neville
has returned to a bunker
in the company of historian Matthew Grant,
one of few people who has studied
the recently declassified
civil defense plan.
- There would have been
a dozen or more of these
around the country.
The Royal Observer Core
were part of a wider network
where they could
monitor radioactive fallout
and warn people if that was coming.
Yeah, right, yes.
Yeah, yeah of course, that's right, yes.
Yes indeed, yeah that's (mumbles).
- [Narrator] Matthew
hopes Neville can show him
exactly how the fallout warning
system was supposed to work.
- [Neville] Equipment we had in the post
basically was the bomb power indicator.
- [Matthew] And what would
it mean if you saw it flash up
to 20 on the scale, what would that mean?
- Well it could mean that a nuclear weapon
has been detonated.
- So that dial shooting up
would be the first indicator
that there was, been
an attack on the country,
for you in your bunker.
- It would indeed be, yes.
- [Narrator] 60 seconds
after the first shockwave,
a volunteer was expected to go outside
to assess the radiation.
- [Matthew] So now we're
at the top of this bunker,
what's this white cylinder here?
- Right, that's a ground zero indicator.
Right, so he would unscrew the lid,
and this you can see there
are four pinhole cameras.
Each of those corresponds
with a cardinal compass point
and against each cardinal compass point
there is a photosensitive
paper in each of these cassettes.
Number one observer
would take them each in turn
and for instance in this
one the size of the spot
would tell you how powerful the weapon was.
- [Narrator] Atomic explosions
that touch the ground
cause radioactive fallout.
A spot low on the paper
would indicate that an explosion
had touched the ground
and radiation was on its way.
That would be Neville's
cue to fire warning flares.
If he had not already succumbed
to acute radiation poisoning.
(man groaning)
- The whole system was very fragile
and it was always very debatable
whether it would have worked.
- [Narrator] The civil
defense plan predicted
that nuclear war would kill
nearly half of Britain's population
and cause a complete societal collapse
but the British people were
told something quite different.
Government films told the
British people they would survive
if they employed the same
pluck and determination
that had helped them survive the Blitz.
- Would have been a
big part of saving lives
in the Second World War.
The problem is, is that
defending Britain from attack
by the Luftwaffe and defending
it from nuclear weapons
was very different.
- [Narrator] In government
films this kind of real
nuclear blast footage was never shown.
(explosion booming)
The long-term effects of
radiation weren't shown either.
- [Man] The radiation
is at its greatest intensity
during the first two days,
but the danger decreases
rapidly as time passes.
- They downplayed the extent of radiation,
sometimes they downplayed
the nature of the blast,
to make people feel that it
was less dangerous than it was.
- [Narrator] Neville is well aware of this,
but he still believes that
all civil defense efforts
were vital.
- In some people's view it
may not have been adequate
or necessary but we were
doing something practical,
something we thought was important.
- [Narrator] It was hoped
that having a defense plan
would prevent scenes like this.
(people shouting)
- One of their fears was
that if people panicked,
what this might actually do
was encourage the Russians
to press harder, which might
actually end up causing the war
that the people who were
panicking wanted to avert.
- [Man] Finally, this is the All Clear.
It means that there is no
further threat of air attack
or fallout, and that you can
leave your place of shelter.
- It was a facade.
And yes, they lied.
But they lied for what they
thought were grander motives
that were designed to ensure that
British security was maintained
in the face of a menacing enemy.
- [Narrator] And so the final secret may be
that lying to an entire nation
is sometimes the right thing to do.
Perhaps when faced with
the madness of nuclear war
we just can't handle the truth.
(explosion roaring and crashing)
(quick dramatic music)
This vast museum bears
witness to the power of a nation
and its greatest sorrows.
For every secret we reveal,
far more must remain unspoken.
Soaring high above our heads,
buried deep beneath the ground,
hidden in plain sight,
inside the Imperial War Museum.
(gate squeaking and clattering)
(dramatic instrumental music)