[R-390] Subs detection of radiation

[Mark Huss]

For what it is worth.  When I arrived at Ft. Devens, MA for Advanced 
Training a few buddys and I took a trip to Rockport, MA one weekend.  
Looking through an Antique Shop for an old-fasioned ships lamp, I saw an 
interesting poster from WWII.  It was a drawing in the typical style 
showing a civilian in a watch cap on the deck of a ship holding out a 
small box with a wire dangling from it.  In the distance was a rough 
drawing of a Nazi bomber, with a brown bomb-shaped airplane much closer, 
heading straight for the sailor.  The caption read 'Your Shaver Might 
Save Your Ship!!!'  As I was attending 33S school at the time, it 
interested me.  But for $100, it was too rich for my blood.  But I was 
interested as to what it was.  The salesgirl was no help at all. 
Several months later, I finally found the answer from a historian at 
M.I.T.'s Lincoln Labs.  During late WWII, the Germans developed an 
Anti-Ship Gliding bomb with a TV camera in the nose.  Launched from a 
Condor, it glided to its target, controlled by the bombader in the 
aircraft.  A nasty little bugger, it was terrorizing Merchant Ships in 
the North Atlantic and Med with its great accuracy.  Then during one 
attack, so the story went, an officer decided he should look his best at 
the Pearly Gates, turned on his electric razor (had to have been British 
;), and the bomb, about to hit his ship, suddenly swerved and missed!  
Putting two and two together, he realized that the razor must have 
somehow interfered with the glide bombs guidance.  Reporting the 
incident, word got back to M.I.T.'s Radiation Lab who was desperately 
trying to develop a countermeasure for the new bomb.  M.I.T. had the 
poster in question printed up and distributed to all Merchant Ships as a 
stop-gap measure until the jammers could be manufactured and 
distributed.  It was probibily more of a feel-good measure than anything 
else, but an interesting piece of trivia.

David M sundheimer wrote:

>Re: discussions on the detection of radiation by enemy subs - the Library
>of Congress, Veterans History Project, Book "Voices of War", Page 135.
>The writer was on the Queen Elizabeth to England.
>  "When the ocean trip began,all electrical devices were called into a
>central room,the reason being that they sent out waves that German
>submarines may pick up. I turned in my electrical shaver."
>        Dave
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