Secret Weapons

As zero hour approached in the battle of Europe, both sides were agog last week over secret weapons:

P: The Nazis had the heavily secret jet-propelled planes of Britain and the U.S. to worry about. But the Nazis uncovered rocket planes of their own during raids on northwest Germany.

P: Adolph Hitler, in his New Year's message, attributed the failure of his U-boats to "one single technical invention" by the Allies. Neither Hitler nor the U.S. Navy was more explicit, but Hitler probably referred to new submarine-detecting devices.

P: What the press now calls the French "rocket-gun coast" continued to get a dramatic pasting from Allied bombers. Rocket guns may or may not have been the bombers' targets. But London buzzed with speculation about secret superrockets and atomic explosives.

Yet, for all the talk, no reputable United Nations scientist or military man believes that secret weapons will have any decisive effect on the war's outcome. This certainty springs in part from the probability that there is no such thing as a completely secret weapon--jet-propelled planes (flown by Italians before the war), rocket guns and atom-busting have all been subjects of intense research by both United Nations and Axis scientists. In part this skepticism springs from the fact that secret weapons have seldom given an army anything more than a temporary advantage.

215 and All That. To defend Syracuse against the Romans (215 B.C.), Archimedes contrived huge rock-throwing slings, long poles thrust from the city's walls to drop missiles on enemy heads, great cranes that hooked into the prows of the Roman ships and hoisted them into the air, "burning mirrors" with which (according to legend) he set the fleet afire. Plutarch reported that Archimedes so terrified the Romans that "if they did but see a little rope or a piece of wood from the city's walls . . . they turned their backs and fled." But they captured Syracuse.

"Greek fire" (a mixture of pitch, sulfur, quicklime and petroleum), invented by a Syrian named Callinicus, saved Constantinople from the Saracens (673-77 A.D.). This was one of the most impressive victories of a secret weapon.

The Battle of Crecy (1346) was notable for the introduction of two "secret" weapons by the British--gunpowder (which fizzled) and the longbow, with which the British put the armored French knights to rout. Nevertheless, the Hundred Years War dragged on into the next century without decisive result.

One of the quickest stalematings of a secret weapon by a secret weapon was the celebrated battle of the ironclads in the U.S. Civil War. Less than 24 hours after the South's armored Merrimac had attacked the North's wooden fleet at Hampton Roads, the Yankee Monitor, an armored "cheesebox" invented by John Ericcson, hove into cannon range. They slugged each other to a standoff.

1914 and After. Of the three great surprise weapons of World War I--Britain's tanks, Germany's Big Berthas and poison gas--none played a decisive part in the outcome. Gas would have been no surprise to the Spartans, who used sulfur fumes in the siege of Plataea (428 B.C.) and lost the battle.

The major secret weapons revealed to civilians in this war have been the magnetic mine, rocket guns (such as the U.S. bazooka and the Russian katusha) and radar. The magnetic mine, sprung by the Germans on Nov. 18, 1939, was neutralized within a month (by equipping ships with degaussing girdles). Rocket guns are now in use both by Axis and Allied armies. Radar is credited with a very large share of British victory in the Battle of Britain. But Germany's radio locator has not enabled the Nazis to avoid defeat in the aerial Battle of Germany.

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