One idea about gas detector patches — something else which is clear from Douglas is that the Air Ministry wasn’t actually very keen on gas bombs, because an accident could expose air- and groundcrew. So maybe that was part of the purpose of the patches? But then I don’t know that a late-war FAA Corsair would be a likely delivery system for gas (though they were used as fighter-bombers).

A few byways – I’m not sure how ‘good’ (read effective) bombs adapted from gas shells would have been in reality; by the inter war period the realisation of the different casing requirements for bombs to shells were well established, although many bombs were found to be pretty useless in reality as well. Fuzing would be the second issue, and I’d bet a pound to a bent copper that there’d have been a lot of duds even if they’d figured how to create aero fuzes that worked rather than the shell type.

There is a patch on the wing of the Fleet Air Arm Museum’s F4U Corsair conservation project that no-one knows why it’s there. It’s been reasonably conjectured that it might be gas-detection paint, which would raise a raft of questions.

http://www.fleetairarm.com/en-GB/past_projects.aspx

Thirdly, in our publication by Alex Crawford on the Hawker Hart family*, there’s reference to Porton Down:

“In June [1939] bombing practice was carried out at Porton. Trials were carried out with containers filled with petrol, which were then dropped from five [Hawker] Hectors at Dartmoor.”

References like this (which could relate to jellied petroleum, later napalm, or liquid based gas attacks) or chemical gas attacks (often just under the ‘cover’ of camouflage smoke practice) are scattered through the period references.

James

*Hawker Hart Family, Alex Crawford, MMP Books, 2008.

I hope whoever it is you’re talking about did get it in time!

R.M. Douglas himself is another of those rare (yet cool) examples of people who cross over between air and police history, since also he wrote a book about Mary Allen, everyone’s favourite flying leatherclad lesbian fascist policewoman.