German phosphorous bombs

Heroes Remember

German phosphorous bombs

Transcript

The Germans, the Luftwaffe, had started dropping a lot of bits of paper coated with phosphorous but with, very wet, soaking wet, dropping them out of planes over farmers fields in England as well as bombs, they were dropping these things. The idea was when the phosphorous, they settled on the ground in the wheat fields and so on, the sun would dry them out and the phosphorus would ignite spontaneously and set fire to the fields and this was going to cause great havoc to the, not only the food industry in Britain but smoke and everything else you see. It was a very ingenious scheme.

Description

Mr. Beall describes how Germany bombed British cropland with bombs filled with phosphorous impregnated paper, which would theoretically set fire to crops.

Herbert Beall

Herbert Beall was born in 1908 in Ottawa, Ontario. He attended Lisgard Collegiate, where he commanded the 94th Cadet Battalion, and also joined the Governor-General's Footguards. He entered the Canadian Officer Training Corps at university, and received his commission in 1931. In 1932, Mr. Beall joined the Royal Canadian Signal Corps. In February, 1941 he transferred to the RCAF as a Flying Officer with the rank of Lieutenant. His service in England saw him at radar stations in the Orkney Islands and the Isle of Wight. He later went to the Middle East, where he set up and maintained portable radar systems in Egypt, and to a lesser extent Kuwait and Jordan.

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