Firstly, Britain's air defences were stronger. The reason why this intrigues me is that I've long wondered why the British government didn't make more of an effort to promote confidence in Britain's air defences in the late 1930s. One was to reassure the public that Britain was safe from air attack in the event of another general European war, the other, according to a press release in July 1945, a deception to cover the real work going on with radar. The government made such announcements about 'invisible walls' and 'rays' for two reasons. But I was also intrigued by something else Bill said, in the context of other press stories of Air Ministry interest in death ray inventions: That turned out to be not quite what happened. After reading Bill Fanning's Death Rays and the Popular Media, I looked at a murky 1937 claim of an official British death ray, supposedly on the authority of Sir Thomas 'Caligula's horse' Inskip, Minister for Defence Co-ordination.
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