Pawle, Gerald (foreword by Nevil Shute), — THE SECRET WAR 1939-45.

Harrap, London, 1957, reprint, 297pp, frontis and 22pp half tone photo ills., facsimile in text, pictorial endpapers, blue cloth lettered in gilt at spine, coloured pictorial dustwrapper by Biro, an account of the Royal Navy's Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapon Development, the department responsible to testing the ideas for new weapons for the efficiient prosecution of WW2 and developing those that seemed to have merit. In the early days of weapons shortage they developed the 'Holman Projector', in use by the RNPS the before anti-aircraft weapons were in mass production it threw a Mills bomb hand grenade at attacking aircraft. Their most notable successes were probably the 'Hedgehog' anti-submarine bomb thrower which replaced the depth charge and which threw a pattern of bombs into the sea which exploded on contact and the 'Swiss Roll' floating roadway used at Normandy. The engineer Lt. Cdr. Nevil Shute Norway (later to become a well known novelist) was a member that Directorate and wrote the foreword, flecks of colour loss to cloth at upper board, edges tanned and faintly foxed, small marks recto frontispiece, dustwrapper: price clipped, a little rubbed at extrems., several short nicks, repaired to reverse, very good in a very good dustwrapper,