Early Attempts To Introduce Area Screening in SWPA

Early Attempts To Introduce Area Screening in SWPA 

In the early phases of the war in the Southwest Pacific Area commanders who considered area screening as a means of concealing airfields from enemy air attack ran up against several serious problems. These included not only a lack of a suitable means for static screening and a shortage of smoke materials but also a scarcity in shipping, both within the immediate area and from the United States to SWPA. If smoke was to be used the means and material would have to be devised locally. 

When an industrial survey disclosed that large quantities of the FS smoke material could be produced in Australia, Colonel Copthorne, Chief Chemical Officer, USASOS SWPA, assigned the 426 Chemical 

Laboratory, then in Brisbane, the mission of developing both a large and a small smoke generator which could employ this chemical smoke. Tests in the summer of 194a revealed deficiencies in the large model which was dropped entirely later in the year after word came that the newly developed mechanical smoke generator would soon be made available to the theater. The 4ad Laboratory Company went on to develop a small smoke generator which was to see limited use in the theater. 

In May 1943 the theater asked the Chief, CWS, to comment on Its tentative plans for a smoke installation at Milne Bay, which, as had been foreseen, was now a more exposed harbor than Port Moresby. These plans, which included the employment of generators both on land and on water to conceal shipping activity in the harbor, suffered from a lack of power boats on which to mount the generators which were to be waterborne. The theater requested the War Department to send several craft suitable for this purpose along with the two smoke companies requisitioned earlier in the year.  

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