R.E.L. Optics Questions

[Surpmil]

If you don't have a copy of "Without Warning" by Clive Law, you should pick one up. I doubt the sunshade for the C67 was of any material but rubber, perhaps with some fibre stiffening. Anything else would potentially impact the shooter's brow.

The story of REL is a microcosm of Canadian industrial history in my opinion: it was a company built from an empty lot in 1940 to over 7500 employees by 1945 and then promptly shut down and "disappeared" not long after. Canada's assigned role in the world of geopolitics is to be a supplier of raw materials and a market for first British and later American goods. As well as a supplier of human "raw material" to the U.K. if that could be arranged. Thanks to the weakness of our political leadership in WWII, that effort was largely successful, in contrast to WWI where our leaders, despite being in some ways closer to the UK or appearing to be, actually carved a much more independent role for us than our ostensibly "Canadian" government of WWII. This correlated of course with the geopolitical goal of minimizing the growth of Canadian economic and political independence and "national sense", which happened to suit both British and American plans. The growth in those phenomena that resulted from Canada's successes in WWI was not something either "great power" wished to encourage. A short-sighted betrayal on the part of the U.K. leadership as soon enough they found themselves being squeezed in the same vise, as the USA leveraged its financial hold over them after 1945 to pick their intellectual pockets and undermine their industries and exports, the aircraft industry first and foremost.

But we digress: R.E.L. built a great range of optical, electronic and mechanical equipment, and built it very well indeed as well as doing a good deal of original research. As a "Crown Corporation" they obviously saw their role, whether officially assigned to them or not, as more than just producing from whatever drawings were passed to them by the bureaucrats, but innovating improvements where they could. What mechanisms existed for soliciting and receiving user feedback I don't know, but some no doubt did. A private contractor would be likely to introduce only changes that were financially beneficial to them, unless of course they happened to "care" enough to attempt improvements that would benefit the equipment users, or hoped to profit in future from any such innovations.

Law documented the games played to keep the REL/SAL innovations out of consideration for U.K. service. Not even a Monte Carlo stock for the No4(T) could be accepted without intolerable loss of face apparently, despite the user enthusiasm for them in the 1944 trials held in the U.K. And so British snipers were stuck with that misplaced cheekrest and the Victorian observing telescopes right to the bitter end.

Just another reminder of how decisions are rarely made on the basis of logic and military effectiveness. Recently picked up a book called "The Secret War 1939-1945" by Gerald Pawle: a history of the Department of Miscellaneous Weapon Development in the (British) Admiralty. The head was a Canadian, Cmdr. (Sir) Charles Goodeve. At one point when the Hedgehog anti-submarine weapon was in development, this at the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, the head of a competing research department came to Goodeve to ask him to

...abandon all work on the new weapon altogether. Goodeve's visitor said bluntly that he wanted a clear field for the development of one of the competing anti-submarine weapons. The future of his own establishment depended on getting their own anti-submarine weapon into service, whereas Goodeve had no need to enhance his own reputation. Clearly, added his caller, the only honourable course was D.M.W.D. was to cease all work on the Hedgehog forwith. Goodeve was flabbergasted. This astonishing request completely ignored the needs of the Navy..."

Plenty of other examples in that book of the bureaucratic and "military mind" at work I might add! Again and again weapons systems that later became famous and highly successful had to struggle to overcome official apathy, lack of vision or such bureaucratic obstructionism, the "bouncing bomb" among them.