The Daily Alaska Empire

Air Raid "Oscars" in FBI Show Would Scare Man Even from Mars
By JACK STINNETT
WASHINGTON. Oct. 23. -- If bombs ever fall on the United States, our police won't be caught short in knowledge of the best methods of meeting such emergencies.
Over at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover's boys have set up an exhibition straight from England, showing all of the equipment used by police during black-outs and air raids.
There are a couple of Oscars (ghoulish dummies used by the FBI in demonstrating murder investigations) decked out in costumes that would make Men from Mars look like a bunch of sissies.
In snouted gas masks, rubber suits and boots, steel helmets, walkie-talkie radios strapped to their backs, and "blackout lights," which look like cowbells at their belts, these two fellows are enough to finish off a good nightmare even if never a bomb was dropped.
To anyone who ever has battled the traffic of American cities, probably even more impressive will be the display of street lights, traffic lights, and auto headlamps.
With bumpers painted white, strips of white paint around fenders, and a single headlight that shows three slits of down-cast light, the sample of an authorized car for black-out driving can be dimly seen at 20 paces.
The street lamps, "20 feet above the kerb," toss out the glorious illumination of 0.2 of one candle power—about the same as a lighted cigarette held a foot away from the object you wish to see.
The traffic lights are the customary green-yellow-red, but the light is emitted from little four-inch crosses, with bars an eighth of an inch wide.
There's a lot more to the exhibition—bomb shelters, various methods of combatting incendiary bombs, air raid sirens, first aid in air raids, and a dozen other horrendous things that any good police force in a bombed city would have to know.
The exhibition is semi-public that is, available to visitors to the Justice Department Building, when it is not being used to instruct "re-training courses" in the FBI's national police school, where 400 men from police departments all over the country are getting concentrated instruction in methods employed by London bobbies to protect the public during air raids.
There is one story in connection with the exhibition that never has been told. Early last winter, Hoover sent two of his ablest assistants to London at the height of the air-raid season.
He told them to take their time, to make a thorough study of everything that had to do with police
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Air Raid "Oscars" in
FBI Show Would Scare
Man Even from
Mars

(Continued From Page One)
activity during blackouts and air
raids. He armed them with special
letters to Scotland Yard officials
and ordered them to bring back
every item of equipment that might
be used in demonstrating British
methods to the American police.
The men stayed four months
and, collected hundreds of pieces
of equipment, ranging from mittens
with finger tips cut out (for
teletype operators, and such, during
gas attacks) to tail-fins from 4,400-
pound "land mines" (which were
dropped on London and made craters
60 feet deep).
The men came back by plane,
the exhibition by ship.
Somewhere
off the coast of the British
Isles, ship and exhibition lie at
the bottom of the sea, victims of
a submarine.
It took nearly six months more
to assemble another collection and
get it over here. It is the only such
exhibition in the United States.