• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Suspiciously Accurate Pop Media Items Attracting Official Inquiries

oll_lewis

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Feb 14, 2002
Messages
1,861
My flatmate has a book about navy blunders from around the world and read me out an interesting one the other day.
When nuclear subs first came about the Eagle comic decided they would do an exploded diagram of one for a pull out in the centre pages (they did do pull outs of planes and boats, I've sean a few of them).
As the subs innards were top secret the artist decided he would just make it up, starting with useing the largest peice of mashinary in the midle of the sub where it would balance better.
Aparently, so the story gos, the artists depiction of the sub was so accurate that after the article was published he was arrested by military inteligence operatives (or some M.I. something organisation) and told to reveeal his sourse.

It seams a little far feched but can anyone conferm it, dose any one have that issue of the eagle? (I think it had the issue number or publication date noted in the book so if it dose I'll post it)

I can remember going on a tour of a nucleair sub on a plymoth navy day in the 80's with my uncle who was a highly ranked navy bod. You were only alowed in the crews quarters though :) and no photos, the other parts were locked off and gauarded by sailors/submarinars.
most of the interior was painted black or gray-blue and one sailor/submarinar was selling pink plymoth navy day rock from some sort of sevice hatch.
I was only around 7 at the time (so posibly 87/88) so It was just like going on any old sub or boat realy.
When we went to another navy day in 1990 or 91 my dad enquired about tour of the nuclear subs again as my brother and I had been too young to realy appreceate it at the time, but the officer he talked to and told of the earlier tour didn't belive that such an event had ever happened.
was this tour something 'they' are trying to cover up or is it some kind of strange created memory my dad, my brother and me share ? or was it just a regular sub full of submarinars laughing about the hilarious trick they played on gullible civilians ?
 
This review of The Eagle Annual of the Cutaways:

https://bearalley.blogspot.com/2008/10/eagle-annual-of-cutaways.html

... provides a substantial bit of evidence that this story is true.

The book begins with an interesting preface by Colin Frewin, the copyright holder of the Eagle name and much of its content. He recounts the story of Eagle’s publication of a cutaway of a nuclear submarine, which was so accurate in its speculations that the Government almost served a ‘D’ notice on Eagle, banning its publication!

Unfortunately, Frewin's remarks apparently don't extend to identifying which issue of Eagle (or even which year) was involved.

The new book does not print the dates of the original publications of each of the cutaways.
 
My first guess is that this story relates to L. Ashwell Wood's cutaway of Britain's first atomic submarine. This appeared in Eagle in 1960 (issue 11-06).

LAshwellWood-UK1stAtomSub-1960.jpg
 
There Is a very similar story told about the designer of the Doctor Who serial The Sea Devils making a model submarine for the show and bring visited by military intelligence who suspected him of having access to secret plans.

I'll have to check, but I believe this story is told in an interview on the Sea Devils DVD.
 
Something similar happened during the making of Dr Strangelove
In the early 1960s the B-52 was cutting-edge technology. Access to it was a matter of national security. The Pentagon refused to lend any support to the film after they read the script. Set designers reconstructed the B-52 bomber's cockpit from a single photograph that appeared in a British flying magazine. When some American Air Force personnel were invited to view the movie's B-52 cockpit, they said it was a perfect copy. Stanley Kubrick feared that Ken Adam's production design team had used illegal methods and could be investigated by the FBI.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv
 
There Is a very similar story told about the designer of the Doctor Who serial The Sea Devils making a model submarine for the show and bring visited by military intelligence who suspected him of having access to secret plans.

I'll have to check, but I believe this story is told in an interview on the Sea Devils DVD.
I was just thinking I would add this story to the thread and you beat me too it! It was specifically about the number of blades on the propellor. This gives a particular acoustic signature making it easier to identify who the sub belongs to underwater when you hear it. The designer gave it the number of blades because he thought it looked more artistically correct.
Interview with Michael Briant, the director
 
I was just thinking I would add this story to the thread and you beat me too it! It was specifically about the number of blades on the propellor. This gives a particular acoustic signature making it easier to identify who the sub belongs to underwater when you hear it. The designer gave it the number of blades because he thought it looked more artistically correct.
Interview with Michael Briant, the director

Thanks for the info, Gordon!

Judging by this thread, it seems as though military intelligence people spend a lot of their time reading comics and watching 70s Doctor Who. I wonder if they're recruiting at the moment, I feel I have the perfect skillset for the role.
 
There's an Arthur C Clarke story in a similar vein about a toymaker who progresses to making convincing-looking model spacraft for a kids' sci-fi show. One day, he receives a visit from a couple of MIB types who quiz him at length about his inspiration for the designs. Then he notices the vehicle they arrived in...
 
After further delving into the Eagle story I'm now confident the 1960 cutaway is the one at issue. The 1960 nuclear sub cutaway is the first Eagle cutaway of a nuclear sub included in a complete collection of Eagle maritime cutaways.

Given this as the basis ...

The first British nuclear submarine was HMS Dreadnought, launched in October 1960.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Dreadnought_(S101)

In 1960 Eagle was published weekly, and the volume designations reflected calendar year boundaries (ianuary - December).
https://boysadventurecomics.blogspot.com/2018/05/correcting-comic-myths-1-how-many.html?m=1

The attribution of the cutaway to issue 11-06 therefore places the publication date in February 1960 - circa 8 months prior to the real sub's launch.

As such, one can understand how official concern might arise about an accurate depiction of the sub's inner workings while it was still under construction.
 
Last edited:
As the subs innards were top secret the artist decided he would just make it up, starting with useing the largest peice of mashinary in the midle of the sub where it would balance better.

IMHO this risks over-estimating the power of Ashwell Wood's imagination.

HMS Dreadnought's nuclear propulsion system employed tech developed and used by the US Navy. (Wholly British-designed propulsion tech would not arrive until the second nuclear sub - Valiant.)

The American nuclear subs starting with Nautilus had been widely publicized with illustrations (including cutaways) of their internal layouts.

I don't know what source(s) Ashwell Wood may have drawn upon in creating his cutaway, but if he'd extrapolated from extant illustrations of then-current-generation American nuclear subs he'd understandably generate something pretty close to what would be installed in HMS Dreadnought.
 
In the early 60's, whilst researching his book "The Mare's Nest", about the development of the Nazi V-weapons, David Irving discovered that the Allies had broken German Enigma codes, at least a decade before this became public knowledge. Because he had been privy to sensitive Defence files, his book had to be vetted before publishing, and he was subsequently summoned to a Cabinet Office meeting by a couple of late-night callers in raincoats, where, as a patriotic Englishman, he was asked to to reconsider this revelation - which was duly removed from the book. (The powers-that-be repaid his gracious act by furnishing him with the exclusive use of Rommel's personnel file)

So why would they ask this of him? Well, because the UK Govt were flogging captured Enigma machines for decades to other countries, marketing them as "unbreakable"...
 
In the early 60's, whilst researching his book "The Mare's Nest", about the development of the Nazi V-weapons, David Irving discovered that the Allies had broken German Enigma codes, at least a decade before this became public knowledge. Because he had been privy to sensitive Defence files, his book had to be vetted before publishing, and he was subsequently summoned to a Cabinet Office meeting by a couple of late-night callers in raincoats, where, as a patriotic Englishman, he was asked to to reconsider this revelation - which was duly removed from the book. (The powers-that-be repaid his gracious act by furnishing him with the exclusive use of Rommel's personnel file)

So why would they ask this of him? Well, because the UK Govt were flogging captured Enigma machines for decades to other countries, marketing them as "unbreakable"...
Didn't he also get labelled as a 'Holocaust denier' because of his variant conclusions about WWII?
 
In the months leading up to D-Day, the following words - all codewords associated with that operation - appeared as solutions in Daily Telegraph crossword puzzles:

All the names of the landing beaches:

Gold
Sword
Juno
Utah
Omaha


Overlord (codename for the entire operation)
Mulberry (the artificial harbour moored at Normandy)
Neptune ( the naval phase of D-Day)

The compiler and his supervisor were both arrested and interrogated by MI5.

The story of the investigation.

maximus otter
 
Back
Top