I’ve just watched The Dig on Netflix, set in Suffolk at the onset of WWII, and in it there was a scene with an official seemingly announcing that different coloured balls would be distributed during an air raid to denote the type of bomb being dropped by the germans:
“[announcer on loudspeaker] The yellow and green balls denote gas.
Red denotes high explosives.
[announcer] Red stripes are incendiary bombs.
If you are caught on the streets during an air raid, you must know the appropriate response to each form of attack.”
My Googling however has yielded no information on the existence of these balls (about the size of tennis balls and bouncy, in the film!). Can anyone out there help please or is this fictional?!
Thanks
I don't believe the balls were to be used during actual raids, more for training; in the novel it's a story related to Edith Pretty: "The cabbie told me that on the previous evening there had been an air-raid drill near to his home in Battersea. A warden had driven round the streets, throwing out different-coloured tennis balls from his car. Yellow and green balls denoted gas; red denoted high explosives, while those with red stripes represented incendiary bombs."
During a raid most people were expected to take shelter, so wouldn't be looking out for balls, but there was a warning for gas - wardens carried wooden rattles to alert people to don their gas masks, fear of aerial gas attack being widespread in the interwar years but thankfully not realised (see a previous question for further details of fears and preparations for gas attack).
The scene in The Dig may well be fictitious, though, I've never encountered similar descriptions in any accounts of pre-war Air Raid Precaution preparations. There were various training efforts - from Richard Overy's The Bombing War, for example: "In the summer of 1939 the Hull ARP organization ran regular training demonstrations of bombs and their effects in local parks; after detonating a miniature but very noisy high-explosive bomb, the training focused on gas bombs. Persistent gases (mustard gas and lewisite) were identified by smell; non-persistent gases were released in small quantities and the trainees warned to stand upwind while they observed its passage." Using different coloured balls rather than actual bombs has a ring of plausibility to it, it's not entirely impossible that an individual warden may have run such a exercise somewhere, but it wasn't a widespread thing as far as I can make out.