The sea is grey and choppy. There鈥檚 a splash. A body floats into view. An airman, forced to bail out of his burning plane, is bobbing up and down in the waves. His life jacket keeps him afloat, but he鈥檚 lying face down, arms and legs dangling helplessly beneath the water. In the standard wartime movie, this is the point at which the audience finally realises that the hero isn鈥檛 coming home, the Sun sinks into the sea and the credits roll. But this film is a record of a scientific experiment. Instead of the setting Sun, a young man in a one-piece swimsuit jumps into the water and pulls out the drowning man.
With the help of a wave machine, the swimming pool at Ealing film studios in west London does a good impression of the North Sea on a squally day. Warships have sunk in this pool. Spitfires have crashed into it. And actors playing heroes have slipped quietly beneath its waves. Cleared of model ships, planes and actors with stiff upper lips, the pool is an ideal place to perform tests that will contribute far more to the war effort. These experiments feature in a shaky, soundless film held in the archives of the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland. The aim was to find a life jacket that would save unconscious pilots from drowning. Even this film had its hero. For accuracy鈥檚 sake, someone had to be thrown unconscious into the water to see if the life jackets worked. Gar Pask volunteered to go under.
THE real Mae West always turned men鈥檚 heads. Unfortunately, the Mae West life jacket couldn鈥檛 be relied on to do the same. During the Second World War, airmen who bailed out over the sea were often unconscious when they hit the water. And by the time rescuers reached them they were often dead. Their life jackets kept them afloat 鈥� but if they landed face down they drowned.
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Edgar 鈥淕ar鈥� Pask was shocked by how often this happened. Pask was a young anaesthetist at the University of Oxford. But in 1941 he left his job to join the Royal air Force. The RAF immediately sent him to work at its physiological research centre at Farnborough. During a stint as an observer on a rescue launch, he became increasingly disturbed by the pointless deaths. If an unconscious man was to have any chance of survival, then his life jacket must twist him around so that he floated face up with his head held well clear of the water.
Ever since he joined the RAF, Pask had been working on ways to increase airmen鈥檚 chances when things went wrong. There were plenty of suggestions for ways to modify the standard Mae West. But they needed testing. That ought to be easy enough: send a man into the deep end, tell him to relax and pretend to be unconscious and let the life jacket do its stuff.
Only it wasn鈥檛 that simple, as Pask discovered when he tried it himself. 鈥淚t has been found impossible for the conscious volunteer to remain quite inert, particularly when things seem to be going wrong,鈥� he admitted later. He insisted that the tests must be done on an unconscious man 鈥� and that he would be the guinea pig.
Pask, dressed in full pilot鈥檚 gearof battledress, service underwear and a thick woollen sweater, was anaesthetised deeply. He was connected to an anaesthetic machine at the poolside by a long, buoyant hose attached to a tube pushed down his windpipe. The tube was held tightly against the wall of his windpipe by an inflatable cuff. Robert Macintosh, Pask鈥檚 boss from Oxford, controlled the flow of ether while a team of swimsuited scientists repeatedly threw the unconscious man into the pool.
Before the real tests started, though, there was something Pask wanted to try. 鈥淲e thought it would be interesting to learn what would happen to an unconscious subject, breathing lightly and not supported by a life jacket, when placed in fresh water.鈥� The result? 鈥淗e sank promptly. The trunk tends to sink a little after the legs but the subject soon came to rest in a horizontal position on the floor of the tank.鈥�
The trials seemed endless. Some were in fresh water. In others, sacks of salt were thrown in to increase buoyancy. And finally, the team decamped to the film studio at Ealing to see how effective the redesigned life jackets were in rough water. In the movies, model ships appeared to battle against immense seas. In reality, the waves generated by the studio鈥檚 wave machine were only a metre high. But that was enough to swamp a half-submerged man in a badly designed life jacket. There was no doubt that Pask was in danger. There was always the risk that water might seep past the cuff around the tube in his windpipe before the observers realised he was in trouble.
By now, however, Pask was used to the rigours of research with the RAF. His first mission had been to identify a survival suit that could cope with the freezing waters of the far North Atlantic. Such a suit was vital for any pilot assigned to protect the northern convoys. If they were shot down, they would last only a few minutes in those waters. Pask tested the designs himself, jumping into the sea off the Shetland Islands where the water was freezing and strong winds increased the chill factor. The tests were evidently a success: while Pask complained that he was too warm, his team of observers had to call a halt to the tests before they froze to death.
In 1942, Pask put himself at even greater risk. The team at Farnborough had been asked to answer something all aircrew desperately wanted to know. What was the maximum altitude they could bail out without breathing apparatus and survive? The higher you went, the lower the air pressure. Too high and there wasn鈥檛 enough pressure to drive oxygen through the air sacs of the lungs and into the blood.
For these tests, Pask dangled from a scaffold in a parachute harness and breathed mixtures of gases with successively lower percentages of oxygen to simulate pressures at different altitudes. At the highest 鈥渁ltitudes鈥� 鈥� between 35,000 and 40,000 feet 鈥� he lost consciousness, his muscles twitched and he struggled to breathe. It was life-threatening stuff, but the experiments established that pilots could parachute from around 35,000 feet without oxygen apparatus and still have a reasonable chance of survival.
Most dangerous of all Pask鈥檚 escapades was a series of experiments in 1943 to find out the best method of resuscitating a drowned airman in a speeding rescue launch. Some people recommended the mouth-to-mouth method. The Royal Life Saving Society preferred the Schafer method, laying the victim face down and applying pressure to the lower back. Others used the Sylvester method, lifting the arms and pushing down on the chest. Finally there was Eve鈥檚 technique, in which rescuers tilted or rocked the victim back and forth. But which was best? Which forced the most air through a drowned man鈥檚 lungs?
For Pask, the only reliable way to find out was to compare all the methods on the same person under the same conditions. And that person must have stopped breathing. Again, Pask offered to be the guinea pig. This time, he would be anaesthetised to the point of respiratory arrest. Unless his breathing was restored he would die.
During two days of tests, Macintosh anaesthetised Pask until he stopped breathing, then connected a tube in Pask鈥檚 windpipe to a device that would monitor the amount of air going in and out of his lungs during the attempts at artificial respiration. On the first day, in the course of two hours of experiments, Pask was taken to the point of respiratory arrest seven or eight times. Two days later he went through it all again. The trials showed that Eve鈥檚 rocking method pumped the most air through the lungs. After that, volunteering to test the effectiveness of life jackets didn鈥檛 seem so risky鈥�
Pask鈥檚 work remained secret until the war ended, when he wrote up his self-experiments and won the distinction of being the only man to have carried out all his research while asleep. But it was another 20 years before he owned up to one particular wartime investigation. He and his colleague John Gilson had been asked if there was any way that Winston Churchill could safely take oxygen at altitudes above 8000 feet and still smoke a cigar. The pair took an ordinary cigar holder and added a side tube for the oxygen. Unfortunately, they couldn鈥檛 find a valve that would ensure the oxygen always flowed in the right direction 鈥� into Churchill鈥檚 throat.
鈥淭he trouble was that the device worked unless you happened to put your tongue over the end of the cigar holder inside your mouth,鈥� said Pask. 鈥淭his caused the oxygen to flow not into Churchill, but out past the incompetent non-return valve and through the lighted cigar. The wretched thing then burst into a brilliant white flame and about an inch of the best Havana disappeared before you could realise what had gone wrong.鈥�