of the grenade ordered that it immediately be put into production. His memo of October 1940 simply read "Sticky bomb. Make one million". A couple of days later, Anthony Eden, then secretary of state for war, added a scribbled note to a cabinet minute that recorded the order to go ahead with the bomb: In spite of top level pressure, the arguments rumbled on. Trials were disappointing, it was not possible to get the bomb to adhere to any surface that was wet or covered with even the thinnest film of dried mud "a customary condition of tanks" as Major-General Ismay, on 27 June, pointed out. Churchill was not amused: Macrae, Ismay and Churchill all saw fit to record these arguments over the technical issue of stickiness. As Eden had pointed out, there was a lot at stake. The British infantry and Home Guard had little with which to put up a fight against tanks and to any who had witnessed trials of Molotov cocktails and SIP grenades it was evident that they could do little to a modern tank other than to provide a blinding pall of smoke. What was needed was a hand weapon to deliver a coup de grâce by punching through the armoured plate. The sticky bomb could do the job and little else was available. In his memoirs, Ismay recalled that he never solved the puzzle of how to convey his very genuine concerns of the time to the right people. A thrown sticky bomb simply would not reliably stick to a vertical surface; the bomb would stick if it was thrown onto the top of a tank, where the plates were more or less horizontal – and thinner – but this reduced the throwing range to at the most, getting that close would only be possible in an ambush or in street fighting. Churchill considered any obstruction, however well-meaning, as singularly lacking in imagination. In the event of invasion, he foresaw a desperate fight to the last and after the war, he wrote about how he envisaged the use of the sticky bomb, "We had the picture in mind that devoted soldiers or civilians would run close up to the tank and even thrust the bomb upon it, though its explosion cost them their lives. There were undoubtedly many who would have done it". He also later recorded how he intended to use the