Most Secret War

by R. V. Jones

  The raid still had a long time to go, but all of us in the flats rallied in the way that people do. The flicker of a candle appeared in the bottom flat and Mrs. Butler, the frail but imperturbable occupant, invited us all in. Our companions were a select lot—selected by the simple test of refusing to budge from London after nearly three months of bombing. With Mrs. Butler were her teenage daughter June, and a rather exotic child psychiatrist, Madam Foussé. From the flat opposite there was Miss Loman, who worked in a bank, and from the flat above Mrs. Butler were a couple in their sixties, the Bryants, whose son Denys, was out at the time with the Auxiliary Fire Service, and whose daughter-in-law, Lilian, a girl of magnificent courage and humour, was driving an ambulance. From the flat opposite the Bryants there were the Radcliffs; and neither of them said much but quietly stuck it out. Finally, there were the four of us intent on our quiet weekend.

  Somethow Madam Foussé got enough heat to boil a kettle, even though all the grates were stacked high with dislodged soot, and made tea. Tradition in this situation clearly expected my mouthorgan, and so I began to play. When I ran out of breath, we took to story-telling; quite the best that night was one told us by Madam Foussé. She had at one time lived in a flat in San Francisco with a companion, and they had been shopping in a drug store. Among other things she had bought a loofah sponge which she left for her maid to unpack from her shopping bag. Madam Foussé noticed that the loofah did not duly appear in the bathroom, and she wondered what had happened to it. She was served it at dinner, steamed and with white sauce.

  Thoughts of bathrooms made me wonder what had happened to our water supply. It was almost certain that our mains had been cut, and we might well be in difficulty, especially if a fire started. I therefore climbed the stairs by the light of the fires outside, and went back to our own flat to fill the bath with water. It seemed to take a very long time, as there was only a slow trickle of rusty water, but eventually the bath was full. The flat was still shaking with the thud of bombs; we had three further sticks within a hundred yards, and furniture was thrown about the rooms, fortunately with little damage. I then went downstairs again, and started a second round on the mouthorgan.

  Suddenly someone fresh burst in through the door. It was Mrs. Anderson, the resident in the one other occupied flat in the block whom we had assumed to be away when she failed to appear with the rest of us. She was notorious for her stream of complaints to the management about almost everything from the behaviour of the porters to the sticking of the lifts, and the noise from other people’s wireless sets, including mine. She was well known, not only in our own block of flats but in most of the others owned by the same syndicate.

  We were not surprised now to find her hysterical. At least, that is what we thought she was when she burst in with ‘Ealing cemetery’s on fire!’ Actually, it was quite true. She had been visiting another part of London and had tried to make her way home through the raid. She had come as far as she could by bus, and then had to walk through the brunt of the raid in Richmond. Incendiaries had fallen in Ealing cemetery and the grass, uncut for lack of labour, was long and dry, so that the cemetery really was in flames. Mrs. Anderson was one of those who complain unceasingly about the pin-pricks of life, but who have tremendous guts when there is a real disaster to face. She was actually quite calm and collected, and not at all unnerved by walking alone through the blazing streets of Richmond, with the bombs still falling.

  Gradually the intensity of bombing died away; and by three o’clock we were able to get some sleep. Charles and I, of course, had to be up at the normal time the next morning, because Scott-Farnie was coming to take us to Fighter Command. He finally appeared climbing over the rubble that surrounded us, having searched in vain for the clock tower.

  I could hardly have been in a more suitable mood for attending a conference at Fighter Command to discuss what use the Command was making of the information that I had been supplying. Charles and I both had bandaged heads and headaches from the car crash. The Senior Air Staff Officer, Air Marshal Douglas Evill, was in the Chair, and I said very little until the end of the meeting. I was not altogether satisfied with the way things had gone, and I finally said that I would like to know just what the Command had so far been doing with the information, since I could see very little result. The Air Marshal gave the usual stalling reply that I must realize that mine was not the only information which the Command had available, and that they had to take this other information into account when making their dispositions. My intervention had caused something of an uncomfortable stir among the Command representatives and I could feel their relief at the skilful reply of the Air Marshal, but I knew that it was untrue and I made a direct counter: ‘In that case, sir, I have evidently overrated the importance of what I and my sources have been doing. We have a good many other things to do, and if you can get most of what you want in other ways, I will redirect my sources on to other problems.’ This did the trick, for the Air Marshal then saw that the Command would be left without its main source of information for making its nightly dispositions, and he capitulated. The Command was very attentive to us after that.

  After lunch we returned home, to find that the water had indeed been cut off, and I went proudly into our bathroom to contemplate my prize, gained at such a risk. The bath was empty. I asked what had happened to it. Vera said, ‘Oh, it was full of dirty water, so I emptied it.’ For days we had to traipse for water down six flights of stairs and hundreds of yards to a stand pipe in the road. Life between us has never been quite the same since.

  When we went to the office the following day, the relevant Enigma signals had been decoded. The target number for our lively night had been No. 54. It would have been flattering, and disturbing, if I myself had been the main objective; but, as far as we could see, the intended aiming point was situated some hundreds of yards away in Richmond Park. The only explanation that I have ever been able to offer is that the Germans did indeed suspect that there was an underground factory in the Park. I have sometimes wondered what I would have done had the Enigma messages been decoded, as so often happened, before we went home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Atrocious Crime

  EVEN THOUGH we now had the radio and audio frequencies of the X-beam correct, and although Bromide jammers were now in operation, there was still little sign in early December that our countermeasures were troubling KGr100. Our remaining defect probably lay in the simple operation of picking up the German beams on a receiver, noting the dial reading and converting this to a frequency, and then setting a jammer on this same frequency. Put simply, British instruments were not as precise as they were supposed to be—and many people may have died as a result. I myself had been interested in many aspects of precision before the war, from straightening the ranks at Trooping the Colour to making accurate measurements in science: but even if I had had no previous inclination in that direction, the experience of Coventry and the other cities would have burnt precision into my mind.

  The countermeasures organization was nevertheless claiming success. It even argued that the Coventry raid was evidence for the success of countermeasures because KGr100’s accuracy had been destroyed so that they could do nothing more precise than fire-raising. In a way, Coventry was indeed evidence of success, not against KGr100 but against Knickebein, the countering of which had forced the Luftwaffe to use KGr100 in a different role from that originally intended. But if Round One in the Battle of the Beams had resulted in the defeat of Knickebein, Round Two against the X-Gerät had gone heavily in favour of the Germans. Once again, the importance of an independent voice was vital, as Churchill himself had commented in writing of Haig in the first war: ‘The temptation to tell a Chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear is the commonest explanation of mistaken policy. Thus the outlook of the leader on whose decisions fateful events depend is usually far more sanguine than the brutal facts admit.’

  Nothing but detailed chapter and verse would enable me
to pin down those in the countermeasures organization who were painting too rosy a picture: the most effective way would be, I thought, to write a full report. This took all the December evenings at Richmond. The report ran to twenty thousand words and covered all aspects of the X system, both technical and operational, as we then knew them. Entirely written in longhand, it was typed by Daisy Mowat direct from my manuscript. I can still see her with duplicator ink smeared over her elegantly groomed and smiling face in the rush to get it finished. Harold Blyth drew the diagrams, Claude Wavell provided the photographs, and Charles Frank contributed an Appendix on the theory of bombing on the X system. Together we assembled and stapled some thirty copies and gave them as wide a circulation as I dared in view of the security. This obviously took time; the report was only finished on 12th January 1941, and action had to be taken well before then. Although hitherto I had always observed Benjamin Franklin’s dictum that ‘I shall never ask, never refuse, nor ever resign an office’ I felt that the time had come to demand more power.

  Although I had now been in Air Intelligence for more than a year I had never met the Director, Air Commodore Boyle; nor, for that matter, had I met Stewart Menzies. When the Air Ministry was split into two in the summer of 1940 the Directorate of Scientific Research to which, strictly speaking, I belonged, had been transferred to the Ministry of Aircraft Production, and so I was technically in a different Ministry from the Air Staff. I would have a better say if I had a recognized position on the Air Staff, and shortly before Christmas I asked to see Boyle and Pye. Both interviews were arranged for Boxing Day.

  To my surprise, Boyle was full of enthusiasm, telling me that what I had done was the finest piece of Intelligence he had ever seen, and that he would very readily agree to my becoming one of his Assistant Directors. I also saw Pye; and so arrangements for my official transfer to the Air Staff could be put in train. In the meantime, I was working to complete my report on the X-beams, and this appeared on 12th January 1941, before any transactions between the two Directors had got very far.

  Besides the details of the X-beam system the report outlined the principles of countermeasures policy:

  14.2 There are three possible aims of countermeasures: (1) To mislead the enemy, so that he erroneously thinks that he has attacked the correct target; (2) To induce a mistrust in his pilots, so that they are not sure whether to believe their instruments and/or their senses, and thus jeopardize their efficiency; (3) To wreck the particular system of instrumental aids employed in such a crude and rapid way that the enemy knows that they are useless, so that his staff may be discouraged from developing similar aids.…

  14.4 With the X-Gerät, we have fallen between two stools because we have probably not discouraged the Germans from beam bombing. They will hope to repeat their transient success, with an improved system. With Knickebein, our crude methods have probably led them to discard the idea of ever again putting such a system into the entire bombing force—at least during the present war. We must therefore expect from time to time to be faced with small formations using specialized methods, and we will be forced to counter them in turn, or we can use crude but rapid counters: if we succeed in killing three methods as soon as they are tried on us, we shall have established a moral superiority which may lead the German staff to abandon all hope of developing a successful method. This is going to make great demands on Intelligence, and on a countermeasure organization, and will require the best technical assistance that can be obtained. The war can be lost without a good, clear thinking, Countermeasure Policy.

  The report had a little light relief in the misfortunes of Feldwebel Ostermeier, where after describing the X-beam transmitters in France it went on:

  8.7 In addition to the above stations, there are other transmitters in Germany, which are used to establish a system of beams on which the crews of K.Gr.100 can practise. The source of the director beam is at Klein Helle, N.W. of Neubrandenburg. This station was under the charge of Feldwebel Ostermeier, whose misfortunes and plaintive garrulity rival those of Donald Duck. He seems to be well known throughout the whole company for his comic stupidity, and those in charge of the other stations delight in sending him dud equipment. The month of October was particularly unfortunate for Ostermeier, as he started it by receiving a complete transmitting set which was defective in so many ways that no one piece of the apparatus could be tested individually. He then waged an epic struggle in which he no sooner put one component right than another went wrong, while the replacements which he ordered from the stores at Koethen repeatedly arrived in unsound condition. At last the transmitter worked: within a day it had broken down again. Koethen then came to his assistance and on 14.10.40, one transmitter was working fairly satisfactorily, but by the end of the month, Ostermeier was in trouble again, describing his plight in somewhat euphonious letters to the stores. About this time he began to express fears about the effects the ravages of the winter might have on his monitoring vans, and was trying to get huts built for them. It is not known whether he was successful, for at the end of November he was removed and sent to HITLER1 (the beam station, not the Führer) by an exasperated senior officer. The reason for his removal was that K.Gr.100 had been asked to give a demonstration to Reichsmarshall Goering, and required the practice stations to be operating at their best. The use of the French stations working over France had been contemplated, but as they had been sited for forward transmission over England only, the proposal fell through. The demonstration had therefore to be made at the practice stations, and the presence of Feldwebel Ostermeier was thought not to be conductive to maximum efficiency. It was with sincere regret that we heard of his passing to a subordinate position.

  The trickiest part of the report was how to criticize our own countermeasures organization. I thought that this might best be done by following Hamlet—the play’s the thing… so I wrote the minutes of an imaginary German Air Staff conference under the chairmanship of the Director of Signals on the future of the beams:

  13.1 The chairman’s introductory remarks would probably be to the effect that while the British had wrecked Knickebein, they had fortunately been surprisingly slow in countering the X-Gerät. They were now, however, seriously interfering with the present X-beam transmissions, and the meeting had been called to discuss future policy.

  13.2 Dr. Kuehnhold would then be called upon to describe the type of interference experienced, and would begin by pointing out that he and his colleagues had originally been seriously perplexed by the appearance of numerous dash transmitters in the Anna band (66.5–75.0 mc/sec) at the beginning of November. These transmissions had been modulated at a frequency of 1500 cycles per second, but as the X-beam modulation frequency was 2000, it was hard to see why the English had chosen exactly three quarters of this figure. It must have been some extremely subtle form of jamming, but had evidently proved unsuccessful, as the British had since changed to a frequency of 2000.

  13.3 A German navigation officer, if one happened to be present, would probably say that as he had warned them before, they had been jammed, and that in his opinion all radio navigational aids were useless.

  13.4 Dr. Kuehnhold would point out with some vigour that even though they might now be jammed, they had had a good run of luck, and the German Air Force had them to thank for getting to its targets in the autumn bombing season of 1940. Moreover, when he was able to erect some more stations, there was some hope that K.Gr.100 would still get through, particularly if the modulation were changed.

  13.5 Hauptmann Aschenbrenner, as O/C., K.Gr.100, and being extremely jealous of his position as leader of the leaders of the German Air Force would endorse Dr. Kuehnhold’s remarks, and would add that Wotan II was still unjammed and for the rest of the winter they might be able to use that.

  13.6 Dr. Plendl would be glad that his particular system would now become of direct operational importance, and would add that while this was probably as easy to jam as the X-Gerät, newer systems could be developed which did not in fac
t involve beam flying but depended entirely on distance measurements from two ground stations, either by frequency modulation, phase measurement, or pulses.

  13.7 Dr. Kuehnhold would probably interrupt with a defence of beam flying, pointing out its operational advantages, and saying that they had only to decrease their wavelength, preferably to the decimeter region, in order to foil the British jamming. With luck, even if the British did discover the change quickly, it would take them some months to develop a jamming system which would, in any case, be even more difficult to operate successfully than that against the X-beams.

  13.8 A representative from Rechlin might point out that even if they could not go to decimeters, the use of frequency modulation with the present system might provide some degree of immunity from jamming.

  13.9 The Director of Signals would end by recording a number of recommendations, and would point out that German radio research had entirely recouped any loss of prestige over the defeat of Knickebein by extemporizing use of the X-Gerät to lead the German Air Force to its target. They had learned from this lesson that it was better to have several alternative systems ready, with one Gruppe specializing in each, instead of equipping the whole Air Force for one method which might at any moment be rendered useless by countermeasures. Therefore, he intended to pursue the development of several systems, and in particular the Wotan method, Knickebein Dezi, and a decimeter X-Gerät. In the meantime, Dr. Kuehnhold’s extra stations, which were already erected, would be equipped with the transmitters now in production. This might give the X-Gerät a new lease of life. The main body of the German Air Force would continue to be mass produced, but K.Gr.100 would be raised to the status of a full Geschwader and would be asked to be responsible for the service development of most of the above methods. Operating first on one system, they would continue to lead the G.A.F. to its targets. When that system was countered, they would change to another. They would thus, with comparatively little equipment, proceed through a succession of systems towards a centimetre ideal, each being more difficult to counter than its predecessor.