Most Secret War

by R. V. Jones

  If, instead of sending the observations of able seamen to able mathematicians on land, the land would send able mathematicians to sea, it would signify much more to the improvement of navigation and the safety of men’s lives and estates on that element.

  Although we were closely co-ordinated with the American forces as regards offensive steps against Germany, we had so far entirely looked after ourselves as regards German attacks on Britain, the famous ‘Eagle Squadron’ of American volunteers excepted. The threat of flying bombs, however, was clearly going to stretch us to the limit. Already the Eighth Air Force was attacking the ski sites but, assuming that the Germans would somehow get to the stage of launching large number of bombs, we had very few fighters that were fast enough to intercept them and they would be very awkward targets for our anti-aircraft guns. As regards fighters, it was mainly a question of ‘hotting up’ our existing aircraft and of speeding new aircraft, such as the Tempest, into service; this task fell to the Fighter Interception Unit, now commanded by Christopher Hartley.

  Along with the guns, we should need new predictors and the new proximity fuses which, although originally a British project, had been developed and were being manufactured in America. Given this need, and the large-scale diversion of bombing effort that would be necessary against the ski sites and which therefore might detract from our joint bombing of invasion targets, the British Chiefs of Staff felt that we must ask for the aid and understanding of the Americans. On 20th December 1943, the problem was discussed at the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, which had before them an appreciation from the U.S. Air Force that the United Kingdom might be devastated.

  Opinions in Washington ranged from a wild over-assessment of the threat to the opposite belief that it was all a hoax by the Germans to divert our effort away from our intended landings in France. The first I knew of the difficulty was when Portal telephoned me to say he wanted me to show all my work to an American who would be sent over to assess it, and then advise the American Chiefs of Staff whether they should help us or not. I was annoyed, because I knew that our work was solid, and required no checking by any stranger especially since it involved revealing all our Intelligence methods. I told Portal that I would only do it if he would confirm that he was giving me a direct order, so that the responsibility would be his. This he immediately did, so we prepared ourselves for the coming of the American, whoever he might be.

  The day of the American inspection duly came, some time in January 1944, and to our surprise a quiet, rather bulky man walked in and explained that he was H. P. Robertson, Professor of Applied Mathematics at Princeton. What he did not say was that, as we afterwards discovered, he was one of the world’s leading theorists on Relativity, and one of the most senior staff members in the Office of Scientific Research and Development in Washington. It was clear, though, that here was someone to whom we could talk, and the morning went very well. We took him across to St. Ermin’s Hotel and we were just settling back after lunch when ‘Jane’ Shaw came in, obviously fortified by a thunderstorm of his ‘lightning snifters’. He did not know that we were the subject of an American inspection, and I was rather worried that his deportment might upset Robertson’s impression of our efficiency.

  It turned out that ‘Jane’ was determined to tell us a story of his career which had been sandwiched between his cavalry and his Air Force days. It was no use trying to stop him. He just went on: the incident concerned his earliest days in Salisbury1, when he had been invited to a party and had got on with a girl there so successfully that he went home and spent the night with her. A week or so later he was in one of the Salisbury bars drinking with another man when he thought that he would improve his general knowledge and find out more about the girl. Gradually he worked the conversation round, and finally said what an attractive girl she was. ‘Yes’, said his companion, ‘what a pity about her leg!’ ‘What’s wrong with her leg?’ asked ‘Jane’. ‘Didn’t you know, old man, that she’s got a wooden leg?’ replied the other. ‘Jane’ was thunderstruck and said ‘A wooden leg! She hasn’t, damn it I ought to…’ and pulled himself up, but it was too late. He said that for months afterwards whenever he went into a bar in Salisbury someone would come up to him, pluck at his thigh and say ‘Excuse me, old man, a splinter!’

  We must have had a Guardian Angel watching over us, but who delighted in teasing us. First he had sent Maggie Blyth as a dea ex machina when Tizard was inspecting us, and now he had sent ‘Jane’ Shaw in a similar capacity. For ‘Jane’s’ story was exactly to Bob Robertson’s taste. Signals went back to the American Chiefs of Staff saying that the British work on the flying bomb was entirely reliable, and that the Americans should give us all the aid within their power.

  One point of special American concern was the timing of the flying bomb campaign and its likely targets. Would the bomb be ready before D-Day, and could it knock out our embarkation ports? Charles Frank prepared a report for S.H.A.E.F. (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force) showing that the only worthwhile target, given the inaccuracy of the weapon, was London. As for timing, he and I reckoned that our bombing could probably postpone the opening of the campaign for some months, and that it would also take this time for the Germans to improve their accuracy in trials to an acceptable level. We might therefore be able to land in Normandy before the first bomb was launched, but we thought that the landing would provoke Hitler into ordering the pilotless bombardment forthwith, whatever the state of the trials. And since we reckoned that a military machine of the scale of Flak Regiment 155 (W) would have a reaction time of about a week, we suggested Day (D+7) as the best guess for the opening of the bombardment.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  ‘Flames’: Problems Of Bomber Command

  AS SOON as I returned from leave in September 1943 I went again to listen to the reactions of the German nightfighters and their ground controls. They had clearly reorganized, but on 29th/30th September we heard how they could now confuse themselves; the raid was on Bochum in the Ruhr and the German controller was broadcasting a running commentary on our route to his fighters. For some reason or other he convinced himself that the raid was instead to be on Bremen, and on 4th October I reported:

  The present German system is unstable in that once the controller has formed a picture of the situation it becomes increasingly easy for him to convince himself that he is right. Having made his guess at the target from the early track of the bombers, he sends his fighters to a convenient beacon. These fighters are then reported by sound observations and, unless the observers are extremely skilled, they may easily be misidentified. The controller then interprets the observations as referring to British aircraft, and is thus confirmed in his initial misjudgement, and so may order up more fighters which may again be misidentified. At Bremen the self-deception went even further; the Flak opened fire, possibly delighted by the absence of Window, and at least one fighter dropped a flare presumably to illuminate our bombers which were in fact at Bochum, 150 miles away. The flare probably convinced the JD 2 controller that the Pathfinders had arrived for even when JD 1 announced that bombs were falling at Bochum, JD 2 countermanded the JD 1 order for the fighters to concentrate on Bochum.

  So far the improvised system has worked fairly well on clear nights and against large raids, but the 250-350 aircraft raids of the last few days have shown that it has a very serious weakness. There is much to be said for raids of not more than 20 minutes duration, for such raids can take full advantage of any errors made by the German controllers. Longer raids will always be liable to attacks on their last waves whenever fighters can fly, whatever tricks are employed to mislead the controllers.

  Surprisingly, the same weakness could also occur in daytime, to the benefit of the Eighth Army Air Force. Sometimes at night when the German controls became confused we would hear the lines cleared for take over by a higher command, and we wondered just how high this was—not that it usually succeeded in clarifying the situation. The answer may lie in
an incident related by Adolf Galland, who now commanded the German fighter force, in The First And The Last. It concerned an American raid on Düren in the Rhineland by day above cloud, aided by ‘Window’. Goering himself took over control and since the ‘Window’ cloud was drifting eastwards, he concluded that the Americans were heading for Schweinfurt, the ballbearing centre. He therefore ordered his fighters to Schweinfurt, and his reporting service now of course reported that there was the sound of many aircraft heading towards Schweinfurt. The fighters, unable to find any American bombers, overshot, and so aircraft were now reported east of Schweinfurt without any bombs falling there. Goering then concluded that the bombers were going to the Leuna Works at Leipzig, where the same process was repeated, causing Goering now to divine the Skoda Works near Pilsen in Czechoslovakia as the target. At last, over Pilsen, the sky was clear, and there were no aircraft but German fighters.

  It was obvious to the whole fighter organization that Goering had literally taken them for a ride, which he had the sense of humour to acknowledge by sending out a signal congratulating himself and all participants on the ‘successful defeat of the air-raid on the Fortress of Köpenick’—the reference being of course, to the classic German hoax of ‘the captain of Köpenick’, where a shoemaker in 1906 procured a secondhand uniform of a Prussian captain, and took command of a squad of soldiers, arrested the local Burgermeister, and confiscated the municipal treasury.

  My report of 4th October concluded optimistically:

  The German defences may of course rapidly change if we successfully exploit their present weakness, but in the meantime we shall have benefited by such exploitation. The Germans may have stampeded more than is justified by the present density of Window, but there can be little doubt that they have for the moment partly abandoned their former system. Window is fulfilling its function even better than could be hoped. So long as we can keep German detection equipment neutralized, the problem of getting our bombers through the present extemporized defence system lies with the tactician.

  One night in October 1943 Charles Frank and I were again at Kings-down listening to a raid, where the German Divisional Controllers called themselves ‘Leander’, ‘Prima Donna’, ‘Kakadu’ (Cockatoo) and ‘Möbelwagen’ (furniture van), and addressed their fighter units by code names, for example ‘von Leander von Leander an alle Schmetterlinge’ (From Leander to all Butterflies) and it was clear that their technique was to ‘scramble’ their fighters on a raid warning and instruct them to orbit one of a number of visual and radio beacons, selecting the beacon nearest to the predicted track of the raid. Then, as the raid approached, the fighters would be in a position to swoop. This system was known as ‘Zahme Sau’ (Tame Sow) in contrast to Herrmann’s ‘Wilde Sau’, and was devised by Colonel Viktor von Lossberg, whom we had previously encountered as the skilled commander of the bomber formation III K.G.26, using the Y-beam and ranging system for bombing us in 1941. The Y-ranging system was now to be fitted to German nightfighters, since it would be immune to Window, and would thus enable the German controllers to know at least where their own fighters were.

  In the morning train back to Victoria I said to Frank (who incidentally, subsequently named his hens after the Divisional Controllers, starting with Prima Donna) ‘The next thing we must do, Charles, is to locate those beacons’, but I had no idea of how we were going to do it.

  That same morning there arrived on my desk a bundle of microfilm prints from the Belgians via our colleague, Jempson. The story behind them, as I now know it, was this: the strain on the German air defences created by the co-ordinated attacks by the Eighth Air Force and Bomber Command was telling so much by August 1943 that the Germans were beginning to send up their nightfighters by day, just as they were sending up their day fighters by night. During an American day raid on 17th or 18th August 1943 a German nightfighter from an airfield near Liège was shot down; one of the occupants escaped by parachute. While he was still in the air he dropped a leather bag containing the flight documents, and by good fortune one of our Belgian agents, Jean Closquet, was on hand. Closquet, who had worked for us since 1941, rushed to the bag, and fled with it into a near-by wood. He evaded the subsequent search, and it was the microfilm of his documents that now, some six weeks later, had arrived on my desk via the famous ‘Service Marc’. It was a marvellous piece of opportunist Intelligence, and it was clear from the Belgian legend ‘Dérobé d’un chasseur descendu’ that they were fighter documents. There were some fifteen altogether, containing call-signs, transmitting frequencies and navigational instructions. Would they have the one list that I wanted?

  There, on the tenth sheet, it was: the code-names of the beacons, Ida, Kurfürst, Ludwig, Marie …, some twenty-one all told, with their ranges and bearings from various German airfields. Charles and I spent the rest of the morning plotting them on a map. We could then imagine ourselves as German controllers: if we could see a raid coming, and had a rough idea of its track, where would we place our fighters so as best to poise them to swoop? Immediately, I informed Bomber Command and Fighter Command, suggesting that if Bomber Command would let me know its route in advance, I might be able to guess the beacons that the German nightfighters would orbit: we could then send a few of our long-range nightfighters to mix in with their German counterparts, and thus create a classic state of alarm by opening fire and therefore, hopefully, starting a fight among the Germans themselves. Bomber Command agreed to let me try to direct our intruding nightfighters in this way, and I had an interesting time seeing how many of my ‘bets’ paid off. Number 141 Squadron, commanded by Wing Commander J. R. Braham, was principally involved. Chris Hartley, too, went out; and on his first night the guess was good enough to put him right into a swarm of nightfighters orbiting one of the beacons and indeed right through the slipstreams of two of them, only to find his own radar had failed. Once or twice we succeeded in so upsetting the German night-fighters that they opened fire on one another, but I would claim no more than that.

  The Closquet documents were thus a bonus to Bomber Command from the Eighth Air Force, whose respective bombing campaigns were supposed to be co-ordinated under the ‘Pointblank’ plan promulgated at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943. But their philosophies differed. The Eighth Air Force believed in precise attacks on selected targets, such as ballbearings and oil, in contrast with Harris’s disillusion over ‘panacea targets’. And the co-ordination of the two campaigns went no further than Bomber Command area-bombing by night the towns in which ballbearing or other targets were being bombed by the Americans by day.

  For several months it seemed that Harris was right. Despite the most gallant and precise attacks in October 1943 by the Eighth Air Force on Schweinfurt for example, in one raid on 14th October, 60 out of 291 Flying Fortresses were lost and it was believed that 75 per cent of the ballbearing production had been knocked out—German production nevertheless somehow went on, and even increased. So it seemed that even at the expense of prohibitive losses the selective policy would not work. The basic, almost philosophical, difficulty was that precise attacks needed optical aiming in daylight so the bombers would always be visible to the fighters and intercepted. They must therefore fight their way in and out, and experience was exploding the idea that formations of bombers could achieve satisfactory mutual protection by cross-fire against attacking fighters. We had learnt this lesson in 1939 and the Americans were learning it now.

  So precise raids, necessarily in daylight, would require fighter escorts, but it was entirely unreasonable to hope that a long-range fighter could ever be able to out-perform the short-range fighters operating over Germany, because it would have to carry a great deal more fuel. Thus the logic of the British position, which basically was one of evading the fighters under cover of darkness, rather than fighting them, seemed unassailable.

  Whichever policy was pursued, my task was to help minimize our bomber losses. One could hardly dare contemplate what our bomber crews were up against. They frequentl
y had to fly about 800 miles through the German defences, at a speed less than 200 miles an hour, and at any time they were liable to unexpected attack. The chances of surviving a tour of thirty operations in Bomber Command in 1943 were about one in six, but morale never faltered. I had the chance to meet the most able of the survivors when in October 1943 Charles Medhurst wrote suggesting that I should lecture to the R.A.F. Staff College at Bullstrode Park, Gerrard’s Cross, of which he was now Commandant. On 28th October I spoke there about the German night defences. The audience consisted of operational officers, usually of Wing Commander rank, who were expected to cram a whole year’s Staff Course into three months, as a relaxation from operations. Guy Gibson, who won the Victoria Cross with 617 Squadron (The Dam-busters) and ‘Sailor’ Malan, for example, were on one or other of these courses. They were worked hard, and almost the only sport in this period of contrast with the stresses of operational life was to bait the visiting lecturers. The result was a marvellously lively audience, especially if one were, as I was, speaking about matters that had been life and death to them, and in all probability would be so again when they returned to operations. To talk to those audiences was one of the greatest privileges and most stimulating experiences that have fallen to me. I talked to every Staff Course in succession from 1943 to 1955, when I finally called it a day partly because I felt that I might be getting out of date but still more because of the mess that was being made of our peace-time organization, in which I felt that Scientific Intelligence was being so badly handled that I could no longer talk about it with confidence.

  The interest in those wartime courses was terrific, one occasion starting at 9.30 a.m. and the questions only finishing when the Commandant called a halt at 1.30 p.m. Subconsciously I acquired the two secrets of lecturing from which everything else follows: first, to believe that you have something worth telling your audience, and then to imagine yourself as one of that audience. Nearly all the advice that I have seen given to would-be lecturers deals with the trimmings without mentioning the fundamentals: but if you get these right, they entail all the rest. You must, for example, talk in terms that appeal to the background experience of your audience. You must be audible at the back of the room, where the details of your lantern slides must be visible and your blackboard writing legible; and you should not distract your audience with antics and fidgeting. You must also detect by the change in tension when you are in danger of losing its interest. But all these follow from the simple consideration of trying to regard yourself from the point of view of a member of the audience in the back row. Even now I cannot claim to satisfy all these criteria: but if I have any merit as a lecturer it derives from those glorious days of lecturing to as gallant and alert a band of men as any speaker could ever address.