Most Secret War

by R. V. Jones

  The German generals had been surprised by the completeness and accuracy of our information, and Martini naturally wanted to know how it had been achieved. It turned out that whenever they were faced with a new development, such as our using H2S, they set up a new committee to investigate it and to decide on courses of action, just as had happened with us with the rocket scare of 1943. Committees were slower and less responsible than individuals, especially when the latter were allowed to work and build up experience over several years, as had been the case with me. Martini told me that if ever he were fighting a war again he would use our system and, in fact, he hoped that he and I would be fighting together.

  My third General was ‘Beppo’ Schmid, who had succeeded Kammhuber. He was different: I believe that he was one of the original Nazis in the 1923 Putsch. He had a less engaging character than the other two, and his views were very direct. He thought that we should have used Window six months before we did. He also said that our greatest mistake was to use H2S, because it had been so treacherous in giving away the position of our bomber stream, enabling him to inflict heavy casualties after Kammhuber’s radar system had been neutralized. Objectively, this opinion would have to be weighed against the damage to German industry that could not have been done without the aid of H2S.

  One name I looked for above all others was that of Carl Bosch. Sometimes during the war I had wondered what he was doing: was he my ‘opposite number’? If so, he would know all my weak points; and he was such an expert hoaxer that he might easily have misled us. So I was relieved to find that, strictly speaking, there was nobody in the corresponding position to mine in Germany, and that all we could learn about Bosch was that he had worked on infra-red viewing systems. But that was not the whole story, as I found in December 1976 when he and I met in Miami (he works for N.A.S.A.) more than forty years after we had last seen one another. He had indeed also been concerned with Intelligence, and he knew Martini, Kammhuber, Speer, and many of the others mentioned in this book, but he was called in from time to time when emergencies arose, rather than on a full-time basis. When H2S was found in a crashed bomber, for example, he was one of those asked to examine it; and he told me that even in Berlin he could hear the H2S transmissions from our bombers over England. He had also been concerned with the U-boat listening receivers, and he had worked on the radio beam guidance system for the V-2 rocket. He had married but had lost his two children in an air raid. This personal tragedy of a friend with whom I had so much in common symbolizes for me the terrible tragedy that the nations of Europe should have wounded each other so much in the two World Wars and have squandered their great common heritage.

  At the same time that I was talking to our German opponents, I was also meeting more of the men who had fought so successfully on our side. I had particularly looked forward to talking to the first post-war course at the R.A.F. Staff College because I knew that some of the ablest and most far-sighted officers had postponed going to Staff College until this particular course because it would be the course in which all the experience of the war would be available for the first time, and at which post-war doctrine would therefore be formed.

  I was not sure that I was going to be invited, because of what had happened at the previous course. I had been smarting under the attacks of the various Rocket Committees, and had had a field-day at their expense in my Staff College lecture. I had, for example, remarked that one of the factors that had probably saved us from an earlier attack by V-2s was that the Germans had set up thirteen different committees to organize V-2 production. The Germans themselves may have had a Freudian abhorrence of Committees because the standard word in German for ‘committee’ is ‘Ausschuss’ which, perhaps by more than coincidence, also means ‘rubbish’. Rather to my concern, the new Commandant, who had succeeded Charles Medhurst, took all my remarks seriously, and he seemed to be so shocked that I was afraid I was not going to be invited back.

  However, the invitation duly came, and he asked me if I would address the Staff College on the morning of 17th October. In fact, he wanted me to give two lectures, because the College was now split into two. Part of it had remained at Bullstrode Park near Gerrard’s Cross, where officers from Allied Air Forces were now attached, and the main British component was now at Bracknell, having taken over the former headquarters of the 2nd Tactical Air Force. So I lectured at Bullstrode on the afternoon of 16th October, one of the men on the course being ‘Sailor’ Malan, the famous South African pilot, and I then drove over to Bracknell, arriving there just before midnight. I was shown up into the Commandant’s flat at the top of the house, and I found him sitting with his head buried in his hands. When I asked him what was wrong he replied, ‘I have just had a mutiny!’ I asked him if he would like to tell me about it, and he said that he had just been presented by a Round Robin signed by all the officers on the course, starting with forty group captains, protesting at various aspects of life at Bracknell. He read me the catalogue, which criticized the lack of married quarters, the absence of garage accommodation, the poor quality of the Directing Staff, and the poor quality of the visiting lecturers—of which I was the next one. He told me that the Round Robin had been presented by the two senior group captains on the course (one of whom subsequently became Chief of Air Staff) and I asked him how he had reacted. He told me that he had said to the assembled course, ‘Very well, I see, chaps, you want me to raise the standard! So I will rise it all round, and not many of you will get through at the end of the course!’ This was fatal. He had been a very gallant officer but, as I had sensed from my previous visit, he was inclined to be too serious. He told me that he did not know how I was going to manage in the morning, and we went to bed.

  I wondered what to do: something was clearly wrong, because I was sure that those on the course were as fine a group of men as one could meet anywhere, and the idea of them being engaged in a mutiny was crazy. However, there was trouble, and I might well be at the receiving end. Somehow, I must strike a welcome chord in the first sentence, for if I could survive that, I knew that what I had to talk about would be of absorbing interest to them. Inspiration came to me, and I went to sleep.

  That first sentence came back thirty years later, in December 1975, when we were visiting Belize where the Vice Chief of Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Peter le Cheminant, had been a week or two ahead of us. He had met my daughter, Susan, and had told her how well he remembered the occasion, for he had been one of the group captains concerned. He said that I had walked straight on to the platform and had said, ‘I sometimes think that strategy is nothing but tactics talked through a brass hat!’ From that moment, the whole course was with me.

  I learnt much from the experience, for the unlucky Commandant was almost immediately superseded by another, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Sanders, who had been Air Officer Administration in Bomber Command. On the next visit, I knew from the way the sentry had saluted at the gate that there had been a change of command; and the improvement in morale was a revelation of what a difference the personality of a Commander can make, even in a large organization.

  It was not an entirely unproductive period for me, wrecked though my post-war hopes had been. I was so impressed by the value of Staff Courses that I proposed to Portal on 8th November 1945 that there should be a Staff College for scientists. Its introduction ran:

  The life of a young scientist consists in the main of passing one examination in order to qualify as a candidate for the next. Then, when his final examination is over, he becomes a research student, frequently dependent for further financial aid on the results of his first researches. The number of permanent academic positions open to him is relatively small, and his merit is judged in competition with his contemporaries. Such a competitive system, while it has some merits, inevitably puts a premium on the short term worker, who concentrates all his energy on the immediate object, be it the next examination or the achievement of quick results in the first few researches. The young scientist who would commendabl
y devote some of his time to external activities, to humane studies, or even to other branches of science, is likely not to reach such an immediately high standard in his own branch. He is thus at some disadvantage in the bitter competition for the early attainment of a permanent position in the academic world. The ‘successful’ scientist therefore tends to be he who shuts himself off from the external world, and even from other branches of science. The same is true, though perhaps to a lesser extent, in the fields of industry or Government service, where in peacetime scientists are largely recruited from those who have fallen out from the academic competition.

  The premium thus placed in a modern scientific career upon undue concentration at an early stage encourages the production of men with a less-than-average appreciation (for their standard of intelligence) of the world at large. This ignorance may even become a habit in after life, when the energy of the hothouse-forced scientist declines, or when, finding himself outmanoeuvred in his first few clashes with professional and classically bred administrators, he retires embittered into his laboratory and decides that his ignorance is really a virtue, since the worldly-wise are such rogues.

  Portal showed my memorandum to Tizard, and they were both enthusiastic. It finally failed, because nobody could see how to finance it. Lord Hankey revived the proposal a few years later, but with equal lack of success. There was one positive result, though, for Portal wrote to me on 21st December, ‘I am therefore asking the Air Staff to examine the practical implications of sending a few scientists on Staff College and I.D.C. Courses’. This resulted in scientists in Government Service being allowed to attend the courses, which has continued to the present day: I am only sorry that such courses are not available for academics generally for, of all people, they need them.

  A few days later I received a call to Portal’s office, along with all the senior members of the Air Staff. It was 31st December, and he was about to leave. Never one to wear his heart on his sleeve, he made a halting speech, and then came to shake us individually by the hand. To me he said, ‘Goodbye, A.D.I. (Science). You know what I think of you!’

  For five years of utterly demanding war Portal as Chief of Air Staff had led the Royal Air Force with tremendous authority; it had been a privilege to work with him, and his support was one of the main sources of my own strength.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Swords Into Ploughshares, Bombs Into Saucers

  ONE REFUGE from the politics of jostling for positions in post-war Whitehall was to think afresh about problems in pure science. The war had, for example, forced upon physicists and astronomers alike the fact that the sun emitted radio waves so strongly that it jammed our anti-aircraft radar on many occasions. The fact that cosmic radio waves were falling upon the earth had been established and reported by Karl Jansky, a radio engineer at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in America, as early as 1931, but his work was almost entirely overlooked until the radar jamming experiences of World War II. Several groups in Britain started to investigate the phenomenon when the war ended, and our part was to provide German radar equipment for these groups, including Martin Ryle in Cambridge and Bernard Lovell in Manchester.

  Another wartime experience that made me wonder was the ability of pigeons which had spent their entire lives in England to home back to their bases after we had dropped them on the Continent. I spent some time with the Air Ministry Pigeon Service in the months after the war, learning from the experts what pigeons could do. There was evidence that the last twenty or thirty miles of their journeys were made by visual means, and that they used landmarks such as coastlines: the Norwich fanciers, for example, complained that in pre-war races from France their birds were always about twenty minutes later than those of the Lowestoft fanciers, the theory being that all the pigeons flew up the coast of Suffolk and Norfolk, when the Lowestoft birds could simply drop into their lofts, while the Norwich birds had another twenty minutes flying overland once they left the coast. Geographical landmarks, though, could not explain a good deal of the wartime flying, and I began to wonder whether the birds had developed a form of inertial navigation, based on the semicircular canals in their heads, which were known to be accelerometers. We tried to keep the Air Ministry Pigeon Service in being after the war, with a view to organizing a prolonged series of experiments, but the scheme fell through when both the pigeons and I left the Air Ministry.

  Another line of thought had more permanent results. The fascination about discovering the methods by which pigeons navigate is much the same as that which I had experienced in working out how it was that German bombers could find their targets. Other animals besides pigeons have methods of locating targets, and these have an equal appeal. Among them are the moths: males home on to females from distances of miles, and the evidence here indicated that they must be super-sensitive to traces of scents emitted by the females. We found that a German chemist (probably Butenandt) had isolated the particular compound emitted by the female silkworm moth, and that a single drop of a solution of this compound at a strength of one part in a thousand million was enough to agitate all the male moths in the same room. Francis Griffin (the Secretary of the Royal Entomological Society, who had been attached to my staff in 1944 when the British Museum wanted us to secure an option on a collection of lepidoptera in Rennes as soon as it was captured) produced evidence for me that male moths home up-wind, and that they could do the coarse homing with one antenna removed, but that they needed both antennae for the final few yards. I was aware of these facts when I began once again to think about the problems of detecting U-boats, now that the Germans had developed the ‘schnorkel’ which enabled a boat to continue submerged and to ‘breathe’ by letting up a tubular trunk to the surface which only needed a fairly small capping valve at the top, and which would therefore give a relatively small radar echo, thus much increasing our difficulty of detection. All the exhaust products of the boat’s diesel engines would be emitted into the atmosphere, and so why should we not try to ‘smell’ these products as they drifted down-wind? Moreover, the idea could be extended, in that it was very likely that plutonium factories would be emitting some radioactive products into the air, and so we could perhaps ‘smell’ these too. On 23rd November 1945 I therefore proposed to Ben Lockspeiser (Director General of Scientific Research in the Ministry of Aircraft Production) that these systems should be developed. Part of my proposal ran:

  You are probably aware that various insects are able to home from distances of the order of a mile or more.… The foregoing facts indicate serious possibilities in homing by smell, and I am suggesting that now we are able to consider long term research again, it might be worth devoting some effort to applying smell techniques to airborne homing. By developing homers on to the exhaust products of internal combustion engines, such as carbon monoxide and dioxide (or preferably more peculiar products) or ions, we might be able to home along aircraft exhaust trails, or on to towns, or on to ‘Schnorkels’. Radioactive smellers (probably using counters) would be a valuable aid in locating plutonium producing piles from the air; I put this possibility to the T.A. people two or three years ago, and they were not very optimistic, but it ought now to be reconsidered. Acid smellers might detect chemical factories, including plutonium separation plants.

  The scheme was taken up and a smell homing device for schnorkels, known as ‘Autolycus’ was developed and put into service with Coastal Command. Its main drawback was that it would detect any oil-burning engine, whether this was in a U-boat or on a merchant ship, and so it never became more than an ancillary aid; and it was, of course, no use against nuclear submarines.

  A further line of thought, which conceivably may have been seminal, came from our experience in transmitting a large amount of information as concisely as possible, for example in the ‘microdots’ used in letters from spies. (Incidentally, the first use of microphotography in war was in Paris in 1870, when microphotographed messages were sent by carrier pigeon.) How could the information necessary to create a co
mplete human being be contained in a volume no larger than a sperm-head? I made a very rough estimate of the number of items of information that would be required, and came to the conclusion that it could only be possible if the data were somehow encoded on an atomic scale where the identities and positions of atoms were significant. I learned to observe bacteria and stain them with the standard agents. My interest had been stimulated, as so often, by Charles Frank, who thought that there must be some long-range forces (on the atomic scale, that is) involved in the separation of chromosomes; he told me that Max Delbrück had come to the same conclusion as I had about genetic information being on the atomic scale. Neither Charles nor I did anything further, because we became committed to more pressing objectives, but perhaps the only good result of the reorganization of Scientific Intelligence was that we were joined by a young physicist who had been assistant to Teddy Gollin in the Admiralty, who still remembers the days when we relieved the dullness of our post-war situation by discussing these problems. He was Francis Crick, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for his part in solving the basic problem of the Genetic Code.

  We had one diversion of an Intelligence nature, which no doubt arose from the general atmosphere of apprehension that existed in 1945 regarding the motives of the Russians, and which anticipated the flying saucer. We had already seen scares arise during the war by the imaginations of men under strain interpreting fearfully observations which had a natural explanation. KGr100 pilots had seen red lights over England. We had had to deal with reports of Fifth Columnists letting off rockets; and our bomber crews had reported single-engine nightfighters with yellow lights in their noses over Germany at times when we knew that no single-engine nightfighters were flying. So we were not unduly surprised when incidents began to be reported in Sweden, which regarded itself as in the front-line should the Russians attempt to move westwards. Stories began to be reported of strange objects seen in the sky, so much so that the Swedish General Staff put out a public request that all such objects should be reported. The result was, of course, a spate of ‘incidents’. Some of these were probably imaginary, but one or two were genuine enough, in that they were seen by many people in Sweden. They were probably meteors, and by bad luck two of them were bright enough to have been visible by day.