Most Secret War

by R. V. Jones

  Regarding my own future, my course is fairly clear. We are very short of scientists, and I may yet be of service in training new ones, incorporating the many lessons which I have learnt in my seven years as an Intelligence Officer. Moreover, my election to the Chair of Natural Philosophy at Aberdeen provides me with an opportunity for removing one disadvantage, admittedly irrelevant, that I constantly encountered in my Intelligence duties. It was clear that one had to be a ‘Professor’ to command the respect of the J.I.C. I fear that had I gone on in Intelligence, the next crisis would have seen the calling in of yet another Professor, no matter how good my qualifications to tackle the task might have been.… Lest it be thought that I resign entirely embittered by the events of the last year, I would say that even knowing this sorry conclusion to the present phase of my association with Scientific Intelligence, I should have undertaken it in 1939 almost as readily as I in fact did. The results obtained during the war would have alone justified that. In addition, we have been able to extract many of the vital principles of Intelligence; and though the J.I.C. and others may choose to ignore them now, I have no doubt that these principles will outlive the J.I.C. My work has brought me into close contact with the Royal Air Force on the one hand, and with the Intelligence sources on the other; and I only resign my connection with them with very great regret. I hope that whatever form the Air Force of the future may take, its Intelligence service will prove worthy of it.

  My final word must refer to my staff. Continuously overworked, they nevertheless gave me their fullest support throughout; most of them have now left, and I shall do my best to see the others settled before I leave. I am confident that, should another war threaten, most of us would be prepared to come back again; but we should hope that our experience would not then be ignored.

  Of my wartime staff, Edward Wright was now, of course, back at Aberdeen, where he later became Principal and was knighted. Hugh Smith had returned to University College London, where he became Quain Professor of English, and headed a very happy and effective department. He became President of the Place-Name Society, and personally compiled several of its county volumes. His work for Scandinavian Studies was recognized by the Swedish Order of the Royal North Star, the Icelandic Order of the Falcon, and the Danish Order of Dannebrog. Bimbo Norman returned to King’s College London as Professor of German, and was awarded the Gold Medal of the Goethe Institut, Munich. Rupert Cecil returned to Oxford, where he became Vice-Principal of Linacre College. John Jennings became a Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck College, and J. A. Birtwistle became Education Officer for Hampshire. Of the members of my overseas party, Eric Ackermann remained in Government Service for many years, one of his achievements being the organization of the ‘Skynet’ Satellite Communications Network. David Nutting became President of the Institute of Measurement and Control. Ken Dobson, after a spell as a financier, returned to technical work and pioneered the first ‘Black Box’ flight data recorder; it proved its value when it successfully analysed the cause of the crash of the prototype BAC III Aircraft. Andrew Fell became Principal of the National College of Horology, and Maurice Stephenson Chief Engineer of the Shell oilfields in Venezuela.

  I had much hoped that Charles Frank would accompany me to Aberdeen, because we had found ourselves so complementary to one another. Unfortunately for me, this did not prove possible, and so I suggested to Neville Mott that he should invite Charles to Bristol. Charles rapidly established himself there, and latterly succeeded to the Headship of the H. H. Wills Laboratory; he became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1954 and a Knight in 1977. Derek Garrard stayed in Government Service, and Arthen Jones accompanied me to Aberdeen.

  My last few months were much occupied in setting the affairs of Scientific Intelligence in order, as far as this was possible, and arranging for our files to be transferred to the miserable premises in Bryanston Square, at the same time preparing myself for the work at Aberdeen. Although it was a period of running down, it had some enlivening episodes. One morning just before a weekend, the Security Officer rushed round the M.I.6 offices telling everyone to take down all maps off their walls. It turned out that the M.I.6 offices were only rented and the landlord had heard that we were thinking of moving. Anxious to re-let the premises in such an event he had somehow made contact with the Russian Trade Delegation, and he wished to take them round on the Saturday afternoon. Could it happen anywhere but Britain that representatives of its major prospective opponent should be allowed a tour of the offices of its Secret Service? The Russians must have wondered whether Philby had been telling them the truth.

  Another incident from the same period was also illuminating. Stewart Menzies, the Chief, was one evening about to depart for a cocktail party in Mayfair or Belgravia when a very secret message came in after his safes had been locked. He stuffed the message into his pocket and thought no more about it until he found that at the party his hostess had hired an entertainer whose forte was removing such items as watches and braces without his victim being aware of it—and whom should he select for the victim but Stewart Menzies who, as he told us, stood apprehensively there while the entertainer removed various of his possessions but somehow missed the message. But if all this seeming ineptitude made us easy to exploit by men like Philby, there was another side: Niels Bohr told me after the war that he had no hesitation in working with the British Secret Service because he had found that it was run by a gentleman.

  I officially left the Air Staff on 30th September 1946, having completed exactly ten years as a civil servant. Two or three days later I was in Aberdeen, preparing for the beginning of term, where I found that I would have to deal with between 300 and 400 students with a staff of nine (including myself), three of whom were new graduates aged under 21. It was clear, though, from my first lecture that despite the drawbacks of limited and inexperienced staff, and the almost complete absence of textbooks, my relations with the students would be warm. They and the two or three succeeding years were vintage, as far as I am concerned. There was a tremendous esprit de corps, and a great deal of experience. After a lecture on hydrostatics, in which I had talked about the physics of diving, and the new method of escaping from submarines, a slightly-built student came up to me afterwards and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, but I found this lecture most interesting—I have done a bit of diving!’ It turned out that he had a D.S.O. for the midget submarine raid on the Tirpitz.

  In retrospect, although the students were older than average, and ‘rusty’ because of the gap in their education, there was one tremendous advantage: almost every man had been out and seen matters of life and death for himself, and had decided of his own free will that he wanted to come back to a university and get a degree. There had been no pressure by parents or teachers, or conformity to a fashion. Some of the men actually said to me that they realized how lucky they were—but for the war, they would never have had the chance of getting to a university. Although this was really the beginning of another story, it is too relevant to omit completely. If the war underlined our need for more scientists, and therefore inclined me towards bringing on the next generation, it also strengthened my interest in research into methods of precise measurement. I might well have gone into radioastronomy but Bernard Lovell and Martin Ryle already had a start, and so I concentraed instead on small-scale research in the hope of improving instruments of measurement, with the twofold objectives of using them to discover new physical phenomena and to increase our national ability in measurement—which episodes such as Coventry and the fictitious D-Day jammers had found so sadly wanting.

  Because there was no house available in Aberdeen I had to leave Vera and the children in Richmond, so I returned there for Christmas. On Christmas morning the telephone bell rang and Vera handed the telephone to me. A voice said, ‘This is Winston Churchill speaking from Westerham. Mr. Jones, how long are you going to be in the southern regions of our Island?’ When I told him about ten days he asked me if I would be good enough to come across and have lunch with hi
m, to which I of course very readily agreed. He went on, ‘Do you know that there is a poem about you in the Ingoldsby Legends?’, and he then recited to me the verses that he subsequently quoted in Volume II of his Memoirs.1

  Two days later I went across to Westerham, only to find him in a four-poster bed, with a cold. He wanted to talk over the war, and especially those parts in which I had been concerned. Two or three days later, I spent another day with him, and these two days were among the most interesting of my life. For most of the time we were alone, and I was able to ask him about things which had puzzled me in his actions. At one point I asked him what he really thought of Macaulay. I told him that I knew that he had called Macaulay a liar because he had said that John Churchill had gained his original preferment by selling his sister Arabella to James II, but what did he really think of Macaulay as a writer because I myself thought that his own style resembled Macaulay’s? He at once said, ‘You’ve hit the nail on the head! If I had to make my literary Will, and my literary Acknowledgements, I would have to own that I owe more to Macaulay than to any other English writer. When I was a boy at Harrow there was a prize that you could win if you could recite 800 lines of any poet or 1,200 of Macaulay. I took the 1,200, and won!’

  I told him that I did not like the way the country was going, with strikes and the clamour for a 40-hour week, and he replied, ‘I could have given them a 40-hour week—if they would work for 40 hours!’ And he wept as he told me that he never thought that he would see the British Empire sink so low. I found no anxiety on his part to argue that he had been right in everything he did—in fact at various points he quite tentatively asked me whether I thought that he had been right, for example in advocating the development of aerial mines.

  I had a final impression of him as I left, and he had accompanied me in his dressing-gown to the top of the stairs. He had asked me how my family were, and I had told him that I was rather concerned because I could see that in my absence during the term the two children were getting rather much for Vera, as children tend to do when they have only a mother to deal with. I remarked that I had myself as a child seen this happen in World War I, for my own mother had pointed it out to me at the time, as regards some of my cousins. I still have the vision of him at the top of the stairs calling out, ‘Remember, discipline those children!’ If the country had taken more heed of this advice, its subsequent problems would have been less. And I sometimes recall his advice to me as a scientist, ‘Praise the humanities, my boy. That’ll make them think you’re broadminded!’

  1a. H. V. Jones (No. 9223 Grenadier Guards), 1899.

  1b. R. V. Jones, 1937.

  1c. F. A. Lindemann (Photograph by A. H. Bodle).

  1d. H. T. Tizard (Photograph by Walter Stoneman, courtesy of R. W. Clark).

  2a. The Clarendon Laboratory. The top floor was where infra-red detectors were developed (Photograph by A. H. Bodle, whose cottage is at left).

  2b. Hoar Cross, Staffordshire.

  Members of the Clarendon Laboratory, 1934–1936.

  3a. T. C. Keeley, who ran the Laboratory during World War II.

  3b. D. A. Jackson, later Chief Airborne Radar Officer, Fighter Command.

  3c. A. G. Touch, who later developed anti-submarine radar.

  3d. Carl Bosch, who developed the radio beam guidance for the V-2 rocket.

  4a. Churchill in the Cabinet Room, 10 Downing Street, the scene of the Knickebein and Window meetings (Cecil Beaton).

  4b. The Cabinet underground meeting room, scene of the V-2 meetings. The wooden chair was Churchill’s.

  5a. Vertical air photograph showing first Knickebein beam station to be found (near Cherbourg), September 1940 (R.A.F. photograph).

  5b. Small Knickebein (F. Trenkle).

  5c. Entrance to the operational dugout of a Knickebein (Kn X on Figure 8) erected south of Cherbourg in 1941.

  5d. Large Knickebein, near Bredstedt, Schleswig Holstein, 100 metres wide by 30 metres high (Photograph supplied by Herr F. Trenkle, who has tentatively drawn in the aerial arrays).

  6a. F. C. Frank.

  6b. A. H. Smith (courtesy of Mrs. Helen Smith).

  6c. F. Norman (courtesy of Mrs. Jean Loudon).

  6d. S. D. Felkin (courtesy of Mrs. Charlotte Felkin).

  7. A Wotan I or X-Beam transmitter. Inset: A Heinkel III with receiving antennae for X-Beams (Photographs courtesy of F. Trenkle).

  8a. Wotan II or Y (or Benito) beam transmitter near Stavanger, photographed by a Norwegian patriot.

  8b. A Heinkel III of IIIKG26 fitted with a Y-Beam antenna with its pilot Viktor von Lossberg (see Plate 17d).

  9a and b. Stereo pair of photographs on which the first German radar station was found, near Auderville on the Hague Peninsula W.N.W. of Cherbourg. The scale of the original photographs on which the difference in the shadows was recognized by F. C. Frank was one quarter of this reproduction – the circular blast walls then appeared as only half a millimetre in diameter. On such clues pilots’ lives had sometimes to be risked, and Intelligence had to depend (R.A.F. photographs).

  9c. Low oblique photograph of the Auderville Freyas taken by Flying Officer W. K. Manifould, 22 February, 1941 (R.A.F. photograph).

  10a. Bruneval. The dot on the arrowhead in front of the house was suspected to be a Würzburg radar (R.A.F. photograph).

  10b. Barbed wire at la Panne, Belgium, erected after the Bruneval Raid, thereby confirming suspicions that the object at the centre of the lower right enclosure was a Würzburg (R.A.F. photograph).

  11a and b. Tony Hill’s photographs of the Würzburg at Bruneval, 5 December, 1941 (R.A.F. photographs).

  12. The terrain of the Bruneval Raid (Original photograph courtesy of After The Battle Magazine).

  13a. Photograph taken by the American Embassy in Berlin, 1941, of a Giant Würzburg on the Flak Tower in the Tiergarten.

  13b and c. Tony Hill’s photographs of the Giant Würzburgs at Domburg, 2 May, 1942 (R.A.F. photographs).

  13d. Giant Würzburg at a nightfighter control station in the Kammhuber Line, photographed by a Belgian patriot, 1943.

  14a. Squadron Leader A. E. Hill, D.S.O., D.F.C. (courtesy of Air Marshal Sir Geoffrey Tuttle).

  14b. Wing Commander G. W. Tuttle, O.B.E., D.F.C. (courtesy of Air Marshal Sir Geoffrey Tuttle).

  14c. Photographic Reconnaissance Spitfire, Mark PR19 (the PRU Memorial at R.A.F. Benson). Note the camera window between the pilot’s seat and the R.A.F. Roundel used for low oblique photography. The Memorial Plaque reads:

  THIS SPITFIRE PR19 STANDS AT BENSON IN COMMEMORATION OF THE OFFICERS AND AIRMEN WHO SERVED WITH THE PHOTOGRAPHIC RECONNAISSANCE UNIT AND SQUADRONS OF THE ROYAL AIR FORCE 1939-1945 REMEMBERING PARTICULARLY THOSE WHO FAILED TO RETURN.

  NO. 1, 2, 3, 4 PRU’S

  140, 540, 541, 542, 543, 544, 680, 681, 682 AND 684 SQUADRONS

  15. Upper two rows: Sketches made by different observers of ‘Bernhard’ radio navigational stations, showing varying degrees of perception. Bottom Row: (left to right) Air Reconnaissance low oblique: drawing made by Hugh Smith from the air photograph: ground photograph.

  16. Part of a German map stolen by a Belgian patriot (agent Tégal) 20 April, 1942, showing the entire radar and searchlight dispositions in one box (No. 6B) of the Kammhuber Line. The box of 27 searchlights occupies a front of 30 kilometres.

  17a. General Wolfgang Martini, Commanding German Air Force Signals and Radar, 1939–45 (courtesy of General Kammhuber).

  17b. General Josef Kammhuber, Commanding German nightfighters, 1940–43 (courtesy of General Kammhuber).

  17c. Dr Hans Plendl, who originated the X and Y bombing systems, and was responsible for many other radio developments (courtesy of Dr. Plendl).

  17d. Oberst Viktor von Lossberg, Commanding Officer of III/KG26 in the Blitz, and who later developed the ‘Zahme Sau’ system for nightfighting (courtesy of Colonel von Lossberg).

  18a. Lichtenstein receiver and presentation unit in the Junkers 88 nightfighter which landed at Dyce ne
ar Aberdeen, 9 May, 1943.

  18b. Lichtenstein BC antenna.

  18c. Camera gun photograph taken by an American fighter of a Junkers 88 nightfighter fitted with the much larger Lichtenstein SN2 antenna, 1944.

  18d. Messerschmidt nightfighter fitted with Lichtenstein at Kastrup Airport, Copenhagen, photographed by a Danish agent, 1943.

  19a. Air Reconnaissance photograph of Heeres Anstalt Peenemünde, 12 June, 1943, on which a large rocket (left centre) was first recognized (Sortie No. N/853).

  19b. Stereo pair of Air Reconnaissance photographs of Peenemünde, 23 June, 1943 (Sortie No. N/860) showing a rocket inside the elliptical earthwork.

  Photographs of the experimental V-1 flying bomb which crashed on Bornholm 22 August, 1943, taken by Lieutenant Commander Hasager Christiansen and smuggled to London.

  20a. Main Body.

  20b. Automatic pilot.

  20c. Compressed air container.

  21a. R.A.F. Reconnaissance photograph of the V-1 launching site being constructed at Bois Carré from Sortie E/463 of 3 November, 1940. Compare with Figure 20.