Most Secret War

by R. V. Jones

  I have more sympathy with the reluctance of a scientist to go into Intelligence when he fears that he may find less creative satisfaction than he would in pure science. I was always aware that, exciting though Intelligence was, and important though its results manifestly were, it was on a lower plane of difficulty than research in pure science. Intelligence is a parasitic activity, in that you are always trying to discover what some other man has already done, in contrast to entering an uncharted field yourself. One of the greatest difficulties in scientific research is to build up your observational experience in this new field, and to develop concepts that have never entered any human mind before. They may even appear to contradict long-established ideas, as when Einstein proposed the equivalence of mass and energy, or when de Broglie postulated that material particles could also behave as waves. Sometimes in Intelligence we experienced this kind of difficulty, when for example it was necessary for us to postulate that radio waves bent further round the Earth than our own experts thought, or that rockets could be made with a range greater than 100 miles; but all the time I knew that we were trying to discover something that had already been discovered and formulated in the minds of our German opponents, and that it therefore should be within our mental grasp.

  To the extent I felt that we were parasitic, and tackling a basically easier job than that of research in pure science, although we sometimes had difficulties comparable with those of scientific innovators when we had to persuade our experts to abandon some of their hitherto accepted concepts. Moreover, the methods we used in gathering and collating information were much the same in principle as those employed in pure science. Where we could claim to be genuinely creative was in developing new methods of Intelligence, such as listening to radar transmissions, and in welding them into a great system for observing the enemy by as many means as possible, and in directing this system and correlating the information that it obtained by these means into a comprehensively reliable estimate of enemy intentions.

  We were remarkably fortunate in our opportunity. Just as the impact of radio in the ‘20’s gave a unique chance for everyman to dabble in the ‘marvels of science’ by making his own receiver—a task complex enough to be fascinating without being so complex, as television later was, that it was beyond the competence of the average man—so it was with Scientific Intelligence in World War II, and for much the same reason. The very development in science and technology that led to everyday radio in the ‘20’s also led to the radar and radio navigational systems of World War II, and these were relatively simple to understand and, if necessary, frustrate.

  Moreover, these developments in radio were of such universal application in military technology that they gave me the entry to fields which at first sight might have seemed quite remote. Radar provided the key to the German night defences, and thus enabled me to attack those defences more fruitfully than through any other channel; and it also enabled me to attack the flying bomb in a positive manner by going for the German radar plots. I was therefore able to reduce some of our major Intelligence problems to the field that by good fortune I knew best.

  Possibly the opportunity of Enigma might be viewed in the same light, for it involved radio communication at a stage of sophistication that was just within the limits of human ingenuity to ‘break’. Its importance in my own field will have been obvious at various points in my narrative. Sometimes, as with Knickebein, a single short decode provided the clinching evidence. And because there was every likelihood that the Germans felt that they were secure in Enigma, even a single message was likely to provide an anchor of truth on which any explanation of German activity could be confidently based, or a touchstone against which previously formed theories of German intentions could be tested. Care was of course necessary—although any one decode was likely to be one hundred per cent reliable, it might well contain much less than the whole truth—a fact that must always be borne in mind regarding information from any source, however reliable. But the confidence with which Enigma decodes could be used in constructing or testing theories of enemy intentions was outstanding among all the sources available to us.

  As will have been evident from my story, it was worth squeezing every drop of information out of the decodes. But it would have been dangerous to have come to rely on them too much, and thus to have neglected the other sources, for in a sense cryptography was the most vulnerable source of all in that it could have been extinguished at any time by a few simple changes in the Enigma machine. At the end of every investigation I therefore looked back to see how far we could have done without Enigma. As the outstanding example, it was reassuring to find that we would very probably have raided Peenemünde without any help from Enigma. This observation is not intended in the slightest to belittle the enormous contribution made by those who broke the Engima traffic—quite the reverse. And it is a pleasure to know that in a war in which science, and especially physical science, gained great esteem, the contributions of our colleagues in mathematics and in some of the Arts subjects can at last be publicly recognized.

  As for a counterpart to myself in Germany, this is a matter in which I was again fortunate. For much of the war, I was concerned that I might have an opposite number in Germany, quite possibly my pre-war friend Carl Bosch, who might have provided me with false clues, as Bosch himself certainly could have done. This would at minimum have made my task more difficult, and could easily have misled me on to several false trails. As it turned out, though, there was no such co-operation between science and the Services in Germany, and so we were spared this problem—and many others. It was the great contribution of the generation of scientists before mine, headed by Tizard and Lindemann, and accentuated by the emergency in which Britain found itself after 1933, that Serving officers and scientists worked together to an extent far exceeding that of our opponents.

  Further, there was leadership. In Churchill we had a Prime Minister with a genuine and strong interest in the possibilities opened up by science, such as none of his successors has had. Even his controversial dependence on Lindemann was evidence of this interest which, for example, made him anxious to be flown—even at some discomfort—in experimental aircraft to see for himself the state of airborne radar. After our first meeting I felt that there was now so strong an appreciation at the top that in emergency I could have appealed to him with confidence, although I also felt that so long as Portal was Chief of Air Staff no appeal would ever be necessary. ‘Your name’, Churchill once said to me, ‘will open all doors!’

  To conclude this catalogue of good fortunes, I must remark the scale on which we operated. Right through to the end of the war I was able to keep my immediate organization small, and to use the initiative of individuals to the full. Had we been a little bigger, we should have had to institute an internal communication system, instead of depending on personal contacts to the extent that we did, and this would have slowed our daily working. But there are many tasks in Intelligence that require large numbers of people, and these tasks have multiplied since 1945; there are, for example, many more radar and guidance systems compared with those with which we had to deal, and they require armies of recording operators and interpreters if they are to be unravelled. Scientific and Technical Intelligence organizations therefore now have to be larger, and the consequent change of scale from that on which we operated may well involve a different balance of qualities in those heading the organization.

  Napoleon and Wellington both made the point that when handfuls of men are involved in combat, the outcome depends on individual fighting ability, but that when armies are involved individual ability may be less important than ability for an army to fight as a whole, Napoleon’s example being that two Mamelukes would beat three French cavalrymen, but that any army of one thousand French cavalry-men would beat fifteen hundred Mamelukes. It would therefore be dangerous to suppose that what we did on the small scale in World War II would provide a satisfactory precedent for what could be done in the future, for we had
the advantage both in timing and in scale.

  But this is not to say that Scientific and Technical Intelligence will be less important in the future. Just as the cryptographers of World War I thought that machine codes could never be broken and therefore that the day of the cryptographer was over, so it would be foolish to conclude that what we did was a mere flash never to be surpassed if not repeated. Perhaps our lessons have been taken to heart more effectively in America than in Britain for in The Craft of Intelligence Allen Dulles wrote, ‘Eloquent testimony to the value of scientific intelligence collection, which has proved its worth a hundred times over, has been given by Winston Churchill in his history of World War II.… Science as a vital arm of Intelligence is here to stay. We are in a critically competitive race with the scientific development of the Communist Block, particularly that of the Soviet Union, and we must see to it that we remain in a position of leadership. Some day this may be as vital to us as radar was to Britain in 1940’.

  It will have been obvious from my account that our work was exhilarating. Tragedy, such as the loss of Tony Hill or the men of the first Rjukan raid, was always near; and tension, as in the Blitz or the ‘V’ campaigns, was often acute; but there were moments of tremendous excitement, as in the finding of the Knickebein beams. And these moments continued throughout the war: the first time we knew an X-beam target in advance of the raid; the photographs of the first Freyas and Würzburg; the Bruneval Raid; the searchlight map; the unravelling of the Kammhuber Line in a flash; Window; the finding of the rockets at Peenemünde and Blizna; the first V-1 tracks in the Baltic; D-Day; the true weight of the V-2. I felt matched to the task, with an operational reward awaiting almost everything that I did; and I worked with as brave a company of men and women as any one man might hope to meet.

  Finally, let me set our contribution in perspective. There were several occasions on which I could conscientiously say, with Wellington after Waterloo, ‘I don’t think it would have done if I had not been there’ (Creevey Papers, Ch. X, p. 236) but this is far from saying that I or anyone else can claim the major credit. Even such a simple operation as countering the beams involved a multitude of men and women, every one of whom played an essential part; patiently cataloguing the call signs of German aircraft, poring over innumerable air photographs only a fraction of which had anything interesting on them, working away at breaking the seemingly unbreakable Enigma machine, interrogating prisoners, examining captured equipment, listening to the beams and scouring the country to find suitable jamming transmitters, and setting these on to the right frequencies, all played their part—and the whole system would fail when any one part broke down. When to all this are added the contributions by those who risked and sacrificed their lives, our own efforts mayperhaps be seen in a more realistic perspective. We all depended on the efforts of a great body of men and women whose existence in Lord Slim’s words, ‘is only remembered when something for which they are responsible goes wrong’.

  If any one of these many components had failed, our entire effort would have come to nothing. Just as any one link in a chain is essential to supporting the weight at its end, or as a breakdown in any one compenent can ruin a machine, so could any one of many agencies have lost us the war. What none of them would have claimed is that it won the war by itself. This lesson, so clear in war, has to be re-learnt in peace, where the successful functioning of a civilized state depends on the efforts of many professions and agencies, each one of which can truly argue that its contribution is vital. But if by threatening to with-hold this contribution any one section holds up the rest to ransom in order to gain for itself a larger slice of the national cake it will start a movement that—if followed by others—will lead to the nation overpaying itself beyond its true income, and thus to ruin. Until we learn that lesson we shall have lost the battle that we in the war fought so hard to win.

  Notes

  Chapter 2

  For the beginnings of radar in Britain, I have drawn on an unpublished memorandum by A. F. Wilkins.

  Another account is in R. A. Watson-Watt’s Three Steps to Victory (Odhams, London, 1957) which is a useful source book on early British radar developments.

  Vol. 93 of the Journal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers for 1946 is another useful source.

  For more details of early British infra-red developments see R. V. Jones, Infra-Red in British Air Defence 1935–8 (Infra-Red Physics, Vol. 1, pp. 153–162, 1961).

  Chapter 4

  Watson-Watt’s opinion of Lindemann comes from his article in The Sunday Times for 7 July 1957.

  Chapter 8

  F. W. Winterbotham has described his work in Secret and Personal (Kimber 1969) and The Ultra Secret (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974).

  Chapter 11

  Sources of quotations in this Chapter are:

  R. W. Clark, Tizard (Methuen, London, 1965).

  D. Irving, The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1973).

  Chapter 12

  Sources of quotations in this Chapter are:

  W. S. Churchill, Thoughts and Adventures (Thornton Butterworth, London, 1932).

  R. W. Clark, Tizard.

  Telford Taylor, The Breaking Wave (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1967).

  For a fuller account of Churchill’s appreciation of science and technology see R. V. Jones, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 12, pp. 35–105, 1966).

  Chapter 13

  Wintle’s life, largely written by himself, can be found in The Last Englishman (Joseph, London, 1968).

  Chapter 16

  Cotton’s life can be found in R. Barker, Aviator Extraordinary (Chatto and Windus, London, 1969).

  The subsequent history of photographic reconnaissance is given in Andrew J. Brookes Photo Reconnaissance (Ian Allan, 1975).

  Chapter 17

  The X-Beam antenna appears to have been a simple two-dipole interferometer with a phase switch for shifting the pattern from dash lobes to dot lobes. The dipole separation was 14.75 metres in one version and 20.5 metres in another, and the waveband 3.9 to 4.5 metres.

  Reflector dipoles were normally added, but these are not present on Plate 7a.

  Chapter 18

  A general account of the Coventry Raid is given by N. Longmate in Air Raid (Hutchinson, London, 1976).

  Chapter 20

  Sir Arthur Harris’s minute of 1 February 1941 was on Air Ministry file S.7347 entitled ‘Offensive action against German W/T stations’.

  Chapter 23

  The photographs on which the Freyas were discovered (p.190 and P1. 9a and b) were taken on a brilliant November day when the low sun cast long shadows—the most favourable photographic conditions.

  Chapter 24

  The quotation of Admiral Cunningham at Crete comes from W. S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. III, p. 265 (Cassell, London, 1950).

  The contribution of Enigma to the Bismarck and other naval actions is discussed in P. Beesly’s Very Special Intelligence (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1977).

  Chapter 25

  Meinertzhagen’s life has been written by John Lord in Duty, Honour, Empire (Hutchinson 1971).

  H. J. Giskes has told his story in London calling North Pole (Kimber 1953).

  Much credit is due to ‘George’ (p.216) but at the request of the Security authorities his real name was withheld from the text. However, it has now been revealed by his former colleague, Ewen Montagu, in Beyond Top Secret U as that of Squadron Leader Charles Cholmondeley.

  Chapter 26

  There was a bullet hole through part of the antenna unit that Cox brought back (p.241).

  Chapter 27

  An account of the Italian two-man torpedo effort is given in J. Piekalkiewicz’s Secret Agents, Spies, & Saboteurs (Morrow, 1973).

  Rémy (Colonel Gilbert Renault) has described his part in the Bruneval story in Bruneval: Opération Coup de Croc (Editions France Empire, 1968).

 
Flight Sergeant C. W. H. Cox’s report was written immediately after the Bruneval raid and was included as an appendix to my Air Scientific Intelligence Report No. 15, The Intelligence Aspect of the Bruneval Raid, dated 13th July 1942.

  Chapter 28

  Philby described his work in My Silent War (MacGibbon and Kee, London, 1968). His judgement of personalities was penetrating until it began to break under the strain of his double-agency.

  Chapter 30

  For an excellent account of Underground activities in Occupied Europe, see M. R. D. Foot’s Resistance (Eyre Methuen, London, 1976).

  Chapter 31

  F. E. Jones’s account of the Oboe attack on Florennes comes from R. W. Clark’s The Rise of the Boffins.

  Chapter 32

  An account of the German nuclear effort, and of the British/Norwegian sabotage effort, is given in David Irving’s The Virus House (Kimber, London, 1964).

  Chapter 38

  The development of the long-range (A4) rocket has been described in General Walter Dornberger’s V-2 (Hurst and Blackett, London, 1954).

  See also E. Klee and O. Merk The Birth of the Missile (Harrap, 1965).

  Chapter 39

  Constance Babington Smith’s part in discovering the V-1 is described in her book Evidence in Camera (Chatto and Windus, London, 1958).

  Glossary of Abbreviations and Code Names

  British Officials and Department

  A.C.A.S. (I) Assistant Chief of Air Staff (Intelligence).

  A.D.I.K. Assistant Director of Intelligence (Prisoner Interrogation).

  A.D.I. (Photos) Assistant Director of Intelligence (Photographic Reconnaissance).