Part of the First Airborne Division, the paratroopers were wearing army uniforms, yet Cox was in RAF uniform. If the assault team was captured, he would stand out, and the Gestapo would want to know why he was with them. Cox most understandably worried about this, and before long, Jones went up to Ringway to comfort him. When Cox explained that he didn’t so much want comfort as the chance to blend in by wearing the same uniforms as the other troops, Jones had to reply that he’d tried in London to get that approved, but the War Office was adamant that switching service uniforms set a bad precedent. Cox explained that he understood about precedents, but that with the Gestapo on hand this could, with justice, be considered a special case. Jones, wincing, had to explain that the War Office had been very adamant.
After the rush course in parachuting, Cox—still in his RAF uniform—was bundled off to Salisbury Plain for an even more rushed course in assault techniques. Some of it he enjoyed, not least the way that anything he asked for was given to him—binoculars, a compass, clean boots, even a smart new Colt .45. Some of the course was more distressing, as when he found out how the Scottish troops he was training with practiced crossing a barbed-wire emplacement. Instead of bringing out wirecutters, as he expected, they simply had one of the men stretch out on the uncut wire to form a human ramp: the rest of the men then crunched over him. None of the officers explained to Cox how difficult the operation was likely to be: they would have only relatively light weapons, and prior airborne operations had proven far more difficult than expected.
The parachute assault took place on the night of February 27, 1942. The Würzburg set they were coming to get began tracking them when they were still twenty miles out, sending fast-rippling invisible waves up into the dark air. Answering electric waves from the incoming British planes shot back ineluctably, launched into the night from the metal wings and body of each aircraft, emanating just inches from where Cox and the paratroopers sat. With those unseen answers, the British team was detected.
When the approximately one hundred men jumped, about two dozen of the team were blown hopelessly off course, coming down miles away, but the bulk of the force landed safely in the target zone. After the usual ritual upon landing—blissfully relieving themselves of the tea they’d drunk in the hours before boarding their planes—the assembled troops walked quickly toward the chateau that overlooked the Würzburg radar. Cox followed, pushing the little wheeled trolley the planners in London had decided he should use to put the captured radar parts on.
Only a few of the defenders were at the chateau itself, but the German radar operator had understood why so many glowing dots on his screen were heading his way. The main group of German troops had been warned and were either in ambush positions or trying to get there. A series of firefights began, and at that moment Cox realized he had to move quickly. There were likely to be hidden explosive charges that could detonate the Würzburg, and Tait would definitely think badly of Cox if that happened, so now Cox hurried forward in the dark, amid the firing, and got over the barbed wire around the set to help find and disarm those charges. He recognized a suspicious moving shadow and thereby helped—most politely—to capture the German radar operator who was running away; he directed the British troops in the use of crowbars to snap loose electronic parts from the Würzburg, and calmly made sure they also collected the serial numbers of any replacement pieces. He was so worried by what might happen if he arrived back without enough samples that even as the German troops approached and mortar attacks began—and while the main paratrooper force had to rush from the Würzburg earlier than planned—he kept at work until he was sure key parts of the swinging curved antenna had been sawed loose.
There was supposed to be an easy scramble down to the beach, but the men who had been allocated to cover this escape were precisely the ones who had been blown off course on landing. A German machine-gun crew started firing at the British, which further worried Cox; as a result he directed the men to shift the Würzburg parts from the trolleys to backpacks (thus ensuring that none of the electronics were damaged), and he also seems to have helped tend the wounded. Just when it looked as if the entire assault team might be overrun, there were sudden shouts of Cabar Feidh! as the lost Scot Highlander covering party finally arrived. The German machine-gunners decided that escape into a convenient ravine was wiser than facing any more of these shouting troops. The raiding force at last made it down to the beach.
The Royal Navy wasn’t there, however, and increasingly urgent radio messages and even bright flares didn’t seem to help. But as headlights from German trucks appeared near the clifftop above, the navy’s landing craft arrived, lots of them, and their heavier guns meant the fresh enemy troops above would be no problem. Most of the escaping troops were left to wallow all the way back to England in the unwieldy landing craft (though they were given rum once aboard), but Cox was taken aside and quickly transferred to a speedboat, then led roaring at over twenty knots toward Portsmouth with two Royal Navy destroyers nearby and soon a flight of Spitfires giving further cover overhead. He made it ashore, was given a fast motorcade ride to London, and, after a quick debriefing and delivery of the precious Würzburg parts, was granted as much leave as he wanted. By midnight he’d made it all the way to his home in the small town of Wisbech, in East Anglia. There was one fire in the house, and his father, mother, grandparents, wife, and toddler child were waiting for him around it. Cox marched in, and as he remembered:
“ ‘Hello, family,’ I said, ‘I’ve been in France, that’s where I’ve been, and it’s in the London newspapers tonight. How about that, then?’ ”
Cox was a hero, but what he’d brought over would be used for one of the largest killings in modern times. The Würzburg radar was even more advanced than British specialists had anticipated. It poured out waves of a bare ten inches from peak to peak. Those small, precise waves could be aimed with far more accuracy. The Chain Home system, with its yards-long waves, was antiquated by comparison.
That was bad enough, but the serial numbers Cox had captured allowed for a very disturbing calculation. Some of the replacement parts in the Würzburg had been installed in December, and the serial numbers on those parts were close together, suggesting that not many machines were in operation. But the replacement parts that had been installed in February had serial numbers much further apart—which ominously suggested that many more spare parts were being produced, to supply a much greater number of Würzburg machines now in use. That explained the attacks the RAF was suffering. The multitudes of new Würzburgs, with their ability to spot incoming aircraft, and their uncannily accurate guidance of searchlight beams, were turning the sky over Europe into a killing zone for Allied fliers.
But then—and could the full consequences of this discovery ever have been averted?—the London analysts found a weakness in the Würzburg. Its settings were very hard to change, and at first no one knew why. The clue came from the young operator that Cox had helped to capture.
He was very young and willing to talk. (“We spent the afternoon,” Jones recalled, “sitting on the floor with him, fitting the various pieces together, and listening to his comments.”) But he was also almost entirely ignorant of how radar worked. (“He seemed to have spent more time inside prison than out of it.”) Britain had a lot of skilled amateur radio operators to draw from, but in Germany it had long been strictly forbidden for private civilians to build radios. Nor could German women be recruited, even if they had an aptitude for technical jobs. In a dictatorship obsessed with eugenics, they were to remain fertile, demure, and at home. German radars had to be very simple, Jones gradually realized, for there weren’t enough educated men available to repair and operate radars of any complexity. In other words, Germany’s most advanced radar had been built to be an immensely sophisticated, idiot-proof piece of machinery.
It was the rigid nature of Germany’s radar that made Jones and others in the Air Ministry believe they could turn Germany’s technical advances back against the
m. For several months already, the RAF had been considering a weapon that at first seemed too simple to be of any great importance. It consisted merely of large numbers of aluminum strips, like long pieces of confetti, that could be dropped from an airplane. (The weapon’s original code name was “Window,” but it later became known as “chaff,” the name we’ll use.) If these strips were released from a fleet of planes, researchers believed they could act as a flurrying cloud, sending back an immense number of electric pulses. Germany’s cities were increasingly dependent on radar for their defenses: there were radar-guided searchlights, radar-guided antiaircraft batteries, and—increasingly effective against British air attacks now—powerful, fast night-fighter planes, guided by information radioed up from still more radar sets on the ground. If chaff worked and the German operators were overwhelmed with false signals, that radar would be useless, and the attacking planes would be effectively invisible. Since British specialists now knew the Würzburg’s exact wavelengths, they could use that to work out the ideal size for the chaff.
Watson Watt knew who was gunning to use chaff. It was Arthur Harris, the head of RAF Bomber Command. Harris had long known what chaff could do, but he’d held back, for chaff seemed to be the sort of weapon that could be used with full effectiveness only once. After a while the enemy surely would work out ways to distinguish the slow fluttering of the chaff from the faster speeding planes; they might also use chaff technology to jam British radar. There had been an impasse—a bit like everyone having poison gas but no one using it. But what the Bruneval raid had revealed was that Germany’s radar sets—and especially the super-accurate Würzburg—were so rigidly calibrated that it would be hard for any of the operators to adapt to the new weapon. Chaff might render fleets of planes impregnable for a long time. Watson Watt knew he had the battle of a lifetime coming up. So did Harris—and he was sure that, this time, he was going to win.
It’s doubtful that there was a more disagreeable character on the Allied military side in World War II than Harris. He could be kind to his immediate family, but he had few friends and no hobbies. He never read a book, and he never listened to music. He had only one great passion in his life, and it was a hatred. It wasn’t directed against Germany. It seems—from the evidence of his actions—that it was directed against blue-collar workers.
Harris was an extreme reactionary. Like many well-off individuals of his time, he often expressed great distaste for the British working classes, and for their German counterparts as well. The writings of even many ostensibly gentle literary intellectuals from this period are disturbing when it comes to this topic; indeed, they bear some resemblance to the racial hatred that Japan and America came to feel toward each other as their battles in the Pacific went on. For American military leaders, this led to the burning down of entire Japanese cities, with few moral qualms; for Harris, it led to a cold and pitiless view of any workers or children who on the ground would be forgotten when his bombers came overhead.
Many officers aware of his plans were appalled at what he wanted to do. The United States, for example, was bombing enemy factories, railroads, and docks. Often there were vast mistakes, and civilians were killed. But at least in Europe that was never the goal of entire campaigns, and American flight officers who consistently missed their navigation targets could be removed from duty. The Royal Navy also wanted to use whatever bombers were available to concentrate on submarine factories and shipyards, and, if possible, to use bombers to target enemy submarines or surface ships on the seas.
Harris saw it differently. Enemy factories may have been his ostensible primary targets, but he was convinced it was a waste of time to try aiming precisely at the factories or construction yards. Nor did he want his planes circling aimlessly over the sea on the hunt for enemy submarines. That was merely a distraction. He wouldn’t allow it, and if it had to happen, he wouldn’t encourage it. He wanted to kill people, quite as much as he wanted to destroy buildings or equipment. The huge supplies of high explosives and incendiaries that the RAF was accumulating were to be dropped on the workers themselves, in the houses where they lived. That, he was convinced, was the most effective way to destroy the enemy’s power. In the very month of the Bruneval raid, Bomber Command released Directive 22, which was meant to ensure that in all attacks “[the] aiming points [are] to be built-up areas, not, for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories….This must be made quite clear.”
Objections were regularly brushed aside, whether they came from military officers or expert civilians. The Bruneval data now helped give Harris the argument he could use to take his efforts to the highest level. He would use chaff to turn off a city’s radar protection. Then, when the city was defenseless, he would do as he liked: trying to destroy its factories, perhaps, but also destroying whoever lived there.
Watson Watt was frantic. This was never what he’d devised radar for, but he was just an underling now, and despite a last desperate rush of words and memos, he could merely watch as the remarkable defensive weapon he’d helped create was lifted from his control. He even tried getting Henry Tizard to help him. Tizard was the man who’d headed the original committee that created Britain’s radar system, and that had been so crucial in the 1940 Battle of Britain. Tizard also despised Harris, and now he started building alliances that in normal times might have been enough to stop him. But everything had to get past the man Tizard had humiliated at the radar committee in 1936—and Lindemann had the exclusive ear of the prime minister now. It was with the greatest pleasure that Lindemann ensured nothing Tizard proposed was seriously considered by the government.
By early 1943, Tizard and Watson Watt knew they had lost. At one point Harris sponsored a talk at Bomber Command’s Buckinghamshire HQ on the Ethics of Bombing. After the talk, the Bomber Command chaplain Rev. John Collins stood up and said that, on the contrary, this was the Bombing of Ethics. But he was firmly corrected, and no one else there dared to speak in his support.
There was little question what city Harris would select to show what his force could do. Hamburg was a huge industrial center, with lots of densely concentrated worker housing. It was also on the North Sea, with the river Elbe going through it. Navigating at the border where land and sea come together is especially easy (for land and water respond very differently to radar, as we’ll see).
Harris gave instructions to guide his RAF navigators as they entered airspace over the city. To the south of the Elbe were the factories and famous U-boat construction yards: Blohm & Voss, Stülcken, and Howaldtswerke. Those were the targets that the Royal Navy and Tizard wanted destroyed. But Harris’s pilots had express orders to avoid them and stay on the north side of the city. There were no war factories there, only row after row of tenements in six-story blocks much like London’s old East End or parts of New York’s Lower East Side. Some of the men there were employed at the factories, but the majority of inhabitants were older people, women, and—since there had been only partial evacuation to the countryside—lots and lots of children.
The Bruneval data was processed by that spring, and small, downward-aiming radars were in place in many of the aircraft; the very final arguments for chaff were won by early summer. Now all that remained was to wait for the ideal weather conditions. In Hamburg, July was a warm month, with temperatures in the eighties. The humidity stayed unusually low for several days. Harris monitored the weather reports.
There were a number of powerful preliminary raids, but it was only on the evening of July 27 that the main RAF force set out. A few couples were still strolling in Hamburg’s parks and open areas; it would be hours before any signs of the RAF appeared.
At eleven P.M. the planes were far over the dark North Sea, still unseen. In the radio headsets of the aircrew, broadcasts sent rippling out from England led to electrons vibrating over minuscule distances, and then magnified into audible sound. Inside the downward-looking radars, more electrons were hurtling through their miniature copper-bound channels, flinging down tig
ht radio waves. There are relatively few loose electrons in water to respond, so when the oscilloscopes showed only blackness, the navigators knew they were over the cold waters of the North Sea.
But then, about an hour later, the invisible waves pumping down from the onboard radars began to hit something different. Metal structures such as sheds or rails have great numbers of loose electrons; tree leaves and brick buildings and paved roads have fewer, but transmit some signals as well. The oscilloscopes two miles high began to reveal a sharp contrast with the blackness of the sea. The Pathfinder planes at the front realized they were crossing the coast and made slight corrections to be exactly on course. More than seven hundred bombers followed close behind.
The bombing crews started expelling the confetti-like bundles of chaff from the planes. The bundles blew apart in the fast-moving air, separating into thousands of aluminum strips as they fell. The invisible waves that the Würzburg and other sets were spraying upward slammed into all the loose electrons in the slowly fluttering aluminum. As the aluminum’s loose, outer electrons moved back and forth under that unstoppable power from below, they became miniature transmitters. The sky was still pitch black to human eyes, but for each radar set below it glowed bright as each aluminum strip began broadcasting. Millions of identical signals rained down.
The Würzburg and other radars were swamped. No ground controller could pick out the actual airplanes in that dazzling electric power. The searchlights they had controlled suddenly began spinning aimlessly; antiaircraft batteries either stopped operating or fired randomly. Fighter pilots called down frantically for directions. Some of the ground controllers in such circumstances yelled into their radios for the fighters to “Break off, the bombers are multiplying themselves!” Others sent angry radio messages up, telling the fighter pilots to fly twisting flight paths in an attempt to have them stand out from the multiplying aluminum transmissions that filled the sky.
Electric Universe Page 11
