Overall, the press and media co-ordination for Bruneval had been masterly. Of course, newspaper readers and cinema audiences wanted to be told good news at this dreadfully low point. And newspaper and newsreel editors were equally keen to tell of a British triumph. But the way in which the press and the newsreels at home and abroad eagerly took up the key messages that the Royal Navy, the army and the RAF wanted to get across about the raid must have pleased the military chiefs enormously. This was another of the many ways in which the Bruneval raid was a turning point. When the suggestion of ‘embedding’ journalists on ships or planes or with military units came up again, the armed forces were more likely to look on it favourably after the success of the Bruneval experience had shown how a good news story could be controlled.
This was not a case of manipulating the press. Everyone wanted to read the story. But the news media were fed the precise spin the military wanted to give. And it never slipped out that the Paras had brought some vital booty back with them for scientific analysis. There would be countless more examples over the next few years of reporters flying on operational missions, of journalists travelling on naval vessels and within military units, and by the end of the war reporters were even jumping behind enemy lines with the Paras. A new example had been set.
The Bruneval raid had entered the consciousness of the British public. Later raids and incursions were not always so successful, but the memory of Bruneval would remain as a heroic episode in Britain’s wartime story. Soon after the war was over, a movie was made about the backroom boys and the radar story, in which a dramatisation of the Bruneval raid would play an important part. School for Secrets was written and directed by Peter Ustinov for Two Cities Films.27 After In Which We Serve in 1942, Two Cities had made another Noel Coward epic in 1944, this time about a family living in the suburbs between the wars and called This Happy Breed. And in the same year the company had made Laurence Olivier’s epic rallying cry for the nation when he directed and starred in Henry V. Unlike these other titles, School for Secrets is no film classic and is largely forgotten today. But it includes many features pertinent to the Bruneval story.
The film presents itself as the story of ‘a handful of boffins’, the word which had come to define the quiet, self-effacing backroom scientists whose work was by 1946 beginning to be recognised for its contribution towards victory. They were usually seen as rather eccentric and whacky, as indeed were the group in School for Secrets. The film tells of a group of five boffins who are sent out of London to carry on their top secret work and are billeted in the same house, with a Mrs Arnold to look after them. Here they begin a desperate race to develop a form of radar that helps to save Britain in the summer of 1940 during the Battle of Britain.
Mrs Arnold, however, is suspicious of her guests and believes they are a group of conscientious objectors. Her son, a pilot in Bomber Command played by a young Richard Attenborough, thinks otherwise and eventually meets some of them carrying out radar experiments on his RAF station. One after another, the inventions come tumbling from the minds of the brilliant but weird scientists. As the wife of one of them says when he drops all the plates while trying to help with the washing up, he is ‘more theoretical than practical’!
The film ends with a sequence based on the Bruneval raid in which a group of commando-paratroopers are instructed to go and capture an enemy Würzburg radar. In this version of the raid the Paras take with them one of the radar experts, Professor Heatherville (played by Ralph Richardson), who gets stuck in a tree with his parachute. He has to dismantle the German radar under fire and is given twelve minutes to do the job. All this is done quite realistically. Indeed, Lieutenant John Timothy was assigned by the Airborne Division to act as technical consultant for this part of the film. Timothy was awaiting his demobilisation and spent a few happy weeks at Denham Studios rubbing shoulders with movie stars. Ustinov offered him a cameo role in the film but the actors’ union Equity blocked his appearance.28 Timothy did not record what he thought of the final version of the film.
School for Secrets was all part of the myth-building about Britain’s war record that the British cinema indulged in through the late 1940s, the 1950s, and even into the 1960s. The film helped to shape some strong interpretations of the wartime experience. For instance, most of the RAF officers are shown as being dismissive of the WAAFs operating the radar. Nevertheless, the glamorous WAAFs bravely rise to the challenge of reading the radar screens even when being bombed by the Luftwaffe, showing how important was the role played by women in the war, despite the chauvinism of the men around them. The film contains another popular cultural stereotype – that of the Paras, who are portrayed as a particularly bloodthirsty and ruthless bunch who kill the Germans with their knives when they can. But it is clearly intended as a celebration of one of Britain’s great wartime achievements, the development of radar, and as a tribute to the backroom scientists whose genius and hard work helped to bring victory in the war.
Ultimately, though, the success of the Bruneval raid would be judged not on the damage it inflicted, nor on the boost to morale it generated, but on the value of the material that had been brought back to Britain. What would the scientists make of the parts that Cox and Vernon had brought back?
21
The Scientific War
It did not take long for the scientists who had suggested the Bruneval raid to get their hands on the booty that had been brought back from France. R.V. Jones, like most other people in Britain, heard over the weekend of 28 February that the raid had been a success. He was telephoned on the Sunday and told that the equipment that had been seized would be at the Air Ministry on the afternoon of Monday 2 March.
Jones was absolutely delighted by what he found. Only one significant component had been left behind in France and that was the display screen, probably the least important feature. Vernon and Cox had done a magnificent job in dismantling the equipment and carrying it down the cliff for transportation back to England. Jones was even more impressed to hear that they had only had ten minutes to take the Würzburg to pieces rather than the half-hour originally allotted, and that the dismantling had taken place under enemy fire.
Jones’s first impression when he started to examine the Würzburg was how much better engineered it was than British radar equipment. It was possible to remove faulty parts and install new ones with ease. As Jones went through the components he realised that many of them had been replaced, each new part containing a works number and the date of manufacture. The thoroughness of the German engineering industry in marking every component turned out to be a great help.
From these details Jones was able to work out the name of every factory building parts for the Würzburg. By looking at the dates of manufacture, he was able to paint a clear picture of how many parts were being produced. And from this, he was able to calculate that the average rate of production was about 150 sets per month. Allowing for the production of a large percentage of spares, this suggested a total output of about a hundred Würzburgs each month. This was way beyond anything that had been anticipated beforehand, and clearly indicated the central role that the Würzburg system was going to play in the radar defence of occupied Europe and primarily of Germany itself.
Jones knew that the Bruneval Würzburg was already of an older type using a simple aerial, whereas the Giant Würzburgs that the photo interpreters had spotted on aerial photographs were not only larger but also had spinning aerials that would enable them to locate and identify a target far more accurately. But he suspected that the same electronic components could be used in both systems. And Jones now had these principal components on a bench in front of him.1
The stolen equipment was soon to be taken to TRE in Worth Matravers, where it could be analysed in detail. There it would be possible to calculate the limits of the wavelengths it could be tuned to. The scientists could come to a detailed understanding of how the electronics operated. And, most importantly of all, now that it was clear that the Wür
zburg was to be at the heart of the German night fighter defence system, ways of jamming it could be sought. But Jones knew that a radar operator had been captured and brought back to England. He was keen to meet this man and hopefully discover even more about how an operator used the Würzburg and what its full potential was. Jones gathered up the pieces and took them with him to the RAF prisoner interrogation centre at Cockfosters, where his old friend Wing Commander Denys Felkin was leading the interrogation of the prisoner.
To the British, Heller was an unlikely man to be operating a front-line radar system. He had very limited scientific knowledge. But the man was certainly willing to talk and had happily filled in his background for Felkin and the interrogation team. Heller told them that he had joined the Luftwaffe soon after its creation in the mid 1930s. But it was clear that he was not an ideal candidate and during his training, which took place in Augsburg, he was unable to learn Morse code. This basic communication system of dots and dashes was still a fundamental requirement for many grades in air force and army signalling units around the world. But Heller had never been able to master it.
Three days after war was declared in September 1939, Heller had applied for compassionate leave to return home, where his baby daughter was seriously ill. With the war just beginning, his request was refused. So he absented himself without leave. On 9 September he was arrested by the military police. Tragically, his daughter died five days later. Heller was taken to Munich, where after an investigation lasting four weeks he was tried by court martial and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. After two months he was released on good behaviour and sent back to a Luftwaffe signals unit in Augsburg. But only two weeks later he went absent without leave once again and with some friends went on a two-day drinking spree. Arrested once more, this time he was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment, with an additional two months remitted from the first sentence. He was sent to the well-known military prison at Torgau, where there were up to two thousand prisoners.
Later he worked as a prison labourer reclaiming land on the Baltic coast and then as a worker in the Volkswagen plant at Fallersleben. He stayed at the factory, even though his sentence had expired, until September 1941, when he rejoined his Luftwaffe unit in Augsburg. Towards the end of the year, his regiment was asked to provide ten men for Luftwaffe units in France. Heller was selected, possibly as a way of getting him out of trouble in Germany, and before long he was allocated to the Würzburg radar station at Bruneval.
No doubt Heller’s low morale was due to the punishment that had been meted out to him and explained in part his willingness to talk to the RAF interrogators. But Felkin was amazed when the prisoner started to talk about the Würzburg, the machine he had been assigned to operate. He spoke with some pride about his machine having a ‘magical eye’. Although he had spent two months on the radar, he still claimed that the Würzburg was able to ‘see’ enemy aircraft in some way. This, he claimed in all seriousness, was why the system was less effective in cloudy weather than when the sky was clear.
Felkin thought he must be trying to take the interrogators for a ride, to deceive them in some way. But as he spent more time with the prisoner he realised that this was a man with a low IQ and little training, who had not understood even the basic principles of radar. In his report, Felkin could barely contain his contempt for the prisoner; he wrote, ‘P/W [prisoner of war] is very willing to impart all he knows, but is of limited intelligence… even after two months’ practical experience of the Würzburg apparatus, he still believes that the instrument “sees” the aircraft in some way.’2
Felkin was very dismissive of the prisoner when Jones arrived at Cockfosters with parts of the stolen equipment. Jones sat on the floor and observed Heller fitting different parts together, which he could clearly do very easily. As he did so, Jones asked him through a translator what the radar could do and what his job had been. Jones, like Felkin, was flabbergasted. The man had no idea of the complexity of the equipment he was using. He was no engineer and had none of the scientific training required of every radar operator in the RAF. In his almost childish way he chatted on about the magic eye. He even said at one point that on his last leave he had told his wife about the isolated outpost he had been assigned to, and that one day the British might raid the site and capture it. He wondered out loud if his wife was a fifth columnist and had passed these details on to British Intelligence.
However, Jones was learning an important lesson about the German radar technology. Although no scientist and no engineer, the prisoner was part of a team using cutting-edge technology. Not only was it supremely well engineered, it was clearly designed for use by operatives with a very low technical competency, people who would have been regarded as unsuitable in the RAF.
Jones later heard that the Luftwaffe had a very low priority in recruiting personnel for their radar and signals units, taking people thought not to be suitable for other duties. In Germany, Hitler had banned amateur radio before the war, fearing that opponents of the Nazi regime might use it to organise an opposition. And so there was no reserve of skilled and enthusiastic amateurs to draw upon, whereas in England men like Charles Cox, who had been assembling and dismantling wireless sets since their childhood, were ideal recruits to RAF radio and radar teams. As Jones now realised, the Germans had to ensure ‘that the equipment was so well made, and so easily replaceable if any part broke down, that the system could be operated by relatively unskilled personnel’.3 This was a revelation both to him and to the rest of the British scientific establishment.
Much had thus been learnt from the pieces brought back from Bruneval. The scientists had discovered the high quality of the design and engineering and the low grade of the operators that were using the equipment. Jones concluded that British scientists now had a ‘first-hand knowledge of the state of German radar technology’, especially as it was being applied to ‘our principal objective, the German night fighter control system’.4
In addition to the technical knowledge gained, the raid had a variety of immediate consequences. Believing that the Villa Gosset was the headquarters of the German radar team at Bruneval, the planners had agreed that one objective of the raid should be to blow the building up. Finding the villa empty when they arrived there, however, Frost and his men left it standing. However, within days of the raid the Germans themselves destroyed the building, believing that it was this unusual structure that had attracted attention to the existence of the Würzburg. Of course, this was not the case. In fact it had nearly diverted the attention of the photo interpreters from the tiny path leading to the speck that was the first sighting of the Würzburg.
As a second consequence, the Germans decided that they must provide better defences for their radar installations along the northern French coastline, and so they constructed large rings of barbed wire entanglements around each installation. What they did not realise was that on black and white aerial photographs barbed wire stands out very clearly, as the grass grows beneath it and has a darker shade than surrounding grassland. The effect was like using an aerial marker pen to highlight every radar station in France. Before long Claude Wavell and his section at Medmenham had been able to identify all the installations along the coast, including several new Freyas and Würzburgs they had not spotted before.5 This was a very welcome if unexpected consequence of the raid.
One further consequence was not so welcome to some. After Bruneval, the possibility of a retaliatory raid on a British radar installation seemed a high possibility. The obvious site for a reprisal would have been TRE – right on the coast, spread out over a large area and easy to identify on aerial photographs with its several masts, tall aerials and workshops. The Air Ministry suggested to Rowe that it was time to move, and some of those working at Worth Matravers began to grow nervous. There was only one road in and out of the site, and that was through the pretty little town of Corfe Castle. It would be easy for a raiding party to block this road, and so scientists and engineers started to ta
ke precious objects like the invaluable cavity magnetrons, and their top secret research papers, home with them of an evening in case there was a raid that night.6 Many of the scientists nevertheless loved where they were working. It was in a beautiful stretch of Dorset countryside near the pretty seaside town of Swanage. They did not want to move.
Night Raid Page 29
