Saturday Snippet: One of the legends of scientific intelligence

 

Dr. R. V. Jones was a leading figure in Allied intelligence during and after World War II, although little-known to the public until he published his memoirs.  He's the scientist who put together clues from various sources to predict - accurately - the German blind-bombing radio guidance beams (and how to defeat them), the German defensive radar system against Allied bombers (and how to beat it), the V-1 and V-2 secret weapons, and a host of other threats.  He may not have been "the man who won the war", but he can truly be described as one of the very few men without whom it might have been lost.  He was a legend in his own lifetime among his peers, and today, even a generation after his death, his book, "Most Secret War", is a standard textbook and reference work in virtually every intelligence service in the world.  It's hard to praise him too highly.

I've enjoyed the book since it was first published, and re-read it at least once every year or two, because the lessons he taught in putting together clues to understand the "big picture", and how to understand what's going on from the sparsest of information, are very valuable to a writer.  I thought my readers would enjoy reading some of his work, particularly the lighter side, because he had a very British sense of humor and indulged it often (sometimes at the expense of his stiff-upper-lip colleagues).

Here's a selection of vignettes from his book.

[The interrogators] had a preliminary meeting together, and decided that the first thing that they had to do was to establish a moral superiority over the [German] prisoner. They were to sit on one side of a long table, and the prisoner was to be marched in and stood to attention between two guards as members of the interrogation panel fired questions at him. When they had settled themselves down, the door was thrown open and the prisoner marched in. He was a typical product of Nazi success. His uniform was smart, his jackboots were gleaming, and his movements executed with German precision. As he came to the centre of the room he was halted and turned to face the panel. No sooner had he executed his turn than he clicked his heels together and gave a very smart Nazi salute. For this the panel were unprepared, and none more so than Josh, who stood up as smartly, gave the Nazi salute and repeated the prisoner’s ‘Heil Hitler!’ Then, realizing that he had done the wrong thing, he looked in embarrassment at his colleagues and sat down with such speed that he missed his chair and, to the prisoner’s astonishment, disappeared completely under the table.

* * *

While my evenings were spent discussing cryptography, my days went in perusing the S.I.S. files. These were not inspiring, for they were very weak on matters concerning science and technology, since (in common with most Ministers of the Crown and their Permanent Secretaries) the average S.I.S. agent was a scientific analphabet. The most entertaining file was undoubtedly one labelled ‘Death Ray’ which was a saga in itself. Over the years the S.I.S. had become tired of reporting death rays only to be slapped down by the Service Ministries, and one S.I.S. agent had been so convinced by a Dutch inventor that the S.I.S. finally decided to show the Service Ministries how wrong they were. It therefore actually provided the inventor with money to pursue his development so that they could present the Service Ministries with the genuine article. The latter part of the file consisted of reports of visits to the inventor to inspect his progress. Invariably he had an excuse for the apparatus not working, right up to the outbreak of war. At last, when it was clear that even the S.I.S. was not being fooled any longer and would therefore give him no more money, his final report stated that although the apparatus had been a failure as a death ray, he had discovered that it had remarkable properties as a fruit preserver, and he therefore offered this invention for exploitation by the S.I.S. in any venture that it might think appropriate.

* * *

[A] demonstration [was held] at Farnborough of a very powerful loudspeaker system and amplifier system that had been developed for installation in aircraft policing the North-West frontier of India. This policing was sometimes done by punishing marauding tribesmen by bombing their villages, after due warning. Someone thought that the warning would be all the more effective if it came as from the voice of God, bellowing out from an aircraft. When the apparatus had been perfected, it was demonstrated to the Air Staff at Farnborough by mounting a microphone on one side of the aerodrome, some two thousand feet away. If you spoke into the microphone you could hear your voice coming two seconds later across from the other side. All went well with the demonstration until one of the inspecting officers struck by the curiosity of hearing his delayed voice, started to laugh. Two seconds later there came back a laugh from the loudspeaker at which everybody laughed. Two seconds later the shower of laughter returned, and I like to think that by now the volume was so great that the returned laugh was picked up by the microphone and duly relayed once again, making a system that laughed by itself.

* * *

Air activity in the early days of the war had shown that British aircraft were much more vulnerable than their German counterparts. Single bullets through fuel tanks proved enough to stop our bombers getting home from Kiel and Wilhelmshafen, whereas the German bombers in the Forth raid had taken many bullets with seemingly little inconvenience. The single bomber that we had shot down was found to have self-sealing tanks, and enquiry revealed that similar designs had been available in pre-war years for our aircraft, but had been rejected. In fact, a nearly satisfactory bullet-proof tank was developed before the end of World War I but, with peace, the specification had been altered to include crash-proof as well as bullet-proof characteristics, since crashes were then the major danger. As a result, every design submitted to the Air Ministry was taken to Farnborough, filled with liquid, and dropped over the side of one of the buildings onto concrete, where it inevitably broke up, and was therefore rejected. Some of the designs would in fact have been bullet-proof (this being achieved by a spongy rubber envelope which closed up again after a bullet had passed through it), but none could stand the fall of 60 ft. onto concrete. It proved a lesson in the importance of making sure that the paper specification defined the essential requirement—I know of at least one other example, when one of my colleagues showed that, according to the War Office specification, the ideal material for making crash helmets for its motorcycle despatch riders would have been plate glass.

* * *

On 10th May the Germans invaded the Low Countries, and with astonishing ease captured the very strong and key fortress of Eben Emael, near Liège. No more than 85 glider-borne troops had mastered a garrison of 750: how had they done it? Hitler gave orders that the method was to be kept secret, and so I spent some time finding out. It transpired that, like ourselves, the Germans had at last decided to exploit the possibilities of the hollow charge: their troops had placed such charges on the cupolas of the fort, blowing holes in them and immobilizing the guns. It was an instance where both sides in secrecy had undertaken exactly the same development, in contrast to others like centimetric radar or the V-2 rocket, where one side built up an overwhelming lead.

* * *

THE BROCKEN "GHOST"

The job that afforded me most interest was to examine the reports that occasionally came in from the Air Intelligence branches. These were usually very slight, but I tried to extract every possible item of information out of them, and I started to interact with Air Intelligence. Finally, a report came in that the Germans were undertaking some very high frequency radio developments on the Brocken, a well-known mountain in the Harz. Now I already knew something about the Brocken, because of the optical phenomenon known as the ‘Brocken Spectre’ or ‘Brocken Ghost’ which arises if you stand on the summit and the sun throws your shadow on a cloud below. If the conditions are right, you see your shadow with a saintly rainbow-coloured halo around its head. I decided that I would see if I could beat the official Intelligence Service in discovering more about whatever was happening on the Brocken, and so I wrote to Charles Frank explaining my interest in meteorological phenomena of the optical variety, and that I would be grateful for a first-hand account of the Brocken ghost.

. . .

When I met Charles Frank he told me that he had immediately grasped the significance of my letter about the Brocken, and had burned it at once. He had taken a trip to see what was going on, and had brought back a picture postcard of the new television-tower that had been erected on its summit. German Air Force personnel were generally around the area, and one thing that he observed neither of us has been able to explain. It was an array of posts rather like Belisha beacons with wooden pear-shaped objects at the top.

. . .

As it happened, the official Intelligence Service, which I had also briefed about the Brocken while I had been stationed at Headquarters, came up with some further information, but Charles and I between us had beaten them by a day, and his description of activities on the Brocken was much more detailed. This, as it turned out, did not go unnoticed.

. . .

Scott-Farnie showed me a short report by Mr. T. L. Eckersley of the Marconi Company, who was the country’s leading expert in radio propagation. On a purely theoretical basis, Eckersley had computed the range at which a transmitter sited at the top of the Brocken (the earlier object of Charles Frank’s and my attention) and working on a wavelength of 20 centimetres, could be heard. If Eckersley’s calculations were correct, the waves would bend round the earth to a surprising extent, and might well be received by a bomber flying at twenty thousand feet over our east coast. I asked Scott-Farnie for a copy of Eckersley’s map, which I placed in my files.

. . .

Within a few days of the final proof of the existence of Knickebein, there was on 27th June another mention of it in an Enigma message. This simply said ‘IT IS PROPOSED TO SET UP KNICKEBEIN AND WOTAN INSTALLATIONS NEAR CHERBOURG AND BREST’. So what was Wotan? And why was it mentioned along with Knickebein? Was it complementary or alternative to Knickebein? Just as there might be a clue in the meaning of Knickebein as Crooked Leg, was there some clue in Wotan? I knew, of course, that he was the Zeus of the German Gods (and still honoured, incidentally, by Wednesday) but was there anything unusual about him? I telephoned Bimbo Norman, whose scholarship in German heroic poetry even I was coming to realize ... as I asked him about Wotan, he replied, ‘Yes, he was Head of the German Gods …. Wait a moment …. He had only one eye’. And then, shouting triumphantly into the telephone, ‘ONE EYE—ONE BEAM! Can you think of a system that would use only one beam?’

I replied that I could, for in principle one could have the bomber fly along a beam pointing over the target, and have something like a radar station alongside the beam transmitter so that the distance of the bomber could be continuously measured from the starting point of the beam. A controller there could know both the distance of the bomber from its target and its speed, from which he could work out the correct instant at which the aircraft should release its bombs to hit the target.

As for the radar system employed, it could be something like our own, in which pulses were sent out to the bomber and reflected back to base; this system could be improved by having a receiver in the bomber which would amplify the signal before re-transmission to base, giving a positive identification of the bomber rather as in our own system of I.F.F. (Identification Friend or Foe). Alternatively the range-finding system might not use pulses but a continuous wave, such as had been mentioned in the Oslo Report, and which I had also found published in a Russian technical journal. In view of the Oslo evidence, I was inclined to look for something like a Knickebein beam with the continuous wave method range measurement. Norman enthusiastically applauded this suggestion, and together we chased every possible clue.

A few days later we encountered another Nordic deity, when on 5th July we learnt that German fighters had been able to intercept some of our aircraft owing to the excellent ‘Freya-Meldung’ (‘Freya Reporting’); and on 14th July we learnt that there was something called a ‘Freya Gerät’ (‘Freya Apparatus’). So Freya appeared to be associated with air defence and to involve specific items of equipment. I knew that Freya was the Nordic Venus: and since Wotan’s one eye had seemed to give us a clue to a new bombing system, so I wondered whether there might be something about Freya that would provide a clue in air defence.

I went to Foyle’s bookshop and bought a book on Norse mythology, and I described the result which I wrote on 17th July under the title ‘The Edda Revived’:

Actually the Decknammen Department of the Luftwaffe could hardly have chosen a more fruitful goddess, but few of her attributes have any possible relation with the present problem. She did, however, have as her most prized possession a necklace, Brisingamen, to obtain which she not merely sacrificed, but massacred, her honour. The necklace is important because it was guarded by Heimdall, the watchman of the gods, who could see a hundred miles by day and night. There is a possible association of ideas with a coastal chain and a detecting system with a range of a hundred miles. Moreover, in Germany, the Brocken is pointed out as the special abode of Freya, and the mystery of the tower on the Brocken is well known. It is unwise to lay too much stress on this evidence, but these are the only facts concerning Freya which seem to have any relation to our previous knowledge. Actually Heimdall himself would have been the best choice for a code name for R.D.F., but perhaps he would have been too obvious.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion therefore, that the Freya-Gerät is a form of portable R.D.F. Freya may possibly be associated with Wotan, as she was at one time his mistress, although it would have been expected that the Führer would have in this case chosen Frigga, who was Wotan’s lawful wife.

[NOTE:  The range of the Freya radar system at that time was later confirmed to be approximately 100 miles.  Later versions could exceed this range.]

* * *

CONCERNING GERMAN BLIND-BOMBING BEAMS:  Churchill was now convinced, and he said that he would like to see all future information but that it might compromise our source if we continued to use the German code name. So he told us that in future all teleprints on the subject should be headed ‘Operation Smith’. His instructions were carried out, with the surprising result that the War Office appeared to lose all interest in information coming from Bletchley regarding the invasion.

After some time, the reason was found. It turned out that the War Office had its own Operation Smith, which was indeed concerned with the invasion. It was the code name for the movement from one of its minor administrative branches from its current headquarters in somewhere like Stroud or Tetbury to some place further north if the Germans should have invaded and posed a threat to south Gloucestershire. The result was that when the Bletchley teleprints were received in the War Office, duly headed according to the Prime Minister’s instruction, they were immediately sent to the Colonel in Gloucestershire, who no doubt impressed by the service that the War Office was providing but realizing that the material was too secret for general circulation, locked them in his safe and told nobody.

* * *

I may mention that at least one A-A gun crew started their war well, for about this time I read one of the most elated accounts that I was to see during the war. It came from a Territorial gun crew near Farningham in Kent, whose first prospect of action occurred when three Dornier 17 bombers flew over in formation during daylight on 8th September to renew the attack on the London docks: according to the gunners they had one shot at the formation as a sighter’ and then carefully aimed their second shot at the leading aircraft. All three aircraft promptly vanished, the gunners claiming that they had hit the bombs in the leader which had exploded and blown up the other two. Certainly survivors of two aircraft were picked up from this remarkable shot (A. I. 1(k) Report 485/1940).

* * *

THE FORTUNES OF MAJOR WINTLE

The grim situation in 1940 was tempered by lighter episodes; and although to record them may appear to hold up the narrative, it may serve to correct the impression of a perpetually breathtaking pace that would be suggested by a compact account merely of the high peaks of my activity. Fortunately we could usually afford the time to laugh, and could then tackle our problems all the better. For me, one of the brightest of such episodes started on 17th June in the middle of the Knickebein flurry, and it was brought about by the impending collapse of France—now only five days away. I was walking back across Horseguards Parade to my office after lunch, perhaps one of the rare lunches that I had as Lindemann’s guest in The Athenaeum, when there were military footsteps behind me, and I received a hearty slap on the back from the brisk figure of Freddie Wintle.

'Hello, old boy, how’s your war going?’ he asked. I told him that for me it had taken an interesting turn, and in reply he told me why he thought we were generally in such a mess. ‘The trouble with this war,’ he said, ‘is that you can’t criticize anybody. It’s “Well done, Neville”, or “Good old Tom” or something like that. Why man, you’re not in a decent Cavalry Mess five minutes before you have been called a bloody fool—and you’re the better for it!’ With that we parted, he towards the Air Ministry in Charles Street, and I to Broadway.

Evidently Wintle proceeded to put his doctrine into immediate practice, but I did not at first correlate it with what I read a day or so later on a placard: ‘ARMY OFFICER IN THE TOWER’. When I bought a paper I found that it referred to Freddie Wintle. The basic reason for his annoyance on Horseguards, which he had not told me, was that he had been ordered back to his Regiment when he believed that if only he could go to France he could so stiffen the morale of the French that they would not give in. He claimed to know the French better than most because he had been an instructor at the Ecole de Guerre, the French Staff College at St. Cyr. After leaving me, he had gone straight to the Director of Air Intelligence to protest at his posting whereupon, it seems, that he thought that the Director had accused him of cowardice in not wishing to rejoin his Regiment. This of course was fatal, for no one could question Wintle’s gallantry. He thereupon drew his revolver in indignation and said, ‘You and your kind ought to be shot,’ or words to that effect. He was arrested and sent to the Tower [of London].

Looking forward to his Court Martial was one of our light reliefs during the Battle of Britain. It duly came off, and he appeared in immaculate uniform, leather and brass shining brightly; drawing a silk handkerchief from his pocket he flicked some imaginary dust from his beautifully pipeclayed breeches, returned the handkerchief to the pocket, crossed his legs, screwed in his monocle, folded his arms and glared at the Court. He had to answer three main charges. The first was that he had faked defective vision in his right eye, the implication being that he thereby wished to avoid Active Service. This he was easily able to refute, because not only did he have one eye useless as a result of being wounded in World War I, but he had also bluffed the examining specialist into thinking that he had two good eyes, and he called the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Edmund Ironside, as a witness. This charge was therefore dropped.

The more serious charge was that he had produced a pistol in the presence of the Air Commodore whom he had threatened to shoot, along with himself, and had ‘said words to the effect that certain of His Majesty’s Ministers or Officers of the Royal Air Force above the rank of Group Captain and most senior Army Officers ought to be shot’. Instead of denying this as regards the Ministers, he proposed to substantiate it as a patriotic action and read out a list of the Ministers who he suggested should be shot. When he got to Kingsley Wood, at No. 7, the Prosecuting Advocate interrupted to say that he did not propose to proceed with this charge, which was accordingly dropped.

Finally Wintle was asked, ‘When you produced the pistol in the presence of the Air Commodore, was it your intention to intimidate him?’ With his monocle held more firmly than ever, he replied, ‘Intimidate the Air Commodore? Oh dear me, no! Why, I have worked with the Air Commodore for over a year, and I well know that he is the type of Officer that if you rushed into his room and shouted at the top of your voice “The Air Ministry’s on fire!” all he would do would be to take up his pen and write a minute to someone about it!’ He was on a pretty good wicket, in that he was being tried by an Army Court Martial for being rude to an Air Force Officer, and he escaped with a severe reprimand.

I lost sight of him after that for some time; being the reverse of a coward, and finding service with his Regiment too inactive, he had volunteered to go into France as an agent with the Special Operations Executive, where he was captured by the Vichy French and we heard of him languishing in Toulon jail. He escaped into Spain at the second attempt, and I again lost trace of him.

At the end of the war he was to make a dramatic reappearance, this time in the house in which I had been born. The lady of the house was much alarmed to hear a great crash in her sitting-room and found that a motor car had come through its front window. The house was on a bend, which the driver had obviously taken too fast. When he stepped out, it was Freddie Wintle, who at the time was standing as Liberal candidate for Norwood against Duncan Sandys. ‘My dear lady,’ he said, ‘I am most frightfully sorry. I must have upset your nerves. What you need is some sherry which I will now go and get.’ And just as on the occasion of my first meeting him, he went to the local pub and returned with the sherry. I am sorry that he did not become our Member of Parliament.

Again I lost sight of him, until I read of a retired Army officer who had lured a solicitor to a secluded flat and removed his trousers because the officer—who once again turned out to be Wintle—thought that the solicitor was tricking one of his female relatives into making over her money. The solicitor summoned him for assault, and Wintle was sent to prison for six months. Nevertheless, when he came out he managed to prove his case against the solicitor and he fought the legal battle right up to the House of Lords, without any professional aid. He won, The Times’ headline being ‘CAVALRY OFFICER JUMPS LAST FENCE TO WIN’.

Wintle died in 1966. Fittingly, his friend ex-Trooper Cedric Mays of the Royals on the occasion of his funeral drank a bottle of Glenfiddich and then, through a mist of whisky and tears, sang the Cavalry Last Post and Cavalry Reveille to the astonished worshippers in Canterbury Cathedral, the Chapel of the Cavalrymen of Britain.

* * *

The question to be decided was whether we should fit de-icing equipment to our bombers or not. At first sight it would seem that the fitting of de-icing equipment was bound to save aircraft but the matter was put to Professor George Temple. When he looked at the figures he came to the following conclusion: the weight of the de-icing equipment meant that each bomber fitted with it must carry a smaller bomb load. Therefore, to achieve the same weight of bombs within destructive range of the target, the total force would have to be increased. Knowing the rate of casualties inflicted by the German defences on our bombers, he could work out how many more bombers would be shot down than before. This number turned out to be significantly greater than the number of bombers that, on average, would be saved by de-icing equipment. Therefore the fitting of this equipment would have increased bomber casualties rather than saved them. This is an example of a phenomenon where an action can have the opposite effect than that intended, and a lesson always to be borne in mind by politicians and administrators.

* * *

Our first officers went over [to France] on [the second day after D-day], and they were soon sending back a steady stream of information, documents, and equipment. On 18th July 1944, a whole 3-ton load of equipment came up to London, but arrived just too late for anyone to examine it, and so it was parked outside the Air Intelligence building in Monck Street. Besides radar equipment it included ‘something for the Boss’ which was the reason why it had been brought straight to Air Ministry rather than going to Farnborough. This was an infra-red detector of the type that the Germans were using for ship detection. When I reached my office in the morning, I found that during the night a flying bomb had scored an absolutely direct hit on our lorry, and all our booty had been destroyed. But it had its compensation in the bewilderment that pervaded the Technical Intelligence branch for the rest of the day. For when they examined the wreck they of course found many items of electronic gear, which they assumed to have been on the flying bomb, and so led themselves to think that the Germans had a new and very accurately controlled missile which could be directed so precisely as to score the closest of near misses on the Air Intelligence building.

* * *

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.

There you have it.  Those are a very few of the many incidents covered by Dr. Jones in his long and fascinating book.  If you have any interest in military history, and particularly in military and scientific intelligence, it's a must-read.

Peter