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Far from the battlefields of the Second World War, an invisible conflict was waged by rival intelligence services, navies, air forces and scientists, in pursuit of advantage in the electronic contest which assumed ever-growing importance in determining outcomes, especially at sea and in the air. Although in the earlier ‘Great War’ wireless interception had played a significant role in the Anglo-German naval struggle, only now was technology evolving that enabled belligerents to locate enemies far beyond reach of the naked eye or telescope. Warships acquired means to pinpoint threats both on the surface and beneath it. ‘Bomber barons’ were progressively empowered by navigation aids and aiming devices. Even more critical, especially in the eyes of governments desperate to shield their homelands, were the incremental advances in defensive radar that first warned of approaching foes, then tracked airborne attackers for destruction by anti-aircraft guns or fighters.
Those British people privy to the secrets of ‘RDF’ or ‘Radio Direction Finding’ – the deceptive cover name given to British radar – took enormous pride in their country’s achievement of having devised this technology, then linked it to a communications network with defending fighter squadrons just in time to win the Battle of Britain. Nationalistic conceit made many, even senior officers, slow to acknowledge that the Germans might have created similar devices and be exploiting them against British fighters and bombers intruding upon Nazi-occupied Europe. They chose to ignore such evidence as the identification of a radar aerial on the foremast of the German pocket battleship Graf Spee, scuttled off Montevideo in December 1939.
One who harboured no doubts, however, was the Air Ministry’s Assistant Director of Intelligence (Science), Dr R.V. Jones – Reg to his family and friends – an authentic wartime star, and a fascinating human being. Born in 1911, this brilliant young physicist escaped from a humble family background through a series of scholarships, first to Alleyn’s School in Dulwich and then Balliol College, Oxford, where he secured a first-class degree in the era when this was a rare distinction. His father had been a sergeant in the Grenadier Guards, and his son wrote: ‘My childhood was steeped in the Regimental tradition of discipline, precision, service, endurance and good temper.’ Reg possessed a miscellany of virtues of which the most conspicuous were brains, curiosity, open-mindedness, articulacy, energy and self-confidence. The debit side of this last quality was an arrogance that exasperated some important people, especially if they were less intelligent than the pushy scholarship lad. Most, however, recognized Dr Jones as uncommonly bright.
No lonely genius he, Reg was compulsively gregarious, a practical joker with unexpected hobbies and interests. For a time, he pursued glass-blowing. Then he acquired a pistol, and made himself a deadly shot. A rich Oxford student friend introduced him to the family stately home in Staffordshire. There Jones, who became a regular guest, roamed the countryside, gun in hand: ‘My bag was mainly rabbits but over the years I also shot hares, stoats, pigeons, crows, jays’ – and once a fox. By the outbreak of war, the scientist’s private arsenal embraced six pistols and a rifle. Intensely romantic, his England was ‘that of Rupert Brooke and [polar explorer Captain] Robert Falcon Scott … If the time came, this England would be worth fighting for.’
Jones began his professional career as an astronomer, but in 1934, when he was twenty-three, he was retained by an American inventor to work on possible methods of infra-red detection. Although it would be years before this science was applied to British defence, Jones became a pioneer. He worked for some time at Oxford’s Clarendon Laboratory, supervised by Professor Frederick Lindemann, ‘the Prof’, Churchill’s familiar, ennobled in 1941 as Lord Cherwell. Jones achieved the difficult double of earning the matching regard of Sir Henry Tizard, Lindemann’s great rival and indeed focus of that tennis-playing bachelor’s enmity. The young man found himself increasingly engaged in the study of radar – and of intelligence. It was a reflection of the village character of Britain’s scientific community that in the autumn of 1939 Jones fell into conversation at a bus stop on Oxford High Street with a colleague who talked to him about the discovery of nuclear fission – the possibility that a Bomb might one day be built; the danger that the Germans might be exploring the same path, with terrible potential consequences.
The secretary of the Tizard Committee on air defence, which played a critical role in the evolution of Britain’s radar-based air defence system, noticed that from 1936 onwards R.V. Jones, though still working mostly at Oxford, ‘continually got himself mixed up with Intelligence matters’. In many countries, notably including Germany, such cross-pollination would have been resented and probably frustrated. It was an important part of the genius – and genius it was – of this element of what became the British war machine that where scientific and technological talent and flair were identified, they were nurtured.
When Dr Jones was invited to accept a salaried post that bridged the Air Ministry and the Secret Service, investigating the role of science and technology in the enemy’s armed forces, he responded with characteristic impulsive eagerness: ‘A man in that position could lose the war! I’ll take it.’ He was given a share in a small office in the Air Ministry, being formally identified as ‘a scientist with a special interest in German weapons’. On 4 November 1939 the British naval attaché in Oslo found himself the recipient of a packet of documents describing various secret weapons at Hitler’s command. These included two types of radar; large rockets; rocket-propelled gliding bombs and much else. The author described himself as ‘a friendly German scientist’.
MI6 rejected the ‘Oslo report’, as it became known, as an enemy ‘plant’. The Secret Service’s senior figures, never celebrated for their imagination, argued that no one person in Germany could have known so much about weapons across such a diverse spectrum. Fred Winterbotham of MI6 passed a copy of the report to Jones. The latter, almost alone, was soon convinced the document was genuine, and benign in intent. He wrote wryly later: ‘In the few dull moments of the war I used to look up the Oslo Report to see what should be coming along next’ – and which often did. Only long after the conflict was Jones able to confirm that the document had indeed been the work of a noble anti-Nazi physicist, Hans Ferdinand Mayer.
One of many written broadsides that Jones fired at the powers-that-be deplored British ignorance of what was happening scientifically on ‘the other side of the hill’, chiefly because spymasters and service chiefs had no idea what to look for. Submitted on 7 December 1939, the report’s language, outspoken as were few Whitehall documents, reflected the character and erudition of its author: ‘A serious disparity in Scientific Intelligence between England and Germany almost certainly exists … due in part to the extra secrecy precautions observed in Germany, and in part to the lack of coordinated effort in our acquisition of information.
‘Parallels have frequently been drawn between the Peloponnesian War and that between England and Germany, but rarely more accurately than in the present connection. A similar disregard for Scientific Intelligence exists now in England to that which existed in Athens. Pericles, in a classic exposition of Athenian policy, stated: “Our city is thrown open to the world, and we never expel a foreigner or prevent him from seeing or learning anything of which the secret if revealed to an enemy might profit him” (Thucydides II, 39). Athens lost the war.’
Tizard congratulated Jones on the report and his proposals for strengthening scientific intelligence, though some service officers bridled at being harangued about their business by a brash young civilian. Jones nonetheless prospered, not least because of his extraordinary network of contacts and relationships. One of the worst aspects of the wartime conscription of intelligent people for uniformed service was that many found themselves obliged to serve in roles that chained them to the chariots of more senior figures, sometimes tyrants, who were much less clever. By contrast, among the admirable features of Britain’s ‘boffin war’ was the manner in which many scientists flitted between services and technical facilities, exchanging ideas and information. Jones, as one of these, enjoyed a privileged war. He worked alongside his intellectual peers, in pastures fertilized by mutual respect between those who grazed them. The Secret Service chiefs did not cause him much trouble, because he was protected by powerful mentors.
He felt equally at home in the Air Ministry, MI6 headquarters in Broadway beside St James’s Park Tube station, ‘Station X’ at Bletchley Park, RAF photo-intelligence at Medmenham … and even – thanks to ‘the Prof’s’ startling, because rarely proffered, goodwill – the Cabinet Office and Downing Street. Jones once attempted the impossible, to broker a reconciliation between Lindemann and Tizard. The latter asked his young friend to carry a message to the darkly brooding prime ministerial favourite: ‘Tell him from me that I should be glad if we could stop this ridiculous quarrel at least for the period of the war, and concentrate on fighting the Germans.’ The other eminence, however, would have none of this. When Jones reported Tizard’s words, Lindemann merely snorted contemptuously: ‘Now that I am in a position of power’ – as Churchill’s scientific adviser – ‘a lot of my old friends have come sniffing around!’
In 1940 Jones married Vera Cain, physically half her husband’s considerable size but a formidable woman in her own right, whom he had met while both were working for the Admiralty Intelligence Branch, where she captained the women’s hockey team. They made their first home in a flat in Richmond from which he commuted daily to Whitehall. The couple would have three children during the course of the war.
In June, amid the Battle of Britain, Lindemann, as ‘the Prof’ then still was, summoned Jones to the Cabinet Office to quiz him about whether he believed the Germans had radar, a notion which many important people dismissed. The following month, Jones first reported to the chiefs of staff on enemy radar development, following the pinpointing of what appeared to be a scanner at Lannion in northern Brittany. Doubts were cast on the identification of this technology, however, by sceptics who pointed out that the array was not mounted on a high tower, such as the British found indispensable for their own installations. Yet Jones linked the photographic images from Lannion with Luftwaffe signals intercepted by Bletchley Park, which made reference to Freya, a Nordic mythological figure. The scientist was prompted to investigate this creature’s biography, scouring both memory and his books.
The goddess Freya had turned to a lover in place of her husband, in order to secure a magic necklace called Brisingamen, guarded by Heimdal, a servant of the gods, gifted with powers to see a hundred miles in daylight and darkness alike. Since British practice strictly forbade the use of a codename for any operation, weapon or device that might reveal its purpose to the enemy, Jones was initially sceptical that the Germans might be employing the designation Freya for a long-range radar. The scientist remained firmly convinced, however, that Freya was radar-related. He finally reported: ‘It is unwise to lay too much stress on this evidence, but these are the only facts that seem to have any relation to our previous knowledge. Actually Heimdal himself would have seemed the best choice for a code-name for RDF but perhaps it would have been too obvious … It is difficult to escape the conclusion therefore that the Freya-Gerät is a form of portable RDF. Freya may possibly be associated with Wotan – she was at one time his mistress – although it would have been expected that the Fuhrer would have in this case chosen Frigga, Wotan’s lawful wife.’
This was an example of a characteristic Jones missive that caused critics to vent irritation towards him, as too clever by half. Nonetheless, he was right. The Germans called radar D/T – Dezimeter Telegraphie. As is so often the case with discoveries, their scientists had worked on its development in parallel with their British counterparts, though likewise in ignorance, once the Nazi era began and international cross-fertilization ceased. The nineteenth-century German physicist Heinrich Hertz could claim to have been the first to demonstrate the nature of radio waves, pursuing a path earlier explored by Faraday and Maxwell in Britain. Karl Ferdinand Braun invented the cathode-ray tube, while Ambrose Fleming made the pioneer radio valve, much improved by the American Lee de Forest.
Two other Americans, Gregory Breit and Merle Tuve, in 1924 devised means for transmitting a succession of radio pulses, and in 1929 a Japanese scientist established a technique for emitting radio signals on a narrow spectrum. By 1933 a German Navy scientist was experimenting upon a primitive radar installation with a dish aerial, mounted on a balcony overlooking Kiel Harbour. Within three years, Hitler was being briefed about this technology, which was detecting warships at a range of twelve miles. Also in 1936, Germany produced the first so-called Freya array, capable of spotting aircraft at ranges of up to seventy-five miles. Almost simultaneously, the Telefunken company created the first short-range height-finding set, codenamed Würzburg.
Essentially, until the last of the interwar years German radar development advanced at roughly the same pace as that of the British, which was powerfully influenced by Robert Watson-Watt. The latter then leaped ahead not with the science, but in its practical application to defence against bomber attack. A.P. Rowe, Sir Henry Tizard and their colleagues conceived a system for harnessing radar to fighter direction, which was enthusiastically embraced by the RAF. It was this system, not superior technology, that gave Churchill’s nation its decisive advantage in the Battle of Britain. The Germans, meanwhile, began to fall behind both with the science and its application because in 1939–40 their leaders, and especially Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering, were little interested in means of defence. Their thinking in those months of victories focused almost exclusively upon the offensive, to which they deemed radar to have scant relevance.
In the late summer of 1940 the War Cabinet, after assessing the evidence from the Lannion photos and from Jones, rejected the notion that the enemy might have matched British development of radar through home-grown expertise. Government luminaries preferred instead to believe the Germans had captured a set in France, and exploited this. The prime minister was then assured that no RDF had been lost to the enemy, though this was untrue. A British apparatus had fallen into German hands near Boulogne; been duly examined by Luftwaffe experts, and judged to be much inferior to their own Freya, which they considered an advance upon anything the RAF was using on such frequencies. It is striking to notice that, after the flurry of 1940 British activity and curiosity about enemy radar, thereafter amid huge events and with so many other demands upon Scientific Intelligence, for months investigation was permitted to lapse. While in Jones’s compelling 1978 memoir, one revelation follows the last in a sequence of pages, a study of the dates he cites shows how protracted the intervals could sometimes be between landmark developments and discoveries.
In the early days of the Luftwaffe blitz, Jones won Churchill’s ear and admiration by urging his conviction, against the views of RAF chiefs and many scientists, that German bombers were exploiting electronic guidance beams to navigate to Britain. The triumphant vindication of this theory, together with his subsequent success in devising means of countering the enemy technology, conferred upon Jones exceptional credibility, especially in the eyes of the prime minister. He retained critics, especially in MI6, who regarded the scientist as a presumptuous young man with too much to say. He himself wrote later: ‘The path of truthful duty is not easy; there were several attempts to get me removed from my post because of my insistence on unpalatable facts being faced. I survived – but I might not have done had the situation’ – beneath the Luftwaffe blitz – ‘not been so serious.’ By 1941 Jones’s star blazed high, his energy apparently limitless, his grasp of Germany’s air defences becoming more impressive by the day. He interrogated prisoners, especially Luftwaffe aircrew. He pored over photographs of enemy installations on the continent, snatched by high-flying Spitfires. He communed with the eggheads and mathematical geniuses of Bletchley Park about the significance of intercepted Luftwaffe signals.
Yet some senior officers still discounted the importance of radar and electronic navigation aids, whether in the hands of the Germans or the RAF. Those outside the technical branches argued – wrongly, because in reality Bomber Command’s aim was wildly erratic – that British aircraft were locating and attacking targets in Germany without any of the elaborate equipment the Luftwaffe seemed to find necessary for its own bombing. The air marshals were almost all men who had attained high commands in the fledgling RAF following youthful army service, rather than after completing apprenticeships in aerial technology, which evolved rapidly through their subsequent service careers. Such men seemed less interested in the enemy’s radar capabilities than were Dr Jones and his colleagues. In February 1941, for instance, Air Vice-Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, then assistant chief of air staff, minuted: ‘Are we not tending to lose our sense of proportion over these German beams? We have endless prisoner of war reports pointing out that they do not and cannot rely on beams to any very great extent because we monkey about with them so successfully … Lack of beams will not stop the Boche and in my opinion will not even embarrass him.’
Other RAF brass, however – the names of Philip Joubert and Edward Addison recur constantly in correspondence with scientific wizards such as Tizard and D.R. Pye – were more enlightened. So was the new assistant chief of air staff for intelligence, Air Vice-Marshal Charles Medhurst, who approached Reg Jones on being appointed early in 1941. ‘He told me how impressed he had been by my work on the beams,’ said Jones, ‘and said that he would like me to take over responsibility for analysing how the German night defences worked.’
The scientist immediately determined to focus his attention on radar, ‘because I was sure that the Germans would find, as we had found ourselves, that … they would have to depend on it for night-fighting’. By 1941, to an extraordinary degree this young scientist represented not merely a component of intelligence studying German air defences, but almost all scientific intelligence – among the few people in Britain possessed of the specialist knowledge and imagination to ask the right questions, then to divine answers. As the British bomber offensive slowly gained momentum, the Luftwaffe was developing techniques for marrying radar to searchlights, flak guns and fighter direction. Suddenly the technologies that had seemed to Goering mere curiosities a few years earlier became the focus of intense interest and mass production, vital to the air defence of the Fatherland.
Jones understood some of this when he received his brief from Air Vice-Marshal Medhurst. He started his investigation with the single fragmentary clue that the enemy was known to be exploiting Freyas. He had by now acquired an assistant named Derek Garrard, who had previously worked on radar at the Telecommunications Research Establishment – TRE – at Swanage in Dorset. In the latter’s first weeks as an intelligence-gatherer, he conducted some experimental electronic trawls for German transmissions, and from a listening position near Dover pinpointed unexplained signals on 375 megacycles. Further research identified these as related to German Seektakt naval radar, employed to direct gunfire against British shipping in the Channel. Evidence was mounting everywhere, especially in the minds of Jones and Garrard and some airmen, that the Germans had technology of a sophistication comparable with that of the British.
They needed to know much more. There were three channels through which relevant evidence could be gathered, and Jones had access to all of them. First were ‘most secret sources’, Luftwaffe messages decrypted at Bletchley Park, for which he was on the tiny authorized reading list. He had already found repeated mentions in Luftwaffe decrypts of the technology codenamed Freya, associated with the big receivers of which a network was growing: by late 1941, Scientific Intelligence had plotted twenty-seven scanners on the north coast of France.
Other decrypts indicated the Germans were also bringing into service a second type of radar, dubbed the ‘Würzburg apparatus’. In March 1941, transmissions from the French coast were intercepted on wavelengths of 53 centimetres. As Jones explained in his subsequent report, ‘they showed pulses characteristic of RDF, and giving a maximum range of about 40 kilometres. These transmissions were independent of the main long range coastal chain of “Freya” stations … and were thought to form an inner chain, probably extending inland in the form of a carpet.’
The RAF’s electronic eavesdroppers monitored German emissions through both ground-based and airborne listening units. On 8 May 1941, a ‘Ferret’ electronic eavesdropping Wellington bomber of 109 Squadron noted that in addition to the now-familiar signals from Freya arrays, operators were also picking up short-range transmissions from other such installations on a frequency of 570 megacycles. A third vital tool of British intelligence thereafter came into play, though only sluggishly, over a period of months: aerial photographic reconnaissance. Jones knew roughly what to look for, because late in 1941 benevolent neutrals, one American and one Chinese, presented the British with copies of photographs snapped near Berlin’s anti-aircraft defence towers. These showed a big circular disc aerial which seemed almost certainly related to the direction of the local AA guns.
Nothing like it had then been identified on the French coast. However, Charles Frank, now working beside Garrard on Jones’s staff, had an inspiration. Frank, exactly the same age as his chief and likewise newly married, was equally gifted and imaginative. He had a prodigious memory and fluent German acquired during youthful studies at Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Physik. Now, studying medium-altitude photographs of a Freya site at Bruneval, north of Le Havre, Frank identified a big farmhouse and buildings nearby which he guessed, correctly, were being used as quarters for its crew. His eye and magnifier shifted a few inches, to an isolated château on a clifftop grazed bare by cattle, and approached by a well-worn track. This would probably be used for officers’ billets, Frank surmised, or possibly as a headquarters. Another much-used track led north from the big house almost to the cliff edge. This ended in a small, unidentifiable black dot, which might be a latrine or a bunker entrance. But it might also be another type of radar scanner, albeit much smaller than that which had been photographed near Berlin Zoo.
Jones now requested low oblique images of the Bruneval site, such as might show the nature of the equipment sited on the cliff edge. The RAF’s specialists, squadrons of the PRU or Photographic Reconnaissance Unit, had adopted a technique which the pilots called ‘dicing’ – as with death. When very close photo cover of an objective was needed, an unarmed fighter streaked in at tree height. Such tactics required luck, courage and the fine judgement to expose images at the right split-second opportunity. PRU Spitfires were using the technique so often several of their wing undersides had been repainted pink, which made them less conspicuous at low level than the previous duck-egg green shading.
The voluminous correspondence in the archives, stretching over two years, testifies to the sluggish pace at which the German radar story, or rather the British response to it, progressed through Whitehall and the service departments. Hereafter, however, everything accelerated. In the winter of 1941, Jones’s networking skills once more played a role in what became the Bruneval saga. The PRU was based at Benson airfield, between Wallingford and the edge of the Chilterns. The photographic interpretation centre was located fifteen miles away at Danesfield, a wisteria-clad mansion which became famous in wartime RAF legend as Medmenham – the name of the nearby village – where some of the great British intelligence discoveries of the war were made, more than a few of them by women of the WAAF who played key roles in the centre’s evolution.
Jones had befriended S/Ldr. Claude Wavell who, within the Danesfield operation, ran G Section, dedicated to the study of enemy radar and wireless installations. The scientist had also struck up an acquaintance with one of the Benson pilots named Tony Hill, with whom one day he went drinking in a local pub. Though Jones never avowed this, it does not seem fanciful to suppose that he felt the inescapable part-envy, part-awe, of a groundling, living a relatively safe war, towards contemporaries and especially aircrew who faced the enemy daily at mortal risk. Hill was twenty-seven, old to fulfil the fighter pilot’s requirement for lightning reflexes. He was a colonel’s son who had attended Harrow public school before becoming a director of a small brewery near his home in Hertfordshire. He had learned to fly with the RAF Volunteer Reserve just before the outbreak of war, and was now piloting a Spitfire over Europe nearly every day, both at extreme high altitude and ultra-low level, almost clipping French trees.
Hill told Jones he had a problem. He was unafraid of hedge-hopping over German positions in his Spitfire, but his photos often proved a disappointment. He was, in his own words, ‘a bit slow’. His camera was located behind the cockpit, pointed sideways and slightly astern. When tasked to film a given objective, a pilot was obliged to dive, watch the target vanish beneath the Spitfire’s beautiful broad, thin wing, then press the shutter release. Again and again, Hill was late doing this, and thus came home without some of the required images. Jones and Hill discussed ‘dicing’ technique exhaustively, then the scientist made suggestions for solving the pilot’s timing problem by trial and error experiments. In the year or so of life left to Hill, in the tragically attenuated human experience which was commonplace for wartime fliers, the young pilot went on to take some of the finest and most significant photographs in the PRU’s record books.
One day in late November 1941, Hill chanced to drive over from Benson to Danesfield with his fellow pilot Gordon Hughes, who needed to chat to Claude Wavell. Hill lingered outside while Hughes disappeared into the rabbit warren of offices. Wavell was almost twenty years older than the airmen. He had gained immense experience of photographing terrain from planes during a decade working on a survey of Brazil. He was also a fine mathematician, and on this winter’s day showed Hughes the use he had been making of spherical trigonometry. He had perfected a new device he dubbed the ‘Altazimeter’, for gauging the height of objects from aerial photographs. This could be determined, he explained to Hughes, by multiplying shadow length by the tangent of the sun’s altitude. An interpreter needed only to know the latitude of a location, the scale and orientation of photos, and the date.
Wavell then began to talk to Hughes about the new German radar which was exciting the curiosity of Jones and his colleagues. He placed two medium-altitude photos of a length of French coast in his stereoscope and showed them to the pilot. The ill-defined object at the bottom of the photos might, just might, be what the boffins – or perhaps ‘spooks’ would be a more appropriate term – were seeking. Hughes suggested Tony Hill should be brought in to examine the pictures. Others were produced from Wavell’s collection, showing – for instance – how a variation in shadow had first enabled Charles Frank to spot a Freya, indeed to convince doubters within the RAF that the Germans possessed radar.
Back to the newer pictures: could these show the dish-shaped aerial of what Jones and his colleagues had started to call a ‘Würzburg’? Hill asked: ‘Where exactly is this place Bruneval?’ Wavell told him, and the pilot said decisively, ‘I’ll get you your answer tomorrow.’ Sure enough, next day the phone rang in his office from Benson. Tony Hill said: ‘You were right. It must be a parabolic whatnot, and the Jerries were round it like flies … It’s like an electric bowl heater and about ten feet across.’ The bad news, however, was that as the Spitfire had streaked low over the French coast at 350 mph, Hill had failed to catch the relatively tiny object on film. ‘But don’t worry. I’ll have another go tomorrow.’
Now came yet another example of how Britain’s war effort, and explicitly the RAF’s part in it, could sometimes indulge astonishing personal initiative, creative indiscipline – choose your own phrase. Next morning Hill took off once more for Bruneval, breaching an entirely sensible rule that no PRU pilot could photograph the same objective – repeat a ‘dicing’ sortie – two days running. Moreover the formal request from Jones for images of Bruneval had now filtered through to Benson, and the mission had been allocated to another of its squadrons. Subsequent legend held that Hill warned his rivals off flying anywhere near Bruneval, which he now regarded as ‘his’. Be that as it may, and whether or not – as is sometimes alleged – ground personnel at the airfield questioned his right to take off, what is certain is that Tony Hill flew to France, captured a series of outstanding images of Bruneval, and returned safely. The pictures, examined by Jones and his colleagues, showed a dish-shaped aerial, obviously atop a Würzburg, smaller relation of the apparatus photographed at Berlin Zoo, of which in the months that followed Hill and his comrades would photograph more examples along the coast of the continent.
The manner in which Jones, aided by the several branches of British intelligence, identified this German radar, already constituted a thrilling and fascinating detective story. Yet developments thus far proved to represent only its first chapter. Scientific Intelligence made an informed guess that the enemy then deployed around four hundred Würzburgs, as a key element of their defences against intruding British fighters and bombers. Methods of countering the technology, they concluded, could be devised only following a physical examination of a set. Here was a vital enemy weapon, so near and yet so far from Reginald Jones. Or was it, instead, a case of so far and yet so near? To be sure, the radar site was located ninety miles from Britain, in Occupied Europe. But the little clifftop fishing hamlet of Bruneval lay at the very outer rim of Hitler’s empire, on the Channel coast within a few minutes’ flying time, a few hours’ sailing, from Churchill’s land. Might it be possible not merely to snatch images of a Würzburg, but to steal its secrets?
When Reg Jones and Charles Frank studied the PRU photos, the former traced his finger along a cliff defile, leading up from the narrow beach. ‘Look, Charles,’ he said eagerly. ‘We could get in there!’ A deep gully was marked on pre-war French maps as ‘descent des anglais’. Here was obviously a route by which, in times gone by, English smugglers, tourists, occasionally sailors and soldiers, had ventured in and out of France. This time, the track might be employed to reach up and snatch an enemy’s jewels. Jones frankly admitted, though, that despite his natural impulsiveness he was at first reluctant to promote a raid. He recoiled from accepting responsibility for risking the lives of other men – the prospective raiders. Moreover, he was vain enough to take pride in his many successes judging the significance of new German technology by sheer brainpower, without the need to explore its physical properties.
Very soon after Jones started to flirt with the notion of raiding Bruneval, however, he chanced to meet Wilfrid ‘Ben’ Lewis, deputy superintendent of TRE, and an expert on Doppler effects. Lewis was yet another remarkable character, a thickset Cumbrian thirty-three at that time, who would later assume direction of Canada’s nuclear research programme and become one of North America’s most distinguished scientists. In 1941, he was preoccupied with improving radar-controlled night-fighter interception, as a means of defence against Luftwaffe bombers. Jones confided his musings about Bruneval, and what might be done there. The Cumbrian immediately responded: if a plan to assault the radar site and snatch its Würzburg was put forward, he and TRE would support it. This was an important conversation: it stirred Jones to take a next step. He put the idea to the Air Staff, and also mentioned Bruneval to Lord Cherwell; which meant, of course, that the prime minister became privy to it.
The outcome was that the Air Staff proposed an attack on Bruneval to Combined Operations HQ, directed by Commodore Lord Louis Mountbatten. It was almost a year since Jones and his colleagues had first spotted traces of the new German radar, and specifically of the Würzburg. The story had been slow to unfold. But in January 1942 Britain’s capabilities by land, sea and air were significantly greater than they had been when Bletchley Park noticed in Luftwaffe signals mentions of a Nordic goddess and her kindred. Mountbatten the naval officer was panting for an opportunity to carry his war to the enemy, and embraced the proposal at once. His staff set to work, to translate Jones’s fantasy into a plausible reality. An assault was discussed at the first of a series of conferences at COHQ in London’s Richmond Terrace on 12 December 1941. Mountbatten chaired a 12 January meeting attended by all the possibly interested parties, to agree a draft scheme. Less than two weeks later, on 21 January 1942, an operational plan to assault Bruneval was submitted to the chiefs of staff. And approved.