Most Secret War

by R. V. Jones

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MOST SECRET WAR

  Reginald Victor Jones was an English physicist and scientific military intelligence expert who played an important role in the defence of Britain in the Second World War. He died in 1997.

  Most Secret War

  R.V. JONES

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published in Great Britain by Hamish Hamilton 1978

  Reissued in Penguin Books 2009

  Copyright © R. V. Jones, 1978

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-195767-8

  Contents

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE: The Men Who Went First

  CHAPTER TWO: Friends and Rivals

  CHAPTER THREE: The Clarendon Laboratory 1936–1938

  CHAPTER FOUR: Inferior Red 1936–1938

  CHAPTER FIVE: Exile

  CHAPTER SIX: The Day Before War Broke Out

  CHAPTER SEVEN: The Secret Weapon

  CHAPTER EIGHT: The Oslo Report

  CHAPTER NINE: A Plan For Intelligence

  CHAPTER TEN: The Phoney War

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: The Crooked Leg

  CHAPTER TWELVE: Reflections

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Fortunes of Major Wintle

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: The Fifth Column

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Edda Revived

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Knickebein Jammed—And Photographed

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: The X-Apparatus

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Coventry

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: Target No. 54

  CHAPTER TWENTY: The Atrocious Crime

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Wotan’s Other Eye

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Retrospect and Prospect

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Freya

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: Beams On The Wane

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: ‘Jay’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Würzburg

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: The Bruneval Raid

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: The Baedeker Beams

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: El Hatto

  CHAPTER THIRTY: Pineapple

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: The Kammhuber Line

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Lichtenstein

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: Window

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: Hamburg

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: Heavy Water

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: Revelations From The Secret Service

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: Full Stretch

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: Peenemünde

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: FZG 76

  CHAPTER FORTY: The Americans Convinced

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE: ‘Flames’: Problems Of Bomber Command

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO: The Baby Blitz

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE: D-Day

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR: V-1

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE: V-2

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX: V-3

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN: Bomber Triumph

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT: Nuclear Energy

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE: A.D.I. (Science) Overseas

  CHAPTER FIFTY: The Year Of Madness

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE: German Generals And Staff Colleges

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO: Swords Into Ploughshares, Bombs Into Saucers

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE: Exeunt

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Glossary of Abbreviations and Code Names

  Index

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Men Who Went First

  IN 1939 I was a Scientific Officer on the staff of the Air Ministry in London, and for the past four years I had been involved in problems of defending Britain from air attack. For reasons that will later become evident I had been exiled since July 1938 to the Admiralty Research Laboratory at Teddington; and it was there in May 1939 that I received a telephone call that changed the course of my life, and perhaps that of many another. It came from the Secretary of Sir Henry Tizard’s Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence, A. E. Woodward-Nutt: he said that he would like to see my work, and we agreed on a visit a few days later.

  As I showed him the work, I sensed that there might be some deeper reason for his visit, and I told him so. He replied that there was indeed another reason: Tizard and his colleagues did not know what the Germans were doing in applying science to air warfare, and our Intelligence Services were unable to tell them. So it had been agreed that a scientist should be attached to these Services for a period to discover why they were producing so little information, and to recommend what should be done to improve matters. ‘I thought of you,’ said Woodward-Nutt, ‘and I wondered whether you would be interested.’ My reply was immediate: ‘A man in that position could lose the war—I’ll take it!’ We agreed that we ought to give the Admiralty Research Laboratory time to replace me and so the date for my move over to Intelligence should be 1st September 1939.

  It turned out that we had hit the very day on which the Second World War started. This book is primarily an account of my part in that war, which was to attempt to anticipate the German applications of science to warfare, so that we could counter their new weapons before they were used. Much of my work had to do with radio navigation, as in the Battle of the Beams, and with radar, as in the Allied Bomber Offensive and in the preparations for D-Day and in the war at sea. There were also our efforts against the V-1 (flying bomb) and V-2 (rocket) Retaliation Weapons and—although fortunately the Germans were some distance from success—against their nuclear developments. In all these fields I had the ultimate responsibility for providing Intelligence, and my main object now is to describe how we built up our pictures of what the Germans were doing. But Intelligence is of little use unless it leads to action, and so I must in some vital instances also describe what went on in Whitehall before action was finally taken. These episodes brought me into contact with many of those responsible for the conduct of the war from Winston Churchill downwards. Also coming naturally into my narrative will be examples of the heroism of some of our Serving personnel and of those many helpers who joined the cause of Allied Intelligence in the Nazi-occupied territories.

  As with many others who played a part in 1940, my own preparation for the Second World War started years earlier; without the experience that we had gained then, we could have done little until t
oo late in the war. I must therefore recall some of the incidents from my earlier days that sensitized me to the work that I was about to do.

  I was born on 29th September 1911; and in a sense, my earliest background was that of the Grenadier Guards. My father had served from Guardsman to Sergeant in the South African and First World Wars, and had been in the King’s Company in the last stages of the Retreat from Mons. Offered a Commission, he refused to leave his friends; he survived Neuve Chapelle, where the battalion lost sixteen out of its twenty-one officers and 325 of its men, and where he himself was to have been recommended for the Victoria Cross; two months later he was very badly wounded at Festubert in May 1915. In hospital and convalescent home for a year, he became a guard at M.I.5 headquarters and later a Drill Sergeant at Aldershot. My childhood was steeped in the Regimental tradition of discipline, precision, service, endurance, and good temper. It was steeped, too, in the experiences of the air raids on London, all of which I went through with my mother and sister. The shattered houses that I saw then, and the suspense of waiting for the next bomb, remained in my memory as the Second World War approached.

  In 1916 I went to my first school, St. Jude’s, Herne Hill in South London. It was a Church school, and religion was of course a prominent feature: the war had plenty of examples of self-sacrifice to which our teachers could point, and I particularly remember being told of an officer who had saved his men by throwing himself onto a grenade that was about to explode. From St. Jude’s I went in 1919 to the one elementary school in the neighbourhood to which my mother prayed I should not be sent, Sussex Road, Brixton, because it was so rough. It certainly was tough, the future of my contemporaries encompassing everything from barrow boy to millionaire scrapmerchant and trade union peer. But I found genuine friendship and decency, and I can still talk on equal terms with some of the stallholders in London street markets. And we had devoted teachers like E. C. Samuel, a great Welshman who had taught one of my uncles before me; and despite the fact that his class numbered 55 he found time to give me personal tuition in algebra, so that I was solving simple simultaneous equations before I was ten. He told me that he himself had been to college, but that all his swans had turned out to be geese, and that he would like to see me go far. Thanks to his help, I won a London Junior County Scholarship in 1922, and went to Alleyn’s School, Dulwich.

  But before I left Sussex Road a trivial incident occurred that helped to shape the course of my life. It was the first Boat Race after the war. However partisan the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge might have felt about the outcome, they were almost as conscientious objectors compared with the belligerent boys of the typical London school of the period, which temporarily split into violently opposed factions. My first acquaintance with the strife, having previously never heard of either Oxford or Cambridge, was when an older boy asked me ‘Which are you, Oxford or Cambridge?’ Perhaps because he had put Oxford first, I replied ‘Oxford’. It turned out that he was Cambridge, so he promptly punched me on the nose and knocked me down. From that moment I swore undying enmity to Cambridge, and the incident may have been at least as significant as any other in the course of my subsequent career.

  For me, the move to Alleyn’s meant a new era of discipline. We were forbidden to run anywhere in the school except on the playing fields. Many of our masters had been in the Army, and the Officers’ Training Corps was one of the strongest activities in the school. I was in it, or its predecessor, the Cadet Corps, for the next seven years. Even now, we still drink at the annual dinner to the memory of the Old Boys who fell in the Wars.

  As for my own career in the O.T.C., my father expected me to be turned out as smartly as a Guardsman, with such details as puttees finishing not more than one half inch beyond the top of the fibula. The incident that probably gave him most satisfaction and most annoyance was when I was in summer camp and the parade was inspected without warning by a colonel in the Coldstream Guards. It happened that I had not had time to clean my brass that day, and I expected to be in trouble. To my surprise, the colonel complimented me on the smartness of my turnout and my father was as pleased with the fact that even with a day’s unpolished brass I had impressed a Coldstream colonel as he was annoyed by the fact that I had not cleaned it.

  When it came to qualifying for a Commission by taking Certificate A in 1928, I decided to put the power of prayer to the test. Previously I had been taught to pray for anything that I hoped would come about, and this of course included passing examinations. By now my doubts were being aroused and since it did not particularly matter whether I passed Certificate A or not, I decided to experiment by not praying. I thought that I had made a mess of the papers, so it was ‘one up’ for God. When the results came out I did not even trouble to look at the noticeboard, and was surprised when one of my contemporaries grasped my hand and told me that I had broken the school record. It was about the only school record that I ever held and, although I readily acknowledge my debt to a most Christian upbringing, I have never prayed since.

  Our headmaster, R. B. Henderson, was a strong influence. After morning prayers he would address the whole school on any topic of his choice, but it generally lay either in the direction of service to the school, community, or country, or in the importance of being good at cricket. In fact, his instructions ruined my cricket, because he taught us that by far the most important thing when batting was to have your bat in the twelve o’clock high position as the ball left the bowler’s arm, and that you should then bring the bat down in a vertical swing. The result, as far as I was concerned, was that I could hardly ever get the bat down before the ball was past my crease and I had been clean bowled. It was only after I went to Oxford and gave up the twelve o’clock fetish that I managed to make many runs.

  Others of his admonitions were more effective. On 21st March he would remind us that this was the anniversary of the Germans’ last great offensive in 1918 which had occasioned Haig’s ‘backs to the wall’ order. He stressed how much we owed to our fathers who had stood fast at that time, and how the time could come again when we should have to follow their example. In a sixth form lesson on the theory of forgiveness he elaborated this theme, arguing that forgiveness could only take place when a sinner had repented. We could therefore not forgive the Germans because they had never expressed regret for the war and, he added, ‘Mark my words, as soon as they’re strong enough they’ll be at us again!’

  He exerted considerable pressure on the brightest boys to get them to study classics. It turned out that I was rather better at Latin than I was in science, but I had already decided that science was what I wanted to do. Fortunately, he did not regard his budding scientists as completely lost, and he provoked us with a weekly lesson on anything ranging from Greek tragedy to Gothic architecture, with Aristotelian philosophy thrown in. The effect that he had on us by opening cultural windows—because some of us looked through them with the hope of proving him wrong—was out of all proportion to the amount of time that his lessons occupied.

  One incident in my first year of physics at the age of 12 will show how well taught we were, and indicate one of the factors that sensitized me, years later, to what was going to happen at Coventry. We had a new and enthusiastic physics master who set us more homework than I could manage; and at the end of more than two hours when the supposed allocation was 45 minutes, I had to solve a problem in specific heats. I worked the answer out to thirteen places of decimals, knowing perfectly well that this was quite unjustified, and in fact getting the answer wrong. The master promptly sent for me, saying that surely I knew better than to work out an answer to that degree of meaningless precision. I replied that I did, but that I thought he would like an answer matching the length of the homework that he had set us. The result was that he moderated his demands, but the point of the story in this context is that as fourth form schoolboys we already well knew how many places of decimals were justified in particular measurements: its significance was to be evident at Coventry in 1940
.

  Life was not easy. I sometimes felt like giving up, when I contrasted my situation with that of some of my classmates who could turn to their parents for help. All that my mother could say, now that I was beyond her academic attainment, was ‘Stick it!’, and somehow I stuck. In retrospect, such encouragement was far more valuable than any detailed help. Too many parents are superficially solicitous over their children, and I have come to appreciate Edward III’s restraint over the Black Prince at Crecy: ‘Let the boy win his spurs!’

  My main hobby in my schooldays was, as with many other boys of my generation, the making of radio receiving sets. There has never been anything comparable in any other period of history to the impact of radio on the ordinary individual in the 1920’s. It was the product of some of the most imaginative developments that have ever occurred in physics, and it was as near magic as anyone could conceive, in that with a few mainly home-made components simply connected together one could conjure speech and music out of the air. The construction of radio receivers was just within the competence of the average man, who could thus write himself a passport to countries he could never hope to visit. And he could always make modifications that might improve his aerial or his receiver and give him something to boast about to his friends. I acquired much of my manipulative skill through building and handling receivers: when at last I could afford a thermionic valve in 1928, I built a receiver that picked up transmissions from Melbourne, which that station acknowledged by sending me a postcard carrying the signatures of the English Test Team.

  My interest in radio, coupled with an instinct that physics was the most basic of the sciences, permanently biased me in that direction. I had originally intended to be a chemist, but by the time I went to Oxford, my choice had finally settled on physics. Actually, the school had wanted me to try for a scholarship at Cambridge in mathematics, but to the astonishment of my masters I refused to enter, remembering my experience at the first Boat Race and saying that I had been Oxford ever since (although we had been defeated nearly every year) and I was not going to change now. Had someone pointed out to me that if I got to Cambridge I might have a chance of working with Rutherford, my blind loyalty to Oxford might have been sorely tried—if I had believed him, for to work with Rutherford seemed beyond dreams. As it was, I was happy to be tutored by a new Oxford graduate in physics who had just joined the school and who was to do much for it over the next forty years, ‘Inky’ Incledon, and I was awarded an Open Exhibition at Wadham College in 1929.