Most Secret War

by R. V. Jones

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Fifth Column

  THE STORY of the engine-stopping rays on the Feldberg (pp. 50 and 84) was one example of how the human imagination can conjure up fear under conditions of stress; these conditions were much intensified with the direct threat to Britain in June 1940. With the example of Quisling in Norway and with stories of fifth columnists causing confusion during the retreat of our Army in France and Belgium, it was not surprising that a scare about fifth columnists swept through Britain. It was, indeed, quite conceivable that the Nazis had infiltrated some of their own agents among the stream of Jewish emigrés who had come to Britain before the war, and it was therefore not unnatural, although unfortunate, that the Government decided not to take any risks and rounded up many of them for internment. The Lander Committee (p. 83) lost two of its members in this way, and it took us months to get them out again. Some were taken to the Isle of Man and others to Canada: they bore this great inconvenience with much patience.

  As far as I could see at the time, and still more in retrospect, the fifth column in Britain was completely imaginary. But great zeal was expended by security officers in chasing reports of fireworks being let off while German aircraft were overhead. Our countryside was scanned by aircraft of the R.A.F. looking for suspicious patterns laid out on the ground which might serve as landmarks to aid the navigation of German bombers. More than one farmer was surprised by a call from security officers to explain why he had mown his hay in such a manner as to leave a striking pattern which could be seen from the air. One chapel, whose gardener had unconsciously laid out paths in the pattern of an enormous arrow as seen from the air, and which did indeed point roughly in the direction of an ammunition dump ten miles away, was raided as a suspected Fifth Column Headquarters. In this instance, as in the Knickebein hunt, the raid was led by Group Captain Blackford.

  Late in the evening of Sunday 30th June, I was telephoned at home by Blackford, who told me that he had just returned from investigating another case, this time in Norfolk, and there was so much to it that he was sure that it was ‘up my street’. He was sufficiently convinced to have some R.A.F. policemen sent up to the area and to have persuaded the Chief Constable of Norfolk to issue search and arrest warrants. He wanted me to fly there the next morning to look over the evidence and sanction the search and arrest parties. It was an unusual job for a scientist, but it promised excitement.

  I went into the Air Ministry first thing in the morning to look at the evidence. It was indeed much stronger than in any other fifth column case I had seen. The file started, as did so many others about that time, with a letter from an R.A.F. Station Commander along the lines: ‘Sir, I have the honour to report the following suspicious incident in the vicinity of my station in the recent past.…’ The station concerned was near The Wash, and the Commander claimed to be the oldest group captain in the Air Force. Certainly, he was one of the most energetic, and he had insisted on coming back from retirement, well over sixty, to ‘do his bit’ once again. He had organized his own dummy aerodrome, complete with fireworks, which he manipulated himself when German aircraft were overhead. From watching these aircraft he concluded that there was a fifth column radio transmitter near his station, because aircraft always approached from the same direction and then turned when almost immediately overhead to go on a new course to their targets inland. Also, he thought that he had some fifth column rivals in letting off fireworks. These factors, fireworks and aircraft changing course overhead, were common to innumerable stories all over England at that time, and the Air Staff had come to take little notice of them. Nothing therefore was done until another letter arrived from the Group Captain, again starting ‘I have the honour.…’ but it was quite clear that by then he considered it anything but an honour to deal with the seemingly lethargic Air Staff.

  The Group Captain’s second letter described events that were quite remarkable, and it was this letter that had led to the hurried visit from Blackford and thus to my own impending trip. Briefly, there was a radar station a few miles from the aerodrome; this station, one of our main chain, was being troubled by jamming, and the C.O. had formed the impression that the jamming was originating locally. There was a small town a few miles away, and he had made private enquiries with the police for any suspected character who might be capable of making a jammer. The police said that they only knew of one man in the town with the necessary competence, and he was the local electrical engineer. It was here that things became interesting, because on looking into his background the police found that he was a Blackshirt, and had actually appeared on the same platform as Oswald Mosley.

  Up to this point, there was little concrete evidence to go on, but within the past few days someone had brought into the police station a six-inch local map which he had found under a seat beside a public footpath. This map had pencil lines on it which were as suspicious as one could hope for. They were line bearings from local points of vantage on to four crosses which represented the towers of the radar station. Now it was at that time an offence to make a sketch or map of any Service installation, let alone anything so secret as a radar station, and yet it was quite obvious that someone had deliberately triangulated on to the towers for the purpose of locating them accurately.

  The police recognized the map as being one sold by the Ordnance Survey through the local stationer, and they therefore visited him to see whether he had sold any such maps recently. The stationer identified the map as one that he must have sold, but said that he had sold none recently. The police were disappointed at drawing blank; but they were visited that evening by the stationer’s younger son, aged about 21 or 22, who was obviously agitated and who claimed the map as his own. He was the local scoutmaster, and said that he must have lost it while explaining map-reading to his scouts. He was not asked to account for the markings, but he was not given back his map, because the police immediately realized a remarkable fact: the stationer’s elder son was the Blackshirt electrical engineer.

  I left for Hendon after reading this, and flew to the aerodrome in time for lunch with the Group Captain. After lunch, I went with the station security officer to visit the radar C.O., and held a conference at which there were, in addition, the Chief Constable, the C.O. of the local coast defence troops, and the two R.A.F. policemen specially brought over from the depot at Uxbridge. We went over the evidence: it was good, but not conclusive. The weak point, I felt, was that the scout-master had unnecessarily put his head into the jaws of the police, but it might conceivably be a double bluff. Anyway, everyone else was convinced, and the decision whether to raid the electrical engineer’s and the stationer’s houses rested with me. I looked at their expectant faces. If I decided against the raid, and went back to the Air Ministry, rumours would still go on and the Air Ministry would be blamed for inaction. On the other hand, a raid would decide the thing one way or the other, and the policemen’s eyes lit up when I therefore gave my verdict in favour.

  We then got out large-scale maps of the town and planned our raid. The two houses, about half a mile apart, were to be surrounded simultaneously, to prevent one house being alerted by secret radio from the other. The electrical engineer had a wife, and we therefore took the ‘Queen W.A.A.F.’ of the station to look after her. Search warrants were produced, and after a cup of tea we set off; I was with the party going to the electrical engineer’s—he was thought to be the more likely to have any apparatus, and the other party was merely to hold everything static until we had finished with the engineer, and were able to rejoin them. We took up positions around the house to give covering fire if necessary to the Chief Constable and the Army Commander as they rushed up the garden path to give a thunderous knock on the door.

  The door was opened by a patently astonished young man who turned out to be the Blackshirt engineer, his alarmed wife clinging to his shoulders. She was gently taken into one room by the W.A.A.F., while we started our search. It stands out in my memory as one of the worst things that I
have ever had to do. It is not a nice thing to ransack someone else’s house, and rudely search through all the minutiae and debris of domestic life; it turns out to be so pathetically like one’s own. It would have been still worse if there had been any children and we had had to go through their toys. None of these thoughts, however, seemed to affect the R.A.F. policemen, who went about their search as enthusiastically as dogs after a winged pheasant hiding under a gorse clump. We inspected the wireless set: nothing unusual. ‘Look at this, doctor,’ said one of the policemen, ‘pages of secret calculations!’ I looked; it was an old lecture notebook compiled by the engineer when he was a student, and nothing more. The policeman went away as disappointed as a dog would be when his master reproved him for retrieving a tame hen. Soon he brought back something else, but again it was nothing of importance. This was repeated many times. I could hear the policemen rummaging about upstairs. Then one of them came rushing down, saying ‘Here it is!’ He had found it hidden away at the bottom of a drawer of clothes, and it was a smallish polished wooden box which might house some scientific instrument—or might not. It was locked; we asked the engineer for the key. He astonished us by saying that he had never seen it in his life. This appeared to be an obvious lie. The policemen fiddled with the lock and ultimately got it open. They gave a yelp, and handed it to me in triumph. There, inside, was an induction coil, some wire, and some crocodile clips. Remember, we were looking for an electrical jamming apparatus, and so their yelp was certainly justified.

  I looked at the engineer. His face showed surprise and embarrassment: he protested that the thing was not his. I looked at the box again; there were some instructions inside the lid. I read them, and realized that this was an electrical hair-remover. His wife, modest woman, had bought it for her personal use, and had been practising a mild deception on her husband. Our search had wrecked her secret—I hope that their domestic happiness survived.

  After a pretence at a further search, we all left the house—at least some of us somewhat discomfited. We still had the stationer’s house to explore, but it was an anticlimax after the stirring events of the last half-hour. One look at the scoutmaster showed us that he could never have the nerve to be a cold-blooded spy. His explanation was quite simple: he had bought an old prismatic compass the year before, and had fitted it with a new crosswire. He had wanted to check the accuracy of the new sight, and so had gone out onto local eminences, and had taken bearings on the most prominent local objects, the radar towers. Actually, the sight was not aligned quite correctly, and he had accordingly triangulated the towers into the wrong field—as could be seen from a more thorough inspection of the map. He had done all this during the previous year, when it had not been an offence. Technically, we could still have charged him with being in possession of a marked map, but it would have been unkind.

  Our mission had therefore been fruitless. All we had done was to explode the main evidence. The jamming of the radar station was almost certainly accidental, and I doubt whether it originated from the hair-remover. The change of direction of German aircraft in the neighbourhood was most probably due to the fact that we were on the coast of the Wash, which served as a very convenient and recognizable landfall taking the aircraft further in towards any of their Midland targets than would any other landfall that they could have made.

  It was too late to get back to London that night; and since the radar station was fortunately one of those where we had fitted one of our Knickebein listening receivers, I stayed through the night at the top of one of the towers listening to the beams that Eckersley had said would not be detectable even at twenty thousand feet. I had some fun with Bobby Blucke, who was in charge of the Knickebein watch at Fighter Command, because I was able to telephone him, as it were, from the wrong side. He naturally assumed that I was still in the Air Ministry, and was much surprised to find me taking one of the actual Knickebein watches out on the coast.

  As dawn broke, I was myself to hear familiar sounds coming unforgettably from the wrong side. They were of larks invisibly far below us, gradually becoming louder as they rose from the darkness to greet the dawn.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Edda Revived

  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. His qualities are best portrayed by what his colleague Leonard Forster wrote of him in The Times after his death in December 1968: ‘… the man known characteristically throughout the academic profession as “Bimbo”. Nomen est omen: the Italian word for a child in fact revealed something very deep in Norman. There is a sense in which he remained a small boy all his life. He preserved until the end the gusto, the quickness of wit, the intellectual curiosity of the formidably intelligent schoolboy that he must have been—and the immediacy and charm. These qualities gave life to his academic teaching and informed the influence he exerted on generations of students. His medium was the spoken, not the written word, in informal conversation rather than in the lecture room; his use of it was memorable. In this way he communicated in a uniquely personal manner his learning, enthusiasm, and the fruits of his wide-ranging, lightning-swift mind.’ I was immediately to have a demonstration of this last quality, for 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, Brisinga-men, 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.

  My report recorded that there were Freya stations near Cherbourg and Brest, and we learnt later that the former had detected our destroyer H.M.S. Delight at a range of about sixty miles, with the result that she was sunk by the Luftwaffe on 29th July. Since she had neither balloons nor air escort, the Freya apparatus must have been able to detect her directly. It appeared to be sited near the village of Auderville on the Hague peninsula north-west of Cherbourg, but it had to be very different from our own coastal chain stations, since it was completely undetectable on the best air photographs that we possessed of the area. This confirmed the idea that Freya was a fairly small apparatus, which had already been suggested by the fact that it had been set up so quickly after the Germans had occupied the Channel Coast.