by R. V. Jones
Although it was reasonably certain that one form of Lichtenstein operated on 61 centimetres, it was possible that this was only used by the coastal nightfighters, where the Germans must know we could intercept the transmissions, and that a substantially different wavelength would be used further back. This was why I had told Charles Medhurst that the next most important objective after the unravelling of the Kammhuber Line was to check whether the nightfighters associated with the Line also operated on 61 centimetres. Within an hour or so of my making the point Medhurst telephoned to say that he had arranged with the Commander-in-Chief, Bomber Command, for the latter to see me before lunch the following day, 20th September or thereabouts, at his Headquarters near High Wycombe.
On my previous visits to the Command I had always been courteously but disinterestedly received, rather after the manner of a gentlemen’s country club. This time the atmosphere was different and I showed the Commander-in-Chief the outline of the German night defences as I now understood them, with the locations of a substantial number of nightfighter control stations. His immediate reaction was a grunt of satisfaction and the exclamation ‘It shows I’m hurting them!’, to which I replied that if we did not do enough about them it would be Bomber Command that would be hurt. I then told him of my requirement for a couple of Mosquitoes and he said that I had better explain the problem to his Deputy, Air Vice Marshal R. H. M. Saundby, whom I already slightly knew. It was nearly lunchtime and so Saundby took me into the Command Mess.
As we passed a portrait of George Washington, he told me that a few days before an American Air Force General with a Germanic name (it may have been General Spaatz) had been visiting the Command and had said something about the portrait as he and the C.-in-C. were passing it. Bert Harris’ reply was ‘I will bet you one thing, Spaatz: for every one Spaatz that fought in Washington’s army, there were ten Harrises!’ Saundby himself had a delightful sense of humour, and he proceeded to divert me with the proof of a theorem that all cats have three tails. For this it is necessary to make two premisses, the first being that one cat has one more tail than no cat, and the second that no cat has two tails. What is more, he knew where the fallacy in the argument lay.
As soon as he had settled me with a drink he picked up a Daily Mirror and asked me to excuse him while he read the strip cartoons. He apologized saying that these cartoons were read by his bomber crews, and that if he showed himself knowledgeable about the cartoons they would be more likely to take notice of his instructions. I was not entirely convinced of the sincerity of the argument, because he himself was clearly interested and he became lost for a minute or so in one of the strips, finally commenting ‘Actually, this one is very funny. You see this chap here—he has just entered for a vegetable marrow competition, but his marrow has died and he is trying to make a dummy one by stretching canvas over a wire frame. Here you can see him painting it!’ He then went on with a sigh ‘It looks jolly good, but I am sure something’s going wrong tomorrow!’ After he had pulled himself away from the cartoons, we went in to lunch, and it was not long before he was cursing the idiots who had lowered the water-table of the whole country by about four feet. I guessed that he was an angler, and he needed little encouragement to go on. By the end of lunch he had become so expansive that he told me ‘As a matter of fact, the first time I met my wife she had a rod in her hand!’ and I began to see hope for the Mosquitoes.
He was indeed a very fine angler. He was President of the Piscatorial Society and after the war wrote a happy book, A Fly-Rod on Many Waters. It contains some penetrating observations, for example on the attraction of a red Mayfly, ‘To the human mind a red Mayfly is incongruous—a ridiculous object. But there is no reason why the trout should react to it in this way. The perception of incongruity—which my ponderings have led me to believe is the basic requirement for a sense of humour—is possible only to a creature possessing considerable powers of reasoning.’ I myself, by an entirely different argument—based on seeing the object of a practical joke as the creation of an incongruity—had come to the same conclusion.
What Saundby perhaps did not see was that he himself created delicious incongruities by his ordinary behaviour. His colleague at Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Saunders, told me that at a conference which the C.-in-C. had called urgently one night Saundby was not to be found. He was not in his room, or in the Mess, but the sentries on the gate maintained that he had not left the compound. The conference had to start without him whilst a search was being made, and it was interrupted by the appearance of a corporal, who came in and said to the C.-in-C. ‘Excuse me, Sir, but we’ve found the Deputy C.-in-C. He’s up a tree, and we can’t get him down!’ Yet another of his interests were moths, and he had happened to spot an unusual moth high up a tree which he proceeded to climb, only to find that it was beginning to sway under his considerable weight, and he dared not climb any further. But neither could he see his way down again. It took quite an effort to retrieve him.
I had known none of this background before our lunch, and now that it was over I was in for another surprise. As we reached the door of the Mess to return to his office he gave me a sideways look and asked ‘Do you like models?’ I cautiously replied ‘Yes, but what sort?’ ‘Model engines,’ he replied, and then asked me if I would like to see some. There flitted across my mind the recollection that German Air Force prisoners had told us that Goering wiled away his time at Karinhall, dressed in a green silk dressing gown embroidered in gold and playing with toy trains. I asked Saundby what kind of trains he had, and he told me that they were Hornby. ‘Not very good, are they?’ I asked and he grudgingly replied, ‘No, but I buy spare parts and modify ’em’. Fortunately this was a field in which I had schoolboy memories and so I asked ‘Where do you buy your spare parts—Bonds?’ His approving affirmative brought the Mosquitoes just a little nearer. Actually, Bond’s shop in Euston Road was the mecca of every model railway enthusiast, and so it had been a fairly safe guess. But I at least felt that if he did not give me the Mosquitoes he would be more inclined, following his own principle with bomber crews, to believe what I told him about the German night defences.
He took me up to his bedroom, and showed me an ordinary Hornby No. o gauge track running on a shelf at waist level all round his bedroom except, of course, for the door. I would not have put it past him to contrive a kind of swing bridge which would come into operation as the door closed. But he told me that he had discussed his wartime policy with his son, who was then about twelve years old, and they had decided that they would concentrate on building rolling stock until the war was over. He showed me a goods train and invited me to test its lightness by pulling it along by hand. He then offered to let me into the secret of how he had achieved such lightness despite the fact that the trucks appeared to be full of coal. ‘It’s not coal, really,’ he said. ‘Actually, it’s cork. What I do is to go round the Mess after a party on Saturday night and pick up all the old corks. Then I mix up linseed oil and bismarck black and put it in a tin with the broken cork. I usually pinch the C.-in-C.’s old cigarette tins for this, and put the cork and the black inside, push on the lid, and shake it up and down like a cocktail shaker. Then I tip the whole lot out onto a piece of blotting paper and let it dry.’ And he went on, ‘As a matter of fact, I get the trains even lighter, because these trucks are not really full of coal.’ He grubbed the top layer on one truck aside with his finger and showed me that it hardly went below the top of the truck itself, because he had filled up the bottom with matchboxes which he had painted black.
Time was now getting on, and he looked regretfully at his watch and said ‘I suppose we’d better be getting back to my office’ and so we got as far as the door. In fact I was already in the corridor outside, but I can still see him, big man that he was, standing in his bedroom doorway with his hands on his hips surveying the room and saying ‘Yes, No. 0 gauge is just about right! No. I gauge is too big, you can’t get much of it into a room. Double 0 gauge is too small and fiddlin
g, so you can’t do any modifications yourself. No. o gauge is the gauge for me! And what’s more, the engines weigh five or six pounds, and you can have a damned good smash with those!’ As we made our way back to his office, I asked ‘Now, what about those Mosquitoes?’ ‘Certainly’ was his answer, and I went back to Air Ministry happy.
Next day I told Charles Medhurst what had happened and said ‘You might have briefed me!’ Medhurst apologized, saying that he thought Saundby’s propensities were so well known throughout the Air Force that it did not occur to him that I didn’t know. He told me that when Saundby was on the Directing Staff at the R.A.F. Staff College he sometimes had to take a session between noon and one o’clock, and somewhere towards half-past twelve he would begin to lose the theme of what he was saying and wander over to the window. This would happen with increasing frequency until finally the whistle or rumble of a train was heard in the distance on the line that ran past Staff College. At that point he would abandon all pretence at lecturing and stay at the window to watch the train out of sight, looking at his watch and making some such comment as ‘Damn it, three minutes late again!’
It would be pleasant to record that the Mosquitoes were forthcoming within a week of my visit to Bomber Command; but this was not so. Since they would have to be allocated to the signals organization that was operating the listening flights, I handed the Bomber Command promise over to them, and awaited results. Unfortunately the Mosquitoes were still not available some two months later, and it was decided to risk flying one of the Wellington aircraft, which were much slower, in front of a nightfighter in the hope that the operator who was listening for the nightfighter transmissions would be able to give enough warning for the Wellington to escape.
Early in the morning of 3rd December a Wellington of No. 1473 (wireless-investigation) flight took off from an airfield near Huntingdon to accompany the raid that was directed against Frankfurt that night. Two hours or so later it was west of Mainz and was turning for home. The special radio operator was Pilot Officer Harold Jordan, who in peacetime had been a schoolteacher. Just after the turn for home he picked up weak signals on the expected wavelength and studied them for the next ten minutes as they increased in strength. He warned the rest of the crew what was happening and he drafted a coded signal saying that the signals had been picked up, confirming our suspicions as they were very probably coming from a nightfighter. The signal was dispatched by the wireless operator Flight Sergeant Bigoray. The nightfighter signals grew to a level which completely saturated Jordan’s receiver, and he warned the crew that an attack was imminent. It was almost immediately hit by cannon shells, and the pilot, Pilot Officer Paulton, tried to throw off the attack. The nightfighter attacked repeatedly, and the rear gunner fired about a thousand rounds back, until his turret was put out of action and he was hit in the shoulder. Jordan was hit in the arm, but he drafted a second message, and then was again hit in the jaw and one eye. As each attack developed, he tried to warn the pilot of the direction from which it was coming by continuing to observe its radar transmission. Ultimately the nightfighter broke off, leaving the Wellington barely flyable. The port engine throttle had been shot away, and the starboard throttle was jammed. The starboard aileron and both the air speed indicators were out of action. Four of the crew of six were badly wounded.
Despite his wounds, Bigoray managed to send Jordan’s second message, repeating it again and again in the hope that someone might hear. It was in fact picked up in Britain and an acknowledgement made, but this was not heard in the Wellington because its receiver had been damaged. Bigoray went on repeating the message until a quarter to seven in the morning. As the aircraft approached the coast of England Paulton decided that it was too badly damaged to risk a crash landing, and that he would bring it down in the sea near the shore. Since he still did not know whether Jordan’s message had got through, and since Bigoray was so badly injured that he might not be able to get out of the aircraft before it sank, Paulton decided that he would fly inland and have Bigoray pushed out with his parachute with the vital information in case the aircraft and its remaining crew were lost in the sea. As Bigoray reached the rear escape hatch he remembered that he had not locked down his Morse key to provide the continuous note signal for ground direction finding stations to track the aircraft, so he painfully crawled back to fulfil his final duty. Paulton then flew back over the sea, and finally ditched in the sea some two hundred yards off Deal. The rubber dinghy could not be inflated since it had been holed many times and the crew stayed on the sinking bomber. Fortunately a few minutes later they were rescued.
It had been an epic of cool observation, great gallantry and resourceful doggedness. For some days we did not know whether Jordan was going to lose his eye, but the surgeons managed to save it. He received an immediate Distinguished Service Order, the next thing to a Victoria Cross. Paulton was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, and Bigoray the Distinguished Flying Medal. The last gap in our understanding of the German night defences had been closed.
The whole investigation, starting with the radar on the Channel coast, had drawn on our resources to the full. It had been a much more difficult Intelligence problem than the beams, where we had had prisoners and equipment presented to us, as it were, and where we could solve most of our problems without moving outside England. With the German night defences, by contrast, we had to go out to get the information by every conceivable means; and the risks run by the patriots in the Low Countries, by our photographic and listening air crew, and at Bruneval, will have been obvious from my account.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Window
OUR STUDIES of German radar were described in a series of reports of which the two most substantial were ‘D.T.’ (this was one of the original German names for radar, as ours was ‘R.D.F.’) dated 10th January 1942 and ‘German Nightfighter Control’ of 29th December 1942. As with the X-Gerät Report they summarized the knowledge we had gained during the preceding year, and ran to some twenty thousand words each. In making such comprehensive surveys we sometimes recognized weaknesses that might otherwise have gone unnoticed: for example, it was only when we put all the evidence together that we could come to the surprisingly negative conclusion that the Germans had no satisfactory method of identifying their own fighters, as we had in I.F.F. This, combined with their ponderous method of telling plots from the Giant Würzburgs to the Seeburg Table, in turn suggested that they might have difficulty in following a bomber that was not flying a straight and level course. This in fact sometimes happened: as the fighter approached the bomber, it was inevitably picked up by the ‘red’ Giant following the bomber; if the bomber suddenly turned away the ‘red’ Giant might continue to follow the fighter and plot it in mistake. This promptly suggested that when flying through the Kammhuber Line our bombers should take ‘evasive action’ as a matter of routine, and various manœuvres such as the ‘corkscrew’ (a sudden twisting dive of a thousand feet or so, and subsequent recovery) were adopted. So besides the intelligence itself, our Reports inevitably considered possible counters to the German defences.
In particular, the ‘D.T.’ Report had a section discussing weak points in the German system, and pointing to the use of spurious reflectors, among other possibilities but first pressing for direct attack on the main radar stations:
The Report then went on to develop the theory of Spoof:
‘10.3.0 Spoof
10.3.1 R.D.F. [Radar] is a system which reports to the enemy the position of your forces by means of the radio echoes to which they give rise. To neutralize its value to him, it must be made to confound him. This may be done in two ways: by persuading him that you are either (a) where you are not, or (b) not where you are. Owing to the nature and good cover of German R.D.F. it may be taken, at least for this argument, that any aircraft within striking distance of the enemy coast will be observed as a positive signal on the cathode ray tube of an early warning station. It is therefore almost impossible to avoid giving t
o the enemy the necessary evidence from which he can deduce your true position. The art of Spoof lies in so colouring his appreciation of this evidence that he comes to a false conclusion. The only method philosophically possible, when you are bound to give him a positive indication of your position, is to provide him with a requisite number of imitation positive indications. No imitation can be perfect without being the real thing, but it is surprising what can be done by dexterous suggestion.
10.3.2 To any one R.D.F. equipment, an aircraft appears as a radio echo on a specific frequency. The fundamental elements of R.D.F. Spoof are echoes from spurious objects, and phenomena which simulate echoes or obliterate them. Obliteration, either by deliberate jamming or by sowing a dense field of spurious reflectors, corresponds to a smoke screen, and although in itself it is not a Spoof, it can be so handled that spoofing may result. For example, if a smoke screen generally preceded an attack, then the enemy will expect an attack whenever he sees a smoke screen. Thus, it is not of great use to obliterate his R.D.F. wherever and whenever a heavy attack is intended: the obliteration will itself provide the necessary early warning for the enemy to prime his defences. If obliteration be physically possible, then it must also be used at times other than those preceding attacks, so that the enemy can either establish no correlation or, better, can be induced to make false correlation.
10.3.4 Apart from obliteration, there remains the possibility of producing swarms of pulses which react as echoes off a large formation of aircraft, either from a ground station, or more easily from a single aircraft. This in itself is true spoof, which can be handled in mass so as to produce a greater spoof.
10.3.5 The enemy knows that an aircraft will show an echo which moves in the same characteristic way whatever radio frequency he projects, and therefore if he has a sufficient number of frequencies in reserve, he can discard those which give suspect indications. It is therefore necessary to be prepared to cover, say, 80% of his available frequencies, although in the heat of operations if even only one half his stations indicated a large raid, it would take a very cool controller to disregard them in favour of the others who truthfully reported only a small raid. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the enemy is omniscient and panoptic and hence of believing that no spoof could fool him. German R.D.F. personnel are only human, and even relatively modest spoof might succeed.