Night Raid

by Taylor Downing

  In no time at all, Dee’s team were receiving radar echoes from cars, aircraft and from ships at sea. In one bizarre experiment they picked up a strong echo from a colleague riding a bicycle by the cliff edge holding up a small metal sheet – a tiny object that in longer wave radar would have been completely lost amid the interference from cliffs, buildings and other objects on the ground. Lovell wrote in his diary that these results were nothing short of ‘amazing’.10 In a neat metaphor Watson-Watt later wrote that the man on the bike representing this new rush of experimentation at Worth Matravers was driving ‘an invisible coach and horses through radar history’.11 In no time at all the army was beginning to experiment with microwave technology to direct the fire from anti-aircraft guns, and the Royal Navy was adapting microwave radar for ships at sea. This new work put great demands on the scientists at Worth Matravers and marked a high point for British radar research and development.

  However, it was clear that the resources available to industry in war-torn Britain were not enough to advance the new era of microwave radar technology as far or as fast as was needed to meet the demands of war. So, in August 1940, Winston Churchill himself authorised Sir Henry Tizard to lead a small delegation of scientists, which became known as the Tizard Mission, to take to Canada and the United States (then still neutral, of course) the latest achievements of British science.12 It was an extraordinary gesture for a nation at war to share with non-belligerents its latest discoveries and inventions. But it was far from an altruistic act. Churchill was keen to get the United States more closely committed to the war and he thought getting US scientists on board was one way to do this. Moreover, he was aware that if Britain was invaded and defeated that summer he was handing on some of the latest of the nation’s inventions to the remaining power base in the free world, where they might be developed further.

  So Tizard and his colleagues, including Taffy Bowen, set off for America with a variety of scientific research papers, along with packing cases containing the latest power-driven gun turrets, proximity fuses and a new gun-sight predictor for the Bofors gun. In addition Tizard took a small black box containing the jewel in the crown of British science at that time, an example of the resonant cavity magnetron. When Tizard took the tiny device out of the box and showed it to a gathering of scientists and senior military men in a hotel room in Washington, the Americans were blown away by the implications of the technology. At that point, to generate centimetric radar the Americans had nothing more than a device called a klystron, with a power output of only 10 watts. The cavity magnetron was able to generate power and send out waves several hundred times more powerful than this. The official historian of the American scientific war described the arrival of the cavity magnetron as ‘the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores. It sparked the whole development of microwave radar [in the United States].’13

  Later that year the Radiation Laboratory (usually known as the Rad Lab) was set up at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. It took the cavity magnetron and developed a new generation of microwave radar technology. Within a few years scientists at Rad Lab had developed about 150 different systems for radar early warning, gun direction, bombing and navigation based on this ingenious device. Churchill’s trust in sharing the latest British science with the Americans would pay off many times over.

  One of the great features of TRE at this time was the freedom of discussion that A.P. Rowe encouraged. Inheriting the concept from Watson-Watt, he took it to new heights. On one or two Sundays every month, a diverse group that might include senior scientific advisers to the government, top military men and scientists from TRE would gather on the Dorset coast. Everyone was encouraged to be totally open and to air the problems they faced or the challenges that were holding up their work. Held on the only day of the week when busy men, carrying the burdens of the war, could find time to gather for this informal sort of exchange, they became known as the ‘Sunday Soviets’ on the principle that everyone was equal and anything could be discussed.

  A lot of myths have grown up around the ‘Sunday Soviets’. It is often said that even the most junior scientists working at Worth Matravers were invited to attend. In fact this was rarely the case and Rowe usually only admitted heads of department. Nor were they quite as free ranging as they were later remembered to be. They usually had a structure and a form of agenda. Nevertheless they were remarkable events. Sometimes Professor Frederick Lindemann, Churchill’s closest scientific adviser and the man described as possessing ‘power greater than any scientist in history’, would attend.14 On most occasions there would be air vice marshals or air marshals in abundance. Other regular attenders included senior civil servants and even government ministers. Goodness knows what the Dorset locals thought about the assembly of all these official cars on a Sunday morning in their once sleepy village.

  In a sense the ‘Sunday Soviets’ represented the best element of a democracy at war in which everyone could speak their mind and senior officers and relatively junior scientists could kick a problem around together until some sort of solution was found. At least one scientist who attended the ‘Sunday Soviets’ described them as having ‘more influence on the outcome of the war than any other single military or civilian activity’.15

  The TRE scientists at Worth Matravers threw themselves into this new phase of radar development. Instead of the giant 300-foot masts that had characterised the Chain Home system, radar antennae could now be produced that were small enough to fit into aircraft. The challenges of airborne radar that Taffy Bowen had struggled with in the early days could now be met and Airborne Interception apparatus became smaller, easier to operate. In April 1942 a Beaufighter was to achieve the first shooting down of a German bomber at night using on-board centimetric radar. And within a couple of years, a form of centimetric blind bombing radar was designed and built to guide heavy four-engined bombers like the Lancaster and the Halifax to their targets. Similar forms of microwave radar were used to pick up the conning towers of U-boats at sea, leading in 1943 to a turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic.

  It was a new lease of life for TRE and they rose quickly to the occasion. All the fundamentals of ground and airborne radar and of what later would be called air traffic control were devised at Worth Matravers and its successor over the next two years. The scientists, engineers and back-up staff who worked in wooden huts spread out across a few miles of Dorset countryside achieved a new peak of creativity and inventiveness and were later described as a ‘galaxy of talent’.16 But located right on the coast, with its tall towers and an array of Nissen huts, TRE was very obvious from the air. How long could this remarkable site be kept secret and secure?

  6

  The First Raids

  While the boffins were making great strides in the science of radar, the military were rethinking their own role in the war. The airborne force of paratroopers created in the face of opposition from most of the senior figures in the War Office was only one of a series of new military and intelligence units created in Britain.

  Nearly all of them stemmed from the fertile and inventive mind of Winston Churchill. He knew that for the foreseeable future, Britain’s war effort had to be largely defensive. But with most of northern Europe having fallen to the Nazis, there were plenty of Europeans smarting under the humiliation of defeat. If Britain could do something to help them, at least this would provide a beacon of hope. Moreover, Churchill hoped such actions would ignite further acts of resistance within occupied Europe itself. As he famously said of one of these new organisations, the Special Operations Executive, he wanted it to ‘set Europe ablaze’.1 While preoccupied with the need to resist a prospective invasion of the homeland, British forces could manage only small-scale actions. But Churchill wanted to gain maximum publicity and effect from any mission that could be mounted, to offer hope to the millions of Europeans living under the heel of the Nazi jackboot. And the long stretch of enemy-occupied coastline facing Britain, from the north
of Norway to the Spanish border, seemed to offer many rich opportunities for secret missions.

  In another of his famous memos Churchill wrote, only a few days after the fall of France, on 18 June 1940, ‘There ought to be at least twenty thousand storm troops or “Leopards” drawn from existing units ready to spring at the throats of any small landings or descents.’2 One of the brightest and most able staff officers working in Whitehall, Lieutenant-Colonel Dudley Clarke, military assistant to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the army’s top soldier, picked up on this and within weeks, while the first paratroopers were being trained, recruitment for these special units had also begun. The troops were to be called ‘commandos’, a new term in the British Army but not in warfare. The Boers had called their small units of guerrillas ‘commandos’ at the beginning of the century. Churchill, who as a young war reporter had been captured by Boer commandos in 1899, had great respect for their unconventional methods. He agreed that this name, suggested by Dudley Clarke, was more suitable than ‘Leopards’.

  Men were hurriedly selected and all sorts of strange units were thrown together. On average the men were in their mid twenties and they all had several years of military experience. The officers were much younger as a group than officers of similar rank in the regular army. They rarely wore formal uniforms, while the men addressed each other, and sometimes even officers, by their first names – unheard of within the stiffer ranks of the conventional military establishment. There was a lack of red tape so the men could concentrate on training and preparing for action. They were encouraged to be self-reliant and aggressive. Discipline was good and the men were hard, tough and determined.

  The first commando raids were carried out within weeks of the formation of the unit. A small-scale attack on the French coast near Boulogne took place in late June, and in mid July about a hundred men led a fruitless raid on Guernsey, which was under German military occupation. The commandos failed to reach their objective, the island’s main airfield. These operations were tiny pin-pricks that had little military significance except that they encouraged the Germans to build up their coastal defences, thus tying up men and weapons that could have been deployed on other fronts. Churchill, however, was not impressed, and wrote that it would be unwise to have any more ‘silly fiascos’ like the ‘pin prick raids’ perpetrated ‘on Boulogne and Guernsey’.3

  Churchill needed the right man to head these special operations. He would have to be an outsider, as Churchill realised the strength of opposition within the conventional military hierarchy to organising small-scale operations. So the Prime Minister turned to Sir Roger Keyes, an old friend and a hero of his whose daring and ingenuity he had admired for many years. Keyes had been a senior naval officer, but one with a very unorthodox mind. In the First World War he had been one of the few senior figures to support Churchill’s naval campaign against the Dardanelles. In 1918 he had led a rare special mission. German U-boats, along with destroyers and torpedo boats, had been using Belgian canals to shelter, repair and refit before emerging into the North Sea to attack Allied shipping. Vice Admiral Keyes planned and led a raid on the port of Zeebrugge with the intention of blocking the route for these enemy vessels to get out to sea. The raid took place on 23 April, St George’s Day, and as he set out Keyes sent a Nelson-like message to all his ships: ‘St George for England’.

  Three elderly British cruisers sailed across the Channel to Zeebrugge, Royal Marines stormed the port defences and the three ships were sunk, blocking the route of the German U-boats out to sea. In a war in which the characteristic form of assault was for tens of thousands of men to get up out of their trenches and walk forward in human waves, the Zeebrugge action was a radically different and risky undertaking. Two hundred men were killed in the assault and the Germans were able to dredge a channel around the sunken blockships within three weeks. But it was a hugely dramatic action which British propaganda hailed as a great victory, and the raiders won eight VCs. The raid was much loved by the press and popular with the British people.

  Keyes had remained a friend and informal adviser to Churchill throughout the inter-war years and on retiring from the navy he became an MP in 1934. He was a staunch advocate of naval rearmament and one of Churchill’s core supporters in the call for the nation to mobilise for war in the late 1930s. By 1940, aged sixty-seven, he was champing at the bit for action. He was not popular with most military leaders, who regarded him as an adventurer, and he had offended many naval commanders in the late 1930s by describing them as too tame. But he was just the sort of maverick Churchill wanted to bring into the war effort to ‘spice things up a bit’. So in July 1940 he was appointed head of Combined Operations, which today would be classed as ‘Special Ops’.

  Combined Operations was a new concept in British military thinking. Although in the First World War ships had carried infantry to land on beaches, as at Gallipoli, the idea of the three services co-ordinating their activities did not gain much traction. And the concept of combined operations did not flourish between the wars. Although flat-bottomed landing craft, designed by the Japanese, were copied elsewhere around the world, there were only nine landing craft in Britain by 1938.

  In the first years of the Second World War, the three armed services tended to jealously guard their own histories and traditions, surveying each other with suspicion, anxious to protect their prerogatives from encroachment. The navy wanted to control amphibious operations as they involved crossing the sea, their domain. The army felt that the navy’s role was simply to transport soldiers to the field of battle and so believed they should be in charge. The air force did not like the idea of any other military commander telling them what they had to do. So the creation of a new headquarters that was to bring commanders from the Royal Navy, the ‘senior service’, the British Army and the youngest branch, the Royal Air Force, together operationally was always going to be a struggle. It would need someone with great diplomatic skill and understanding and a strong sense of authority. Sir Roger Keyes was sadly not that person.

  Right from the beginning, Keyes was frustrated by the other service chiefs, who saw the whole concept not only as a challenge to their status but also as a nuisance and a sideshow at a time of national emergency. They failed to provide his special unit with the landing craft or the weapons it needed. The commando force soon amounted to about four thousand men and they started a period of rigorous training on Loch Fyne in Scotland. But training without action proved a major frustration. After Keyes complained to Churchill of the obstacles put in his path, the Prime Minister wrote to Anthony Eden, Secretary of War, on 25 August:

  I hear that the whole position of the commandos is being questioned. They have been told ‘no more recruiting’ and that their future is in the melting pot… there will certainly be many opportunities for minor operations, all of which will depend on surprise landings of lightly-equipped, nimble forces accustomed to work like packs of hounds instead of being moved around in the ponderous manner which is appropriate to the regular formations… we must have at least 10,000 of these small ‘bands of brothers’ who will be capable of lightning action.4

  But despite his protestations, nothing much changed.

  The Special Service Brigade, as the commandos were now called, continued to train and to prepare for missions that were planned but then cancelled. They practised cliff assaults and the use of small boats to get ashore at night in secret. Finally, on 4 March 1941 at the Lofoten Islands off the coast of Norway, two troops each of 250 men carried out the first fully successful commando raid. Its purpose was to attack Norwegian factories that were exporting fish and fish oil to Germany. The raid achieved complete surprise and the commandos captured more than 200 German prisoners and 20,000 tons of enemy shipping, also bringing back more than 300 Norwegian volunteers to join the war effort. Only one commando was wounded, an officer who shot himself in the foot by mistake.

  After the success of this mission, it might be thought that Keyes would have had an eas
ier time to argue the case for the commandos. But he was still at loggerheads with most of the Chiefs of Staff and they found it impossible to agree targets and to find the resources he needed. Another raid against Spitzbergen in northern Norway in August once again achieved total surprise and succeeded in freeing more than two thousand Soviet miners stranded there when Hitler invaded Russia. But it was hardly the major operation Keyes longed for and in frustration he resigned in October – or, more probably, Churchill asked him to resign.

  To be fair, there was confusion as to how Combined Operations had been set up. Keyes thought he had been asked to report solely to Churchill as Minister of Defence and Prime Minister. The Chiefs of Staff were convinced he reported directly to them. A skilful negotiator might have been able to reconcile the two, but Keyes believed the military chiefs were far too timid in their approach and did not hesitate to tell them so. So it was inevitable that he would not make much progress. In a speech in the Commons he won no further friends by declaring that he had been ‘frustrated in every worthwhile offensive action I have tried to undertake’. He summed up his feelings by saying that he fully endorsed ‘the Prime Minister’s comments on the strength of the negative power which controls the war machine in Whitehall’. It was a heavy salvo against the military establishment fired by an angry, impassioned veteran.