R.V JONES: ‘RADIO WAVES & ELECTRONIC JAMMING’

ON THE AFTERNOON of September 7, 1940, the first German bombers came rumbling up the Thames, to drop their bombs on London in the opening act of what became known as the “Blitz.” They were followed by a further 250 Luftwaffe bombers, unloading the first instalment of a massive payload of some 14,000 tons of high explosive that rained down on London until May of the following year.

The trial by fire that started more than 70 years ago is often depicted as a triumph of human resilience, a refusal by ordinary people to submit to terror. And so it was. But it was also a victory for a less known aspect of applied science, for, alongside the ferocious aerial combat another secret, electronic war was taking place, known to very few at the time and little appreciated since.

We rightly celebrate military victory in the Battle of Britain and civilian grit in the Blitz, but Britain’s astonishing scientific triumph in what Winston Churchill later called “the Battle of the Beams” has often been too easily overlooked. It saved countless thousands of lives, confused the German assault and helped to stave off the threat of invasion. This battle was fought, not with bombs and bullets, but radio waves. In the age of Shock and Awe, this covert scientific battle offers a timely reminder that ingenuity is just as important in war as brute force.

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THREE MONTHS before the Blitz began, a 28-year-old scientist named Reginald Victor (R. V.) Jones was summoned to Downing Street to address the cabinet on the subject of radio beams. Churchill had become increasingly worried by intelligence reports suggesting that the Nazis had developed some kind of secret ray that could magically guide the Luftwaffe bombers to their targets, even when flying at night and in dense cloud.

Though outnumbered, heroic RAF pilots flying nimble and venomous Spitfires and Hurricanes saw off the Luftwaffe, their decisive victory finally coming on September 15, 1940.

An RAF officer working in technical intelligence, Jones had begun studying German radio navigation systems several months earlier and offered the Cabinet a most alarming conclusion: the Germans were using two narrow radio beams transmitted from separate locations in continental Europe to pinpoint strategic locations in Britain. In effect, the German bomber pilot could follow one radio beam until it intersected with the other beam and then drop his payload – directly over the target.

Night-bombing made bombers safer from interception by fighters and anti-aircraft systems, but finding a target in the blackout or bad weather using traditional navigation was tricky. German scientists, it seemed, had solved the problem: they codenamed it “Knickebein”, meaning “crooked leg”, a reference either to the shape of the intersecting beams or the bent appearance of the transmitting antennae. The Germans could never resist a hinting code-word – the German codename for their long-range radar system, for example, was “Heimdall”, after the Norse god with the power to see over vast distances. But the British were similarly addicted to code-wordplay. With admirable understatement, this threatening new German radio navigation system was given the codename “Headache”; the countermeasures required to defeat it were named, perhaps appropriately, “Aspirin”.

TO TACKLE the problem, R.V. Jones turned for help to medicine. Electro-diathermy sets were used in hospitals to destroy abnormal tissue and to cauterise wounds. Suitably modified, they also proved highly effective at jamming the Knickebein transmissions and were now deployed to send out a blizzard of radio noise over a wide range of frequencies.

Hermann Goering, the Luftwaffe chief, had given Hitler his personal pledge that the radio navigation system was invulnerable. He was far wide of the mark and so, increasingly, were his bombers. During the crucial months of September and October 1940, as the Luftwaffe night-raids mounted in intensity, Jones and his fellow scientists became ever more adept at jamming and diverting the radio beams, using more powerful radio transmitters to “inject” the Knickebein signals with confusing Morse code elements.

Deprived of reliable electronic direction, the Luftwaffe crews could become disorientated at night. One pilot was said to have landed in Dover, thinking he was back in France. Bombs intended for vital and heavily populated targets fell relatively harmlessly in fields and hills. According to some estimates, as much as 80 per cent of the German night bombs missed their target. Intercepted messages between German ground controllers and Luftwaffe pilots unable to locate their targets provided vital evidence that the beam-jammers were having the desired effect.

Even so, “Aspirin” was far from a cure-all remedy. The German bombers still caused appalling damage. London represented a target too vast to miss, even at night. A derivative of Knickebein radio navigation, known as “X Apparatus” was used to guide 400 Luftwaffe pilots to Coventry on November 14, 1940. Because of a technical error, the British jammer stations attacked the wrong frequency. The city was devastated, 568 people died, and Joseph Goebbels coined the term “Coventriert” to describe a particularly satisfactory level of destruction.

But how many more lives might have been lost, how many key military and industrial installations would have been destroyed and with what effect on the progress of war, if the Luftwaffe had been able to continue precise bombing under cover of darkness? Churchill was never in any doubt that science had played a pivotal role in blunting the Blitz. He dubbed R.V. Jones the “man who bent the bloody beams”.

R.V. JONES, who died in 1997, was a remarkable warrior, but one who believed in trickery and creativity as the antidote to savagery. In 1993, the CIA founded an intelligence award named in his honour, for “scientific acumen applied with art in the cause of freedom”. Yet, in this country, which he did so much to defend, so secretly, his is not a household name.

The Blitz and the Battle of Britain are synonymous terms that have left an enduring legacy of proud national stereotypes; the Spitfire pilot, the ambulance driver, the unbowed housewife sweeping up after the bombs had left their mark.

Just as important, although much less lauded, was the scientist in his lab, using a medical gadget to baffle and confuse Hitler’s bombers.