In The Critic, Robert Hutton reviews The Battle of the Beams by historian Tom Whipple, who retells the story of the technological struggle between Britain and Germany during the Second World War to find ways to guide RAF or Luftwaffe pilots to their targets:
In an age when my phone can tell me exactly where I am and how to get where I’m going, it’s hard sometimes to imagine a time when navigation was one of any traveller’s great challenges. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the advice to Royal Air Force pilots trying to find their way was, more or less, to look out of the window and see whether anything on the ground looked familiar. The Luftwaffe, though, had a rather more sophisticated means of finding their targets.
As Britain braced herself for the bomber onslaught of 1940, there was comfort in knowing that radar would give Hurricanes and Spitfires advance warning of where the attack was coming. As soon as the sun went down, so did the fighters: at night, relying on their eyeballs, they simply couldn’t find the enemy.
That wasn’t so bad, as long as the German pilots had the same problem, but one young British scientist began to suspect that the Luftwaffe had developed a technology that allowed them to find their way even in the dark, guided by radio beams. In June 1940 he found himself explaining to Winston Churchill that German bombers could accurately reach any spot over England that they wanted, even in darkness.
Reg “RV” Jones was the original boffin: a gifted physicist who was recruited to the Air Ministry at the start of the war to help make sense of intelligence reports that offered clues about enemy technology. It was a role to which he was perfectly suited: a man who liked puzzles, with the ability to absorb lots of information and see links, as well as the arrogance to insist on his conclusions, even when his superiors didn’t like them.
The story of the radio battle has been told before, not least by Jones himself. His 1978 memoir Most Secret War was a bestseller and remains in print. It is 700 pages long, though, and it assumes a lot of knowledge about the way 1940s radios worked that readers probably had 50 years ago. Since few people under 50 have much clue why a radio would need a valve or what you might do with a slide rule, there is definitely room for a fresh telling.
