Journal 41 Reprints of Selected papers 1 ROYAL AIR FORCE HISTORICAL SOCIETY JOURNAL 41 2 The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the contributors concerned and are not necessarily those held by the Royal Air Force Historical Society. First published in the UK in 2008 by the Royal Air Force Historical Society All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing. ISSN 1361 4231 Printed by Advance Book Printing Unit 9 Northmoor Park Church Road Northmoor OX29 5UH 3 ROYAL AIR FORCE HISTORICAL SOCIETY President Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Michael Beetham GCB CBE DFC AFC Vice-President Air Marshal Sir Frederick Sowrey KCB CBE AFC Committee ChairmanAir Vice-Marshal N B Baldwin CB CBE FRAeS Vice-ChairmanGroup Captain J D Heron OBE SecretaryGroup Captain K J Dearman FRAeS Membership SecretaryDr Jack Dunham PhD CPsychol AMRAeS TreasurerJ Boyes TD CA MembersAir Commodore H A Probert MBE MA *J S Cox Esq BA MA *Dr M A Fopp MA FMA FIMgt *Group Captain N Parton BSc (Hons) MA MDA MPhil CEng FRAeS RAF *Wing Commander A J C Walters BSc MA FRAeS RAF Wing Commander C Cummings Editor & PublicationsWing Commander C G Jefford MBE BA Manager *Ex Officio 4 CONTENTS EDITOR’s NOTE6 ERRATA6 20 October 1986. THE INTELLIGENCE WAR AND THE7 ROYAL AIR FORCE by Professor R V Jones CB CBE FRS. 16 March 1987. WORLD WAR II – THE BALANCE26 SHEET by John Terraine. 14 March 1988. THE IMPACT OF THE SANDYS44 DEFENCE POLICY ON THE ROYAL AIR FORCE by T C G James CMG MA. 29 June 1988. THE POLICY, COMMAND AND66 DIRECTION OF THE LUFTWAFFE IN WORLD WAR II by Dr Horst Boog. 31 October 1988. Seminar – THE ROYAL AIR FORCE AND86 CLANDESTINE OPERATIONS IN NORTH-WEST EUROPE. BOOK REVIEWS112 5 SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS ABMAnti-Ballistic Missile ACAS(Int)Assistant Chief of the Air Staff (Intelligence) ADI(K),Assistant Directorate of Intelligence (K) AIAir Intelligence ASWAnti-Submarine Warfare CASChief of the Air Staff CDSChief of the Defence Staff CIGSChief of the Imperial General Staff DDDeputy Director(ate) DFDirection Finding DCASDeputy Chief of the Air Staff DZDrop/Dropping Zone FEAFFar East Air Force FINRAEFerranti Inertial Rapid Alignment Equipment HUDHead Up Display IFFIdentification Friend or Foe MAMilitary Intelligence QRAQuick Reaction Alert SACEURSupreme Allied Commander Europe SACLANTSupreme Allied Commander Atlantic SAMSurface-to-Air Missile SISSecret Intelligence Service SOESpecial Operations Executive VCASVice Chief of the Air Staff 6 EDITOR’S NOTE The established cycle that determines the content of our Journals means that the edition which appears in or about January of each year reflects the proceedings of the event held in the previous spring which it does by publishing the papers read on that occasion. In 2007, however, we interrupted the usual sequence by sponsoring, instead of the usual seminar, a visit to the recently opened National Cold War Exhibition at the RAF Museum’s Cosford site. While those who attended were treated to some presentations, they were to do with the design and operation of the splendid new building and the preparation of the displays. In other words, while interesting in their own right, they were not to do with RAF history per se. That created something of a problem as we would either have to skip an edition or find something else to print. Your Committee decided that we could usefully fill the gap by reprinting some of the more significant papers that were read to the Society in its early days and which appeared in publications that are no longer readily available. ERRATA Anthony Furse has pointed out an error on page 11 of Journal 40 where it says that Newall was CAS in December 1940. Newall had, of course, been succeeded by Portal in October. Tim Wingham has noted an error in the caption to the photograph of HSL 2550 on page 57 of Journal 40. He points out that those are not ‘twin Lewis guns on pillar mountings’ as stated; they are Vickers 0.303 inch Gas Operated Mk 1, No 1s aka Vickers Class Ks, or VGOs for short. As Tim says, when ‘presented with a picture of a drum-fed machine-gun in an RAF setting, the immediate assumption is – Lewis gun.’ I plead guilty as charged. That was my caption, so mea culpa. Ed. 7 RAF HISTORICAL SOCIETY INAUGURAL LECTURE 20 OCTOBER 1986 The Society’s inaugural lecture was given by Professor R V Jones, CB, CBE, FRS, author of Most Secret War, the account of British Scientific Intelligence during the 1939-1945 war, published in 1978, serialised in the Sunday Telegraph and used as the basis for the television series The Secret War. Introducing Professor Jones, Air Commodore Probert said: ‘In introducing this evening’s lecturer I’d like to take your minds back to the middle 1930s, the time when – according to some – the RAF was doing so little to prepare to meet the German threat. The facts are rather different for, as John Terraine has recently reminded us in The Right of the Line, those years witnessed a silent, almost unseen, transformation. It was Professor Blackett, in his 1960 Tizard Memorial Lecture, who pointed out so clearly that one aspect of this transformation was the growing intimacy between senior officers of the armed forces and the scientists in the government research establishments. It stemmed primarily, of course, from the formation in 1935 of the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence, and R V Jones was one of the young scientists who came to work for the Air Ministry at that time. Incredible as it now seems, by 1940 his field of research led to his being summoned to attend a meeting of the Cabinet on the subject of the German beams – at the tender age of twenty-eight! Throughout the rest of the war he was closely involved in almost every aspect of intelligence, including Ultra, and nobody is now better placed to talk to us from personal experience about the RAF and the intelligence war. Moreover, ‘RV’ addresses us this evening, not as a guest, but as a fully paid-up founder member of our Society!’ 8 THE INTELLIGENCE WAR ANDTHE ROYAL AIR FORCE by Professor R V Jones CB CBE FRS In the frantic decade of the thirties, when some of us were doing all we could to tackle the problems of air defence, Professor Lindemann once told me that he had written to the Air Ministry accusing it of taking so much time to do anything that it must be attempting to emulate the Deity to whom we sang ‘A thousand ages in thy sight are as an evening gone’. On that scale the sixty-eight years since the creation of the Royal Air Force would seem as a minute or less in the long cavalcade of human history; but they have seen more spectacular advances in knowledge and technology than had occurred in the entire preceding span of historical time. Jet engines, supersonic flight, radar, television, computers, guided missiles, atomic bombs, artificial satellites and interplanetary probes have all come into being since the Royal Air Force was formed; and it has had to evolve with them through the most intense period of technological development the world has yet known. So whatever the history of the Royal Air Force may lack in duration is much more than compensated by the range and scale of its activities, both technological and operational, and by its vital part in the momentous battles of the Second World War. It is, therefore, entirely opportune that this history is now to be recognised by the formation of the Royal Air Force Historical Society, and it will be gratifying to all of us who served in Intelligence that the Society has chosen for the subject of its first lecture the relations between the Royal Air Force and Intelligence. The title of the lecture incorporates more than one ambiguity when it refers to ‘the intelligence war’, even if we confine the context to World War II. Does it mean the war between the British and German intelligence services? Or might it refer to the struggle that sometimes occurred between the intelligence branches of the three Services; for example, in getting the highest priority in the cryptographic effort at Bletchley? Or to that other war that broke out from time to time between the intelligence and operational branches, when the operators found intelligence assessments of their success too low to be palatable? If that were not enough, we in Intelligence occasionally found 9 ourselves in dispute with some of the leading experts in the country regarding the interpretation of evidence concerning new German weapons; for example, in the weight of the V2, of which an American witness, Professor W W Rostow, wrote ‘Although I was at that time relatively young (27), I had acquired some experience with both academic and governmental bureaucratic structures and their capacity for bloodless tribal warfare. But I had never been present at, let alone presided over, a meeting charged with more emotional tension than that centred on the weight of the V2 warhead’. A further interpretation of our title might point to the part played by the Royal Air Force, not in using intelligence, but in gathering information which was to be collated with that obtained from other sources to build up the intelligence assessments of our opponents’ intentions. What I shall have to say will probably draw on experiences in all these aspects, not primarily in reminiscence but in the belief, with Dionysius of Halicarnassus, that ‘history is philosophy teaching through examples’. At the same time, some degree of reminiscence will be inevitable, if only to express an appreciation of some of the personalities involved. My own contact with Air Intelligence started in 1938, and I became regularly involved from September 1939 onwards. The main objects of pre-war intelligence were the size and technical capabilities of the various branches of the Luftwaffe, and of its bomber component in particular. On estimates of size from 1935 onwards the Air Ministry found itself in conflict with other bodies, including Winston Churchill, who contended that its estimates were too low. This was, in fact, true up to September 1939, when Air Intelligence began to over-estimate; for example by one-third in the numbers of the German long-range bomber force. Some of us can remember the fantastic official predictions for the numbers of casualties to be expected in London in the first week of the war. Frank Inglis, who as DDI3 was head of the German branch of Air Intelligence early in the war, told me how the prediction had originated. He had been asked, at very short notice, for an estimate of how great the casualties might be and so he assumed that every available German bomber might be employed on a round- the-clock programme, allowing only enough time between sorties to be re-armed and re-fuelled. He realised that this would result in a wild 10 over-estimate of what would probably happen and had not expected any rational being to take it seriously; he had merely supplied an answer which matched an irresponsibly posed question. It was interesting to watch the change of positions in the first two years of the war. Churchill, who before the war had challenged the Air Intelligence figures as being too low, now began, prompted by Lindemann, to challenge them as being too high; one of the key points being the fighting strength of a Staffel, which Air Intelligence held to be twelve, whereas Lindemann was for nine with three in reserve. The controversy resulted in a judge, Mr Justice Singleton, being appointed in December 1940 to settle it. I was summoned to his Inquiry, the erroneous impression having gone around that I was an expert on the size of the Luftwaffe. I managed to avoid embarrassment by telling the judge that I was no such expert, but might be able to help him in one way, which was to give an opinion of the reliability of the various sources of evidence that would be laid before him, based on the experiences that I had had with Knickebein and the other beams. Quite the most reliable source for numbers, I told him, had been the Y Service (now Sigint) records of the W/T call-signs of individual aircraft. An enormous amount of painstaking observation and recording must have been undertaken by the call-sign section of what was then called DDSigsY, under Gp Capt L F Blandy. Time after time, when I asked Flt Lt Maggs, the head of the section, whether he had any trace of a particular call-sign, he was able to tell me when the aircraft had been heard and the airfield with which it had been in contact. The Singleton Report noted that the Y Service coverage of call-signs of the long-range bomber force was as high as eighty to ninety per cent. Lindemann, too, gave the Y Service evidence great weight; and the final assessment justified his original challenge which reduced the estimate of German front-line strength by a quarter. While such estimates involved the collation of evidence from different types of source, which was the prime function of many of the branches in the Air Intelligence Directorates, the call-sign evidence also illustrated another area of Air Intelligence; this was to collect raw information for itself. Apart from what it might receive from secret agents via MI6 it could, of course, draw on reports from Air Attachés and on whatever might be available in the press. But, particularly in war, other channels of information could be opened up; photographic 11 reconnaissance, electronic reconnaissance, prisoner interrogation and captured equipment could all provide valuable evidence and would require specialist staffs with air force and kindred personnel to operate and exploit them. And in the case of World War II, the Royal Air Force had another direct part to play in the hazardous ferrying of agents into and out of German-occupied territory. Let us look briefly at these activities in turn. As regards pre-war secret agents, they produced very little for scientific and technical intelligence before 1940. One telling failure in this respect was the absence of any report of the erection of two massive and remarkable radio structures, one at Schleswig-Holstein and the other near Cleves, only a few miles from the Dutch border, which were the Knickebein beam antennae, a hundred feet high and mounted on turntables three hundred feet across. As the war progressed, of course, there were new opportunities for MI6 in encouraging and working with the resistance organisations which developed in the occupied territories. In Most Secret War I gave a few examples of the bravery of the men and women of the Resistance; and as a result of the book being published I have learnt of further examples, and of the identities of individuals whose stories I told but whose names I did not know; the Belgian agent, for example, whose reconnaissance report of German radar stations ended with an emphasis of their importance which he illustrated by the vigilance of the sentries who had shot at him, ‘fortunately’, he said, ‘with more zeal than accuracy’. He went on, ‘As far as our work is concerned, it would be helpful if we knew to what extent you and the British Services are interested. We have been working so long in the dark that any reaction from London about our work would be welcome to such obscure workers as ourselves. We hope this will not be resented since, whatever may happen, we assure you of our utmost devotion and the sacrifice of our lives.’ One of the Belgian resistance organisations has since identified the writer as a thirty-year old doctor, André Mathy, who was later captured by the Germans and executed on 21 June 1944 at Halle after more than a year as a prisoner; he had kept his word to the last. Another gallant episode which only came to light after my book was published involved a Frenchman, Pierre Julitte. A member of de Gaulle’s staff, he had joined the Resistance, and was captured by the 12 Gestapo in March, 1943. He then spent the next twenty-five months in prisons and concentration camps, including Buchenwald and Dore. At Buchenwald he and his comrades realised that what they were being made to work on were the V-weapons, and they managed to get a message out recommending that the factory, in which they themselves might well be working, should be attacked. On 24 August 1944, he said, it was indeed bombed. At first I wondered whether his story could be true, for there was no trace of such an attack either in Basil Collier’s The Defence of The United Kingdom or General Dornberger’s V-2 nor in The Rocket Team by Ordway and Sharp. Fortunately, I asked Air Cdre Probert at AHB whether there was anything in the records that might confirm the story because, although in his book Pierre Julitte had changed the names of all the characters involved (he afterwards told me that he wanted to tell a truthful story but did not want to identify individuals who had behaved badly), his account rang true. And indeed this turned out to be the case, for the Air Staff Operational Summary for 25 August recorded that, on the previous day, 128 Flying Fortresses had attacked ‘an armaments factory’ at Buchenwald with ‘excellent results’ which were later detailed as ‘severe damage to nearly every major building’, including some of the barracks in the concentration camp. Julitte and his immediate colleagues survived, but they could well have been among the many who did not. Such sacrifices are rarely recorded in official histories, partly through the difficulty of historians getting near enough to the evidence, particularly when, as in this instance, there is no clue to the underlying truth in the bald statements of operational summaries. I am reminded of Lord Slim’s book, Unofficial History, where he begins each chapter with a statement from the official History of Military Operations in World War I and then spends the whole chapter describing what actually happened from his own direct involvement in the episode concerned. And I know how he felt because of my own experience in the Baedeker raids of 1942, where the Official History merely records that, after 4 May, ‘almost everything went wrong for the attackers’. The main thing that went wrong was that their percentage of bombs on target fell from about 50% to 13%, thanks to our introduction of supersonic jamming of the X-beams. How we knew that supersonic jamming would be needed, how we prepared for 13 it but failed to use it for the first fatal fortnight, was a story that merited a chapter in itself. Actually, official historians are not to be blamed if the relevant information is not available to them or when time does not permit them to ferret it out. I am reminded of this point in connection with reports from the Resistance that sometimes failed to get through to us in London. Thanks again to the publicity arising from Most Secret War, one or two of these have now come to me, in particular from General Pomes Barrere of the Deuxième Bureau, who had sent in reports on the V-weapons in 1943 and 1944 which would undoubtedly have been helpful had they reached us at the time. There were probably many such instances, some of which were due to some intermediate official not realising the importance of sending the reports on, incomprehensible to him though they might have seemed. No such problem affected photographic reconnaissance, which was the unique contribution of the Royal Air Force to the intelligence war. It owed much to the enterprise and technical skill of Sidney Cotton whom his successor, Geoffrey Tuttle, described to me as the greatest leader he had known. Since I have described my own relations with photo-reconnaissance in some detail in Most Secret War, I will say little more here beyond repeating my admiration for the outstanding work that was done at all levels, both by the pilots and by the interpreters and also by the army of men and women who processed the photographs – those whose work, in Lord Slim’s words, usually only comes to notice when something for which they are responsible has gone wrong. This was equally true of another service for which the Royal Air Force was directly responsible, that of the radio intercept operators who listened to German radio signals and had to spend long hours taking down streams of Morse characters whose significance was to them quite unintelligible and yet whose accurate recording was essential if the cryptographers were to have any success in deciphering them. It was rather better for those operators who had to record the radio-telephone messages between, for example, German night fighters and their ground control stations, because once we had worked out the significance of various calls such as ‘Emil Emil’ or ‘Rolf Lise’ it was possible to listen to the activities of the German night defences against our bombers almost as though we were in a 14 ringside seat. But it was a strain, all the same. Cryptography, of course, deserves far more than a lecture to itself, even at the tactical level where codes were relatively easy to break. Curiously, not so much has been told of the work at this level, beyond Aileen Clayton’s excellent book The Enemy is Listening. As regards cryptography at the then highest level, Gordon Welchman has given a detailed account in The Hut 6 Story which has been supplemented by a posthumous paper earlier this year (ie 1986 Ed) in Intelligence and National Security. In this latter he pays a more adequate tribute to the work of the Poles who, in 1939, were substantially ahead of us in breaking Enigma and who handed over their work, including reconstructions of actual Enigma machines. Let me say rather more about the Poles, for not only did they lead the way, but they succeeded in covering their tracks on leaving Warsaw when it was being overrun by the Germans. They escaped via Rumania to France and by the end of October 1939 they had started to work again on German cyphers in Paris. On the collapse of Northern France, they moved to a site in Vichy France, but finally that too became untenable when the Germans took over. Once again, in January 1943, they tried to escape, this time over the Pyrenees into Spain. But their commanding officer, Colonal Lange, and three others were betrayed en route and were sent to concentration camps where two of them died. And yet the Germans never extracted from them any inkling that Enigma was vulnerable; to me, their devotion is as impressive as their intellectual feat in breaking Enigma. And in passing we may note that 139 Polish pilots actually escaped to fight in the Battle of Britain and that they were Polish Army units which in 1944 took Monte Cassino after it had successfully withstood all our own gallant efforts to take it. A few Poles, too, came into Air Intelligence; one, a flight lieutenant, was in the Central Interpretation Unit at Medmenham, where he worked as a photographic interpreter. His commanding officer, Gp Capt Peter Stewart, told me that on one occasion he was taking the late Duke of Kent on a tour of inspection and the Duke asked the Pole what he was doing. Standing to attention, he very correctly replied, ‘Please, Sir, you must ask my commanding officer.’ After the Duke had left, the group captain took the Pole aside and, while praising him for his sense of security, told him that when a 15 senior officer was escorted around the unit in the company of the CO the Pole could, if asked, say exactly what he was doing. A few weeks later, the CAS himself visited Medmenham and in due course he came into the Pole’s section and asked him what he was doing. Coming stiffly to attention, but with a twinkle in his eye, he replied, ‘Please, Sir, I am making the secret waste!’ Such experiences as all of these made me realise the poignant force of that part of Poland’s National Anthem which runs ‘Poland is not yet lost’. Another important channel by which a Royal Air Force organisation gained information was that for interrogating prisoners: this task was undertaken by a branch that ultimately became an Assistant Directorate, ADI(K), and was headed throughout the war by Denys Felkin. He and his other interrogators secured much information by their gentle questioning, including the earliest mention of the X-Gerät, in March 1940, which occasioned my first meeting with him. From that fortunate start we worked together in complete confidence and with very fruitful results for the entire war. Equipment and documents, besides prisoners, also fell into our hands, the principal items being, of course, crashed aircraft. In general, the documents went to Felkin, who would send them on to whomever he knew would be most interested. The examination and recovery of crashed aircraft was undertaken by the technical intelligence branch originally designated as AI1(g) and which ultimately became an Assistant Directorate. Its officers did excellent work in the field, which was followed up by detailed examination at Farnborough. One example of Farnborough’s careful analysis was its noting in 1940 that the Lorenz Blind Landing Receiver installed in German bombers was much more sensitive than would be needed for its ostensible purpose: this clinched our theory that it was to be used for beam bombing. As the war progressed, radar equipment, too, became targets for Intelligence, the first and most spectacular example being the Wurzburg that we deliberately set out to capture at Bruneval, and which formed the objective for the classic raid in which the Parachute Regiment won its first battle honour. Most of our information about radar had, however, to be gained by other means, of which the easiest appeared to be the direct interception of German radar transmissions. Since such transmissions, 16 and also those associated with radio-navigation such as the beams, took place in the same medium, classically called the aether, as that used for Morse and telephonic communications, there was a case for these new tasks of interception to be undertaken by the Y (or Sigint) Service. But the two problems, though technically similar, were philosophically different; in signalling, the aether was being used to transmit information from one human brain in which it had originated to another human brain, by means of frequency or amplitude modulation of the radio waves leaving the transmitter; in radar and radio-navigation the waves were being used, not to transmit intelligible information, but to establish from their times and directions of travel, geometrical relationships between points in space. While the Y Service was excellent in the former task, it was not at first attuned to the second; and it was only after one of my own officers in desperation took a receiver to the south coast in February 1941 that we detected the transmissions from the German Freyas that the Y Service had missed from July 1940 onwards. In parenthesis here, the differences in the two ways in which one and the same medium, the aether, can be exploited may be illustrated by the analogy of our ability to use the single medium of paper and pencil both to produce written messages and to make sketches; two different forms of expression that lead on to literature in the one case, and pictorial art in the other. Electronic intelligence can, therefore, require specialists as different in their skills and backgrounds as are pictorial artists from writers. This difference was not appreciated by the classic Y Service, nor for that matter by their post-war successors at GCHQ. We in scientific intelligence had a mixed relationship with the Y Service as a result. Some degree of difficulty was inevitable, for if the Y Service was responsible for signals intelligence and we for scientific intelligence, whose was the primary responsibility for investigating any German development that involved a new application of science to signalling? At one of the more difficult periods in our relationship I happened to read in The Times of the engagement of the second-in-command of DDI4 – the Air Intelligence Branch responsible for the Y Service; he was Wg Cdr Claude Daubeny, and so I telephoned him anonymously and rendered what I could of the Mendelssohn Wedding March on a mouth-organ. Being 17 in signals intelligence he succeeded in tracing the call and, as he later told me, decided that I could not be so unco-operative as some of his colleagues claimed me to be. So, on being appointed a few months later to take over as head of RAF ‘Y’, he telephoned asking if he could come to see me. On arrival he said, ‘I am now DDI4. I have served as deputy to two previous DDI4s and I saw them do everything they could to get you out of your job; they did not succeed; I want you to know that I am not as clever as they are, and so I am not going to try!’ This was the start of the warmest of friendships; Daubeny had been at Cranwell with Douglas Bader and was well into a career as a General Duties officer when he was posted to the Y Service. Here he did so well that the Navy and Army agreed that he should head the organisation that was set up for post-war ‘Y’. He told me that in the final interview that led to his appointment he was asked whether he had any special requirements. ‘I told them’, he said to me, ‘that I must have plenty of time to attend meetings, and they agreed. Of course, I didn’t tell them that I meant race meetings!’ In the immediate post-war period he had found that he could make money through betting. His theory, which ultimately ruined him, was that although the odds were stacked in favour of the bookmakers, what an intelligent punter was doing was to bet, not against the bookmakers, but against the public through the bookmakers. There is one lasting memorial to his interest in horseracing; it is the siting of GCHQ, for when a new establishment had to be built for cryptographers when Bletchley was evacuated, he picked Cheltenham because he could then look forward to combining visits to GCHQ with attendance at the Cheltenham meetings. He would have been amused to see an incident on television two or three years ago, when GCHQ was invaded by racegoers who thought that they were entering the gates of the racecourse. Mention of Bletchley recalls the fact that several of our organisations were accommodated in former country houses: photographic interpretation at Medmenham; prisoner interrogation at Latimer; technical intelligence near Harrow; besides signals intelligence at Bletchley; radio countermeasures at Radlett; MI5 at Blenheim; Political Warfare at Woburn, and so on. This fact at times encouraged the development of a ‘country house’ complex, where the inmates genuinely believed that theirs was the most important, and 18 sometimes the only significant, contribution to the intelligence war. It is easy to see how this could happen; each in relative isolation would see relatively little of what the others were doing; and then, in a visit of encouragement, some senior officer would attempt to pep them up by telling them how valuable their work was, sometimes slipping into such hyperbole as to say that theirs was the only contribution that mattered. I myself never did this; even though I visited them as often as I could, I tried to show each the whole intelligence picture as I saw it, and where their particular contribution fitted in. It is a point that is worth watching for any future intelligence organisation, for the ‘country house’ complex can be a source of weakness of which I saw two other examples. Fortunately, the first was in Germany where military research after World War I was restarted in clandestine establishments which could only come out into the open after 1933. The Germans then found that they had a relatively large number of small establishments, individually too small to be ideally effective, but also strong enough to resist absorption into bigger establishments. As a result, the Germans were unable to co- ordinate their efforts as effectively as we had been able to do, and only late in the war did they attempt the task. My second example was in the French Resistance organisations where, for security, if for no other purpose, small networks had to operate in isolation, and many naturally came to believe that their contributions were unique. Friction could start when two networks overlapped, especially when some networks had different political complexions from others; and there tended to be rivalry for credit and status at the end of the war when the networks could come out into the open. Another kind of intelligence source, too, tended to be found in country houses; these were our British experts in the field of weaponry. Radar, for example, had been housed at Bawdsey Manor, and later at Worth Matravers before settling into Malvern College; and even in large establishments such as Farnborough and Porton something of the same complex could be found. In fact we sometimes had an intelligence war between ourselves and the experts whom we came to regard as our spies on the laws of nature in the field concerned, while they regarded themselves, and not us, as the ultimate authority in what the Germans were doing in that field. I have already mentioned the battle over the V2 warhead; and I would tend to blame 19 what was probably our greatest failure over a new German weapon – the failure to discover the nerve gases – on the fact that in chemical warfare the authority for assessing what the Germans were doing did not rest with the regular intelligence organisation but with the chemical warfare experts at Porton. The main Air Commands, too, resided in country houses. Fighter Command at Bentley Priory, Bomber Command at High Wycombe (Not actually in a country house. Ed), Coastal at Northwood and 2nd TAF at Bracknell. In a sense, too, the Commands were sources of intelligence, for they fed us the combat reports of their aircrews. At times these tended to confuse us, for example in the overclaims in the Battle of Britain, or the bomber myth that IFF paralysed the radar control of German searchlights. But the crews’ experiences did intensify our own efforts to discover the nature of that control and it did prove to have a radar component. Although overclaiming had led us to regard fighter reports with reserve, they proved to be remarkably good as regards the damage inflicted on German radar before D-Day. One important episode in which the bomber crews thought that we were doubting their claims concerned the proportion of our bombers in 1941 that were succeeding in hitting their targets. Senior officers, and even Henry Tizard, believed that we were doing well, using astro navigation and dead reckoning; but some of these had doubts which in my case were reinforced by an indignant report from a secret agent in Czechoslovakia that on a night when we claimed to have bombed the Skoda works at Pilsen there were no bombs within many miles of the town. I told Lindemann, who succeeded in pressing a most unpopular investigation of our bombing accuracy, the acid test of which would be flashlight photographs taken by each bomber. There was resentment from the crews, who thought that the investigation called into question their courage in pressing home attacks on defended targets. But they co-operated well, and the evidence proved damning to all illusions of accuracy, for on the average, only one-fifth of our bombs had fallen within five miles of their targets. This was one of the occasions when Intelligence had to utter unwelcome truths. I myself had to do this several times, notably regarding our jamming of the X-beams in 1940, and in the use of IFF by Bomber Command over Germany in 1943 and 1944. I could hardly blame the CinC for resenting my critical reports, one of which resulted 20 in him being carpeted by the Secretary of State, Sir Archibald Sinclair. CAS’s secretary told me that from time to time when one of my reports showed that things were going wrong, CAS would telephone the CinC and ask him whether he had seen the report and what he was going to do about it. At last, in autumn 1944, I was able to report that with IFF switched off and more discrete use of H2S, and all our counter-measures, things were now going well for the Command. This time the CinC phoned the CAS first, saying, ‘Have you seen Jones’ latest report?’ It obviously meant all the more because of our previous refusal to flinch from saying when we thought things had gone wrong. Indeed, a trust had gradually developed which can be simplest illustrated by the difference in attitudes between 1941 and 1944. In 1941 I had wanted to try to deceive German bombers by sending them counterfeit messages, which we could easily have done, but DCAS – who happened to be Bert Harris – refused permission on the grounds that we might well give away more than we would gain. But in 1944 not only did we have permission to give spoof instructions to the German night-fighters, but Bomber Command would te1ephone me every afternoon before operations with exact details of targets, timings and routes, so that I could try to guess which beacons the German night fighters would be sent to orbit as our raids developed, so that our own night fighters could be sent to attack them at the beacons. As illustrated in our relations with Bomber Command, the need for Intelligence to have both integrity and a voice that is independent from the operational staff must be paramount in a healthy military organisation. If anyone doubts this, let him read the second chapter of Freeman Dyson’s book Disturbing the Universe, describing his experiences in the Operational Research Section at Bomber Command – or Winston Churchill’s verdict on the Battle of the Somme: ‘Sir Douglas Haig was not at this time well served by his advisers in the Intelligence Department of General Headquarters. The temptation to tell a chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear is the commonest explanation of mistaken policy. Thus the outlook of the leader on whose decisions fateful events depend is usually more sanguine than the brutal facts admit.’ Thus one of the features of working with Churchill was his interest in getting the facts from Intelligence, even to the extent of sometimes wishing to see the raw reports for himself. He only had the time to do 21 this occasionally; but as in all his other activities he wanted to maintain contact with the front line with as few intermediate links as possible, and so at times he would summon individuals such as myself. And even though he might have flashes of anger when you had to tell him some particularly unwelcome news, he knew from his earlier experiences that this was the only way to correct ‘mistaken policy’. Incidentally, among his earlier experiences were some 140 flights to acquaint himself with the handling of aircraft – before June 1914! Besides Churchill himself I was privileged to come into working contact with many of the senior Air figures in the war, and an entire talk could be devoted to reminiscent appreciations of their achievements and characters. Charles Portal as CAS for example, took a great interest in our work and invited me to contact him direct if I had a problem that the normal organisational arrangements would not clear. This was never necessary when Charles Medhurst was ACAS(Int) because he gave us splendid support. Sholto Douglas, too, as CinC of Fighter Command, was determined to use all the information we could provide, both in the Battle of the Beams and in exploiting the decrypted German radar plots of our fighter sweeps. If I had to single out the senior Air Officer who has had least recognition from posterity for the magnitude of his contribution it would be Wilfrid Freeman, who as the pre-war Air Member for Research and Development had warmly and powerfully supported the development of radar by Watson-Watt and of the jet engine by Whittle, the Mosquito by de Havilland and several of the ideas of Barnes Wallis. In 1940 he might well have become Chief of Air Staff, but unselfishly agreed to be Portal’s Vice-Chief, even though his seniority was such that he had been on the Directing Staff at Staff College when Portal was taking the course. And again, in 1941, when things were going wrong in the Mediterranean, and Churchill had such doubts about Tedder’s leadership that Freeman was sent out to investigate, Portal signalled him with the suggestion that he should stay and take over from Tedder. On receiving the suggestion, Freeman signalled back; ‘It is obvious that evidence of friend sent out to investigate is being used to incriminate. You and S of S will understand that role of Judas is one I cannot fill.’ And so he gave up the chance of going on to be Deputy Supreme Commander in Normandy. I still have an entirely 22 unsolicited and handwritten note from him as VCAS congratulating me on my report on the X-Gerät of January 1941 which, because it incidentally showed that our countermeasures organisation against the X-beams had so far been almost entirely ineffective, aroused so much hostility from the staff concerned that they succeeded temporarily in enforcing its withdrawal. But Freeman went well out of his way to encourage me, describing the report as ‘admirable’ despite the controversy it had raised among the staff. That was the kind of man he was – and no-one deserves a biographer more. (Again, this was said in 1986; the gap has since been filled by Wilfrid Freeman by Anthony Furse; Spellmount, Staplehurst, 1999. Ed) If I may mention one other officer who has received little mention in the records but whom I came to admire, this would be Air Cdre Frank Woolley, the Chief Intelligence Officer of the Mediterranean Air Forces in 1944, which reminds me that yet another kind of Intelligence War that we had sometimes had to fight was with our American counterparts when it came to deciding the destination of captured German equipment. Naturally, they wanted it to be sent direct to America, and we to Britain. At one stage there was a crazy ruling that anything small enough to go into an aircraft should come to us, and anything bigger should go by ship to America. One friendly American colonel said to me that this was resulting in my chaps going around with hacksaws and his with welding torches. At times, though, things could be unpleasant, and one of my civilian officers got so worked up that he threw an inkstand through the window of an American colonel (not the one of the previous sentence) from inside the colonel’s room. I thought it tactful to recall him, and in due course I sent out a replacement, having taken the greatest care to pick one on whose equable temperament I could depend. I was grateful to Frank Woolley for even accepting a replacement after all the trouble he had had in smoothing out the previous fracas. I was, therefore, horrified when before long there was an even more serious fracas when my new representative asked to go to Rumania to examine captured radar there. The Americans insisted on sending one of their civilians to accompany him, even though their man was not nearly so well qualified and was, in fact, junior in rank; and they insisted that their man should be in charge. In Bucharest there was a flare-up which went so far as the American striking our 23 man – but because the American had the signals link, he radioed a formal complaint alleging that he had been struck by our man, and asking for the latter’s withdrawal. ‘This makes stirring reading,’ minuted ‘Tubby’ Grant, the Director of Intelligence in London, when the papers were laid on his desk. It became quite an inter-allied incident and I would have entirely understood if Frank Woolley, having had the previous trouble over one of my staff, had insisted on the second man being recalled, and been only too glad to be relieved of us turbulent scientists. Instead he signalled that he was taking no action until he had heard my officer’s account of the incident and in the meantime he weighed into the Americans stressing the vital importance of our work to the Americans and the Russians as well as ourselves. It fortunately turned out that the behaviour of our man had been exemplary in the face of provocation, and Woolley’s faith in us had been justified; but I learnt much from his restraint in not passing judgement until he had heard both sides, despite any predisposition to believe the worst. At that point he and I had never even met; and our meeting was delayed because of serious injuries he sustained at Cassino. He may be remembered by some from pre-war air force days, for he carried out the acceptance trials for the Anson, which developed into one of the great workhorses as a result of his suggestions. Fortunately, Woolley was one of those Royal Air Force officers of whom it has been my privilege to know many, who are patient enough to endure the peccadilloes of civilian scientists. In retrospect I gratefully recall how patient most senior air officers were with us. The tradition evidently goes back to RFC days, for the late Sir William Farren wrote of his experiences in 1916 in learning to fly along with F A Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell) when they were civilian scientists at Farnborough. ‘I doubt’, wrote Farren, ‘whether anything about him impressed me quite as much as his complete indifference to the difficulties of arriving at an RFC station in a bowler hat and carrying an umbrella. Lindemann was unperturbed and, to my surprise, so was the RFC. Their instructions were to teach us to fly, and presumably did not extend to what particular kind of clothes we wore.’ I found almost the inverse situation one day in 1943 when I was visiting the Central Interpretation Unit at Medmenham and I was asked over a pre-lunch drink what kind of man Professor J D Bernal 24 was. I cautiously replied that he was a very good physicist, and asked the cause of the enquiry. I was then told that he had visited Medmenham in the previous week because he was concerned with bomb damage assessment, as they also were. They had been set back by his untidy appearance and they commented, ‘After all, we are a regular RAF Station, and he might have put on a decent suit to visit us. But he seemed quite a pleasant chap, and at the end of the afternoon he invited us to go over to see his own work at Princes Risborough. We went yesterday, and as soon as we saw him in his own place we realised we had done him an injustice — he had put on his best suit when he came to visit us!’ There are many other points that I should like to have made, but they would stretch far beyond the compass of a single lecture. I have said nothing, for example, about the many gallant actions by RAF personnel in the pursuit of the intelligence we required, such as the contributions of Sqn Ldr Tony Hill and FSgt Charles Cox to the success of the Bruneval raid, and Plt Off Harold Jordan and the entire crew of the reconnaissance Wellington who, although wounded, survived eleven attacks by a German night fighter while listening to its Lichtenstein radar, and brought their riddled aircraft, and their vital information, back to England. Also, I have not discussed the problems of deciding priorities between short-term and long-term intelligence, for example in competing for the cryptographic effort at Bletchley. Nor have I mentioned the complementary task of Intelligence in trying to mislead the intelligence organisation of an opponent, such as the part played by Flt Lt Cholmondeley in The Man Who Never Was, or the hazardous operations of dropping and picking up Resistance agents. These and many other topics could be among those that the Society may care to consider in its future deliberations. Looking back on those aspects with which I myself was particularly concerned, our successes, such as those against the beams, radar and the V-weapons, were obvious enough, but we sometimes had failures even in the midst of success, and something might be learned from studying them. The nerve gases, for example, were not recognised; this was due at least in part to the fact that, although we heard of nerve gas in 1940, the correlation of intelligence in chemical warfare was not done in the intelligence organisation proper, but at Porton where the interpretation of reports may have been biased too 25 much by a knowledge of what Porton itself had succeeded or failed in developing. We may have been slow to detect upward firing guns on German night fighters, and it seemed that we did not emphasise sufficiently, although we had reported it, the awkward height at which the V1s flew – too high for light, and too low for heavy, AA guns. We also failed to recognise the aerodynamics research institute at Volkenrohde. In nearly every case part of the explanation lay in inadequate liaison between different sections of intelligence or between the intelligence organisation and the operational commands or our own research establishments. Where we succeeded, I felt, this was due to strengths of understanding that came from contacts that were all the closer and warmer under the stimulus of a perceived danger. And here, in conclusion, I would echo Tizard’s verdict on the success of his famous Committee on the Scientific Survey of Air Defence: ‘The first time, I believe, that scientists were ever called in to study the needs of the Services as distinct from their wants, was in 1935, and then only as a last resort. The Air Staff were convinced of the inadequacy of existing methods and equipment to defeat air attack on Great Britain, and a Committee was established for the scientific survey of air defence. I want to emphasise that this committee, although it consisted on paper only of scientists, was in fact from the first a committee of scientists and serving officers, working together. When I went to Washington in 1940, I found that radar had been invented in America about the same time as it had been invented in England. We were, however, a very long way ahead in its practical applications to war. The reason for this was that scientists and serving officers had combined before the war to study its tactical uses. This is the great lesson of the last war.’ And that lesson applies with as much force to intelligence as it does to science.