People, ideas, machines VII: 'The Wizard War' - lessons on technology, intelligence & organisation from World War II

RV Jones's classic Memoir... Science is cumulative, the lessons of politics are cyclical, endlessly forgotten and re-learned... Whitehall is in 'forgot & don't want to re-learn' mode...

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all others. Churchill

Despite any unpopularity, I survived because war is different from peace: in the latter fallacies can be covered up more or less indefinitely and criticism suppressed, but with the swift action of war the truth comes fairly quickly to light — as Churchill said, ‘In war you don’t have to be polite, you just have to be right!’ RVJ

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 far more sanguine than the brutal facts admit. Churchill

[UPDATED: 23/5: final thoughts and general lessons.

The war ends, RVJ goes to Aberdeen, Whitehall dismantles the successful system built during the war (like it dismantled the Vaccine Taskforce and other things built in 2020), committees replaced individual responsibility, analysts pulled away from the front line, talent pushed out of Whitehall, Alanabrooke’s COS system also vandalised — a prelude to decades and thousands of acts of Whitehall vandalism that has destroyed talent in public service and made our institutions pathological.

SW1 discusses all new ‘scandals’ and failures as if they’re ‘shocking’ and an effect of recent developments but they all trace back to the 19th Century, fundamental dynamics of big organisations from Google to the Pentagon, and a core issue — is a permanent bureaucracy that recruits overwhelmingly from an internal caste (A) a ‘Rolls Royce civil service’ or (B) ‘a programmed pathological disaster that will force stupidity even in an existential crisis and remorselessly deteriorate decade after decade, impervious to all discussion of reform’? SW1 thinks (A), I think (B)…

The successes in WW2 (e.g Alanbrooke’s COS system, RVJ and Scientific Intelligence) came from rare individuals who found ways to build things with effective-enough barriers against the entropy and pathologies of normal Whitehall, NOT from ‘normal Whitehall’ which was a constant source of entropy (NB. the Germans suffered from similar problems with committees, cf. V2 program). It’s only when the Northcote-Trevelyan system itself is replaced, as should have happened after 1945 and could have happened in the 12 months after April 2020, that we have a hope of revival. All ‘reform’ discussion is conducted in ignorance of (99%) or knowingly deflecting from (1%) the issues around the pathological dynamics of ALL big organisations.

Whatever happens in the election, 99.99% of the same people will stay running the country as now, Starmer will have the same attitude to the civil service actually running the country as Cameron and Sunak, and the situation since 2010 will largely continue: The government does not control the government, doesn’t want to, and couldn’t if it tried… Cf. Francis Crick’s plea as Whitehall wrecked Intelligence 1946: ‘It’s no use reorganising with just the same old gang’. He was ignored and he left for Cambridge.

I urge subscribers to ignore the election. It will be almost entirely clowns jabbering things not-even-wrong interpreted by hacks who’ve never built anything valuable in their lives and are anti-expert on how power works, how communication works, and how high performance organisations are created. Noise about noise. All the budget numbers will be fake because of the massive black budget horrorshows and corruption of the MOD. Starmer will be given these on yellow paper soon after he goes to No10 and he and others will say to themselves ‘un-fucking-believable’. Then, probably, punt-and-classify like Brown, Cameron, May, Boris, Truss, and Sunak. I’ve been talking to various people about what should be built after the 2010-24 clown show is over and the new clown show begins. As promised I’ll share here first.]

The Wizard War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939-1945 is the memoir of RV Jones, a legendary physicist who built and ran a new science and technology intelligence operation in World War II. Aged just 28 RVJ was summoned to No10 by Churchill himself in 1940 to discuss the ‘battle of the beams’, the offensive and defensive duel over radar and navigation that was central to the Battle of Britain. From 1939-1946, RVJ was Head of Scientific Intelligence on Britain’s Air Staff and Scientific Adviser to SIS (a crucial role that exists today and is greatly underrated and under-supported in Westminster). His operation played a vital role including in defeating the German air force in the Battle of Britain and many other critical battles of the war.

It is a wonderful, inspiring, fascinating tale. It has many deep lessons for today whether you’re in government, running an AI company, a VC investor etc. It also deepens one’s gloom and anger about how Westminster has failed year in year out since 1945 in so many ways, something RVJ refers to himself:

And in a Britain that has been drifting downstream ever since 1945, I hope this story will show one facet of what we could achieve no more than forty years ago, and what therefore — since a people cannot change its basic make-up so quickly — Britain could achieve again, if it could only replace the present mood of self seeking easement with a sense of purpose and service.

These words ring true and heavy for us.

Previous in this series:

VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is

V: Colin Gray and defence planning

IV: Notes on The Kill Chain

III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence

II: Thinking about nuclear weapons

I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail

Nothing I write about is of less interest to political people in Westminster than the intersection of war, politics, technology and management. Near zero MPs or political hacks are interested and the only discussion I have is with the odd deep state official, military people, and people outside Westminster where there is 100X more interest. This is not accidental but points to a general, important, and deeply bad feature of our political class.

For example, I’ve written on this blog many times since leaving No10 about something of the absolute first importance — the dangerous rot of our nuclear weapon infrastructure, the massive bills for this vast failure, the way these bills make all official budget numbers (including OBR numbers) fake, how this is covered up by more and more classification, how I started working with the deep state to sort it out in 2020, how much of this was kiboshed within hours of leaving No10 (when Boris encouraged senior officials to u-turn on facing the truth on budgets and instead double down on lies), how I insisted to Sunak in our two discussions on returning to it as a condition for helping him politically and so on.

And I’ve pointed out that the old media doesn’t cover the story and our MPs actively avoid thinking about such problems — a very large, important, and disastrous shift in our political system, one so important it is entirely invisible in the mainstream news and pundit-world. This week another hard-to-keep-secret symptom of the rot hit the media with the botched missile exercise incident. Nothing will change. Sunak decided to go with the Whitehall flow. Once Whitehall itself realises that the political leadership has no gumption and no desire to face reality, it will, acting naturally in accordance with the perpetual laws of large bureaucracies, hide, punt, and manage the theatre of power for the ministers without the truly important issues on the agenda. Our MPs will not, as they could, insist on uncovering this 20 year tale of dereliction of duty. Our media will not expose the problem just as they almost entirely ignore the day-to-day farce of procurement and Ukraine. (MPs really are needed here because it is illegal for those who know about it to discuss most of the nuclear issue in any detail unless the MPs create a process allowing people to speak legally, and it is not a subject that should be briefed/leaked as many others are treated.)

Starmer will be confronted with a symbol of this on his first day as PM when he talks to the deep state about the submarines and his letter. And the Cabinet Secretary will say something like: PM, not for now but we will have to discuss some important aspects of this subject soon… And Starmer will read (on yellow paper above Strap 3) the detail of these horrific budgets. And he will face the same choice Boris and Sunak faced: go public, blame his predecessor and face openly the vast financial (and other implications) or classify, punt and continue the charade that means the continuing cannibalising of the open budgets by the broken black budgets and their black holes. (An interesting question that will signal power will be: is Sue Gray allowed in the room for the submarine chat or not?)

These deep problems are behind the predictable and predicted in this blog disastrous failures in Westminster over Ukraine — while, of course, the MPs and hacks have told themselves an opposite story of bravery and success, a fake story now colliding with reality as always happens eventually in war. But, as with covid, our failures are also seen across the west and should be seen as only partly idiosyncratic and, most importantly, as part of a general rot of the West’s post-1945 regimes.

In the world of RV Jones, duty and public service were seen differently. Senior ministers took their highest duties seriously. As Bunk says to Omar, makes me sick how far we done fell…

Below are notes. I will tweet a link to each update so subscribers know.

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Some subscribers of this blog are researchers and/or in the deep state working on some of these issues. What’s the very best stuff written on:

• What are the best examples of people doing safety well and drastically improving standards with extremely dangerous technologies? (E.g improving nuclear weapon safety after they started with 0000 pin numbers, the differences between the best bio-labs and those that have lab leaks.)

• What are the worst examples and why do they persist even in the most sensitive areas? (E.g repeated debacles with nuclear weapons constantly exposed by Red Teams that politicians do not act on.)

• What are important general lessons from security we can be confident in? (E.g the recurring problem of vulnerability to social attacks on key individuals, such as the KGB’s honey trap girls (some of whom I met in Moscow 30 years ago). Defending against this is a general social/management problem for everyone trying to maintain security regardless of the particular technology. If I were a state looking to evade sophisticated security in top AI firms, I would start with such tried and trusted (and relatively cheap) methods. Many recently suggested a ‘Manhattan Project for AGI’ to bring the top people together in a safe place. Leaving aside all other aspects of this idea, those suggesting it rarely seem aware that the original, conducted with a level of secrecy and security hard to imagine today, was so thoroughly penetrated by the Soviets that Stalin and Beria knew more about many critical aspects than Truman.)

• A lot of critical software now is open source which is more secure because it is open to scrutiny. Which systems are not open for good reasons? What lessons are there from software for nuclear, bio, AI? What’s the best exploration of the ‘open source is vital for software security’ versus ‘yes but this will break at a certain point with AI models’ argument? I’ve seen many speculative assertions about this but not detailed analysis. This has huge economic importance because vast investments are being made in OS, and many entrepreneurs are basing products on OS to avoid being vulnerable to events like the OpenAI coup or the crazed Google-like decisions evident this week, but many safety people argue OS models will have to be stopped/regulated ‘for safety’.

• What lessons are there for software/AI from biologists with the security mindset, such as Kevin Esvelt, who are pushing for large improvements in bio security? Some aspects of bio-defence must be decentralised and open but some he suggests should be closed and secret. What implications for AI? (NB. over the next few years the capability to build bio-weapons will be radically democratised with vast implications being ~100% ignored by western regimes as you’d expect from regimes that have allowed gain-of-function to continue after covid.)

• What are examples of governments and companies collaborating well together on complex systems problems of great significance to governments? (E.g a case study is TRW and Simon Ramo working with Schriever on ICBMs, after von Neumann’s Teapot Committee, developing the core ideas of ‘systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’. I wrote in 2017 how these lessons would be central to the next pandemic (and how EU procurement law would kill people) and so it turned out but a) the Pentagon systematically unlearned these lessons starting in the McNamara era, b) so did we, c) covid and Ukraine have shown how hostile our regimes now are to doing this properly — their revealed preference is ‘rather lose in Ukraine than face reality on procurement and industrial capacity’.)

• Which regulators have done a good/bad job in drawing lines defining banned/unbanned R&D? (E.g you can research X in nuclear physics but Y is illegal unless authorised by government; you can create CRISPR but you can’t engineer a more deadly smallpox.)

• What persistent patterns are there in how voters have thought about science/technology and safety/regulation? What’s the best things written on fears of automation and the cycle of such stories? A fundamental argument on AI now is a) ‘practically all fears and demands for regulation now are the same cycle we always see and almost all of this proves to be wrong and counterproductive and simply a way for those with power threatened by the new technology to defend themselves’ versus b) ‘superhuman capabilities really are “different this time” and we need to find ways for government to try to regulate better than it has ever regulated anything’. I’ve strongly recommended reading von Neumann’s essay Can We Survive Technology? for years and I think core ideas are relevant to this problem. (If like me you are worried about things like democratising bio-weapons capability and the next generation of AI/drones applied to war, you should also be thinking about how to end the dumb Ukraine war and de-escalate conflict over Taiwan and seek a new version of the post-1815 Concert of Powers, rather than continue current escalatory dynamics that our regimes are obviously incapable of handling.)

An RV Jones of today is likely to be working at the intersection of such questions.

Please leave links to documents you think could help figure out good ideas on these issues.

Separately, please post links to the best-vastly-underrated sources of analysis on the US election, public opinion, election models etc. Where is the best data on what question voters think the election is fundamentally about? Who is publicly tracking — this election is really about Biden’s senility / Trump’s criminality / the border / democracy etc?

A paper (Social class and wise reasoning about interpersonal conflicts across regions, persons and situations, 2017) suggests evidence that people from the lowest social class (therefore on average less educated and lower IQ) are more likely to use ‘wise reasoning’ than highest social class (more educated, higher IQ). Does anybody know the status of such claims given how little in social science stands up to scrutiny/replication? (I’m inclined to believe the result based on my own observations but…)

A paper (Individuals with greater science literacy and education have more polarized beliefs on controversial science topics, 2017) suggests that more knowledgeable people use scientific knowledge to defend positions that have become politically polarised (rather than use their knowledge to challenge their own beliefs). Does anybody know the status of such claims? (I’m very inclined to believe these results!)

A paper (Ideology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflection, Kahan 2013) suggests that those who scored highest in cognitive reflection were the most likely to display ideologically motivated cognition (which promotes individuals’ interests in forming and maintaining beliefs that signal loyalty to in-groups): i.e the disposition to engage in conscious and effortful System 2 information processing ‘actually magnifies the impact of motivated reasoning’ to signal loyalty. Other studies suggest that if looking at issues that have not been polarised politically (e.g skin rash treatment), people with better quant skills do better but if the issue has been polarised those people are even more polarised. Does anybody know the status of such claims? (I’m very inclined to believe these results!)

I wrote in November that Netanyahu is a disaster and the sooner he’s replaced the better. I’ve never followed Israeli politics in any detail. Does anybody know of particularly interesting work on predicting Israeli elections? (E.g This appears to have a particularly tricky problem — that there is a threshold between 3-4% that is very important for seats won in a tight election but is well within the margin of error in normal polls.)

Thanks for subscribing and if you’re not, you should — you’d have been way ahead of the game on Ukraine, Sunak’s collapse, Biden’s senility and Trump being ahead in the electoral college contra mainstream predictions since 2020, AI going mainstream in 2023, the covid inquiry farce, and much much more, £100 a year is a massive bargain…!

Foreword

The Foreword was written by a female agent who gave two months warning of the V-bombardment of London — ‘AMNIARIX’, Jeannie Rousseau, Vicomtesse de Clarens. Many in the ‘underground’ in Europe contributed to British intelligence. She describes living with fear of capture and torture without knowing whether the information discovered is passed on and useful.

RVJ wanted to use the title Merchants of Light after the reference in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis but was dissuaded on marketing grounds.

Churchill recounted in his Vol II his first meeting with RVJ in the dark days of June 1940 in a chapter called The Wizard War. So RVJ used that for his title. Churchill wrote of the intelligence battle:

This was a secret war, whose battles were lost or won unknown to the public; and only with difficulty is it comprehended, even now, by those outside the high scientific circles concerned. No such warfare had ever been waged by mortal men.

Although he did not keep a diary — and refers to this as ‘expressly forbidden’ (suggesting Alanbrooke broke his own rules) — he had access to his reports and notes from the time.

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PART ONE

CH 1: RVJ background

RVJ was born in 1911. His father was part of the original BEF (the ‘Old Contemptibles’), served heroically in WWI and was badly injured. As a child RVJ experienced the first air raids on London. He went to a rough local school and was in a class of 55 yet his teacher had him solving simultaneous equations before he was 10 [NB. relevant to Maths Circles!] He won a scholarship to Alleyn’s School, Dulwich. Tough discipline. Running was forbidden. The head gave regular talks on the importance of service and the likelihood of having to emulate their fathers in war — the Germans had not repented and would try again. The scientists were given lessons on Greek tragedy and other cultural themes. It was tough and he sometimes complained to his mum who simply replied: ‘Stick it’ which RVJ later thought of as great advice.

He made radio sets as a hobby. With a few home-made parts boys could make something that could make a working radio. In 1928 he could afford a thermionic valve and pick up transmissions from Australia. He chose to do physics at Wadham College Oxford over maths at Cambridge (partly because as child he was once punched by someone pro-Cambridge!). His tutor warned that in another war there would be six months of disaster due to the wrong people promoted in peacetime! At Oxford he got to know Lindemann, a great physicist of great courage. He got a First in 1932 and started work on a doctorate.

He was there in 1933 but not a member of the Union when it held its notorious debate on refusing to serve King and country’: ‘I was disgusted.’ (In 1965 Erich von Richthofen wrote a letter to the Telegraph claiming this was highly influential with Hitler. Any other evidence? NB. A commenter references a paper that suggests this is wrong, the debate had little effect in Germany and the Richthofen letter was a hoax.) His later memory was that his contemporaries were not worried about Hitler and Lindemann was the only person he could remember talking to him about it. He took his doctorate at 22. He had a funded research career. He started tutoring an undergraduate from a family with a stately home. He described himself as having seen tough schools and stately homes and left with ‘none of the class bitterness that has since so bedevilled English politics’.

[Some of the material from this chapter about 1938-39 I have shifted to Chapter 5 to avoid duplication.]

CH 2: Tizard, Lindemann & Whitehall manoeuvres re air defence

On 10 November 1932, Baldwin told parliament that ‘the bomber will always get through’. Many agreed.

Lindemann was friends with Churchill who depended on him for advice on science and technology (and personal matters like the design of fountains at Chartwell).

The two went to visit Baldwin during his holiday in 1934 to push the idea of a special subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID). 

As often happens, around the same time someone else had a similar idea — the scientific civil servant, Rowe, assistant to the Director of Scientific Research in the Air Ministry (Wimperis). In June 1934 Rowe warned the Air Ministry to seek new methods for air defence. In November 1934, Wimperis proposed the formation of a Committee for the Scientific Survey of Defence and Tizard was selected as Chairman.

Both Tizard and Lindemann had been test pilots during World War I even though each had defective vision in one eye. Then they were friends.

Lindemann and Churchill thought the Air Ministry was too defeatist and they wanted the problem considered at CID. In November 1934, Lindemann met Tizard at the Royal Society and asked for help in pressing for this idea. It’s unclear (to RVJ) quite what Tizard knew when.

On 12 December, Tizard was formally asked to chair the Air Ministry’s committee.

In January the PM agreed with Lindemann and Churchill on their idea of a CID subcommittee. Only afterwards did the PM discover the Ministry plan [some things never change]. Lindemann and Churchill were informed, were cross and suspected foul play. The relationship between Lindemann and Tizard became acrimonious.

Britain now had a great stroke of luck. In January 1935, Wimperis was casting around for ideas. Multiple people had noticed for years that aircraft disturbed radio reception and had ideas about using this effect for detection. These conversations swiftly came to the Tizard committee via Watson-Watt (from the Radio Research Station). In February a test was held using radio waves and a bomber which was immediately successful. So within weeks the Tizard Committee had a basic solution to the great problem it had to face. [NB. how people then could be told of an idea, decide to hold a test, do the test — all within a few weeks.]

The PM then agreed to set up the CID subcommittee too, notwithstanding the existence of Tizard’s. It met for the first time in April 1935 under Lord Swinton. Churchill was asked to be a member. He asked that Lindemann join the technical subcommittee, which was how Churchill regarded the Tizard committee.

RVJ knew very little of all this. In February 1935, by chance he was asked by a visiting American (hoping to sell to the Air Ministry) to consider a detection system for aircraft based on infrared or heat radiation emitted by aircraft engines.

So, at about the same time, radar was at the nascent stage and RVJ became involved with infrared at a similar stage. Lindemann told him that he should not be working on such an idea for an American inventor but for HMG. Lindemann made claims to the Tizard committee about infrared that RVJ discovered were a large over-claim. Tests over subsequent months showed the infrared ideas were not yet applicable. But the ideas were hopeful so RVJ was asked to explore further.

CH3: RVJ & the Clarendon lab

In Jan 1936, RVJ got an honorarium of £100 and £50 for equipment to pursue infrared research — ‘large compared with what many of us in laboratories in the ‘30s were accustomed to’.

Lindemann took over the Clarendon in 1919. The few research students had ‘no expert help, so it was very much a matter of sink or swim’. 2-3 graduates started research each year and roughly 2-3 left after 2 years. There were no more than six Fellowships in physics in Oxford University so there was little chance of of one becoming vacant for a new worker to fill it. The Cavendish at Cambridge under Rutherford had ‘much greater attractions for serious physicists’. But the Clarendon was ‘a lively’ lab and its 15-20 members had a number of other achievements to their credit. One rode in the Grand National. And Keeley and Bolton King for some years ‘made the best photoelectric cells in the world’. They had two great mechanics in the workshop. One of them encouraged him to read Herodotus and a story RVJ read inspired a trick he’d later use against the Germans.

In 1933 there begun an exodus of Jewish scientists from Germany. Lindemann was quick to offer refuge. So they nabbed Schrödinger, Szilard and others.

One day a German journalist arrived at the lab. RVJ worried he was a spy and invented a story to distract him from some equipment. He turned out actually to be a spy. Carl Bosch spent some time at Oxford and later designed the radio beam that guided V2 rockets.

RVJ became more immersed in air defence but wider Oxford continued without absorbing the Nazi threat. The socialist London County Council suppressed the Cadet Corps in London schools.

In 1936 and 1937 the predominant feeling in Oxford was still pacifist… But it was different among working men.

After March 1938 and annexation of Austria, ‘the scales at last fell from the eyes of my contemporaries’. RVJ suggested to the new Director of Scientific Research at the Air Ministry that they should figure out NOW which researchers are suitable for what work so that if war comes there is a plan for where to send researchers and how to scale efforts. He got a reply promising a fuller reply but never got one. But Tizard took up the idea and made some sort of plan.

CH4: tensions with Tizard committee, RVJ caught in middle

In 1936, Lindemann introduced Watson-Watt to Churchill, without the Tizard Committee knowing, to discuss the air defence problem. Churchill was then critical of the Tizard Committee at the CID committee. Lindemann also insisted on writing a minority report.

Lindemann rightly stressed the importance of not just radar as a priority but also a communication system to get the information to fighter controllers and on to fighters. But tensions, including annoyance of Lindemann briefing Churchill and Lindemann standing for Parliament on the air defence issue, undermined such suggestions. Tensions blew up when Blackett and others said they’d resign. Lindemann was removed from the Tizard Committee.

RVJ: there was right on both sides. Lindemann was right about, for example, the potential use of accelerometers for inertial guidance but the Committee said it couldn’t work. Lindemann had better physical intuition than the Committee but Tizard had more common sense. Also, often forgotten is that the RAF officers really cared about the defence and radar issues so they listened and helped. When Tizard set up a committee to look at offence, it failed. The key difference was the bomber pilots were over-confident and didn’t agree/listen. (This point was made in Rosen’s book, cf I: On innovation in militaries).

RVJ did not want to go abroad when a war might break out. He was appointed a Scientific Officer to the Air Ministry staff in October 1936. His salary of £500 was the highest of any government scientist of his age. In October Lindemann brought WSC to the Clarendon and RVJ met him for the first time. RVJ thought he looked so tired he wouldn’t last much longer.

RVJ continued with his infrared work. In spring 1937 he flew a plane with a detector on board and conducted the first ever detection of one plane by another in flight using infrared.

The Tizard Committee concluded RVJ’s infrared work should be closed down because of its limitations. RVJ pointed out to Lindemann that radar also had problems such as the possibility of the counter-measure that became known as ‘window’ (UK) and ‘chaff’ (USA), which could be as simple as wires suspended from balloons. RVJ continued his work including on what became known as LIDAR, the optical analogue of radar (now used in autonomous cars). His work was shut down by the Ministry in January 1938. RVJ was cross about the manner, having been encouraged to continue it at the expense of his academic career and despite encouragement from Tizard. He felt he had become ‘a pawn in a distinctly unpleasant game’ and wanted to get away from Watson-Watt and Tizard.

But his father had lost sight in one eye, could not work, and RVJ had to consider how to look after his parents. He told WW he was unhappy about how he had been treated but negotiated a new deal. WW was then promoted to a new job running a new Directorate of Communications Department in the Air Ministry. WW offered him a deal where he could continue his infrared work but working with the Navy, to keep him out of WW’s hair. RVJ was somewhat depressed but, because of his father’s situation, he persisted…

CH5: Exile

RVJ was initially attached to the Air Ministry HQ.

He developed ideas for how bombers could locate themselves by receiving pulses sent simultaneously by three ground stations and using the intervals from any two pulses to calculate where it is on a hyperbolic curve. Radio engineers thought it wouldn’t work.

I was, incidentally, astonished by the complacency that existed regarding our ability to navigate at long range by night. The whole of our bombing policy depended on this assumption but I was assured that by general instrument flying, coupled with navigation by the stars, Bomber Command was confident that it could find pinpoint targets in Germany at night, and that there was therefore no need for any such aids as I had proposed. I was not popular for asking why, if this were true, so many of our bombers on practice flights in Britain flew into hills.

In summer 1938, still as a Scientific Officer on the Air Ministry staff, he moved to the Admiralty Research Laboratory at Teddington. He enjoyed it but felt he did not have nearly enough to do. While there in 1938, a friend to whom he had written about reports of strange goings on at a German base at Brocken had visited the place and taken photos. This proved useful later. (A new building had been procured at Teddington. The rock of the organisation, a former Chief Yeoman of Signals in the navy, notified everybody that Whitehall had built a new building for them without electrical or water supply.)

He was in London when Chamberlain returned from Munich to declare ‘peace in our time’.

I was as angry as a cat which has just been robbed of its mouse. Those who felt like that were a minority among the almost hysterical majority who thought that Chamberlain had done a great thing, but when I went into the Air Ministry … the following morning I found that the Air Staff was convinced that Chamberlain had only postponed the reckoning.

At Teddington he met his wife. Amid the panic of Munich some physicists had started to dig trenches in case of surprise German attacks. A woman chased them off her hockey pitch. They were engaged in 1939 and married in 1940.

In May 1939, he got a telephone call from the Secretary of Henry Tizard’s Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence, Woodward-Nutt, who asked to see him. Tizard and his colleagues did not know what the Germans would do in applying science to air warfare and British intelligence could not tell them. They wanted a scientist attached to the intelligence services to discover why they were producing so little information, and to recommend how to improve matters.

The Treasury, however, had refused financial support saying that science was international and that British scientists should be able to tell how their opposite numbers were thinking by talking to them at conferences, and that this should cost nothing.

Woodward-Nutt had therefore come up with the idea of shifting RVJ to Intelligence so it cost the Air Staff nothing.

Would RVJ do it? ‘A man in that position could lose the war — I’ll take it!’ The date for his move was agreed to be 1 September 1939 which turned out to be the day the war started.

He describes his role as:

to attempt to anticipate the German applications of science to warfare, so that we could counter their new weapons before they were used.

It included:

• radio navigation, as in the Battle of the Beams

• radar, as in the Allied bomber offensive and preparations for D-Day

• efforts against the V1 and V2 rockets

• efforts against German nuclear plans

A few weeks after his chat with Woodward-Wyatt, he had a discussion with Jim Tuck who told him about the discovery of nuclear fission and the possibility of an atom bomb. Tuck thought the idea was buzzing around German physicists and some of them might be trying to warn the rest of the world.

CH6: The Day Before War Broke Out

In spring Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia, blowing up Munich. Chamberlain gave the guarantee to Poland. In August came the ‘astonishing’ news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

He tells the story of a last summer weekend at a country house, concerns over whether women could wear shorts to play tennis, and an old Earl saying that Hitler was bluffing and he didn’t believe in the war. 12 hours later, Germans were in Poland.

CH7: The Secret Weapon

Children were evacuated from big cities. He listened to Chamberlain’s broadcast on the 3/9. Chamberlain sounded like ‘a decent, if ineffectual, man’.

RVJ returned to London and reported for duty at the Directorate of Scientific Research which packed up files and evacuated a lot of people to Harrogate. He met the head of the Air Intelligence branch which was the Air component of SIS.

On 19/9 Hitler gave a speech in which he claimed to have a secret weapon. Chamberlain asked what it could be. RVJ was summoned from Harrogate where he was reading files. This proved a stroke of luck for, instead of months on the periphery, he was immediately taken to the very heart of Intelligence ‘and all its secrets were laid bare to me’. He spent a couple of days at SIS HQ (then 54 Broadway) then was sent to Bletchley, or ‘Station X’ as it was then called, which was also the evacuation HQ for SIS. There he met some of the cryptography team including Turing and discussed the problem of cracking Enigma. His time in SIS files was not so profitable — SIS was ‘weak’ on science and technology because of long-term recruitment policies. He could find no useful trace of a ‘secret weapon’.

RVJ wondered what exactly Hitler had said. He got the recording from the BBC and had someone at Bletchley re-translate it. It turned out that the meaning was different to ‘secret weapon’, more like ‘a weapon with which we cannot be attacked’.

This was very much an anti-climax, and not popular with our own Admiralty, who had been encouraging me to say that the secret weapon was the magnetic mine.

The whole scare had risen because the Foreign Office had botched the translation. (NB. Even when the stakes are ‘beating Hitler’ there is low hanging fruit everywhere.)

CH8: The Oslo Report

The old Chief of SIS, Admiral Sinclair, had just died and Stewart Menzies took over. RVJ did not meet him for a year. He did meet the Vice-Chief, Claude Dansey.

As RVJ was finishing his report on the ‘secret weapon’, on his desk landed a parcel. It had come from our Naval Attaché in Oslo. It was the famous Oslo Report. This came after a letter that had said — if Britain wished to receive reports on German science and technology, it should alter the words of a World Service broadcast. The broadcast was tweaked. The report had arrived, 7 pages of text with diagrams, accompanied by an electronic tube.

The Oslo Report was a sensational prize. RVJ described it as ‘probably the best single report received from any source during the war’ that in ‘one great flash had given us a synoptic glimpse of much of what was foreshadowed in German military electronics’. While the contributions of decrypting ENIGMA and some other projects were bigger, they were the product of many people, sometimes thousands. Oslo was written by one man. The author was a German mathematician and physicist, Hans Mayer, who wrote it on a trip to Oslo in November. RVJ revealed the existence of the Report in 1947 in a talk. The identity of the author only became known to RVJ in 1953, via an extraordinary chain of events, but he agreed with Mayer not to make it public. Mayer moved to America after the war as part of Operation Paperclip. He died in 1980 never having been revealed. RVJ revealed the extraordinary secret in 1989 — not in this book but in a later book.

It revealed the existence of the Peenemünde facility; remote controlled drones; the use of gyroscopes; radar systems; new torpedoes and much much more.

When the Report was first circulated, ‘nobody would take it seriously’. The leading doubter was the Deputy Director of Scientific Research at the Admiralty who thought it ‘a plant’ — it was very unlikely one man would have such extensive knowledge. RVJ pointed out that it would have to be an extraordinary hoax given the an electronic tube had already proved to be more advanced than anything we had. He failed to convince.

The report was thereafter disregarded in the Ministries, which did not even keep their copies, and all I could do was to keep my copy and use it as a basis for much of my thought.

CH9: A Plan for Intelligence

RVJ completed his initial survey on 7 December. To illustrate the difference between the state of Britain and Germany viz scientific intelligence he quoted a Pericles speech about Athens being ‘open to the world’.

The primary problem of a Scientific Intelligence Service is to obtain early warning of the adoption of new weapons and methods by potential or actual enemies…

The adoption of a fundamentally new weapon proceeds through several stages.

1) General scientific research of an academic or commercial nature which causes

2) Someone in close touch with a Fighting Service, and who is aware of Service requirements, to think of an application of the results of academic research. If this application be considered promising

3) Ad hoc research and small scale trials are performed in a service laboratory. If these are successful

4) Large scale Service trials are undertaken, which may lead to

5) Adoption in Service.

The first stage is generally public and is probably common knowledge to all progressive countries. Frequently, therefore, the idea is born almost simultaneously everywhere; its subsequent history depends on the attitude of the Services concerned...

The third and fourth stages are more difficult to observe, and the only method of dealing with the former is direct espionage, or the observation of indiscretions by research personnel concerned. Sometimes the recruiting of new staff, who have already attained some eminence in research, will give a clue to the type of research. The supply of operators by commercial firms may also furnish clues. In many ways those are the most important stages at which a good Intelligence Service should be able to give timely warning to its Government, and every effort should be made to extract the upmost from any item of information...

Information leaks out in five ways:

1) Accidental indiscretions (including deciphered messages) of which there are always a large number and if these are pieced together a valuable impression may be gained.

2) Indiscretions encouraged by alcohol and/or mistresses. The results obtained by these methods are all that can be expected.

3) Information that cannot be kept secret and yet can give useful information to an enemy. [E.g transmissions, losing kit to an enemy.]

4) Direct acquisition of information by placing agents in Military Research Departments. Such a method is difficult and hazardous and comparatively little is obtained; its value is large.

5) Information from disaffected nationals. Frequently this is unreliable and must always be checked.

A Scientific Intelligence Service starting at the present time would have to concentrate on (1) and (3) but the other ways should be exploited to best advantage.

He explained that there was no systematic observation of evidence concerning German RDF transmissions. What was needed was an organisation with a central section with the following objects:

1) To ascertain the development of new weapons and improvement of existing ones by other countries.

2) To mislead potential or actual enemies about our own weapons.

3) To mislead the enemy about the success of his own weapons.

4) To assist technically in espionage and its counter (including codes and ciphers, where technicians are becoming important at the expense of classical scholars).

5) To coordinate Scientific and Technical Intelligence between the services.

In addition to the central section, there should be branches attached to the Director of Naval Intelligence, the Director of Military Intelligence, and the Director of Air Intelligence. He stressed that the teams ‘should be kept as numerically small as possible, and that quality was much the most important factor.’ 

The report was circulated to the three directors of intelligence, the three directors of scientific research in the Service Ministries, and to Tizard. Tizard and five of the other six supported it. Only the Director of Scientific Research of the Admiralty, advised by his deputy (Buckingham), disagreed but ‘on this one disagreement the whole scheme founded’.

Buckingham argued that while the information should be collected it should be assessed not by a new organisation but by experts in the Scientific Directorates, the people best qualified because they were working on our own weapons.

But ‘the scientific experts in one country are not necessarily as good as assessing evidence as independent intelligence officers.’ They inevitably often have not thought of an idea or have made some mistake in thinking about it or have tried it before the time is ripe. People then invent a reason for their own failure and blame the operation of some fundamental law.

He recounts an example: everybody wrongly thinking that a fundamental law prevented the generation by electronic valves of radio wavelengths of the order of 10 cm. (The realisation of the error came from a demonstration of a sound system attached to aircraft with the purpose of shouting at Indian villagers from the air, as if with the voice of God.)

Although the experts will usually be right they will sometimes be wrong and those occasions ‘usually turn out to be very important’. Their evidence should therefore be weighed by independent people looking at all information.

Fortunately for us, the Germans operated throughout the war on Buckingham’s system, and so were badly caught out from time to time.

RVJ was nearly withdrawn from intelligence after Buckingham’s successful opposition but pleaded to stay and RVJ’s boss, the Director of Scientific Research at the Air Ministry (Pye) agreed. He was not allowed to hire anyone.

CH 10: The Phoney War

RVJ tried to effect a reconciliation between Tizard and Lindemann but the latter wouldn’t cooperate.

In March he got married.

He spent a lot of time talking to all sorts of people. He started working on issues of radio navigation beams. They started getting some evidence of beams, captured documents from downed planes etc.

In April Germany invaded Norway, in May they smashed into northern France.

England had to contemplate an imminent massive air attack. RVJ warned of the possibility of Germany using intersecting beams for navigation and bombing attacks.

On 10 May Eden announced the formation of the Local Defence Volunteers (later the Home Guard). RVJ called Richmond police station to volunteer before the broadcast was over. He turned up with his pistols. On 13 May Churchill gave his ‘blood, tears, toil and sweat’ speech. They watched Dunkirk and prepared for an attempt at invasion.

CH11: The Crooked Leg [& the famous meeting with WSC, 21/6/40]

Lindemann was now the PM’s Scientific Adviser.

In June RVJ was given a scrap of paper that referred to KNICKEBEIN, the second time he had come across such a reference (the first from a downed aircraft). It was an intercept from Bletchley. RVJ realised that it suggested that Germany had established a radio beam transmitter called Knickebein set up at Cleves on the nearest German soil to Britain and the existence of the beam had been established at a position over England.

The same day RVJ went to see Lindemann in the Cabinet Office. Lindemann asked him what he thought about German radar. It was lucky RVJ had done the signal meeting first. He told Lindemann he was convinced Germany was using radar, gave him details from the Oslo Report, and that the Admiralty had reported from the wreck of the Graf Spree that she had radar-type aerials. The last point should have been definitive but ‘seemed somehow to be ignored in Whitehall which for many months more continued to debate whether the Germans had radar’. He also told Lindemann about the KNICKEBEIN message and that he thought Germany was using an intersecting beam system for bombing England. If they could make narrow beams for navigation they could make them for radar. Lindemann replied with the conventional wisdom about short waves not bending around the earth, which many had assumed true. RVJ told him about calculations from Eckersley (Marconi) showing the conventional wisdom was false.

RVJ briefed prisoner interrogators on what to seek. Quickly they heard German pilots saying to each other that we would never find the equipment, showing that it must be in the downed planes. They soon found that the normal equipment used for blind landings had been modified to detect the beams. RVJ told Lindemann of his discoveries, Lindemann told Churchill, the investigation was energised. It was soon agreed to equip some aircraft to find the beams. Others worked on ideas for jamming. RVJ had ideas for ‘spoofing’, the term now used for inserting false signals, in order to get the bombers to drop their bombs early. There was a search for fifth columnists and equipment Germany may have set up inside England. RVJ got Lindemann to get Churchill to authorise that the effort could grab anyone whose research was not likely to affect production within the next three months. WSC minuted: ‘Let this be done without fail.’ All this was conducted in an atmosphere in which many expected a full scale invasion within weeks. (Tizard was unconvinced and still over-confident about the accuracy of bombing without such devices.)

The basic idea of the beams: if you transmit two relatively blunt beams pointing in slightly different directions but overlapping each other in a relatively narrow region, this region becomes the ‘beam’ along which aircraft are intended to fly. The transmitter is switched back and forth between the two beams to transmit a sort of dot-dash code for the aircraft listening to the beams. Then another beam is set up from a site well to the side of the director beam to warn the crew that they are hitting the target. They soon found the location of the other beam (in Schleswig Holstein) from a downed plane in France. And they had clues for the frequency of the beams.

On 21 June RVJ went to the office late-ish as his routine was to work late and come in at 10ish in time for the night’s incoming messages. (RVJ caught the train from Richmond at 935 and was at his desk by 1010. Is this still possible today given much of our infrastructure is going backwards?! Someone should do this Richmond-office trip today and post the result.) He arrived to find that he’d been summoned to No10. At first he thought it was a practical joke. He arrived about 25 minutes after it had started. He entered through the double-doors which when I was there and I think now lead into the PM’s study and therefore saw WSC in the middle to the left with his back to the fire, as the PM sits today. Lindemann was to his right and Beaverbrook to his left — remember Alanbrooke’s references to being revolted by Beaverbrook’s presence in the Cabinet room. Everyone else was on the other side of the table including Tizard, Watson-Watt (now Scientific Advisor on Telecommunications) and other important Air characters. (The clock above the fireplace worked then but does not now.)

Immediately, I encountered a problem: the atmosphere was clearly tense and perhaps even that of a confrontation, and I stood for a moment waiting for an invitation to sit down. Lindemann waved for me to go to sit beside him, and at the same time the Air Staff beckoned me to sit with them. Lindemann was my old professor, and was probably responsible for my being there, but my post was with the Air Staff. I saw that I could conveniently resolve this conflict of loyalties by sitting in the chair near the door, which was in the ‘no man’s land’ at the end of the table between the two sides; and so there I sat, somewhat isolated. [I would sit in this exact place in many meetings, or the place exactly opposite at the other end of the table, partly also to swerve the implicit ‘sides’ and here you’re better able to observe the faces and glances on both sides.]

Churchill’s subsequent description of the meeting in Their Finest Hour was not quite correct, for he said there that ‘according to plan’ he invited me to open the discussion. Actually, it must have already been in progress for some 25 minutes when I arrived and I listened for a time while some of those around the table made comments which suggested that they had not fully grasped the situation; only then did Churchill address a question to me on some point of detail. Instead of dealing with it, I said, ‘Would it help, sir, if I told you the story right from the start?’

Churchill seemed somewhat taken aback, but after a moment’s hesitation said, ‘Well, yes it would!’ And so I told him the story. The fact that my call to the Cabinet Room had been so sudden had given me no time to rehearse or even to become nervous. The few minutes of desultory discussion that had ensued after my entry showed me that nobody else there knew as much about the matter as I did myself and, although I was not conscious of my calmness at the time, the very gravity of the situation somehow seemed to generate the steady nerve for which it called. Although I was only 28, and everyone else around the table much my senior in every conventional way, the threat of the beams was too serious for our response to be spoiled by any nervousness on my part. [A critical aspect of how we are governed is precisely this issue of a) whether the person who really understands the subject is in the room with the PM and b) does the group encourage honest digging to the truth or reading out scripts from officials defending established positions. Sometimes in covid we managed to get the equivalent of RVJ to that table and had them listened to properly but often they were blocked from attending or else others would sabotage the discussion.]

RVJ spoke for about 20 minutes which, as he says, is quite some time to be speaking to the PM at the gravest moment in our history.

[WSC] went on to say: ‘When Dr. Jones had finished there was a general air of incredulity. One high authority asked why the Germans should use a beam, assuming that such a thing was possible, when they had at their disposal all the ordinary facilities of navigation. Above twenty thousand feet the stars were nearly always visible. All our own pilots were laboriously trained in navigation and it was thought they found their way about and to their targets very well. Others around the table appeared concerned.’ 

Again, I sensed that Tizard had perhaps overdone his scepticism about the beams, but Churchill asked me what we could do. I told him that the first thing was to confirm their existence by discovering and flying along the beams for ourselves and that we could develop a variety of countermeasures ranging from putting in a false cross-beam to making the Germans drop their bombs early, or using forms of jamming ranging from crude to subtle. Churchill added all his weight to these suggestions. In addition, he said that if the Germans were to fly along beams, this will be the ideal case for us sowing fields of aerial mines, which he had been pressing on the Air Ministry for some years, adding as he angrily banged the table, ‘All I get from the Air Ministry is files, files, files!’ And then the meeting ended. There were no minutes because the matter seems to have been deemed so secret that no secretaries were present, and the only record was the one that I made for my report written during the following week.

RVJ left elated but his elation was quickly dashed. That afternoon there was a followup meeting. Eckersley now tried to knock down RVJ’s theory about the beams and himself gave the conventional argument — the beams would have to be too short-wave to bend around the earth, and that he did not believe his own calculations showing the opposite! The Deputy Director of Signals (Lywood — see below) said that the top expert had now disproved the theory and they should abandon the search for the beams as a waste of time.

RVJ gambled and told the official that if the flights were cancelled after the PM had authorised them, RVJ would see to it that the PM were informed of the fact and who had done it! The official backed down, the flights went ahead. RVJ suggested they assume the director beam would be aimed at the Rolls Royce factory at Derby as this was the most crucial target in England making engines for Spitfires and Hurricanes. RVJ had an anxious night worried he’d blundered and wasted everyone’s time at a crucial historical moment.

That night our planes found the beams consistent with transmitters at Cleves and Bredstedt. The Derby guess was right. After the war RVJ discovered that on 21 July the German Chief of the Air Staff recorded in his diary that Goering thought air supremacy could only be achieved by destroying the RAF and its supporting aero-engine industry which should be targeted.

All doubts were now removed and plans for countermeasures could go urgently ahead.

RVJ went to the pub and celebrated. He wrote an account of the episode with the title ‘The Crooked Leg’, as this is a meaning of Knickebein.

Over ten days the matter developed from conjecture to a certainty. It shows German technology is well developed and can place a plane to within 400 yards over this country using beams.

CH12: Reflections

RVJ summed up WSC: distrusted by many as an exotic dangerous adventurer but the right man for the time.

Alone among politicians he valued science and technology at something approaching their true worth, at least in military application.

Disaster united us. People understood that Churchill would never surrender. RVJ said that whenever he met WSC he felt ‘recharged by contact with a source of living power’. He was rarely complimentary (‘brought up in sterner days’) but ‘to stand up to his questioning attack and then to convince him was the greatest exhilaration of all’.

After the war WSC told RVJ that he had convinced himself that the RAF could just hang on then RVJ appeared with his news that the Luftwaffe could continue its attack at night when we would be defenceless; it was one of his blackest moments of the war; but when RVJ explained possible countermeasures his mood lifted. RVJ did not see him again for two years but many of his reports went to him. It was useful to RVJ that there was a widespread view that he had the ear of the PM because people feared ‘the wrath’ of the PM if they didn’t do as he suggested.

In his Report, RVJ added that if his appointment was thought useful it should be remembered that it had been supported by Tizard and opposed by the Treasury! RVJ did not discover for a long time what damage Tizard had done to himself by being so hostile to RVJ’s ideas. Tizard felt so bad he retired to the Athenaeum to write his resignation. Two years later Lindemann told him that when Tizard threatened to resign again, WSC recounted the 1940 incident and said that if we’d listened to Tizard ‘we should not have known about the beams’ which came to us from ‘that young Dr Jones’. Tizard was magnanimous enough not to hold it against RVJ and continued to help him until his death.

The episode also showed Buckingham had been wrong about letting the service experts be the judges of scientific intelligence — this would have given the last word to Eckersley and this would have delayed action, perhaps until it was too late for the Blitz.

CH 13: The Fortunes of Major Wintle

A friend of RVJ, Major Wintle, believed he could stiffen the sinews of the French and prevent collapse. He opposed a posting back to his regiment. In heated/confused discussions he thought a senior officer in the Air Staff had accused him of cowardice. He drew his revolver and said, ‘You and your kind ought to be shot’. He was arrested and put in the Tower.

When his Court Martial came he was accused of having faked an eye injury but he had lost his eye in the first war; the charge was dropped. He was accused of demanding senior people including ministers be shot. He argued that he was right and read out a list of Ministers who should be shot including Kingsley Wood; the prosecutor swiftly dropped the charge (!).

He was then charged with drawing his pistole to intimidate the Air Commodore.

Intimidate the Air Commodore? Oh dear me no! Why, I have worked with the AirCommodore for over a year and I well know that he is the type of Officer that if you rushed into his room and shouted at the top of your voice ‘the Air Ministry is on fire!’ all he would do would be to take up his pen and write a minute to someone about it!’

He escaped with a severe reprimand. Wintle volunteered for the SOE, was captured by the Vichy French, escaped to Spain. He died in 1966.

CH 14: The Fifth Column

There was a huge scare about Fifth Columnists amid stories from the collapse of France and preparations for German invasion. RVJ thought the problem understandable psychologically but practically ‘completely imaginary’. Farmers were interrogated about why they had mown their hay a certain way etc etc. Nothing ever turned up.

He tells the story of going on a raid prompted by suspicions that a Mosley supporter was mapping radar stations. Many suspicious signs really did point to guilt. But he was not guilty.

[To what extent was this a problem outside RVJ’s area of investigation?]

CH 15: The Edda Revived

An ENIGMA decrypt referred to ‘Wotan’ in relation to Knickbein. RVJ consulted ‘Bimbo’ Norman, an expert on German poetry. Norman shouted down the phone:

He had only one eye… ONE EYE — ONE BEAM!

Perhaps the Germans were flying down a single beam with radar giving them their distance? Perhaps there were radar receivers in the bombers? They then encountered references to another Nordic deity, Freya. It seemed Germany had developed a portable R.D.F.

Hut 3 at Bletchley invited RVJ to present what he was working on. But some parts of the Air Staff (including Lywood) still resisted the importance of the beams. There were no attacks on London which they knew from ENIGMA was because Hitler had forbidden it for now. Further intel from downed aircraft and ENIGMA allowed RVJ to warn on 4/8: major night bombing was imminent. They also started surveys of German bombing to seek patterns.

In July Germans focused on coastal shipping. In August they switched focus to radar stations and aerodromes.

For weeks there was no suggestion from ENIGMA of an invasion. Then there were references to Operation Sealion. WSC was informed but was sceptical. The head of SIS (Menzies) insisted. RVJ was asked to add his voice and did. WSC accepted the advice but said they should not use the German codename but ‘Operation Smith’. This resulted in a spell in which the War Office lost interest in Bletchley intelligence on the invasion. The reason was that the War Office had its own Operation Smith, an operation of minor importance, so messages on it were forwarded to a Colonel in Gloucestershire who fortunately appreciated the importance of the material that started arriving on his desk and put it all in a safe — an amazing tale of how even at this stage there were no thought out protocols for crucial aspects of handling intelligence!

Ch 16: Knickebein jammed — and photographed

Towards the end of August Germany started fairly heavy night attacks. On 24th a few stray bombs fell on London. WSC ordered retaliation on Berlin. On 7/9 London was attacked. RVJ was in his office when the sirens went. He and others went to the roof and saw the bombs falling on London docks to the east.

Although there were operations to confuse the German planes using the beams, RVJ feared the fires would give the enemy the location information they needed to focus on central London. Brave firefighters battled to put out the fires as they were being bombed.

Our fighters inflicted ‘almost no losses on the night bombers’. They badly needed a good airborne radar and it was not yet available. Anti-aircraft guns were quite ineffective. Blunting Knickebein was ‘almost our only hope’.

The climax of the daylight attacks was 15/9 with Fighter Command stretched to the limit but so was the Luftwaffe which then focused on night attacks. From 7/9 to 13/11 London was bombed every night except one. Many bombs went astray because of the operation to jam Knickebein.

At least some of the credit for this must be given to our counter-measures, because in principle any German bomber flying on Knickebein ought to have been able to hit a target of about one mile square.

Although the Luftwaffe knew its beams were being jammed, in London people thought that nobody wanted to tell Göring. A German responsible for the beams told RVJ after the war they’d sent special listening sorties to check crews’ reports and concluded the beams were being bent not just jammed.

Aerial photography had been neglected before the war but some enterprising characters had done some themselves. Even during the war some such characters were ‘organised out’ for being ‘too irregular’. RVJ became friends with some of them and got photos of Knickebein in September.

Ch 17: The X-Apparatus

In early September RVJ was woken by a call from Bletchley. He drove up. They’d broken a new line of ENIGMA traffic. Messages referred to new beams and units using them. The X-Gerat was distinct from Knickebein. And some beams seemed to be at smaller wavelengths. New listening posts were created and new beams found.

RVJ made himself unpopular with parts of the Air Staff for saying he thought their counts of downed aircraft were too optimistic and they were ‘fooling themselves’. After the war it proved that even RVJ’s more cautious estimates were too optimistic.

Despite any unpopularity, I survived because war is different from peace: in the latter fallacies can be covered up more or less indefinitely and criticism suppressed, but with the swift action of war the truth comes fairly quickly to light — as Churchill said, ‘In war you don’t have to be polite, you just have to be right!’

If ENIGMA could crack the codes fast enough then they could find where special units were going to attack and have fighters ready, jammers on the right frequencies etc. But this was hard. Orders went out in the afternoon. Bletchley made a supreme effort and in October they pulled this off for the first time and could do it for a while about one night in three. They could therefore tell Fighter Command the exact place of attack, time of the first bombs, ground speed of bombers, their line of approach to 100 yards, and height. But despite this phenomenal intelligence our nightfighters ‘repeatedly failed to locate’ the enemy [a great example of ‘the fog of war’].

I will not go into the technical detail of how the beams worked.

All this work went on while they were bombed nightly. Trains were often disrupted and RVJ drove to work. Despite RVJ’s role he had ‘no special privileges’, had no official transport throughout the war, and had ‘no help apart from what Daisy Mowat was able to do when she was not occupied with Fred Winterbotham’s work.’ His filing system was ‘box files into which papers of any size relevant to a particular subject can be hurriedly deposited’. He ended up with 400 files by the end of the war. There was also a problem of what knowledge would be lost if RVJ were killed in the Blitz. He persuaded the Director of Scientific research, D.R. Pye, to give him an assistant, Charles Frank (who was working at Porton on chemical warfare). On 11/11 RVJ was promoted to the grade of Senior Scientific Officers with a salary rise from £575 to £680 per annum.

The Telecommonications Research Establishment at Swanage made great progress with waves of around 10cm wavelength and a great breakthrough in Birmingham by Randall and Boot meant the new beams could be applied to airborne radar a great advantage in the radio war’.

CH 18: Coventry

On 6 November a German plane with the X-Gerat equipment landed on a Dorset beach after suffering from jamming. Sadly the fog of war stopped it being fully recovered intact and the tide partly destroyed it.

Versions of a story have spread in which Churchill was presented with the dilemma of a) evacuating Coventry because of our prior knowledge of bombing or b) doing nothing to preserve the security of ENIGMA.

To the best of my knowledge this is not true.

There was confused intelligence and a failure to bring together some of it including a prisoner suggesting heavy attacks on Coventry. False inferences led to focus in the south. RVJ tells the detailed story of the buildup to Coventry’s bombing. He says he does not remember Coventry being mentioned in ENIGMA decrypts as some post-war accounts suggested and ‘no message mentioning Coventry was brought to me… As for any argument as to whether or not Coventry might have been forewarned, I knew nothing of it.’ Witnesses from No10, including David Hunt and John Colville, have also rejected the idea WSC was informed in the afternoon and posed this dilemma. Churchill left London for Ditchley, there read decrypts, and immediately returned to London suggesting that, as often, he was determined to be there if the bombing were fierce. He sent Colville and John Martin to a bunker while he went to the Air Ministry roof to watch.

It turned out that they would have figured out that Coventry was the target but for a simple error in calculating an aspect of the beams and RVJ said angrily that the person responsible should be shot. Further the countermeasures team now overclaimed their successes. RVJ put on record he thought they were wrong.

I have no doubt that had I been part of the countermeasures organisation, instead of having an independent voice through Intelligence up to the Chief of Air Staff, my criticisms would have been suppressed.

It seems a later attack on Wolverhampton was deterred because they figured out early that it was the target, got lots of antiaircraft defences in place which German reconnaissance then saw, leading to cancellation.

[Please post a link to the definitive truth on the Coventry legend.]

Ch 19: Target No. 54

Hut 3 passed on raw intel from the codebreakers and RVJ worked closely with Norman there. Hut 6 did the codebreaking. In November RVJ went to talk to Hut 6. On the way back in the dark he crashed into a lorry. RVJ and his companion went through the windscreen but escaped with minor injuries. They‘d crashed just outside St Albans’ hospital. By now his wife was 6 months pregnant. London was being bombed. They got back to the office the next morning with bandaged heads.

A few days later RVJ was at home for dinner when his block was nearly blown to bits, bombs fell either side. The next morning he picked hiw way through the rubble to a car that took him to a conference with Fighter Command. Dowding had just been replaced by Sholto Douglas. It was a tetchy meeting as RVJ did not think they had been active enough in exploiting intelligence and were making excuses.

CH 20: The Atrocious Crime

British instruments were not as accurate as German. This held us back on practical measures on radar.

Coventry in a way had been a partial success in that countermeasures against Knickebein had forced Germany to shift to KGr100 differently. Round One to Britain, Round Two to Germany.

People in the countermeasures team were ‘painting too rosy a picture’. RVJ wrote a 20,000 word report in December, typed by Daisy Mowat. He circulated 30 copies on 12 January.

Although RVJ had been in Air Intelligence for over a year he had never met the Director, Air Commodore Boyle, nor Menzies (head of SIS). In summer the Air Ministry had been split into two with the Directorate of Scientific Research transferred to the Ministry of Aircraft Production so RVJ was technically no longer part of the Air Staff. [NB. they did a ‘machinery of government’ change on the Air Ministry in the middle of the Battle of Britain — a fact never referred to in all my listening to officials give advice on MOG changes. A demonstration that it is possible to do a MOG change fast in a crisis — fast being the word that cannot be digested in modern Whitehall.] RVJ spoke to Boyle on Boxing Day. It was agreed he would become an Assistant Director.

The report stated there were three aims for countermeasures:

1. To mislead the enemy so he wrongly thinks he has attacked the right target.

2. To induce mistrust in pilots so they don’t know whether to believe senses or instruments.

3. To wreck a system of instrumental aids.

To criticise our countermeasures, RVJ put the description in the form of an imaginary German meeting under the chairmanship of their Director of Signals on the future of the beams.

The report produced ‘a most violent reaction’ especially from Lywood (who had tried to cancel the mission searching for the beams, above), it was recalled by the Chief of the Air Staff (Portal) thus ensuring the 30 copies were read carefully before being returned. Lindemann told RVJ that Portal had discussed the report with him at Chequers and had been ‘as amazed by its brilliance as he was appalled by its indiscretion’. Lindemann and Portal had agreed RVJ should be transferred to the Air Staff with the rank of Deputy Director.

There was a problem when RVJ’s assistant, Charles Frank, had, at a breakfast table, corrected Menzies in front of some secretaries without realising he was talking to the head of SIS who was offended and ordered his removal. RVJ asked to see Menzies (for the first time) and implored him not to remove Frank as he was crucial.

That’s alright then, I’ll stand anything if a man’s efficient — he can stay!

RVJ thereby established cordial relations with Menzies.

Bomber Harris at this time remained a deep sceptic on the value of the beams on the grounds that such navigation aids were not necessary for the success of RAF bombing!

After resisting, Lywood gave up his copy with comments scribbled on it. RVJ: Lywood had made many inaccuracies and even wrote that the report was skewed by ‘one inexperienced young scientist’s mind’. RVJ scribbled on Lywood’s report Pitt’s reply to Walpole:

The atrocious crime of being a young man, which the Honourable Gentleman has with such spirit and decency charged upon me, I shall attempt neither to palliate nor deny; but content myself with wishing that I shall be one of those whose follies shall cease with their youth, and not of that number who are ignorant in spite of experience!

RVJ ensured that when the reports were sent back, Lywood was given his copy with RVJ’s reply scribbled on it. ‘Tempers ran very high for a time’. Lindemann sought to make peace. They chatted for a while as they walked from the Cabinet Office then Lindemann went off for lunch with a girlfriend.

CH 21: Wotan’s Other Eye

He describes in detail other countermeasures and the use of the BBC transmitter to disrupt beams. Once the countermeasures became known to German crews they got a further win — crews became suspicious of whether instructions were real or fake. The fog of war added further chaos. The new Y system soon was withdrawn. The bombing did not stop but inland towns were now much harder targets and Germany had ‘little further success against them’.

CH22: Retrospect and Prospect

‘By February 1941 the Battle of the Beams was as good as won.’ Knickebein, the X system and the Y system were defeated. Nightfighters were equipped with airborne radar so could shoot down more bombers.

Luckily Germany had tried out its devices on a small operational scale before major operations and only this gave Britain the chance to unravel the beam system ‘in the nick of time’, helped by the hero who provided the Oslo Report which provided crucial insight for RVJ. Britain later made the same mistake.

Without RVJ, or if he had accepted Eckersley’s opinion about Knickebein, we would have been slower with radio countermeasures and bombing of inland towns would have been worse. Possibly our aero-engine factories would have been knocked out.

The success with the beams put scientific intelligence on the map and ‘made a great difference to the position of science in national affairs’ and shown ‘science and engineering could be essential to national survival’. WSC wrote in Finest Hour about the ‘ever-memorable and decisive part’ that ‘British science and British brains’ played in defeating the German air attacks. Bimbo Norman at Bletchley, the cryptographers of Hut 6, Denys Felkin with prisoner interrogation and captured documents, Rowley Scott-Farnie with wireless listening, Claude Wavell in photo interpretation, and Charles Frank all contributed crucially. (I repeat their names here, it’s good for us all to remember the names of such dead heroes.)

Despite the success with the beams the situation was dire: ports were bombed, rationing was biting, amenities of peace-time were disappearing, invasion in summer seemed likely, a counter-invasion seemed ‘improbable for long into the future’, the Luftwaffe was disposed in a great arc from Norway through Denmark, Holland, France, U-boats were sinking vast amounts, and mines threatened strangulation.

I used to look at my wall map every morning and wonder how we could possibly survive. Anyone in their right senses would do the best deal he could with Hitler — but we had no thought of it.

Despite everything WSC was right that a powerful emotion ran through the country ‘giving the individual a strange, subdued elation at facing dangers in which he may easily perish as an individual but also a subconscious knowledge that any society which has a high enough proportion of similar individuals is all the more likely to survive because of their sacrifice.’

Hopeful signs: Wavell’s progress in Africa, FDR sending arms, and ‘above all’ we’d cracked ENIGMA and this held huge promise if we could turn the tide.

Portal was strengthening the Air Staff. Intelligence was strengthened. The deal to promote him to Deputy Director of Intelligence was a promotion of three grades which ‘was too much for the Civil Service’ which said only one grade!! (Civil Service HR was a nightmare even when fighting the Nazis!) He decided not to fight their decision. So he became Assistant Director of Intelligence (Science) and made responsible to the new head of Air Intelligence, Air Vice Marshal Medhurst. RVJ was the only civilian in an executive position on the Air Staff. He got on well with Medhurst.

WSC decided in 1940 that, given our inability to beat Hitler on land and the naval blockade being broken, Britain had to bank on ‘an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland’. Major attacks required fighter escorts. But daytime gave Germany a huge defensive advantage (e.g they could choose when to intercept, they needed less fuel etc). So a major factor would be how well Germany could use radar for defence at night. So RJ would focus on German radar which might prove ‘the key to understanding their whole system of night defence.’

Part II

CH23: Freya

We had very few intelligence assets in France, Belgium and Holland because ‘as a matter of principle’ we had not spied on allies!?

They obtained photos of German radar and an enterprising character found the frequencies despite the lack, still, of a proper Listening Service. This was the end of disbelief in German radar. Soon they had mapped German radar stations.

RVJ thought that Britain had an advantage in the discussions between airmen and technology people — radar was developed according to operational needs and handled by officers who had thought about how it could best be used. For us, the main contribution of radar was ‘a means of economising in fighters, one of our most precious commodities’.

The Germans did not have the same close relationship between flyers and engineers. Their radar was ‘much better engineered than ours’ in stability and precision but the Luftwaffe ‘made a philosophical mistake by focusing on the wrong objective’. Germany did not realise that maximum use of radar information required backing the stations with a communications network which could handle the information fast. They seemed to be trying to economise on Observer Corps posts on the ground and it took maybe two years for them to learn.

An amazingly brave and resourceful Dane had escaped Denmark in a plane (p200) and brought film of the Freya stations. The film was nearly all ruined by bungled MI5 handling of the film and they were suspected of being spies given their extraordinary story. Their story was true. As RVJ says, the more gallant and improbable the truth the less likely such people were to be believed. He ended up in the RAF. At the end of the war RVJ tried to do him a favour by arranging for him to lead the squadron into the airport at Copenhagen as the first Allied Force to return! Instead of being treated as a hero, he was cold-shouldered.

If they survive, the men who go first are rarely popular with those who wait for the wind to blow.

CH 24: Beams on the Wane

In North Africa, Wavell was rolled back by Rommel. On p204 RVJ says that ENIGMA messages showed German operations in North Africa yet Wavell told him after the war that the presence of the Germans was a complete surprise and if he’d known he would have changed his plans. (Was this a cockup or a deliberate protection of Bletchley’s decoding?)

Bletchley also gave three week warning of the Crete invasion but this didn’t enable us to stop it. When the Naval Commander-in-Chief had to choose between leaving the Army and saving his ships or playing the traditional part of getting the Army out, Cunningham said:

It takes the Navy three years to build a new ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition. The evacuation will continue.

Before Crete was finished it already seemed from ENIGMA that Germany was preparing to attack Russia. RVJ thought it was mad to do it before knocking Britain out but ‘what a relief it was’. JIC was much slower to conclude than Bletchley. WSC commented that he was unsatisfied with the collective process of JIC and wanted to see the original messages himself. (I think many senior officials today would threaten to resign if a PM asked similarly to see the original messages and sources of intelligence assessments.)

Fascinatingly, RVJ says that among the issues chased after the Oslo Report was a) radio-controlled rocket-driven gliders for use against ships, b) ‘a television head’ for a ballistic bomb which would be steered from a launching aircraft using the TV picture — i.e the sort of FPV drone now being deployed in Ukraine! The former was deployed two years later, the latter not until after the war. (Interesting example of how an idea like this can occur long before it is technically possible.)

RVJ had briefed agents to look for traces that might indicate German developments on the atom bomb including heavy water production in Norway. Signals came in suggesting heavy water production was increasing and this was one of the reasons America decided to embark on the Manhattan Project. More important was the British Committee under Sir George Thomson, convinced particularly by Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, decided a bomb was feasible.

Watson-Watt considered forming the scientists dotted around Whitehall into one organisation. Tizard was asked to consider the question. He visited RVJ’s offices and saw Decline and Fall on the desk. He flicked through and read a famous passage about one of the two Gordions, famous for his interest in concubines and his amazing library. RVJ showed him what they’d been doing, hoping to show he needed no ‘coordination from above’. There was though a case for bringing together the scientists periodically especially those working on what’s now known as ‘Operational Research’. The heads of various sections were formed into a OR Committee with a Research Centre as part of the Air Staff. (RVJ points out that similar work was done in WWI, OR was not entirely new.) An ‘impresario’, Leslie Macdonnell, was given the task of handling the ‘prima donna’ scientists. (NB. Alan Kay’s comment that the ability to handle great scientists is a skill rarer than a Nobel Prize.)

RVJ looked at the problem of bombing. Cameras were installed in bombers to determine their location when they dropped bombs. This finally convinced the Air Marshals that ‘astronavigation, dead reckoning, and ordinary radio beacons were thoroughly inadequate’ and they started emulating German techniques.

Until this there was a huge difference between Fighter Command and Bomber Command in how they treated scientists. The former knew it was ‘up against desperate odds’, the latter was complacent.

RVJ tells a marvellous story of a classic English eccentric, Hugh Smith — an engineer who became a scholar in Anglo-Saxon, and had built replicas of old printing presses to solve scholarly problems. He was to be invalided out of the RAF and wanted to join RVJ’s team. He suggested he could analyse charred documents found in planes. He proved a valuable recuit.

CH 25: ‘Jay’

‘Force and fraud in war are the two cardinal virtues.’ Hobbes

One of the great German operations was masterminded by Colonel Giskes who turned ‘Operation North Pole’ against us. SOE parachuted sabotage agents into Holland. Giskes caught one of the first and sent suitable messages back to London. Giskes discovered the network, where future drops would be etc. He caught everyone while tricking the SOE into thinking all was well. He even tricked the SOE into dropping tennis balls instead of explosives on the pretext the agent was in touch with the King of Belgium who was known to be keen on tennis.

One of RVJ’s assistants went to work with Kim Philby of MI6. One of those working in deception, ‘George’, came up with the idea of putting a body into the sea off Spain, dressed as a Marine colonel, with a case containing documents making it seem we would land in Sardinia and Greece in 1943 instead of Sicily. The deception worked. Germany diverted an armoured division to Greece and didn’t realise the target was Sicily until too late. This was part of Operation Mincemeat.

(RVJ only learned the truth of this operation in 1952 after WSC got him to return briefly to the MOD when RVJ was also a member of JIC. Ian Colvin had figured out the story, partly from clues in Duff Cooper’s Operation Heartbreak (ostensibly fiction). Cooper was approached by security authorities. He told them that if they tried to prosecute him he would state that he got the story from WSC himself. JIC decided (‘unsportingly’, RVJ) to hold back Colvin’s book until they could get an official account out in another book, The Man Who Never Was.)

RVJ worked with ‘George’ in August 1941. A device for navigation had been developed similar to RVJ’s proposal that was rejected in 1938. But Bomber Command, still unconvinced, had deployed it in a trial in Germany without telling the Air Staff. One of the planes was lost. It was a repeat of Germany’s error in 1940 but ‘even more serious’. There were emergency meetings. The bombing campaign of 1942 would be hugely affected. How likely was it that the Germans had figured out the new device from a combination of downed pilots and the equipment? Could deception be applied?

RVJ came up with various measures to fool his opposite numbers including the use of serial numbers for equipment. The system they wanted hidden was called ‘Gee’. RVJ created a new system called ‘Jay’, so that if POWs had been overheard saying ‘Gee’ the Germans would think ‘it must have been Jay not Gee’! Jay was made as authentic as possible. And clues were scattered. ‘George’ had various German agents in Britain under control. So it was fed back via a German agent that he had overheard British officers discussing Jay in the Savoy. An elaborate hoax was created. We monitored the German agents thanked by their masters for their valuable contribution! They hoped to buy three months or so for Gee to be deployed from March 1942. They got 5 months before jamming started. They counted it a success. Evidence emerged after the war how Germany had been tricked. Further, after the germans realised they’d been hoaxed, they stopped paying attention to the Jay beams which continued to work to the end of the war and provide a useful homing beacon!

CH 26: Wurzburg

A heroic pilot, Tony Hill, got photos of equipment at Bruneval. (Hill crashed on another mission. A rescue attempt was made with the Resistance grabbing him from a hospital but he died as he was being carried to the plane. ‘I felt his loss more than any other in the whole war.’) They also briefed the emerging ‘underground’ in occupied countries to seek radar installations.

Germany had ‘a far greater command of precision engineering than we had (some notable exceptions such as Rolls Royce apart)’. The British approach was to look for technical snags and how to get around them ‘without having to go to the trouble of great precision of design or workmanship’ and perhaps we often ‘took as much trouble in avoiding the difficulties as the Germans did in overcoming them by good workmanship’. Overall in the war German equipment was very good but less adaptable and ‘we could more easily change ours to meet a new situation’.

CH 27: The Bruneval Raid

The general situation was terrible over winter 1941/42 and in feb 1942 Singapore fell (recounted in Alanbrooke’s diaries). Also in February there was the shock of German ships leaving Brest and sailing through the Channel. This embarrassing disaster was partly helped by a clever German tactic of subtly increasing jamming over a period so our listeners got used to it.

Morale was partly restored by the Bruneval raid. RVJ and others had looked at Hill’s photos of Bruneval. They discussed the idea of a raid. A plan was suggested to the Combined Operations HQ. Reconnaissance was carried out by French resistance fighters. The beach was not mined. It was decided to send in ~120 paratroops who would then put captured equipment on a ship. RVJ volunteered to go but admits to being ‘distinctly relieved’ when he was forbidden to go on the sensible grounds that it would be a huge security disaster if he were captured. A mechanic was sent to deal with the equipment. RVJ tried to get him an army uniform so he would not stand out if captured — and ‘it seems incredible, even at this distance of time, but the War Office adamantly refused to cooperate’ [some things never change!!].

Some of the paras were dropped off target. This reduced the force for the attack. But they successfully grabbed equipment and got to the boats on the beach. Two were killed, six missing (survived the war). Two prisoners were brought back, one an operator of the kit. He turned out to be useless. Germany did not give these teams priority over personnel and Hitler’s ban of amateur radio deprived the Nazis of a cadre of enthusiastic amateurs which England had. After the war the head of German Air Signals and Radar told RVJ that the equipment was particularly well made partly to make up for the known low quality of the people.

The raid provided great knowledge of the state of radar technology applied to nightfighter control. A consequence of the raid was that orders were issued that all German radar equipments were to be protected by barbed wire. This shows up strongly on aerial photos because the grass grows longer underneath and this allowed RVJ to discover other stations. After the war the German Paratroop Commander said that Bruvenal was the best British raid of the war.

RVJ did not know until after the war that he had been nominated for a CB (The Companion of the Order of the Bath) by WSC himself but the head of the Civil Service threatened to resign if he was given a CB. A compromise was reached on a CBE. The raid also ‘clinched the future of paratroops in Britain’. The 1st Airborne Division and the 1st Paratroop Brigade were immediately formed and ‘Bruneval’ is inscribed on the drums of the Parachute Regiment.

Yorkshire TV organised a reunion in 1976 for those still alive (many survivors were killed in later operations). If anybody finds a copy please post the link.

CH 28: The Baedeker Beams

There was huge relief about the Nazi turn East. RVJ started seeing despairing messages from German commanders about their engine oil freezing solid. There were hopes maybe Russia could hold out.

RVJ gave 6 weeks notice of the ‘Baedeker’ raids from April 1942 but there was a botch over supersonic beams. An elementary mistake with the listening stations led to the false conclusion that supersonic beams were not being used therefore jamming of supersonic beams was not deployed. When the error was uncovered they deployed supersonic jamming and the accuracy of the bombing collapsed. They missed the chance to stop maybe 80% of the bomb damage. RVJ was ‘so sickened that I did not even say that someone should be shot’. This error was left out of the Official History.

CH 29: El Hatto

Kim Philby was critical of how SIS was run but he had the habit of being right so was not removed. His main job was to watch and frustrate the Abwehr. He detected an operation to build an infrared detector in Spain to monitor shipping through the Straits of Gibraltar. This might compromise Operation Torch, the landing of American and British troops in North West Africa.

RVJ remembered reading the signal from Rommel that he was held up by ‘fanatical resistance at Bir Hacheim’, resistance of a Free French force.

To me, it was the beginning of a French revival that has continued long into the subsequent peace. It is today an encouragement that we, too, could again revive after the age of abdication that has paralysed us since 1945.

There was still no scientist in the Admiralty in the corresponding position to RVJ on the Air Staff, because of the opposition of the Directorate of Scientific Research, so RVJ was ‘in effect doing their Scientific Intelligence for them’ in collaboration with part of the Signals Section of Naval Intelligence. In trying to work out an approach the First Sea Lord botched security and provided ultra secret decrypt intelligence to people he should not. RVJ invented a bogus cover story that the decrypts were actually a cover story to hide intel from an agent inside the Abwehr, ‘el Hatto’ (Hatto being the name of Professor Hatto who worked at Bletchley)!

They managed to persuade Spain to stop supporting the German effort.

When they discovered a new German system being set up in Spain the next year, RVJ figured out that it would actually be net-more-useful to the RAF than to the Germans so they figured out how it worked and used it themselves! The system was so good it was continued after the war and spread across the world!

CH 30: Pineapple

An SOE officer suggested to RVJ that they try to steal a German nightfighter. It proved impractical but they focused on a different problem, a new beam station. The Resistance reports were so good, done by someone with serious technical skills, that RVJ concluded it was not justified to send someone to raid the station. SOE asked him to write an official letter thanking them so those on the ground did not feel their efforts had been wasted, which he did.

A few weeks later RVJ was summoned to Dansey, deputy chief of SIS. He was enraged about ‘those buggers in SOE’. It turned out SOE had sent a memo to the Chiefs of Staff proposing they take over SIS quoting RVJ’s letter!! RVJ had to explain that he’d written the letter and why. Dansey walked around his office saying ‘THE CHEATS, THE CHEATS, THE CHEATS!’ then, ‘As a matter of fact, he was our agent anyway.’

The agent turned out to be Yves Rocard, Professor of Physics at the Sorbonne. He was brought back to England foolishly by SOE then joined the Free French Navy. In 1944 his house was bombed. He realised his floor had vanished but his bed luckily remained on a shelf. He went back to sleep and in the morning found a crowd had gathered to watch the spectacle. He was ‘one of only two non-British-nationals who so gained our confidence’ he was allowed in RVJ’s office. His wife convinced the Germans that he had shown signs of going mad and survived the war. His son turned out a Far Left activist prominent in the 1968 riots. Rocard received a CBE.

CH 31: The Kammhuber Line

Specialists from the Telecommunications Research Establishment were given RAF commissions in case they were lost on flights to detect new German beams. One of them, Howard Cundall, was shot down and ended up in Stalag Luft 3 where he built a radio transmitter, opened up communication with UK, and fed back intelligence through the war — ‘and thus aided our offensive even from behind the barbed wire’.

The Belgian Underground was very productive sending information across France to Lisbon where it was sent back to London. A fireman on the train Lille-Lyons kept packages under the coal so that if the Germans searched he could shovel the package into the fire box. One of the volunteers told RVJ after the war that Belgium had a long history of being occupied so there was a culture of population surveillance of occupying forces.

In May 1942 Hitler ordered searchlights withdrawn to defend German cities. A Belgian, agent ‘Tegal’, had broken into a German base and stolen a map of German searchlights. This helped RVJ figure out how the lights and radar were coordinated. Interestingly RVJ says that the display used by us (using cathode ray tubes) was better than the display used by the Germans (spied and reported on by agents).

He recounts a message from a Belgian agent on German radar stations who, with friends, had mapped them out and been often shot at. He asked whether the British could signal the value of their work:

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 you can rely on our entire devotion and on the sacrifice of our lives.

RVJ reflected on his relative good fortune and wanted to try to show them how much their work was valued.

I was able a few months later to arrange some direct action. The episode illustrates the enormous advantage of my personal position in Intelligence. Having such a vivid contact with those who were risking their lives to get the information on the one hand, and with those at the summit of power, like Churchill, Cherwell, Sinclair and Portal on the other, I was able to ensure that work in the field was appreciated at the top with as little hierarchic attenuation as possible.

A new system was being developed which did not rely on beams but entirely on distance measurements from two ground stations which proved to be the most accurate bombing system developed in the war. When a trial was needed RVJ chose as a target one of the stations reported by the Belgians. He sent signals to the Belgians to watch. In December 1942 bombers flew at a constant radius from one Oboe station and the correct instant for bomb release was decided by a controller at a second station. The Belgians paced out the distances of the bombs and sent their measurements back to London. One of the bombs hit the building in which the nightfighter HQ was housed.

In areas with no direct contact with resistance agents, they dropped containers with carrier pigeons inside and questionnaires, like ‘Are there any German radio stations in your neighbourhood with aerials which rotate?’ Locals answered the questions and the pigeons brought the answers back to Britain!

With some clever inferences about missing information, they managed to put together a full systems map of the German night defences. He took their conclusions to Bomber Harris. He needed a Mosquito to confirm the picture and Harris had almost all of them. He got Cherwell to get Churchill to minute about the importance of finding German airborne radar wavelengths (a classic bureaucratic trick to change the incentives of those you have to appeal to).

CH 32: Lichtenstein

In Britain they’d decided as early as 1935 that night time interception would probably require a detector in the nightfighter to enable it to find the bomber after ground control put it in roughly the right area. RVJ had worked on this idea, cf. his infrared project. His team turned their attention to German airborne radar and infrared.

On previous visits to Bomber Command RVJ had been ‘courteously but disinterestedly received’. Now ‘the atmosphere was different’. He explained his need for some Mosquitoes (to detect airborne signals) to the C-in-C’s deputy, Air Vice Marshal RHM Saundby. Saundby read the Mirror cartoons, explaining the men would take his instructions more seriously if he showed familiarity. Saundby was another of those eccentrics that it’s hard to imagine getting anywhere in English public life today.

The Mosquitoes were agreed but did not appear. A Wellington, much slower, was sent instead to try. They found the signals but came under attack. The plane was wrecked and 4/6 of the crew injured. The radio operator continued to send back data on the signals even after shot multiple times and in the eye. The plane staggered back to England, ‘an epic of cool observation, great gallantry and resourceful doggedness’. The eye was saved and he was awarded the DSO. The last gap in understanding German air defences was closed.

The whole operation was harder than figuring out the beams, where they had prisoners and equipment to study. With the German night defences they had to search for the information by every conceivable means using many different brave and resourceful networks.

CH 33: Window

Comprehensive surveys looking at the whole picture (especially reports of 10/1/42 and 29/12/42) helped them to discover missing pieces such as the ‘surprisingly negative conclusion’ that the Germans could not identify their own fighters as we did with I.F.F. Understanding how the defences worked allowed our bombers to adapt tactics and counter-measures.

They also developed ‘the theory of Spoof’. You must either persuade the enemy a) you are where you are not or b) you are not where you are. German radar is good enough that you will be observed by their system. From his report:

It is therefore almost impossible to avoid giving to 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…

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…

Apart from obliteration, there remains the possibility of producing swarms of pulses which react as echoes off a large formation of aircraft... This in itself is true Spoof, which can be handled in mass so as to produce a greater spoof…

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…

It is unwise to be squeamish about taking countermeasures against any enemy development because of the danger of reciprocation. The enemy is not altogether lacking in ingenuity, and has probably be thought of most of the counters. The true reason against undertaking countermeasures is that ultimately the enemy will learn to overcome them, and that it is only during the period of his education that we shall reap the advantage. This period must be made to occur only when we want it, no matter what action the enemy may take against our own system in the meantime. When the correct time arrives there should be no hesitation.

There had been ‘a remarkable squeamishness’ regarding technical countermeasures against German radar. He was ‘amazed’ to sit through meetings up to the end of 1942 to discuss whether it was ‘wise’ to start a tit-for-tat on radar when our Navy had been jamming German radar since October 1940 and Germany had jammed our own radar successfully! Despite this there was a ‘nebulous but strong reluctance against taking technical measures against Luftwaffe radar’. At the heart of it was Watson-Watt.

RVJ makes a fascinating point on counterfactuals: one can partly understand why before the war there was fear in pursuing ideas about jamming because what if senior people decided radar was easily countered therefore they did not push it! But what if Germany had been more competent and had developed jamming themselves — we would have been sunk in 1940!! Perhaps Watson-Watt had a ‘bridge on the River Kwai’ attitude to radar and didn’t want it wrecked. Perhaps RVJ himself ‘remembering our old enmity’ wanted to wreck radar with Spoof.

After many delays and tests the idea of ‘Window’ (codename) went to the Chiefs of Staff Committee on 27 April 1942.

In the first 3 years of war Bomber Command was much more concerned about anti-aircraft guns than fighters ‘and it needed much convincing that the fighters were the greater threat, my own conclusion being that 70% of our losses were due to fighters at a time when the Command would not agree to a higher figure than 50%.’

After the COS approved Window, there was a further delay as others (including Watson-Watt) prevailed over Lindemann to stop deployment. Therre was a bureaucratic battle over summer 1942. RVJ thought the only big issue was timing, per his report at the time, not principle, partly because Germany now had such vast challenges in the East.

In October 1942 a Danish agent reported an overheard discussion between two Luftwaffe women staff discussing possible spoofing (the women were discussing a German control station thrown into chaos by a British deployment of aluminium dust). It was ‘extraordinary and unique in my experience, because the value of the report was independent of whether it was genuine or a plant’ (cf. p293). Opposition to deployment was entirely based on the argument that the idea (‘obvious’ according to RVJ) had not occurred to the Germans but now we had evidence that, whether the intel was real or fake, unarguably the Germans knew about the idea.

RVJ circulated a report quickly. RVJ could still not persuade Lindemann. He told Lindemann he would have to oppose him in the meeting.

L: If you do that, you will find Tizard and me united against you!

RVJ: If I’ve achieved that, by God, I've achieved something!

They parted in laughter. (Interesting and important they could keep relations friendly even over serious disputes about crucial issues affecting their reputations.)

Bomber Command retreated on the issue. RVJ lost the battle in the critical meeting but Lindemann did support further research. Other measures were deployed including jamming ground-air communications (when RVJ heard the codeword was TINSEL he was worried it might suggest to Germans the metal foil strips we were still withholding!).

In spring 1943 there was still opposition. Calculations were done on how much would be needed for what effects. At a meeting with Portal, Watson-Watt (now Scientific Advisor on Telecommunications, S.A.T) overplayed his hand claiming no radio or radar device in his experience had been more than 20-30% efficient in its initial stages. RVJ replied that if this figure were to be accepted then it should also be applied to German needs for use against us. Lindemann expanded.

Portal: S.A.T you’re clean bowled!

WW: Not bowled, sir, but caught at the wicket perhaps!

That was almost the end of the six year argument ‘for Portal would have no further debate’ and said he’d ask the PM’s permission to use Window as soon as possible. The Chiefs of Staff delayed until after Sicily had been invaded which RVJ could not understand. Portal pushed for a COS meeting with the PM on 23 June 1943. It was the second time RVJ had seen WSC since the beams meeting of 1940.

RVJ put the case. Watson-Watt pointed out the potential damage if Germany copied us. WSC asked Leigh Mallory, head of Fighter Command, his opinion for he would have to ‘carry the can’ if our defences failed. Mallory said our defences might be neutralised but he thought the gains in saved bomber crews were worth it and he would take responsibility. WSC concluded: ‘Very well, let us open the Window!’ (After the meeting WSC asked RVJ if Mr Sandys had seen him yet and RVJ replied ‘No sir’. (See chapter 38 below for what this refers to.)

RVJ organised for lectures to the bomber crews to explain how German air defences worked. There was a further delay when Herbert Morrison found out and threatened to raise the issue in Cabinet (because of possible civilian casualties). WSC said it was too technical for discussion in Cabinet and he would take responsibility.

RVJ was still puzzled: the Germans knew about the idea but had not deployed it, was this because of a German Watson-Watt arguing about the possible reprisals?! After the war he tried to find out. After Bruneval they expected us to use Window and were mystified when we didn’t. The Germans did trials in 1942. The effects were do disastrous Göring ordered all reports destroyed and forbade further discussion in case Britain found out about it!

CH 34: Hamburg

RVJ and others went out to a listening station to watch the first raid with Window in July 1943. Only 1.5% of bombers were lost compared to 6% for the previous attacks on Hamburg. They listened to German defenders perplexed over coming nights.

Hamburg raids produced a firestorm that RVJ said was unanticipated. Speer said after the war that the Hamburg raid produced ‘an extraordinary impression’ and the Nazi command feared that ‘this type of attack upon another six German towns would inevitably cripple the will to sustain armaments and war production’.

RVJ: we started the war opposed to civilian bombing and ended up doing Hamburg — how? Many blamed Lindemann but he’d been keen on precision strikes as was Portal who wanted to focus on destroying oil facilities. But we’d been acting under the delusion that our bombing was much more accurate than it really was then we were forced to realise we couldn’t ‘even guarantee to hit towns, let alone individual factories’. After Germany started bombing cities indiscriminately it was ‘an emotional certainty’ that we’d do the same.

Could we destroy Germans’ will to fight? Only a few ‘clung to the immorality of area bombing’. The rest of us asked: how to balance what would be needed for Hamburg style attacks versus the weakening of other efforts including dealing with U-boats?

We probably lost more in airmen’s lives and expensive bombers than we did damage to Germany ‘but such an analysis may be too facile’. German production went up ‘spectacularly’ at a time we expected it to fall, ‘a remarkable tribute to the increased determination of the Germans in response to our terrible attacks’. But we also saw signs of ‘technical distress’ which must be thrown into the balance along with the large manpower tied down in air defence. Ironically, improvements in our bombing technique meant we could have now down precision bombing much better but we were now ‘so indoctrinated with the area policy’!

We could not keep up the scale of Hamburg attacks and they recovered production and reorganised air defence to deal with Window.

[Could we really not have kept up the scale? Was it impossible for us to have saved up resources and done ‘another Hamburg’ instead of more smaller operations, then saved up and done ‘another Hamburg’ — might it not have been more effective to systematically obliterate entire cities even if this meant long pauses between attacks to save enough ammo to pass the critical firestorm threshold??]

Window bought a temporary window of relief in which RVJ could turn to other matters.

CH 35: Heavy Water

Tronstad’s heavy water telegram and journey from Norway to Britain in 1941 confirmed our suspicions that Germany was interested in heavy water for an atomic pile.

In 1942 the SOE captured a Norwegian steamer, on it was Skinnarland who came from the site of the heavy water plant, and he was briefed and parachuted back into Norway before his absence was noted. He made contact with the chief engineer of the plant and eventually people and information were extracted from Norway. RVJ debriefed them. It was agreed to try to knock out the plant. To avoid civilian deaths a special forces operation was launched which hit disaster when the planes crashed. Another operation was launched in 1943 which the German commander in Norway described as ‘the best coup I have ever seen’. The plant was knocked out of action for months.

In December 1942 the first atomic pile went critical in Fermi’s lab in Chicago. It was suggested that Britain try to get Niels Bohr to Britain from Denmark. Chadwick was persuaded by SIS to write a letter to Bohr but Bohr decided to stay in Denmark.

RVJ was asked by Eric Welsh to withdraw Charles Frank from meetings in the Tube Alloys project (i.e the UK nuclear project). RVJ agreed: ‘It was to have grave effects’ (see chapter ??).

CH 36: Revelations from the Secret Service

A ‘fascination’ of the war was the weird and wonderful talent thrown together.

There were mathematicians at Bletchley. There were men who alternated between desk jobs and ‘the sharp end’.

He describes some adventures to rescue servicemen captured in Europe who escaped. There was a section of MI9 (attached to SIS) to organise such escapes. One of those working in it was Airey Neave who made a famous escape from Colditz (and was later crucial in Thatcher winning the leadership then was blown up in Westminster by the IRA). It was a fraught business as rescues also often meant local civilians being executed.

One of those who, like the Pimpernel, appeared out of nowhere to help the operations in Europe turned out to be, when his identity was finally figured out, a confidence trickster suspected of murder who had fled to Europe — his patriotism kicked in and as RVJ says ‘who better than a confidence trickster who was prepared not to stop at murder?’ After the war it turned out he had played a double game with the Germans, informing on French activities, so he did help some escape but also got locals killed. A few days before the liberation of Paris he left it in the uniform of a German officer. Some months after VE Day he was arrested in the American Zone of Germany posing as a captain in the British Intelligence Corps. He was brought back to Paris, stole a uniform, escaped, then died in a shoot out with the French police who tried to arrest him again. Romantic illusions about a villain who turned out a hero were ‘shattered’.

Another renegade turned out to be Prof Lindemann’s black sheep of a brother who had become an actor and helped SIS give agents lessons in makeup for disguise.

RVJ tells various amusing stories I won’t repeat here.

RVJ remarks that many involved in crazy wartime adventures found it impossible to adjust to normal life after the war and chased dangerous adventures and killed themselves.

CH 37: Full Stretch

By the end of 1942 the resources of his ‘small Section were stretched to the limit’ — at this point only five people.

A more accurate form of radar was invented. Should it be used in bombers or against U-boats first, especially given the fast invention/counter-action cycle of the war rendered neutralised many good ideas quickly? The initial decision was for bombers. RVJ wrote a meme arguing that if it was fitted to bombers it would soon be discovered in wrecks and there would be a speedy counter-measure, so they should try it against U-boats first because this had greater optionality [as people put it these days]. He lost the argument and it was deployed in both.

We had also had success against the German Naval Enigma signals (more complex than the Luftwaffe version). And we therefore were desperate for a deception operation to fool the Germans about the reason for our successes against U-boats. We created a fake story that we were using infrared. (This sparked the creation of an ingenious paint to make U-boats look invisible to infrared, though we were not using infrared.)

We deployed the new radar successfully for 6 months (‘much longer than we had dared to hope’) from March 1943 before the Germans figured out what was happening. Fortunately when they realised we had a better radar, they blamed all the U-boat losses on that, not on us cracking Enigma.

RVJ’s team of five read about ‘150 sheets of foolscap paper’ plus meetings and visits. In November 1942 he felt swamped and in danger of missing vital things therefore asked for further staff. The development of scientific intelligence had started too late, he had not been allowed to build his team until after more than a year and ‘all the ablest people had been fitted into posts and it was now difficult to prise them out’.

It has been part of our policy to keep the staff to its smallest possible limits consistent with safety, because the larger the field any one man can cover, the more chance there is of those fortunate correlations which only occur when one brain and one memory can connect two or more remotely gathered facts. Moreover, a large staff generally requires so much administration that its head has little chance of real work himself, and he cannot therefore speak with that certainty which arises only from intimate contact with the facts. [There’s a Steve Jobs email somewhere making this point, can someone leave a link in comments?]

RVJ says that ‘even a single individual can sometimes be more effective than a large organisation’. He read every Enigma message himself in 1940 and his memory was so good he could relate new ones to old ones, causing many to think he had some secret source of intelligence.

He was allowed a few more staff.

He recounts how only once during the war was he diverted from the war — by a committee of the Institute for Physics that published a plan for after the war.

His letter in response should be read in full:

TLDR: Those who actually understand planning got involved before the war and are now busy — so pipe down!

He goes on to say that the IOP report was misunderstood and led to e.g a DOWNGRADE of the importance of physics in Scottish education post-war! My broken record: today’s Whitehall problems are intrinsic to its post-1850s ‘professionalisation’, i.e bureaucratisation.

Four weeks later there arrived in his office a telegram from Stockholm saying that a Danish engineer had overheard a discussion between a Berlin professor and engineers about a new German weapon, a rocket containing 5 tons of explosive with a range of 200km. A further report in January 1943 warned of a factory at Peenemünde. These reports ‘foretold a deluge’ — the V2 rocket program.

In May 1943 a German crew of a Ju-88 nightfighter defected and managed to land in Scotland without getting shot down. RVJ tried to get the pilots who chose NOT to shoot it down (rightly) a DFC — this was too much for the system but they were Mentioned in Despatches. This gave us an undamaged new German radar and a cooperative crew.

For two years stubborn officials in the Photo Branch of the Air Staff resisted adding cameras to planes to improve the photos. RVJ found the blocking official, discovered that he loved making jam, opened up a chat about making quince jam, promised to deliver quinces to him, and got his approval, finally, for forward-facing cameras on Mosquitoes. [Having sunk to some depths in battles to make officials see sense, I have enormous respect for RVJ in this tale — this should be in the unofficial spad ‘how to get things done’ handbook!]

CH 38: Peenemünde

The Oslo Report had mentioned Peenemünde as a site for work on radio-controlled rocket gliders and, separately, work on gyro-stabilised and radio controlled shells.

When the Danish warning had come about Peenemünde, only 3 rockets had been fired, the first in October 1942.

In March 1943 transcripts of discussion between two German generals captured after el Alamein who discussed rockets going into the stratosphere, one of them had visited a site with von Brauchitsch.

This was ‘a classic situation’ — they were aware of something ‘without knowing enough to give the Operational Staffs something to act on and so take countermeasures’. RVJ thought his team should not pass on bits and pieces of intelligence — this could a) precipitate erroneous action and b) insidiously acclimatise recipients so they felt no need for urgent action. It was better to wait and present a fuller picture. If the watchdog barks too late it’s fatal but if ‘he barks so often at threats which do not subsequently materialise then his master will get tired of responding to false alarms’.

Action from the War Office led to escalation of worries as far as General Ismay writing to the PM. The Chiefs of Staff recommended a single investigator (Sandys) be appointed — it ‘did not seem to occur to the Chiefs that they already had a Scientific Intelligence component inside their organisation’. RVJ resolved to help Sandys while keeping an eye on the problem.

He also made his ‘longest shot in the entire war’. He thought that if rockets were being fired, then the Germans would have to deploy their best radar teams to track experiments. So he kept a lookout with Bletchley on signs of this happening.

Meantime Sandys started trying to cut RVJ’s team out of information on rockets [NB. again normal bureaucratic infighting]. But he controlled information from agents and the photo section kept sharing with him. Sandys’ team badly briefed agents (‘a considerable art’) and this bedevilled the rocket inquiry for the next year. Sandys was also given duff interpretation of photos.

On 14 June the PM was shown photos and given Sandys’ team’s interpretation. RVJ saw them on 18th. The photos showed a rocket which had been missed by Sandys. RVJ is honest enough to admit a feeling of ‘elation’! RVJ went to Lindemann who asked RVJ to share the information with Sandys which he did, hoping for discussion.

Instead, there was no acknowledgement of my note: two or three days later there appeared an addendum from Sandys’ interpreter to his previous report, saying that an object was visible on the photograph, without any mention that anyone but himself had found it. This experience certainly confirmed my impression that my help was being avoided, and that Sandys wished to have others think that his arrangements were working well.

Lindemann was no more pleased than I was, and he again spoke to Churchill. He told me that he had told Churchill that he did not know whether I was going to agree with him about the rocket or not, but that my record was such that Churchill must hear me. To his credit, he already knew that I did not agree with him, and the gesture must have cost him much. It was this pressure from Lindemann, almost certainly, that was the cause of Churchill calling me to his side after the Window meeting of 23 June [Chapter 33] and asking me whether Mr Sandys had been in touch with me. So with his instruction to hold myself in readiness for the following week, I sat up that same night until 2.30 a.m writing a report to summarise what I could now see of the rocket picture.

RVJ recommended bombing Peenemünde as a top priority. Also his long shot had paid off. The Germans’ top radar team had been shifted to Peenemünde.

There was a meeting of the War Cabinet Defence Committee (Operations), in the underground Cabinet rooms, to discuss it on 29 June with the PM, Attlee, Eden, and other ministers. RVJ largely agreed with Sandys’ presentation. Lindemann argued against this interpretation and thought it was a German deception operation (confusing matters, some of the photos were of wooden dummies, not real rockets, so Lindemann was sort of right). RVJ argued against Lindemann. He did not think it was a deception operation and the case for rockets was stronger than the case for beams had been in 1940.

Interestingly RVJ found Alanbrooke ‘disappointing, in view of his high reputation’ and his notes of the meeting were ‘superficial’ (cf. for reference to the meeting in AB’s Memoirs). It was agreed that Peenemünde would be bombed ASAP; it eventually happened on 17/18 August 1943. The raid was somewhat botched, targets ill-chosen then bombs went awry — one consequence was we destroyed the living quarters of foreign workers who had supplied us with intelligence: ‘we never had another report from them’ [my god]. We killed Dr Thiel, responsible for rocket jet design, and caused other disruption. estimates of delay casued varied from 4 weeks to 6 months. RVJ thought ‘at least two months’ and the delay meant we did not have the rocket and flying bomb at the same time in 1944. The raid also proved the use of Window through the use of a diversionary sortie towards Berlin which caused chaos for German fighters. The chaos was so bad that an infuriated Goering called the Chief of the German Air Staff who shot himself [put people under pressure & you never know what good luck you’ll get]. Other key people survived including von Braun who rescued key documents from the flames. [Von Braun of course was crucial post-war to NASA.]

CH 39: FZG 76

RVJ tried to have a holiday but was called back for a meeting to discuss new intel on the rockets on 31/8.

An object had crashed on an island in the Baltic, been photographed by Swedes and the info sent to London. (One of those involved was captured, tortured, rescued, recovered, returned to active service.) It was a flying bomb. Another report came in from the French network — it turned out to be from ‘AMNIARIX’, Jeannie Rousseau, Vicomtesse de Clarens, who wrote the Foreword (above). Her report is p351. It contained German estimates that 50-100 such bombs could destroy London and Germany was planning systematic destruction of British cities.

RVJ had to absorb multiple reports in a few hours after returning from his holiday then attend a meeting with the PM. Lindemann continued to reject the evidence and feared diverting resources, such as steel for shelters.

I said almost nothing at the meeting... The experience brought home to me what my real strength had been at the earlier meetings. It was that, in contrast to everyone else sitting around the Cabinet table, I had done all my own work for myself, and forged out every link in the chain of evidence, so that I knew exactly what its strength was. Everyone else, in their more elevated positions, had had to depend on work done for them by their staffs, frequently only to be briefed at the last moment, as I myself had had to be on this occasion. And even with Charles Frank’s understanding and skill, and even though I had been away from the work for only a week, I felt that there was too much sloppiness in my knowledge for me to pronounce positively on the various possibilities. On a previous occasion I had quoted Palmerston’s statement of 1838 to Queen Victoria, and now I even more appreciated its force:

In England, the ministers who are at the heads of the several departments of the State are liable any day and every day to defend themselves in Parliament; in order to do this, they must be minutely acquainted with all the details of the business of their offices, and the only way of being constantly armed with such information is to conduct and direct those details themselves.

First, RVJ’s point here is obviously directly relevant to the entire debacle of covid and the entire question of the general competence/incompetence of government.

One of the most fundamental problems in government normally — therefore in covid at the start before we forced changes — was ‘the normal process’ generating briefings from relatively senior people who did not really understand the subject rather than relatively junior people who did understand. When you combine that (A) with (B) largely clueless ministers — clueless in the sense of *clueless about how to have serious meetings and how to get things done* and clueless in the sense of *clueless about viruses/pandemics* — and combine both A and B with (C) a lack of Red Team and data science function at the heart of No10/70 Whitehall to expose errors, it’s obviously a disastrous combination.

One of the most fundamental things I tried to do (as well as creating the data science / Red Team function) was therefore to get the person who had done ‘my own work for myself, and forged out every link in the chain of evidence’ in the Cabinet room. This was often highly unpopular because it subverted the extremely hierarchical culture of modern Whitehall and it involved relatively young people explaining things to senior people, which was extremely unpopular with many senior MPs and officials (young men, bad enough, young women, even worse). The PM, the Cabinet Secretary, and senior ministers all complained to me at different times. I told them all to suck it up. They did not like it. It made everything better.

Second, the development of the supposedly meritocratic and supposedly impartial civil service since the 1850s has destroyed the principle that Palmerston describes about how the British state used to work. Today, ministerial responsibility is fake and so is the supposed responsibility inside the civil service that supposedly replaced the old system. Practically nobody anywhere ever takes individual responsibility for anything. And both the MPs and officials are happy with this system. Yes it guarantees government is a joke but for the individual players, today in May 2024 in SW1, they have grown up in this system, have known no other (except for the brief period in 2019-20 which they mostly hated), cannot conceive of something different, and anybody suggesting a shift from it will be immediately marked for career death.

So our official constitutional story is based on the idea that Palmerston’s 1838 statement — ministers are actually directing details and therefore are actually responsible — remains true but it is now a fake story that everybody is happy to repeat, like the idea that the civil service recruits from ‘the best in the world’ when it actually recruits almost entirely internally and deliberately excludes ~100% of the most talented. (NB. In summer 2020 the Cabinet Secretary agreed to end this. Like almost all such important changes in summer 2020 it was immediately dropped when Vote Leave left No10.)

This passage, focusing attention on two critical aspects of how the British state works and the central issue of personal responsibility, gets to the absolute heart of what works well/badly in government and why. And it shows a fundamental meta-lesson of history and high performance that I keep repeating, but which you will never ever see pundits repeat because it undermines the fake official narrative: we see this lesson repeatedly yet every core institution of the state works to suppress learning the lessons and to enforce the opposite practices.

This is bound to be the case when the critical mass of people are normal MPs and officials and it is futile to pretend the same people can be ‘reformed’ into behaving differently. Only a change in the centre of gravity of the nature/skills of the people can bring a change in the culture from *fight learning* to *embrace fast learning* and therefore a change in institutional performance.

Today in Westminster, everything works to entrench the culture of failure and fight against the culture of fast learning. Revealed preference is that almost everybody is happy with this (those who aren’t know it’s suicidal to say so) and all the whining about ‘incompetence’ really just means ‘I want my friends in charge’, that is, changing one set of people for a practically identical set of people, like electrons without individual characteristics — it does not mean changing the institutions that program identical blunders repeatedly.

Truss: useless, never known anything other than useless SW1.

Sunak: smartest and hardest working MP, worked at Goldmans.

Result?

Identical: total humiliating failure.

What lesson will be drawn from this?

Change the leader!

What will not be learned?

*Swapping electrons is pointless, the system is running the people and is working as intended.*

I have put the above in bold because it is so important — and like all the most important things about history and government, its importance is in direct proportion to its simplicity-obviousness and invisibility in official discussion. The fact that it is both so simple-obvious and so invisible sums up our situation and why we see states blunder into stupid wars, as we have blundered with Ukraine.

Back to RVJ…

AMNIARIX had managed to get herself hired to translate work on the rockets and got to know some of the Germans. She would be captured just before D-Day but even as she was captured she talked loudly in German, thus warning others who escaped. She was sent to a concentration camp. She survived and met with RVJ in 1976 for a Yorkshire TV show (please find/put on YouTube!!)

An ENIGMA message of 7/9 tipped us off about a pilotless aircraft, which Lindemann had predicted. (NB. there was a) the first guided ballistic missiles and b) a rocket driven ‘pilotless aircraft’ — they were different things but part of the same research project. The V2 rocket was the first manmade object to cross the Karman line into space.) But Lindemann refused to accept the evidence and argued that it was referring to ‘an anti-aircraft aiming apparatus’, a predictor. RVJ thought Lindemann was by now so obsessed by going on the offensive and so hostile to returning to being on the defensive ‘that he subconsciously rejected any interpretation that might throw us back on the defensive, even at the expense of denying his own vindication by the appearance of the pilotless aircraft’.

On 14/9 RVJ issued a note saying that the Germans were installing, under the cover name FZG 76, a large ground organisation in France-Belgium ‘probably concerned with directing an attack on England by rocket-driven pilotless aircraft’. Attack by the pilotless aircraft appears from reports to be ‘fairly imminent’ but the ballistic missile deployment is unclear. There was still bureaucratic confusion with the Sandys group. And Lindemann kept arguing that there wasn’t a fuel that could drive the ballistic missile.

On 25/9/43 RVJ wrote another report (p358).

[Carried on from before…]

He warned that because our sources had given good warning but the attack hadn’t yet happened, it would be a mistake to ‘discredit their account’. Some think the technical barriers are to great but we’ve seen the German succeed where we’ve failed. It’s ‘probable’ they also have a ‘pilotless aircraft’ as well as a rocket and ‘it is very possible that the aircraft will arrive first’.

This was discussed with the PM on 25/10. The PM asked Field Marshal Smuts what he thought and after a pause Smuts said, ‘Well the evidence may not be conclusive but I think a jury would convict!’

RVJ’s long term bet on monitoring the best German radar team now paid off. In the autumn they found the unit in the Baltic tracking an object and transmitting data. It was the flying bomb. There were also reports of German constructions near the Channel coast.

They got crucial information about the sites from Michel Holland. His network mapped the bases partly by becoming workers there. His network survived so long because he used no radio. He was finally caught (5/2/44), tortured, didn’t break, was sent to a concentration camp, survived, and met RVJ post-war. The French resistance ‘played a great part’ in this episode. Another, Olivier Giran, was caught in 1943. He wrote to his parents after his death sentence:

‘Squabbles’ in London continued — some ‘inevitable and fair’ but ‘others were entirely avoidable’. To RVJ’s ‘amazement’ the Air Staff now stepped in. An Air Commodore was put in charge of coordinating intelligence on the matter and directing countermeasures. And JIC ‘stepped in to back [the Commodore] up’.

RVJ gives an interesting assessment on JIC,

[JIC’s] record had been singularly undistinguished even to the extent of being far later than Churchill himself in recognising the German intention to attack Russia.

JIC wanted RVJ to provide raw data which it would turn into ‘appreciations’, meeting every afternoon. Had he attended RVJ would have lost half of every working day. He wrote to the JIC Chairman strongly objecting to the creation of a committee, making a general point about how often they are ‘otiose’, and stating that he would continue his own investigations regardless of the new committee:

The JIC chairman did not reply. RVJ then went down with a nasty bug and a temperature of 108 which then collapsed to the bottom of the scale. He was quite seriously ill, was forbidden to return to work until his temperature was normal, after 2 weeks he returned telling the doctor he only had to last another 6-8 months. While he was in bed we got good photos of crucial sites including of an actual flying bomb. RVJ compiled a report for 23/12/43 summarising the intel with predictions of the intended rate of bombardment, accuracy etc. Post-war analysis showed RVJ got most of it right. His main mistake was propulsion which they only figured out after the attacks started. Interestingly the ingenious design was another example of a core idea being quite old (1929) and underrated. RVJ says that his general principle of Occam’s Razor was usually effective but occasionally went wrong and this was an example. Luckily this particular error did not make a difference to the proposed countermeasures.

When our bombing started the Germans tried to conceal their operations with a deep deception, essentially closing down the key unit and having it to transfer to a new one, with the commanding officer even dying his hair and changing his name. AMNIARIX, however, caught wind of it and sent a full report of the secret operation.

[JIC remains an important committee. Its place in the structure has changed a few times since then. It is now one of many parts of the Cabinet Office system for national security that a) is for all practical purposes totally outside any ministerial or PM oversight, b) only the PM could change how it works (the Foreign Secretary or Defence Minister would be ignored if they demanded any changes), and c) a PM would face severe obstruction were they to try to exercise any serious oversight of it, or even send a ‘political’ adviser to listen to it. In covid JIC was out of its comfort zone and anyway is seriously deficient in its ability to do scientific work in the way of RVJ’s team. It had to be prompted by political people to do some obvious things. The Cabinet Office redacted my comments on aspects of this from my covid statement, as they did regarding the lab leak. NB. things the CO redacts for the Inquiry are not seen by the judge. What’s the best thing written on JIC and WW2?]

CH 40: The Americans Convinced

Rivalry between the US Navy and Army was even greater than observed in the UK.

RVJ recounts how minesweeping data turned out to be largely bogus when a physicist went out on minesweeping boats to see for himself — the only accurate data was whether it blew up port or starboard. It showed what Newton had written:

If, instead of sending the observations of able seamen to able mathematicians on land, the land would send able mathematicians to sea, it would signify much more to the improvement of navigation and the safety of men’s lives and estates on that element.

An American professor of applied maths was sent to check RVJ’s work on the rockets and confirmed to the US Chiefs of Staff that the work was sound.

The accuracy meant that RVJ was confident that London was the only viable target and Germany could not target critical ports for D-Day. They hoped to land in Normandy before the first attacks came but expected Hitler to launch them immediately after.

CH 41: ‘Flames': Problems of Bomber Command

By October 1943 Window was performing ‘even better than could be hoped’. Goering wrote that the British must have ‘the greatest genius’ in the field of radar, must have worked out a countermeasure for Window, and after the war he would buy a British radio!

The Belgian resistance captured some important German documents with data on German radio beacons.

Bomber Command and Harris operated on braoder targets, the US Eighth Air Force on more precise targets such as factories. Coordination was poor.

In October 1943 a US raid on a ballbearing factory involved the loss of 60/291 Flying Fortresses and was thought to have knocked out 75% of ballbearing production. BUT, ‘production somehow went on and even increased’ so it seemed that ‘even at the expense of prohibitive losses the selective policy would not work’. The logic of the British strategy had been —

1. Precise attacks needed optical aiming in daylight so bombers would always be visible to fighters.

2. Precise raids in daylight required fighter escorts.

3. Long-range fighters needed more fuel so would never be able to out-perform short-range fighters.

4. Therefore bomb at night, but be less accurate.

The chances of surviving a tour of 30 operations in Bomber Command in 1943 were about one in six ‘but morale never faltered’.

In late 1943 it turned out that the Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) system that RVJ had warned about futilely in 1941 was now being spoofed by the Germans to destroy bombers. He regarded it as ‘immoral’ that Bomber Command had continued its use because the crews believed in it so it would give them ‘confidence’ and he particularly criticised the Operational Research Section ‘which, as scientists, should have been much more objective’.

In early 1944 the upgraded Mustang had the speed and range to change the balance and support daylight bombing. In February 1944 we used this advantage to smash German aircraft factories, including destroying 700 M-109s. Still, German production had risen from 100 planes per month in 1943 to 1,500 in 1944, a 15X growth. But Germany was running out of trained pilots.

Still the Germans came up with a new airborne radar that was highly effective (SN2). This combined with ‘appallingly indiscreet’ use of radio transmissions by Bomber Command allowed German intelligence to predict Allied routes and wreak havoc for months. On 30 March we sustained the worst losses of the war — 96/795 failed to return.

CH 42: The Baby Blitz

27/11/43 Goering promised Hitler a revenge attack on London for the attacks on Berlin but it had to be delayed as did other German operations as the pressure told. The attack came in January 1944 and was known as ‘the Baby Blitz’, fizzling out in April.

RVJ’s son was born in Feb.

In Q1 1944 the Germans also started deploying Window. RVJ suggested using a trick the Germans had played on us, using IFF, back at them. The Germans had to turn off their recognition sets thus complicating the tasks of their ground controllers.

CH 43: D-Day

RVJ’s main concern with D-Day was to knock out as much of German radar as possible. He’d been building up a picture of the German stations all through the war. Direct attack by plane was tricky (hard to identify the targets) so RVJ suggested having a photo reconnaissance pilot in each squadron. They ensured all reports covered a wider area than Normandy so that if captured they would not tip off the Germans.

But RVJ was not brought into invasion planning! In April he got a chance to talk to Tedder, Deputy Allied Commander. RVJ told Tedder the plans for German radar were inadequate and they agreed that Supreme HQ would request a new group to work on it. This did the trick.

(He tells an interesting story of running into someone from the Planning Staff who was surprised to see RVJ alive. Why? ‘I gave orders for you to be shot!’ It turned out that he had thought RVJ was going on the Dieppe raid, and had given orders to two soldiers to guard RVJ but that if it looked like RVJ would be taken prisoner, to shoot him because he was such a security risk! When the survivors landed RVJ was not among them so ‘he therefore thought it best not to make further enquiries’!!! The wartime spirit!!! In fact a Flight Sergeant, Nissenthal, went on the Dieppe Raid, months after Bruneval. Somehow the order given that would have applied to RVJ had he gone was actually applied to Nissenthal. RVJ comments — there was ‘no more reason for him to be shot than there would have been for Cox in the Bruneval Raid’ but the order was given because of the misapprehension that RVJ was there. Dieppe was a nightmare but Nissenthal survived the Germans and his guards.)

RVJ flew around the country before D-Day organising raids on German radar. His pilot had two rules: 1) never have a working radio to avoid ground control, 2) ‘you can get away with anything once’.

Window was also used to create diversions at sea just before D-Day to mislead about the attacks.

By May RVJ observed that we’d become much better at precision bombing but this lesson was not absorbed until much later.

Of the 47 radar stations in operation 3 weeks before D-Day, only half a dozen could transmit on the vital night and these were ‘so shaken’ they fell for some tricks. One radar operator detected our actual armada but his report was discounted in the chaos.

So the surprise on D-Day was much greater than it might have been. But we won this advantage at the cost of many brave pilots dead.

What’s the current view on the importance of this RVJ intervention and focus on German radar for D-Day? Ws his meeting with Tedder crucial?

CH 44: V-1

Bombing disrupted German production on the rockets and the campaign against London kept getting delayed.

Bureaucratic disruption (shuffling people, like covid!) disrupted our effort somewhat.

Hitler ordered the first attack in response to D-Day and it occurred 7 days after D-Day, as RVJ’s team predicted. The first night’s attack was ‘a mouse’ (Lindemann). Then it heated up.

For some reason WSC did not issue a warning and Londoners felt we’d been ‘taken unawares’.

On 15/6 200 flying bombs were launched:

• 144 crossed our coast

• 73 reached London

• 33 brought down

• 11 landed in Greater London.

Information from RVJ’s team re the likely height of the bombs did not get through:

Once again, this was an example of the hierarchical attenuation of information, and it underlined the need for the shortest links between Operations and Intelligence Staffs.

The Battle of Britain was fought on the system of each pilot having their own crew which felt part of a team. But this could be extravagant in ground crew. Operational Research showed economies from shifting to a central garage system from which each pilot would draw a serviced aircraft. The shift improved flying hours per aircraft and per unit of ground crew but damaged esprit de corps between pilots and crew, and made pilots more likely to demand a fault-free plane because they didn’t know it intimately. This enthusiasm is hard to measure by Operational Research [or a data science team] and is therefore often underrated. One way it became visible was in experimental squadrons which were more efficient. [Made me think of the Bezos line — when the data and the anecdotes differ, listen to the anecdotes.]

An interesting problem arose. We were sending back many fake reports via agents that were actually ours but the Nazis thought were theirs. These agents were requested to send back data on the bomb impacts. Should we give true data, preserve the deception for the longer game, but help targeting, or give duff data that could be exposed by photos and expose that the agents had been rolled up?

Photos could not tell the Germans the time of impact and agents were often wrong on times. RVJ came up with the idea that we could give correct points of impact for bombs that tended to have a longer range than usual but combine them with times of bombs that had fallen short. If the Germans tried to work out what had happened, they would be led to reduce the average range and therefore miss to the south-east. (This was where RVJ’s parents lived and old school was.) However, the issue got kicked up to Cabinet and Morrison objected as his constituency was in Lambeth, and he thought the idea was an attempt by officials and others in Westminster, Belgravia and Mayfair to keep bombs ‘off themselves at the expense of the proletariat in south London’! Morrison ended up chairing the crucial meeting and decided against interfering with Providence. ‘George’, the MI5 officer, asked RVJ what they should do. RVJ, remembering Nelson’s famous moment at Copenhagen, said that the decision was too incredible to believe in the absence of written evidence so should be ignored!! They ignored Morrison and continued tricking the Germans. (After the war, RVJ bumped into the Air Secretary who had been in the meeting who told RVJ that he had said at the end of the meeting with Morrison that the decision was so secret it should not be written down, hoping that RVJ would cheat it!)

When they overran the rocket HQ 10 weeks later they discovered that the Germans had had sample bombs which had been fitted with radio transmitters. These contradicted the fake agents’ reports. But the agents were deemed so ‘reliable’ they were ordered to trust the agents over the measurements! We got another shock. We’d assumed the Germans had kept up photo reconnaissance throughout the war but in fact it had stopped 10/1/41 to 10/9/44! So we were flying such missions 500 miles into German occupied territory but they couldn’t manage 50 miles — ‘I knew of no more startling contrast in the entire war', a joint tribute to Fighter Command and to our Reconnaissance Units’.

A Fermi estimate: the deception saved maybe 3k deaths and 8k serious injuries.

On 18/6 RVJ was on the phone when he heard a flying bomb overhead cut its engine. He and others climbed under their desks and waited. It dropped nearby on the Guards Chapel, on the south side of St James’s Park, during a morning service and killed 121.

Alanbrooke’s diaries also mentioned this bomb — one of those killed was a friend of AB’s he was about to have lunch with, AB was picking up the invitation from his desk as he was told of his death. On 27/6, at Cabinet Morrison was in ‘a flat spin about the flying bombs and their affect on the population’:

After 5 years of war we could not ask them to stand such a strain etc etc… However, Winston certainly did not see eye to eye with him!

Morrison’s performance was a poor one, he kept on repeating that the population of London could not be asked to stand this strain after 5 years of war. He suggested that our strategy in France should be altered and that our one and only objective should be to clear the north coast of France. It was a pathetic performance, there were no signs of London not being able to stand it, and if there had been it would only have been necessary to tell them that for the first time in history they could share the dangers their sons were running in France and that what fell on London was at any rate not falling on them. Thank heaven Winston very soon dealt with him. [Alanbrooke Diaries.]

It proved hard to find the landing sites fast enough to smash them. The pressure led to another bureaucratic reorganisation of the effort. By August countermeasures were working. And the resistance provided locations for supplies of the flying bombs that could be smashed.

The flying bomb was an excellent weapon. Very simple construction, very cheap, hard to shoot down. The cost of our countermeasures was greater than the cost to the Germans.

CH 45: The V2

After the attack of August 1943 on Peenemünde, flying bombs clearly took priority from rockets. Some of the rocket work moved along the Baltic coast to Brüster Ort and an out-station of Peenemünde was set up at an SS camp at Blizna near Debice, 170 miles south of Warsaw. They got on its trail via ENIGMA. RVJ ordered reconnaissance of the Blizna area in May 1944. Polish underground reported from crash sites (an amazing story is told of their bravery and an SOE operation on p443-5).

A German rocket test went wrong and landed in Sweden. We inspected debris and were surprised at the amount of electronic control equipment: such expensive complexity was thought to imply a warhead of at least 10,000 pounds.

RVJ went to Lindemann one-one with the stack of evidence accumulating and said — you must change your mind. Lindemann agreed.

RVJ’s wife ‘always held me responsible, as she has done since, for any calamity that befell the country’. The flying bomb had forced another family into living with RVJ. Everybody was sleeping in one room under tables and it was ‘not easy to get enough isolation’ for his usual night-time reflection on the day’s intelligence. Vera and the children went to Cornwall. RVJ spent quiet hours after dinner going over all the rocket evidence. He found a rocket in a photo from Blizna and a concrete square. Might the rocket need nothing more elaborate to launch than a flat pad, contra assumptions so far? Phone lines were down so RVJ wrote a note that would be found if he were killed by a flying bomb in the night.

On 18 July he had to present to the PM in the evening. The day was spent in committee meetings generated by ‘the general alarm’. And the public had ‘become increasingly critical of the government’. It seemed the PM had been briefed to gun for the Air Staff. RVJ’s view was that the faults lay with the botched organisation of the effort, confused responsibility and not letting his team handle it all from the start. But now HE was responsible.

RVJ answered question after question. Finally he told the PM he thought Germany had over 1,000 rockets. The PM then ‘started to thump the table’ and produced ‘almost word for word’ arguments that RVJ had had from his wife!

I respectfully thumped the table back.

I told him that if we had been caught napping, this was due to his own directive issued before D-Day that in any conflict between requirements for defence and offence priority should be given to the offence, and in my field this meant concentrating on knocking out the German radar. The fact that his army was now safely across the Channel testified to the efficiency with which we had done that job. But, even so, we had not been napping as regards to the rocket. I had promised that we would find the Germans again if we drove them out of Peenemünde, and we had indeed found them in Poland. It seemed to be foolish to be surprised that if the Germans thought a weapon worth making at all, they would not have made at least a thousand; and as for the destruction it could do, even if the warhead weighed five tons — which I did not believe — this only meant a total of five thousand tons of explosive on London, which was little more than Bomber Command was delivering in Berlin in a single night. [Speer wrote after the war that even 5,000 rockets, 5 months of production, ‘would have delivered only 3,750 tons of explosives’ compared to a single attack by UK/US bombers dropping 8,000 tons.]

RVJ explained they had only in the last few days spotted the rocket in Poland and also told WSC that ‘the experts had advised us to look for the wrong things’ and his team was therefore ‘misled regarding the nature of the launching apparatus’ which they had also only just figured out themselves. [Again, covid echoed this problem of experts giving wrong advice and how hard it is to have institutions that catch such errors early, e.g DHSC ‘experts’ opining that rapid tests wouldn’t work.]

WSC asked why he had not told Lindemann about the launching apparatus and RVJ replied that he had only found it last night ‘and I have had seven committee meetings to attend since then, Sir’! [Also covid: a proliferation of committee meetings dragging people away from critical work.]

There was a silence in which none of the Chiefs of Staff or the Ministers present saw fit to intervene until Colin Gubbins, the Head of SOE, introduced some unintentional comic relief by saying that the SOE had had a report that the rocket was to be steered to its target by a man inside it, who was to parachute out of it during its final descent. The tenseness having been broken, Portal came strongly to my support, testifying to the value of our work throughout the whole of the period, and Winston subsided.

RVJ reflected that ‘never in my life have I enjoyed a fight so much’ —

Each of us had too much respect for the truth to resort to any subterfuge or sophistry, and we both knew that the truth was what we wanted to get at.

A week later at another meeting on 25th the PM asked RVJ how many meetings he had had to attend today.

Six, sir, I replied.

What are they? he asked.

I proceeded to catalogue the first five, some of which had been chaired by men now sitting around the ‘Crossbow’ table. Before I could go on he said, ‘And now this is the sixth!’ ‘Yes, Sir’ I replied, ‘this is the sixth’…

He then said, ‘I can well see that you could never get any work done if all your time has to be spent in committees. You have my authority to absent yourself from any committee that you do not think worthwhile!’

It was a valuable concession, since almost none of the committees was genuinely useful, and most of them owed their origin to a general panic resulting from too much theorising on too few facts. My job was to get the facts.

In the meeting the experts claimed the evidence was aligning with their ideas, which it was not, and they were starting to ‘shift their ground’. RVJ asked Portal to try to get some officers on the ground to inspect the Blizna camp if it were overrun by the Russians shortly and it is important enough to justify a personal request from the PM to Stalin. This happened but the team was chosen by Sandys, not RVJ. Then they were held up by the Russians for not having proper visas. Then they got dysentery in Tehran. One of RVJ’s team signalled that the mission was hopeless because of the incompetent team and could he return home. RVJ agreed. Eventually the team arrived in Moscow. They got to Blizna on 18/9, ~8 weeks after leaving. The Russians had delayed the team then on their way home the Russians stole the specimens they were bringing back. Probably those Poles who spoke to our team were killed/imprisoned. Our team were thoroughly naive and ‘probably did positive harm and achieved no good whatsoever’. When the specimens finally arrived in England the Russians had substituted them for old aircraft parts. ‘So much for the contributions of ‘experts’!’ [A brilliant example of how a bureaucratic effort with the wrong leader, Sandys, will inevitably stumble from one failure to another, always tripped up by friction, always finding a way to fail. Note that picking the team is critical and ministers today have ~0 power to pick the team.]

On 29 July the sniping, backbiting and confusion ‘from Duncan Sandys and his array of experts’ got so bad RVJ complained to Portal then drafted a letter of resignation.

I can make no stronger protest. Our sources will be mishandled: collation will be wild and incomplete: presentation will be political … unless officers can be found to defend the traditions of Intelligence to the last, so that the Intelligence system as a whole can work out its results in unmolested good faith.

He had it in his pocket the next morning when he spoke to Frank Inglis (Assistant Chief of Air Staff) who told him he intended to transfer responsibility for the rocket intelligence from RVJ to one of his Directors of Intelligence. This ‘drove any further thoughts of resignation from my mind, because it brought home to me the mess that might result if I ceased to watch the rocket.’ RVJ told Inglis that Inglis could not remove from him ‘the function of discovering the scientific and technical nature of the rocket’ since this was squarely inside his Terms of Reference since the start of the war.

An SOE operation flew a plane into Poland to collect pieces of debris that had been bicycled through the retreating German forces to an airfield. This alerted them to a problem with the rockets (a fuel tank kept exploding near the end of the flight).

Morrison was pushing in July for the evacuation of a million people from London. By now RVJ had better intelligence on the weight of the rocket. RVJ continued to have a nightmare time dealing with the ‘experts’ who were ‘very eminent … yet completely out of their depth when dealing with the rocket.’ (Cf. p447 for a technical example re our experts not understanding the German use of gyroscopes for guidance.)

RVJ reviewed all the evidence. Much was contaminated because people were ‘feeding back to us information which had unwittingly been provided in previous briefings’. He therefore focused only on reports mentioning liquid fuel since those had ‘a touchstone [of] at least one element of truth’ and might therefore reflect the knowledge of someone close to real information. [Interesting. Again, similar to covid in that in No10, I and others started focusing from summer on those who had proved correct about some important thing previously when the consensus was strongly supporting the wrong idea, on the basis that perhaps they had the odd characteristics needed for avoiding groupthink.]

This approach yielded just five reports all of which suggested a much lower weight than our experts guessed. RVJ decided the weight was probably about 12 tons with a 1 ton warhead. Some recent ENIGMA traffic indirectly seemed to suggest this too.

At the Crossbow meeting on 10 August, RVJ gave his estimate which was met with ‘a generally incredulous reception’. By 26 August RVJ wrote a report of 30,000 words summarising everything known.

Bombing of factories had pushed rocket production into a vast underground factory which from August 1944 knocked out ~600 per month.

RVJ came to believe there was something ‘psychological’ about the rocket — that both Hitler and our politicians viewed it in some magical way.

A rational approach brought us nearest the truth regarding the technique of the Rocket. When, however, we try to understand the policy behind it, we are forced to abandon rationality, and instead to enter a fantasy where romance has replaced economy.

The Germans have produced a weapon which, at the cost of years of intense research, throws perhaps a one or two ton warhead into the London area for the expenditure of an elaborate radio controlled carcase consuming eight or so tons of fuel. Their own Flying Bomb achieves the same order of result far more cheaply. Why, then, have they made the Rocket?

The answer is simple: no weapon yet produced has a comparable romantic appeal. Here is a 13 ton missile which traces out a flaming ascent to heights hitherto beyond the reach of man, and hurls itself 200 miles across the stratosphere at unparalleled speed to descend — with luck — on a defenceless target. One of the greatest realisations of human power is the ability to destroy at a distance, and the Nazeus would call down his thunderbolts on all who displease him. Perhaps we may be permitted to express a slight envy of his ability, if not to destroy his victims, at least to raise one of the biggest scares in history by virtue of the inverted romance with which those victims regard the Rocket.

In an epilogue he reflected on the bureaucratic muddle of the past 16 months and the relationship between Intelligence problems and technical expertise:

When Intelligence first detects a new enemy development, there are generally insufficient facts to eliminate all explanations but the true one. If therefore these insufficient facts are submitted to a body of experts, each can hold his own theory without the others being able to prove him wrong; the situation can only be resolved by getting more information, and generally when this information is obtained, an approach through Intelligence rather than through technical experience is the more reliable one for reaching the correct solution. Expert advice can be dangerous in intelligence problems, for rather a simple reason. Our experts are engaged in developing weapons for British use; the enemy experts for German use. The requirements and stimuli are different and in any case a few experiments may discourage either side.

Four situations can therefore arise in any one technical development,

(a) Neither side makes it work. This presents no Intelligence problem.

(b) Both sides succeed. This is a normal Intelligence problem for it soon becomes a matter of general knowledge and Intelligence is reasonably well briefed as to what to seek.

(c) Our experts succeed, the Germans fail. This is an Intelligence worry, for proving the negative case is one of the most difficult of Intelligence exercises.

(d) Our experts fail or do not try, the Germans succeed. This is the most interesting Intelligence case, but it is difficult to overcome the prejudice that as we have not done something, it is impossible or foolish. Alternatively, our experts in examining the German development are no longer experts but novices, and may therefore make wilder guesses than Intelligence, which at least has the advantage of closer contact with the enemy.

The positive contribution of technical experts to Intelligence problems can be great, and there are many cases where Intelligence would be remiss in not asking for their advice; but from an Intelligence point of view, it must always be born in mind that the advice comes from a British, and not from a German, expert. If this difference in background is not continually appreciated, serious misjudgements can be made. In the tactical field, Napoleon knew this danger well: he called it ‘making pictures of the enemy’. In the technical field the same danger exists: the present investigation is sufficient example.

[This is obviously highly relevant to covid and particularly the lab leak hypothesis.]

RVJ made and distributed 40 copies. Portal withdrew it after complaints from Sandys about the epilogue. This guaranteed it was read cover to cover by those sent it. Months later RVJ requested it be recirculated but this was refused though it was available for historical purposes. WSC included RVJ’s comparison of his figures and the actual German figures in his Memoirs.

RVJ said a heavy rocket attack could not start before mid-September but our attacks may force a smaller earlier attack. It seemed touch and go whether our advancing armies could push fast enough to capture the territory from which the rockets could be launched and push them out of range.

On 6/9 the Vice Chiefs of Staff declared the threat over and on 7/9 Duncan Sandys held a press conference to announce the threat to London over which was reported on 8/9. In the evening of the 8/9 RVJ was in the office when he heard the bang of the first V2 rocket landing near Chiswick. Our armies had been held up by rivers and there was an area around the Hook of Holland still in German hands which they used to launch.

[Checking on the Alanbrooke blog, the PM, Alanbrooke and most of the senior team were away to North America at this time and I guess had little idea of this botch, may not have known about it for a day or so.]

Because of the valiant failure of Arnhem and ‘the bridge too far’, the launching area remained in German hands throughout the winter. By 7/4/45 they launched 1,190 rockets , 169 failures, we detected the fall of 1,115 of which 501 fell in the London defence region. Some warning of launch by radar was possible. Antwerp suffered more than London.

At the request of the USAF, RVJ wrote an article on the future of the rocket. In it he predicted that:

• ‘sooner or later someone will seriously try to reach the moon — and succeed’.

• We can imagine the use of ‘atomic fuels to drive an exhaust of hydrogen molecules, or perhaps lighter molecules, giving an entirely different order of performance’.

• It will become possible to improve accuracy via ‘homing devices’.

• We may have fission bombs and put them on rockets.

• Perhaps anti-missiles will work.

• The German achievement will ‘be regarded as one of the masterpieces of human endeavour when it comes to be applied to the exploration of Space’.

CH 46: V-3

Other missiles in research had little effect on the war but were important after.

There was a Kamikaze project whereby what we think of as ‘suicide bombers’ would pilot manned V-1s into London. It was not deployed. Its viability was proved by a courageous female test pilot, Hanna Reitsch, ‘who actually flew a V1 to establish the cause of its control troubles’.

The ME-262 fighter, the world’s first jet powered fighter aircraft, was introduced too late and with too few numbers to affect the war much — if earlier and at scale it could have been very significant as it was much better than anything we/America had. By now German industry was so damaged that production at scale was a crucial limiting factor.

CH 47: Bomber Triumph

Finally from summer 1944 our bombers started doing raids with total radio silence. It greatly cut losses.

[Amazing there were not trials of the idea earlier so we could just test if they worked better.]

We could finally jam all German radar.

We had pushed Germany back so they had less warning for defence.

They were running out of fuel.

We ran ‘spoof’ raids using Window to tire out defending fighters on nights when we did not have big attacks.

In November 1944 we sank the Tirpitz.

With their ship capsized, the doomed men inside were heard singing ‘Deutschland uber Alles’ as the waters rose. What a tragedy men like that had to serve the Nazi cause.

By the war’s end we had identified 48 different types of ground radar and located 740 radar stations in western Europe; only 6 were unknown when our ground forces overran them.

When officers examined the German nightfighter system at the end of the war they reported that there was no equipment in use of whose existence we had not been notified by Intelligence.

The official Bomber Command report after the war concluded:

The outstanding impression which such a study leaves is of the extraordinary range and accuracy of the technical Intelligence with which Bomber Command was provided for the conduct of the R.C.M. offensive [radio counter-measures]. No praise can be too high for those responsible for producing this Intelligence, without which no worthwhile R.C.M. effort could have been possible. Nor is there any need to ask indulgence for labouring this point, since the critical reader cannot fail to have been impressed by the importance which attached to the possession of accurate information regarding the enemy’s methods and equipment.

We had certainly done our upmost; but thinking of those hundreds of dreadful hours flown through the German defences by 200,000 airmen of whom 50,000 British and a comparable number of American did not come back, how could we have done less? And was it enough?

CH 48: Nuclear Energy

RVJ found an SIS officer, Eric Welsh, to help on nuclear intelligence and (cf. CH35) arranged for him to meet Michael Perrin of the British Tube Alloys project.

Welsh’s ‘dragooning’ of James Chadwick into writing to Bohr initially seemed to have little result. Bohr stayed in Copenhagen.

We heard that Heisenberg had pulled physicists out of large cities to a place around Hechingen, a small town near Stuttgart. It seemed the activity was less than ‘had they been as near to making a bomb as were the Americans and ourselves’. We had the ‘impression that they had originally been thinking of a bomb, but had decided that it would not be practicable inside the time span of the war’, since in 1942 they allowed publication of some papers which ‘seemed to have been kept secret while they decided whether to go for the bomb or not’. [Check with Groves’ book — was this a cockup?]

In October 1941 [September], as Niels Bohrl said, Heisenberg visited him in Copenhagen. RVJ says that ‘Bohr was positive, as he told me, that Heisenberg at least implied that the Germans were already working on the atomic bomb.’ (See end of this chapter for some other notes on this famous meeting.)

After the war Heisenberg said that an investigation of the critical size was not undertaken but in answer to a question at a meeting in June 1942, Heisenberg indicated that an amount of uranium as small as a pineapple would be enough to destroy a large city, suggesting he’d done some calculations.

All this was unknown to RVJ at the time. Given the pressures of the war and the lack of pre-war planning for scientific Intelligence:

[W]e had had to rely on catching a weapon in the development and production stages, rather than in the research laboratory; and it was in the production stage, with heavy water, that we had caught the German nuclear work.

Welsh had persuaded No10 to send messages to America using apparatus in Jones‘s office which ‘was especially secure’ [interesting]. RVJ therefore read a message from WSC to Roosevelt on 19/8/43 in which WSC agreed that post-war the President would decide on crucial aspects of nuclear development for civilian use. RVJ was so upset he raised it with Lindemann ‘to upbraid him for giving the Prime Minister such bad advice’. Difficulties had been growing as America was suspicious that our interest was more about post-war commercial opportunities than immediate military concerns, a mistake we contributed to with some foolish errors such as having a large ICI poster in the entrance to the Tube Alloys office.

On 6/10/43 Bohr came to England after escaping from Copenhagen to Sweden from which we flew him in the bomb bay of a Mosquito. His head was too big for the helmet therefore he could neither speak to the pilot nor switch on his oxygen. He lost consciousness. Luckily it was not fatal. On arrival he was brought to dinner at the Savoy with the head of SIS, RVJ and others. They then went to America and returned in April 1944.

RVJ wanted to talk to him but was swamped by work (but got a few tutorials from him). Bohr wanted to talk to Churchill. RVJ thought it a good idea for Bohr to persuade WSC how important nuclear weapons would be as he thought Lindemann had ‘inadequately briefed’ Churchill because Lindemann ‘did not really believe that nuclear energy would ever be released’ and Tizard agreed.

Bohr wanted Britain and America to share their atomic secrets with Russia to improve goodwill and show Stalin he had nothing to fear from us. [An amazing example of how incredibly smart people can be amazingly misguided about the psychology of dictators!] RVJ did not agree but still wanted Bohr to impress on WSC that nuclear weapons would work and be a huge post-war issue.

The meeting was a disaster. By chance RVJ saw Bohr walking down the street afterwards. ‘It was terrible! He scolded us like two schoolboys!’

Project ALSOS, created by General Groves to investigate German nuclear research, arrived in London in spring 1944. We were the junior partner. In November 1944 a sudden flurry of activity around Hechingen sparked fears of a last ditch German effort to make a bomb. It was a false alarm.

After ALSO captured documents they were flown direct to America — not copied first in case of an accident. When copies were later supplied, they went to Welsh, not RVJ, who then controlled nuclear intelligence. (Welsh had turned on RVJ and told the Americans RVJ’s offices were not secure enough for nuclear documents. RVJ implies Welsh wanted the bureaucratic power from controlling information on this vital project, cf comment below.) This proved ‘disastrous’ for Scientific Intelligence. And after the war Tizard was also cut out of nuclear issues when he became Chief Scientific Adviser in the MoD.

German physicists were brought to England and put in Farm Hall where they were secretly recorded at RVJ’s suggestion (we kept the transcripts secret for decades, much longer than we should). We heard them discussing the news of the bombs falling on Japan. Some claimed that they had not wished to build an atomic bomb because they didn’t want Germany to win the war. Bagge said that this view was ‘absurd’ and did not reflect the view ‘for all of us’. Otto Hahn was so upset his original discovery of fission had led to such bombs he had to be restrained from suicide.

Albert Speer said after the war that if Germany had built the bomb Hitler would certainly have nuked Britain.

RVJ ends the chapter saying that some scientists were corrupted by ‘the prospects of the personal power to be gained from association with the nuclear project’.

Postscript on the legendary meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg (not in RVJ)

The Copenhagen meeting was in the week of 15-21 September as the Nazis were racing towards Moscow.

By August 1941, Heisenberg and colleagues were close to the world’s first evidence of neutron multiplication, which they confirmed the next spring. At this point the Germans thought rightly they were ahead of the Allies.

After the war Heisenberg said:

It was from September 1941 that we saw an open road ahead of us, leading to the atomic bomb.

The meeting is still clouded in mystery. After the war Heisenberg claimed that he told Bohr that he believed a nuclear weapons was possible and raised moral questions for scientists:

Does one as a physicist have the moral right to work on the practical exploitation of atomic energy? [Heisenberg’s 1948 version of what he asked Bohr]

In a postwar letter Heisenberg described the meeting:

This talk probably started with my question as to whether or not it was right for physicists to devote themselves in wartime to the uranium problem — as there was the possibility that progress in this sphere could lead to grave consequences in the technique of the war.  Bohr understood the meaning of this question immediately, as I realised from his slightly frightened reaction.  He replied as far as I can remember with a counter-question, "Do you really think that uranium fission could be utilised for the construction of weapons?"  I may have replied: "I know that this is in principle possible, but it would require a terrific technical effort, which, one can only hope, cannot be realised in this war."  Bohr was shocked by my reply, obviously assuming that I had intended to convey to him that Germany had made great progress in the direction of manufacturing atomic weapons.  Although I tried subsequently to correct this false impression I probably did not succeed in winning Bohr's complete trust, especially as I only dared to speak guardedly (which was definitely a mistake on my part), being afraid that some phrase or other could later be held against me.  I was very unhappy about the result of this conversation.

When he read it Bohr wrote a letter to Heisenberg he never sent. He wrote that he was ‘greatly amazed to see how much your memory has deceived you’.

Personally, I remember every word of our conversations, which took place on a background of extreme sorrow and tension for us here in Denmark. In particular, it made a strong impression both on Margrethe and me, and on everyone at the Institute that the two of you spoke to, that you and Weizsäcker expressed your definite conviction that Germany would win and that it was therefore quite foolish for us to maintain the hope of a different outcome of the war and to be reticent as regards all German offers of cooperation. I also remember quite clearly our conversation in my room at the Institute, where in vague terms you spoke in a manner that could only give me the firm impression that, under your leadership, everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons and that you said that there was no need to talk about details since you were completely familiar with them and had spent the past two years working more or less exclusively on such preparations. I listened to this without speaking since [a] great matter for mankind was at issue in which, despite our personal friendship, we had to be regarded as representatives of two sides engaged in mortal combat.

That my silence and gravity, as you write in the letter, could be taken as an expression of shock at your reports that it was possible to make an atomic bomb is a quite peculiar misunderstanding, which must be due to the great tension in your own mind. From the day three years earlier when I realized that slow neutrons could only cause fission in Uranium 235 and not 238, it was of course obvious to me that a bomb with certain effect could be produced by separating the uraniums. In June 1939 I had even given a public lecture in Birmingham about uranium fission, where I talked about the effects of such a bomb but of course added that the technical preparations would be so large that one did not know how soon they could be overcome. If anything in my behaviour could be interpreted as shock, it did not derive from such reports but rather from the news, as I had to understand it, that Germany was participating vigorously in a race to be the first with atomic weapons.

Besides, at the time I knew nothing about how far one had already come in England and America, which I learned only the following year when I was able to go to England after being informed that the German occupation force in Denmark had made preparations for my arrest.

Bohr drafted other documents giving his version but didn’t publish them and his family kept them sealed until publication in 2002.

A week after he returned to Germany, Heisenberg wrote to a colleague:

I really liked the passage in your book about the mind-set of the middle ages in contrast to our epoch. In this connection it suddenly came to me that such a transformation could occur once again in the near future. For perhaps we humans will recognise one day that we actually possess the power to destroy the earth completely, that we could very well bring upon ourselves the “end of the world” or something closely related to it. (Letter from Heisenberg to Hermann Heimpel, 1 October 1941)

In 1942 Germany decided that although atomic bombs were theoretically possible, the industrial effort needed was so vast and would extend for so many years that it would not happen in this war. Germany instead focused on rockets and jet aircraft.

Heisenberg was a German patriot who went along with the Nazi regime. He wrote in 1942:

For us there remains nothing but to turn to the simple things: we should conscientiously fulfil the duties and tasks that life presents to us without asking too much about the why or the wherefore… And then we should wait for whatever happens … reality is transforming itself without our influence.

In 1943 he said:

Democracy cannot develop sufficient energy to rule Europe. There are, therefore, only two alternatives: Germany and Russia. And then a Europe under German leadership would be the lesser evil.

CH 49: ADI (Science) Overseas

RVJ’s main job was directing collecting agencies, collating what they provided, and ensuring their achievements were ‘used to best advantage’.

But he also had to send people into the field to give advice, pick up information etc.

Their first officers went over on D+2 and started sending back documents, equipment etc.

In July a load arrived and was parked outside the Air Intelligence building. Over night a flying bomb scored a direct hit. Because of the electronics strewn around, there was some fear the Germans had used some new targeting technology to score ‘the closest of near misses on the Air Intelligence building’.

RVJ only went to France once to advise on counter-measures to V1s and V2s, now directed mainly at Antwerp. He used his chance in Paris to buy ‘kirbigrips’ (hairclips) his wife had missed. This was a disastrous present!

They took back radar components and other instruments and materials to British universities, labs, and companies.

American soldiers operated on the basis of written orders so RVJ’s team gave themselves written orders written extremely broadly to wave at Americans and get what they wanted including planes to fly stuff home.

CH 50: The Year of Madness

A friend of RVJ in Naval Intelligence Division (NID) came to see him and warned of bad plans afoot.

Remember how in 1939, ‘when Scientific Intelligence could have been rationally organised on an inter-Service basis’, the Admiralty refused. Even well into the war the War Office ‘had still no scientist in Military Intelligence’.

Now NID went to JIC and suggested a special committee to plan the post-war arrangements under Professor Blackett. Blackett was a wonderful physicist but RVJ saw him ‘make mistakes’. He proposed ‘rational’ solutions that ‘completely overlooked the human aspects involved, and he would then press these solutions with a fervour that belied their apparent rationalism’. [NB. rationalists, AI safety network!]

The Committee was dominated by people without experience of wartime scientific-technical Intelligence.

RVJ wrote a paper making some fundamental points:

A fundamental difficulty of Intelligence work is that input is by source, and output is by subject. A changeover has thus to occur inside the Intelligence machine, which therefore has to act as far as possible as a single perfect human mind, observing, remembering, criticising and correlating different types of information, and then giving expression to the result. No card index can do it although indexes are useful adjuncts. The large of the organisation, the less can it resemble a single mind. An intelligence organisation has therefore to consist of as small a number as possible of individuals with abilities as great as possible. For the same reason, intelligence is better done by a staff than by committee.

Another fundamental difficulty in Intelligence organisation is that the collators have the more responsible task in that they must direct the collecting services, if only because the collators alone see the whole picture; if there are any criticisms from the external world, it is the collation section which has to face them. At the same time, the collectors often have the more difficult task, and their work is the more fundamental. This inequality between responsibility and fundamental importance can only be solved by making collection and collation responsible to a common head.

So: a small elite staff with a single head, not a committee.

RVJ thought Scientific Intelligence should continue to work inside SIS, particularly given both human and signals/technical intelligence both reported to ‘C’. [Obviously this changed with the creation of GCHQ in its post-war form.] And RVJ thought his own success vis other parts of the system stemmed partly from him keeping collecting and collating ‘as intimately together as possible’.

The potential weak point of RVJ’s argument was that such an integration created a large empire without sufficient regard for those whom it should serve such as Operational Staffs. He dealt with this by always recognising the potential problem and working closely with those Staffs. If he had to choose between sitting with the Staffs or with the collecting agencies he would choose the latter ‘because the links on that side would be the more difficult to maintain with the necessary intimacy and informality from a distance’.

Blackett ‘would not listen’. His solution was:

• each of the three Service Ministries would have its own separate Scientific Intelligence and Technical Intelligence Section;

• separate Scientific and Technical Intelligence Sections inside SIS and any other organisations that might become involved;

• no single coordinating head;

• if RVJ were to continue to head Air Scientific Intelligence then new personnel would have to be found for the Sections in SIS.

In RVJ’s proposed 1939 scheme, the three sections with the three services were to be subordinate to the central section.

Blackett said he would have no further discussion and overruled my objections. I told the Committee that they had wrecked the future of Scientific Intelligence, but this produced no effect. I wish that I had been able to quote a passage in Macaulay which I have since encountered, as advice to would-be rationalists. He described the objects of Whig legislation as, ‘To think much of convenience and little of symmetry’ and ‘Never to remove an anomaly simply because it is an anomaly’. If Blackett had headed these, Scientific Intelligence in post-war Britain would have been much stronger.

Inevitably, the Joint Intelligence Committee, which itself consisted of senior offices with little experience in intelligence, accepted Blackett’s recommendations. Not only were all three Services to have their separate Sections, but, accepting my point about the indivisibility of Scientific Intelligence (for example a new weapon developed by the enemy for use by its Air Force might be intended for use against our Navy, and therefore two Services were directly involved), Blackett recommended that all the new Sections should be housed together in one building; and, for symmetry, this could not be one of the existing Service Ministries so they were all to be housed together in derelict premises in Bryanston Square, far away from all three Services, and also from MI6.

This resulted in the worst of all worlds in that the new organisation would not have closed connections with either the collecting agencies or with the operational staffs. Contact with MI6 was to be through the Joint Scientific and Technical Intelligence Committee, of which the total membership was to be thirteen, and to ensure perfect fairness and symmetry, the heads of the individual Scientific and Technical Intelligence Sections were to be Chairman in rotation, the chairmanship changing every three months among eight individuals or more. To add to the craziness of the scheme, Blackett overlooked the fact that Atomic Intelligence was not part of it. This was going to be done by Welsh and Perrin entirely independently of the main Scientific Intelligence organisation, and it would have the foothold in MI6 that was denied to the rest of Scientific Intelligence.

So having been in charge of Scientific Intelligence throughout the war, I now found myself consigned to be a single member of a committee of thirteen, only one [other] of whom had any experience of Scientific Intelligence at all, and I was to take my turn as Chairman for three months every few years.

When the new arrangements were promulgated, I called my staff together and told them what happened. I had always said that, having had all the fun during the war, I had been prepared to go on through the dull days of peace to act as anchor-man to keep the nucleus of an organisation available, which could be expanded again when trouble threatened. But that it was now going to be very difficult for me to go on, and I could certainly see no future for them in staying. Some … were already going back to the pre-war university posts, and I offered the others all possible help in finding positions…

How had this disaster happened? Unfortunately, Blackett’s enquiry had been conducted inside a frame of reference in which I had to fight entirely on my own; there was now nobody like Medhurst inside Intelligence who would have appreciated what we had done, except perhaps for Stuart Menzies [‘C’], who had disliked what Blackett had forced through. Menzies, discussing the disruption with me, said that we had worked together through the war and he would be glad to continue. He knew that he could work with me, but he was damned if he was going to try working with three different scientists. Since my wartime job was to be split right in half – the MI6 side and the Air Staff side, he hoped that I would stay with him; but the split would be an unhappy one and probably unworkable, since whoever took over the other side would have had no experience and I would for a long time know his job better than he did.

As for seeking support outside Intelligence, I had of course Lindemann and Portal: but the tide was running fast against individualism and in favour of egalitarianism: it was running against the Government, and everything was so much upset by the 1945 Election that nobody in high office could be expected to spend much time thinking about my problems. And unless they could have spent the time, they might merely conclude that I was trying to preserve my position for purely personal reasons. The explosion of the atomic bomb and the dropping of the Iron Curtain meant that our military stance had to be thought out afresh; and although a fundamental look at Intelligence should have been part of this thinking, many in senior posts were exhausted by the strains of the war.

The strain had told on Churchill too, and it showed in his election speeches, in which he conjured up a frightening picture of what Britain would be like under Socialism. Actually, his speeches do not sound so shrill now as they did at the time; but he was addressing a nation out of temper: for although the Allies won the war with Germany, Britain — while bearing the brunt — had had to submit to America; and the submission was patent to the common man by such measures as the replacement of British markings by American on British tanks before D-Day. One general even said to me, ‘What else could you expect from a man with an American mother?’ I was alarmed by the tone of Churchill’s first speech, and immediately went to [Lindemann] and asked him to advise Churchill to take a different line because it was misjudging the temper of the nation. I added, ‘If he goes on in this way the PM will lose the election’. Lindemann said that he agreed with me, but that he was unable to do anything because Churchill had taken advice about his line of attack from Brendan Bracken and Duncan Sandys; but I note that Lord Moran has said that it was Bracken and Beaverbrook who were the men who had advised Churchill in this instance.

Anyway, the Conservatives lost the election and Churchill resigned on 27th July 1945. He felt the shock deeply — it was a sharper change of fortune than any man might expect to face. But no political misfortune could detract from the universal admiration for what he had done in the war. And so, after a moment of uncertainty in which he contemplated graceful retirement ‘in an odour of civic freedom’ his confidence returned. ‘Many people,’ he said to me eighteen months later, ‘say that I ought to have retired after the war, and have become some sort of elder statesman. But how could I? I have fought all my life and I cannot give up fighting now!’

A few thoughts:

• ‘Rationalists’ are often a disaster in bureaucratic battles, NB. those interested in AI safety.

• A small brilliant team with a responsible head is always to be preferred over a bloated Whitehall committee. Modern Whitehall works on the exact opposite principle.

• Extremely interesting that JIC immediately after the war was already populated by non-experts in Scientific Intelligence!

• The reorganisation by JIC is a classic Whitehall farce, all the more powerful for being done in the shadow of the war when people were much closer to such problems. Imagine how hard it is today for anybody with sense to be heard when nobody has been near a major war.

• Notice how the reorganisation a) bloats everything, b) pushes people away from the operational front lines, c) creates complex reporting that diminish/eradicate personal responsibility. Once this happens, it’s almost impossible for any self-correction to happen without an existential crisis. Even immediate nuclear nightmares did not force a rethink.

• Notice how ‘C’ disliked what had happened but couldn’t stop it. Even supposedly high agency people can be remarkably powerless in Whitehall unless they are prepared to make something a resigning issue, which can only be a card rarely played.

• Notice the connection between bureaucratic structure and talent that I have written about for many years. As soon as you create a dumb structure, you drive talent away. Talent does not want to work in dumb structures and has other options. So you have created a tendency to mediocrity whereby talent leaves and more mediocre types willing to waste time in dumb meetings stay, get promoted, and hire people like themselves. Again, this is extremely difficult to reverse.

• There are many more appalling committees now and the confusion across Intelligence and the Cabinet Office is a nightmare. One is a Cabinet Office committee responsible for prioritisation of intelligence operations and resources. It is appalling and ineffectually hated by the three agencies and special forces. I doubt any minister or PM (or any political person other than me) has considered it and discussed it with the intelligence agencies in over a decade. Such things are of no interest to Tory MPs and the officials don’t want Hancock-types involved.

• Britain has deteriorated over the decades to a large extent because of an accumulation of thousands of such acts of Whitehall vandalism which together have destroyed the quality of people in public service and made institutions pathological.

CH 51: German Generals and Staff Colleges

RVJ spent time in the second half of 1945 talking to German generals about what had happened. They were interned in a Georgian country house, Wilton Park. His main target was General Wolfgang Martini, General der Luftnachrichtentruppe (Google translates this as Air Intelligence Troop).

The Germans too were hampered by committees! Each new British innovation led to a new committee which was ‘slower and less responsive than individuals, especially when the latter were allowed to work and build up experience over several years’. RVJ remarked at a Staff College talk that we’d probably been saved from ealier V2 attack by the fact that the Germans had set up 13 different committees to organise V2 production.

RVJ also wrote a note for Portal suggesting a Staff College for scientists and in his memo he reflected on the career of a young scientist. Our funding system, with its bitter competition for a few jobs and little money, ‘puts a premium on the short term worker’ who focuses on quick results and shuts himself off from the external world and even from other branches of science. And in peacetime government scientists tend to be those who have ‘fallen out from the academic competition’. It encourages the production of young scientists ‘with less-than-average appreciation (for their standard of intelligence) of the world at large’ and this ignorance ‘may become a habit’ and prepare them to be outmanoeuvred by ‘professional and classically bred administrators’, after which they will retire embittered to the laboratory deciding ‘ignorance really is a virtue since the worldly-wise are such rogues’.

[In some ways the UK AI company Faculty provides something similar now. It takes maths, physics, computer science PhDs and trains them in how to work in applied fields on business and government problems. This includes explaining to them how government actually works.]

It failed because ‘nobody could see how to finance it’. Lord Hankey (who created the Cabinet Office in 1917) tried to revive the idea a few years later but also failed. Portal instead funded some scientists to attend the existing Staff College courses which continued to this day (i.e 1980s). Academics ‘of all people’ need such a course!

He ends with a tribute to Portal who had led with ‘tremendous authority’ and ‘his support was one of the main sources of my own strength’.

CH 52: Swords Into Ploughshares, Bombs Into Saucers

The war sparked interest of physicists in many problems such as cosmic rays which they turned to afterwards. RVJ’s work with carrier pigeons to bring intelligence sparked the thought that perhaps pigeons had evolved some sort of inertial navigation based on accelerometers in their heads.

Similarly, RVJ had thoughts about connections between the problem of how moths find each other and potential for ‘sniffing’ for chemicals including atomic materials. He discussed with Francis Crick how genetic information might be compressed.

There were soon many scares about Russian planes flying at vast speeds made of exotic materials. These reports prompted fears and inquiries and some foolish conclusions.

CH 53: Exeunt

In November 1945 he was invited to apply to be Professor of Natural Philosophy at Aberdeen. George Thomson, who won the Nobel, agreed to recommend him despite wartime differences. WSC also weighed in during a visit saying Aberdeen must appoint the man who ‘broke the bloody beam’.

RVJ wrote to Lord Tedder, Chief of the Air Staff, resigning:

A Committee wastes too much time in arguing and every action it undertakes merely goes as far as common agreement and compromise will allow. Common agreement and compromise, as every Commander knows, generally do not go far enough. The Head of an Intelligence organisation is really in the position of a commander planning a perpetual attack on the security of foreign powers, and he must be allowed all the privileges of a commander…

The JSIC regime is the main reason for my resignation; but there are others. The first is to some extent another consequence of the JIC control of Intelligence, and concerns the arrangement made for Atomic Energy Intelligence.

A new entity has been created whose head sits inside SIS, a privilege now removed from ‘my own section’. Intelligence is ‘rather despised in the Services’. The individual members of JIC ‘change rapidly and are therefore on the average inexperienced in the basic principles of Intelligence’ [a problem ever since and a standard problem with Whitehall] and they ‘feel bound to put the interests of their particular Services, on which their promotion depends, before the interests of Intelligence as a Cause’. [Yes, career incentives are critical.]

RVJ said that he regretted leaving ‘more than anything else I have ever done’ and that UK would have to recreate something like what we build during the war to replace the Committee structure if we again got into an existential war and the vital principles of Intelligence ‘will outlive the JIC’.

[NB. Nothing since then including covid and Ukraine have prompted a shift to the right model, the system has proved totally impervious to failure and demands for improvement. So far JIC has outlived ‘the vital principles’ even though the Agencies hate the Cabinet Office’s vandalising micromanagement. Cold War victory came not from superior Intelligence — which was famously dreadful on many crucial aspects (e.g the Soviet economy) and was thoroughly penetrated here and in DC — but because the Soviet system could not compete economically or with aspects of technological R&D.]

One day in 1946 they had to hurriedly take down maps from the walls. SIS offices had been rented. The landlord heard they were leaving and was showing around the Soviet Trade Delegation.

Could it happen anywhere but Britain that representatives of its major prospective opponent should be allowed a tour of the offices of its Secret Service?

After leaving he spent some time with WSC discussing the war. RVJ said he did not like the drift in the country with strikes and clamour for a 40 hour week. WSC wept ‘as he told me that he never thought that he would see the British Empire sink so low.’

Churchill advised him to ‘Praise the humanities, my boy. That’ll make them think you’re broadminded!’

Epilogue

In a speech to RUSI in 1947 he gave some lessons from the war. I’ll put them in a bullet list:

• You must remember that Intelligence depends more than anything else on individual minds and on individual courage, and your organisation should only provide a smooth background on which these can operate.

• You must employ as few links as possible between the source and the operational staff who make use of the information.

• You must never forget to stand by your sources: they will repay you.

• Do as much of the actual Intelligence work yourself as you can; you will find that you can then speak with increased confidence at the highest conferences, which you will certainly be required to do. The fact that you have done much of the work yourself will give you a great advantage.

• Remember, as the cardinal principle of Intelligence, Occam’s Razor, ‘hypotheses must not be multiplied unnecessarily’.

• Remember Kipling‘s advice … ‘keep your head when all about you are losing theirs’… In a time of crisis you will find that a tendency to lose one’s head is apt to appear at any level in administration… You will be unable to lay all these bogies at once, because to prove a negative case is one of the most difficult of Intelligence exercises. But you must find the simplest, commonsense hypothesis and stick to it until a fresh fact proves you wrong, however eminent an authority is attached to another view.

• You will find yourself blamed on the one hand for not telling everybody every conclusion you come to, even before you have thought of it, and on the other for indiscretion by the Security authorities.

• You will be accused of hoarding information even though this is often a legitimate thing to do.

• And you will learn that in the Intelligence work there is an enormous premium placed upon going off at half-cock. The World seems to prefer a busy show of promptness to quiet, mature action, however timely. But you must never succumb. In a crisis you find that these distractions may easily take up to 80 percent of your time. Your nights, or what is left of them after the work which you would have done during the day but for the distractions, will often be spent sleeplessly wondering whether this time you have not been too phlegmatic in decrying other people’s fights of fancy or too rash in extrapolating from too few facts in forming your own hypothesis. But if in all this you can use the remaining 20 percent of your time in encouraging your sources, directing your staff, correlating the Intelligence pictures for yourself and presenting it in logical and clear reports, you will generally find yourself vindicated by events.

• And if you can persuade someone to take countermeasures in time, you may have the satisfaction of seeing danger averted for thousands of your unsuspecting countrymen.

• Though fortunes may vary and its methods change, the principles [of Intelligence] will remain the same.

If one man would have carried RVJ’s hopes that ability in Intelligence ‘would ultimately win the day over the organisational disasters brought upon us by Blackett’, he would have been Francis Crick who tried to fight the system and force through RVJ’s vision after RVJ retired.

Crick wrote a point that bears constant repetition:

One point needs bringing out strongly. It’s no use reorganising with just the same old gang. We must [emphasis in original] have someone rather more lively to lead the thing.

Amid wrangling with the Cabinet Office, Professor David Brunt was appointed as permanent Chairman of the Joint Scientific and Technical Intelligence Committee, replacing the three-month rotation system.

It made little difference. Brunt found it so exasperating he resigned within a year. Crick left for Cambridge.

Tizard had been called back as Chief Scientific Adviser to the MOD. He told RVJ that JIC wanted RVJ to return. RVJ declined.

When WSC again became PM he asked RVJ to return and ‘such a request I could not refuse’.

He was promised that atomic energy intelligence would return to be part of the general Scientific Intelligence organisation under RVJ’s control but the promise was broken. [Classic Whitehall. I wonder if RVJ got his promise in writing, as I always advise people before they speak to the PM about such jobs (and as I did myself in 2019). They almost never do as they are overwhelmed by the psychological force of talking to a PM, who always dodges such requests and makes it uncomfortable to insist.]

In the MOD the streamlined Chief of Staff organisation Alanbrooke built had been been replaced by ‘an administrative jungle of such inefficiency that, for example, papers sometimes came out over the signatures of the Chiefs of Staff, when in fact none of the three Chiefs of Staff had ever seen them’.

Part of the trouble was due to the fact that each of the three Services tended to send to the Ministry of Defence only their second-best officers, so as to keep their own ministries as strong as possible.

‘American relations were in fact quite the happiest aspect of my experience.’ They had done what RVJ suggested and put scientific intelligence inside the CIA with atomic intelligence inside that office.

Although I did some useful things inside the Ministry of Defence, I could not justify prolonging my absence from the University and so left the Ministry again at the end of 1953, having recorded the strongest possible protest about the way in which things were still drifting.

He also opposed the arrangements regarding electronics intelligence.

It may be wondered why, with Churchillian backing, I could do so little. The fact was that I tried to play the game according to the rules inside the Ministry, without invoking Prime Ministerial intervention; and by the time that I did tell Churchill of the situation he was too exhausted to act. He had already had a stroke.

After he left the Directorate of Scientific Intelligence was downgraded so that Scientific Intelligence again ‘had no independent voice at the top level’.

It’s inevitably hard to get reputable scientists to work in intelligence during peace time. Some dislike the ‘dirty’ business. Others reasonably find it less interesting than pure science. Intelligence work is ‘on a lower plane of difficulty than research in pure science. Intelligence is a parasitic activity, in that you are always trying to discover what some other man has already done, in contrast to entering an uncharted field yourself.’

During the war we proved to be fortunate — though we did not know this at the time — that cooperation was much greater than in Germany between scientists and the armed forces and intelligence agencies and there was no direct equivalent of RVJ.  

RVJ ends with a tribute to the extraordinary people he worked with and their extraordinary courage. And a reflection that if some group in society ‘holds up the rest by ransom in order to gain for itself a larger slice of the national cake’ — a clear implicit reference to the Unions — it will start a movement that will lead to ‘the nation overpaying itself beyond its true income, and thus to ruin.

Until we learn that lesson we shall have lost the battle that we in the war fought so hard to win.

What a wonderful book by a great hero.

The ‘movement’ he closes with has grown and grown, despite some setbacks for it in the 1980s. The Whitehall pathologies he describes have grown so vast that the MPs won’t look at them and don’t want to think about them. The lessons from RVJ of how to integrate scientific and technical skills with the highest reaches of policy were forgotten. Over 100,000 were unnecessarily killed in covid. We have had nothing resembling a strategy for Ukraine, just hollow spin and random Ministers saying things that, if they were serious rather than clownish babble, would mean nuclear war (e.g Wallace and Truss). Hopefully millions will not pay the price in current or new wars.

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Lessons

[I’ve bodged this together and edited as I’ve gone. It’s now 99% final.]

These lessons remain highly relevant to Scientific Intelligence, highly relevant for startups and highly relevant for those interested in the intersection of AI’s rapid development and politics/geopolitics/military/intelligence/safety etc.

They are also highly relevant to Starmer’s team as they ponder how to change the wiring of No10 and the Cabinet Office. But it’s very unlikely that Starmer will absorb such lessons now, it’s likely he will do the same as every other PM since Thatcher — fail to control the government and write ruefully in his memoirs about his vain search for ‘the levers of power’. Those levers do exist but the system operates to make it very hard psychologically for a PM to understand them or, if they try, actually to pull them.

1/ The culture of research pre-war was different and in many ways healthier.

Researchers in their twenties were given freedom. They’d be astonished how we now focus so much money with such old people who are high status but no longer working intensely at the frontier.

Bureaucracy was so much lower that many things could be done between 10X to 100X faster and cheaper than now. People could have an idea and almost immediately test it. The enormous bloat of administrative jobs in research (and generally) had not happened. They could move faster in peacetime than the near-wartime atmosphere of Whitehall in the 2020 covid crisis.

They could quickly nab scientists fleeing the Nazis. In contrast, Whitehall has systematically sabotaged efforts to get scientists out of Russia in total contradiction to explicit policy. (I know this from personal efforts to get Whitehall to help people leave. After one particularly important group tried to leave, much to the interest of parts of our intelligence services, Whitehall not only refused to help them — they then called universities to sabotage private efforts to help, even though Government policy has been ostensibly aimed at ‘weakening Putin’s Russia’.)

Many labs then were better at nurturing the support network of mechanics, apprentices, technicians etc.

But even then, as he says towards the end, incentives were to focus on short-term research to get funding. This got worse after the war then much worse since the 1990s and is now 10-100X worse.

2/ Many eternal lessons of very high performance are here.

E.g Teams ‘should be kept as numerically small as possible, and that quality was much the most important factor.’ If RVJ’s team had been a little bigger ‘we should have had to institute an internal communication system, instead of depending on personal contacts to the extent we did, and this would have slowed our daily working’.

Quality and speed are intimately connected. Almost nobody around Westminster has ever worked in an intense well-managed organisation so they have no personal experience of this. When everyone is blind to it, slow mediocrity becomes the norm.

You should be biased towards flattening hierarchies to reduce the ‘hierarchical attenuation of information’. This also connects to speed and quality.

You should assume committees are bad and encouraging individual responsibility is much better. If you can’t avoid committees the only hope is, as Groves said, to manipulate their composition from the start. This also connects to speed and quality.

It’s really hard even for very bright and honest people — even in a crisis as big as ‘beat Hitler’ when they’re really trying — to face reality sometimes. Perhaps because it’s bad/unpleasant news (e.g Lindemann resisting V2 intel). Perhaps because it means admitting you were wrong (e.g people resisting the evidence on the beams). Therefore it’s critical to have a) a mix of institutions/incentives so someone will push and say ‘no I’m right here’s why’ and b) won’t get crushed by their boss and c) somehow this view wriggles up to senior levels.

There’s no alternative or bureaucratic process to substitute for the moral courage to focus on the truth. Moral courage is more likely to flourish if you encourage individual responsibility and is easily killed if you encourage slow, bloated committees. Although in RVJ’s account there are many moments of serious tension, even anger, and bureaucratic power games, there is not one story of a senior person trying to pressure RVJ in a corrupt way to lie in the way that is now routine and if they had it is clear he would have had the moral courage to resist.

NB. If you read General Groves’ book on Manhattan, Now It Can Be Told, you will see exactly the same lessons often in near-identical terms. And of course Groves was pushed out just like RVJ after the wartime crisis.

3/ The iron laws of large bureaucracies were already apparent in 1930s Whitehall — after the creation of the Northcote-Trevelyan system in the 1850s and its transformation via World War I — including, as now, their tendency to crush, obstruct, and subvert the lessons of high performance above.

This point was made in Alanbrooke’s diaries too.

Despite any unpopularity, I survived because war is different from peace: in the latter fallacies can be covered up more or less indefinitely and criticism suppressed, but with the swift action of war the truth comes fairly quickly to light — as Churchill said, ‘In war you don’t have to be polite, you just have to be right!’

I’ll collect examples here:

• Hard for Whitehall to find the right bureaucracy in the 1930s to think about and fund technology problems.

• The development of scientific intelligence started too late. There should have been a small elite team with people like RVJ already working on many crucial problems long before the war started. This meant that after the war started we were trying to detect clues of enemy action while the war was going on and we were losing, rather than having already developed files, networks, leads and so on during peace time. Imagine all the surveillance of German bases that could have been done by ‘civilian’ elements 1938-39 that became hard/impossible/costly after September 1939. This meant we had to rely on catching new technologies in the development and production stages rather than in the research laboratory stage. (Who is responsible today for detecting PRC AI developments in the laboratory stage? When I asked this in 2020 the answers were dreadful.)

• RVJ was initially blocked in creating the Scientific Intelligence organisation because of misconceptions in Naval Intelligence about the importance of independent smart people being able to review specialist experts (i.e Buckingham’s approach would have empowered Eckersley’s error on the beams).

• Even after his unit was created RVJ was not allowed to grow his team until after more than a year and ‘all the ablest people had been fitted into posts and it was now difficult to prise them out’.

• Tendency for departments to have promoted during peace people whose instincts are always to ‘write a minute’ rather than act.

• Spectacular coups like the Oslo Report are often neglected because bureaucracies don’t grasp technical details, confuse themselves about ‘disinformation’ etc.

• Many critical problems, such as proper protocols for crucial aspects of handling intelligence, were not thought out in peace and had to be bodged during war. We constantly read this tale in history — i.e we do not learn from it.

• RVJ’s ‘close and informal’ personal relationships with Bletchley staff was crucial in speedy action.

• Civil Service HR was a nightmare even in 1940-41.

• Teams in Whitehall have a tendency to empire building, hoarding information etc. E.g Sandys trying to cut RVJ out over V2 rockets.

• Confusion of individual responsibility and the creation of duff committees hindered the response to the V2 rocket program, cf. chapters 37 on, so bad that RVJ even drafted a letter of resignation in summer 1944. Committees waste time arguing and every action ‘merely goes as far as common agreement and compromise will allow’ but ‘common agreement and compromise, as every Commander knows, generally do not go far enough’.

• The duff committees also dragged people away from critical work, like on covid. (Cf. p439, CH45, for RVJ telling Churchill about the seven committee meetings that day then giving RVJ permission not to attend committees.)

• The constant problem of ‘hierarchical attenuation of information’ — information had to travel through multiple people in hierarchical bureaucracies, with a risk of information loss in each transfer, therefore the need to shorten links. E.g crucial information about height of flying bombs not getting through to air defence, spring 1944.

• The pursuit of efficiency can focus on data that misses hard to measure things. E.g the old squadron system’s esprit de corps versus the more ‘efficient’ central system.

• Technical experts of undoubted intelligence and expertise can be an absolute nightmare, and behave very far from the Platonic ideal of a scientist, when dealing with a complex mystery. E.g our rocket experts dealing with the V2.

• ‘It’s no use reorganising with just the same old gang’ (Francis Crick). When people look at nightmares in Whitehall, roughy 100% propose a reorganisation but without changing the people. This is largely doomed but nobody wants to face it. Crick’s point is exactly what I said to the PM repeatedly 2019-20. Whitehall repeatedly creates a new Y to replace ‘rubbish X’ (a new MOD innovation hub!) then all the people from ‘rubbish X’ are transferred over and, surprise surprise, Y is rubbish too.

• Whitehall is good at getting X to agree to take on a job on condition X will get ABC then they cheat after X has joined (e.g with RVJ and atomic intelligence in his return 1952).

• Things that worked were closed. Alanbrooke’s Chiefs of Staff system: closed. RVJ’s Intelligence section: closed. See below.

• Such problems of large organisations are so widespread that many were mirrored in Germany. E.g there was no equivalent of RVJ and the V2 program was plagued by multiple committees.

• Highly intelligent ‘rationalists’ like Blackett can often be disastrous when it comes to understanding large organisations and high performance.

• In intelligence collection and collation should be responsible to a common head but Whitehall breaks up responsibility among committees.

• JIC was created but people without intimate knowledge of intelligence were put on the Committee. This is normal Whitehall’s instinctive hostility to building long-term true expertise.

• Dumb structures drive away talent.

NB. Most of these problems were seen with covid, were not fixed, then got worse with the Ukraine war, nobody is trying to fix them, everybody thinks (rightly) their job is to make them even worse. Whitehall as constructed is incapable of ameliorating them to any important degree, only a change in the fundamentals could possibly do so.

There’s another general issue.

New valuable ideas necessarily seem bad to most people. They are not obvious and many smart people think they are wrong. If new valuable ideas were usually obvious and easy to demonstrate, the world would be different.

There is necessarily/inevitably resistance, scorn, bureaucratic friction etc.

Many don’t persist through the social difficulties inherent in this process.

When someone succeeds with a new valuable idea they remember the difficult experience. They remember how they had to dig deep to persist. This makes them both a) more likely to get through the ordeal again and, inevitably, b) often somewhat clearly convinced in their own judgement, which can increase resistance from others.

There is no way to solve this, just ameliorate it! The startup ecosystem is so powerful because it is a system that allows people to build and cope with these problems (providing money, networks, support etc). When considering government problems like R&D it’s crucial to introduce diversity of funding otherwise this problem squashes everything, as UKRI does now.)

4/ Whether innovations prosper or fail often depends on how people at the front line respond and are managed.

Eg. the difference between fighter and bomber command listening to the scientists. Cf. Rosen’s book.

5/ The Treasury routinely enforced appalling judgements.

Refused to pay for scientific intelligence even in 1939.

Tried to block RVJ’s appointment.

Opposed extremely modest growth of RVJ’s team.

At the end of the war Scientific Intelligence was moved into dilapidated buildings. This air of dilapidation persists today amid massive bloated budgets.

After the war Whitehall wouldn’t fund a Staff College course for scientists, something of trivial cost and immense but hard to measure potential gain.

6/ The critical importance of whether the person who really understands X is allowed in the room with the PM and listened to properly.

E.g RVJ’s famous meeting with WSC on 21 June 1940 where he explained the theory of the beams and got WSC’s support for action.

E.g the rocket meeting in Chapter 39 when he’d been on holiday and couldn’t study all the details himself — a big difference with the beams meeting in 1940.

7/ New technologies lead to new forces. E.g the Bruneval Raid led to the formation of the Paratroop Regiment.

Instead of year after year of dumb arguments with the RAF, we should have created a new Robot/Drone Force so technical people could experiment quickly with Special Forces etc.

8/ You must assume the enemy is smart and will think of most things you do therefore the timing of measures is crucial.

You will have a window when the enemy is figuring out your new move so use it well. And you should remember the lessons of Window: both sides delayed using it because of the idea that ‘the enemy will then learn about it and deploy it on us’. Göring stopped German deployment, Watson-Watt delayed Britain’s. The logic was bad.

9/ It’s incredibly hard to get crucial big strategic judgements right.

E.g We a) initially thought wrongly that our bombing was much more accurate than it was, then switched to area bombing (e.g Hamburg), then b) failed to appreciate our own innovations in precision bombing and stuck with area bombing long after we could have gained from precision! (p303-304)

E.g The Germans spent so much on the rocket program partly because of the psychological attraction of the rocket!

This echoes Alanbrooke’s Diaries on the long-running saga of arguments with America on an early D-Day versus North Africa, Mediterranean, Italy first etc.

10/ You need to send able technical people out to the front line to suppress errors, per Newton:

If, instead of sending the observations of able seamen to able mathematicians on land, the land would send able mathematicians to sea, it would signify much more to the improvement of navigation and the safety of men’s lives and estates on that element. (Newton)

11/ The relationship between Intelligence problems and technical expertise: ‘Expert advice can be dangerous in intelligence problems’.

In intelligence problems (mysteries), technical experts can maintain different theories for a long time without it being possible to disprove them.

If the opponent has done something we have failed on, can’t figure out, or haven’t tried, then it is hard for our experts to overcome the prejudice that because we have failed or haven’t tried, it is therefore impossible or foolish. And our experts can easily fool themselves that they are still experts when they are in fact novices.

Intelligence, on the other hand, has the advantage of closer contact with the enemy.

12/ RVJ’s highly unusual character, selected against in Whitehall.

He’s a mix of highly intelligent, anti-bureaucratic friction, highly persistent and hardworking, creative, aggressive, resilient, and psychologically cunning with an instinctive feel for overcoming bureaucratic blocks — a highly unusual combination. He could manipulate Whitehall and talk on equal technical terms to mathematicians. And he had the moral courage to focus on the truth, rather than empire building and HR games.

RVJ was young and empowered. He was both close to the edge of the network — such as reading direct reports from agents in Europe, raw ENIGMA intercepts, and talking to POWs — and he was close to the apex of power. His position did not report through multiple layers and he found informal ways to go around normal hierarchies without (mostly) offending people. Therefore he could quickly connect the summit of power to reality.

He had a knack, which is psychological not IQ, for knowing how to ‘trick’ the system into doing what he wanted. E.g getting Tedder to request a new group working on German radar for D-Day. This knack is crucial for getting things done in Whitehall where the formal hierarchy is often wrong and the most efficient action by far is to route around the block and find the right senior person who can then ask for something that generates a signal that you can respond to and thereby forces nudges others into doing what you want. Of course, others who understand this are doing it simultaneously all day long!

Whitehall today employs very, very few such people — they are in startup world where they can build away from HR…

And even the odd brilliant people are almost always in dysfunctional organisations.

13/ The Great Meta-Lesson of Performance and Government that I’ve written about for a decade strikes again: a) the principles of high performance are eternal from Sun Tzu to RV Jones but b) also eternal is almost everybody in large organisations fighting bitterly to suppress them and work on opposite principles — and when occasionally brilliant people flourish the example is suppressed, the people removed, and the system quickly reverts to its normal equilibrium: normal failure that isn’t and can’t be scrutinised internally.

Post-war the system RVJ built was broken and he and other talented people like Crick were made unwelcome in Whitehall. Whitehall built new systems largely based on the opposite principles to those that had proved so effective, almost as if working on an anti-checklist for high performance.

• Similarly General Groves was effectively fired from the Pentagon which ditched effective systems for WW2 and ICBMs, shifting to new systems that we are plagued by today and which have resisted all attempts at reform.

• Similarly George Mueller left NASA and it quickly lost the Apollo culture and never regained it — that culture is now in SpaceX.

• Similarly Bob Taylor was fired by XEROX when he’d built a research lab that developed ideas that proved to be worth trillions.

The normal Whitehall bureaucracy developed since the 1850s has an automatic propensity to replace things that work well with bloated bureaucracies that slow everything down and drive out talent.

The way in which the successful wartime approach was immediately dismantled obviously echoes with how Whitehall immediately dismantled successful aspects of how we dealt with covid:

• Closing the Vaccine Taskforce in 2021 instead of advancing to new vaccines that would stop transmission.

• Trying and partially succeeding closing sewage monitoring which we need for future pandemics and bioweapons, and which could help generally with public health.

• Closing the project to build manufacturing for rapid testing here then running out of tests in omicron.

If we’d stayed 2020-24 a) the Cabinet Office and MOD now would be extremely different and b) there would be new institutions (we started setting up in Q3 2020) working on different principles.

But without a political force, there is no hope of the system changing itself significantly without an even bigger shock than covid and Ukraine, which Whitehall has shrugged off and continued business as usual. Generally it is only existential danger that really drives change in large bureaucracies, they are impervious to anything else.

Notice how the wrecking of Scientific Intelligence was done by people who had themselves just gone through an existential war against Hitler — nevertheless the iron laws of Whitehall prevailed. If such people with such an immediate experience, and looking at the sudden arrival of nuclear weapons, could destroy the COS system, then ask yourself how likely it is that the rancid Whitehall of today thinks out and enacts some program of ‘reform’.

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Looking to see if RVJ’s children were alive I saw this. His daughter died less than a month after his wife. If anybody knows if his son is alive please post below, I’d like to visit him and thank him for his father…

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Further Reading

Some lessons in intelligence, an address by RVJ to the CIA, 1993

Reflections on Intelligence, RVJ. I will read this too…