B o ok s
A dangerous man to ignore
Peter Calvocoressi
Most Secret War: British Scientific Intel', ,Iiience 1939-1945 R. V. Jones (Hamlsh riamilton E6.95) The subject of this excellent book is to be found in its sub-title. It is written by an actor Who, from the first day to the last, was in the thick of things scientific and technical. It is a Contribution to the history of the war of exceptional interest and importance. It is a success story. It is very readable, even by untutored (though not dim-witted) laymen. It has some of the excitement of the chase. Above all it is authentic. The reader does not in this case — alas, there are others — have to ask himself whether this is what really happened or whether the author Knows what he is talking about. Professor Jones notes more than one episode in the course of his war service When he had luck, hut the reader quickly Perceives (as Professor Jones would be the last to deny) that he had also exceptional talent and plenty of nerve. The talent, presumably inborn, includes an extraordinary Memory, an incisiveness evident in his prose Style, and an aptitude for scientific inquiry and synthesis. Young Jones, whose father was a sergeant in the Grenadier Guards, Went to a church school, a state elementary school, a public school (Dulwich) and Wadhatn College, Oxford, before reaching t.he academic pinnacle of Balliol and becomIN Dr Jones at the age of twenty-two. clinewhere along this line he cultivated a respect for talent in others and a disrespect or station or rank when annexed to inferior talent. Churchill took to him at once, which w. as a help in one or two tight spots in the !a-fighting in the wartime Intelligence Jungle, but mostly Dr Jones was his own he who survived and succeeded because 'le was nearly always right. So his book is always a personal story as well as a piece of national history. It tells what he succeeded at and how. His Job, to which he was appointed some Months before the outbreak of war and entered upon by coincidence on 1 September 1939, was to improve the flow of Scientific Intelligence which was at that Point minimal. First and foremost this Meant finding out what new weapons the Germans had up their sleeves, how the technical components of their existing weapons worked, and how they could be Countered. He worked at 54 Broadway Which was the HQ of the Secret Service, Otherwise and confusingly called MI6, but it heeds to be explained that he was not work for Military Intelligence but for Air 04atelligence and as a member of the Air 'WT. He was therefore concerned with the
air war and not with the war on the ground or at sea, except indirectly. His main sources were reports from agents or wellwishers (the most remarkable of these, the Oslo Report of November 1939, came in out of the blue and even now it is not known who sent it, though Dr Jones has his own ideas about that); photographic reconnaissance; conscious or unconscious revelations by prisoners of war; the Y (or listening) Service; and decoded Enigma cypher traffic.
The first big challenge came with the bombing blitz of 1940. How did the Ger man bombers find their targets and what could be done to nullify their scientific aids?
This has now become known as the Battle of the Beams. Special German units with spe cial equipment led the way, marked the target and so in theory made everything simple for the following force. The riposte was to deceive, derange or deflect the pathfinders by knowing all about their radio equipment and drowning or distorting it.
There were three phases in this contest, each of them dominated by a different German device for doing roughly the same thing. They were Knickebein, X-Gerat and Y-Gerat. Briefly, as this book makes clear, we dealt successfully with the first and last but less creditably with the intermediate stage. Dr Jones became known as the man who beat the beams. This part of the book contains also a further salutary debunking of the myths about the Coventry raid.
After the beams came a series of scientific inquiries in aid of our own bomber offensive. These included finding out about German uses of radar for fighter control; about how to confound German defences (e.g. with the metal strips called Window); and about the workings and weaknesses of the very sophisticated night fighter defence system called the Kammhuber Line. At the same time there was the watch on the V weapons with which Germany might regain the ascendancy or even win the war. Dr Jones and his colleagues (incidentally his entire outfit still consisted of only five persons including himself at the end of 1942 — this was one of its strengths) played the major part in elucidating what was going on at Peenemfinde and in forecasting what London would be hit with and when. These latter problems gave rise to much controversy which became more than a little tinged with unscientific acrimony and a priori prejudice. Dr Jones is pretty scathing about some (not all) of those who differed from him or got in his way and there is no doubt that he was on occasions rather scurvily treated. But he was a difficult man to put down and a dangerous one to ignore and any way he has lived to tell the tale wie es eigentlich geschehen ist.
The book ends on a leaden note. Dr Jones disapproved strongly of the proposals for carrying on Scientific Intelligence in peacetime, but this time he failed to prevail and he retreated to the Chair of Natural Philosophy at Aberdeen where he has remained until retirement except for one brief and disillusioning return to Whitehall when Churchill became Prime Minister again in 1951. The war produced, in curious ways, many good Intelligence Officers.
Among them was a handful of outstanding ones. Those who were there would to a large extent agree on who these were. Dr Jones would be on everybody's short list.
He says at one point that he was finding that he had acquired a 'feel' for the way the Germans did things. That is a just obser vation, though a maddeningly imprecise one. The feel was the thing — plus method, memory, very hard work, the open mind, keeping your unit small and, as this book abundantly testifies, knowing how your society works.
There is a book to be written on the sociology of British Intelligence and there are clues here: for example, the story of how, unofficially and without any rank to pull, you can get a chap whose father you
once knew in —shire to go off on an unauthorised and dangerous reconnaissance which somebody else has been ordered to carry out. It is this sort of thing which gives British war books, even by boffins, a certain gaiety amid all the strenuousness and grimness. Foreigners are misled into calling it amateurishness, but the principal actors in this book were exceedingly professional, albeit with an extra dimension which does not, I think, figure in equivalent accounts by Germans, Frenchmen or Americans. So in the end this is not just a book about Scientific Intelligence. It is also, if secondarily, about how the British go to war and how they go about war.
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