Most Secret War

In an interview on Pioneers of Intelligence Gathering

Your fourth book is R V Jones’s Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence, 1939-1945.

The First World War was the chemists’ war and WWII was the physicists’ war. Jones was a scientist in Oxford doing his PhD and was interested in looking at infra red, which became very important for night bombing missions. They were all looking at what the Germans were doing and what counter-measures could be taken, how you could foil them. Science is very important in warfare, of course, and James persuaded the government that it could pose a serious threat. This book is his memoir and recounts how he created a scientific intelligence system.

What kind of innovations was he responsible for?

Well, he discovered that if you dropped small strips of silver foil out of planes it could confuse German radars. He didn’t want to go in too early with this so they waited a couple of years and it turned out that the Germans had discovered exactly the same thing and were waiting too! At the start of the war bombing raids had to be done in daylight, but the Germans developed beams that they could fire from stations in Europe and that the bombers could latch on to and follow. Nobody thought it could be done because of the curvature of the earth, but Jones worked out how the beams would bend round the earth and worked out ways to bend them away from cities and away from their targets.