Most Secret War - R.V.Jones

This is one of a whole set of books from Fran's father's collection - his interests being aspect of war from Wellington to Churchill. This particular book is from 1978.

Prior to World War II, the British government was working on methods to detect and track aircraft approaching the United Kingdom. R.V.Jones was assigned to explore the possibilities of using infrared detection but eventually concluded that with current technologies the possibilities were very limited. Despite this, his technical skills across the whole electronic spectrum were sufficient that as war started, he was charged to look at what technologies the Germans might be exploring. And so we launch into a history of discovering bomber guidance beams, countering those, exploring German radar usage, vengeance weapons, and nuclear efforts.

It would be possible to suspect some elements of personal ego and bombast - but his skill and accuracy in interpreting what the Germans were and might be doing seems to be proven. Even though only in his late twenties, he found himself occasionally at Churchill's war cabinet table and his opinion was sought in deference to that of Admirals and Flight Commodores.

For those interested in cryptology, the method by which he helped discover the secret vengeance weapon development site at Peenemünde is an excellent example of the value of signals intelligence. Jones and others had been mapping the positions of German radar installations and had become very familiar with the different groups operating those radars. He noted two military units as being particularly good and frequently used for testing new radar and radio direction beam systems. So he asked Bletchley to keep him informed of anything to do with those two units. And a decrypted message asking for a member of one of those unit to report to Peenemünde was one of the first mentions of that facility and a warning for photo reconnaissance flights over that facility. In addition, the test flights of the weapons developed there were tracked and reported by the German radar units, whose communications were intercepted in almost realtime and so Jones was able to determine when the weapons were still early prototypes and when finally about to become real threats.    

More amusing, if it wasn't sad for the lives lost, was his battles with parts of the RAF to get bomber crews to turn off many of their new electronic systems except when absolutely needed. Jones was aware of when the Germans had detected the frequencies on which those systems worked and were starting to use those signals to detect and intercept bombers. In fact much of the book is the constant escalation in both directions of new system being developed, then detected by the opponent and either countered or exploited. As one example, having detected the signals used by German night fighters, the RAF developed a system for plane to detect when a German fighter was behind them. But the German then detected that system and started to use signals from that system to locate the bombers.