Most Secret War
by R V Jones
Buy on AmazonMost Secret War is R V Jones's account of his part in British Scientific Intelligence between 1939 and 1945. It was his responsibility to anticipate the German applications of science to warfare, so that the British could counter their new weapons before they were used. Much of his work had to do with radio navigation, as in the Battle of the Beams, with radar, as in the Allied Bomber Offensive and in the preparations for D-Day and in the war at sea. He was also in charge of the British intelligence against the V-1 (flying bomb) and V-2 (rocket) retaliation weapons and, although fortunately the Germans were some distance from success, against their nuclear weapons.
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"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 infrared, 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. 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."
Pioneers of Intelligence Gathering · fivebooks.com