A Summer Bright and Terrible (10 page)

Yet Churchill roared on, in Parliament and
newspaper articles and political meetings, scorning the scorns—indeed, at times
seeming to revel in them—stubbornly presenting the facts that the world wanted
to ignore. And always searching for more. How he found his facts, everyone
suspected and no one knew—and everyone suspected someone else. Some said agents
in MI5, disaffected by the waffling of His Majesty’s government, fed the gadfly
their secrets. Others blamed Brendan Bracken, a friend so intimate that many
thought he was Churchill’s bastard son, whose house in North Lord Street became
the headquarters for those fighting against Chamberlain’s appeasement policies.
Some said Churchill communicated with spirits; others said his wife was
sleeping with someone in the cabinet.

The prime minister harried his security people.
Perhaps it was some of these people, perhaps others, perhaps all of them.
Whatever his sources, Churchill seemed to know more than anyone else about what
was going on in Germany, about what the British government knew about what was
going on in Germany, and about what was going on in the corridors of the
British government.

And so he found out about the Rowe memo, and he
faced Wimperis with it. What was being done, for instance, about the death ray?
“It’s all nonsense,” Wimperis very properly responded, but Churchill would have
none of that. He reminded Wimperis of the tank, of how that too was deemed
nonsense until he, Winston, had discovered the discarded file and asked what
was so nonsensical about it. When no one could tell him—when, as it turned out,
there was nothing at all nonsensical or wrong with the idea except that it was
new—he had roared his roars and pushed the tank through development until it
became the weapon that crushed the trenches and won the Great War.

“So now,” he asked again, “what are you doing
about the death ray?”

Wimperis found it impossible to explain just
why this weapon really was pure fantasy. It is, after all, difficult to argue
with a bellicose ignorance, and that is what he was facing in Winston
Churchill. A great man, certainly, but one of whom it was said, “the man’s mind
has astonishing gaps of total ignorance.” So the Director of Scientific
Research reluctantly asked his staff to investigate the possibility of a death
ray, and if they couldn’t come up with one, perhaps they could at least come up
with a report that would convince the bombastic Churchill to sod off and leave
them alone.

In the event, that is what happened. But the
report led to a bit more than that.

A death ray would use electromagnetic
radiation of some sort. Consequently, on January 18, 1935, Wimperis sent for
Robert Watson Watt, head of the UK’s Radio Research Laboratory, and asked him
if he could possibly provide the military with a death ray to destroy enemy
bombers. Watt was a serious Scotsman, and he did not laugh; presumably, he was
just dismayed at the ignorance involved in such a question. Scientific officers
should not take science fiction seriously. But Wimperis was serious, especially
when he asked Watt to provide him with, if not the death ray, then specific
data as to why it was impossible.

This Watt could not do on the spur of the
moment. He returned to his laboratory and passed the problem on to “a junior
scientific officer,” as he later put it, an unassuming young man named Arnold “Skip”
Wilkins, without mentioning the words
death ray
or
enemy bombers.
He liked to keep secret things secret, and Wilkins was not within his circle of
trusted friends. He decided to present Wilkins with a “formalized problem,” and
so Wilkins returned from his lunch one day to find a used calendar leaf on his
desk, turned to the blank side. He recognized this as Watt’s usual method of
communication. On it was scribbled a note from “S,” Watt’s usual notation for
himself, the Superintendent. The note told Wilkins to “calculate the amount of
radio-frequency power which should be radiated to raise the temperature of
eight pints of water from 98°F to 105°F at a distance of 5 km and at a height
of 1 km.”

To bring down an enemy bomber, it wasn’t
necessary to kill the pilot; raising his temperature to 105° would make him
delirious and incapable of keeping the plane under control. Watt—or Watson-Watt
as he renamed himself after the war when he was knighted—thus framed the
calculation in these terms. Wilkins, it turned out, was just as clever, and
immediately realized the only possible purpose of heating eight pints of water
(the amount of water in the blood of a person) to delirium temperatures five kilometres
away and one kilometre up in the sky:

It seemed clear to
me that the note concerned the production of fever heat in an airman’s blood by
a death-ray and I supposed that Watson-Watt’s opinion had been sought about the
possibility of producing such a ray.

My calculation
showed, as expected, that a huge power would have to be generated at any radio
frequency to produce a fever in the pilot of an aircraft even in the unlikely
event of his body not being screened by the metal casing of the fuselage. . . .

[As nothing remotely
like the power required could be produced], it was clear that no radio death
ray was possible.

I said all this to
Watson-Watt when handing him my calculation and he replied, “Well, then if the
death ray is not possible how can we help them?” I replied to the effect that
Post Office engineers had noticed disturbances to VHF reception when aircraft
flew in the vicinity of their receivers and that this phenomenon might be
useful for detecting enemy aircraft.

His insight went back to a day when he had been
having a cup of coffee with several Post Office engineers—who in England were
also responsible for radio communication—who were complaining about the
problems of aircraft interference. Wilkins recognized that, of course, metal
airplanes flying between radio stations would interfere with the radio waves.
In effect, they would absorb the radio waves and reemit them in all directions,
setting up interference patterns. There was nothing to be done about this for
the Post Office people, since there was no way to shield the planes so that
they would pass through the airspace without causing interference. But now he
realized that such interference would be an indication of the airplane’s
presence in the sky.

Wilkins explained all this to Watson-Watt, who
then wrote a memo to Wimperis stating unequivocally that a death ray was
impossible, but suggesting this use of radio interference to locate enemy
bombers before they appeared visibly in the skies. Thus was radar invented.

But Watson-Watt was no fool. In his memo, he
didn’t mention Wilkins’s name, and so history records that the “Father” of
radar was Robert Watson-Watt. You will seldom find the name of Skip Wilkins in
the history books. (That’s the way the game is played. As another instance, in
1960, a Cambridge University graduate student named Jocelyn Bell discovered the
existence of pulsars. After much arguing, she managed to convince the director
of her laboratory, Anthony Hewish, that there really are stars up there that
pulse. No one understood what they could be until Tommy Gold of Cornell
explained them as the long-sought-after neutron stars, appearing to pulse
because they were rapidly spinning. The Nobel Prize went—surprise, surprise—not
to Bell or Gold, but to Hewish.) Watson-Watt, in his memoirs, did try to
resuscitate Wilkins by calling him the “Mother” of radar for all his subsequent
work in bringing it to fruition, but he never acknowledged that the initial
idea was not his own.

Well, never mind. Wimperis reported the
Watson-Watt memo to Churchill—who in his generally masterful history of the war
gives sole credit to Watson-Watt for radar—and to the first meeting of a
committee he had formed, the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air
Defence.

I suppose there is some truth to the idea
that there is nothing new under the sun, and radar is no exception. It might
have been invented much earlier, for the idea was floating around out there.
Radio waves had been discovered by Heinrich Hertz in 1886, and by 1900 a
controversial genius and early pioneer of radio communication named Nikola
Tesla suggested the idea, although of course at that time he was not thinking
of airplanes: “When we raise the voice and hear an echo in reply, we know that
the sound of the voice must have reached a distant wall or boundary, and must
have been reflected from the same. Exactly as the sound, so an electrical wave
is reflected, and the same evidence [can be used to] determine the relative
position or course of a moving object such as a vessel at sea.”

But nobody was interested in measuring the
position of an object at sea: What was the point? And Tesla was known as a wild
man who claimed to receive radio messages from Mars, so his idea disappeared,
only to be resurrected a few years later when a German inventor, Christian
Hulsmeyer, rediscovered the principle and proposed to use it to avoid ship
collisions in foggy weather. He actually obtained funding, started his own
company, gave public demonstrations, and offered the system to the German navy
for a modest sum. As with the British Admiralty and its response to airplanes,
the Germans were not interested. Hulsmeyer was asked by the Dutch to give a
demonstration; he did, the system worked perfectly, and the Dutch then decided
that they too were not interested. He offered it to the British navy, which
also turned it down. One can’t imagine what they there thinking—or rather, how
on earth could they
not
be thinking? Ships at war were often baffled by
fog or smoke; how could they not be interested in a device that could see
through such obstacles?

But they weren’t, and the concept disappeared
again. And then again it surfaced, in 1916, when Hans Dominik and Richard
Scherl invented it for a third time and offered it to the German Kriegsmarine
for a second time. This time, in the midst of the Great War, the admirals were
interested. They asked how soon they could have a working system installed in
their ships. “Six months,” Dominik and Scherl replied. “Too late,” the admirals
said, dismissing them. “The war will be over by then.”

Oh, who is so blind as those who will not see?

The concept was used for sound waves rather
than radio waves, in the systems called Asdic by the British and Sonar by the
Americans, to detect submarines. A ship on the surface sent a sound wave down
through the water; if a submarine was present, the sound bounced off and an
echo was heard up on the surface. In 1925 King George V was given a
demonstration and, revealing an intellect not often associated with royalty,
pointed out that electromagnetic waves—radio waves—travelled much faster than
sound waves, and so wouldn’t it be better to use radio instead? The admirals
coughed discreetly. “Quite impossible, sir,” they murmured. “Scientific
considerations, you know. Impossible to describe. No, no, quite impossible.”

As indeed it was, or at least it was difficult,
due to scattering and interferences in the water. King George nodded; it was
only a thought, and it quickly disappeared. Not to reappear for another ten
years, when Skip Wilkins made the suggestion to Watson-Watt, the ostensible
father of radar, who seems to have been the only man in the past twenty-five
years who
hadn’t
thought of it.

Ten

And so Wimperis reported to the Committee
for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence that he had it on good authority that
although a death ray was impossible, they might use radio waves to locate enemy
bombers before they reached the English coast. With the committee’s full
approval, he went the next day to see Dowding to tell him the good news and to
ask him to authorize, on his authority as Air Member for Research and
Development, the necessary funds to begin to construct this early-warning
system. The decision rested squarely on his shoulders.

Dowding said no.

Behind his stuffy exterior, his eyes must have
been gleaming. This could be the third part, the missing part of the puzzle.
The Spitfire and Hurricane, with their eight guns, were nearing production. If
he could find the bombers with enough time for the fighters to reach them . . .

But his budget was tight and the government was
adamant about not raising taxes to increase military expenditures, and he was
not much impressed by calculations. He had spent the several previous years
listening to requests for funds for death rays and frozen clouds, and he had
seen those phantasms evaporate before the peering eyes of experiment. Was this
to be just a bit more pie in the sky?

He knew about radio from his own experiences.
He knew how useful it could be, and how new the technology was; he knew how
bright people, those unhindered by preconceived ideas, could find new uses for
it.

He had done so himself, when he had come back
from Baghdad in time for the summer air exercises. When he had been put in
charge of fighter defences, he turned out to be the first ranking officer in
the RAF to use radio in these exercises. Without telling anyone, he sent
several trucks equipped with radio out on the roads over which the bombers
would have to pass. When the airplanes did, the news was radioed back to
Dowding, who then scrambled his fighters in time to intercept them—just as he
would do with radar and the Luftwaffe bombers in the summer of 1940. But the
umpires in the 1930s saw this as cheating. They stopped the exercises and told
him to play by the rules like a gentleman, and they started over again.