Most Secret War (Jones, 1978)

Most Secret War (Jones, 1978)

R. V. Jones

From Foresight, Loveridge, 2009:

p.153 The learning basis of scanning (for weak signals of change) and of foresight are intended to enable coping with situations as they evolve and to anticipate or shape the way that evolution progresses into the future. Anticipatory learning then needs to have Jones's (1978) characteristics of intelligence gathering and learning leading to the creation of a library of anticipations comprising trends, issues and events relevant to the time horizon of the scenarios. Event strings are composed of anticipations drawn from the library and placed in alternative sets of sequences that, when examined critically, are thought to be free of inconsistencies and impossibilities... The library of anticipations ought to contain entries in all the six themes of the STEEPV set, as any real-world situation will have elements from each theme... The anticipation in the library needs to meet the criteria of relevance, reasonableness and robustness

p.154 Intelligence and anticipation from a Jones-based process (1978), emerge from memory, counter-intuitive interpretation of the commonplace, and careful interpretation of the unusual, the unexpected or speculation.

"...there is at present no means of preventing hostile bombers from depositing their loads of explosives, incendiary materials, gasses, or bacteria upon their objectives... no method can be devised to safeguard great centres of population from such a fate... The whole weight and influence of the Government should be thrown into the scale to endeavor to find a solution."

JLJ - World War II stories turned into lectures in intelligence. I personally feel that strategy is the art and science of trying to out-think someone who is out to out-think you.

Jones, with an apparent encyclopedic memory for small details and most likely aided by a calendar or daily schedule, as well as formerly 'most secret' documents recently made publicly available, cleverly combines storytelling with insight on the art of intelligence gathering to create an intense, incredibly detailed, readable WWII story-for-the-ages, occasionally spotted with British-English terms that might cause an American to pause and wonder if we in fact speak the same language. An experienced practical joker, scientist, scholar, schemer, budding politician and observer, Jones would later apply what he learned inside and outside the laboratory to the problems of his time and age.

It appears that the entire German military was no match for the intelligence, wisdom, political skills, and raw scheming of a physicist-turned-warfighter with an attention for detail who found a niche in a British Intelligence system where scientific advances were needed - fast - to counter a menace and a World War threatening to destroy a country, a people and a nation. Jones tells in great detail how close the War came to ending differently, and takes pride in detailing his efforts to weaponize science itself in the general mobilization effort.

A man as comfortable in the presence of workshop mechanics as with Sir Winston Churchill, Jones traces a 'Winds of War' style epic where he happens to be involved in important war functions, making decisions with great impact as the British nation struggled against the clock to develop defenses against hostile bombers that one alarm-raising academic claimed in 1934 represented a threat the nation had 'no means of preventing'.

xvii This book tells of the rise of Scientific Intelligence in warfare as I saw it in World War II.

p.3-4 In 1939 I was a Scientific Officer on the staff of the Air Ministry in London, and for the past four years I had been involved in problems of defending Britain from air attack... the Second World War... This book is primarily an account of my part in that war, which was an to attempt to anticipate the German applications of science to warfare, so that we could counter their new weapons before they were used. Much of my work had to do with radio navigation... and with radar... There were also our efforts against the V-1... and V-2... and... against their nuclear developments. In all these fields I had the ultimate responsibility for providing Intelligence, and my main object now is to describe how we built up our pictures of what the Germans were doing. But intelligence is of little use unless it leads to action

p.7-8 My main hobby in my schooldays was, as with other boys of my generation, the making of radio receiving sets... There has never been anything comparable in any other period of history to the impact of radio on the ordinary individual in the 1920's. It was the product of some of the most imaginative developments that have ever occurred in physics, and it was as near magic as anyone could conceive, in that with a few mainly home-made components simply connected together one could conjure speech and music out of the air.

[JLJ - As a 19-year old in Engineering school in 1985 deciding on a specialty area, and therefore a career for the rest of my life, I was likewise interested in all things electrical, and decided on being an electrical engineer. I was also interested in programming computers, but saw them as little more than toys with potential. Chemical engineers at that time were said to make more money, but I kind of liked how you could "summon" electricity on demand with a wall switch or a plug, and "command" it to do various things.]

p.13 The week that I went to Hoar Cross [1934, Jones spent a summer month as a tutor at the home with the name Hoar Cross], The Times published on 8th August a letter from Lindemann headed 'Science and Air Bombing'. This read:

...there is at present no means of preventing hostile bombers from depositing their loads of explosives, incendiary materials, gasses, or bacteria upon their objectives... no method can be devised to safeguard great centres of population from such a fate... The whole weight and influence of the Government should be thrown into the scale to endeavor to find a solution.

p.16 Wilkins replied that he knew that Post Office engineers had noticed disturbances to radio reception when aircraft flew in the vicinity of their receivers, and that this phenomenon might be useful for detecting enemy aircraft.

The Post Office observations had been made in 1931, and indeed rather similar observations had been made at H.M. Signal School in 1923. Moreover, Marconi had proposed in 1922 to detect ships by means of reflected radio waves and in 1931 W.A.S. Butement and P.E. Pollard of the Signals Experimental Establishment at Woolwich had devised and made a pulsed radio system on a wavelength of about 50 centimeters for detecting ships... it was Wilkins' remark to Watson-Watt that started the serious development of radar.

[JLJ - frequency = c / wavelength, so F = 3x10⁸/.50 or 600 MHz, in the UHF band. The Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar tells a more complete story, with other countries making their own advances in the field or radar. Curiously Jones downplays or ignores the accomplishment of the German inventor Hulsmeyer: "The German inventor Christian Hülsmeyer was the first to use radio waves to detect 'the presence of distant metallic objects'. In 1904, he demonstrated the feasibility of detecting a ship in dense fog, but not its distance from the transmitter. He obtained a patent for his detection device in April 1904 and later a patent for a related amendment for estimating the distance to the ship. He also got a British patent on September 23, 1904 for a full radar system, that he called a telemobiloscope. It operated on a 50 cm wavelength and the pulsed radar signal was created via a spark-gap. His system already used the classic antenna setup of horn antenna with parabolic reflector and was presented to German military officials in practical tests in Cologne and Rotterdam harbour but was rejected."]

p.205 In the background of our minds there was of course the possibility of the devastatingly powerful atomic bomb. As soon as I had joined Intelligence I had briefed agents and other sources to look for traces that might indicate German developments, including the production of heavy water at the Rjukan plant in Norway, where surplus hydroelectric power was used on a routine basis to electrolyse natural water and so leave a concentration of heavy water in the residue.

p.209 We formed a special Sub-Committee to determine the best tactical countermeasures for Bomber Command to use against the German night defences, both fighters and flak.

p.215 Deception has been an important stratagem in war at least since Gideon scared the hosts of Midian into a disastrous stampede

p.306-307 the Germans would be interested in heavy water as a 'moderator' if they intended to make an atomic pile... A contract had been awarded to the plant to produce 1,500 kilograms of heavy water starting in the autumn of 1941, and it seemed that the Germans were on the way to making an atomic pile in which plutonium might be produced... In the meantime, the information about heavy water production at Rjukan was so positive that I was asked whether we ought to try to knock it out. When I agreed, the recommendation went up to the War Cabinet, which requested Combined Operations to prepare an attack... the plan was formed to fly in two gliders carrying a force of 34 men of the First Airborne Division, who would attack the plant and attempt to escape into Sweden. The attempt was made on 19th November 1942, but met with utter disaster... All we knew at the time was that every man had been lost.

p.493-494 A fundamental difficulty of Intelligence work is that input is by source, and output is by subject. A changeover has thus to occur inside the Intelligence machine, which therefore has to act as far as possible as a single perfect human mind, observing, remembering, criticizing and correlating different types of information, and then giving expression to the result.