The lifting of the restrictions of the British Official Secrets Act has led to a spate of “now it can be told” accounts, of which R. V. Jones’s is the latest and not the least interesting. His memoir tells of a twenty-eight-year-old budding scientist, swept up by patriotism into the war effort against Germany. Throughout the war, Dr. Jones’s main concern was with German radar and guidance systems. His task was to keep one step ahead of the Germans in this matter. For the most part he succeeded, and as a result he contributed a useful share to the eventual victory. To an extent, German night fighters were thwarted; to a degree, British bombers got through German radar defenses; a percentage of V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets went astray from their primary London targets.
One senses, however, that Jones would object to this view of his achievements. The Wizard War often urges us to feel that the author won the war—single-handedly, for the most part, though, on occasion, with the able assistance of Sir Winston Churchill and his scientific adviser, Lindemann. With few exceptions, Jones presents himself as having been almost infallible in his intelligence analyses, although he faced opposition as formidable as Sir Henry Tizard, scientific adviser to the Air Staff. Even Jones’s mistakes, such as the one regarding the fuel used in the flying bomb, are presented as being of no consequence except as vindications of his general method. He depicts himself as a man almost invariably right, whose advice was nevertheless frequently ignored because of envy and obtuseness on the part of others, and always with severe consequences to Britain. When the war ended, moreover, Jones suffered the final indignity when, despite his perfect willingness to head British Scientific Intelligence, his offers of service and organizational advice were unheeded and he was forced to resign. (But then, so was his friend Sir Winston.) At this point Jones quotes the former Prime Minister: “Many people say I ought to have retired after the war, and have become some sort of elder statesman. But how could I? I have fought all my life and I cannot give up fighting now.” Apparently Jones means these sentiments to apply to himself as well.
Although Jones’s memoir does reveal a vain, arrogant, insufferable man propelled into high office too quickly, it also reveals a man ideally suited to the task before him. Jones’s perceptions were clearly beyond the ordinary. Furthermore, his training and interests fitted exactly into an intelligence organization that needed men who loved to solve puzzles, to manipulate, to “fool” others.
For the enemy had to be fooled; Britain was in mortal danger. Until Hitler foolishly opened a second front by attacking the Soviet Union, Britain stood alone—an island no bigger than the state of Michigan, fighting against the combined might of Germany and Italy. Moreover, the Germans were just across the English Channel, some twenty miles away. In the air Messerschmidts and Junkers were more than a match for Spitfires; on the high seas U-boats and mines challenged British shipping. Invasion seemed likely. The Germans code-named the planned invasion “Operation Sea-Lion,” and the British made plans to relocate their seat of government to Canada.
In this context, in a London disrupted by bombs, flying bombs, and rockets, Jones revealed the secrets of German radar and guidance systems. He did this in part by surrounding himself with a small band of intelligent and loyal followers adept at besting not only opponents, but colleagues in other departments as well. The game had two victories: over colleagues still befuddled by the problem, and, of course, over the Germans themselves. Thus, for once, bureaucratic rivalries had the color of patriotism and the spice of national survival.
The Wizard War concerns one man’s enthusiasm, fervor, and exuberant high spirits; but it is also about intelligence work itself, a job which turned out to be (quoting Thomas Edison) “ten percent inspiration, ninety percent perspiration.” The main sources of intelligence were cryptography (breaking the enemy’s codes), aerial photography, prisoner interrogation, examination of captured enemy equipment, reports from agents in enemy territory, and tracking enemy radar and guidance systems. The array seems formidable; but to make sense of the clues offered by each of these sources—to discard false or misleading clues and to interpret real clues correctly—is a perpetual challenge to intelligence and patience. For example, the site of a Würzburg radar station at Bruneval in France showed up on an aerial photograph merely as a miniscule smudge.
But patient observation and careful gathering of the facts are not enough. These facts must lead to correct inferences—the heart of intelligence work. In this matter Jones reveals his central principle—Ockham’s Razor (hypotheses are not to be multiplied without necessity):
For it you start allowing more complicated hypotheses than are essential to explain the facts, you can launch yourself into a realm of fantasy where your consequent actions will become misdirected. . . . Time after time when I used Ockham’s Razor in Intelligence it gave me the right answer when others were indulging in flights of fancy leading towards panic.
The Wizard War, however, reveals more than a patient investigator piecing together clues; the book shows us the high courage often necessary to gather such clues. For instance, to check on German night fighter radar transmissions, a slow, specially equipped Wellington bomber was sent as part of a raid against Frankfurt. The necessary information was discovered, but at a terrible price—four of the six crew members were badly wounded.
The extent of the risk that this air crew undertook is as startling as the courage with which they carried out their task. Nor was this risk unusual in intelligence gathering. The flight of the Wellington, the sorties for aerial photography, the Bruneval raid designed to capture enemy radar equipment, the courage under torture of Allied agents in occupied countries—all of these are as much a part of intelligence as the piecing together of evidence. Jones keeps this truth constantly in the forefront of his lengthy memoir. He narrates tales of courage in a laconic style befitting the subject, only occasionally inserting into the straight narrative patriotic statements or value judgments. Such a style has its point: it is well-suited to express the author’s belief that war was at bottom an opportunity for ordinary Englishmen to show their patriotism, resourcefulness, courage, and tenacity.
Intelligence sometimes stops with the accurate assessment of the offensive or defensive strength of the enemy; at that point sheer force takes over and a bombing raid is organized. Sometimes, however, intelligence itself provides countermeasures of considerable ingenuity. It is these countermeasures which the author, an inveterate practical joker, likes to invent. At Malta, powerful German jammers rendered British radar useless until Jones stepped in:
I knew that the Germans judged the success of their jamming by listening to our radar transmissions to see whether, for example, they ceased to scan, as they might well do if they could not be used. I therefore signalled Malta to go on scanning as though everything were normal and not to give any kind of clue that they were in difficulty. After a few days the Germans switched their jammers off.
“Window” was another hoax, based this time not on German habits but on the technical properties of radar. In his explanation of Window, the author reveals another strength of his style—clarity of explanation in technical matters:
Spurious reflectors . . . contained an element of hoaxing. The phenomenon on which they depended was that of resonance. If a reflector is made of a simple wire or strip of metal of length equal to half the wavelength used by a radar station, it resonates to the incoming radio waves and re-radiates them to such effect that it is roughly equivalent to a whole sheet of metal whose dimensions are a square which has sides equal in length to half a wavelength. Thus a few hundred such strips or wires would reflect as much energy as a whole Lancaster bomber.
These strips, code-named Window, were strewn in the air by British bombers, after which German radars directed night fighters as much against showers of foil as against English airplanes.
The Wizard War is a readable and revealing account of one aspect of British scientific intelligence. There is little doubt that Britain would have been the worse had Jones not existed and that history would have been the poorer had these memoirs not been written. However, The Wizard War must be read with the caution always to be observed when studying the memoirs of those whose egos are perhaps larger than their accomplishments.