The Battle of the Beams

A brief review of Tom Whipple's new book

The excellent Aspects of History magazine have published a brief review of Tom Whipple’s excellent Battle of the Beams. Please do consider subscribing: its only £9.99 a year.

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What do the code-names Grocer, Cigar, Jostle, Pieprack, Bagful, Blonde, Boozer, Barbara, Barbarossa, Bernhard and Bernhardine, Taunus and Berlin have in common? How were they related to an otherwise obscure British scientist who went by the name of Reginald (he always preferred his initials, ‘R.V.’) Jones? The answer is that they were all for devices on the electromagnetic spectrum designed to find out information about the enemy or to prevent the enemy finding out information about us. Some were British and some were German. Indeed, one of the strengths of this compelling book is the emphasis the author provides on how much more the Germans knew about radar at the start of the war, and the full extent of German resourcefulness during it. It was incredibly lucky that German scientific ingenuity never found the cavity magnetron (which allowed for miniaturisation), but in all other respects the Germans traded blow for blow with Britain through the long years of this invisible war. This is one of the 1940 myths that could do with having the cobwebs dusted from it, and Whipple does the job comprehensively.

As for Jones, Britain can only thank God for him. Churchill certainly did, describing him as the man ‘Who Broke the Bloody Beam.’ It was an apt appellation. For those in the know, the work of R.V. Jones is not new, but what Whipple does in this account is provide a considerable dose of contextual freshness to an old and exciting story. It is an important reminder that war is not only fought by the men in the front line but by those wielding their brains in the background. Without Jones’ intelligent energy and deep probing understanding of the nature of radio-waves Britain would have been even further behind Germany in 1940 than it was in most other technical respects. The story of radar and its use by both the British and the Germans in the war is (almost) as exciting and dramatic as those of the men on the ground and in the air fighting for their lives in battle. It was as consequential. Whipple has certainly done an excellent job in telling the fascinating story of the electromagnetic war in a refreshing and interesting way. I know this subject very well, and yet I was still held by the power of his story-telling. I was particularly pleased to see Whipple give a full account of the battlefield ‘system’ that Jones established to fight this particular war, with resistance groups in Occupied Europe being used to decisive effect to bring back critical information to aid Allied decision-making.

This is an excellent book that will be consumed eagerly in a few hours of summer reading. It will be best read under a bucolic English sky, where only the sound of a Spitfire’s Merlin engine would be required to take the reader back to desperate days and raise in him or her a grateful exclamation of thanks to the men and women – led undoubtedly by Jones – who in our country’s darkest days ‘Broke the Bloody Beam’ and allowed us to see into the Nazi heart of darkness and win the war.