Ferdinand Mount was editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1991 to 2002. His memoir, Cold Cream, is just out in paperback.
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Vol. 30 No. 3 · 7 February 2008
pages 21-22 | 2866 words
‘Derek, please, not so fast’
Ferdinand Mount
- BuyAs I Was Going to St Ives: A Life of Derek Jackson by Simon Courtauld
Michael Russell, 192 pp, £17.50, October 2007, ISBN 978 0 85955 311 7
In all the history of second-guessing in warfare, the Window affair is one of the most extraordinary. As early as 1934, Post Office engineers reported that passing aircraft could interfere with radio reception. Less than a year later, Robert Watson-Watt demonstrated by a simple experiment in a field outside Daventry that aircraft could be detected by radio. Radar was born. Remarkably, it was only two years after this that Lindemann demonstrated to Churchill that tinfoil strips cut to a certain length and jettisoned from a height would simulate aircraft on the enemy’s radar screen and baffle anti-aircraft batteries. Churchill, always a sucker for gadgets, loved the idea, but the scientists in charge ‘looked down their noses at the suggestion’, according to Lindemann’s protégé R.V. Jones, who had first thought of it. Partly they didn’t care to see their amazing discovery so quickly outfoxed, but also they worried what would happen if the Germans got hold of this simple device. For the next five years, no research was done on Window – as the scheme came to be known. So in the first raids of the war British bombers flew over German defences like so many flights of sitting duck.
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Letters
Vol. 30 No. 4 · 21 February 2008
From Martin Ward
It would be playing into the obviously overbusy hands of Derek Jackson, whose biography was reviewed so entertainingly by Ferdinand Mount (LRB, 7 February), to say I owe my existence to him, but there is a link. In the spring of 1942, when Jackson was trialling the tinfoil strips that would confuse enemy radar and save the lives of so many bomber crews, my father turned 17 and joined up before he was called up. He became the wireless operator in a Halifax bomber (Mount mentions the Lancaster and if there is one thing my father gets crusty about it is the latter’s cachet over the Halifax, much as the Spitfire is favoured over the Hurricane) and one of my first memories of him talking about the war was his enthusiasm for Jackson’s tinfoil. Indeed, he brought a few reels with him on being demobbed and in those austerity years after the war used to tear it up into strips with which to decorate the Christmas tree.
Martin Ward
Northampton
From Ted McFadyen
Ferdinand Mount seems to imply that the Germans never used the ‘Window’ anti-radar device in raids on this country. But I remember vividly, as a teenager living in North London during the smaller blitz of 1942-43, going out into the playing-fields behind our Muswell Hill house and collecting the shining tinfoil strips which lay scattered over the tennis courts and cricket pitches, along with the pieces of shrapnel much prized by schoolboys.
Ted McFadyen
Hove, East Sussex
