How THIS Stupid Intelligence Mistake Tipped the Scales of WW2
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- čas přidán 4. 06. 2024
- Historical note: it was very difficult to find actual photos of the Graf Zeppelin II that I can legally use in this video, so many are of the original Graf Zeppelin. It was this or not being able to tell the story at all.
As the Second World War loomed in 1939, a little know mission was launched by the Third Reich. Targetting Britain's newly built Chain Home network, the Germans wanted to know what it was designed to do.
After several costly blunders, the Germans were none the wiser, or were they?
This is the story of the German spy balloon that cost them the war and the amazing discoveries modern historians have uncovered.
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⏱️ Timestamp:
0:00 The spy mission that went wrong
12:18 Amazing Conclusions
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Enjoyable and informative. Later in 1942, Operation Biting was carried out to steal parts of a Wurzburg radar array in France. The commandos, who arrived by submarine, succeeded in dismantling and grabbing the relevant parts, namely, the magnetron. The raiding team neutralised the defending troops easily, however, a woman operator was just pushed aside After the war, it turned out she was part of the design team testing new equipment. She was believed to have been Lisabeth Fassbender who worked in the Heinrich Hertz Institute developing radar systems.
My great grandfather in Germany was a carpenter in the Zeppelin factory. Ironically my grandfather, was in the RAF during WW2, was married to my German grandmother. My grandparents married just before the war but my English grandfather was killed while bombing an Italian ship in the Mediterranean. His crew called him grandad because he was 27. One of our family mysteries is that we can't figure out how he learnt to fly at 17 at Shoreham even though he was an apprentice accountant at the time he got his licence. That was when young lads cycled 30 miles just to watch planes at an airport and you didn't need permission from your parents to learn to fly.
Common sense. That was the prevailing factor controlling most people not laws and regulations and restrictions.
Not saying it was aliens, but obviously it was aliens that taught him to fly.
The documentary "The Spies Who Lost the Battle of Britain" (available on DVD) says that the Zeppelin crew did actually hear Chain Home signals, but mistook them for arcing from hig voltage power lines. The Chain Home radar pulses were actually synchronized to mains voltage because this was the cheapest option, although it had technical drawbacks. OTOH, it made the radar signals difficult to tell apart from power grid interference with the means available at the time.
This is quite true, the huge structure of the airship was a giant antenna resonating at mains frequency from the pulse frequency (NOT the transmitted wave frequency!) of the CH radars. It is baffling that they did not perceive the huge difference in the power involved, but this was 1938-9 science education was not what it is today and it is remarkably easy to be wise nearly 90 years after the event. Then we have the personnel differences, the RAF made it a point to recruit radio-hams, post office wireless workers and other such men into their radar/telecom units. The Luftwaffe had a selection scale, best were for aircrew, then various levels for technical service, anti-aircraft units, etc., further down came the signals (perhaps just before the catering staff). This is why German radar was so impeccably built and of modular architecture, as we found out after we nicked the one in Bruneval. They had to make it as foolproof as possible as their staff could not be relied on to be creative or think outside the box (or think at all...).
Notice how nobody in 1915 or 1939 thought the Zepellins were space aliens.
On the Round-the-world flight (1929) it seems some believed it was alien. But not any civilized people.
The idea of suggesting aliens to distract people from guessing what they saw were actually top secret experimental aircraft hadn't been thought of then.
Also notice that our ancestors could have been smarter than us.
Good point!
No, because they could see what they were as zeppelins are way slower than UFOs... Hehe
Chain Home was like the Hawker Typhoon; it was far from being perfect - but it was plenty good enough to do its job.
According to Dr RV Jones book Most Secret War the reason the zeppelin flights failed was that they were searching the wrong frequencies.
A terrific book and my recollection is the same as yours: they were searching at the wrong frequencies and concluded it was a navigation aid.
They detected the chain home radar signals, but because of the low frequency of the radar pulses, the Germans thought they were seeing signals generated by the National power grid electric discharge radio signals. Watson Watt had used the National grid 50cycles per second frequency to time the chain home radar system pulses , this also gad a bebefit of synchronising the whole Chain home radar system. The Germans reported that the British had no functioning radar. They thought the towers were some sort of radio beacon system for the Royal Navy navigation as a radio aid for position determination. A german Luftwaffe General was shocked by learning after the war that the British had an operating radar system at the time of the battle of Britian.
The Secret war episode " to see one hundred miles" details radar before and during the war.
International zionist bankers declared war on Germany in 1933 after Hitler took back control of the German central bank from the rothchilds and locked one up, Kennedy was about to take back the federal reserve from international zionist bankers, ect , we have been lied to for a long time research everything.
Anyone with any interest in electronic surveillance in WWII should read this book. Published 1978 London: Hamish Hamilton. It is possibly out of print, but as I have a copy of the 5th impression I'm sure there are plenty of used copies around the world. The point that he wrote and kept extensive notes, so what he says can be trusted. He is even mentioned in Churchill's memoirs ; as he attended certain War Cabinet meetings (approximate quote follows):- "I had almost given up hope [for some project] when this young man spoke up and ...
Fascinating, never came across this pre WW2 incident before. Thank you 👍
Zeppelin SIGINT missions in 1939 are mentioned first thing in the opening of the 2nd episode of the excellent documentary series "The Secret War", first aired in 1977 and available in full, for free, on CZcams.
The episode is titled "To See for a Hundred Miles", and it covers the development and use of radar, both ground-based and airborne, by both the British and the Germans during WW2.
Same here
WW2 was already happening in June 1939
@@wobblybobengland you mean Czechoslovakia?
@@wobblybobengland No... Just... No... The only conflict I can remind myself of was the Chinese-Japanese war but it was hardly anything other than a local war.
Having been a military pilot and, later, a marketer of industrial RF systems for several years, I really appreciated this video on the topic of German attempts to do some RF sleuthing of British defense frequencies in the early days of WWII. Outstanding work here!
Thank you for watching, I really appreciate your comment.
My grandfather said, he had seen Graf Zeppelin fly over the UK . The plan was to have two radar systems . One in Britain and a second in France on the German border . But the collapse of France put a stop to it . They were to be know by , Home and Away . After the British name for football matches . Where they were either played at the home football field or at the other teams field, (away ) . The RAF's head of radio intelligence, Squadron leader Ramsbottom. Took a holiday in Germany in about 1937 , just before the war started . He took many photographs of his wife . That by chance had German radar sites in the background . This was at considerably risk , if the Germans had got wise to him or developed the film on his camera he and his wife could well have been shot as spies !
I remember the tale of those photos coming up in "Most Secret War".
Really? The british had a lot of time from msept. to june 1940 to build such second chain in France so more than questionable that the collapse of France put a stop on something that had not even been planned.
Imagine they would have lost the secrets there and left it all behind like in Dunkirk ?
The reality is a different thing - and planning versus fighting another dimension, otherwise market garden would have been a success, not a big defeat. From that day on Montgomery was just a usual commander after all these slow long campaigns he had fought before since El Alamein.
My grandfather fought in the 8th army in Africa. My father in the wermacht. Uncle in the Luftwaffe..
Squadron Leader Winterbothom, who later headed the Ultra project.
I wondered where the name Chain Home came from. Cheers for the info.
Excellent video with new-for-me information. I have been working in defence radar for the last 2 decades and as most radar guys fascinated to hear how Chain Home was operational so early. Thank you for this unique and nicely researched insight!
Thanks for watching Rob!
It's interesting how RADAR is given all of the credit by his historians for providing forewarning of Luftwaffe attacks while the role of codebreaking is ignored. Bletchley Park was decrypting two rotor Enigma Luftwaffe & Heer radio traffic in real time. Group Captain Frederick Winterbotham was hand delivering the decrypted messages to Keith Park at Bentley Priory ( a distance of 30 miles as the crow flies ) each morning. An easy drive even for an English car.
Stephen Bungay is on record as saying it was incredible how accurately Keith Park distributed his forces with so little warning and how difficult it is to better those decisions even now when not pressed for time but going into no detail about how this was achieved.
Not to take away anything from Keith Park who was a brilliant commander as confirmed later when Churchill had him pushed out to Malta.
RADAR was important but it was also used as the cover to protect Ulra. Subsequent post-war secrecy has prevented Bletchley Park cryptanalysts from receiving their due credit in winning the Battle of Britain.
Sadly Ultra wasn’t working during the Battle of Britain, so Chain Home Radar was vitally important. It gave up to an hours warning of impending attacks on London( once bombers had got up to 15,000 feet)
Early Enigma was braked by Poland that used to monitor german coms.
Before the war, they gave the technology to british technitians.
Later versions of Enigma were not so easy to decode. And it got easier as german operators didn't follow rules to the letter, because it was a lot of work....
Thank you. Keith Park is a NZ hero.
Bletchley Park was even more secret than Radar. They were prepared to give Radar the credit, in order to avoid the Germans changing their codes probably
@@paulinecabbed1271 not their codes, but to obligatory implementation of correct operational proceedings.
And ad extra wheels that would be impossible to decode
While the Chain Home system was the prime early warning sensor for the Dowding System, there was also the Y service that monitored radio traffic and could detect when a mission was on the way from the radio traffic: preparatory tests by ground crew and then ground-to-air transmissions as the bomber and fighter groups formed up.
The Dowding system itself was, once again, something that Nazi Germany could not comprehend, with their tightly partitioned command structure, each element jealous and secretive of the other. This was straight down to Hitler, who made sure none of his subcommands could amass enough support to threaten his own position.
The low-level detection gap was recognised quite early, and began to be addressed in 1939 by Chain Home Low, an adaption and expansion of CD, the Coastal Defence radar designed to allow coastal artillery to target enemy ships at night and in bad weather. The needed extra radar systems were deployed at the same locations as Chain Home, but the CHL system was not complete in time for the Battle of Britain.
Very good and interesting video.
One minor point is that the locations of Bawdsey and Canewdon are wrong. Canewdon is in Essex just a few miles north of Southend. Bawdsey is north east of Ipswich. There is a radar museum there, which is well worth a visit.
The positions of radar sites at Canewdon and Bawdsey have been switched. Canewdon is about 6 miles north of Southend-on-Sea in Essex; and Bawdsey (the original AMES or Air Ministry Experimental Station where RDF radio direction finding was developed) is located about 4 miles northeast of Felixstowe in Suffolk). Both were operational before war began. RDF was brought to operational status under the direction of Sir Robert Watson-Watt. The unit about 6 miles northeast of Norwich in Norfolk, Neatishead which houses the Radar Museum did not become operational until 1941; so took no part in the shadowing of the pre-war German reconnaissance Zeppelin operation of August 1939.
Although I live in Auckland, New Zealand, I grew up in Felixstowe and Ipswich. Bawdsey (Manor) is close by the mouth of the River Deben and is in Suffolk, not Norfolk as captioned .
Funny, when I heard about the "strange balloons of unknown origin" (with a nod to the Critical Drinker there), my first thought was, it's been done before! Fu-Go and the Graf Zeppelin coming to mind. Fun fact, as a kid the only way I could remember the year my mum was born in was because it was the same year that the Graf Zeppelin flew around the world 😂
After the Hindenburg disaster, the Graf Zeppelin Mk.2 had been used for a while for radio reconnaissance missions.
Very fascinating information about Chain Home. As you mentioned, the technical side of radar was only part of the British assets. Chain Home was part of a fully functional air-defense SYSTEM, and it worked quite well. One can see the difference in the US Army and Navy's use of radar during the early campaigns in the Pacific. The USN had a good radar that gave early warning of air attack, but it took quite a while for them to get a proper fighter direction set up going. All too often, the defending fighters were not in the right position, or the pilots jammed the radio with non-essential chatter. The British success was based on a system approach and the results are now well known. Aircraft detection is nowhere near the same as air defense.
One of the Canewdon masts still stands at Great Baddow in Essex. I did read a book on the development of British Radar,(maybe the Colin Latham publication) which had accounts of the airship causing a huge reflection on the scopes of the receivers. The Germans were probably confused by the signals they were receiving, as all the stations were on exactly the same frequency. The only separation was provided by the pulses being allocated a different portion of the 50 Hz(c/s) mains cycle. Having said that, the French put construction of the proposed Chain Home Away out to tender, so a lot of the information was in the public domain.
Interesting that, war relic is still standing, we still have some air-raid/civil-defence sirens not removed around 🇬🇧 ~ I live in north London and there is still a siren on a bridge pillar in Waterloo - left over from the cold-war ☢️
I'm not sure about the same frequency, from what I picked up adjoining stations were tuned out from each other. The 50 Hz business could only be the repetition frequency, it's a bit low but functional. The actual transmission frequency would be around 25 MHz.
Nice description. One small nitpick is that the error wasn't 'confirmation bias' so much as 'mirroring', in that the German technicians assumed that the British system must operate the on the same frequencies as German systems, rather than being open to other possibilities.
An excellent and well researched video. Clearly, Germans made a number of blunders in the lead up to WWII and during which cost them the war. Their biggest blunder was underestimating the enemy, which in war is fatal. The Royal Navy was the biggest underestimated factor of the war. Planning an invasion as we saw with D-Day later on needed an almost unlimited supply of Navel, Air, and ground forces. RAF did the job, but if they didn't have radar, then things could drag out a lot longer.
Thanks for watching Barry. I agree with you, we often 'forget' about the naval element of war.
It wasn't only the naval element. There were defensive placements at handy ambush points all over the country. Britain wasn't just waiting anxiously to be invaded, they were preparing a lethal defence.
They biggest blunder was hubris. That also covers believing your own propaganda.
I thought the invasion plans were one of Adolf's evil plan to have a peace treaty with the Brits so they could concentrate on the real enemies, the godless communist slave. But then again, I hear a lot of things!!!
Blunders, a loony and blind luck. If the Germans had done things a bit differently they would have had Europe in their hands ten times out of ten. Even as it was, at the start of hostilities, in one instance only, if Doenitz had the number of U-Boats he wanted, Great Britain would have been lost. We had no measures to prevent them picking off at will. Remember too the RAF was on its knees when Germany changed tack The war turned with the US and Operation Barbarossa. .Both these are blunders and doomed the Nazis, otherwise Europe was theirs. Of that there is simply no doubt. Blind luck was on our side, which includes the blunders and the loony. It was after all the loony's blunders. Thank god.
PS. The German navy may not have had numbers but each pocket battleship was worth a small fleet and had the better of any ship at sea. The Hood lasted five minutes. Also everyone had RADAR, just Britain had high resolution RADAR with the invention of the cavity magnetron. Possibly the most significant development of WW2.
The Germans both knew a lot about Allied radar tech and used radar extensively themselves as early as 1939. The use of radar by the RAF was know, duing the Battle of Britain and radar stations were regularly targeted.
Radar warning receivers ('Funkmessbeobachtungsgerät') where widely used as early as 1939/40, especially on Kriegsmarine units including submarines. Throughout the war it was basically a race between the radar engineers and the radar detector engineers on the other side. To be able to properly detect enemy radar the wavelength has to be know beforehand as until 1944/45 German detectors were not able to cover multiple wavelengths. A lot of information about allied radar tech came from bombers shot down over German controlled areas and the analysis of their on-board systems. One of the few examples covered by the english Wikipedia is the Naxos, used from 1943 onwards in night fighters and U-boats.
Radar itself ('Funkmessgerät') saw even more widespread usage, from the naval and stationary units at the beginning of the war to much smaller and sophisticated systems used in the night fighters of the late war. 1938 the a radar unit was installed on Admiral Graf Spee and by 1945 every Kriegsmarine units was equipped with radar, from U- and S-boats to the remaining capital ships. This gives a good overview of German naval radar throughout the war.
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u/LemuelG avatar
LemuelG
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10 yr. ago
The Germans knew of the British Radar (RDF) system before the start of the war, but failed to appreciate how sophisticated the integrated RAF command & control methods were - they had their own system too - Freya and Wurzburg, first used against the RAF raid on the naval yards at Wilhelmshaven in December 1939.
Brilliant! I learned quite a lot about this dangerous game. You made it very interesting and compelling.
Thank you!
I really enjoyed this video. I am a recent subscriber, but have enjoyed all of your content so far. Keep it up, sir. Btw, as an American, I appreciate your efforts to be objective.
Awesome, thank you!
i LOVE that you cited your source material and even put pictures of the covers of the books. You earned my subscription ^_^
Thanks for watching mate!
Thank you. This took a lot of research I’m sure. Much appreciated.
Outstanding historic research, at great depth on primary sources. Your channel is on my permanent list of best sites.
Thanks Bob, I really appreciate that!
As they say, when you assume... 😂 Not only did the Germans assume we used radar in the same way, the Luftwaffe also made some miscalculations in regard to basic British squadron size and strength. They calculated British squadrons using the same squadron size as they had. But the two sides did not have squadrons of the same size. Thus, based on this assumption, the Germans constantly miscalculated RAF squadron strengths.
Sadly the Brits did the same exact thing with similar results.
Something like miscalculating metric and imperial measurements
@@owen368 The Brits overestimated Luftwaffe strengths, the Lufwaffe underestimated RAF strengths. This was because, in general terms an RAF squadron was 12 aircraft, where a Luftwaffe squadron was generally 16 aircraft. Brits had the advantage in two main areas, fighting over home territory (meaning if you were shot down or bailed out you wouldn't end up a prisoner and theoretically could be back in the fight in a few hours) and being able to replace lost aircraft more easily. Add to that the Luftwaffe expected the RAF to fold a lot earlier, as they had calculated (on the mistaken squadron size assumption) that the RAF had lost more aircraft than it actually had, meant that the high command felt pressure to change tactics. This ended up being disastrous for the Axis as they'd very nearly beaten the RAF, but switching from bombing airfields and radar stations to bombing civilian targets let the RAF off the hook.
I do know about these Zeppelin flights as I came across them some years ago. Another misjudgement by the Germans was the fact that the British fighter aircraft were being directed from the ground. Because they did not know about the British radar they assumed that the reason for the pilots being directed from the ground was because British fighter pilots were of a poor quality and training and needed to be controlled from the ground. A notion the Germans were disabused of once they started dogfighting with the British fighters.
I'm sure I'm being ignorant here, but what does it mean to be 'directed from the ground', compared to presumably other methods of direction? Surely all control operations run by the different forces were based on the ground, there were operational control stations floating around in the skies. As I said I presume from your nomenclature that I'm simply ignorant of the terminology, and asking for a clarfiication.
@ Big Blue: there was a lot of hubris in the early years of the war, from both Germany and Japan, which resulted in neither of them suspecting their codes were broken, because they simply didn't think the Brits were smart enough. If they'd only know that the Poles made the bulk of the running they'd have been even more surprised, as they had been brought up believing that all their European neighbours were vastly inferior to themselves in every way, whereas Hitler did have a certain initial respect for Britain, which is why he was so keen to negotiate terms for them not to enter the war.
@@neekfenwick I think in the absence of ground radar, aerial operations would be controlled by the wing commander or squadron leader from his own aircraft, based on first and third person visual info.
@@neekfenwick hi Nick. Sorry I missed your question. Ground control mean that that everything the pilots did was controlled from the ground with no input from the pilots. An example of this is the North Vietnamese airforce during the Vietnam War. The pilots were told where to go. What to do and how to attack the American aircraft.
Because the Germans were not aware of British radar they assumed that the same thing was happening with the RAF pilots. If they had known about the radar they would have realised what was happening and not made the mistake of underestimating the RAF pilots.
@@Gottenhimfella this is true. Everyone underestimates the Poles and ends up regretting it.
Great story!
I'm betting a few of the viewers (mainly the younger ones ) are wondering why the photo at 5:18 has two identical (apparently, but not quite) photos side by side? I first encountered these at the Carnegie Public Library in Lawton OK, where I grew up. They are two photos taken at the same time and placed next to each other to be viewed through a scope that looks kind of like a primitive version of VR goggles with a sliding bar in front on which the photos are placed. You slide the photos in or out until the "focus" (convergence, actually) is at the appropriate distance for your particular eyes, and then the image comes together as a 3D image. I spent countless hours looking at old historical photos like this. One of my favorite childhood memories.
Stereoption is the name of the device. You could buy sets of images. Places like the Eiffel Tower, Grand Canyon etc..
Very popular entertainment device.
@@mikefightmaster Thanks for helping e remember the name. I think it's StereoptiCon, though, isn't it? Also, I think that name refers to the entertainment device for retail sale, but is the old-fashioned library tool called by the same name? Not sure. (Was stereopticon a trade name?) Anyway, it's essentially the same thing. I had forgotten about the "toy" version. My parents never bought me one, but I loved looking at my friends'.
If you adjust the size of those photos on your screen so that they're as far apart as your eyes (or maybe a little closer) by changing the size of the window, and then stare at them while relaxing your eyes, you can see the 3D picture without a Stereopticon device.
StereoGraph Zeppelin
When I visited Duxford, the experts on Radar and Radio said that the German equipment tended to be
over engineered and built to last. But the British equipment was built more for the actual conditions at the time 🕰
There was a saying going round at the time "second-best tomorrow", basically it doesn't matter if it is built into a biscuit tin held closed with string and insulating tape as long as it does its job and is in service as soon as possible. German sets tended to be real works of art, bakelite or light alloy casings, modular construction, standardised connections... but they took longer to build, tied up more resources, etc. R.V. Jones questioned Gen. Martini about this, and he replied that the signals branch of the Luftwaffe was quite far down the pecking order when it came to new recruits, so equipment had to be foolproof and need as little adjustment as possible, because chances are the git that's operating it wouldn't know his * from his elbow. The RAF was very careful to scoop in all sorts of useful amateurs, from radio-hams to TV or radio repair men (TV was in its infancy then). The German over-engineered approach limited the numbers built and the availability of spares, but Martini wasn't taking any chances. One tell-tale was the pulse frequency, there is no big precision requirement for this, as long as pulse echoes don't overlap. For example for a max range of 150 Km the frequency cannot be higher than 1 kHz or the returns will get muddled, let us say anything from 600 to 800 Hz is acceptable. However on a German set the frequency would be exactly 720 Hz (for the sake of argument) and stable. This could be picked up and used to identify the set type. This precision probably meant the set was pre-set at the factory and did not need oafs mucking about with it. A British set would be adjustable and rely on the operator optimising the pulse rate. Generally, the operational intelligence on the British side was miles ahead of the Germans. Even simple decisions reflect this, the German successfully jammed the early warning radars on Malta (I don't know what type they were), the RAF simply continued to transmit, even if they were not getting any useful information from the sets. The nazis therefore assumed that their jamming was not working and after a while stopped! There are a couple of Len Deighton books out there about this period, "Blitzkrieg", "Fighter" and "Bomber", Deighton is not a scientist or an engineer so most of his conclusions do not hold much water, but the books are well researched and are a useful read.
@@ricardodavidson3813 thanks for the great explanation of how the different approaches to selecting the human operators made such a difference to the design, manufacture and operation of equipment on both sides. Without your explanation it would be easy to think the German approach was best by building sturdy foolproof equipment that anyone can operate while the British approach seemed doomed to failure by building low quality equipment that needed trained and skilled operators.
@@albrussell7184 Your remarks are at best reductive and at worst show prejudice. British radar and other sophisticated electronic equipment was definitely not low quality. It had better, more innovative technology than the German equipment (and much better than American stuff). It was based on broader and better science, for a start they did not discount out of hand science from Jewish authors! The big difference is that at the start of WW2 British progress was essentially reactive. The Germans started preparing WW2 from 1920, the British held on to the illusion of peace almost until it was too late. There were also severe budgetary constraints, like in the USA as both were open economies. The German economy was nominally open but in fact was not, they had all sorts of schemes to keep up the pretence, but essentially they could bypass budgetary constraints and control imports very tightly. There is a documentary from the 1970's "The Secret War" from the BBC and IWM (you can find it as a DVD) which includes an interview with Albert Speer where he points this out exactly, and how fast and effectively the British caught up with and overtook the Germans. German equipment was not designed to be "operated by anyone..." that is a really naive view. Technicians were well trained (except near the end of the conflict), however they could not be relied upon to "think outside the box" (never a strong suit in dictatorships...) as they had no experience beyond their training. This does not mean there were not some excellent operators, but this came with time and practice. The men worked to procedures and the equipment had to be capable of producing results in these conditions. The British could not afford the time to go through a rigorous testing and perfecting period, so they issued the stuff and relied on feedback from their skilled and educated operators for improvement suggestions. You can see this when you compare the Mk.1 of anything with the Mk.2; the leap forwards is substantial, take ASV radar for instance. The British were also keen on the multidisciplinary approach, take someone from a completely different branch of science and see what he/she comes up with. Take the AI Mk VIII radar, decades ahead of anything anyone else had (the same basic principle was used up to the 1980's when solid-state array ariels came into use). The display was the only one ever to be able to show a 3-dimensional situation on a 2-dimensional screen. The technology was too complex for the American manufacturers however so the next Mk returned to a 2 screen display, albeit a more developed version. Large quantity production was required so this was accepted. I read somewhere that one of the leading lights in radar at the time was actually a biologist! It should be understood that these advances were completely new, there was nothing before, no term of comparison, while we are looking back at the situation from a scientifically very high ground. German solutions were generally over-engineered, for instance the tracking table set-up in the Kammhuber line, needing 2 Wurtzburg sets and one Freya to control only one night fighter at a time. The British approach had one sweeping radar with a Plan Position Indicator display (another British first) and several controllers if necessary, so several fighters could be co-ordinated by one radar set and passed on from one area to the next. What made the Kammhuber Line dangerous was the sheer density of bombers coming through a given couple of boxes, skilled pilots sometimes shot down several bombers in one sortie. The fighters in the other boxes twiddled their thumbs waiting for the return of the bombers, but that is the fault of the system not the gear. Some German kit was so bad the soldiers refused to use it, for example the 5 cm light mortar. After 1940 front line troops used the much better captured French 5 cm mortar, and later on the Russian one. The myth of German excellence is just that, a myth. They had their good points and bad ones like anyone else, they started earlier and cut labour costs by employing slaves that they gradually starved to death.
It boosts the ego of the victors to elevate the enemy to Demi-god status, after all we defeated them and they were so very good... Objectivity and balance are dying arts.
One more thing. The British ran out of people with radio ham experience and radio technicians pretty soon, there aren't that many around anyway! By then the systems had been developed and the experienced operators were there to share their knowledge. It was at the beginning that these people were crucial to the development phase. Early Airborne Interception (AI), another British first by the way, the equipment was fraught with problems and the operators involved were in fact engineers and not airmen. That brought a whole gamut of other problems as these folks didn't know one end of an aeroplane from the other. Try to find "Night Fighter" (can't remember the author, sorry!) an autobiographical work that recounts these episodes with some humour. The downside was that when you lost such an aircraft, not only did you lose a skilled pilot and the kit under development but also a valuable development engineer. "Instruments of darkness" by Alfred Price is also an excellent reference. One really interesting radar that the British developed later in the war was an automatic tracking unit for AI, it took a long time to perfect and was absolutely cutting edge, but the the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm lost interest... typical. I think the excuse was that once it had locked on to a target it was no longer capable of search! This is stupid, you can't have it both ways, it either searches or locks on, but the FAA wanted both. A fantastic development never produced.
@Ricardo Davidson I recall an interview(or it may have been an episode of Desert Island Discs) where Sir Bernard Lovell was recounting his work during the war. Apparently a number of very qualified scientists were allowed to go up in an aircraft equipped with the AI they were developing. Sadly, it crashed, killing all on board.
I laughed a bit as I learned that you were, in effect, imagining viewers' minds about the animation.
You get extra points for being on the ball.
Excellent. Most interesting, especially as my childhood experienced the London 'blitz', & everything that followed it.
Really glad I found your channel! Great video, very informative and enjoyable! Thank you!
Glad you enjoy it JT!
I first learned of the LZ-130's missions over the UK a few months ago via the redoubtable Mark Felton's You Tube channel. With great respect to Dr. Felton, this piece is comprehensively superior. Thev work of a true historian and thank you for it!
That's very kind of you to say Donald, thanks for watching.
to clarify: The _Graf Zeppelin II_ (LZ130) was used for the surveillance mission, as you point out at 5:00 et seq. LZ130 never entered passenger service (a lot of the pix we see are of LZ127). Both _Graf Zeppelins_ were scrapped for their aircraft aluminum in 1940.
Points for "et seq". Point deducted for "pix" :P
The pics are all over the place. Godawful but totally typical of so many YT videos. Some of them are of WWI Zeppelins with control cars dangling underneath.
@@Qossuth you might have to educate the peanut gallery (the uneduated masses), like me. Was it wrong to portray a WW1 Zeppelin with a control car underneath? You don't say so.
@@neekfenwick It was very wrong to portray a WWI Zeppelin with an underslung control car, while voiceover is discussing Graf Zeppelin II spy mission along English coast 20 years later. This is extremely typical of crappy YT "documentaries."
I was not aware that the Germans, or anyone, operated Zepplins after the Hindenberg disaster!
Gosh! I never knew this nugget of WWII history. Thank you for enlightening us all watching this video!!! 👏👏👏👍👍👍
Thanks for watching!
As a boy in London during the Luftwaffe attacks, this took me back 80 years! One night, when a bomb came whistling down, my mother dragged me into the bathroom, saying "Lean over the bath - it will make less mess". Terrifying. That bomb demolished a nearby Victorian 30 room pair of semi.d's at the end of our road, some 150 yards away.
Great job telling the story! I never knew that!
Very good stuff here that I didn't know it was around before 1940. My mom said that when she was a kid, she remembered seeing Zeppelins fly over back in the 30s. Zeppelins and Mom are gone now. Don't think Zeppelins would do well these days because of the wind situation. Lots of high winds at all times of the year anymore.
You are welcome.
Wow! I'd never heard of the Graf Zeppelin mission before!
Great historial video. Thanks!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Several times I've set out to upload a video regarding the development of pre-war radar but have become bogged down in the weeds with too many contradictory sources. (I too am an individual producer). What a joy, therefore, to come across this wonderful content. Thank you.
Thanks for watching Richard. Let me know when you publish your video, I'd be happy to share it!
My dad worked at Clee Hill RADAR station in Shropshire. His boss was a guy called Dickie Barrett. Dickie was taught by Watson Watt, the guy credited with inventing RADAR
Part of the 1940 Dieppe Commando raid was to assess a Freya station, which was too strongly defended. However, cutting the land lines permitted analysis of the alternative radio communications. This was followed by the 1942 Bruneval Para raid, which removed an entire Freya and a Würzburg artillery control system, complete with two technicians.
Great video, some great viewer commentary also!
A great video. In 1980? I was told by then an 80 yr old British lady that if the BEF had been captured instead of escaping Great Britian would have sued for peace. She said the entire country was completely shocked over the overwhelming and stunning defeat suffered by the British in France. She said had the BEF been captured- it would have ended the war.
It was a saving grace, ironically a major oversight was during the said phoney war when Germany had 90% of its airforce and most of its divisions in Poland and the UK and France not pressuring Germany had let them assemble for their spectacular in 1940
I'm glad I found this channel! The information was completely absorbing! Although as a teenager in the 1950's l remember our teacher saying it was Radar that won the battle of Britain. Of course there was no Internet or home computers then so there was no way to find out more. I have subscribed and look forward to more of your videos!
Thanks for watching Morgan!
"...there was no way to find out more." I was a teenager in the late 50's, fascinated by all things airplanes, rockets, and space. The only source of information was TV news and newspapers. The internet, Google, and CZcams have totally changed my life. And, yes, kittens are cute. Sometimes.
Thanks for the interesting video. Liked and subscribed.
Thanks for watching Simon, I appreciate it mate!
"They aren't doing it like us. Their gadgets can't be as good as ours." -Every defense contractor since the snake that sold Cain the rock that bashed in Abel's head.
Very interesting. Thank you
Glad you enjoyed it
Can I say i think you had just one picture of the Graf Zeppelin II it looked almost exactly like the the Hindenburg except while the hindenburg had pusher props the Graf Zeppelin II had tractor ones. The original Graf Zeppelin Lz-127 was famous in its day flying all over the world so visual material for it is very easy to come by. It also used a different font from the the Graf Zeppelin II Lz-130 so that's a legitimate way to tell them apart 😀
Yeah, I know. It was SO difficult to find images I could legally use in this video. Unfortunately, people weren't as prolific with their photography back then as they are now.
@@CalibanRising I understand completely still an excellent video if you need airship material let me know I have a pile of it, I used to have an ashtray made from salvaged metal from the R101 crash and must be the most questionable piece of memorabilia ever.
cheers!
@@CalibanRising By legal do you mean these images are copyrighted or because of the hakenkreuz on the tail fins? There are plenty of images of LZ 130, even colour photos and footage.
@@anunheardtruth3071 Yes I mean copyright. Not a lot seems to be in the public domain.
I like the video, very informative! I was posted at RAF Bawdsey in the 80s when it was a missile base. I should say Bawdsey is in Suffolk. It still had one of the towers up, and there was another just a short distance away in Thorpeness. Keep up the great work my friend.
Cheers Neil. Sorry for the mistake, I'll try to catch those in future.
And in the late 1970s when asked about a new pop groups sound ,Roger daltrey said they would go down like a lead Zeppelin 🤔🤔😂
It was Keith Moon who said that
and it was the late sixty's
Bawdsey is in Suffolk, not Essex, as was captioned. Also, CH used metal transmitter towers and wooden receiver towers, typically four of each. I grew up in North East Suffolk and remember seeing the two remaining of four CH transmitter towers at what was RAF Stoke Holy Cross, just south of Norwich. Sadly, only one of the CH towers now remains.
At 13:37 picture on the left is of two CH transmitter towers and the picture on the right is a CH Low tower (possibly located at RAF Hopton On Sea, which is a couple of miles from the village I grew up in, so I was aware of a radar station there that was used on and off into the 1990s).
According to another CZcams video on CH, the system used the 50Hz frequency of mains electricity as a clock signal to synchronise all the CH stations. The Germans in the Graf Zeppelin picked up the pulses of the National Grid as it travelled up the east coast, which is where the confirmation bias came in about their assumptions concerning British radar.
Thanks for the correction. Said Suffolk but for some reason wrote Essex.
Great Job thanks😃
Thanks for watching Dave!
I have read about this about 30 years ago .
I think Len Deighton's Blitz!!
I also read it in Deighton's 'Fighter', a similar number of years ago.
From what I have read, Churchill tried his best to persuade 🇫🇷 to stay in the war in June 1940.
Even when some British troops were being evacuated, fresh combat troops were being sent to France.
Cool. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for watching!
Top content mate
The photo at 18:38, technician in what seems to be a transmitter room... is he holding a rod with a neon bulb and using it to tune the antenna's standing wave ratio?
A fine analysis. As I understand it, Britain's choice of long wavelength was inelegant, but it assured wide coverage. Its weakness was perfectly counterbalanced by the filter stations.
Never heard this before. Good.
excellent stuff
Thanks Prof. Holland. Just watched your Foo fighter video, fantastic stuff sir! Clearly I need to dig a bit deeper.
Thanks for an interesting video. The observer corps could have functioned fine without radar, and it's not clear it would have been easy to knock out radar as they were very hard to accurately bomb and could sometimes be fixed within 12 or 24 hours. My 2 cents anyway!
Excellent video. Really interesting. Don’t mean to be personal but I did get a jolt every time I heard luft”w”affe😮
Thanks for the feedback Robin!
A well researched and sound video but I would gently suggest that this does not illuminate the key mistake the Germans made. Firstly, in all fields, the Germans were obsessed with developing the highest possible technology resulting in insufficient equipment and weapons and always too late. Their enemies deployed adequate technology in huge numbers and in good time (and won).
So with radar.
1) the Germans were well aware of HF/VHF/and UHF. So were the British.
2) the Germans believed that the British HF stations were just a crude trip wire early warning system because HF (unlike their VHF/UHF) is good at determining range but is too broad brush to accurately determine bearing to target.
3) the British knew that too but also knew that they could deploy a chain of HF stations all around the Eastern and Southern coasts in the little time that they had
4) they also knew they could simply work round the bearing problem with a solution that never occurred to the technology obsessed Germans.
The key is in the much overlooked Filter Stations which miss out on all the attention given to the Sector Stations with WAAFs moving counters over a map and a balcony of RAF officers moving squadrons like chess pieces. "Filter" just implies some crude removal of rubbish when, in fact, they were where the magic happened. Each radar station reported into individual WAAFs who sat shoulder to shoulder around a huge map. Using accurate range but only approximate bearing information these very intelligent and diligent girls plotted the ranges as arcs on the map, working with their colleagues, either side who also had range data from their own radar stations. Where these accurate arcs crossed was exactly where the raid was, to a very high degree of precision.
This was the information the Filter Station sent out with the Germans never realising that the crude HF equipment could be used this way because it used intelligent young women not cutting edge science.
Outstanding.
Awesome Vid !!! I thought that the Graf Zeppelin II was a sister ship to the ill-fated Hindenburg. That design was substantially broader than the narrow-waisted LZ 27.
You´re right, the pictures are wrong. LZ 127 was mistaken for LZ 130. Further on Graf Zeppelin II had tractor propellers
Thanks for watching!
Unfortunately there are very few LZ 130 images in the public domain, so I had to use what I could find.
well done cali
Cheers for watching Martin!
I really enjoy your stuff. Jim (Tasmania). Son of downed 452 Spitfire pilot operating out of Red Hill Sussex.
Thank you for watching. And thank you to your Father. Was he also Australian?
I did a little bit of flying out of Red Hill years ago. Luckily they wouldn't have been closed in by Heathrow and Gatwick airspace back then. 😀
The German response is reminiscent of China's explanatation of their balloons over North America.
Very interesting!
An airship is not a balloon. Airships had the ability to steer and move horizontally, independent of the wind. Noticed how the Graf Zeppelin decided where it wanted to go. When the mission was over, they headed home.
Mount a propeller on a balloon, and good luck.
One term for airship is "dirigible balloon" or just "dirigible" for short. Certainly, in earlier days of airships, the US Navy liked to call them dirigibles.
@@Steve-GM0HUU
Looking at the English dictionaries for 'dirigible', 'airship' is given as a synonym.
While 'dirigible balloon' is a bit like getting cash out of the 'ATM machine'
@@stephenarbon2227 This got me curious as to when it was realised that using a cigar shaped envelope rather than spherical balloon was a better idea (for a controllable lighter than air vehicle). I don't know who first came up with idea. Though, did find references to Henri Giffard in 1852 being the first to successfully demonstrate. For example,
"The first airship was built by the French engineer Henri Giffard in 1852 [2]. This airship had a length of 143 feet and a diameter of 40 feet. It successfully completed a flight of 17 miles at a speed of 5mph."
[A review of airship structural research and development
Article in Progress in Aerospace Sciences · May 2009]
In 1939 Polish Navy opened competition for naval radar system, although devices using infrared vision were also allowed.
Do a video on the high flying German diesel Ju 86 Recon/Bombers that were almost impossible to reach.
The Luftwaffe was attacking the radar sites early in 1940 so they obviously knew what they were for. According to the RAF Museum website Göring said in August 1940 “It is doubtful whether there is any point in continuing attacks on radar sites, in view of the fact that not one of those attacked so far has been put out of action.”
Are you sure that is a picture of Erhard Milch at 4:08. I thought it looked more like Ernst Udet.
Ah, you could be right. Might be a mislabeled photo in the public domain resource I use. Thanks for the correction.
They didn't have truly frequency agile receivers back then. You had to plug in a new crystal and then tune for each frequency. The range of frequencies in use was enormous and the enemy broadcast had to be discovered through very laborious trial and error. The zepplin didn't have the right receiver and so it didn't hear them. The Germans simply failed to persevere.
They did detect the CH HF pulses, but CH used a very low pulse repetition interval of 25 Hz half the 50 Hz electrical grid which it was locked to to avoid interstation CH station interference. The Germans interpreted this as some feature of the electrical grid, their own radars operated in the VHF at prfs in the hundreds of Hz which would be expected for a radar with a range of 100 miles.
Very interesting.
It sounds incredible that managers can be so perverted that they put their individual turf wars above the success of the organization as a whole, but it happens all the time. All it takes is one guy at the top who only rewards people who tell him what he wants to hear, rather than dealing with reality.
Thank you --- old git, UK
I would say the Kriegsmarine was a bigger threat to a German invasion force than even the Royal Navy. Given that the invasion was going to use Rhein river barges, the backwash from the escorting destroyers would have capsised most of the transports drowning thousands and losing much equipment.
Discounting the hype and the propaganda, the nazis had no experience of amphibious operations. There's a good chance that it would have been a failure, however the propaganda effect was such that the defending force generals may have just packed it in. There's a bit in "Darkest hour" where Gen. Ironsides presents a highly fantastic possible invasion, nobody questions the logistics of this because they assume the nazis would have that sorted, after what they did in France everyone was scared, but it was all smoke and mirrors. In France they counted on French incompetence, anglophobia, germanophilia and general inability to organize a piss-up in a brewery. The enormous RAF losses during the Battle of France were largely due to the fact that they were under French command.
Wasn´t there the incident where a german bomber flight mistakenly attacked a german destroyer flotilla, panicking them to an extend that they popped smoked and then wildly fired at each other and the rescue effort, leaving the perplexed british observers to guess at what the heck that tossup had been about? Yeah, that level of command and control...with an amphibious assult....good night....the Kriegsmarine would indeed have been its own worst enemy....
@@paavobergmann4920 I am not aware of that particular incident, but it does not surprise me. War is complicated, it runs on expected reactions by key people to unforeseen events, however much you train there will be something out of the ordinary to mess it all up. Very thorough doctrine-based training, like the Germans excelled at, is wonderful until something happens outside the box (I get the impression this also applies to the US forces ). The phrase "Waterloo was won on the playing field of Eton" is actually quite profound, a leadership class that played team sports from a very early age, interacted with each other outside the family bubble during their formative years, produced some remarkable leaders (and quite a few idiots, but that's another story...).I wouldn't have sent my kids to Eton or another such school even if I could afford it, but that system supplied the nation with many capable administrators and military leaders for over two centuries.
British development of the cavity magnetron and GE putting it into volume production put the allies ahead of Germany in radar. Then development of the klystron left them far behind. And gave us the tool sensitive enough to detect a submarine periscope at a far range. Many hundreds of us trained on this WWII equipment in the 1960s as it was still relevant at the time.
Development of cavity magnetron was later than 1941 surely?
@@paulinecabbed1271 The cavity magnetron was a radical improvement introduced by John Randall and Harry Boot at the University of Birmingham, England in 1940. Their first working example produced hundreds of watts at 10 cm wavelength, an unprecedented achievement.
I trained on this stuff for Army Security Agency in 1965
The cavity magnetron was a brilliant piece of lateral thinking and helped in the sea war as well, as centimetric radar could detect a schnorkel only a few feet in size.
Paul, I believe the 1st naval radar sets were installed in Liberators, but there was a "p__ng contest" between the Army Air Force and Navy for control of said anti submarine work?
Interesting. Thanks :)
Glad you liked it!
@@CalibanRising Yes I never knew. :)
This is really interesting,
Thanks for watching Jason!
10:39 Near bottom right: "Monster Reported Seen Again". Well, that's just a normal headline...
3:17 This is the key. While the British concentrated on defence, the Germans were focused on offense. It was what their entire military apparatus was built around. The fact that they later (much later) proved adept at defence shows how misguided their strategy had been (thankfully).
Great comment David, thanks for watching.
Cartoon on the podcast is great 👍
I bet Martini must have been embarrased when the British chap told him, post war, the radar picked up the airship. I would loved to have seen his face.
To digress from Radar to another aspect of RAF advantage over the Luftwaffe.
Was aircraft battle damage repair. The RAF could more easily repair aircraft damage on their home territory
what is the court that "suing for peace" would have been heard in?
During WW2 the Germans flow at very low level up Southampton water. A UK battleship near Southampton loaded it main guns with airburst munitions and fired above the German Aircraft and blasted them into Southampton water.
In "The Man in the High Castle", a novel about what things might look like if Germany had won WW2, the question of Hitler's successor arrives and one comment is "Of course it should be Goering, he's the one who knocked out all the radar towers and won the Battle of Britain!"
Very hard to destroy a Home Chaim Radar tower - the geodesic design seen in the Wellington..Bomber fuselage..consists of rectangular holes thru which air passes meeting no resistance..nothing but a direct hit.woud destroy it.😏👍
True, but at the start of the war, most of the control rooms had not been relocated to underground bunkers and were vulnerable.
Thanks
Thanks for watching Graham! Really appreciate it.
What a catastrophic precursor, indeed, to the Battle of Britain and all that followed.. Hard to believe, but arrogance is the best explanation of the Luftwaffe's inferiority during the war.
I thought Canewdon was along the River Crouch in Essex.
6:12 - The narrator says: "twelfth of JULY 1939"; date on screen reads 12.06.1938
Me: ...??!
What a mistake a to make
Martini stayed behind because he was shaken and not stirred.
;)
Knowledge is indeed power. As a consequence of that being a fact, most details reported here are a case of rewritten history, yet still factual information in it's peculiar way.
I have read countless books about the Second World War and I never ran across this story. Great video, Phil.
Wasn't the Würzburg UHF System paired with the famous 88 mm flak cannon? Professor Roentgen invented the X-ray machine at the College of Medicine of the University of Würzburg as well. I was once an exchange student there, sadly without accomplishing any breakthroughs in radiation science, or anything else.
I think you are right that the Germans used radar-guided flak early on. I have to admit I only brushed the surface in this video and there's a lot more to say about German radar technology.
@@CalibanRising Well, I don't anything about it really. The Wurzburg connection got my attention, and I read something a while back about the radar guidance of the 88. Did you know the North Vietnamese used German 88s to shoot down our planes during the Vietnam War? That one shocked me too. I assume the radar was upgraded.
@@CalibanRising
The point the Germans had no idea of the extent of the British radar early warning system and how it worked was also an eye-popper. More precisely, a few officers in the upper echelons of the German command surmised the basics of what Britain was doing with radar. Still, these correct surmises were never exploited due to interservice compartmentalization and rivalry.
Würzburg was used to get high and range information and was used to steer a master searchlight which illuminated the target. Actual gun laying was done by a optical predictor with used both optical range finding and Würzburg range information to steer the guns and allow shell fuze timers to be set. The radar in its 1940-42 versions wasn't good enough to actually aim the guns by itself. A bigger version was used for night fighter control.
@@richardvernon317 Great answer, Richard. Thank you. In less than 100 years, warfare went from muzzle-loading cannons from the age of Napoleon to rapid-firing radar-guided triple-A. Blows my mind.
The image of PM Churchill at 19:30 shows him wearing an RAF uniform with many service ribbons. I would be surprised if the image is genuine.
Can you recognise the colour of the ribbon please?
They probably were genuine from previous wars he had taken part in
Churchill, as a military man, would not have worn ribbons he had not earned.
@@ralphwortley1206 Churchill served in the Royal Army, including WWI trench combat. I don’t question that he earned many decorations. I do wonder about the RAF uniform and especially the RAF pilot’s insignia.