How Onboard Radar Technology Beat the Germans

Roger Dunsford, the author of Three in Thirteen, explains how it wasn’t just the brave pilots who saved us during the Battle of Britain, but the scientists and engineers who worked out how to combat night raids using radar technology.

On the dark murky night of Sunday the 19^th of March 1944, a 25 Squadron Mosquito Mk XVII fitted with an Air Interception (AI) radar Mk 10 and flown by Flight Lieutenant Joe Singleton with Flying Officer Geoff Haslam as navigator, destroyed three Junkers aircraft and their crews, in thirteen minutes, over the North Sea.  That feat, in itself remarkable, almost certainly saved many lives at the target of the fifty plus Luftwaffe raid – Hull.  But, just five years previously: the aircraft was barely more than a prototype light bomber for which nobody could think of a use; the pilot could not fly and the navigator had never seen a radar, let alone used one; the smallest radar in existence was way too bulky to be fitted into the largest aircraft yet built; and, even if an aircraft had been large enough, the radar’s weight and the demands it made on electrical power supplies were such that it would never get off the ground.

 

Much has been written, rightly, about the feats of imagination, brilliance and perseverance by British scientists and engineers, during the nineteen thirties, to produce the right aircraft, linked to a unique network of radars, to save the nation from invasion in the Battle of Britain.  The Battle was won by radars directing the fighters to within a range at which the pilot could see the enemy aircraft with an eyeball Mk I and prosecute the attack autonomously from there; that required daylight.  By the end of 1940, Germany realized that the only way they were going to achieve its objectives was to switch to night operations.  The much- vaunted defensive capabilities of Hurricanes and Spitfires, within a highly efficient command and control system, enabled by ground-based radars, suddenly, was rendered impotent.  The radars could still see the raids coming, the Command and Control was still operating brilliantly and put the defenders in the vicinity of the German raiders but, if the pilot saw anything at all, it was nowhere near enough to prosecute a kill.  The carnage and destruction in Britain by the Luftwaffe’s Night Blitz was the result.

If the night bombing could not be stopped, the threat was no longer of invasion but to the survival of our industrial capacity and our national will to continue the war.  The race was on to find a way to supplement the Mk I eyeball with something, anything, that could enable the defender to see the attacker at close range.  Many oddball ideas were tried – airborne searchlights or flares, all failures – but the same brilliant scientists knew there could be only one solution – airborne radar.  To miniaturise these behemoths of radars, in the compressed timescales of a war going badly, down to a size that could be carried by an aircraft was, arguably, an even greater achievement, than it was to create them in the first place.  Then there was the problem of which type of aircraft was needed. When fitted with a radar, it had to be still capable of the manoeuvrability necessary to get into a firing position that would enable a kill.  The current crop of bombers certainly did not fit the bill – they were too cumbersome.  Yet the proven fighters, whilst proven once in a firing position, were no good either, because they were too small to fit in not only radar equipment, but also a radar operator.  It was realised at an early stage that no pilot could be expected (as they are nowadays with fourth generation technology) to both operate the radar and fly the aircraft to attack.  It had to be, at least, a two-seater aircraft.  The answer, another superb example of British ingenuity, was aircraft somewhere between, in terms of size and load-carrying capacity, the conventional concepts of bomber and fighter – first the Beaufighter, then the Mosquito.  But even these were dependant upon the radars not only being made smaller and lighter, but also on dramatically reducing the power required to operate them.  The major breakthrough came with the invention (or exploitation if you are non-British!) of the cavity magnetron by scientists at Birmingham University.  This enabled the high-powered microwaves (as in today’s ovens) utilized by radars to be generated by the much smaller electrical inputs, produced within the aircraft itself.

 

So, Three in Thirteen is not merely about the exploits or war chronicles of a fighter ‘Ace’, even though that is the central thread that I could readily relate to, with my background as a pilot who has specialised in operational night flying.  It is also about how one man, more often than not by chance, was intimately involved in one of the most extraordinary step changes in technological warfare in the Second World War.

 

Roger Dunsford is the author of Three in Thirteen about Joe Singleton, a Mosquito night fighter ace, and how the technological advancements in the Mosquito and onboard radar technology allowed him to shoot down three German planes in thirteen minutes.

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