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Short filmTranscript
00:01Just a few weeks before the Second World War, Germany's huge Graf Zeppelin crossed the North Sea on a daring spy mission.
00:11On board, a team of military and wireless experts spent the next 24 hours probing the mysterious towers that had appeared around the British coastline.
00:22This spy mission had been ordered by the head of German signals, General Wolfgang Martini.
00:28He knew the war was just weeks away and he desperately needed to find out more about the towers.
00:37Were the Zeppelin spies about to unravel Britain's greatest secret?
00:42In the summer of 1940, Britain fought for its very survival in the skies over southern England.
01:00But the full story has never been told.
01:09Churchill's few had gained a huge tactical advantage from the work of a brilliant team of scientists.
01:15In just four frantic years, Robert Watson Watt led the team that designed and constructed Chain Home, the world's first radar defence system.
01:27There was no plan B. The entire defence of Britain was gambled on Watson Watt and his boffins.
01:36The Battle of Britain was in fact won some years before by decision to build Chain Home and to develop the very effective communication system between it and fighter command.
01:51That's something which one can't underestimate.
02:00As the world's largest air force began its assault on Britain, Luftwaffe commander Herman Goering boasted he would seize control of British skies in a matter of days.
02:09Destroying the RAF was the prelude to Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Britain.
02:18If air supremacy had passed to the Germans, they would have attempted Sea Lion and had it done so, it would probably have been successful.
02:28The RAF fought the Battle of Britain under the assumption that the Germans knew all the secrets of British radar.
02:34There could be no other reason behind the Zeppelin spy flight in those last weeks of peace.
02:43The collusion we reached was that they had located all the stations and therefore the most probable thing would be an attack on them in the early stages of the war.
02:54So why had the Germans not destroyed British radar before the battle?
03:01The mystery of the Zeppelin spy mission was not solved until long after the war.
03:07When the guns finally fell silent in 1918, the world had been traumatised by the horrors of modern warfare.
03:23Further conflict in Europe seemed inconceivable.
03:27After the immediate end of the First World War, there was a widespread feeling among the public that they didn't want any more war.
03:38That would be the end of war.
03:40And so defences were run down immediately.
03:43The RAF, which had been created in 1918, became a fraction of itself.
03:47Partly because there was no sense that there was really any enemy out there who was now going to attack Great Britain.
03:51But things were about to change.
03:59The defeated Germany was soon ravaged by hyperinflation, unemployment and civil unrest.
04:08From this chaos, a sinister new force emerged.
04:13Hitler's rise to power was born of the resentment of the harsh reparations imposed at the end of the First World War.
04:22He promised a new and stronger Germany.
04:30By the time Hitler came to power in 1933, they were close to the point where they could now begin to build once again a military air force.
04:39And a military air force with advanced technology.
04:42He made his sidekick, Hermann Göring, minister for air.
04:47Forbidden to rearm, the German aircraft industry had turned to civil aviation.
04:54This became part of Göring's plan to construct a secret air force.
05:00By the mid-1930s, German aviation was leading the world.
05:05But these new high-speed airliners and mail planes were barely disguised bombers.
05:13This was something I think the British had always anticipated.
05:19But they soon became terrified that all the rumours coming back of the aircraft that had been seen, camouflaged about developments of secret air bases and so on, suggested to them that Germany was going to be the real threat.
05:32For centuries, the sea had been Britain's natural defence.
05:40But a new and terrifying scenario now loomed.
05:45A new generation of German bombers could strike targets across the country before the RAF had time to intercept.
05:55Britain was no longer an island.
05:59It desperately needed an early warning system.
06:01During the First World War, sound locators were a successful method of being able to track aircraft close into the British coast.
06:17And during the 1930s, the British government decided to build even larger sound locators in the hope of detecting aircraft many miles away from the coast.
06:28If proven effective, these concrete sound locators could be developed into a national warning system.
06:37With the massive 200-foot sound mirror just completed, everything now depended on a crucial test.
06:44And there's a classic story of the air staff all assembled for a demonstration, listening to the incoming bomber formation.
06:55It sounded very much as if one of the planes had a faulty engine.
07:00And all they saw was a local dairy farmer with his milk cart and his milk shards rattling together.
07:12And that was the state of our air defence in 1934.
07:16Amongst those who witnessed the fiasco was the head of air ministry research, Hugh Dowding, and one of his scientists, A.P. Rowe.
07:31Rowe realised that the day of the sound locator was over.
07:34He wrote to his boss and said that unless urgent action was taken, Britain would lose the next war.
07:43It had taken a milk float to rattle the government into action.
07:4830 enemy aircraft over the channel, flying due west.
07:53German bombers could attack across the North Sea anywhere from the Orkneys down to the Isle of Wight.
07:59A vast area of 70,000 square miles.
08:04In 1935, the idea of a warning system that would cover 70,000 square miles was the most utter science fiction.
08:12Rumours began to circulate that the Germans were developing a death ray.
08:23A high energy beam that would boil the blood of a pilot.
08:32This was taken seriously by air ministry.
08:34And they offered a prize of an award of a thousand pounds for anyone who could kill a sheep at 200 yards.
08:53The death ray challenge found its way to the obscure radio research station near Slough.
08:58Its chief scientist was a lively Scot called Robert Watson Watt.
09:05Air ministry, call his name.
09:06Watson Watt.
09:08Watson Watt was a marvellous little chap.
09:11He bubbled away the whole time talking.
09:14He could certainly try a monkey out of a tree, certainly without the slightest effort.
09:19Watson Watt asked his able assistant, Skip Wilkins, to get to grips with the death ray conundrum.
09:25He soon found the energy required would be out of this world.
09:32Hello, can you put me through to the air ministry, please?
09:34But Watson Watt sensed an opportunity with the air ministry.
09:38I'd like to speak to Dr. Wimbros, please.
09:40Watson Watt could sell refrigerators to rescue boats without the slightest effort.
09:45Harold!
09:47Watson Watt replied, saying, absolutely impossible, but I believe I can use radio energy to detect an enemy bomber.
09:54Okay, bye-bye, bye-bye.
10:01But this extravagant claim was based on little more than a hunch.
10:06Watson Watt had been tracking thunderstorms by radio direction finding, when he became puzzled by some mysterious reflections.
10:12Wilkins suggested there might be echoes from passing aircraft.
10:20So when the air ministry demanded he prove his claim, he turned again to his young assistant.
10:27Wilkins estimated how much radio energy could be reflected from an aircraft.
10:32The answer surprised everyone. It was very favourable.
10:40Air Marshal Dowding, the head of air ministry research and development, saw the calculations but said,
10:46these scientific fellows can prove anything with figures. I want a demonstration.
10:54Within a few days, Wilkins devised a pioneering experiment.
11:01Welcome, come on in.
11:02The mobile laboratory was an old ambulance packed with hastily improvised equipment.
11:09A Hayford bomber would fly a course between the BBC transmitter at Daventry and the van.
11:16Any radio reflections from the aircraft would disturb the display.
11:20A.P. Rowe from the air ministry joined them as they anxiously awaited the bomber.
11:30Do you hear that? Some sort of hum.
11:34Definitely an engine, it could be our man.
11:37As the engine drone grew louder, the spot refused to move.
11:42That could be atmospheric, Skip.
11:45The Hayford turned and made a second approach.
11:48Could be a tractor.
11:51No, no, no, no. That's a propeller.
11:53Of some sort.
11:55That is our man.
11:57Contact.
11:59There he goes.
12:01Wilkins had made Britain's first radar contact.
12:05And Watson Watt was quick to realise the significance.
12:08With deep irony, Wilkins' success came on the very same day that Hitler revealed the Luftwaffe to the world.
12:26It was the first exhibition of military might by the self-appointed Führer.
12:31In just two years, the Nazis had constructed the world's largest air force in total secrecy.
12:42Hitler's old henchman, Hermann Göring, was given supreme command.
12:47The threat to Britain was now all too clear.
12:55Following that first radar experiment, 10,000 pounds of funding allowed Watson Watt to gather a small team of scientists at a remote aerodrome in Suffolk.
13:01The conditions in the actual laboratories where we worked on radar were completely primitive. They were just wooden huts.
13:19All our test gear had come over on the boat, everything came over on the boat, and there simply wasn't much test gear anyhow.
13:34As the team explored the design of a national early warning system, Watson Watt knew the frantic race to defend Britain could only be won by developing existing technology.
13:46But keeping it simple came with drawbacks.
13:52The problem was that to transmit enough radio power with existing technology required the aerials to be over 300 feet high.
14:03A national network would require dozens of these huge towers to be linked together to form a coastal chain.
14:10The echoes of any aircraft within that transmission area were picked up by a receiving system which could tell the direction from which the echo was coming.
14:20Watson Watt's third best system became known as Chain Home.
14:26Put me through to the Air Ministry, please.
14:29Many still considered Watson Watt's ideas total fantasy, but he was gaining rapid progress.
14:34The radar team had cracked the basic mechanics of radar.
14:41It now had to evolve into an air defence system.
14:45It was not developed as a scientific device.
14:50It was developed as a war weapon for the use of fighter command.
14:54And the requirements of fighter command were of overriding priority.
14:57The expanding research team had outgrown the primitive huts at Orford Ness.
15:06Just down the coast, the imposing Bordsey Manor became the perfect home for Watson Watt's new wave of recruits.
15:14The drive was on to collect the best brains from Britain's universities.
15:19The impact of Bordsey Manor and all the equipment on me as a young man in my mid-twenties was colossal.
15:30As Bordsey's scientific elite grew, they gained a name that would stick with them.
15:37The Boffins.
15:38We all felt the war was coming, but we only had a little time in which to be ready to defend this country.
15:48And that was the atmosphere.
15:55As the first of the giant 350-foot towers went up at Bordsey, Watson Watt's confidence grew.
16:02He summoned the top mandarins of Whitehall for a full-scale demonstration.
16:08Well, the great day dawned and this great fleet of aircraft left the dock at Felixstowe and then they were going to make an attack on board of you.
16:21Watson Watt told them how marvelous radar was and what a great replacement it would be for sound location.
16:27And the time came, of course, for these aircraft to appear and nothing much was seen by the three observers.
16:36I was one of the observers.
16:38It became increasingly embarrassing in the darkened room.
16:42And then finally Watson Watt gave up talking.
16:46And in the quiet, after he stopped talking, we began to hear the distant hum of aircraft engines.
16:54And at the same time as we heard them, or possibly one second before, we saw some faint echoes on the cathode ray tubes.
17:07As a demonstration of the efficacy of radar, it was about as bad as you could possibly get.
17:14The top brass stormed back to London convinced that Watson Watt was little more than a charlatan.
17:23Radar was all but finished.
17:26The disaster left only one senior figure still with confidence in the boffins.
17:36Air Marshal Hugh Dowding understood the huge technical challenges they faced.
17:42I'm quite sure Dowding could see no other solution to the effective defense of this country.
17:50Use of standing patrols and other means of detecting and directing fighter aircraft against incoming bomber streams was well beyond the capability of the resources of the country.
18:01Radar had to be successful and Dowding kept on supporting it right up to the hill.
18:06Radar gave fighter command a method of locating the attacking bomber.
18:16But that was only half the problem. The other half was to direct the fighter effectively to intercept.
18:22Dowding's new system would keep fighters on the ground until the enemy was detected by radar.
18:28All fighter squadrons take off.
18:34Once in the air, a constant stream of instructions by two-way radio would guide them to intercept.
18:42Orbit, Angel 15, and transmit for six, over.
18:47OK, listening out.
18:49As the development of radar progressed, Watson Watt knew that his first priority was the defense of London.
18:58London was less than 90 minutes flying time from major Luftwaffe bomber bases.
19:06At the start of 1938, five radar stations began construction around the Thames estuary.
19:13The new radar network was going to need hundreds of trained personnel.
19:22Foreseeing a lack of manpower in wartime, the RAF began to recruit women operators.
19:28Nobody could be told what they were doing. It was absolutely Britain's top secret.
19:36We marched up and down. We saluted people. And so it went on for two weeks.
19:44And then we were all called into a hut and told where we were going to be sent.
19:50And I was told I was going to be a clock special duty. And everybody wanted to know what it was.
19:56I couldn't tell them. I had no idea.
19:59And we had our first lecture when they told us the secret of radar.
20:05When you were operating on the set, you had what was called a trace, which is a line of light across the screen, full of little things wiggling up and down like that.
20:18And these were either noise interference or the real thing, what you were looking for, the echoes.
20:27By the start of 1938, the five Thames radar stations gave London a 20 minute warning.
20:35But this was simply not enough time for the RAF's gladiators and gauntlets to climb and intercept.
20:42The air defence of London would need the new high speed Hawker hurricane.
20:48By February 1938, just 16 had reached the front line.
20:58A few weeks later, the Reichstag rose to the news that Austria was to unite with Germany.
21:04The Graf Zeppelin, the last of the great airships, overflew Vienna in a triumphant display of Nazi power.
21:18But the flight was cover for a top secret spy mission.
21:23The Graf headed east to shadow the Czechoslovakian border.
21:27On board, a team of military and wireless experts gathered intelligence on the Sudetenland.
21:35It was Hitler's latest territorial claim, and it brought Europe to the brink of war.
21:47As the Czech crisis deepened, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew to Munich to confront Hitler head-on.
21:53Chamberlain had just been briefed on Britain's readiness for war.
22:00I don't know how strong Chamberlain's poker face actually was, but at the time of Munich, Britain's air defences can best be described as dire.
22:10Munich became a deadly game of bluff.
22:13Chamberlain was aware that we had just 406 fighter aircraft.
22:20Of those, only 70 were Hurricanes, and just 14 were Spitfires, not even operational.
22:27All the rest were obsolete biplanes.
22:32Air raids on London, Chamberlain had been told, would result in hundreds of thousands dead.
22:40Provoking Hitler risked creating that enormous catastrophe.
22:44Mollifying Hitler had bought a fragile peace.
22:50But Chamberlain's Peace For Our Time hit a secret race to complete Britain's defences.
22:57A new Hawker factory was now producing Hurricanes in significant numbers.
23:02And the problems that had dogged the mass production of the Spitfire were finally solved.
23:09By the summer of 1939, five frontline squadrons had the RAF's fastest fighter.
23:20With the frantic construction of 14 new stations, radar coverage was extended from Newcastle to the Isle of Wight.
23:28The year after Munich was critical.
23:32During that year, the Chainholm system came into full operation.
23:39It had taken just four years from that first experiment to put Chainholm at the cornerstone of Britain's defence.
23:50This led us to ask ourselves the question, well, the Germans must know what we're doing.
23:55We're building these stations and all this activity going on.
23:59360-foot steel towers, 240-foot receiving towers.
24:04They can't have missed it.
24:07One German had been watching the towers.
24:12General Wolfgang Martini was the head of German radar.
24:15The latest reconnaissance alarmed him.
24:20Could the mysterious towers be British radar?
24:25Martini knew that war was only weeks away.
24:30He desperately needed to know more about the towers.
24:33And on the 3rd of August 1939, the radar station just north of the Thames at Canudon spotted an echo moving in towards the Thames estuary.
24:46A massive echo, bigger than anything one had ever seen before, moving at some 60, 70 knots.
24:51Fighter command went into high alert.
24:59Could it be an invasion fleet or a huge formation of circling bombers?
25:05It turned out to be the German airship LZ-130, the Graf Zeppelin.
25:16And over some hours, they plotted the movement of the echo from somewhere off the coast of Essex up to the north of Scotland.
25:23On board were the Luftwaffe's top wireless team, just returned from a spy mission on the Polish border.
25:35Martini's experts spent the next 24 hours combing the wavelengths for any evidence of British radar.
25:44Fighter command was in complete shock.
25:47The appearance of the Zeppelin could only mean one thing.
25:53The collusion we reached was that they had not only located all the stations, they would have measured their frequency and other important characteristics.
26:03And therefore, the most probable thing would be an attack on them in the early stage of the war.
26:09And indeed, we thought that Bordzee would be the prime target.
26:12As the German war machine rolled into Poland on the 1st of September 1939,
26:25Fighter command braced itself for a German onslaught on the radar chain.
26:31But it didn't happen.
26:33And we couldn't understand why.
26:34As Britain declared war on Germany, the nation dug in and prepared for the worst.
26:51But the feared air raids on British cities never came.
26:57In April 1940, this phony war came to a dramatic end.
27:02The German blitzkrieg rampaged through Holland and Belgium.
27:17A large British expeditionary force was supporting the defence of France.
27:22But the fast-moving panzers encircled and trapped them on the beaches of Dunkirk.
27:32Amongst the vast amounts of materiel abandoned in the Maelstrom was some secret radar equipment.
27:40The British radar sets which had been captured were very crude mobile models.
27:45And the Germans concluded that whatever British radar was, it certainly wasn't up to much.
27:53The Boffins had little idea of the German intelligence picture of British radar.
27:59But with the Zeppelin mission and the capture of the equipment at Dunkirk, they feared the worst.
28:06The fall of France had taken just six weeks.
28:12Hitler now turned to Operation Sea Lion.
28:19The invasion of Britain.
28:22One of the factors that played a role in persuading Hitler that Operation Sea Lion was a possibility.
28:30It was that Hermann Göring really wanted to prove that his force could do it.
28:34That his force could win air supremacy over Britain.
28:36And I think, you know, people say that Göring is a fantasist, he's a boaster.
28:41But actually it had annihilated the Polish Air Force in a matter of days.
28:44They defeated all the aircraft thrown at them in the Battle of France with relative ease.
28:48The idea that you couldn't use the same tactics and destroy the RAF in four days, Göring thought,
28:54is not as implausible as it now looks.
28:57With the towers of Dover radar station clearly visible across the channel, the Luftwaffe began an attack on British ports and shipping.
29:06At first, the Canal Kampf seemed to go the Germans' way.
29:15Then the RAF began to appear.
29:22Dowding carefully positioned his fighters for the best advantage.
29:27The Germans began to think to themselves, well, why are we always meeting the RAF?
29:37We don't think it's very big and yet here they always are.
29:40It began to ring rather quiet alarm bells in the German Air Force
29:45about whether the British actually had got some kind of system to detect incoming aircraft.
29:51Martini took his fears directly to Luftwaffe High Command.
29:55But Göring was an old-school thinker.
29:59For him, the offensive spirit of the Luftwaffe would be the deciding factor.
30:05Nothing at all to do with gadgetry.
30:08If Göring could draw the RAF into a decisive battle with his Messerschmitt aces,
30:15then the Spitfire and Hurricane could be wiped from the sky.
30:18But the events of the 11th of August were to shatter this confidence.
30:26The Luftwaffe mounted three widely separated raids across southern England.
30:31But Dowding had seen the build-up and had swarms of RAF fighters ready to intercept.
30:40In just a few hours, the Luftwaffe lost over 45 aircraft damaged or destroyed.
30:49But Martini had been monitoring RAF radio communications.
31:01From intercepts, they were able to identify that fighters were being directed by radio towards the German bombers.
31:12Therefore, radar must be the basis of the British air defence system.
31:18Martini was also puzzled by the powerful signals they could detect from the towers.
31:27They were crude, but somehow they must play a part in guiding British fighters.
31:32Göring finally conceded. The towers must be destroyed.
31:43Early on the 12th of August, a crack ground attack squadron crossed the channel.
31:49The frontline radar stations of Dover, Rye, Pevensey and Dunkirk came under direct attack.
31:56At Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, a direct hit caused major damage.
32:06In the following days, Stukas joined the onslaught.
32:1419-year-old Avis Parsons was on duty at Poling near Chichester.
32:19As Stukas died, it screams the most hideous noise.
32:25It's very, very frightening.
32:28And then the bombs began to fall.
32:30And suddenly my line went dead.
32:32And the building next to where I was was just a heap of rubble.
32:42The attacks on Chain Home had been feared since the Zeppelin spy mission.
32:47But after three days, they mysteriously stopped.
32:52This remained a very great puzzle because we knew the extent of the damage they'd done.
32:57And we knew what they had to do to finish it.
33:00But they didn't.
33:02The returning airmen reported extensive damage to the towers.
33:08But when Martini's experts checked their frequencies, they were astonished by what they found.
33:14The radar signals were still there, a little fainter or on different wavelengths.
33:22Unknown to the Germans, the source of the signals were mobile radar vehicles that had been brought into operation
33:30when the main radar stations had been knocked out by the bombing raids.
33:34Despite the extensive destruction, the mobile stations had kept the radar chain on the air.
33:42The damage to the towers was rapidly repaired.
33:45We had all those four stations back in operation by midnight that night, plotting to find a command.
33:53Quite unintentionally, the mobile reserve had been a perfect deception.
33:58With the radar stations appearing undamaged, Martini's ideas were sidelined.
34:09Goring called the conference on the 15th of August and instructed his Luftwaffe commanders to waste no more time on these radio installations.
34:19Get on and fight the war.
34:20Goring's frustrations were growing. He now had a plan that would call on every man and aircraft on the Western Front.
34:30The chain home stations began to track the gathering formations extending from 5,000 to 20,000 feet.
34:39And it was then that we began to get the very large numbers of aircraft.
34:48Because 100 plus had never been seen on a radar screen before.
34:53Adla Tag, or Eagle Day, was Goring's plan for a decisive hammer blow.
35:00The target soon became clear.
35:03The plan was to assault the RAF, its airfields, its bases, depots, and aircraft production in southern England.
35:14Once you'd degraded the RAF, you then moved on to attacking communications and administrative centres, and then the invasion would take place.
35:21The RAF airfields were taking a pounding.
35:26Squadrons were broken up, and fighters became scattered across southern England.
35:31There were points in late August and early September 1940, where the system was almost on the point of collapse.
35:41With Dowding's ability to deploy his fighters fast disappearing, the Battle of Britain was on the brink.
35:49On the night of the 24th of August, the Luftwaffe attacked an oil refinery in the Thames estuary.
36:06But the raid went badly wrong.
36:11Crews got lost, and some jettisoned their payloads.
36:15For the first time, bombs fell on central London.
36:20Hitler had forbidden any attack on the capital, fearing a reprisal.
36:30He was right.
36:33Within 24 hours, Bomber Command was over Berlin.
36:37The token raid did little damage, but Hitler was outraged.
36:49Goering changed his tactics again.
36:54Pepper Schmidt, head of German air intelligence, had been telling Goering over and over again that the RAF was finished, virtually.
37:02There's a couple of hundred planes left.
37:03We've achieved air supremacy.
37:05And so it was possible to make this switch to the bombing of London, according to the programme, without much danger.
37:10Late in the afternoon of the 7th of September, the chain stations plotted large formations grouping over France.
37:21Soon, Hermann Goering had assembled the largest air armada the world had ever seen.
37:28370 bombers headed directly to their target, London.
37:36Goering's daily bombardment continued for weeks.
37:41But shifting his attention away from the airfields proved to be a huge tactical error.
37:49Had the Germans sustained their attacks on the sector airfields and the sector controls in particular,
37:56it would have been impossible for Fighter Command to continue the defence of Britain.
38:04With the heat off the airfields, the RAF quickly returned to strength.
38:08As Goering continued to pound London, Dowding used his radar advantage to the fore.
38:17Yes, there is a major raid developing to the south east.
38:19He chose to intercept every raid with small numbers of fighters, rather than risk all in a pitched battle.
38:27This constant harassment left German intelligence only guessing at the strength of the RAF.
38:33They were told that Fighter Command was more or less finished. Every time they flew out, there were more of them.
38:40As Bomber lost his sword, Goering ordered his fighters to fly in close escort.
38:45But they lost their advantage of height, and London was at the limit of their range.
38:55The Luftwaffe was forced to seek the cover of darkness.
38:59The daylight bombing raids were a disaster.
39:04Lost raids that the German Air Force simply couldn't support.
39:08And of course, air supremacy had not been won. So sea line was abandoned.
39:13The Battle of Britain had been won.
39:24But the mystery of the Zeppelin spy mission was still unresolved.
39:28Why had the Germans not destroyed British radar before the battle?
39:36It was only afterward, 1950, when I, at the Farnborough Air Show, met General Martini,
39:43who was the chief sequence officer at the Luftwaffe.
39:46And I said to General Martini, why didn't you destroy the radar system when the war broke out?
39:51He said, you didn't have a radar system when the war broke out.
39:54I said, well, how did we track the Grand Zeppelin?
39:59Should you track the Grand Zeppelin? Yes.
40:01I described precisely.
40:03He said, I don't believe it.
40:05I said, you have to, we did.
40:08The astonishing truth dawned.
40:11The Zeppelin spies had failed to identify British radar.
40:18The Luftwaffe's top wireless experts would have had no trouble finding the powerful chain home signal.
40:25But what they found baffled them.
40:28They expected to hear high-pitched noises and musical tones, as you would get from an oboe in the middle range of the piano.
40:38The latest German radar equipment could transmit pulses between 500 and 1,000 times a second.
40:46Nothing like the crude signals they were now receiving.
40:50Listening to CH, all you would hear would be a dull sort of ticking, tick, tick, tick, something they didn't recognise at all.
40:58German radar generated its own pulses.
41:04British radar, by contrast, sampled the pulses of the national grid.
41:08So as the airship flew up the coast, it picked up the same radiation all the way up.
41:15Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, ticking, without change.
41:18So no matter how they tuned their receivers, they would have heard this curious ticking all the way.
41:22As the LZ-130 approached Scotland, the Zeppelin spies still struggled for an explanation.
41:34The signals appeared to have no direction, just a general widespread ticking.
41:39With British radar still blaring from their headphones, they decided the ticking could only have one source.
41:50The national grid.
41:53They were completely foxed by the fact that the repetition rate of the CH stations, 25 pulses per second,
42:04was quite unlike anything which they had used on their own radars,
42:08which they mistakenly took to be arcing and sparking from the British electrical distribution system.
42:14The Zeppelin spies had made the greatest intelligence blunder of the war.
42:26Rob Zeppelin returned and the head of the mission reported that there was no sign of any radar transmissions.
42:33Watson-Watt's basic, almost primitive system had spoofed the finest technical minds in the Luftwaffe.
42:40Ironically, if Watson-Watt had gone for anything more sophisticated than third best, the Germans would have been onto it immediately.
42:51The Luftwaffe fought the Battle of Britain with little knowledge of chain home,
42:57or of the huge tactical advantage it gave the RAF.
43:01I believe the failure of the Zeppelin mission and the failure of Martini to persuade Goring
43:08that the stations had to be destroyed effectively, cost Goring and the Battle of Britain,
43:15and that saved this country from a German invasion.
43:18and that saved this country from a German invasion.
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