On June 4, 1940, a defiant Winston Churchill delivered his famous “Dunkirk” speech to Parliament. The British had just rescued 338,000 retreating Allied soldiers, cornered by German forces. France was days away from formal surrender. It was spectacular humiliation spun as victory.
“We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be,” he said. “We shall never surrender.”
Yet in the shadows, Churchill was preparing for Britain to fall. In three months, he would authorize an unprecedented, top-secret operation that signaled his desperation: the handover of all of Britain’s scientific and technological innovations to the United States.
At best, Churchill hoped America would put these innovations into production for British forces. At worst, should Germany invade, the United States would, hopefully, finally, enter the war with great advantages.
James Phinney Baxter III, director of the US Office of Strategic Services from 1942 to 1943, would call the secrets, contained in a simple black metal box, “the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores.”
But it was also the resolve of the project’s mastermind that changed the course of the war. It was known as the Tizard Mission — and though this month marks its 75th anniversary, it has somehow remained one of World War II’s least-known triumphs.
Team of visionaries
Five years before Great Britain went to war, the Royal Air Force staged a mock aerial assault on London. The results were devastating, their means of national defense primitive.
Churchill was not yet prime minister but supported the new Committee for Scientific Study of Air Defense (CSSAD). Henry Tizard, a former military pilot and chair of the Aeronautical Research Committee, was tapped to lead it.
Tizard agreed to join on one condition: That he and his top two advisers not be paid, so as to put them “in a stronger position.”
All agreed.
Initially, the British government was in search of a “death ray.” They didn’t know what this would be other than some kind of paralyzing surface-to-air force that targeted bombers in the sky. The British still had no means of detecting unseen aircraft, nor shooting them down from the ground — they didn’t know how to predict a flight pattern or adjust a shot to hit a moving target.
One of Tizard’s first hires was Robert Watson-Watt, a scientist working in the field of radio waves. Watson-Watt dismissed the death ray, but he thought radio waves might be used to detect incoming bombers.
It was the inception of radar.
Tizard also hired a 24-year-old boy genius named Dr. Edward “Taffy” Bowen to collaborate with Watson-Watt. Bowen quickly regarded Tizard as a visionary. As he later said, “It was Tizard alone who saw the German air force, successfully shot down in daylight, switching to night raids.
“His prediction . . . must rank as one of the best examples of technological forecasting made in the 20th century,” Bowen said.
Here was the challenge: How could a British pilot detect and destroy a German bomber he couldn’t see or hear? Bowen had to build a lightweight device that could fit in a small plane, run on a very low supply of electricity, withstand turbulence and hits, and be simple enough for a pilot under attack to use.
Meanwhile, a panicked British government was seeking more practical, earthbound solutions. “Silhouette” was a plan, hatched in 1938, to implant the whole country with floodlights to detect night fighters. It was abandoned as useless in 1939, and on Sept. 2 of that year, with Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Britain was at war.
Tizard and his team had made great strides. As Steven Phelps wrote in his 2010 book, “The Tizard Mission: The Top-Secret Operation That Changed the Course of World War II,” they had developed prototypes of AI (airborne interception) and ASV (air-to-surface vessel) radar. As early as 1936, Tizard was aware of a former RAF Officer named Frank Whittle, who had invented the turbojet engine.
The government thought it was impossible; Tizard did not.
As Britain prepared for war, its citizens putting their dogs down and sending their children away, Tizard pressed on. This time period, from September 1939 to April 1940, passed with no great attacks and came to be known as “The Phony War,” or, as the Brits called it, “The Bore War.”
But that time gave Tizard an enormous advantage: He sent an attaché to obtain a copy of a top-secret document called the Frisch-Peierls memorandum, which had been drafted just one month before Germany attacked.
It was written by two British scientists who had determined that it was possible to build a deployable atomic bomb, one light and small enough to be flown thousands of miles overseas and dropped from above. It was a calculation even Albert Einstein doubted.
A desperate plan
As early as 1937, Tizard was looking to work with the Americans, but the idea went nowhere.
By early 1940, Britain was bracing for assault, and Tizard’s colleague Archibald Hill, a Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist, encouraged him to simply give America his secrets.
“We are fooling ourselves if we put any trust in secrecy,” he wrote Tizard. “We can get very considerable help from the United States if we are prepared to discard what is now really a fetish.”
Tizard agreed. He and Hill submitted just such a proposal to Churchill upon his appointment as prime minister on May 10, 1940. A little more than one month later, pressed by his war Cabinet, Churchill approved the mission. The Battle of Britain would begin on July 10, 1940, the German Luftwaffe carpet-bombing Britain from the sky.
Tizard assembled his team of six on Aug. 10. The looming question: What to give the Americans? The mission had settled on packing up an unremarkable black metal box no larger than a suitcase.
Their key invention, one so revolutionary that the item itself had to be packed, was Bowen’s Cavity Magnetron No. 12 — a vast improvement upon existing magnetrons and one so small it could be installed in fighter planes. Here was airborne radar.
Also in the box: the A-bomb memorandum, the plans for Whittle’s turbojet engine, the design for the VT, or variable time, fuse — which allowed timed bombs to detonate automatically — as well as reams of blueprints and documents on everything from rockets to gun sights to chemical warfare.
Tizard was also sure to pack film, mainly combat footage; the isolationist United States needed to see the devastation. He gave a special instruction to the three military members of his mission.
“Take every opportunity that naturally presents itself,” he said, “to discuss war experiences with officers of the US forces.”
Tizard left for the United States on Aug. 14, flying in advance of his team. He met with ambassadors and officials in stately town houses, cocktails at the ready. It was surreal.
“He had left behind a world threatened with imminent disaster,” Phelps writes, “where every day, every hour, counted. Each minute that ticked by seemed to take Britain closer to the final reckoning. But Washington was still at peace, and the weekend was still the weekend.”
Two weeks later, on Aug. 28, the young Eddie Bowen woke up in a hotel near Marble Arch, the locked metal box with the nation’s wartime secrets under his bed. He was to take the train from Euston Station to meet the other team members in Liverpool, where they would board a steamship and sail through U-boat-infested waters.
Should the ship be attacked, they would throw the box overboard — small holes had been drilled in its sides to keep it from floating.
Bowen hailed a cab to Euston Station, and the driver tied the box to the roof. For whatever reason, he would not let Bowen carry it in the car.
At the station, as Bowen collected the rest of his luggage, an overeager porter grabbed the most important box of all and dashed off to the train. Bowen nearly lost sight of him as he frantically dashed to catch up.
“The only way to keep track of him,” Bowen later said, “was to watch the box weaving its way through the mass of heads upfront.”
Once Bowen and the box were safely ensconced in a reserved compartment, he noticed a man board the train and take the seat across from him. Bowen was puzzled until two other passengers tried to sit with them and the strange man told them to leave.
“It was not what he said but how he said it,” Bowen recalled. “For the first time, I realized that the precious cargo was under some kind of protection.”
The Americans
By the time the Tizard Mission sat down with their American counterparts in early September, the Blitz was under way. Their homeland was now subject to the gravest, most sustained aerial assault in its history, and its very future hinged on these meetings.
They began inauspiciously. The British, so confident in their new capabilities with radar, were surprised that the Americans were unimpressed and more curious about other technologies.
The British were shaken. They told the Americans of progress made in anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry, which went over fine. Then they displayed the design for the VT fuse — the first moment when the Americans seemed intrigued.
Whittle’s turbojet engine proved another revelation. The Americans immediately saw the potential, and by 1941 the US Army Air Corps was sending research and development teams to Britain. Unknown to all at that table, the portable and deployable atomic bomb would eventually end the war.
Tizard had strategically staggered the flow of information, and the last innovation to be presented, he thought, was the most valuable. He had Bowen reveal the box’s final item: the Cavity Magnetron No. 12, which he’d perfected.
The Americans were dumb-struck. They had never seen anything like it. They recognized Bowen’s work for the genius it was: a revolution in modern warfare, radar that could fit in a plane.
It could beat back the Germans.
After that final reveal, Phelps writes, came “a welter of activity.” The Americans now had full faith in the Tizard Mission’s objective and aims, and suddenly the Brits had access to US training methods. They observed battle-fleet maneuvers. They were given access to America’s Doppler radar, and RCA and Bell Labs, both previously off-limits to the Brits, were now studying their cavity magnetron.
Bell agreed to quickly put it into production, and MIT founded the Radiation Lab to facilitate further research and development into microwave technologies. Bowen would later recall those weeks as “electric.”
The Brits wanted only one thing in return: the US Navy’s Norden bombsight, the most advanced technology in high-altitude bombing. The Americans, wary of such technology falling into German hands, said no — although they did give Tizard the external specs so British bombers could be outfitted for potential future use.
His objectives achieved, Tizard quietly left Washington, DC, on Oct. 2, headed back home.
His final order of business: He owed his nuclear physicist, professor John Cockcroft, five pounds. Tizard had bet that before they could return from the States, Britain would fall.
