Engineering Hitler's Downfall. Gwilym Roberts

tensions between government departments it enabled the War Cabinet to make quick decisions based on accurate data and was undoubtedly an important component of the organisation behind the successful prosecution of the war.

      The Allied Central (Photographic) Interpretation Unit (ACIU) was based at Medmenham, Buckinghamshire. Originally the RAF Photographic Interpretation Unit, it became the Anglo-American Allied Central Interpretation Unit after the entry of the Americans into the war.

      During 1942 and 1943 the unit gradually expanded and was involved not only in the planning stages of practically every operation of the war but in every aspect of intelligence. In 1945, the daily intake of material averaged 25,000 negatives and 60,000 prints. By VE Day it employed 1,700 personnel, a large number of whom were women, and the print library, which documented and stored worldwide cover, held 5,000,000 prints from which 40,000 reports had been produced.

      Combined Operations Headquarters was a department of the War Office established in July 1940 to harass the Germans on the European continent by means of amphibious raids carried out by commandos. Its first director was Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes, who had won distinction in the First World War for leading a raid on the Dutch port of Zeebrugge. (He was succeeded in October 1941 by Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten followed by Major General Robert Laycock in October 1943.)

      Bizarrely, the organisation became the godfather to a scheme named Project Habakkuk, which envisaged the manufacture of reinforced icebergs for use as floating aircraft carriers. It was conceived by the eccentric inventor Geoffrey Pyke, an advisor to Mountbatten, and it was named after the minor Hebrew prophet whose eponymous book in the Bible includes a phrase reflecting the project’s ambitious goal: ‘Be utterly amazed, for I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told.’ (Hab. 1:5 New International Version).

      A news correspondent in Germany at the start of the First World War, Pyke had been interned but had managed to escape – a feat which earned him a measure of notoriety. Between the wars he had invested heavily in the stock market, founded a school, and become bankrupt. Following the German invasion of Norway he conceived a novel method for transporting troops across snow fields using screw-propelled vehicles called Ploughs. The idea was taken to Mountbatten who thought it worthy of further investigation. He took Pyke on to his staff, both for his original ideas and because he prompted other staff members to think less conservatively. The concept was then actively pursued by the Americans and Canadians but was eventually superseded by the Canadian Weasel and the American M29 tracked personnel carriers.

      In mid-1942 Pyke was asked to investigate problems concerned with the icing of ships in Arctic waters. This prompted his lateral-thinking brain to consider related matters, in particular whether artificial icebergs could be used as aircraft carriers that could help close the mid-Atlantic air gap or support an amphibious landing on a coastline, such as the Bordeaux region of France – then beyond the reach of land-based aircraft.

      To do this he conceived the manufacture of a new material made from wood, pulp, and frozen water which became known as Pykrete and was extremely hard and slow-melting. Examples were given to Mountbatten, and by him to Churchill. Both of them actively supported the idea, which was considered by the combined chiefs of staff at their meeting in Ottawa in August 1943.

      An Anglo-American-Canadian committee was established to investigate further, though by the end of the year the need for such a project had been nullified both by Allied successes in the Battle of the Atlantic and by the decision to invade France through Normandy, which was within reach of UK land-based aircraft.

      Sunday Soviets

      Britain organised collaboration between the military, scientists, and industry supremely well – discussions between the respective participants were open and frank with the objective of finding not the perfect solution, but one which worked and could be applied effectively and quickly in as many applications as possible.

      This willingness to discuss ideas and problems was well illustrated by the ‘Sunday Soviets’ who met on Sunday mornings at the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) in Malvern. Originating with discussions between senior RAF officers and Robert Watson-Watt and Jimmy Rowe (the scientists who developed radar), they developed into regular meetings of an informal nature and were attended by senior officers from all three services. Here the operations of a whole command could be discussed, and junior personnel who had a useful contribution to make, whether technical or military, were invited to attend and encouraged to speak.

      It has not been possible to ascertain why they were called Soviets, a word often associated with the Russian Communist regime.

      Tots and Quots

      Professor Solly Zuckerman had established in 1931 a London-based dining club called the Tots and Quots, which included many leading members of the British scientific establishment. Its name was derived from the Latin tag Quot homines, tot sententiae (‘As many opinions as there are men’).

      Zuckerman,Lord Solly OM KBE FRS (1904–93)

      A zoologist and Operational Research pioneer, he was born to Jewish immigrants in South Africa. After studying medicine at the University of Cape Town and later attending Yale University, he went to London in 1926 to complete his studies at University College Hospital Medical School. He began his career at the London Zoological Society in 1928 and worked as a research anatomist until 1932. He taught at the University of Oxford in 1934–45, in which time he was elected FRS. In 1931 he established the Tots and Quots scientific dining society. During the Second World War he undertook various research projects, advised the RAF, and proposed that in the build-up to the Normandy landings the Allied air forces should target the French railway network, in particular its locomotives and locomotive repair facilities.

      In June 1940 a meeting was attended by Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, who was so fascinated by the discussion about what scientists could do to help win the war that he offered to publish the arguments. Eleven days later 25 scientists delivered their manuscripts, and in late July 1940 a 140-page Penguin Special entitled Science in War was published, opening with the stark message, ‘The full use of our scientific resources is essential if we are to win the war. Today they are being half used.’

      Our American Allies

      From the beginning of the war Henry Tizard, the rector of Imperial College and chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Study of Air Defence, had been considering how to cultivate ties with American scientists with the objective of ‘bringing American scientists into the war before their government’. As a result, in February, 1940 Professor Hill went to the USA to discuss with American scientists possible areas of collaboration. Encouraged by the discussions, he and Tizard set about obtaining Cabinet approval for the dispatch of a formal scientific mission to the USA to share the UK’s military and scientific secrets with the Americans.

      The result was that in September 1940, while the Battle of Britain was at its height and well over a year before the Americans entered the war, Tizard himself led a mission to the USA to disclose Britain’s most carefully guarded secrets. These included designs and hardware for anti-submarine detection, explosives, gyro-gunsights, jet propulsion, micro-pump valves, proximity fuses, radar, cavity magnetrons, rockets, and a possible atomic bomb. Of these it was the cavity magnetron which, by increasing by a factor of a thousand the transmitting capabilities of American radar, convinced the Americans that the British were disclosing everything they knew.

      Tizard, Sir Henry FRS (1885–1959)

      He was educated at Westminster and Oxford and, as a physical chemist, was elected a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, in 1911. In the First World War he joined the RFC, where he undertook aerodynamic observations, worked on bombsights,