It is well documented that at 4.25 a.m. on 13th July 1944 a Junkers JU88G-I aircraft of the Luftwaffe’s 7.INJG 2 Unit made a wheels down landing at RAF Woodbridge, Suffolk. Its unscheduled arrival on the station’s emergency airstrip surprised everyone, not least the Flight Sergeant on duty who, armed only with a flare gun, took the pilot of the JU88, Hans Miickle, and his crew prisoners. The German crew were equally surprised as they thought they were somewhere near Berlin. Somehow they had followed a reciprocal course to the one set and finding themselves hopelessly lost and virtually out of fuel had little choice but to touch down. It transpired that they surrendered themselves and their aircraft to the welcoming arms of the RAF.
It was immediately recognized by the hosts that this was no ordinary JU88 but a nightfighter that was carrying the very latest equipment in radar and radio surveillance. Those in the highest offices of Bomber Command were immediately informed and as the aircraft was flown post-haste to the RAE at Farnborough the best minds in the land with knowledge of the technologies of electronic espionage were summoned.
Calling the shots was Reginald Victor Jones, a brilliant Oxford graduate who had come to the attention of Winston Churchill when he identified the use of navigational beams by German bombers in 1940. He had compiled a map of German radar assets in preparation for the Allied invasion of Normandy that pinpointed the location of radar transmitters to within a quarter of a degree and led the scientific assessment of offensive and counter-measure technologies within the Intelligence section of the Air Ministry. He was instrumental in the deployment of window and instigated a series of scientific and technical initiatives in what has been called ‘the secret war’.
Hurrying from TRE (Telecommunications and Research Establishment) head quarters at Malvern to join him were two other outstanding talents in the field of radar countermeasures and all things electronic. Martin Ryle, who was later to become Sir Martin Ryle, Nobel Laureate and Astronomer Royal cut his teeth as a researcher on wartime electronic countermeasures whilst his companion, Derek Ainslie Jackson, was an equally talented Cambridge graduate whose early research work in spectroscopy at the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University established him as a precocious talent. At the outbreak of war Jackson, working for the Admiralty, was headhunted by Churchill and whilst he steered his way through his time in the RAF to become a Wing Commander the major role he was cut out for was that of research scientist in the field of RCM, especially in the development of window. As early as 1942 he had been made chief airborne radar officer of Fighter Command.
With Air Marshall Sir Arthur Harris and the Prime Minister aware of this stroke of good fortune there was pressure for the earliest possible revelations as to what benefits were to be realized from the fortuitous ‘drop-in’. It was nevertheless still surprising by any standards to note that a complete evaluation of the JU88 was produced as a written paper within 72 hours and published on the 16th July 1944. It was published as document No8/151, Serial No 242 of Air Intelligence (2g) and signed by Squadron Leader H.F. King, the Director of Intelligence.
In the short term the boffins had done their jobs with speed and efficiency. There were two most important new findings that when applied to Allied operations would prove to save countless lives. Firstly, the Germans had developed an Airborne Interception apparatus called the Lichtenstein FuG 220 (Model SN-2) that, operating at a frequency of 90 Mc/s, was not jammed by window. Secondly, the aircraft carried an installation designated the FuG 227 Flensburg that was able to home in on radar devices like ‘Monica’ that were carried by all aircraft of Bomber Command. These two devices were key in enabling German nightfighters to track the paths of bomber streams and target them on approach to and withdrawal from their operational objectives.
Immediately, Jackson initiated a series of test flights at Farnborough to evaluate the accuracy of the supposed findings. His first action was to try the Flensburg against the Monica and the results were shattering. The results demonstrated that the integrity of Monica had been totally compromised as the bearings of RAF bomber streams were clearly apparent to German aircraft using it from a range of 45 miles and possibly as much as 130 miles. Frustratingly, Bomber Command was unconvinced. Jackson then substantiated his evaluation by using the Flensburg ‘homer’ against a small number of Lancasters with the same results. Bomber Command remained unconvinced.
Enter 192 Squadron in the form of the crew of Flt/Lt George Russell Dixon and Special Duties operator Cooper accompanied by a complement of ground crew to support the Wellington aircraft that accompanied them. In the Squadron diary and ORBs there is no clear written account of why these men were sent on 31st July to the scene of such a top secret operation but it is apparent that:
• They stayed at RAF Ford in West Sussex where 100 Group’s recently annexed 23 Squadron had taken up residence on 1st June 1944.
• They ‘commuted’ to Farnborough to take part in two operations over the south of England to assist in the evaluation of counter measures against the new technologies discovered on the JU88.
• Those counter measures probably did not relate to the SN2 as a solution in the form of a new type of effective window was realised as early as 23rd July.
• Those counter measures probably related to the ongoing investigation into substantiating the effectiveness of the Flensburg in homing on to tail warning sets like Monica - something that Bomber Command was unwilling to accept.
It is not unlikely that the two operations flown by Dixon’s crew may have entailed 192’s Wellington with Monica attached acting as a foil to the JU88 in the process of ongoing evaluation. Whatever the case, when Dixon’s crew and support arrived back at Foulsham on 4th August Bomber Command was still not accepting Jackson’s findings.
It was not until the end of August that Harris ordered that Monica be switched off or removed from all RAF Bomber Command aircraft. Jackson finally and unequivocally showed that Monica indicated to German nightfighters the exact positions and pathways of bombers by a demonstration involving over 70 Lancasters orbiting a route between Gloucester and Cambridge. Flensburg was able to pinpoint individual aircraft with alarming ease and worse than that it had been doing so since the end of 1943. Jackson did not pilot the JU88 on this final evaluation but was on board as the navigator and therefore observed events at first hand.
It was not the first time that Jackson had flown a Junkers aircraft of the so-called Rafwaffe over England but the aircraft in question was a large developmental step beyond anything he had accessed previously. Extraordinarily, there are accounts that Ryle and Jackson were not the first at Farnborough to get their hands on the captured JU88 as before they so much as set eyes on it the aircraft had found its way on the morning of 14th July to the Central Fighter Establishment’s tactics branch at Tangmere where it was put through a series of partial rolls, tight turns, dives, climbs and wingovers in order to assess its flight characteristics.
The executor of these maneuvers was one Wing Commander Roland Beaumont who as he came to completing his assessment of the JU88’s handling saw the opportunity to ‘dive upon’ an approaching Mosquito. What the pilot of that aircraft must have thought is anyone’s guess but it transcended that he evaded the JU88 with a tight turn and there followed a circling dog fight in which the Mosquito turned the tables as Beaumont’s lack of familiarity with the JU88 showed. This turned out to be no embarrassment as the pilot of the Mosquito was Squadron Leader Bob Braham, a celebrity in the art of flying twin engine aircraft.
But, one is left to ponder, what kind of disaster would it have been if such dueling had led to the loss of the JU88? On the other hand there are conflicting accounts that state this assessment of flying characteristics did not occur until after the evaluation of the JU88’s electronics. Hopefully good sense had prevailed but it is not a matter of conjecture to say that Bomber Command was painfully slow in taking on board Jackson’s full findings and laying silent German radar screens.
In retrospect it became obvious why Bomber Command suffered such dreadful losses in the early months of the year in its actions over Berlin and Nuremberg, for example. Germany had had the technology to see them coming and going but with the capture of this single aircraft the balance had tipped in favour of the Allied forces in what Ryle described as ‘a mistake of the greatest importance to Bomber Command.’ Whether the crew and company of the 192 Wellington had any idea of how important a part they played in advancing the changing fortunes of the RAF over the Luftwaffe in their war of the waves or the high calibre of military office and scientific intellect they had rubbed shoulders with for those few days in August 1944 is unknown.
The German military machine certainly appreciated its significance and was thrown into despair when suddenly in early September their radar screens went blank!
The Wellington crew and ground support of 192 Squadron who took part in the testing of the capabilities of the JU88 are listed in the Rees & Rees text, Espionage in the Ether, as having been Fl/Lt G. R. Dixon (pilot), F/Sgt J. McCutcheon (Navigator), Sgt H. Boyd (Wireless Operator), F/O F. J. Young (Front Gunner), F/Sgt J. R. Powell (Rear Gunner), F/O H. B. Cooper (Special Operator), Cpl C. H. Hoddy, L. Edwards (LAC), C. Hayward (LAC).
John Powell
This article is from the Spring 2009 issue of Confound and Destroy
