THE MAN WHO OUTWITTED THE LUFTWAFFE
On the afternoon of June 12, 1940, Frederick Lindemann, whom British prime minister Winston Churchill had just appointed as his scientific adviser, convened a meeting at the Air Ministry. Lindemann, known to everyone as “the Prof,” extended a last-minute invitation to 28-year-old Reginald V. Jones, the relatively obscure deputy director of intelligence research. The sole topic of the meeting was Germany’s progress in developing and deploying defensive radar systems, research that Britain was already doing with its own secret Chain Home radar stations. As the meeting came to an end, Jones stunned everyone in the room with an alarming piece of intelligence he had learned about only that morning. He now believed, he told the others, that the Germans had made a breakthrough in electronic bomb-aiming that, if successfully implemented, could very well cause Britain to lose the war.
Jones, the son of a London postman, was, from an early age, something of an academic prodigy. By age 22, having earned a doctorate in physics from Oxford University’s Balliol College, he embarked on a civilian career in the Air Ministry that within just a few years had him in the agency’s No. 2 intelligence position, specializing in electronic and radio defenses against air attack.
The advent of commercial broadcast radio in the mid-1920s was as close to magic as anyone could have imagined. It was only three decades removed from Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi’s initial discovery that radio waves could send messages through the ether, which led to his pioneering transatlantic long-distance radio transmission in 1901 (from St. Johns, Newfoundland, to Cliveden, Ireland). Initially, the system could transmit only the dits and dahs of Morse code, but within a few years voice transmission became possible. With that development and a few readily available components, anyone at home with a bit of technical skill could construct a workable radio set and, as Jones would later write, “conjure speech and music out of the air.”
In the mid-1930s, Jones’s research focused on detecting infrared radiation emitted from hot aircraft engines approaching the British Isles. While that intriguing work eventually led to a dead end, it advanced his growing reputation as a young man to watch. Most important, his work had caught the eye of Frederick Lindemann.
Jones first came to Lindemann’s attention in 1931 while the former
