Abstract
The development of radar in Europe, particularly in the period 1937–1945, has been strongly influenced by the need for a defence against attacks from bombers, whose destructive capability greatly improved in the 1920s and 1930s, when many nations put in service acoustic detection means. The effectiveness of such “aerophones” or “sound mirrors” was limited due to their inherent limitations, and they were promptly abandoned in favour of the emerging radar technology in the mid-1930’s. The first integrated national air defence system, the British “Chain Home”, was operational since 1939 and greatly contributed to limit German bombing on England and to avoid its planned invasion by sea. This system remained a valuable asset after the war. A similar roadmap was followed by other nations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
On December 17th, 1935 the DC 3 started flying. With such aircraft, the first big airlines could operate, and in 1935/36, in the USA, the first air traffic control systems, initially private and then federal, were born.
- 2.
Gregory Alegi (1963) is a military historian and a journalist. His research interests are centered around the “Air Power”, on which he has published numerous essays.
- 3.
These techniques (and the related systems) are the subject of the modern electronic warfare.
- 4.
Hermann Goering (1893–1946) entered the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische der Deutschen Arbeiter Partei) in 1920. He was designated by Hitler “his successor”. Sentenced to death by hanging at the Nuremberg trials, he committed suicide in prison.
- 5.
During the conflict, through to its conclusion on May 7th, 1945, the Luftwaffe lost about 95,000 aircraft of every type and about 200,000 between officers and soldiers.
- 6.
Those that have not been destroyed are now a tourist attraction, see: http://www.andrewgrantham.co.uk/soundmirrors, http://www.flickr.com/groups/780291@n22/pool.
- 7.
Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt (1892–1973), Scottish, in 1912 obtained a degree in engineering at the University of Dundee, where he was introduced to radiotelegraphy. From 1916 he dealt with meteorology, in particular the location of lightning, obtained with directive antennas. In 1933 he became director of the Radio Department of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) at Taddington. On September 1st, 1936 Watson-Watt was appointed director of the Bawdsey Research Station, the new institute of the Air Ministry, the Ministry which controlled the RAF.
- 8.
Between the beginning of 1940 and June 1943, 826 visually impaired men in Italy overcame the tests of “listeners” and were enrolled for the discovery of air attacks. It was the first time in the Italian history that some blind people actively participated, although without weapons, to war operations with delicate and critical tasks.
- 9.
During the Second World War, the bombers arrived at heights of 7 km and at speeds of up to 450 km/h, almost half of that of sound, making the warning time very short. The bomber moved typically at high altitudes while the sound, when detected, has traveled a long way, from the aircraft on the ground, i.e., on the diagonal of a triangle. In [Sad 06] it is explained that the aerophones were inefficient since the sound of a bomber that moves toward its target by flying at two hundred knots and twenty thousand feet reaches the target after the plane itself!
- 10.
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (November 30th, 1874—January 24th, 1965), a politician, historian and journalist, as prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 has conducted the Great Britain during the war.
- 11.
The Committee—which met for the first time at the end of January 1935—in addition to its president included some remarkable civilians, i.e. professor Hill, professor Blackett (both, Nobel prizes), H.E. Wimperis and finally the physicist A.P. Rowe (1898–1976), director of the Telecommunications Research Establishment (T.R.E.). With typical British pragmatism, the civilian members of the Committee immediately got full access to all the information covered by military secret, including the “top secret” ones.
- 12.
In 1935 this hypothesis was not fully absurd: for a long time there were rumors in the press about the hypothesis of using radio waves as a weapon capable of stopping internal combustion engines or to disable the pilots of hostile vehicles.
- 13.
Albert Percival Rowe (1898–1976) was the Director of the Telecommunications Research Establishment in the period 1938–45. In Great Britain during the second world war he was one of the key personalities in the development of radar, both terrestrial (Chain Home) and airborne (H2S, see Chap. 6). A.P. Rowe wrote the first published book on the history of the radar, [Row 48]. For his non-trivial biography, see http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/rowe-albert-percival-11572.
- 14.
Arthur Neville Chamberlain (March 18th, 1869—November 9th, 1940) by May 1937 was the successor of Stanley Baldwin to the head of the British government. He tried to find a line of dialog with the Germany, in order to avoid the war, but he also started the British rearmament and finally decided for the declaration of war to Germany on September 3rd, 1939, a few days after the invasion of Poland. He resigned in favor of Churchill on May 10th, 1940, after the German invasion of Norway.
- 15.
The Munich conference was held on 29th and 30th September 1938 between the heads of government of United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy for the discussion of German claims on the portion of territory of Czechoslovakia inhabited by the Sudeten Germans (a population of German ethnicity and language) and ended with the agreement leading to the annexation of vast territories of Czechoslovakia by the German state. In reality, only six months later, despite the Munich Pact, Hitler invaded Bohemia and Moravia, including Prague.
- 16.
At the end of the war the fifty stations were kept in operation for a few years. Subsequently, they were generally dismantled and some of the many trestles were recovered for other purposes.
- 17.
In the Battle of England the Germans did not implement what it is today known as Suppression of the Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD), which is carried on in the early hours of attack to the enemy territory, using missiles, often of the anti-radiation, or antiradar (ARM) type and cluster bombs.
- 18.
The rationale for such a higher frequency is that the minimum elevation angle in order to see targets above the sea is proportional to the ratio between the radar operational wavelength and the height of the antenna. The related, well-know phenomenon of lobing was also exploited by German bombers who learned how to fly at low altitudes during their attacks to London.
- 19.
As a matter of fact, they were able to detect and track signals well below the noise level of the receiver. The reason why was never completely clarified; probably the operators implemented a sort of “pattern recognition” with which they could distinguish the useful signal from the noise. This hypothesis is consistent with the fact that in the Chain Home a useful signal reappears at every pulse repetition period (i.e., with a frequency equal to the PRF) and is “integrated” by the persistence of the phosphors on the Braun tube display (and by the brain of the operators).
- 20.
It could be added that from July 1st, 1939 till October 1943, the WAAF group was directed by the Senior Controller Jane Trefusis Forbes , who in 1966, at the age of 67, became the third wife of the 73-year-old Robert Watson-Watt : a curious post-war union between the inventor and the user of the Chain Home!
- 21.
Lee De Forest (1873–1961), scientist, as well as director and producer of movies, invented the triode (initially called Audion), a vacuum tube with three electrodes that allowed for the amplification of weak radio signals, for which he got the US patent No. 879532 in February 1908. De Forest, who never liked Marconi’s word wireless, first introduced the term radio. He carried out the first radio broadcasts, among which that of Tosca in 1910, followed by that of Enrico Caruso , from the Metropolitan Theatre in New York.
- 22.
The other publications in this set, to the best of the author’s knowledge, are only in Italian language: [Tib 39], [Taz 39], [Taz 41]).
- 23.
As already shown, earlier in 1934, at the Naval Research Laboratory in the USA, Robert M. Page implemented and tested some much more advanced pulse radars.
- 24.
This myth is present in many sources, for example, in http://www.radarpages.co.uk/mob/ch/chainhome.htm, a Web site with an ample and detailed description of the Chain Home. The lack of paternity of Watson-Watt is well highlighted by Gregory C. Clark in [Cla 97]) and in http://spitfiresite.com/2010/04/deflating-british-radar-myths-of-world-war-ii.html/6.
The American G.C. Clark did not miss an opportunity to identify an American inventor of radar, i.e. Robert M. Page, who inter alia wrote a remarkable book [Pag 77]. Clark wrote:”…in 1934 Page first developed practical monopulse. If there be an “inventor” and pioneer of radar, it is him.
- 25.
Most operators were the girls of the WAAF as explained above.
- 26.
It is easily understood that the method of target tracking in the early 1940s is, in principle, the same as today. Of course, the introduction of automation has deeply changed the means of processing and transmission of information, as well as the human role.
- 27.
The problem of the Luftwaffe was not so much the loss of the aircraft (that the powerful German war system produced quickly in a large quantity), but, rather, the loss of the crews: the training of pilots, radio (radar) operators, bombing operators etc. required a too long, not compressible time. Therefore a loss of 25 % of the crews each raid was not acceptable.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Galati, G. (2016). Air Defense and the Alleged Father of Radar. In: 100 Years of Radar. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00584-3_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00584-3_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-00583-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-00584-3
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)