May 10, 2024 • 42 mins
Neatly dressed in his suit, Hans Ferdinand Mayer was every inch the unassuming corporate executive. So, when he asked to borrow a typewriter from his hotel in Oslo, nobody could have guessed he would use it for one of the most extraordinary intelligence leaks in history.
Mayer's gloved fingers punched out the details of Nazi Germany's most sensitive military operations and, when he had finished, he immediately dispatched his documents to the British — who did nothing.
Why did the British ignore Mayer? Did they fail to pick out a crucial signal amid the noise of detail — or was something else going on?
This episode of Cautionary Tales is based, with permission, on Tom Whipple’s book The Battle of the Beams, which is available from all good booksellers.
For a full list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. November nineteen thirty nine. It's been two months since
Nazi Germany invaded Poland and one month since Poland surrendered.
France and Britain have declared war, but there's not much fighting.
(00:39):
An uneasy quiet has descended over Western Europe, with neither
side keen to take major risks. It's obvious that the
choet won't last, and a German executive named Hans Ferdinand
Meyer has picked a side. Maya is visiting Oslo on
(00:59):
a business trip. He doesn't look much, a neat middle
aged fellow in a suit who works in some sort
of corporate research lab back in Germany. Nobody bats an
eyelid when he descends from his room to the lobby
of Oslo's elegant Hotel Bristol and asks the head porter.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Would it be possible please to borrow a typewriter.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Maya takes the typewriter back upstairs to his room. He
closes and carefully locks the door, pulls on a pair
of gloves to obscure his fingerprints. What He's about to
do is dangerous, very dangerous. If the Gestapo ever find
out he's a dead man, then Maya's gloved fingers begin
(01:48):
to type perhaps the most spectacular intelligence leak in history.
In a terse but wide ranging pair of reports, he
describes Nazi Germany's most sensitive military technologies, their bomber production,
the aircraft carrier being built in Keel Harbor, the remote
(02:11):
controlled gliders fitted with large explosive charges. Maya deftly outlines
the Nazi autopilot system, which is under development and which
will allow them to take down barrage balloon defenses using
unmanned planes. He keeps typing, describing the ballistic missiles that
(02:33):
the German Army are developing and the name of the
research center. He provides the location just north of Berlin
of the R and D laboratories of the German Air Force,
the Luftwaffer, and suggests that.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
It would be a rewarding target.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
How did Mayer learn all this? Some of its gossip,
some of it's wrong, but much of what he writes
is specific, technically rigorous and ab solutely accurate. And this
he knows because he's the director of the Seamen's research
laboratory in Berlin, and the scientists working for him have
(03:19):
increasingly been producing cutting edge electronics for military purposes. Shortly
after Maya borrows the typewriter. He arranges to have his
two letters delivered to Oslo's British embassy for the embassy staff.
They're mysterious, sensational baffling. It seems to be some of
(03:43):
Nazi Germany's most closely guarded secrets, signed only with the
curious name Martin who sent them? Can they be believed?
Maya must be convinced that some deep evil lurks at
the heart of the Nazi regime because he's willing to
risk his life to warn the British about what the
(04:07):
Nazi military is capable of. But will the British listen?
I'm Tim Harford and this is cautionary tales. Ostriches do not,
(04:44):
in fact bury their heads in the sand when trouble
is approaching, but sometimes people do. That's what this cautionary
tale is all about. Why do we manage to ignore
the obvious?
Speaker 3 (04:59):
It should have.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Been clear that Hans Ferdinand Meyer's letters, which became known
as the Oslo Report, were worth taking seriously. Yes, this
mysterious Martil fellow might have been a crank, or the
letters could have been fakes, a double bluff planted by
the Nazis. To deceive the British about their real capabilities,
(05:22):
But the Oslo report included several paragraphs that could hardly
be a Nazi bluff. They gave a detailed and authoritative
description of German radio wave technology. At the time, the
British tended to be rather sniffy about German engineering. Yes,
the Germans could do things cheaply, but they were hardly
(05:45):
at the cutting edge. Meyer's report suggested otherwise. He explained
that the Luftwruffer was developing guidance systems using radio beams
to help bombers drop their deadly payload at exactly the
right spot, the equivalent of satellite navigation. Before satellites existed,
(06:07):
Germany would be able to bomb British targets even at night.
Meyer also described Germany's defensive radar technology, short wave radio transmitters,
which bounced signals off incoming aircraft and used the reflections
as an early warning system. If the British sent bombers
(06:30):
over Germany, the radar stations would see them coming and
Germany's fighter groups would have easy pickings. He gave the
details the wavelengths being used, even the mathematical formulas involved.
This couldn't be a bluff. At the very least, it
proved that someone in Germany knew all about radar, which
(06:53):
the British had assumed was their closely guarded secret. Radar
technology would be pivotal in the Second World War, as
vividly described in Tom Whipple's book The Battle of the Beams,
and Hans Ferdinand Meyer's brave decision to expose the secrets
(07:15):
of German radar could be pivotal too, if the British
took it seriously. If in the early nineteen thirties a
senior British politician stood up in Parliament to explain the
(07:38):
likely course of a future war.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
It is well also for the man in the street
to realize that there is no power on earth that
can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him,
the bomber will always get through.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
That seemed all too true at the time. There was
no defense against the new bombers that were being developed.
They flew too high to be easily intercepted, and would
attack without warning. In nineteen thirty seven, the Luftwaffir seemed
to prove the point by laying waste to the Spanish
(08:15):
market town of Gernica with one of the first major
bombings of a civilian population. But when Gernica was attacked,
the British had already been working on a secret defense
for a couple of years, and by nineteen thirty nine
that defense was fully prepared. An invisible network of radar
(08:36):
stations blanketed the country in places with reliable electricity supplies,
good visibility out over the sea, and that would not
gravely interfere with grouse shooting. This was Britain, after all.
If the grouse shooting was disrupted, then the Nazis had
already won. These radar stations would send out pulses of
(09:01):
invisible light radio waves and detect the reflection of those
pulses from incoming objects. The Royal Air Force would get
advanced notice of approaching bombers and could send fighters up
to intercept them. Guided by radar, the outnumbered fighters of
the Royal Air Force could be mustered and focused where
(09:23):
they were most needed. The heroic few could stand up
to the mighty looftbuffer. So when Hans Ferdinand Meyer was
typing his secret Oslo report early in November nineteen thirty nine,
radar was old news to the British What was new
(09:47):
and should have been a dramatic revelation, was the fact
that the Germans had radar too. Meyer's brave act of
espionage could save many British lives if they paid attention
to the Oslo report. If not, they'd have to find
out about German radar the hard way. On December the eighteenth,
(10:14):
nineteen thirty nine, a few weeks after Meyer had typed
his report, it was a cold, bright day over the
northwest coast of Germany and the naval base of Wilhelmshaven.
To the Royal Air Force, it was a lovely day
for the precision bombing of the German fleet. Not a
(10:34):
bomb would be wasted, not a civilian would be harmed.
The conditions were ideal that all assumed the bombers would
attack without warning if the defenders knew they were coming. However,
the clear conditions would be a double edged sword.
Speaker 5 (10:53):
Splendid weather for fighters.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
A Pine's a luftwaffer fighter commander. He's not really expecting
a British attack, merely hoping for one. His assistant shakes
his head regretfully.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
The Tommies are not such fools. They won't come today.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
On the tiny German island of hellegeraland less than half
a square mile in size, electronic eyes have been installed.
German radar there and elsewhere will give plenty of warning
of any incoming bombers. But the British, despite Maya's warning,
(11:34):
are convinced that only they and not the Germans, have
cracked the secrets of radar. The pilots of the twenty
two bombers heading towards Wilhelmshaven have every reason to believe
they will catch the defenders completely unawares. When the radar
operators on Hellegaland notify their superiors of the incoming bombers,
(11:58):
they're met with disbelief.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
You are plotting seagulls.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
With the winter sun low in the southern sky, the
defensive LUFTWAFFEFI would have plenty of cover for their counter attack.
Could the British really be so foolish as to try
something they would? The images on the radar scope aren't seagulls,
(12:23):
their twenty two sitting ducks. Were the German fighters given
so much warning by the radar system, the incoming British
bombers don't stand a chance. More than half of them
are shot down as the rest flee to safety. Having
barely made attempt in Germany's fleet, the utter route of
(12:47):
the bomber force did prompt to rethink in future the
Royal Air Force would attack at night. Of course, radar
also works perfectly well at night, but the idea that
the Germans had radar had yet to penetrate the skulls
of the British elite. Cautionary tales will be back after
(13:09):
the break, and just a warning there will be a
brief mention of suicide. Two years earlier, in nineteen thirty seven,
(13:35):
relations between the German Luffaffer and the British Royal Air
Force had been cautious, at cordial. Officers from each side
would visit the other, chatting diplomatically about the friendship between
the two great nations. One visiting German officer took a
surprisingly frank line of questioning.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
How are you getting on with your experiments in the
detection by radio of aircraft approaching your shores?
Speaker 1 (14:03):
He asked his astonished hosts.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
He added, cheerfully, we have known for some time that
you were developing a system of radio detections, and so
are we, and we think we are ahead of you.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
The British didn't need Meyer to warn them about German radar.
A Loftbraffer officer had done the same two years before
war broke out. Somehow the lesson didn't stick. So why
do we sometimes deny the obvious? One answer is that
maybe what seems obvious with hindsight wasn't obvious at the time.
(14:41):
The Oslo report, coupled with the indiscreet visiting officer, should
have been evidence enough. But that's easy to say. With hindsight.
There would have been dozens of informants, hundreds of reports,
countless rumors. Different people in the British military will have
heard different things, and not every piece of information would
(15:02):
have reached the right person. Some reports will have been
dismissed as junk, Some will have been too sensitive to
share widely. A conversation with a visiting German and an
officer's mess in nineteen thirty seven might have been reported somewhere,
filed and forgotten, or not reported at all. We have
(15:24):
amidst all the noise, it can be difficult to pick
out the signal we are. In their book Predictable Surprises,
Max Beseman and Michael Watkins call this an integration failure.
An organization may have all the information it needs, but
(15:44):
sifting out what really matters and assembling those disparate clues
into the true picture can be a near impossible task.
The British weren't the only ones to suffer integration failures.
The Germans, for example, regarded their radar system as the
mother of all secrets, yet they also published publicity folksographs
(16:09):
showing radar aerials clearly visible. This was because the radar
system was so secret that the German censors weren't told
that it was a secret, Nor were the Americans immune.
In fact, the most famous intelligence failure of the war
was arguably an integration failure. The Japanese attack on Pearl
(16:33):
Harbor came as a complete surprise to the US forces.
There shouldn't the Americans have seen the Japanese coming. The
clues were there. Several American and British strategists had warned
that Pearl Harbour would be a tempting target for a
Japanese attack. US Japanese relations were extremely tense, and war
(16:55):
seemed a distinct threat. An American codebreaker, Genevieve Grojan, had
cracked a Japanese diplomatic code six weeks before the attack,
she exposed a message between the Tokyo government and the
Japanese embassy in Washington, noting there is more reason than
ever before for us to arm ourselves to the teeth
(17:19):
for all out war. Just a week before the attack,
another message was deciphered. The Japanese ambassador in Berlin was
instructed by Tokyo to warn Adolf Hitler that war may
suddenly break out between the Anglo Saxon nations and Japan.
(17:39):
This war may come quicker than anyone dreams. With hindsight,
this all seems very obvious, so obvious, in fact, that
some people believe in a conspiracy theory that the US
or the UK deliberately ignored the warnings in the hope
that Japan would attack and American voters would support the
(18:01):
US entering the war. The truth is more prosaic. There
were lots of hints of trouble, but lots of noise
and false alarms too. Different decision makers had different clues,
and these clues didn't reach the right people at the
right time. In her influential book about Pearl Harbor, the
(18:23):
historian ROBERTA. Wohlstetter wrote, it is only to be expected
that the relevant signals so clearly audible after an event,
will be partially obscured before the event by surrounding noise.
Perhaps the British failed to understand that the Germans had
radar because they were simply suffering an integration failure. If so,
(18:49):
they were about to get another very clear signal amidst
the noise. In December nineteen thirty nine, the same month
as the disastrous raid on Wilhelmshaven and six weeks after
Hans Ferdinand Meyer's letters, another German named Hans would present
the British with another opportunity to learn what they faced.
(19:13):
This fellow is Hans Langsdorf, captain of the Graf Spey,
a mighty German battleship. The graf Spey had been prowling
around the South Atlantic, sinking merchant ships after first allowing
their civilian cruise to disembark. Captain Langsdorf regarded naval warfare
(19:34):
as a matter of honor. After all, Still, he was
avoiding a real fight, since German naval doctrine at the
time was to attack only civilian ships, causing maximum trouble
for minimum risk. Captain Langsdorf and the Graf Spey were
causing a lot of damage to the Allied war effort,
(19:55):
and the Royal Navy resolved to hunt them down near
the huge River Plate estuary where Argentina, Uruguay and the
Atlantic Ocean meet. Just after dawn on the thirteenth of December,
three British cruisers spotted the Graf Spay's smoking funnel on
the horizon and gave chase. That was a brave move,
(20:20):
even with three against one. The Graf Spey was a larger,
better armed and armored ship, a formidable opponent. Graf Spey
concentrated its fire on one ship, the Exeter, and within
minutes Exeter had lost the torpedo crews, communication systems, an
entire gun turret, with most of the men on the bridge.
(20:41):
Exeter's captain was lucky to survive, wounded in both legs
and both eyes. The British pulled back to assess the situation.
Graf Spey had been hit more than twenty times that
the damage seemed superficial. The British didn't know that they'd
been lucky. One of Exeter's shells had shattered Graf Spey's
(21:05):
fuel filtering plant. The German battleship would run out of
fuel within hours. Graft Spey dashed towards Montevideo, the nearest port,
which was in neutral Uruguay. Once there, Captain Langsdorf frantically
tried to repair his battleship while the British scrambled to
(21:27):
assemble reinforcements. Langsdorf was alarmed when he was informed that
a British communication had just been intercepted. The British ambassador
to Uruguay had ordered fuel in order to supply the
new British battleships that were arriving. Langsdorf's crew were starting
to panic. One officer was convinced that, gazing out from Montevideo,
(21:53):
he had seen lurking on the horizon not only a
British battleship, but an aircraft carrier and three destroyers. What
none of them knew was that the ambassador's fuel order
was a bluff. Knowing his communications would be intercepted, he
had paid for fuel for ships that didn't exist. Langsdorf
(22:18):
felfret and bowed to what seemed inevitable. He limped the
graft spay out to the river Plate estuary planted explosives
on her hull. And sent her to the bottom of
the sea. Sadly, for Captain Langsdorf, the bottom of the
(22:38):
sea was only twelve yards down. Most of the ship
remained above the surface, and photographs of the burning wreck
went around the world, gleefully exploited by the British for
propaganda purposes. For Captain Langsdorf, an honorable man, it was
a final humiliation. From a hotel room in nearby Buenos Aidre's,
(23:04):
he wrote a letter to his wife and another to
his parents. The third letter was addressed to the German government.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
For a captain with a sense of honor, it goes
without saying that his personal fate cannot be separated from
that of his ship.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
He explained, having written the three letters, he spread the
Graf Spey's ensign flag out on the floor, lay on
top of it, and shot himself out across the river
plate estuary. The smoke from the Graf Spey began to clear.
(23:46):
As it did, a sharp eyed observer in British intelligence
noticed something curious in the latest photographs. What was that
mysterious network of criss crossing wires on Graf Spay's forward tower.
It was now January nineteen forty let me introduce you
(24:08):
to a British radar scientist named Labouchere Hilliard Bainbridge Bell.
I hope you'll forgive me if I just call him
Bainbridge Bell. He thought the array on the graf Spey
looked suspiciously like a radar system. He flew to Uruguay
to find out more. When Bainbridge Bell arrived in Montevideo,
(24:31):
his James Bond style cover story was that he was
a scrap metal dealer. British intelligence had already purchased the
salvage rights, and Bainbridge Bell rode out to graft Spey
to examine his property. Although the ship had already been
picked over by scavengers and gutted by fire, he was
(24:54):
relieved to discover that the radar tower still contained many
clues for radar tower it undoubtedly was. As he stood
on the sloping deck amidst the wreckage, Bainbridge Bell g
around at the fragments of a cathode ray display and
sifted through the gears and the electronics that lay scattered around.
(25:18):
His report back to the British government was unambiguous.
Speaker 5 (25:22):
The writer's personal opinion is that the installation was a
sixty centimeter RDF radar. It seems strange that no one
was curious before January nineteen forty about the aerial on
the control tar.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Strange indeed, but as Tom Whipple explains in the Battle
of the Beams, the lack of curiosity would continue. The
report was filed and then forgotten. Not only had Hans
Ferdinand Meyer warned the British that the Germans had radar,
(25:59):
but Bainbridge Bell had seen the radar with his own eyes.
The official position of the Royal Air Force, however, did
not change Britain, and Britain alone commanded the miracle technology
of radar. Cautionary tales will be back after the break.
(26:31):
By February nineteen forty. It should have been brutally obvious
that the Germans had radar, but the British refused to
believe it. The delay was costly. Just ask the surviving
crew of HMS Delight. This British destroyer ventured out of
a harbor on the south coast of England in the
(26:53):
summer of nineteen forty, and within a few miles was
sunk by German dive pommers. Six sailors died. How unlucky
thought the British, but it wasn't bad luck good German radar.
The same story could be told by the crews of
(27:14):
British bombers in nineteen forty. The British weren't in a
position to bomb the Germans very often, but when they did,
the losses were unexpectedly grievous, how unlucky. If the British
had woken up to the obvious, the true source of
these losses would have been recognized, and some of them
(27:34):
could have been prevented. If you understand that an enemy
has radar, you can start to take precautions, flying decoy
missions or flying informations that overwhelm the radar operators, or
trying to jam the radar electronically or fill the sky
with false signals. Later in the war, both sides became
(27:57):
masters of such tricks, but at the start, the Nazis
were racing to develop countermeasures to British radar, and the
British didn't even know there was a race at all.
So why did it take the British so long? Was
it just an integration failure? Were different parts of the
(28:18):
British military receiving different signals and were they unable to
put them all together and spot the pattern amidst the noise.
I discussed this question with Tom Whipple, the author of
the Battle of the Beams. He pointed out that there
was one British intelligence analyst who didn't have any trouble
at all piecing together the pattern. His name was R. V. Jones.
(28:44):
If you've heard our series on the V two rocket,
R V. Jones was the man who rightly warned Winston
Churchill that Germany was developing the V two ballistic missile
at pain and Munder. Jones was just as sharp on
the question of German radar. He didn't miss much. In
May nineteen forty he informed his colleagues that it was
(29:07):
almost certain that Germany had radar. In July nineteen forty
he wrote another short report summarizing the evidence. A prisoner
of war had admitted that the German Navy had range
finding radar. German planes had been spotted with what seemed
to be radar systems. Eavesdropping on German radio revealed that
(29:29):
pilots were celebrating the use of a code name system
to successfully intercept British planes. And of course, there was
the Oslo Report and the discovery of a fragmentary radar
system on the graft spay. R V Jones declared it.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Is safe to conclude that the Germans have an RDF system.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
They had radar. Jones pulled together much of the relevant evidence,
drew the obvious conclusion in plain language, and circulated his
analysis to Winston Churchill's chief scientific adviser and several other
senior p This wasn't a Pearl Harbor situation. It wasn't
(30:13):
an integration failure. The men who needed to know the
truth were told it, and they refused to believe. Early
in nineteen forty one, a mysterious figure was seen standing
on the south coast of England pointing a mysterious array
(30:37):
of aerials out over the sea towards occupied France. The
locals were alarmed, and this dastardly fellow was soon in
the custody of the police as a suspected German spy.
He was, in fact a frustrated British scientist named Derrick Garrard.
(30:58):
Garrard was waiting to receive permission to join the intelligence
team of the formidable r V Jones, but his security
clearance had been slow to arrive, and Deck Garrard was
in a hurry. There was a war on after all.
He convinced the police to release him and headed straight
back to the coast to set up his equipment. Again.
(31:20):
He was listening for the distinctive pulses of a German
radar system r V. Jones, meanwhile, had been shown a
pair of aerial photographs with a strange anomaly in them,
a blur that suggested a rotating object. Jones already suspected
(31:41):
that the sight in question on the French coast might
contain a radar station. He requested that a spitfire fighter
pilot make the dangerous journey over the sea to get
a close up photograph strange object. The pilot returned and
complained that all he had found was an anti aircraft gun,
(32:01):
a gun which could have killed him. But when the
photographs were examined, they showed not only the gun, but
off in the background at the edge of the image
a radar area. Jones had seen the enemy, and Derek
Garrard had heard it, the very same radar station that
the spitfire pilot had photographed. As Jones was studying that photograph,
(32:26):
Garrard burst in breathless with news that his aeriels on
the south coast had clearly picked up the radar signal.
This might come in Handy Jones was due at a
meeting later that day called by the Royal Air Forces
Head of Radar and Signals. The agenda for the meeting.
(32:47):
Did the Germans have radar? At the beginning of the discussion,
that was still an open question. When r V. Jones
strolled in with Garrard's report of listening to the radar
in one hand and the spitfire pilot's photograph of it
in the other, the question had finally been answered. It
(33:08):
was February nineteen forty one, fifteen months after Hans Ferdinand
Meyer had borrowed a typewriter and risked his life to
warn the British that the Germans had radar.
Speaker 5 (33:29):
R V.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Jones didn't suffer fools gladly, but he was diplomatic enough
not to name the fools. Shortly after the war, he
dryly wrote.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
The evidence and rough performance of German radar had already
been deduced in summer nineteen forty Despite this evidence, there
still remained some expert prejudice against believing that the Germans
had radar.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Prejudice is the right word. Too. Many of the people
who mattered had already made up their minds that the
Germans couldn't have radar. The original sins here were pride
and wishful things. Pride in British ingenuity meant that British
scientists and officers were reluctant to admit that German technology
(34:18):
might be just as good as theirs, and wish for
thinking the hope that the fearsome German war machine had
a weak spot their lack of radar. And because the
British were so determined to disbelieve in German radar, they
found fault with every piece of contrary evidence that crossed
(34:38):
their desks. Those bulges on German planes weren't radar, they
were just bulges. The Oslo report was clearly unreliable, and
Nazi bluff evidence from interrogated prisoners couldn't be trusted. Psychologists
call this biased assimilation of information. Claims that support your
(35:00):
views are seized upon without question. Contrary evidence is dismissed
or explained away. This is a sadly familiar story to
connoisseurs of cautionary tales. We all have fond beliefs and
we're at risk of mental contortions to protect those fond beliefs.
(35:25):
Even as the British started to wander if the Germans
really did have radar, their pride wouldn't let them admit
that the Germans might have figured it out all by themselves.
Winston Churchill asked the Air Ministry to check that no
British radar had been captured during the fall of France.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
I understand there were two or three British radar sets.
Can I be assured they were effectively destroyed before evacuation?
Speaker 1 (35:54):
He was right to ask. The Germans had indeed managed
to seize a British radar while sweeping across Belgium and
France in May and June of nineteen forty. German radar
engineers had taken it apart and examined it closely before
concluding that the British technology was so crude that they
(36:15):
had nothing to learn. After the war, R. V. Jones
tried again and again to figure out who had written
the Oslo Report. In the end, he gave up, assuming
that the anonymous author had been killed in the war,
(36:36):
or perhaps executed as a traitor. Hans Ferdinand Meyer had
been arrested by the Gestapo in nineteen forty three, but
not because of the Oslo Report. His crime was listening
to broadcasts from the BBC. A neighbour's maid overheard him
(36:57):
repeating something critical of the Nazi regime from one of
those broadcasts, and that was Maya's undoing. Maya was sent
to Dakau, a concentration camp, where he was put to
work trying to develop counter intelligence in a radio research laboratory.
(37:17):
He kept his head down as the regime began to
fall apart. At the end of the war, Hans Ferdinand
Meyer simply walked out of a prison camp and into
the safety of a nearby wood. Maya knew that some
people would view him as a hero and others as
a traitor, so he preferred to keep his authorship of
(37:41):
the Oslo Report a closely guarded secret. But through an
extraordinary set of coincidences, R. V. Jones finally learned his
identity and tracked him down. In nineteen fifty five, he
was living in Munich and once again running a research
lab for Siemens. One evening, over quiet conversation in Meyer's
(38:05):
apartment in Munich, Jones asked him why he had done
what he had done. Why had he taken such extraordinary risks?
There's a political answer and a more personal one. The
political answer is simply that Maya was a staunch anti Nazi.
The personal answer is that Maya had a friend in Britain,
(38:29):
another electronics expert named Henry Cobden Turner. When the Nazis
rose to power, Maya and Cobden Turner worked together to
rescue a half Jewish girl named Claudier Martyl Carvik, whose
Jewish mother had been expelled from Germany and whose Nazi
father had disowned her. At Mayer's request, Cobden Turner managed
(38:54):
to get a visa and a British passport for her,
and she was saved, eventually moving to New York and
living a long and happy life in America. Maya and
Cobden Turner became the most loyal of France. Cobden Turner
was godfather to Maya's son. Cobden Turner urged Maya to
(39:15):
leak German secrets to help bring down the Nazis, but
Maya refused. It wouldn't be right, he insisted unless the
countries were actually at war, and once war came, it
was impossible for him to reach Cobden Turner directly, hence
the pretext to visit Oslo, the borrowed typewriter, and the
(39:37):
mysterious letters to the Oslo embassy. Maya always hoped they
might get into Cobden Turner's hands, since he was a
radio expert himself. That was why the letters were simply
signed Martyl, the middle name of the girl they had
saved together. Cobden Turner was the only man alive who
(39:58):
would understand the reference. R V Jones listened to all this,
and then he kept Maya's secret for decades until both
if Mayer and Meyer's wife were dead. The Oslo report,
he said.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Was probably the best single report received from any source
during the war.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
But that quiet evening in Munich did R V. Jones
tell Mayer that the British simply hadn't believed the Oslo
report and that the Royal Air Force was still debating
the existence of German radar more than a year later.
I hope not. Mayer had risked everything to warn the British.
(40:45):
It would have been cruel to tell him that the
British simply hadn't listened. This cautionary tale is based with
(41:08):
permission on Tom Whipple's book The Battle of the Beams.
It's a vivid and surprising history, and there's a lot
more to it than the argument about German radar. Pick
up a copy if you can. For a full list
of our sources, as always, see the show notes at
Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim
(41:36):
Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines with
support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music
is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts.
It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge,
Stella Harford, Jemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also
(41:56):
wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohne, Vital Mollard, John Schnaz, Eric's handler,
Carrie Brody, and Christina Sullivan. Tales is a production of
Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by
Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share,
(42:20):
rate and review, tell your friends, and if you want
to hear the show ad free, sign up for Pushkin
Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts, or at
pushkin dot Fm, slash plus,
Pushkin. November nineteen thirty nine. It's been two months since
Nazi Germany invaded Poland and one month since Poland surrendered.
France and Britain have declared war, but there's not much fighting.
(00:39):
An uneasy quiet has descended over Western Europe, with neither
side keen to take major risks. It's obvious that the
choet won't last, and a German executive named Hans Ferdinand
Meyer has picked a side. Maya is visiting Oslo on
(00:59):
a business trip. He doesn't look much, a neat middle
aged fellow in a suit who works in some sort
of corporate research lab back in Germany. Nobody bats an
eyelid when he descends from his room to the lobby
of Oslo's elegant Hotel Bristol and asks the head porter.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Would it be possible please to borrow a typewriter.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Maya takes the typewriter back upstairs to his room. He
closes and carefully locks the door, pulls on a pair
of gloves to obscure his fingerprints. What He's about to
do is dangerous, very dangerous. If the Gestapo ever find
out he's a dead man, then Maya's gloved fingers begin
(01:48):
to type perhaps the most spectacular intelligence leak in history.
In a terse but wide ranging pair of reports, he
describes Nazi Germany's most sensitive military technologies, their bomber production,
the aircraft carrier being built in Keel Harbor, the remote
(02:11):
controlled gliders fitted with large explosive charges. Maya deftly outlines
the Nazi autopilot system, which is under development and which
will allow them to take down barrage balloon defenses using
unmanned planes. He keeps typing, describing the ballistic missiles that
(02:33):
the German Army are developing and the name of the
research center. He provides the location just north of Berlin
of the R and D laboratories of the German Air Force,
the Luftwaffer, and suggests that.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
It would be a rewarding target.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
How did Mayer learn all this? Some of its gossip,
some of it's wrong, but much of what he writes
is specific, technically rigorous and ab solutely accurate. And this
he knows because he's the director of the Seamen's research
laboratory in Berlin, and the scientists working for him have
(03:19):
increasingly been producing cutting edge electronics for military purposes. Shortly
after Maya borrows the typewriter. He arranges to have his
two letters delivered to Oslo's British embassy for the embassy staff.
They're mysterious, sensational baffling. It seems to be some of
(03:43):
Nazi Germany's most closely guarded secrets, signed only with the
curious name Martin who sent them? Can they be believed?
Maya must be convinced that some deep evil lurks at
the heart of the Nazi regime because he's willing to
risk his life to warn the British about what the
(04:07):
Nazi military is capable of. But will the British listen?
I'm Tim Harford and this is cautionary tales. Ostriches do not,
(04:44):
in fact bury their heads in the sand when trouble
is approaching, but sometimes people do. That's what this cautionary
tale is all about. Why do we manage to ignore
the obvious?
Speaker 3 (04:59):
It should have.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Been clear that Hans Ferdinand Meyer's letters, which became known
as the Oslo Report, were worth taking seriously. Yes, this
mysterious Martil fellow might have been a crank, or the
letters could have been fakes, a double bluff planted by
the Nazis. To deceive the British about their real capabilities,
(05:22):
But the Oslo report included several paragraphs that could hardly
be a Nazi bluff. They gave a detailed and authoritative
description of German radio wave technology. At the time, the
British tended to be rather sniffy about German engineering. Yes,
the Germans could do things cheaply, but they were hardly
(05:45):
at the cutting edge. Meyer's report suggested otherwise. He explained
that the Luftwruffer was developing guidance systems using radio beams
to help bombers drop their deadly payload at exactly the
right spot, the equivalent of satellite navigation. Before satellites existed,
(06:07):
Germany would be able to bomb British targets even at night.
Meyer also described Germany's defensive radar technology, short wave radio transmitters,
which bounced signals off incoming aircraft and used the reflections
as an early warning system. If the British sent bombers
(06:30):
over Germany, the radar stations would see them coming and
Germany's fighter groups would have easy pickings. He gave the
details the wavelengths being used, even the mathematical formulas involved.
This couldn't be a bluff. At the very least, it
proved that someone in Germany knew all about radar, which
(06:53):
the British had assumed was their closely guarded secret. Radar
technology would be pivotal in the Second World War, as
vividly described in Tom Whipple's book The Battle of the Beams,
and Hans Ferdinand Meyer's brave decision to expose the secrets
(07:15):
of German radar could be pivotal too, if the British
took it seriously. If in the early nineteen thirties a
senior British politician stood up in Parliament to explain the
(07:38):
likely course of a future war.
Speaker 4 (07:42):
It is well also for the man in the street
to realize that there is no power on earth that
can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him,
the bomber will always get through.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
That seemed all too true at the time. There was
no defense against the new bombers that were being developed.
They flew too high to be easily intercepted, and would
attack without warning. In nineteen thirty seven, the Luftwaffir seemed
to prove the point by laying waste to the Spanish
(08:15):
market town of Gernica with one of the first major
bombings of a civilian population. But when Gernica was attacked,
the British had already been working on a secret defense
for a couple of years, and by nineteen thirty nine
that defense was fully prepared. An invisible network of radar
(08:36):
stations blanketed the country in places with reliable electricity supplies,
good visibility out over the sea, and that would not
gravely interfere with grouse shooting. This was Britain, after all.
If the grouse shooting was disrupted, then the Nazis had
already won. These radar stations would send out pulses of
(09:01):
invisible light radio waves and detect the reflection of those
pulses from incoming objects. The Royal Air Force would get
advanced notice of approaching bombers and could send fighters up
to intercept them. Guided by radar, the outnumbered fighters of
the Royal Air Force could be mustered and focused where
(09:23):
they were most needed. The heroic few could stand up
to the mighty looftbuffer. So when Hans Ferdinand Meyer was
typing his secret Oslo report early in November nineteen thirty nine,
radar was old news to the British What was new
(09:47):
and should have been a dramatic revelation, was the fact
that the Germans had radar too. Meyer's brave act of
espionage could save many British lives if they paid attention
to the Oslo report. If not, they'd have to find
out about German radar the hard way. On December the eighteenth,
(10:14):
nineteen thirty nine, a few weeks after Meyer had typed
his report, it was a cold, bright day over the
northwest coast of Germany and the naval base of Wilhelmshaven.
To the Royal Air Force, it was a lovely day
for the precision bombing of the German fleet. Not a
(10:34):
bomb would be wasted, not a civilian would be harmed.
The conditions were ideal that all assumed the bombers would
attack without warning if the defenders knew they were coming. However,
the clear conditions would be a double edged sword.
Speaker 5 (10:53):
Splendid weather for fighters.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
A Pine's a luftwaffer fighter commander. He's not really expecting
a British attack, merely hoping for one. His assistant shakes
his head regretfully.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
The Tommies are not such fools. They won't come today.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
On the tiny German island of hellegeraland less than half
a square mile in size, electronic eyes have been installed.
German radar there and elsewhere will give plenty of warning
of any incoming bombers. But the British, despite Maya's warning,
(11:34):
are convinced that only they and not the Germans, have
cracked the secrets of radar. The pilots of the twenty
two bombers heading towards Wilhelmshaven have every reason to believe
they will catch the defenders completely unawares. When the radar
operators on Hellegaland notify their superiors of the incoming bombers,
(11:58):
they're met with disbelief.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
You are plotting seagulls.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
With the winter sun low in the southern sky, the
defensive LUFTWAFFEFI would have plenty of cover for their counter attack.
Could the British really be so foolish as to try
something they would? The images on the radar scope aren't seagulls,
(12:23):
their twenty two sitting ducks. Were the German fighters given
so much warning by the radar system, the incoming British
bombers don't stand a chance. More than half of them
are shot down as the rest flee to safety. Having
barely made attempt in Germany's fleet, the utter route of
(12:47):
the bomber force did prompt to rethink in future the
Royal Air Force would attack at night. Of course, radar
also works perfectly well at night, but the idea that
the Germans had radar had yet to penetrate the skulls
of the British elite. Cautionary tales will be back after
(13:09):
the break, and just a warning there will be a
brief mention of suicide. Two years earlier, in nineteen thirty seven,
(13:35):
relations between the German Luffaffer and the British Royal Air
Force had been cautious, at cordial. Officers from each side
would visit the other, chatting diplomatically about the friendship between
the two great nations. One visiting German officer took a
surprisingly frank line of questioning.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
How are you getting on with your experiments in the
detection by radio of aircraft approaching your shores?
Speaker 1 (14:03):
He asked his astonished hosts.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
He added, cheerfully, we have known for some time that
you were developing a system of radio detections, and so
are we, and we think we are ahead of you.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
The British didn't need Meyer to warn them about German radar.
A Loftbraffer officer had done the same two years before
war broke out. Somehow the lesson didn't stick. So why
do we sometimes deny the obvious? One answer is that
maybe what seems obvious with hindsight wasn't obvious at the time.
(14:41):
The Oslo report, coupled with the indiscreet visiting officer, should
have been evidence enough. But that's easy to say. With hindsight.
There would have been dozens of informants, hundreds of reports,
countless rumors. Different people in the British military will have
heard different things, and not every piece of information would
(15:02):
have reached the right person. Some reports will have been
dismissed as junk, Some will have been too sensitive to
share widely. A conversation with a visiting German and an
officer's mess in nineteen thirty seven might have been reported somewhere,
filed and forgotten, or not reported at all. We have
(15:24):
amidst all the noise, it can be difficult to pick
out the signal we are. In their book Predictable Surprises,
Max Beseman and Michael Watkins call this an integration failure.
An organization may have all the information it needs, but
(15:44):
sifting out what really matters and assembling those disparate clues
into the true picture can be a near impossible task.
The British weren't the only ones to suffer integration failures.
The Germans, for example, regarded their radar system as the
mother of all secrets, yet they also published publicity folksographs
(16:09):
showing radar aerials clearly visible. This was because the radar
system was so secret that the German censors weren't told
that it was a secret, Nor were the Americans immune.
In fact, the most famous intelligence failure of the war
was arguably an integration failure. The Japanese attack on Pearl
(16:33):
Harbor came as a complete surprise to the US forces.
There shouldn't the Americans have seen the Japanese coming. The
clues were there. Several American and British strategists had warned
that Pearl Harbour would be a tempting target for a
Japanese attack. US Japanese relations were extremely tense, and war
(16:55):
seemed a distinct threat. An American codebreaker, Genevieve Grojan, had
cracked a Japanese diplomatic code six weeks before the attack,
she exposed a message between the Tokyo government and the
Japanese embassy in Washington, noting there is more reason than
ever before for us to arm ourselves to the teeth
(17:19):
for all out war. Just a week before the attack,
another message was deciphered. The Japanese ambassador in Berlin was
instructed by Tokyo to warn Adolf Hitler that war may
suddenly break out between the Anglo Saxon nations and Japan.
(17:39):
This war may come quicker than anyone dreams. With hindsight,
this all seems very obvious, so obvious, in fact, that
some people believe in a conspiracy theory that the US
or the UK deliberately ignored the warnings in the hope
that Japan would attack and American voters would support the
(18:01):
US entering the war. The truth is more prosaic. There
were lots of hints of trouble, but lots of noise
and false alarms too. Different decision makers had different clues,
and these clues didn't reach the right people at the
right time. In her influential book about Pearl Harbor, the
(18:23):
historian ROBERTA. Wohlstetter wrote, it is only to be expected
that the relevant signals so clearly audible after an event,
will be partially obscured before the event by surrounding noise.
Perhaps the British failed to understand that the Germans had
radar because they were simply suffering an integration failure. If so,
(18:49):
they were about to get another very clear signal amidst
the noise. In December nineteen thirty nine, the same month
as the disastrous raid on Wilhelmshaven and six weeks after
Hans Ferdinand Meyer's letters, another German named Hans would present
the British with another opportunity to learn what they faced.
(19:13):
This fellow is Hans Langsdorf, captain of the Graf Spey,
a mighty German battleship. The graf Spey had been prowling
around the South Atlantic, sinking merchant ships after first allowing
their civilian cruise to disembark. Captain Langsdorf regarded naval warfare
(19:34):
as a matter of honor. After all, Still, he was
avoiding a real fight, since German naval doctrine at the
time was to attack only civilian ships, causing maximum trouble
for minimum risk. Captain Langsdorf and the Graf Spey were
causing a lot of damage to the Allied war effort,
(19:55):
and the Royal Navy resolved to hunt them down near
the huge River Plate estuary where Argentina, Uruguay and the
Atlantic Ocean meet. Just after dawn on the thirteenth of December,
three British cruisers spotted the Graf Spay's smoking funnel on
the horizon and gave chase. That was a brave move,
(20:20):
even with three against one. The Graf Spey was a larger,
better armed and armored ship, a formidable opponent. Graf Spey
concentrated its fire on one ship, the Exeter, and within
minutes Exeter had lost the torpedo crews, communication systems, an
entire gun turret, with most of the men on the bridge.
(20:41):
Exeter's captain was lucky to survive, wounded in both legs
and both eyes. The British pulled back to assess the situation.
Graf Spey had been hit more than twenty times that
the damage seemed superficial. The British didn't know that they'd
been lucky. One of Exeter's shells had shattered Graf Spey's
(21:05):
fuel filtering plant. The German battleship would run out of
fuel within hours. Graft Spey dashed towards Montevideo, the nearest port,
which was in neutral Uruguay. Once there, Captain Langsdorf frantically
tried to repair his battleship while the British scrambled to
(21:27):
assemble reinforcements. Langsdorf was alarmed when he was informed that
a British communication had just been intercepted. The British ambassador
to Uruguay had ordered fuel in order to supply the
new British battleships that were arriving. Langsdorf's crew were starting
to panic. One officer was convinced that, gazing out from Montevideo,
(21:53):
he had seen lurking on the horizon not only a
British battleship, but an aircraft carrier and three destroyers. What
none of them knew was that the ambassador's fuel order
was a bluff. Knowing his communications would be intercepted, he
had paid for fuel for ships that didn't exist. Langsdorf
(22:18):
felfret and bowed to what seemed inevitable. He limped the
graft spay out to the river Plate estuary planted explosives
on her hull. And sent her to the bottom of
the sea. Sadly, for Captain Langsdorf, the bottom of the
(22:38):
sea was only twelve yards down. Most of the ship
remained above the surface, and photographs of the burning wreck
went around the world, gleefully exploited by the British for
propaganda purposes. For Captain Langsdorf, an honorable man, it was
a final humiliation. From a hotel room in nearby Buenos Aidre's,
(23:04):
he wrote a letter to his wife and another to
his parents. The third letter was addressed to the German government.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
For a captain with a sense of honor, it goes
without saying that his personal fate cannot be separated from
that of his ship.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
He explained, having written the three letters, he spread the
Graf Spey's ensign flag out on the floor, lay on
top of it, and shot himself out across the river
plate estuary. The smoke from the Graf Spey began to clear.
(23:46):
As it did, a sharp eyed observer in British intelligence
noticed something curious in the latest photographs. What was that
mysterious network of criss crossing wires on Graf Spay's forward tower.
It was now January nineteen forty let me introduce you
(24:08):
to a British radar scientist named Labouchere Hilliard Bainbridge Bell.
I hope you'll forgive me if I just call him
Bainbridge Bell. He thought the array on the graf Spey
looked suspiciously like a radar system. He flew to Uruguay
to find out more. When Bainbridge Bell arrived in Montevideo,
(24:31):
his James Bond style cover story was that he was
a scrap metal dealer. British intelligence had already purchased the
salvage rights, and Bainbridge Bell rode out to graft Spey
to examine his property. Although the ship had already been
picked over by scavengers and gutted by fire, he was
(24:54):
relieved to discover that the radar tower still contained many
clues for radar tower it undoubtedly was. As he stood
on the sloping deck amidst the wreckage, Bainbridge Bell g
around at the fragments of a cathode ray display and
sifted through the gears and the electronics that lay scattered around.
(25:18):
His report back to the British government was unambiguous.
Speaker 5 (25:22):
The writer's personal opinion is that the installation was a
sixty centimeter RDF radar. It seems strange that no one
was curious before January nineteen forty about the aerial on
the control tar.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Strange indeed, but as Tom Whipple explains in the Battle
of the Beams, the lack of curiosity would continue. The
report was filed and then forgotten. Not only had Hans
Ferdinand Meyer warned the British that the Germans had radar,
(25:59):
but Bainbridge Bell had seen the radar with his own eyes.
The official position of the Royal Air Force, however, did
not change Britain, and Britain alone commanded the miracle technology
of radar. Cautionary tales will be back after the break.
(26:31):
By February nineteen forty. It should have been brutally obvious
that the Germans had radar, but the British refused to
believe it. The delay was costly. Just ask the surviving
crew of HMS Delight. This British destroyer ventured out of
a harbor on the south coast of England in the
(26:53):
summer of nineteen forty, and within a few miles was
sunk by German dive pommers. Six sailors died. How unlucky
thought the British, but it wasn't bad luck good German radar.
The same story could be told by the crews of
(27:14):
British bombers in nineteen forty. The British weren't in a
position to bomb the Germans very often, but when they did,
the losses were unexpectedly grievous, how unlucky. If the British
had woken up to the obvious, the true source of
these losses would have been recognized, and some of them
(27:34):
could have been prevented. If you understand that an enemy
has radar, you can start to take precautions, flying decoy
missions or flying informations that overwhelm the radar operators, or
trying to jam the radar electronically or fill the sky
with false signals. Later in the war, both sides became
(27:57):
masters of such tricks, but at the start, the Nazis
were racing to develop countermeasures to British radar, and the
British didn't even know there was a race at all.
So why did it take the British so long? Was
it just an integration failure? Were different parts of the
(28:18):
British military receiving different signals and were they unable to
put them all together and spot the pattern amidst the noise.
I discussed this question with Tom Whipple, the author of
the Battle of the Beams. He pointed out that there
was one British intelligence analyst who didn't have any trouble
at all piecing together the pattern. His name was R. V. Jones.
(28:44):
If you've heard our series on the V two rocket,
R V. Jones was the man who rightly warned Winston
Churchill that Germany was developing the V two ballistic missile
at pain and Munder. Jones was just as sharp on
the question of German radar. He didn't miss much. In
May nineteen forty he informed his colleagues that it was
(29:07):
almost certain that Germany had radar. In July nineteen forty
he wrote another short report summarizing the evidence. A prisoner
of war had admitted that the German Navy had range
finding radar. German planes had been spotted with what seemed
to be radar systems. Eavesdropping on German radio revealed that
(29:29):
pilots were celebrating the use of a code name system
to successfully intercept British planes. And of course, there was
the Oslo Report and the discovery of a fragmentary radar
system on the graft spay. R V Jones declared it.
Speaker 2 (29:46):
Is safe to conclude that the Germans have an RDF system.
Speaker 1 (29:52):
They had radar. Jones pulled together much of the relevant evidence,
drew the obvious conclusion in plain language, and circulated his
analysis to Winston Churchill's chief scientific adviser and several other
senior p This wasn't a Pearl Harbor situation. It wasn't
(30:13):
an integration failure. The men who needed to know the
truth were told it, and they refused to believe. Early
in nineteen forty one, a mysterious figure was seen standing
on the south coast of England pointing a mysterious array
(30:37):
of aerials out over the sea towards occupied France. The
locals were alarmed, and this dastardly fellow was soon in
the custody of the police as a suspected German spy.
He was, in fact a frustrated British scientist named Derrick Garrard.
(30:58):
Garrard was waiting to receive permission to join the intelligence
team of the formidable r V Jones, but his security
clearance had been slow to arrive, and Deck Garrard was
in a hurry. There was a war on after all.
He convinced the police to release him and headed straight
back to the coast to set up his equipment. Again.
(31:20):
He was listening for the distinctive pulses of a German
radar system r V. Jones, meanwhile, had been shown a
pair of aerial photographs with a strange anomaly in them,
a blur that suggested a rotating object. Jones already suspected
(31:41):
that the sight in question on the French coast might
contain a radar station. He requested that a spitfire fighter
pilot make the dangerous journey over the sea to get
a close up photograph strange object. The pilot returned and
complained that all he had found was an anti aircraft gun,
(32:01):
a gun which could have killed him. But when the
photographs were examined, they showed not only the gun, but
off in the background at the edge of the image
a radar area. Jones had seen the enemy, and Derek
Garrard had heard it, the very same radar station that
the spitfire pilot had photographed. As Jones was studying that photograph,
(32:26):
Garrard burst in breathless with news that his aeriels on
the south coast had clearly picked up the radar signal.
This might come in Handy Jones was due at a
meeting later that day called by the Royal Air Forces
Head of Radar and Signals. The agenda for the meeting.
(32:47):
Did the Germans have radar? At the beginning of the discussion,
that was still an open question. When r V. Jones
strolled in with Garrard's report of listening to the radar
in one hand and the spitfire pilot's photograph of it
in the other, the question had finally been answered. It
(33:08):
was February nineteen forty one, fifteen months after Hans Ferdinand
Meyer had borrowed a typewriter and risked his life to
warn the British that the Germans had radar.
Speaker 5 (33:29):
R V.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Jones didn't suffer fools gladly, but he was diplomatic enough
not to name the fools. Shortly after the war, he
dryly wrote.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
The evidence and rough performance of German radar had already
been deduced in summer nineteen forty Despite this evidence, there
still remained some expert prejudice against believing that the Germans
had radar.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Prejudice is the right word. Too. Many of the people
who mattered had already made up their minds that the
Germans couldn't have radar. The original sins here were pride
and wishful things. Pride in British ingenuity meant that British
scientists and officers were reluctant to admit that German technology
(34:18):
might be just as good as theirs, and wish for
thinking the hope that the fearsome German war machine had
a weak spot their lack of radar. And because the
British were so determined to disbelieve in German radar, they
found fault with every piece of contrary evidence that crossed
(34:38):
their desks. Those bulges on German planes weren't radar, they
were just bulges. The Oslo report was clearly unreliable, and
Nazi bluff evidence from interrogated prisoners couldn't be trusted. Psychologists
call this biased assimilation of information. Claims that support your
(35:00):
views are seized upon without question. Contrary evidence is dismissed
or explained away. This is a sadly familiar story to
connoisseurs of cautionary tales. We all have fond beliefs and
we're at risk of mental contortions to protect those fond beliefs.
(35:25):
Even as the British started to wander if the Germans
really did have radar, their pride wouldn't let them admit
that the Germans might have figured it out all by themselves.
Winston Churchill asked the Air Ministry to check that no
British radar had been captured during the fall of France.
Speaker 3 (35:45):
I understand there were two or three British radar sets.
Can I be assured they were effectively destroyed before evacuation?
Speaker 1 (35:54):
He was right to ask. The Germans had indeed managed
to seize a British radar while sweeping across Belgium and
France in May and June of nineteen forty. German radar
engineers had taken it apart and examined it closely before
concluding that the British technology was so crude that they
(36:15):
had nothing to learn. After the war, R. V. Jones
tried again and again to figure out who had written
the Oslo Report. In the end, he gave up, assuming
that the anonymous author had been killed in the war,
(36:36):
or perhaps executed as a traitor. Hans Ferdinand Meyer had
been arrested by the Gestapo in nineteen forty three, but
not because of the Oslo Report. His crime was listening
to broadcasts from the BBC. A neighbour's maid overheard him
(36:57):
repeating something critical of the Nazi regime from one of
those broadcasts, and that was Maya's undoing. Maya was sent
to Dakau, a concentration camp, where he was put to
work trying to develop counter intelligence in a radio research laboratory.
(37:17):
He kept his head down as the regime began to
fall apart. At the end of the war, Hans Ferdinand
Meyer simply walked out of a prison camp and into
the safety of a nearby wood. Maya knew that some
people would view him as a hero and others as
a traitor, so he preferred to keep his authorship of
(37:41):
the Oslo Report a closely guarded secret. But through an
extraordinary set of coincidences, R. V. Jones finally learned his
identity and tracked him down. In nineteen fifty five, he
was living in Munich and once again running a research
lab for Siemens. One evening, over quiet conversation in Meyer's
(38:05):
apartment in Munich, Jones asked him why he had done
what he had done. Why had he taken such extraordinary risks?
There's a political answer and a more personal one. The
political answer is simply that Maya was a staunch anti Nazi.
The personal answer is that Maya had a friend in Britain,
(38:29):
another electronics expert named Henry Cobden Turner. When the Nazis
rose to power, Maya and Cobden Turner worked together to
rescue a half Jewish girl named Claudier Martyl Carvik, whose
Jewish mother had been expelled from Germany and whose Nazi
father had disowned her. At Mayer's request, Cobden Turner managed
(38:54):
to get a visa and a British passport for her,
and she was saved, eventually moving to New York and
living a long and happy life in America. Maya and
Cobden Turner became the most loyal of France. Cobden Turner
was godfather to Maya's son. Cobden Turner urged Maya to
(39:15):
leak German secrets to help bring down the Nazis, but
Maya refused. It wouldn't be right, he insisted unless the
countries were actually at war, and once war came, it
was impossible for him to reach Cobden Turner directly, hence
the pretext to visit Oslo, the borrowed typewriter, and the
(39:37):
mysterious letters to the Oslo embassy. Maya always hoped they
might get into Cobden Turner's hands, since he was a
radio expert himself. That was why the letters were simply
signed Martyl, the middle name of the girl they had
saved together. Cobden Turner was the only man alive who
(39:58):
would understand the reference. R V Jones listened to all this,
and then he kept Maya's secret for decades until both
if Mayer and Meyer's wife were dead. The Oslo report,
he said.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
Was probably the best single report received from any source
during the war.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
But that quiet evening in Munich did R V. Jones
tell Mayer that the British simply hadn't believed the Oslo
report and that the Royal Air Force was still debating
the existence of German radar more than a year later.
I hope not. Mayer had risked everything to warn the British.
(40:45):
It would have been cruel to tell him that the
British simply hadn't listened. This cautionary tale is based with
(41:08):
permission on Tom Whipple's book The Battle of the Beams.
It's a vivid and surprising history, and there's a lot
more to it than the argument about German radar. Pick
up a copy if you can. For a full list
of our sources, as always, see the show notes at
Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim
(41:36):
Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines with
support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music
is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts.
It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge,
Stella Harford, Jemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also
(41:56):
wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohne, Vital Mollard, John Schnaz, Eric's handler,
Carrie Brody, and Christina Sullivan. Tales is a production of
Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by
Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share,
(42:20):
rate and review, tell your friends, and if you want
to hear the show ad free, sign up for Pushkin
Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts, or at
pushkin dot Fm, slash plus,
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