Comment by kreelman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kreelman | Hacker News Reader

This is such a fascinating piece of history.

I've always been very interested in the developments that occurred in WW2. I think The "Battle of the Beams" is one development that gave us the basis for what we use so much now in general aviation.

The BBC series "The Secret War" is a fantastic series that pulls apart how these discoveries were made. It has a lovely 1970s vibe to it and is very well narrated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkCW4g8It_A&list=PLV7OedKrXD...

Interesting to realise that the cavity magnetron, providing higher resolution radar, was invented by the British and gifted to the United States. I believe the Germans researched it, but decided it was impossible. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this though.

If you watch "Greyhound", the tools that sunk the U-boats were British inventions, hedgehog and ASDIC. HuffDuff (High Frequency Direction Finding) is mentioned I think in the movie? It was made by a Polish engineer working for the British. Amazing that the Kriegsmarine didn't work out that their mandatory reporting schedule was sinking their U boats. With such a collection of defenses combined with doctrine changes for attacking U boat swarms, no wonder the U-Boat losses became so huge.

WW2 changed the world and brought us forward so much in terms of technology. Fascinating stuff.

It's a great place to explore the physics of it all, since the tools used were sometimes elementary (X-Ray machines to baffle direction beams).

Reginald Jones changed the world. Thanks hi_hi for the links.

The BBC "Secret War" series and RV Jones' books are superb. I would recommend also reading his "Reflections on Intelligence" - it was written later and is slightly more philosophical. By that time Jones had been burned by bureaucrats - he compares his small efficient wartime office to the post-war bloat.

The BBC series is really good. They don't make documentaries like that anymore. The "Still Secret" episode on Enigma is easily the best coverage of how the system worked, was cracked and the organisation behind it. There is also an accompanying book, which has many more details.

>I think The "Battle of the Beams" is one development that gave us the basis for what we use so much now in general aviation.

Actually it started the other way around. The beams were based on pre-war blind landing Lorentz system.

Ah, thanks. As I think about it, you're right. There was a Lorentz landing system in bombers that was far too accurate for just landing. Intelligence gathering extracted that from the crew's conversations. That was how they hid their direction finding... But the system already existed.

I think I got confused with radar, but radar isn't beams as such.

It is amazing how war accelerates technology development. Radar and the Manhattan project are cases in point, probably squashing 20 years of normal research into 3. Drones in Ukraine are a contemporary example.

However, when the war is over, things stagnate: The UK bombed the Falklands in 1982 with a radar which was essentially an upgraded wartime H2S/H2X set.

My thanks to you @kreelman.

I have not seen these documentaries before. Indeed I had not seen video footage of RV Jones before. As a lifelong hero of mine, I’m looking forward to watching these in their entirety.

I’m currently in the process of reading Churchills autobiographies. While quite heavy, he writes with such clarity and knowledge. It’s a great account of how WW2 came about, and articulates how easily it could have been avoided if only a few people in positions of power had made different choices.

How different our world and technology could be if not for those terrible circumstances of war.

Glad you'll get to watch them.

RV Jones was pretty incredible. From the interviews you get a bit of a picture of his initial attempts at getting his points across. He was persistent and knowledgeable.

Indeed, it's a shame that war brought us so many advances...

Somebody, either Buderi or Rhodes has the magnetron appearing in the MIT Radar labs and somebody saying "oh, thats obvious" and being asked "ok smartass, how does it work then..."

Sometimes, simple things are obvious in hindsight.

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