Britain's Shield: Radar and the Defeat of the Luftwaffe

by David Zimmerman

2010 is not only the seventieth anniversary of the legendary Battle of Britain, it is also the seventieth anniversary of another fi nest hour - that of Radar. The bravery and skill of British pilots in the Second World War, and the fighting capability of their aircraft, would have been in vain had they not been part of a highly complex and sophisticated air defence system based on radar. The development of this system in just five years is one of the most remarkable scientific and technological accomplishments of the twentieth century. Despite this, the creation of radar defence has been somewhat overlooked. Many of the studies on radar have focused on the development of the technology, with little attention given to the creation of the much larger system for integrating it into the nation's air defences. Britain's Shield relates the development of radar with the diplomatic and air policy concerns of the period. It shows how a small group of scientists, engineers, airmen and politicians accomplished this technological miracle, and offers a revisionist appraisal of Churchill's role, showing that his influence was, more often than not, counter-productive to the development of effective air defences.

352 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 15, 2001

About the author

David Zimmerman was raised in Atlanta, Georgia and attended Emerson College and the University of Alabama. He spent several years living and working in Brazil and Ethiopia. After winning the Three-Day-Novel Contest, Anvil Press published the resulting novella, Socket. His debut novel, The Sandbox, was published by Soho Press in 2010, and his newest novel, Caring is Creepy, will be released in April of 2012. He now teaches at Iowa State University.

Reviews

[Alistair Edwards · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have been looking for a while for a book about the development of radar. It had occurred to me that it took more than the gallantry of the pilots to win the Battle of Britain and that radar played an important role. I wanted to know more about how it worked and how it was developed. It also had occurred to me that there was more to it than the technology, that radar was part of an information processing system.

This book met some of my expectations. There were some problems with it, though.

I have heard suggestions that currently publishers do very little work. It seems to me that they do not employ proof-readers (or editors?). It would seem that they did not in this case.

I read the Kindle edition. I suspect that these are often scanned from the print copy and errors can be introduced, as I think they did in this case. Also the author is American, but was unsure what spellings he should use. Specifically 'program' and 'programme' were interspersed.

There were also a number of typos and other errors. While reading this book I found that the Kindle has the facility to report errors in the book and I am afraid that I used it quite a lot for this book. I wonder whether there will be any corrections?

The story is interesting. Already in World War I the Germans had mounted bombing raids on England - by Zeppelin but also some aeroplanes, so it was evident that this would be an important aspect of any future war with them and defences would have to be mounted. Some thought that defence was impossible, that the bombers would always get through, and hence the only 'defence' would be retaliatory bombing. Others looked to technology. This included radar (or RDF as it was initially known - Radio Direction Finding), but also several other, quite odd technologies. Ways of hearing aircraft were seriously tried, with the building of some large acoustic amplifiers. Another idea was the sowing of some kinds of aerial minefields - nets of bombs which could somehow be suspended in mid-air (balloons or parachutes) for the bombers to fly into.

Eventually, though, it was radar which proved to be practical. Ensuring that and overcoming the alternatives was largely a political matter, and so it is that quite a lot of the book is about the politics. I suppose this was necessary, but it was also a bit boring.

I was interested in the technology and that was described, but not always in a manner that I found easy to understand. Perhaps some diagrams would have helped? A specific problem I had was in the plethora of acronyms. A glossary would have been helpful, but hyperlinks are often hard to use on my Kindle. (It would rather turn the page than go to the link.)

I was right that the whole information system was important. (Although again I could not always follow the details: 'filtering' at different levels?) Evidently this was the origin of the discipline of Operational Research (OR).

Secrecy was also a vital aspect. It seems that the Germans were ignorant of the technology. Clearly they could not miss the presence of large radio masts all around the coastline and they did bomb some of them, but clearly they did not realize what could gained if they had bombed more of them. (One of the motivations for using the term RDF was that it did not give much of a clue as to what the technology really was.)

It seems that early radars were quite crude and inaccurate, but also that without them the Battle of Britain would probably have been lost - and then what about the war?

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mostly a very good book on the history of the British development of radar (RDF). Does a decent job of covering everything from the politics to the technical without getting too bogged down in any one detail.