The Dark Arts

CCXC

Chain Home

Ironically, it would be a German discovery that would ultimately cost Germany a victory in World War II. Late in the 19^th Century, a Sanskrit-speaking physicist from Hamburg would discover that electromagnetic waves, long postulated but little understood, really did exist and could be used to transmit messages. His name was Heinrich Rudolf Hertz.

Heinrich Hertz (1857 – 1894) only lived 36 years but his discoveries are the basis of all modern methods of communication

Hertz discovered that electromagnetic forces are the basis of the light we see and the sounds we hear. He grasped, early on, that electromagnetic waves could be manipulated to produce certain desired results. 

Hertz realized that by applying high voltage to the opposing ends of this dipole resonator he could create a spark in the small gap in the center. The sparking created radio waves in the wires which could be modulated or amplified to carry messages across open space. This device operated at 50 Megahertz (MHz), the frequency of a modern television

When we speak of “frequencies” we are talking about the number of waves (peaks and troughs) that pass a given point in a given amount of time. Low frequency signals have fewer peaks and troughs per unit of time; higher frequency signals have more. The peaks and troughs together are now called “Hertz” after their discoverer. Frequencies are described by their number of Hertz, and can be measured in individual units of thousands (Kilo) or millions (Mega) or more of Hertz. Different frequencies can be used to carry different messages. For example, with a common radio receiver 1610 Kilohertz (KHz) is at the top end of the amplitude modulation (AM) scale; 88 Megahertz (MHz) is at the bottom of the Frequency Modulation (FM) scale

Hertz discovered not only that electromagnetic waves could be used to transmit data, but that they could be bounced off of a physical structure or blocked entirely. This combination of bounce and block could be used to discover such important information as the shape of the physical structure, its distance, and whether or not the structure was in motion. 

Had Hertz lived, it’s quite likely that Germany would have had radar and air-to-ground radio communications between fliers and airfields during the First World War. But he predeceased that war by two decades, and the men who followed his work lacked his incisive brilliance. Thus, the development of radio and radar was far slower than it might have otherwise been.

Radios come in all shapes and sizes but fundamentally they are all the same. An electrically-charged coil captures passing electromagnetic waves and converts them to sounds (or pictures, since TVs are nothing but radios with a screen). By messing with the knobs a user can tune in to a particular frequency and hear or see what’s “on” that series of waves. The word “radio” dates back only to 1904 and comes from the word “ray”. Prior to 1904, the technology was called “wireless”

RADAR (Radio Detection And Ranging) was the name American technologists gave to that radio system designed to bounce waves off of distant objects. The recaptured wave, with its odd deformities, was displayed on an oscilloscope; from the shape of the wave RADAR operators could determine various qualities of the object. SONAR (Sound Navigation Ranging) is a similar system used to find submerged objects. The British name was ASDIC (Anti-Submarine Detection and Investigation Communications system)

The Germans were oddly slow to capitalize on Hertz’ discoveries. Instead, it was the British who began working with RADAR (it soon lost its capitalization) during World War I. It was all strictly experimental, highly classified, utterly military, and was treated even by the few who knew about it as some kind of occult secret. The only people in Britain who grasped what radar was (or could be) were the boffins of the “Wireless Experimental Establishment” headed up by the brilliant and mercurial Hugh Dowding.

Dowding knew that radar worked even though almost no one else did, and when he was appointed head of Fighter Command Dowding insisted that the government build a radar net around the island of Great Britain.  And despite the fact that most government Ministers thought of radar the way they thought of witchcraft (or perhaps because of it) Dowding’s plan for a radar net was approved. It was called “Chain Home.” 

Chain Home consisted of a series of radar stations placed along the British coast fronting the European littoral. Each station was made up of four tall transmitting towers and four equally tall receiving towers. The average range of transmission / reception was about 150 miles. For high-flying aircraft it was much longer, and for low-flying aircraft much shorter.

Especially around the Dover Straits Chain Home could observe aircraft movements just after they lifted off from their runways in France, Belgium, and The Netherlands. Each Chain Home station overlapped with the ones alongside it, providing a full coverage radar umbrella over the British coast.

Chain Home (CH) stations peppered the British coasts. When it was discovered that low-flying aircraft could evade CH the RAF established Chain Home Low (CHL). The maximum range of CH was about 250 miles for a plane at high altitude; CHL could pick up a low-altitude inbound within 50 miles

For what it was, Chain Home was actually fairly primitive. It could detect solo aircraft in flight, but if a large grouping were within its range it could not distinguish the position of each individual airplane. It also could not distinguish between British aircraft and foreign aircraft in flight, at least not until the British developed IFF technology. But it worked, and despite the H.G. Wellsian towers that sprouted along Britain’s beaches, it remained, amazingly, secret. 

The Chain Home network was proposed by Dowding in 1937, not long after he became the head of Fighter Command. The system was completed, serendipitously, by the summer of 1939, just before the outbreak of war. 

After a few destructive air raids proved that low-flying Luftwaffe bombers could fly under Chain Home, Dowding sought approval for the supplementary Chain Home Low system. It was put in place immediately, its last stations coming on line in late April 1940, just in time for the Battle of Britain.

IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) consisted of a coded signal beamed from a friendly aircraft to an IFF receiver on the ground much like this one. Identifying friendlies was critical because it saved resources and lowered the risk of the British shooting down their own aircraft; although it sounds absurd, early and zealous anti-aircraft gunners and Home Guardsmen were wont to take potshots at anything with wings, including geese, Heinkels, and Spitfires too

Chain Home had its first real test in 1938, when the new Zeppelin Graf Zeppelin II “accidentally” crossed the English Channel on a baldfaced spying mission. The huge new dirigible was tasked by Goering with taking photographs of the Chain Home towers. It was a stupid mission, and one that underscored the lack of imagination that plagues all authoritarian regimes. 

The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. Put into service in 1964 and retired in 1990, this revolutionary stealth spy plane still holds the record as the highest-flying (85,069 feet) and fastest (2,193 mph) jet aircraft in the world

First of all, having something the size of an ocean liner appear in English skies unannounced was going to set off alarms regardless of anything else; hardly the equivalent of the SR-71 Blackbird, the ponderous, if majestic, lighter-than-air craft might as well have had the flashing signboard of its smaller Goodyear descendants: We Are Spying On You. 

Secondly, the Germans were flummoxed when a mixed flight of Hurricanes and Spitfires suddenly appeared out of nowhere to chivvy the big balloon out of British airspace; How did they know where we were? 

Nobody in Nazi Germany seemed to connect the dots between the towers, the Zeppelin, and the fighter escort, evidence of a lack of intellectual acumen that spelt the doom of the Nazi regime. And all this, despite the fact that the Germans had essentially invented radar.

The story of Chain Home is instructive, in that intellectual curiosity blossoms in freedom and is suffocated by authoritarianism. It is a truism that every authoritarian regime holds within it the seeds of its own destruction and that those seeds begin to sprout from the moment the authoritarians take hold. 

Germany is by far the best example of this, for in the half-century or so between 1870 and 1915, Germans had been the preeminent leaders in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, and even psychology and sociology.

Paul Ehrlich (1854 -1915)

was a German-Jewish immunologist and Nobel Prize winner who discovered the cure for Syphilis

In the 1890s and early 1900s most American States did not require a doctor to have any formal medical training; those who were serious about medicine traveled to Germany, where groundbreaking work was being done in every medical specialty. To speak German was a better indication of a doctor’s knowledge than any certificate from an American medical school. Most U.S. doctors at the time could finish their training at home without ever having seen a patient, alive or dead. German medical schools required direct patient contact and treatment.

In the fourteen years between 1901 and 1915 Germans won eighteen Nobel Prizes. The social traumas of the First World War and Germany’s defeat, the Treaty of Versailles, the economic crisis of 1920 – 22, the Great Depression, Naziism, and the almost complete collapse of German society in World War II turned Germany from the intellectual powerhouse of the Western World into a notable maker of cameras and stereo systems in the 1950s.

Nazi racial “science” made use of absolutely worthless body measurements to “prove” the superiority of the Master Race

The German fall from eminence was perhaps made all the worse by the fact that the very science the Germans had prided themselves on discovering was replaced by so-called “Nazi Science” --- a pastiche of fact and fantasm fueled by bankrupt and crackpot National Socialist racial theories. To do any scientific work in Germany between 1933 and 1945, a scientist had to subscribe to this warping of reality, bringing his conclusions into line with the accepted tenets of Naziism. Those who did not do so could not work or worked independently at the risk of their liberty and lives --- and their discoveries were often derided or discarded when they were made public at all. 

It is a hard indication of how crippled German science really was even just five years after the ascent of Hitler to power that even though the German military was working on its own radar net nobody in Germany seemed to grasp what Chain Home was or what it was useful for.*

Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) is probably the most famous scientist of all time. The Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist changed our perception of the nature of existence. Born in Ulm, Germany to a Jewish family, he ultimately fled Nazi-dominated Europe and settled in the United States where his work gave rise to the atomic bomb

*Over the course of the history of the Nobel Prizes Germans have won 108 (1901 – 2018). Of those 108, thirteen were awarded to German Jews. This represents over 14% of the German total. Eleven other native-born German Jews won Nobel Prizes on behalf of their adopted countries, bringing the number of native German-Jewish winners to 24 of 119 or almost one-quarter of the total. If Austrian winners (6 of 21 Nobel laureates, almost one-third of Austria's total)) are factored in, the percentage rises further. The brain drain caused by Naziism, both by the killing of intellectuals or by their fleeing for their lives, undoubtedly contributed to the downfall of the Nazi state