Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Part I: A Failure of Intelligence

Continued from page 1

By Freeman Dyson

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Our ORS was divided into sections and subsections. The sections were ORS1, concerned with bombing effectiveness; ORS2, concerned with bomber losses; ORS3, concerned with history. My boss, Reuben Smeed, was chief of ORS2. The subsections of ORS2 were ORS2a, collecting crew reports and investigating causes of losses; ORS2b, studying the effectiveness of electronic countermeasures; ORS2c, studying damage to returning bombers; ORS2d, doing statistical analysis and other jobs requiring some mathematical skill. I was put into ORS2d.

Two other new boys arrived at the same time I did. One was John Carthy, who was in ORS1; the other was Mike O'Loughlin, who shared an office with me in ORS2d. John had been a leading actor in the Cambridge University student theater. Mike had been briefly in the army but was discharged when he was found to be epileptic. John and Mike and I became lifelong friends. John was cheerful, Mike was bitter, and I was somewhere in between. In later life, John was a biologist at the University of London, and Mike taught engineering at the Cambridge Polytechnic. After retiring from the Polytechnic, Mike became an Anglican minister in the parish of Linton, near Cambridge.

The ORS consisted of about 30 people, a mixed bunch of civil servants, academic experts, and students. Working with us were an equal number of WAAFs, girls of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, who wore blue uniforms and were subject to military discipline. The WAAFs were photographic interpreters, calculators, technicians, drivers, and secretaries. They did most of the real work of the ORS. They also supplied us with tea and sympathy. They made a depressing situation bearable. Their leader was Sergeant Asplen, a tall and strikingly beautiful girl whose authority was never questioned. The sergeant kept herself free of romantic entanglements. But two of her charges, a vivacious redhead named Dorothy and a more thoughtful brunette called Betty, became attached to my friends John and Mike. Love affairs were not officially discouraged. We celebrated two weddings before the War was over, with Dorothy and Betty discarding their dumpy blue uniforms for an afternoon and appearing resplendent in white silk. The marriages endured, and each afterwards produced four children.

My first day of work was the day after one of our most successful operations, a full-force night attack on Hamburg. For the first time, the bombers had used the decoy system, which we called WINDOW and the Americans called CHAFF. WINDOW consisted of packets of paper strips coated with aluminum paint. One crew member in each bomber was responsible for throwing packets of WINDOW down a chute, at a rate of one packet per minute, while flying over Germany. The paper strips floated slowly down through the stream of bombers, each strip a resonant antenna tuned to the frequency of the German radars. The purpose was to confuse the radars so that they could not track individual bombers in the clutter of echoes from the WINDOW.

That day, the people at the ORS were joyful. I never saw them as joyful again until the day that the war in Europe ended. WINDOW had worked. The bomber losses the night before were only 12 out of 791, or 1.5 percent, far fewer than would have been expected for a major operation in July, when the skies in northern Europe are never really dark. Losses were usually about 5 percent and were mostly due to German night fighters, guided to the bombers by radars on the ground. WINDOW had cut the expected losses by two-thirds. Each bomber carried a crew of seven, so WINDOW that night had saved the lives of about 180 of our boys.

Part I: A Failure of Intelligence

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