Operation Biting - Background

Background

After the end of the Battle of France and the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk during Operation Dynamo, much of Britain's war production and effort was channelled into RAF Bomber Command and the strategic bombing offensive against Germany. However, bomber losses on each raid began to increase during 1941, which British intelligence concluded was due to German use of advanced radar techniques. British and German radar technology and techniques had been in competition for nearly a decade at this point, with the Germans often either at the same level as the British or surpassing them due to heavy military investment in the fledgling technology. By the beginning of World War II, British radar technology had managed to rise to an effective level, primarily due to the work of Robert Watson-Watt, although much of the technology was still rudimentary in nature and mistakes were made, such as the inability of Watson-Watt and other scientists to devise an effective night-defence system in time for the German night-time bombing of Britain during 1940. Another British scientist working on radar technology and techniques was R. V. Jones, who had been appointed in 1939 as Britain's first Scientific Intelligence Officer and had spent the first years of the conflict researching how advanced the German radar technology was in comparison to Britain, and convincing doubters that the Germans actually had radar.

By scrutinising leaked German documents, crashed Luftwaffe bombers and Enigma decrypts, as well as interrogating German prisoners of war, Jones discovered that high-frequency radio signals were being transmitted across Britain from somewhere on the continent, and he believed they came from a directional radar system. Within a few months of this discovery, Jones had identified several such radar systems, one of which was being used to detect British bombers; this was known as the "Freya-Meldung-Freya" system, named after an ancient Nordic goddess. Jones was finally able to see concrete proof of the presence of the Freya system after being shown several mysterious objects caught in reconnaissance pictures taken by the RAF near Cap d'Antifer - two circular dishes approximately 20 feet (6.1 m) in diameter which were being rotated. Having found proof of these Freya installations, Jones and the other scientists under his command could begin devising counter-measures against the system, and the RAF could begin to locate and destroy the installations themselves. Jones had also found evidence of a second part of the Freya system, referred to in Enigma decrypts as "Würzburg", but it was not until he was shown another set of RAF reconnaissance photographs in November 1941 that he learnt what Würzburg was. It consisted of a parabolic reflector about 10 feet (3.0 m) in diameter, which worked in conjunction with Freya to locate British bombers and then direct Luftwaffe night-fighters to their position. The two systems complemented each other: Freya was a long-distance radar system, but lacked precision, whereas Würzburg possessed a far shorter range but was far more precise. Würzburg also had the advantage of being much smaller than the Freya system and easier to manufacture in the quantities needed by the Luftwaffe to defend German territory.