The USA had now entered the war, and we had attached to us from January 1942 onwards, one or two US Air Force officers to whom we passed our production experience and methods, as, although the US had some Radar from 1939 onwards, it had not been developed for Airborne use, and after Pearl Harbour the British Government provided full collaboration by sending over teams of specialists under Watson Watt, with drawings and models of everything we made. Regular supplies of all our drawings and change notes went by air almost weekly to the Washington liaison office.
The US officers attached to us attended all production meetings and design conferences, and soon the US electronics industry was deeply engaged in the production of all types of Radar. Their highly planned production systems usually needed a much longer time to get a job from the handing over of drawings to the production stage, but once they got going, taking often twice as long as we did, they could produce at a rate far in excess of what we could.
Our speed in getting into production was largely accounted for by a system of pre-production planning which at the time, 33 years ago, was unique, and which I wrote up at MAF request for selective circulation to the BSH, Metro Vick and other firms in England and the USA. The system involved regular fortnightly meetings held in my office, attended by the TRE Scientists, the Malmesbury Development unit (WDU) and the key production staff from the factory.
As each part of the approved prototype from the Development section was drawn up, the meeting vetted the design for availability of material, ease of tooling, and other factors, so that when each part was approved, an order could be issued for the whole of the material for the production, and twenty of each part were produced by hand in the model shop. At the same time jigs and tools were ordered from the tool room. This meant that by the time the last of the drawings was approved, the job was already well under way.
The twenty sets of hand produced parts, often included items ingeniously produced by the Development Section Model Shop were progressively assembled, this giving valuable experience prior to the production line being assembled. Meanwhile, the TRE and the WDU and the AID (Aircraft Inspection Directorate) had agreed on the tests and inspection systems and the type of test gear to be used, which was produced in the Test Dept.
Workshops and the same procedure was adapted for the electronic features of the equipment, test gear and limits specified etc. At each meeting the notes, called "Action minutes" were dictated to my most efficient Secretary; in a side column the initials were inserted of the person responsible for following up each item. In this way those responsible knew exactly what was wanted of them and at the next meeting reported progress thereon.
This system for accelerating production is today common practice and indicated in many Management text books. We decided to do an actual Radar range test on the finished AI Mk VIII, and to do this, a tower was erected in the grounds, about 60 feet high, with a lift to take the gear up to a laboratory on the top. The RAF erected a high mast at a known distance from the tower, fitted with a Radar Reflector, and each set was finally tested by receiving the reflected echo on the screen.
Every piece of equipment had, in addition to be tested for functioning at an atmospheric pressure corresponding to operating height of 25,000 feet. This was done in a series of Vacuum Chambers designed and constructed in our workshops, and about one in every hundred sets was taken up to the laboratory and tested to operate not only at this altitude but also at a temperature of minus 50°C.
The first twenty pre-production sets were being delivered to Fighter Command for evaluation three months after prototype approval had been received. This, for a complicated gear, consisted of Power Pack Transmitter, Pulse Generator, Receiver and Display Unit, containing in all, probably 200 valves was quite a record. The Mk VIII turned out to be a very successful gear; it was used for submarine detection as well as night fighter work, and was in full use throughout the rest of the war including D day, the Ardennes offensive of Christmas 1944 and the Italian Campaign.
I don't think any of these very sophisticated Radars were supplied to the Russians who did have some early and not very effective Radar of their own, but they were later supplied with heavy Gun Laying Equipment GL Mk II for Anti Aircraft use. This was made by Metropolitan Vickers at Trafford Park, and Cossors at Chadderton. We had co-operated with Metro-Vicks on the 271 sets for the Navy which had been an important factor in beating the submarine menace.
Their Works Manager, the late Walter Symes told an amusing story of a visit by a Russian Army group shortly after the German invasion of Russia in 1941. He was under orders to keep the visitors out of the Radar section of his works, and use the visit largely as a propaganda and moral boosting exercise for their workers.
On the tour of the factory, the Russians were being steered past sliding doors leading to the Radar Assembly shop, when one of the Russian Officers said to Symes: "Are you not going to show us your GL Mark II?!" Shortly after this, he told me, Churchill agreed to ship a full GL Mk II to Russia via Murmansk, on condition that it was to be operated solely by British personnel, under a British Officer.
When the ship arrived at Murmansk, the weather was too bad to unload cargo and while waiting for the storm to abate during the night, the whole equipment with the lorries and generating set had been unloaded, and had disappeared. Frantic appeals to Sir Stafford Cripps our Ambassador in Moscow, failed to locate the set, and after out team had spent some time in Moscow kicking their heels, they were finally informed that they could now take charge of the set.
It had been set up as part of the Moscow AA defenses, and, with a Russian team was demonstrating its capability as a box barrage director. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this story, as it came to me second hand, over thirty years ago, and writing entirely from memory, this anecdote may be somewhat lacking in accuracy. I did learn after the war, that whereas the GL AA Radar was used in the UK, as I well knew, as direction and range finding for laying groups of three or four AA guns, the success of this system against enemy bombers was sadly disappointing until the intervention of the proximity fuse for AA shells.
The Russians, having since Napoleonic times pinned their faith to masses of artillery in unheard numbers, used our GL in a more effective way. They were supposed to have operated thousands of AA guns around Moscow in groups of some hundreds, each group linked to a common director and range finding system. In this way, if, say, a given number of guns with suitably selectively fused shells can render a cubic kilometre of airspace almost 100% lethal, then by forecasting into which cubic km of space the enemy plans will be put any time delay necessary for the guns to be laid and automatically be fired, the kill is 100%.
This is logical given enough AA guns and shells and seems to be in accord with Russian Military practice. This may well have been a satisfactory system requiring as it did less than pin point accuracy both for the Radar and the shell fuses, but with Bombers now doing 1400 instead of 200 MPH it would be little use today, compared with target-seeking rockets and Multi-Barrell Radar controlled guns.
