Author guest post from Norman Ridley.

Generalleutnant Wolfgang Martini was head of the 3rd Abteilung (Funkhorchdienst), which had been set up in 1936 specialising in monitoring the radio traffic of potential enemies. On 17 May 1939, before the outbreak of war, he despatched and flew in the airship LZ127 Graf Zeppelin, packed with large quantities of electronic receivers to drift up the east coast of Britain. The LZ127 had been retired from commercial service and was now serving as a long-range surveillance craft. Martini’s objective was to listen to any signals emanating from the new towers being constructed there, suspecting that they were part of a British electronic early warning system.

Despite flying over Bawdsey and Canewdon radar stations and inland up the Humber Estuary, Martini’s technicians were unable to draw any conclusions from the signals they picked up in the ten to thirteen metre band. The wavelength of the signals was unlike any that they, themselves, were using in their own radar research. While not ruling out radar as the purpose of the towers, the team had insufficient evidence to convince the sceptics.

After the fall of France, the new German radio intercept stations set up along the Channel coast found communications with Potsdam to be problematic owing to the distance between them, so a new cryptographic centre was established at Noisy, just north of Paris. Unwilling to let the matter of the towers lie, Martini repeated the Zeppelin operation on 3 August, 1939 but again all they picked up was what they perceived to be high frequency noise in the same frequency band as before which, because of their failure to investigate the potential role of VHF and UHF in their own research, they could not prove was anything other than meaningless static rather than radar beams. The airship was picked up by British radar off Dundee and initially, generating such a large echo, was taken to be a large formation of aircraft. When the radar signal indicated that the intruder was moving south and not approaching the shore, it was allowed to proceed unhindered, but radar stations tracked it all the way down the coast and even let it drift some nine miles inland at one point.

On both each occasions the airship was detected by a number of other British radar station, but they chose not to investigate with aircraft fearing that such a response might alert the interloper that they had been spotted. It turned out that Martini was monitoring on the wrong wavelengths and so failed to pick up any of the signals which, rather than diminish his suspicions, led him to conclude that the stations were not operating at the time of his missions. He remained convinced that the stations were part of a radar chain, but the failure of his missions did not help his cause, and it remained an uphill struggle to get Goring interested in British radar.

Hermann Göring seemed to think that Martini was exaggerating the importance of his work for personal advancement. The almost total lack of cooperation with other intelligence departments also robbed Martini of the chance to correlate his own information with that of other sections, such as that which interrogated captured British airmen. He reported directly to Luftwaffe intelligence chief, Oberst Josef ‘Beppo’ Schmid, who was very judicious in his use of Martini’s reports and generally gave them scant attention. It was Schmid’s general policy to ignore or downplay information for which he could not take personal credit. Even had Martini discovered the true nature of the spindly towers, he would have had no way of understanding how radar detection fitted into the Dowding System of fighter control. German research into radar was conducted, for the most part, by departments outside the Luftwaffe which had never considered it to be a basic requirement of air policy. Radar was, if anything, a component of defence rather than attack and had been side-lined within the Luftwaffe, considered to be of interest mainly to the Army; it was generally outside Luftwaffe operational needs. Crucially, however, neither had it given any thought to how radar might be developed as a component of an enemy defensive system which the Luftwaffe might come up against.

Neither Poland nor France had employed radar to any significant extent and so the Luftwaffe had no experience of how it might be used by an enemy, nor how it could be countered. Little thought had been given as to how a more scientifically orientated air force, such as the RAF, might use it. The sheer power of the Luftwaffe, the report seemed to say, obviated the need to look closely at British defensive capability, which would crumble under the crushing blows of the first mass attack. Had Schmid consulted with other intelligence units, such as Martini’s 3rd Abteilung, he might have been able to build up a more comprehensive understanding of the sophistication of the Dowding System but, of course, that was never likely to happen.

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