Winning the Radar War; A Memoir
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987. First U.S. Edition [stated], First printing [stated]. Hardcover. xii, [2], 224 pages. Maps, Illustrations. Index. DJ has some wear and soiling and is taped to the boards. Some marginal pencil marks noted. Jack Nissen (1918-1997) was a technician who worked on radar developments and installations during World War II. Recounted in his memoir, Winning the Radar War, Jack Nissen was part of a secret reconnaissance assignment during the Dieppe Raid. The Canadian South Saskatchewan Regiment escorted Nissen in his quest to find out more about the German Freya radar installed at Pourville, near Dieppe. His job was to find out if Germany possessed precision radar technology. However, because of his valuable knowledge of the British radar, the South Saskatchewan Regiment was under orders to shoot and kill the radar specialist should the task be intercepted by the Germans and the raiding party be in danger of capture; under no circumstances could the British afford to let Nissen be taken alive. With numerous close calls during the raid, which was eventually successful, Nissen escaped capture and returned to England. His action in cutting the land lines and forcing the Freya operators to resort to radio transmissions, which the British radio listeners were able to monitor, confirmed that the German Freya radar was indeed a precision installation. Radar is an object-detection system that uses radio waves to determine the range, angle, or velocity of objects. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, weather formations, and terrain. A radar system consists of a transmitter producing electromagnetic waves in the radio or microwaves domain, an emitting antenna, a receiving antenna (separate or the same as the previous one) to capture any returns from objects in the path of the emitted signal, a receiver and processor to determine properties of the object(s). Radar was secretly developed by several nations in the period before and during World War II. The term RADAR was coined in 1940 by the United States Navy as an acronym for RAdio Detection And Ranging. The term radar has since entered English and other languages as a common noun, losing all capitalization. Full radar evolved as a pulsed system, and the first such elementary apparatus was demonstrated in December 1934 by the American Robert M. Page, working at the Naval Research Laboratory. The following year, the United States Army successfully tested a primitive surface-to-surface radar to aim coastal battery search lights at night. This was followed by a pulsed system demonstrated in May 1935 by Rudolf Kühnhold and the firm GEMA in Germany and then one in June 1935 by an Air Ministry team led by Robert A. Watson-Watt in Great Britain. Development of radar greatly expanded on 1 September 1936 when Watson-Watt became Superintendent of a new establishment under the British Air Ministry, Bawdsey Research Station located in Bawdsey Manor, near Felixstowe, Suffolk. Work there resulted in the design and installation of aircraft detection and tracking stations called "Chain Home" along the East and South coasts of England in time for the outbreak of World War II in 1939. This system provided the vital advance information that helped the Royal Air Force win the Battle of Britain. An earlier report about aircraft causing radio interference led to the Daventry Experiment of 26 February 1935, using a powerful BBC shortwave transmitter as the source and their GPO receiver set up in a field while a bomber flew around the site. When returns were clearly seen, funds were immediately provided for development of an operational system. Given all required funding and development support, the team had working radar systems in 1935 and began deployment. By 1936 the first five Chain Home (CH) systems were operational and by 1940 stretched across the entire UK including Northern Ireland. Even by standards of the era, CH was crude; instead of broadcasting and receiving from an aimed antenna, CH broadcast a signal floodlighting the entire area in front of it, and then used one of Watt's own radio direction finders to determine the direction of the returned echoes. This meant that CH transmitters had to be much more powerful and have better antennas than competing systems but allowed its rapid introduction using existing technologies. In late 1941 Popular Mechanics had an article in which a U.S. scientist speculated about the British early warning system on the English east coast and came close to what it was and how it worked. In 1943, Page greatly improved radar with the monopulse technique that was used for many years in most radar applications. Condition: Good / Good.
Keywords: RADAR, Radio Detection and Ranging, Bawdsey Manor, Ground Control Interception, Dieppe, Freya, Roy Hawkins, Don Priest, Rosehearty, Victor Tait, Robert Watson-Watt
ISBN: 0312015356
[Book #72329]
Price: $55.00