Читать книгу Engineering Hitler's Downfall - Gwilym Roberts - Страница 26

From the beginning of the war Henry Tizard, the rector of Imperial College and chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Study of Air Defence, had been considering how to cultivate ties with American scientists with the objective of ‘bringing American scientists into the war before their government’. As a result, in February, 1940 Professor Hill went to the USA to discuss with American scientists possible areas of collaboration. Encouraged by the discussions, he and Tizard set about obtaining Cabinet approval for the dispatch of a formal scientific mission to the USA to share the UK’s military and scientific secrets with the Americans.

The result was that in September 1940, while the Battle of Britain was at its height and well over a year before the Americans entered the war, Tizard himself led a mission to the USA to disclose Britain’s most carefully guarded secrets. These included designs and hardware for anti-submarine detection, explosives, gyro-gunsights, jet propulsion, micro-pump valves, proximity fuses, radar, cavity magnetrons, rockets, and a possible atomic bomb. Of these it was the cavity magnetron which, by increasing by a factor of a thousand the transmitting capabilities of American radar, convinced the Americans that the British were disclosing everything they knew.