Stephen Phelps - The Tizard Mission: The Top-Secret Operation That Changed the Course of World War II

T HIS IS A STORY OF UNLIKELY HEROES: men whose contribution to World War II went beyond the daring exploits of fighter pilots, the stubborn bravery of bomber crews, the tenacity of those who manned the arctic convoys, and even the raw courage of soldiers caught up in hand-to-hand fighting. These people would be hardly recognizable in such company. They worked in the homeland, hundreds, even thousands, of miles from the front line. They wore suits rather than uniforms. Sometimes they even smoked pipes as they went about their work. However, they would make a hazardous sea journey, crossing the U-boat-infested Atlantic with arguably the most precious cargo of the war. What they carried with them would revolutionize the way war was fought. It would save countless thousands of livesand send many others to their deaths. These men were scientists, Britain's best, and the cargo they carried with them on the liner Duchess of Richmond in August 1940, was a small black japanned box. Inside it were the country's top scientific secrets, and the passengers were on their way to America to give them away.

Led by one of the world's great scientific minds, Sir Henry Tizardaviator, academic and brilliant administratortheir mission was a desperate throw of the dice. They aimed to draw America into the war, or at least to secure the vast manufacturing might of the United States by dazzling the giant neutral nation with a glimpse of the future.

The story of the Tizard mission and the technological revolution it unleashed unfolded during that vital summer and fall of 1940, when Britain stood alone and the world came so close to being shaped into one unrecognizable from that we live in today. It drew on the courage and genius of an extraordinary cast of persons ranging from the president of the United States to a bright young lad from the Welsh valleys, from a bespectacled army officer who'd flown biplanes in World War I to the men who would launch the nuclear age. The Tizard mission brought together all these people, who would play a vital part in creating what was virtually a whole new industry in a matter of months. In the face of opposition and intransigence and under the shadow of Fascist powers striving for world domination through tanks, bombers, and submarines, it was a race against time to invent and manufacture a whole new class of weapons and defensive systems to prevent the destruction of the western democratic way of life.

And all this was made possible when Sir Henry Tizard and his mission slipped into their box of tricks a small metal object no bigger than a man's hand. It would revolutionize not just the war effort but the shape of the world that would emerge from the rubble. A handful of bright men. A lump of metal a few inches across. A secret mission that lasted just a few weeks. In the great sweep of history that is World War II these things might seem insignificant; indeed few are fully aware of the pivotal role it played in the progress of that war. Secrecy, too, contributed to this lack of understanding. The metal objectthe cavity magnetronwould eventually render many of the existing weapons systems obsolete. Before I started researching this story the cavity magnetron was unknown to mebut I own one, and so do most people. It powers the microwave oven that is now an integral part of kitchens around the world.

The role of this humble, everyday gadget in the technological war against the Axis powers cannot be overestimated. Picture the history of World War II shaped like an hourglasshuge forces being brought to bear on nations across the world as the story begins to unfold, narrowing sharply as France falls and Britain fights on alone, then mighty outcomes as the free world finally overwhelms the forces of fascism. Now think of the Tizard mission as the neck of that hourglassa concentration of ideas and invention from the Old World that was released through the New and would power the defeat of the forces of darkness to lay the foundations of the modern world.