The top secret scientific mission that changed the course of the
Second World War.
In August 1940, a German
invasion of Britain looked
inevitable. Luftwaffe bombers were pounding British cities, France had surrendered, and the Low Countries were under German control. Although
sympathetic to Britain’s
plight, the United
States remained staunchly neutral.
Unknown to the rest of the world, Britain’s
brightest scientific and military minds had been working on futuristic
technology for a decade, including radar and jet propulsion. While the great
value of radar to locate and identify objects at long distance and at night or
in bad weather was appreciated, at the time it was thought that practical
radar required a room-sized device for generating an effective signal. At the
heart of British radar defence, however, was the cavity magnetron, a
groundbreaking invention hundreds of times more powerful than any other in use
and small enough to be held in the hand. With the British economy and industry
reeling from the war, Winston Churchill reluctantly agreed to an unorthodox
plan: a team of scientists and engineers would travel under cover to the
United States and give the
still-neutral Americans the best of Britain’s military secrets. It was
hoped that in exchange the United States would provide financial
and manufacturing support—which might even lead to their official entry into the
war.
The Tizard Mission, named for its leader Sir Henry Tizard, steamed
across the Atlantic carrying a briefcase-sized
metal deed box. Chained to the ship in the event it was torpedoed and sunk by a
U-boat, the box contained details of the Whittle jet engine, critical
calculations for an atomic bomb, and a precious cavity magnetron.
The Americans proved to be astonished, receptive, and efficient: Bell
Telephone produced the first thirty magnetrons in October 1940, and over a
million by the end of the war. With this device, both warships and aircraft
could carry war-winning radar. But Britain did not only give America military
secrets, these same technologies would produce a fortune for post-war
commercial industries, with the magnetron being the key component to the
microwave oven. In The World in a Briefcase: The Top-Secret Scientific Mission
that Changed the Course of Second World War, Stephen Phelps reveals how the
Tizard Mission was the turning point in the technological war, giving Britain
the weapons it desperately needed to defend itself and laying the groundwork for
much of the United States’s post-war economic boom, an effect that still
resonates today.
