Hacker Cinema
Battle Stations
2000 · TV series · documentary · 1 season
Battle Stations is a documentary series of 1 hour episodes, which uses archive footage, re-enactments and first-hand accounts from the crews, to follow the machines and technology implemented from the Second World War to the Gulf War in the land, air and sea.
1 positivefrom 1 commenter
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
3 comments on Hacker News
The "Radar" episode of the tv show "Battle Stations" says that Goering and most of his staff believed the towers to be communications towers, but one member of his staff supected the truth. This one staff member got permission from Goering to bomb the towers once or twice at the very start of the BoB. He also got permission to fly a blimp loaded with radio receivers up and down Britain's east coast to settle the question of the nature of the towers, but the German radio engineers made a technical mistake that led them to the wrong conclusion, after which the Germans never again made any moves against the towers or the other components of the radar network during the BoB.
>bombing something that small would've been very difficult given that it was in operation and well covered by fighters
The veteran British radar scientist and others interviewed on the TV show _Battle Stations_ said different.
>the infrastructure around the RADAR was more important i.e. the command centres
The fact that the stations by themselves would have been useless has no bearing on the question of how vulnerable the stations would have been to German attacks.
I didn't mention the communications lines and the command centers because they were less vulnerable to German attack.
To summarize: if they had known about it, the Germans probably could've degraded the British radar network enough to succeed in their goal of destroying the RAF. They came close to destroying the RAF as it is.
Because their air forces were more effective, the Brits and the Americans could rely more on their air forces to neutralize their enemy's tanks (an approach they continued during the cold war, where the A-10 and the Apache helicopter were developed primarily to kill Soviet tanks).
On Battle Stations' episode on the Tiger, a former British M4 commander told the camera that encountering a Tiger sucked, but that the air force responded very quickly whenever he reported one. (The air force used rockets against the Tiger.)