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The Secret War
1977 · TV series · documentary · 1 season
Created by William Woollard
The Secret War was a six–part television series produced by the BBC in conjunction with the Imperial War Museum documenting various technical developments during the Second World War. It was aired during 1977 and presented by William Woollard. The programme opening music was an excerpt from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. The closing music was by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The 'seventh' episode often included with video versions of the series was not part of the original series but produced separately.
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10 comments on Hacker News
The BBC "Secret War" series and RV Jones' books are superb. I would recommend also reading his "Reflections on Intelligence" - it was written later and is slightly more philosophical. By that time Jones had been burned by bureaucrats - he compares his small efficient wartime office to the post-war bloat.
The BBC series is really good. They don't make documentaries like that anymore. The "Still Secret" episode on Enigma is easily the best coverage of how the system worked, was cracked and the organisation behind it. There is also an accompanying book, which has many more details.
>I think The "Battle of the Beams" is one development that gave us the basis for what we use so much now in general aviation.
Actually it started the other way around. The beams were based on pre-war blind landing Lorentz system.
This is such a fascinating piece of history.
I've always been very interested in the developments that occurred in WW2. I think The "Battle of the Beams" is one development that gave us the basis for what we use so much now in general aviation.
The BBC series "The Secret War" is a fantastic series that pulls apart how these discoveries were made. It has a lovely 1970s vibe to it and is very well narrated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkCW4g8It_A&list=PLV7OedKrXDcCWzlrNR9hf8pm-NS1lOw49
Interesting to realise that the cavity magnetron, providing higher resolution radar, was invented by the British and gifted to the United States. I believe the Germans researched it, but decided it was impossible. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this though.
If you watch "Greyhound", the tools that sunk the U-boats were British inventions, hedgehog and ASDIC. HuffDuff (High Frequency Direction Finding) is mentioned I think in the movie? It was made by a Polish engineer working for the British. Amazing that the Kriegsmarine didn't work out that their mandatory reporting schedule was sinking their U boats. With such a collection of defenses combined with doctrine changes for attacking U boat swarms, no wonder the U-Boat losses became so huge.
WW2 changed the world and brought us forward so much in terms of technology. Fascinating stuff.
It's a great place to explore the physics of it all, since the tools used were sometimes elementary (X-Ray machines to baffle direction beams).
Reginald Jones changed the world. Thanks hi_hi for the links.
Throwing an aside here that anyone interested in 1940s war technology must check out the old BBC documentary The Secret War (1977) which goes into depth on solving the engineering challenges of the war.
There's an episode of the 1970s BBC documentary series "The Secret War" about the miscellaneous technology projects that sound obviously crazy now, or may have been cancelled to soon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJCF-Ufapu8&t=8883s
The whole series is worth a watch, including episodes on radio location finding, radar and radar jamming, Jet engines, the V1/V2 rockets, and Ultra/Enigma etc. Many of the participants (both British and German) are interviewed - including Albert Speer.
> I think ['The Secret War' by Brian Johnson is] an earlier version of ['Most Secret War' by R V Jones]
Most Secret War is R V Jones' memoir of his personal involvement in radar, aerial navigation, aerial surveillance etc. in British military intelligence. I read it a long time ago but I don't remember it as a dry read at all - dramatic times after all.
Brian Johnson was involved in writing and producing the BBC documentary and a book. So it's not an earlier version of the same thing. The documentary is on youtube I think - a good watch, but I'd recommend reading Jones' original book.
He was also the principal interviewee in the 1977 BBC Documentary series "The Secret War".
There's a YouTube compilation of the six episodes here : https://youtu.be/GJCF-Ufapu8?si=8UcQQ66fcq4ixNKi
Anyone who browses HN regularly will probably enjoy the book "Most Secret War" by R.V. Jones (or the accompanying TV show "The Secret War"). Jones was a physicist working for Churchill directly by the end of the war.
Everyone has heard of Bletchley park and the Manhattan project, but Jones's book covers the game of genuinely deadly cat and mouse that was played throughout WW2 as each side learned and adapted to eachothers scientific intelligence. Radar, Sonar (ASDIC at the time), Magnetic mines, etc.
Its easy to think of it as an intellectual game of chess but it is telling that when the Allies bombed Peenemunde (Nazi area 51) they flew straight over the laboratories to bomb the houses of the scientists.
The TV adaptation is brilliant - thoughtful documentary production, not dumbed down, and most of the people were still alive when it was filmed.
https://youtu.be/GJCF-Ufapu8
Edit: for anyone reading the book look out for mentions of any members of the Cambridge five - Jones was shunned after the war so he is perhaps overly kind to Kim Philby. The same system that allowed the KGB to run wild wouldn't recruit Jones into intelligence work for being of the wrong sort (apparently - according Peter Wright)
I spam this everytime WW2 engineering is mentioned and I'll do it again:
https://youtu.be/GJCF-Ufapu8
The secret war is a documentary about exactly that (amongst other things e.g. the magnetic mine): WW2 RADAR and radio navigation, and the intellectual battle between the Brits and Germans as they tried to locate beams and steal (genuinely!) entire German ground radar stations
It's very long, very detailed but well presented - in a style that assumes you aren't stupid.
For anyone else interested in WW2 reverse engineering and design etc., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJCF-Ufapu8 "The secret war" is a huge documentary covering british efforts to counter german electronic warfare and V-weapons.
It's been posted in this thread, but I'll say anyway: The British "The Secret War" documentary is absolutely fantastic and well worth watching either for the engineering or the human intelligence working around the engineers