GERMAN SECRET WEAPON RECOVERED
London, England · November 6, 1940
On this date in 1940 a German Heinkel 111 was shot down and sank in the shallows off southern England. A waterlogged X‑Geraet (“X‑device”) was recovered. The X‑Geraet played a role in the Battle of the Beams, a period early in the war when German bombers were equipped with increasingly accurate systems of radio navigation. Before the X‑Geraet there was the Knickebein (“Crooked Leg”), first tried out in 1939, which broadcast guidance beams from occupied Europe that intersected at the point where bombs should be dropped on British targets. German bombers would fly into one beam, or set of radio waves, and “ride” it until the radio operator started hearing the tones from the second beam on a second receiver. When the steady “on course” sound was heard from the second receiver, the bombardier dropped his payload. (The cross-beam development had its inception in blind landings at airports in bad weather or at night.) Knickebein was used early in the Luftwaffe’s night-bombing campaign and was succeeded by the four-beam X‑Geraet, which was similar in concept, but it operated at a much higher frequency and was used to greater effect. The British city of Coventry, with its 14th‑century Gothic cathedral, was its best-known victim, on November 14–15, 1940. The Y‑Geraet was an improvement in that it used a single narrow beam from the ground station pointed over the target. Daytime bombing could rarely achieve the accuracy of these nighttime bombing raids. By way of example, bombs dropped using the X‑Geraet were placed within 100 yards of the device’s centering beam, good enough to hit a large factory. The British scientific community fought back with a variety of its own increasingly effective countermeasures involving jamming, “bending” or distorting the German navigational beams, and tricking the Germans to drop bombs away from their intended targets. A raid on Britain’s second-largest city, Birmingham, on the night of November 19, 1940, less than a week after the successful Coventry raid, was disrupted by jamming. The British were slowly gaining the upper hand. But the Battle of the Beams and the Blitz on British cities really only ended when the Luftwaffe moved its bombers to the Eastern Front in May 1941, in preparation for Operation Barbarossa, the attack on the Soviet Union and the harbinger of Nazi Germany’s ruinous end.
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Battle of the Beams: Defeating Germany’s Radio Guidance Systems
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Left: Map showing Knickebein radio transmitters whose intersecting beams were broadcast from Schleswig-Holstein near the Danish border, at Kleve near the Dutch border, and at Loerrach near the border with France and Switzerland in southwestern Germany. Following the fall of Norway, the Netherlands, and France in April–June 1940, additional Knickebein transmitters were installed in those countries as well. The Knickebein was the predecessor to the more accurate X- and Y-Geraet systems, which required new, more sophisticated radio equipment.
Right: The X‑Geraet used a series of beams to locate the target, each beam named after a river. The guide beam “Weser” was intersected by a series of three very narrow single beams, the “Rhine,” “Oder,” and “Elbe.” The intersecting beams accurately measured distances across the guide beam. The “Oder” and “Elbe” were spaced roughly 5 to 10 kilometers (3.1 to 6.2 miles) from the bomb release point along the line of “Weser.” The bombs were automatically released on signal from the device. The British were able to defeat the automated system by transmitting a false “Elbe,” so that the bombs dropped prematurely, miles short of their target.
The Secret War: Battle of the Beams (Electronic Warfare)
World War II was the single most devastating and horrific event in the history of the world, causing the death of some 70 million people, reshaping the political map of the twentieth century and ushering in a new era of world history. Every day The Daily Chronicles brings you a new story from the annals of World War II with a vision to preserve the memory of those who suffered in the greatest military conflict the world has ever seen.