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I had a most un-heroic war. My comrades and I fired no shot or shell, but our weapons were electromagnetic waves and cathode-ray-tubes. We joined the RAF as Radar Technicians, sworn to secrecy, as this was hush-hush throughout the war; and without the chain of ‘CH’ stations along the south and east coasts the Battle of Britain might have concluded differently.

I was stationed at Ruislip near London, where our job was to assemble transmitters, receivers and the rest of the ‘gubbins’ from various manufacturers into complete Radar Stations, mounted in a convoy of ‘Crossley’ trucks, to be dispatched to the zone requiring them.

Later a much more compact equipment known as ‘Light Warning’ was developed. We assembled many of these as transportable radars, housed in camouflaged tents for ‘front line’ deployment. Then came a mobile version built into ‘Morris’ 15 cwt vans. When ‘Gerry’ developed a rear-looking Radar in his bombers and re-started night raids on London (the Little Blitz) we retuned some of our transmitters and modified them to transmit ‘noise’ instead of a radar pulse. There was a great ‘flap’ dashing around the south coast in several teams, setting these up to blind ‘Gerry’ to the attacks from astern. The newspapers said that a diet of carrots was the reason for the improvement in success of our night fighter pilots.

For the Normandy landings we had to water-proof all the L.W. Radar vehicles using yards of rubberised balloon fabric and gallons of ‘Bostick’. Working on this we all got thoroughly ‘stuck-up’. Then for the Arnhem Drop and the Rhine crossings we built up specially modified mobile units, which were carried in ‘Hamilcar’ gliders. Driven out on landing these were quickly operational. I pitied the lads who crewed these because they had to carry several gerry-cans of petrol for the generators, an obvious extra hazard if shot down.

When the ‘V1’ (buzz bombs) attacks started we went to the coast to set up mobile units, right on the sea shore, to give the earliest possible plot after their launch from France. However the ‘V2’ rockets were a different matter, launching almost vertically with a trajectory far out of range of our equipment.

For the Pacific we carried out a tropicalisation programme, stripping the units and re-assembling with termite proof insulated wire, encasing some components in plastic and coating the rest in fungicidal varnish.

The invention of the magnetron made airborne radar viable, enabling use of centimetric wavelengths. This brought radar into the modern world, but it was not until WWII was practically over that we saw the magnetron in use in our ground-based sets. The ‘CH,’ ‘CHL’ and ‘LW’ equipments, which were our mainstay in the war, employed wavelengths measured in metres, but they did a sterling service in their day. At a recent reunion I saw a photograph of one of my LW tent sets erected on top of a pyramid in Egypt. What a range that must have had!

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