Tom Whipple: The Battle of the Beams (1940)

Travels Through Time

Today Tom Whipple, science editor of The Times, takes us back to a critical moment at the beginning of World War Two.

Just a month after replacing Neville Chamberlain as prime minister, Winston Churchill learned that the Nazis were using beams to direct their bombers towards targets in Britain’s industrial heartlands.

The science behind these beams was so pioneering that it was difficult to believe that it was true. But, as Churchill learned at a dramatic meeting in Whitehall in June 1940, the beams were scientifically plausible. The man who told him this was an extraordinary 28-year-old physicist. His name was RV Jones.

RV Jones is the central character in Tom Whipple’s enthralling new book. The Battle of the Beams: The Secret Science of Radar That Turned the Tide of WW2 is out this week.

For more, as ever, visit our website: tttpodcast.com.

Show notes

Scene One: 21 June 1940. RV Jones attends a meeting at the cabinet room in Whitehall

Scene Two: June 1940. With Flight Lieutenant Bufton/Corporal Mackie on a mission to find Jones’s ‘beams’ over Britain

Scene Three: 6 November 1940. At the crash site of a Heinkel III bomber at Chesil Beach in Dorset

Memento: Vera Cain’s (RV Jones’s wife) diary

People/Social

Presenter: Peter Moore

Guest: Tom Whipple

Production: Maria Nolan

Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours

Theme music: ‘Love Token’ from the album ‘This Is Us’ By Slava and Leonard Grigoryan

Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_

See where 1940 fits on our Timeline