For six years, Britain and Germany fought a bitter aerial war at huge cost in terms of lives lost and aircraft shot down. This book traces effectively the largely hidden battle in the first widespread use of electronic warfare. Supported by some excellent images. Most Highly Recommended.
NAME: Instruments of Darkness, The History of Electronic Warfare 1939-1945 FILE: R2476 AUTHOR: Alfred Price PUBLISHER: Pen & Sword, frontline BINDING: soft back PAGES: 272 PRICE: £19.99 GENRE: Non Fiction SUBJECT: Air war, carpet bombing, night fighters, Bomber Command, WWII, World War 2, World War Two, Europe, blitz, electronic warfare, ELINT, radar, radio, direction finding, radio guidance
ISBN: 1-47389-564-2
IMAGE: B2476.jpg BUYNOW: http://tinyurl.com/mfeldce LINKS: DESCRIPTION: For six years, Britain and Germany fought a bitter aerial war at huge cost in terms of lives lost and aircraft shot down. This book traces effectively the largely hidden battle in the first widespread use of electronic warfare. Supported by some excellent images. Most Highly Recommended. The Royal Navy pioneered electronic warfare during WWI. It established radio monitoring stations around the world with the ability to not only listen in to enemy radio traffic, but also use the stations to triangulate on an enemy transmitter to find its location. The reason that the Royal Navy was the pioneer was that it had invested heavily in equipping its warships with radio and understood its advantage and potential weakness. Finding ways to exploit weakness in enemy radio was a logical next step. At the time, the size of radio equipment, its weight, and the amount of wire required for an antenna, meant that it was difficult to deploy outside warships and fixed ground stations. As WWI progressed, radio development made it practical to equip aircraft and the Royal Navy had a wider air mission than the Army's RFC, making radio more important to link aircraft escorting convoys and searching for enemy ships, ground stations and friendly warships. After WWI, the development of electronics was starting to speed up. By the start of WWII, radio was used by military vehicles, especially tanks, warships, land forces and air forces. It was to become the war where electronic warfare came of age. This new form of warfare was very secret and had enormous impact on the conduct and outcome of the war. For aircraft, the use of radio for communications and for navigation became critical. The use of radar and command and control became critical to air defence, and radar was to become an effective bombing aid. That increasing dependence of radio- based electronics was to spur the use of encryption to hide content from the enemy, code breaking to unmask the content that had been encrypted, and computers to provide the means to process the huge amounts of electronic intelligence being collected. It was also important to develop methods of jamming enemy transmissions, particularly radar through the use of 'window'. The author has been able to use information only recently de- classified and has presented a very broad picture of the very secret electronic war that was previously difficult to produce from then available information.