The Bruneval Raid; Flashpoint of the Radar War

Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1975. First U.S. Edition stated. Presumed first printing. Hardcover. Good. Maureen Verity (Maps). xvi, [2], 221, [1] pages. Rough spot at top of inside back board. Red dot on top and edge soiling. Includes Author's Note and Acknowledgments; Foreword by Admiral of the Fleet The Earl Montbatten of Burma; Abbreviations, Introduction, Chapters 1-22, Notes, Bibliography, and Index. Also contains 17 black and white photographs between pages 102 and 103. George Reid Millar DSO MC (19 September 1910 - 15 January 2005) was a Scottish journalist, soldier,and author. He was awarded the Military Cross (MC) in early 1944 for escaping from Germany while a prisoner of war and making it back to England, which he wrote about in his 1946 book Horned Pigeon. Millar was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the French Légion d'Honneur and the Croix de Guerre avec Palmes for his service as an SOE officer in France in 1944. He recorded his experiences fighting behind the lines with the local Resistance in his 1945 book Maquis. Millar joined Alan Moorehead and Geoffrey Cox as Paris correspondents of the Daily Express shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. He covered the Battle of France as a war correspondent with the French Army, and was the last Express journalist in Paris before escaping back to England in June 1940 via Bordeaux. In an immediate and vivid account, he drew on his journalistic skills to describe life living in the woods with the Maquis, various sabotage missions against the railways and trying to organize the villages before liberation by the Americans. It received good reviews and Charles de Gaulle privately complimented him on it. Derived from a Kirkus review: The Bruneval Raid is broad on the scientific side and has some amusing stiff-upper-lip humor thrown in. Millar has researched the history of British and German radar. Since both nations discovered it independently, neither could determine how advanced the other was. Each had developed ways of jamming the other's radar but were reluctant to reveal these simple methods (such as dropping thousands of pieces of tinfoil during a raid -- the aluminum looked like numberless planes on the radar screen) and thus teach the enemy how to jam effectively. England was ringed with radar defenses almost from the start of WW II, but the Germans found a precision bombing technique by triangulating their beams which made it necessary for the English to capture a unit intact. A night sortie by a parachute squadron was carried out successfully, with the raiders returning by ship. The adventurous operation makes a lively climax to the book's main subject, research development -- which has a different fascination from battle.