[Milsurplus] Japan's Pearl Harbor Blunders?

[Jim Haynes]

On Tue, 12 Feb 2013, Ray Chase wrote:

> it.  Fortunately the Japanese were more hidebound in adopting radar until it 
> was too late in the war.

However, I remember an article from an IEEE publication about the Japanese 
having a cavity magnetron, while the British/US thought they had that 
secret to themselves. They were hoping to shoot down aircraft by beaming 
microwaves at them.

There's mention in the green books about how the AAF wanted the Signal
Corps to duplicate the British CH system for U.S. defense; while the
Signal Corps protested that they already had a much better radar about
ready for the field.  The AAF had simply seen the British air defense
system in operation and how effective it was.

I was reading somewhere recently about the debate over whether effective
air defense was even possible.  The British knew they needed it, while
Germany thought that pressing the offensive was the only thing that
mattered.

There's an interesting piece in some book about the British radio
transmitter known as Aspidistra.  It was originally built by RCA
as a 500 KW transmitter for some U.S. broadcast station; but then
the FCC capped broadcast transmitter power at 50 KW.  So the transmitter
was shipped to England and put on the air there.  It was used for two
purposes.  (1) Black propaganda, in which it pretended to be a radio
station located in Germany and broadcasting discouraging news to the
people there, especially the submarine crews. (2) As a countermeasure
to German air defense.  At first Germany tied interceptors to specific
defense sectors and gave them directions from the ground.  Later they
just had the ground station give more general directions to all the
interceptors.  The British would record these directions at the time
and then a few nights later play them back, when the target for that
night was entirely different.  And Aspidistra was powerful enough
almost to drown out the Germans' own fighter direction transmitters.

The name of Aspidistra came from a popular, totally silly, song of the
period, about a house plant that was crossed with a tree to become
"the biggest aspidistra of them all".