Radar Saved the Day

Had it not been for radar, there’s no doubt about it, we would’ve lost. It saved the day. It gave advance warning of when the German air fleets were coming over and permitted the small numbers of RAF fighters, a good most of them Spitfires, to be diverted to where the aircraft were coming, instead of having to protect the whole coast from the North Sea down to the English Channel. We found out about … it didn’t take too long to find out how important that radar was to our, or their, our survival, and to have lost then would have made all the difference to humanity. It’s hard to predict just what might have happened. But when we got into actually seeing the early radar and making use of it, we could see what a potent thing it was. In my particular case, because I was over amongst the very early ones, I was given the opportunity to train people at Royal Air Force schools in Scotland and in England. And I was able to see, as the training was required for different kinds of radar people, how the war was progressing, from protecting the British Isles from the German aircraft coming over from the continent, to going out into the far areas of the earth to protect against submarines and surface radars, which is a different kind of radar. It was airborne radar as compared with the early ground radar, and that’s a long story and a long technical story, but we won! We won.