The Secret War

What Hacker News said

Strong rec mhh__ · 2019-07 · on “WWII Propaganda Popularized Myth That Carrots Help You See in the Dark (2013)”

I spam this everytime WW2 engineering is mentioned and I'll do it again: [this video] The secret war is a documentary about exactly that (amongst other things e.g. the magnetic mine): WW2 RADAR and radio navigation, and the intellectual battle between the Brits and Germans as they tried to locate beams and steal (genuinely!) entire German ground radar stations It's very long, very detailed but well presented - in a style that assumes you aren't stupid.

Strong rec mhh__ · 2020-06 · on “Ask HN: What's your favorite book that nobody you know has heard of?”

Anyone who browses HN regularly will probably enjoy the book "Most Secret War" by R.V. Jones (or the accompanying TV show "The Secret War"). Jones was a physicist working for Churchill directly by the end of the war. Everyone has heard of Bletchley park and the Manhattan project, but Jones's book covers the game of genuinely deadly cat and mouse that was played throughout WW2 as each side learned and adapted to eachothers scientific intelligence. Radar, Sonar (ASDIC at the time), Magnetic mines, etc. Its easy to think of it as an intellectual game of chess but it is telling that when the Allies bombed Peenemunde (Nazi area 51) they flew straight over the laboratories to bomb the houses of th

Strong rec smilespray · 2021-12 · on “Electronic warfare history of the Battle of the Bulge”

For more R V Jones goodness, watch "The Secret War" from 1977. The two first segments, "The Battle of the Beams" and "To See for a Hundred Miles" should be of interest, but all of it is great, really. [this video] Bonus: It includes interviews with Albert Speer. More info about the series: [LINK]

Strong rec mhh__ · 2022-03 · on “What happened to Russias Air Force? U.S. officials, experts stumped”

One thing a lot of people forget because war movies don't show them, is that by the end of the war allied and German aircraft were absolutely loaded with electronics. The story of Radar on the ground is well known, but the story of systems like [LINK] (so named apparently because it was a smell that no one had discovered before) is not so well known. Similarly a lot of these British efforts were more at risk to their own commanders that the Germans at the beginning, because the engineers were having to go through utterly ridiculous hoops to justify basic physics to their superiors. Sometimes their scientific superiors... [this video] is a very very good documentary about this kind of thing. Made

Recommends timrichard · 2019-04 · on “How Germany used radio waves to guide night bombing raids in WWII”

He also features a lot in the 70's BBC Series, 'The Secret War'. A compilation of it seems to be on YouTube (for the time being). The Battle of the Beams is the first segment : [this video]

Recommends mhh__ · 2019-06 · on “The German Tank Problem”

For anyone else interested in WW2 reverse engineering and design etc., [this video] "The secret war" is a huge documentary covering british efforts to counter german electronic warfare and V-weapons.

Recommends mhh__ · 2022-10 · on “Edward Stone retires after 50 years as NASA Voyager’s project scientist”

For fans of tomorrow's world: "The secret war" is another William Wollard show about the technology that Britain used in the war. If you like hackernews, you'll probably like it [this video]

Recommends helsinkiandrew · 2025-06 · on “Panjandrum: The ‘giant firework’ built to break Hitler's Atlantic Wall”

There's an episode of the 1970s BBC documentary series "The Secret War" about the miscellaneous technology projects that sound obviously crazy now, or may have been cancelled to soon: [this video] The whole series is worth a watch, including episodes on radio location finding, radar and radar jamming, Jet engines, the V1/V2 rockets, and Ultra/Enigma etc. Many of the participants (both British and German) are interviewed - including Albert Speer.