Word: radars
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Radar was only half the story of electronic war. The other half was "counter-radar"-that elaborate series of Allied tricks and dodges to gum up the enemy's radar. Secret until last week, counter-radar had cost the U.S. more than $300 million. But it saved many times that amount in ships and planes. -Headquarters for counter-radar was Harvard's Biological Laboratory. The lab's peacetime monkeys and pickled dogfish were replaced by a regiment of electronic engineers. Their job was to poke fingers into enemy radar eyes. To get in practice...
...Counter-radar licked Japanese naval radar, but its toughest enemy was the enormous radar network the Nazis spread over Europe. German coastal radars watched for Allied ships and planes. Thousands of inland "Wurzburgs" (radars shaped like giant electric heaters) aimed the Nazis' antiaircraft guns with fiendish precision. If the Wurzburgs had not been scotched by counter-radar, they might well have defeated Allied bombing...
...ounce bundle of six thousand such trips, called "Chaff" by the American, dropped from a plane and scattered in the air, gives an echo resembling that of three bombers on a radar scope. Large numbers of these small bundles scattered through the sky can effectively screen whole formations of bombers from enemy radar; similarly, the "Chaff" dropped by one plane can present the illusion of a mass raid where there is no raid...
...reduced German anti-aircraft efficiency by 75 percent--that by the end of the war almost 90 percent of Germany's high-frequency radio experts, some 7,000 men, were diverted from other urgent work to the single job of finding a way to prevent jamming of German radar...
...Germans were not without their own radar countermeasures. They jammed American radar badly at the Anzio beach-head, and it was German jamming that enabled the Seharnhorst and Gneisnau to escape through the English Channel, by blocking out British radar along the whole Channel coast. After these early successes, however, the Germans and Japanese never again succeeded in seriously jamming Allied radar, because our radar was adapted to much higher frequencies -- microwaves -- which are much harder...