British Army. GL
mark II, 5m gun laying, receiver British Army. GL mark II, 5m gun laying,
receiver. The set had three dipoles: one at right and left for direction by
swinging the whole assembly; a third that moved vertically for height
determination. Although classified as “gun laying,” it had little or
no blind-fire capability. Deployed 1940. Produced by the Soviets as SON 2.
Whoever wishes to learn how governments fail in the duties
of protecting their peoples from disaster should study the history of the
Soviet Union; whoever wishes to learn how competent engineers can best be
thwarted in their efforts to provide weapons vital for defense should study the
history of Soviet radar. It is always the case, that in large projects those
close to the details are vexed by the confusion and mismanagement they perceive
in their leaders and, above all, in the administrative machinery that attempts
to carry out their leaders’ instructions. Such was the case in all radar
development in the Second World War, but those who toiled in the laboratories
of Britain, America, Germany and Japan and who suffered in this way little knew
that their work places were ruled by reason and benevolence when compared with
their counterparts in Muscovy.
There was every reason to believe that the Soviets might
have surpassed the west in this new craft. They began first with high-level
support, had the influential interest of academician A F Joffe, had a brilliant
young electrical engineer and veritable model of the new Soviet man, Pavel
Oshchepkov, and a radio engineer who had proved himself with decimeter waves,
Yu K Korovin, as enthusiastic leaders, and had obtained financial support in
1934 of 300 000 roubles, which dwarfed that provided by any other power. The
initial work pointed toward the development of a Freya and a Würzburg, but by
1940 the resulting radar designs were poor, inferior to the Japanese, and left
Russia dependent on Britain and America for much of her needs during the
war.
To understand the history of this place and period one must
learn the identities of the contending bureaucratic agencies, and in order to
keep this cast of characters straight it is best to know them by their
identifying abbreviations.
GAU The Main Artillery Administration, an engineering
service of the Red Army concerned with the design of weapons.
PVO The Air Defense Forces, the service to which Oshchepkov
was assigned and that had the responsibility for the employment of AA troops;
they had interests in weapons design.
SKB (also KB-UPVO). A special construction office within the
PVO to produce radar, opened in 1933 with Oshchepkov in charge.
VNOS The Aerial Observation, Warning and Communication units
of the PVO, which were to be the immediate users of radar.
VTU The Military Technical Administration, a part of Red
Army headquarters.
LFTI (also LIPT). The Leningrad Physical-Technical Institute, Joffe’s organization, which included D A Rozhanski until his death in 1936.
LEFI Leningrad Electro-physical Institute, a GAU laboratory,
led by A A Chernishev.
QRL (also TsRL) The Central Radio Laboratory, another GAU
laboratory, led by D N Rumyanysev.
NII-9 Scientific Research Institute 9, another GAU
laboratory that absorbed LEFI in fall 1935. The renowned radio engineer
Professor M A Bonch-Bruevich became its director after the purges and attracted
good men. Unfortunately, he died in March 1940.
UFTI The Ukrainian Physical-Technical Institute, a
laboratory organized by Rozhanski and where research in magnetrons was
conducted. Later directed by A A Slutskin.
NKTP The Research Sector of the Commissariat for Heavy
Industry, the supervisory organization for both LIPT and UFTI.
NIIIS-KA Scientific Research Institute of Communication
Engineers of the Red Army, a group with its own program for the development of
signals equipment.
VEI All-Union Electrical Institute, a competent research
organization with a laboratory for ultra-short waves led by Professor B A
Vvedenskiy.
SRI (also NII-RP). Scientific Research Institute of the
Radio Industry headed by A B Stepushkin.
The Academy of Sciences (mercifully seldom referred to by
initials). An organization consulted at the highest levels that concerned
itself with all manner of scientific and engineering problems relevant to the
Soviet state.
NKVD The People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the
secret police, the name of whose chief, Lavrenty P Beria, carried terror to
millions.
At this point one might well let the reader form in his mind
the kind of radar that was to come from the machinations of these agencies, all
of which participated, and his construction would probably be close to the
mark. Yet the poor Soviet product resulted as much from the purges that Stalin
initiated in 1937 as from clumsy, bickering agencies which knew how to use the
NKVD for their bureaucratic ends and to take care of a few personal matters
along the way. Fear concentrates thought but on survival, not on the subtle
intricacies of electronic circuits. This no doubt lies behind the marked
deterioration in design encountered in the second stage of Soviet radar
development. Important parts of this story will remain unknown to us.
The PVO had responsibility for early warning and had
sponsored the early work on the radio screen Rapid that was done at LEFI until
that group was absorbed into the Television Institute, the combination becoming
NII-9. Despite the objections from many that Rapid gave precious little data of
value about intruding aircraft, PVO had LEFI build under the supervision of B K
Shembel a model suitable for army deployment, which had its first tests in July
1934.
The GUA also wanted radio AA gun-laying equipment and had
been sufficiently impressed with the experiments QRL had conducted in January
1934 with a 50 cm set that they wished the idea exploited, and NII-9 undertook
the task of providing a suitable prototype. The work was started under Shembel.
By early fall 1936 NII-9 had produced an experimental continuous-wave twin-dish
set, Storm, which operated on 18 cm using early magnetrons from UFTI that gave
about 6 W of continuous wave power. The detection range was only 10 km, and the
directional accuracy only 4°, neither adequate. The range problem was a
compound of magnetrons with too little power and frequency stability and a
noisy receiver that also picked up too much of the primary transmitter signal.
Shembel devised a solution for the direction problem analogous to lobe
switching and presaging mono-pulse radar. He used four dishes, one a
transmitter and the other three paired off in horizontal and vertical
coordinates. The first trials failed, and he was unable to bring the concept to
fruition before being separated from NII-9 in 1937.
Victorious NIIIS-KA also continued the GUA gun-laying
project, replacing NII-9 with UFTI. The principal deficiency of Storm had been
the use of continuous rather than pulsed waves. Bonch-Bruevich had held the
project to continuous waves, despite having used pulsed waves in early
ionosphere studies; he even terminated pulse work at NII-9 when he became
director in 1935. UFTI turned their efforts to a new, pulsed wave 64 cm design
called Zenith. It combined every bad feature one could reasonably imagine in
one set. It reported the coordinates of range, azimuth and elevation only every
17 s, making it useless for directing an AA gun, and had a dead zone extending
out to 6 km, the result of the receiver being unable to recover from the
transmitter pulse, although it could observe aircraft to 25 km. A pulse length
of 10 to 20 µs gave correspondingly bad range accuracy. Work continued and by
the middle of 1940 the range had been extended to 30 km, but the equipment had
such a catalogue of ills that it was given up. The technical reasons for
failure are not apparent. It would appear that the designers were unable to
master the techniques of microwave electronics and thereby profit from the
magnetron that N F Alekseev and D D Malairov had invented.
The purges had at least made one agency responsible for
radar, NIIIS-KA, but in the process had removed good engineers from the
laboratories and the most supportive top military commanders. Soviet radar
entered World War II a low priority project with equipment inferior to all the
major powers. Yet it need not have been so. The early start with high-level
support, capable engineers and the cavity magnetron could easily have made the
Soviet Union the leader in radar.
The reader must consider these simplified attempts at
recounting relevant events in Stalin’s state with suspicion. The material
available is limited and was written before the collapse of communism opened
secret files and by men not indifferent to what history would record.
As already discussed, Soviet radar development suffered from
lack of interest in the high command, confusion as to its mission and the
dispatch of excellent radar engineers to the Gulag during the purges of the
late 1930s. That anything at all came out is remarkable. Because of or in spite
of these extraordinary circumstances there occurred what must be one of the
most baffling incidents in the history of radar. In April 1940 when the cavity
magnetron was Britain’s most precious military secret, when it traveled under
armed guard, when its use was discussed at cabinet level, when it was described
as the most valuable cargo ever to arrive in America, when the United States
was preparing to open a special laboratory just to exploit its properties, when
all these circumstances applied, two Soviet engineers published a complete
description of it in the open scientific literature.
During 1936 and 1937 N F Alekseev and D D Malairov produced
a series of cavity magnetrons as part of a project for building an anti-aircraft
(AA) gun-laying radar at Scientific Research Institute 9 (NII-9) from proposals
by its director, radio-eminence Mikhail Alexandrovich Bonch-Bruyevich. The
magnetrons were discarded in favor of a pulsed transmitter that used
very-high-frequency triodes that worked on 64 cm, had 12 kW peak power, was
called Zenith and was abandoned in 1940.
One can presume and little other evidence is at hand that
the lack of success of magnetrons in this work, for whatever reason, taken
together with Professor Joffe’s long-standing opposition to microwaves for
radar allowed the publication of the paper. Irrespective of the reasons, the
paper is a complete disclosure of the elements of the cavity magnetron. One
does not even need to know Russian. It suffices to see the tables giving
wavelengths and powers and to think a bit about the drawings of the
characteristic electrode shapes. That the drawings showed water-cooled anodes
tells one a lot. It was all there. There is a report of the independent
invention of the klystron at NII-9 by N D Devyatkov during those same years,
but even less was made of it than the magnetron. It was quickly followed by a
reflex klystron.
The skepticism that had met Oshchepkov’s Rapid soon hardened
into hostility to radio location generally in the form of a report in 1935 by
the Red Army Chief of Signals, which asserted on the basis of studies by his
own NIIIS-KA that radio location was unrealistic and a waste of time. M N
Tukhachevskii, Chief of Ordnance, had been impressed with the possibilities of
the new technique, even if it was not satisfactory at the moment, and decided
in favor of retaining the infant radar program after a rousing fight. It was,
as those familiar with the ways of bureaucracies will recognize, not the end
but only the beginning. Life was becoming complicated and dangerous.
In 1937 Army Commander A I Sedyakin conducted a large air
defense exercise using conventional acoustical and optical methods that had a
most unsuccessful outcome. He became acquainted with the new radio-location
methods during discussions with General M M Lobanov of the GAU, who convinced
him of the need to pursue this kind of work. This happy state of affairs came
to a quick end in June 1937 when the purge swept military and technical ranks. Both
Tukhachevskii and Sedyakin were quickly eliminated, and the NIIIS-KA instigated
investigations of NII-9 and SKB with the resulting arrest of NII-9’s chief and
the dismissal of Shembel. Bonch-Bruevich, who had attracted Lenin’s favor for
his early radio work and who stood highest in electronic prestige, appealed
directly to Central Committee Member Andrei A Zhdanov, who used Party influence
to preserve the activities of NII-9. SKB was cleaned out and Oshchepkov, along
with other radio engineers, went to the Gulag for ten years; he survived,
thanks in no small part to academician Joffe, who sent him food packages and
letters.
NIIIS-KA stepped into this to absorb NII-9 and SKB, and once
the hated radar project was theirs their attitude changed; they completed the
transformation of Rapid into an army prototype called RUS-1 (Rhubarb). It had a
truck-mounted transmitter and two truck-mounted receivers that were normally
placed about 40 km from the transmitter. These sets, of which only 44 were
manufactured in 1940 and 1941, were technically not significantly advanced over
the way Oshchepkov had left them and proved to be of little value.
Following completion of the design of RUS-1, LFTI set about
building a pulsed air-warning radar, RUS-2 (Redoubt). It was bi-static
equipment of 50 kW working on the 4 m band; transmitter and receiver were
mounted on separate trucks having Yagi antennas that tracked one another in
direction, although they had to be located about 1000 m apart, the obvious
result of not having solved the common-antenna problem. The experimental set
started in 1936 was not completed until late 1939, just in time for it to be
tried in the Russo-Finnish War where it was successful enough for ten sets to be
ordered on a crash basis. RUS-1 failed the same test completely. RUS-2 provides
an exception to the general rule for design of meter-wave air-warning sets of
the time in using Yagis rather than dipole arrays backed by conducting screens,
the directional antenna immediately and instinctively adopted by others.
