Oslo Report - British Reaction

British Reaction

On 4 November 1939, Captain Hector Boyes, the Naval Attaché at the British Embassy in Oslo, received an anonymous letter offering him a secret report on the latest German technical developments. To receive the report, all he had to do was arrange for the usual announcement of the BBC World Service's German-language broadcast to be changed to "Hullo, hier ist London". This was done, and resulted in the delivery of a parcel a week later which contained a typewritten document and a type of vacuum tube, a sensor for a proximity fuze for shells or bombs. The typewritten document accompanying it became famous after its existence was revealed in 1947 and would go down in history as the "Oslo Report".

Boyes quickly appreciated the Report's potential importance and had a member of the embassy staff make a translation which he forwarded to MI6 in London along with the original.

The Oslo Report was received with indifference or even disbelief by British Intelligence, with the notable exception of Dr. R.V. Jones, a young Ph.D. physicist who had recently been put in charge of a new field called "Scientific Intelligence". Jones argued that despite the breadth of information and a few inaccuracies, the technical details were correct and argued that all the electronic systems divulged therein be further explored. In a 1940 report, Jones summarized his thoughts.

The contribution of this source to the present problem may be summarised in the statements that the Germans were bringing into use an R.D.F. system similar to our own,... A careful review of the whole report leaves only two possible conclusions: (1) that it was a "plant" to persuade us that the Germans were as well advanced as ourselves or (2) that the source was genuinely disaffected from Germany, and wished to tell us all he knew. The general accuracy of the information, the gratuitous presentation of the fuse, and the fact that the source made no effort, as far as it is known, to exploit the matter, together with the subsequent course of the war and our recent awakening with Knickebein, weigh heavily in favour of the second conclusion. It seems, then, that the source was reliable, and he was manifestly competent.

In his 1989 book, Jones summarized the importance of the Oslo Report as follows:

It was probably the best single report received from any source during the war. ...Overall, of course, the contributions from other sources such as the Enigma decrypts, aerial photographs, and reports from the Resistance, outweighed the Oslo contribution, but these were all made from organizations involving many, sometimes thousands of individuals and operating throughout most of the war. The Oslo Report, we believed, had been written by a single individual who in one great flash had given us a synoptic glimpse of much of what was foreshadowed in German military electronics.

While Jones took the Oslo Report very seriously, the Admiralty for one thought that the Report was "too good to be true" and therefore had to be a devious deception by the Abwehr, with its fantastic claims written by psychological warfare experts. An additional argument raised by the doubters was that no single person could have such wide knowledge of weapons technology as discussed in the Report. This was mainly because interforce co-operation, e.g. between the Navy and Air Force, was at the time poor in both Britain and the US, and it was known that in Germany the two organisations were virtually at war between themselves.

In fact, the Oslo Report is strongly focused - on electronic technology - and several major German companies were involved in such projects for all three armed forces; some scientists in these companies would indeed have had a wide-ranging overview.