Tizard Mission - Moving The Secrets

Moving The Secrets

After Churchill's approval for the project, the team began gathering all technical secrets which might have military use. At the end of August, Tizard went to the U.S. by air to make preliminary arrangements. The rest of the mission would follow by ship. They were:

• Brigadier F.C. Wallace MC (British Army)
• Captain H.W. Faulkner (Royal Navy)
• Group Captain F.L. Pearce (Royal Air Force)
• Professor John Cockcroft (Army Research) - nuclear physicist and Assistant Director of Scientific Research at the Ministry of Supply
• Dr Edward George 'Taffy' Bowen (radar)
• Arthur Edgar Woodward-Nutt, an Air Ministry official (secretary)

All the documents were gathered in a small trunk: a lockable metal deed box, used for holding important valuable documents such as property deeds. Bowen was allowed to take 'Magnetron Number 12' with him. After spending the night under Bowen's hotel bed, the case was strapped to the roof of a taxi to the station. An over-eager railway porter whisked it from Bowen at Euston Station to take it to the train to Liverpool and Bowen almost lost sight of it. Inconsistently, in Liverpool the magnetron was given a full Army escort. According to James Phinney Baxter III, Official Historian of the Office of Scientific Research and Development: "When the members of the Tizard Mission brought one to America in 1940, they carried the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores". The British magnetron was a thousand times more powerful than the best American transmitter at the time and produced accurate pulses. The team arrived in Halifax in Canada on 6 September and went on to Washington a few days later. The team of six assembled in Washington on 12 September 1940.