AT ABOUT 10:30 ON AN otherwise uneventful morning, August 15, 1940, radar operators sitting in the cramped wooden huts studded every 20 miles along the southern and eastern coasts of England were startled to see their electronic equipment suddenly go haywire. Above each but loomed a skeletal pair of 300-foot steel towers with several transmitting antennae strung between them, accompanied by a second set, of wood measuring about 200 feet, that bore a series of crossed receiving antennae.

Nobody but these handpicked technicians knew the purpose of these strange-looking masts -yet this top-secret project would determine whether Britain could continue to fight Nazi Germany. Since the outbreak of war in September 1939, Britain had suffered an ignominious series of losses: Poland and the Low Countries were gone, France too, and whatever remained of the British army had been salvaged from Dunkirk by mere good fortune. Beginning in early July, when Hitler authorized the conquest of Britain, waves of German Heinkel He 111, Junkers Ju 87 and 88, and Dornier Do 17 bombers had attempted to draw the Royal Air Force-the major obstacle preventing a seaborne invasion-into an aerial battle of annihilation. So far, the defenses had held, but the RAF's pool of fighters had fallen perilously low. The radar operators, most of them women (female voices carried the most clearly over radio), stared at their cathode-ray- tube oscilloscopes, which resembled small, primitive television sets. It was largely unproven technology, and there remained gremlins aplenty to play tricks on the unwary. The crazy electronic blur puzzling the operators on August 15 could simply be yet another annoying malfunction . . . or it might mean their sensors were being swamped by a torrent of echoes indicating an unprecedentedly large German bomber armada. By lunchtime, it was alarmingly apparent that hundreds upon hundreds of aircraft were swarming across the English Channel-from every direction, their targets unknown.

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