Churchill didn't get his two squadrons by the autumn, but he did pretty nearly get them by the end of the year, and in December of 1942 – it seems incredible that all this happened in that one year of 1942 – we had quite a lot of my staff at Whitten near Huntingdon which was the headquarters of the Pathfinder force. And the duty of the Pathfinders was really to drop flares, to light up the target with the main force coming behind and bombing on the flares, and I had a code, O'Kane who was one of the originals I mentioned, who flew the original equipment. He was... I stationed him at Whitten, the headquarters of the Pathfinder force, at the aerodrome at Whitten and he was there maintaining the equipment, which was difficult to maintain because of the high altitude in which the planes were flying. And the Secretary of State ruled that although there were seven Halifax in one squadron of the Pathfinder and seven Stirling aircraft in another squadron, they were not to be used over enemy territory unless or until the Russians held the line of the Volga.

Now, I must say that in that autumn a most extraordinary situation developed with the Americans. They regarded... although they had nothing to do with the invention of the Magnetron, they were astonished when the secret was given to them in the Tizard Commission in the autumn of 1940, and they believed it was a war winner, and that if we lost it – if we lost the secret to the Germans – it would be used against us. In fact, in one awful time a high level deputation was sent over from America, including Purcell and Rabi and we had a very unpleasant meeting in the division leaders' office, in Dee's office, and they were quite unpleasant. They said, 'Look, we've tried to repeat your equipment in the United States and it will not work', and we had... it happened that some of the TR people had been sent over to help the Americans and they also said it could not work. Well, you see, it was all the difference between living at reasonable peace and being at war, and so it was because of that I think and because of the worry of the Americans that this sort of attitude was taken by the Secretary of State.