The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

Blue), on which he had drawn on his visit to Britain. There were, however,
plenty of gaps in his knowledge of British industry and so, on German Air
Ministry notepaper, he had written to a London bookseller asking for copies
of books about the subject. The witless bookseller had duly obliged.
Heinkel 111s with civilian markings had also flown over taking
comprehensive reconnaissance photographs, the British press had been
scoured for information, and the German air attaché in London had also
been ordered to obtain as much information as possible. The net result was
that Study Blue became a fairly comprehensive reference source about
British targets, from power plants to aircraft industry factories to airfields. It
was still the major point of reference now as the Luftwaffe prepared to
assault Britain.
British intelligence had its faults but at least all three services had their
own branches within the intelligence service and at least each of those
branches was sensible enough to recruit the best brains for the task in hand,
which was why a brilliant young civilian scientist like RV Jones was able to
work for Air Intelligence. There was also complete co-operation between
different organizations. RV Jones would not have discovered the key to
Knickebein without the help of the Admiralty Research Laboratory, the Y
Service, the Blind Approach Development Unit, the codebreakers at
Bletchley, the RAF Director of Signals and the Government itself. Such a
scenario was inconceivable in Nazi Germany.
There was nothing comparable within the Nazi party or the Wehrmacht
– no Joint Intelligence Committee, for example, where Group Captain
Tommy Elmhirst met with his other service colleagues, nor an office where
intelligence officers from different arms of the forces worked side by side.
This was because different intelligence bodies in Germany viewed
themselves as rivals. In a state where knowledge was power, it did not pay
to surrender that knowledge to those rivals within the system. Thus Göring
still had his listening service, the Forschungsamt, which was entirely
separate from the Wehrmacht secret service, the Abwehr, and equally so
from the Sicherheitsdienst, which included the Gestapo, the Nazi secret
police.
Nor was there any co-ordination between inter-service intelligence
departments. The result was that intelligence only really came together at
the very top. Since Hitler was not a man who took kindly to unfavourable
intelligence reports, and since giving him good news tended to improve the