I dimly recall from my youth in Cornwall that it was a particular problem if the aircraft ended up too far west - they would leave the South Wales coast, cross the Bristol Channel - confuse that with the English Channel, and then land, lost, at the first airbase they found in Cornwall -thinking they were at least in France.
One issue is that a lot of this wasn't declassified until long after the initial histories were written. Winston Churchill's fantastic multi-volume history makes no mention of ULTRA and I recall that a lot of the engineering stuff was only declassified in the '70s.
I'm almost finished reading a UK printing of The Deceivers: Allied Military Deception in the Second World War (http://www.amazon.com/Deceivers-Allied-Military-Deception-Se...) which was first published in 2005 and it comments that a lot of its material was only recently declassified. Prior to it the only detailed history was the bit known as The Man Who Never Was: World War II's Boldest Counter-Intelligence Operation (http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Never-Was-Counter-Intelligence...) from the '50s, which wildly overstates the importance this particular bit of deception used for the invasion of Sicily. It was one of many pieces which in total achieved complete success, but it and they don't hold a candle in "boldness" to FORTITUDE SOUTH and QUICKSILVER (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude) which convinced Hitler and most of the Wehrmacht high command for well over a month that the Normandy landing was only a feint.
Keep in mind that this is not pure engineering, as you're not just trying to solve a problem, you're trying to solve a problem against a living, reacting adversary. So strategy ("game theory") enters into the picture.
Edward Luttwak's book "Strategy: The logic of war and peace" (http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Logic-Peace-Revised-Enlarged/...) has a lengthy dioscussion of the strategic back-and-forth in the Battle of Britain. Besides the beams, both sides were also experimenting with new kinds of bombers, bombs, fighter planes, ways of finding and fighting fighter planes, countermeasures for preventing the enemy from finding your fighter planes, etc. Very interesting read.
Interesting indeed. If you think all the new tech in WW2 (missile, radar, atom bomb, Enigma, u-boat), calling the WW2 "the first war of engineering" isn't far from the truth.
It is a bit far from the truth. Kadesh is possibly the first war of engineering we have accounts of, in which the manevourability of chariots were decisive.
Actually, every nation that challenged the status quo of their times run a war of engineering.Avars and the stirrup, kinghts and the body armor, Turks and the cannon, etc, etc...
U-boats were a major factor in WW1 - the United States probably wouldn't have entered the war if it hadn't been for German attacks on transatlantic shipping.
There is a spectacular book about the Battle Of the Beams written by R. V. Jones, who was the British scientist in charge of countering the German technical advances.
It mentions however that the system was used after the campaign has switched to night bombing, which was months after the evacuation from France. The error was at least as large as the channel.
