On the night of the American election, early returns briefly suggested Wendell Willkie might do better than expected, but by late evening Franklin Roosevelt’s victory was clear. The result was celebrated across Whitehall because Roosevelt’s reelection seemed to bring American partnership in the war closer at the very moment Britain desperately needed help. That need was urgent: Churchill was told that Britain would soon run out of money to pay for weapons, food, and other essential supplies.

Churchill sent Roosevelt an ornate congratulatory telegram, saying he had prayed for Roosevelt’s victory while pretending not to ask for anything in return. Roosevelt did not answer. After nearly three weeks of silence, Churchill became both irritated and uneasy, so he quietly asked Lord Lothian in Washington to find out, as discreetly as possible, whether the telegram had been received and whether anything in it had caused offense.

At the same time, Frederick Lindemann brought Churchill encouraging military news. In a test of parachute-tethered aerial mines, one German bomber disappeared from radar after entering the drifting mine curtain, suggesting the weapon had finally worked. The test also exposed a dangerous malfunction in the mine-release device Lindemann called the “ovipositor,” when one mine exploded against the RAF aircraft that dropped it, but Churchill’s support for the project remained firm.

Lindemann also kept pressing Churchill over German radio-navigation beams, arguing that the Air Ministry was not moving fast enough on countermeasures. Churchill forwarded the complaint to Charles Portal, who insisted that jamming systems and decoy “Starfish” fires were already being pursued at top priority and were successfully drawing bombs away from real targets. Lindemann then highlighted another failure: when a German bomber from the secretive KGr 100 unit crashed near Bridport, army and navy jurisdictional disputes delayed recovery efforts until the sea wrecked the aircraft. Churchill ordered Hastings Ismay to tighten procedures so future opportunities to capture enemy equipment would not be lost; some of the aircraft’s radio gear was eventually recovered from the wreckage.

The crash itself turned out to be evidence that British countermeasures were working. After prodding from Lindemann and technical work by R. V. Jones and No. 80 Wing, the RAF had learned enough about the Luftwaffe’s X-system to create transmitters that could bend and misdirect its beams. During a mission to bomb Birmingham, pilot Hans Lehmann lost his guidance beam, tried to reroute to Bristol, then followed what he thought was the Luftwaffe beacon at St. Malo. In fact, the signal came from an RAF meaconing station at Templecombe, which lured him back toward England. Believing he was landing near France, Lehmann put his aircraft down in the sea off Dorset, and he and surviving crewmen were captured, giving British intelligence confirmation that they belonged to the elusive KGr 100.