ROTOR was a huge and elaborate air defence radar system built by the British Government in the early 1950s to counter possible attack by Soviet bombers. The system was built up primarily of war-era radar systems, and was used only briefly before being eventually replaced by the more modern Linesman/Mediator system.
Contents |
UK radar operations were wound down late in the war, and by the time the war ended were already largely unused. It was assumed that another war was at least ten years away, and the need for any improvements in the cobbled-together system seemed remote.
Thinking changed dramatically in 1949 with the Soviet test of their first atom bomb. It was known that the Soviets had made exact copies of the B-29 Superfortress as the Tu-4 Bull, and these aircraft had the performance needed to reach the UK with a nuclear payload. Studying the problem, the Cherry Report of 1949 which suggested that the 170 existing Royal Air Force radar stations be reduced to 66 sites and the electronics extensively upgraded. East Coast sites were constructed in various 'hardened' designs in the 'R' series (R1, R2, R3 and R4 etc.), the original designs were not 'nuclear hardened' bunkers but very substantial structures protected against conventional attacks. West Coast sites were in semi-sunken hardened structures ( 'R6') or above ground 'Secco' type huts (Hartland Point etc.).
Most of the new network would be made up of 28 re-built Chain Home systems, while the rest were taken from the existing selection of Chain Home Low, Chain Home Extra Low and the various Ground-controlled interception (GCI) radars that had formerly served special purposes. This was, in part, a stop-gap measure anticipating the availability of the dramatically improved Type 80 Green Garlic radar which would replace the various early warning radars with a single system of much greater performance. Interception guidance would still be handled by existing systems in either case.
All of the radars were to be improved in terms of siting with the addition of hardened control bunkers to protect the operators from a conventional attack. On the east coast, the coast toward which a Soviet attack would be most likely, the bunkers were underground, while those on the western side of the UK were generally above ground as a cost-saving measure. The bunkers themselves were otherwise similar, featuring 10-foot-thick (3.0 m) concrete walls with all equipment, operations generators and air conditioning located inside.
Additionally, ROTOR re-arranged the existing RAF Fighter Command structure into six "Sector Operational Commands" (SOC) with their own command bunkers (three level 'R4' protected accommodation). Only four of these were built. Additional "Anti-Aircraft Operations Rooms" were built to coordinate the British Army's AA defences in the same overall system. The entire network of bunkers, radars, fighter control and command centres used up 350,000 tons of concrete, 20,000 tons of steel and thousands of miles of telephone and telex connections.
The work was mainly carried out by the Marconi Wireless and Telegraph Company in several phases, called ROTOR 1, ROTOR 2 and ROTOR 3.
As the anticipated Type 80 "Green Garlic" radar started testing shortly after ROTOR came online, it became clear that it could fill both early warning and interception guidance from a single site. This dramatically decreased the complexity of the ROTOR system, which otherwise required sightings from the early warning radars to be telephoned to the fighter control GCI stations for local plotting. By concentrating all of this complexity at a single site the total number of operators was greatly reduced.
As a result of the introduction of the Type 80 (Green Garlic), many of the existing ROTOR sites were rationalized into Master Radar Stations (MRS), while the rest were made redundant, some only two years after opening, and all of the AAOR sites were closed. A few of these were re-used for government department ('RSG's) and local authority wartime headquarters. In the mid-1960s the MRS's themselves were replaced with a new system called Linesman/Mediator.
Until the end of the Cold War many of the sites were retained by the government but now have been sold off to private buyers or converted into museums (for example 'RAF Hack Green') and some transferred to the National Air Traffic Control Centre.
Custom Built: