The Tizard Mission, officially the British Technical and Scientific Mission, was a delegation from the United Kingdom that visited the United States during World War II to share secret research and development (R&D) work that had military applications. It received its popular name from the programme's instigator, Henry Tizard, a British scientist and chairman of the Aeronautical Research Committee, which had orchestrated the development of radar.
The mission travelled to the U.S. in September 1940 during the Battle of Britain. They conveyed a number of British technical and scientific secrets with the objective of securing U.S. assistance in sustaining the war effort and obtaining the industrial resources to exploit the military potential of these technologies, which Britain itself could not fully use, due to the immediate demands of other war-related production.
Referring to one such British secret, a device known as a resonant cavity magnetron, American historian James Phinney Baxter III later wrote, "When the members of the Tizard Mission brought one to America in 1940, they carried the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores."[1] The mission also opened up channels of communication for jet engine and atomic bomb development, leading to the British contribution to the Manhattan Project, and catalyzed Allied technological cooperation during World War II.
The Tizard mission is seen as one of the key events that forged the wartime Anglo-American alliance. After the war, it became the foundation for future cooperation in scientific research at institutions within and across the United States, United Kingdom and Canada.
- ^ Baxter III 1946, p. 142.