From: Jon Elson
if they did air raids over France or Germany, that
eventually a plane
with one would get shot down and a magnetron would be obtained in
relatively good shape. So, likely by 1942 it was considered to no
longer be a secret.
One was lost near Rotterdam in a raid on Cologne on February 2, 1943 (only
the second raid of the war using centimetric H2S radar which used the cavity
magnetron), and the remains were discovered in relatively good shape by
German technicians. The Germans worked out what it did pretty quickly, and by
the fall of 1943 they had started to deploy microwave detector systems.
Noel