Blackett's War (15 page)

In June 1934 the Air Ministry’s director of scientific research, H. E. Wimperis, had asked his assistant A. P. Rowe to look into what was being done from a scientific standpoint to improve the air defense situation, and as Rowe recalled he reached exactly the same conclusion that Lindemann had—almost nothing:

Even in the air force and navy, services that certainly by the 1930s depended upon scientific innovation for their very existence, the suspicion of science and scientists ran extraordinarily deep. England’s scientists may or may not have been “united” in disdaining war work, as J. D. Bernal claimed, but uniformed officers were at least as united in disdaining civilian scientists, even the ones who did work for them. Rowe himself had received a vivid introduction to traditional military attitudes when he joined Wimperis’s staff in the mid-1920s and tried to have a bomb tested in the wind tunnel at Farnborough, only to be told that the directorate of scientific research was to limit its inquiries to aeronautical questions; armaments were not its business. After a long bureaucratic struggle Wimperis was made an associate member of the interservice Ordnance Board, whose chairmanship rotated among an admiral, a general, and an air marshal. Rowe was sent as the scientific directorate’s representative. Noticing that he was the sole civilian in the room, he took what he hoped was an inconspicuous spot at the table. It did not work. The chairman opened the meeting by announcing, “And today we have with us Mr. Rowe of the Air Ministry. Now perhaps, Mr. Rowe, you would like to let us know what you have to say.” Rowe replied modestly that he had come to listen, not to speak. “In that case, Mr. Rowe,” replied the chairman, “we need not detain you any longer.”
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Now, ten years later, Wimperis took what Rowe rightly called “a bold step” for a civilian bureaucrat in the military services in this climate, and submitted directly to the Air Staff and the secretary of state for air, Lord Londonderry, a detailed and forceful proposal that a Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence be established with a wide-ranging mandate “to consider how far recent advances in scientific and technical knowledge can be used to strengthen the present methods of defence against hostile aircraft.” To ensure that this was more than just a rubber-stamp committee or a cover for business as usual, Wimperis urged that three outside experts—all distinguished scientists with military experience and unimpeachable integrity and independence—be brought in to serve on the committee. For the chairman he proposed Henry Tizard, a physical chemist at Oxford; the other two members would be A. V. Hill, a professor of biology at University College, London, and P. M. S. Blackett, “who was a Naval Officer before and during the War, and has since proved himself by his work at Cambridge as
one of the best of the younger scientific leaders of the day.” Rowe and Wimperis would make up the rest of the committee.
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“The five men who met under Tizard’s chairmanship in Room 724 of the Air Ministry from 11 a.m. until 1.45 on the morning of 28 January 1935 were to help transform Britain’s defences between 1935 and the outbreak of the war,” states Tizard’s biographer Ronald W. Clark.
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They would also, it is no exaggeration to say, revolutionize the model of the application of scientific expertise to the art of war.

Tizard was a friend of Lindemann’s—he had helped secure Lindemann’s Oxford appointment—and like Lindemann had rather improbably learned to fly during the war to conduct scientific research for the air force. Tizard worked out a brilliant system that combined radio signals, sequential photography, and a pen recorder to precisely track the release and fall of a bomb from an airplane as part of the successful effort to develop the Royal Flying Corps’ first practical bombsight. (Like Lindemann, too, he suffered from poor vision, the result in his case of a boyhood accident that left one eye damaged. He had been rejected for service by the navy for that reason. But he was accepted by the army, transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in 1915, and talked the authorities into letting him take flying lessons by proposing to fly only on days when the weather was too bad for the regular student pilots to go up.)

Tizard’s ability to speak the language of airmen and understand their problems would carry weight. He also had a tough, skeptical, independent mind. As a student at Oxford he had learned an invaluable lesson about questioning received wisdom when his chemistry tutor had suggested he ought to do some serious reading during the long vacation:

Tizard quickly did find a mistake (which “aroused a detective spirit”) and by the time he was done he had a long list of corrections, which he duly sent off
to the author, receiving a gracious acknowledgment in return. During the war, after his work on the bombsight, he carried out a study of Allied bombing operations in France and concluded that there were so many sources of error, besides just aiming—target selection, navigation problems, poor visibility, difficulties in identifying the target—that the chance of a bomb ending up anyplace where it would have an actual effect on the enemy was “small,” not exactly what his superior officers in the RFC wanted to hear.

The third outsider on the committee, A. V. Hill, was another man cut from the same straight-talking mold. He had shared the 1922 Nobel Prize in medicine for studies of muscle physiology. In the war, he had done groundbreaking work on statistical analysis of antiaircraft fire for the army.

In Wimperis’s memorandum to Lord Londonderry he had urged that “no avenue, however seemingly fantastic, must be left unexplored” in the search for improved air defenses that could protect Britain’s population centers. In preparation for the committee’s first meeting Wimperis decided to try to get a definitive answer about one such fantastic avenue that had a long history. For years the Air Ministry had been pestered by inventors who promised that with sufficient time and money (“particularly money,” Rowe noted) they could develop a “death ray.” Hoping to get them out of their hair the ministry had offered £1,000 for the successful demonstration of such a device that could kill a sheep at 100 yards. Unfortunately this only encouraged more cranks when word got around about the promised cash prize. In the first week or two of January 1935, Wimperis phoned Robert Watson-Watt, who directed the National Physical Laboratory’s Radio Research Section, and asked him if such a ray that could disable an aircraft or its crew was a physical possibility. Watson-Watt had his assistant A. F. Wilkins work out the numbers and it was immediately apparent that the amount of energy required was so vast as to be impractical. “Well, I wonder what else we can do to help them,” Watson-Watt then said to Wilkins. The two talked over a few ideas and recalled reports that radio signals sometimes fluttered when an airplane flew nearby. Wilkins then did another calculation to see how much energy would be needed to bounce a radio signal off an airplane and receive an echo. The results were distinctly promising.
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Lindemann and Churchill meanwhile were still lobbying hard for a higher-level committee to be established and were suspicious when they learned the Air Ministry had beaten them to the draw in setting up its own panel. Churchill thought that entrusting the job to the same department
that had failed so miserably to date was to guarantee just more inaction. In fact, the Tizard Committee moved with a speed that probably still holds an all-time record in the annals of military bureaucracy. At their first meeting Wimperis reported Watson-Watt’s preliminary findings; at the second meeting, on February 21, they reviewed a full report that they asked Watson-Watt to prepare; and five days after that Watson-Watt, Wilkins, and Rowe were huddled before an oscilloscope watching the green trace rise and fall as a Heyford bomber flew through the radio signal from a nearby BBC shortwave transmitter. A week later Wimperis sent a memorandum to Air Marshal Hugh Dowding, the member of the Air Staff responsible for research and development, which began, “We now have in embryo a new and potent means of detecting the approach of hostile aircraft, one which will be independent of mist, cloud, fog, or nightfall.”
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Wimperis proposed that the Air Ministry provide £10,000 to continue the research. Dowding approved it on the spot. It was the beginning of the radar system that five years later would save the nation in the Battle of Britain, with Dowding himself in command as the commander-in-chief of Fighter Command.

Two months later, in April 1935, Churchill’s political persistence paid off and his Air Defence Research Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence was established, with himself as one of the members. Lindemann was added to the Tizard Committee. To confuse matters further, Tizard’s committee was decreed to be simultaneously an Air Ministry committee and a technical sub-sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence.

Churchill’s enthusiasm for things scientific was genuine, if naive. He had a Victorian-era fascination with technology and statistics, which was fine; more troublesome, he had a weakness for the picture of the lone amateur inventor upending establishment thinking with a revolutionary idea that required a courageous champion to see it through. As first lord of the Admiralty he had played a real part in championing the development of the tank in 1915 against the resistance of the army (“Winston’s Folly” it was called in Whitehall), which only confirmed his belief in his ability to pick a winning idea and become its patron. Soon Churchill and Lindemann were bombarding Tizard with all sorts of half-baked schemes, the loopiest of which were aerial mines that would intercept enemy bombers with a curtain of explosives drifting down on parachutes, and a device to create artificial updrafts to flip an airplane over in mid-flight. Another Lindemann-Churchill pet project was infrared detection of aircraft, which while not ridiculous in
principle had been shown already to be extremely difficult in practice given the ease with which heat emissions from an aircraft engine could be shielded.

Tizard, Hill, and Blackett became increasingly incensed by Lindemann’s efforts to push these hobby horses, especially since it would mean giving less attention to the crucial technology of radar. Blackett described how the issue came to a head the following year:

Lindemann’s defenders would later assert that he and Churchill were always fully behind radar and were merely pressing for other promising ideas to receive attention as well. A thick file in the Air Ministry’s archives labeled “Correspondence with W. S. Churchill, M. P. Air Defence Research Committee” suggests otherwise; it shows Churchill and Lindemann single-mindedly pursuing the aerial mine and infrared detection schemes and lambasting Tizard and the committee for their “half-hearted” and “slow-motion” efforts on these two projects. R. V. Jones, Lindemann’s former student, recalled Lindemann mocking his rivals at this time with a parody of Omar Khayyám: “Something along the lines of ‘The Blackett and the Tizard keep the courts where Trenchard once did sleep,’ ” Trenchard being the first chief marshal of the RAF. Following Hill’s and Blackett’s resignations, Lindemann smugly wrote the secretary of state for air that with those two obstacles out of the way, he was confident “this extremely important work will now be pursued more effectively and with due energy.”
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Zuckerman observed that he could “not imagine any two people less likely to trust or like each other” than Blackett and Lindemann—Blackett “straightforward, leftish, Bohemian and unconventional,” Lindemann high Tory, patrician, and calculating. The same went for Hill and Lindemann. And Tizard, though an old friend, found his patience wearing thin, too, especially when he discovered that Lindemann was repeatedly working
through Churchill to revive in his Committee of Imperial Defence subcommittee ideas that had already been shot down on technical grounds by the Tizard Committee. “The trouble about Lindemann is that he is getting so infernally unscientific,” Tizard wrote at one point. “He takes no trouble to examine even his own proposals properly, let alone anyone else’s.”
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Tizard, by contrast, saw that developing mutual trust with the air force’s officers and researchers was key to getting anything done. Early on, Tizard admonished Lindemann that if he could not abide by the committee’s decisions and understand the damage he was doing, he should not be a part of it. “What disturbed me in our conversation the other day,” Tizard wrote him, “was your attitude that the people at the various Research Establishments were sure to be unhelpful, and slow to work out any ideas but their own.” Just before the meeting that prompted Blackett’s and Hill’s resignations, Tizard again chastised Lindemann that “far from ‘accelerating progress’ you are retarding it.… If you want to have the work pressed with greater vigour, at the expense of other important work, you must surely start by convincing willing colleagues of the wisdom of doing this, instead of complaining to other people that they are slackers.”
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