Blackett's War (16 page)

For once Churchill was outmaneuvered in a skirmish of bureaucratic warfare. Following Blackett’s and Hill’s resignations the secretary of state for air promptly dissolved the committee, then reestablished it with all of its original members—save for Lindemann. The animosity between Churchill’s favorite scientist and Blackett and Tizard would flare up again during the war when Churchill became prime minister and brought Lindemann back to Whitehall with him, with important and tragic consequences both personally and for crucial questions of war strategy.

AS THE AIR MINISTRY WAS
taking its first steps to face the growing German air menace, “a most surprising act was committed by the British Government,” as Churchill wrote with exaggerated restraint in his memoirs. On June 21, 1935, the first lord of the Admiralty informed Parliament that the British and German governments had reached an agreement on the future size of the two countries’ naval forces. It was a stunning bow to Germany’s unilateral repudiation of the military limitations imposed by the Versailles treaty. Even more stunning, Britain had not bothered to consult with or even inform her ally France of what it was about to do.

The Admiralty, in a lengthy memorandum enthusiastically backing the
proposals that had been brought to London by Germany’s ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop, argued that given the reality of Germany’s undeniable intention and ability to rearm it behooved Britain to cut a deal quickly. Under the terms of the German proposal, Germany promised that her warship tonnage would never exceed 35 percent of Great Britain’s. The British naval staff noted that “the German Government genuinely consider that they have made a generous and self-sacrificing decision, and that if the opportunity to close with the offer is lost, it is improbable that they will stop short at the 35 per cent level in building up their fleet.” Moreover, “the statements of Herr Hitler … make it clear there is no prospect whatever of Germany coming to agreement on any question … except on the 35 percent. basis.” Pressed by Ribbentrop for a quick answer—the German ambassador had expressed “disappointment that Herr Hitler’s historic decision should have caused a delay”—the British government swiftly accepted.

On the question of submarines, the agreement astonishingly allowed Germany to build up to 45 percent of British strength—and, “in the event of a situation arising which in their opinion makes it necessary,” 100 percent. (The only proviso was that “the matter shall be the subject of friendly discussion before the German Government exercise that right”; it was not, however, subject to British approval.) The British naval staff brushed off this as well, insisting that it really just came down to a matter of
Gleichberechtigung
, a favorite word of the Reich negotiators, which roughly translated as “equal rights”:

As part of the deal, Germany solemnly agreed to accede to the 1930 Submarine Protocol, a restatement of the principle that the laws of war applied to submarines just as they did to surface ships. In light of subsequent claims by German U-boat officers that the rules of international law permitted a submarine to torpedo merchant ships without warning when they were armed, or traveling in convoy, or with their lights darkened, or in war zones, or if they tried to radio for help, or if they otherwise placed the attacking U-boat in danger—assertions that even many historians who should know better have swallowed over the years—it is worth quoting the protocol in full:

The 1935 Anglo-German Naval Treaty was the apotheosis of the appeasement mind-set in Britain as Hitler was busily laying his plans for European conquest. Churchill called it the “acme of gullibility” to believe that the Germans would abide by their pledge to adhere to the Submarine Protocol once they possessed “a great fleet of U-boats,” as they would now be permitted under the treaty. The truth was even worse than Churchill suspected. Hitler told Admiral Erich Raeder, the chief of the Marineleitung, the naval command, that he was overjoyed by this masterstroke and that the signing of the treaty was the happiest day of his life.
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Construction of the Reich’s new U-boat fleet was already in fact well under way. For over a year a steady
stream of submarine components had been flowing from Germany to the Dutch front company IvS, then secretly reshipped by sea along the coast back to Germany for assembly. “The Führer demands complete secrecy on the construction of U-boats,” Raeder recorded in his diary following a long discussion with Hitler in June 1934.
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The naval staff had long settled on three designs for its new U-boat fleet: the Type II, a coastal vessel of 250 tons; the oceangoing Type VII of 625 tons and up; and a long-range Type IX of 1,000 tons. Now, just eleven days after the signing of the Anglo-German Naval Treaty, the first German U-boat since the war—a Type II boat designated
U-1
—was officially commissioned. Thirteen more would be completed by the end of the year. A modest stockpile of torpedoes was coming out of German factories as well.
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On September 28, 1935, Karl Dönitz took command of the First U-boat Flotilla. A week earlier the Reichsmarine ensign was replaced by the Nazi swastika throughout the fleet. Just over a year later Dönitz was promoted to Führer der U-boote, in command of the entire U-boat force. Now a Kapitän zur See, a full captain, he had continued to receive consistently excellent marks for his leadership, soldierly impression, popularity with officers and men, and energy. In his new task, he placed an unstinting emphasis on rigorous training and the inculcation of a “spirit of selfless mission-readiness” and an “attacking spirit” in his commanders and crews.
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THE NAZIS’ INTENSIFYING PERSECUTION
of Jewish scientists in Germany chipped away at both leftist pacifism and centrist apathy in the British scientific community. Blackett, for all of his continued entrancement with Marxist ideas about the role of science in advancing the working class, and his more than passing gullibility in accepting Soviet assertions about the USSR’s unsurpassed support of scientific research, had parted company early with the pacifist party line of the British left on precisely this point. In December 1934, just before joining the Tizard Committee, he wrote a note on the state of science in Germany expressing concern that “many eminent scientists had left Germany, science was being used for anti–working class activities, and scientific fact was being deliberately distorted to accord with Nazi teachings.”
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Some of the most eminent German Jewish scientists had departed even before the Nazi takeover, correctly reading the harbingers of rising anti-Semitism in Germany. The Hungarian-born aerodynamicist Theodore von
Kármán left for Caltech in 1930; Albert Einstein departed for Princeton in December 1932. Four months later Hitler promulgated the first anti-Semitic decree of the Nazi regime, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. It decreed that all “non-Aryan” employees of the state “must retire.” Universities were state institutions, and some 1,600 scholars were immediately stripped of their posts, including a quarter of the nation’s physicists. Among them were eleven past or future Nobel laureates. Hundreds more were solid, competent scientists but lacked the fame of an Einstein to be sought out by an American university eager to land a scientific star.

Blackett was active from the start in the effort to find places for the ousted scientists at English universities and laboratories, and he did what he could in his own lab. Otto Frisch, who would play a pivotal part in the design of the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, was at the University of Hamburg when he and his fellow physicist Otto Stern were dismissed under the new law. Stern offered to make the rounds of the laboratories of colleagues he knew in France and England “and see if he could sell his Jewish collaborators,” as Frisch remembered him wryly putting it. Stern told Frisch he would try to “sell” him to Madame Curie in Paris. “When he came back,” Frisch recalled, “he said Madame Curie had not bought me, but Blackett had.”
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Lindemann and A. V. Hill were also early participants in the effort to aid the refugees. Lindemann, though given to uttering occasional anti-Semitic remarks of the patrician British sort, immediately used his connections to procure a £20,000 grant from Imperial Chemical Industries to create positions for twenty displaced physicists and chemists from Germany. Hill, who became secretary of the Royal Society in 1935, had like Rutherford previously maintained that scientists should remain aloof from politics “as a condition of complete intellectual honesty.” He revised that opinion in the face of the Nazis’ outrages against what he termed “freedom of thought and research” and became a prime mover in establishing a more formal organization to aid the displaced scientists. With Rutherford lending his name as president and Hill as vice president, the Academic Assistance Council (later the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning) went to work raising funds and began providing modest grants, £182 a year to unmarried scientists, £250 for those with families, so they could be given places at British universities and other institutions. By the time the war began, the organization had raised £100,000 and aided some 900 scientists.

It was probably the single most powerful influence in awakening British scientific opinion in the late 1930s to the growing threat, and evil, of Nazism.
The same, though, could hardly be said for British opinion as a whole. After receiving a barrage of anti-Semitic hate mail, the council played down the fact that most of the scientists it was aiding were Jews. For fear of stirring up a further anti-Semitic backlash in Britain, the Royal Society, as a condition for offering office space and support, even vetoed the council’s proposal to appoint a Jewish scientist to its board. Still, it was something. “More unanimously than any other intellectual group,” C. P. Snow thought, “the scientists were anti-Nazi.” Blackett’s prominent role in aiding refugee scientists, as well as his example in rejecting the left’s moral strictures upon scientists becoming involved in military work, was a powerful influence during this period. Blackett, in Snow’s view, “was the chosen symbol of scientists on the Left. In fact, he spoke for the younger generation of scientists in the thirties very much as Rutherford spoke for the older.”
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The hard left among the British scientists remained as doctrinaire, obdurate, and self-regarding as ever, and J. D. Bernal in particular was conspicuous in his absence from the serious work of aiding the Nazis’ scientific victims. But by 1938 even he had done an about-face on the question of whether scientists could in all conscience help their government win a war against fascism. This, to be sure, may have had more to do with the Marxist dialectic than the facts about Hitler and his intentions. Bernal was writing a book titled
The Social Function of Science
that sang a Marxist paean to the Soviet regimentation of science for social progress; it was full of what Leonard Woolf once aptly termed the “slants, snides, sneers, and smears which Communists and Fellow Travellers habitually employ as means for building a perfect society.”
³⁸
Bernal wrote that it remained doubtful whether the armed forces of Great Britain would ever be employed in behalf of “the principles of democracy and civilization”; that the application of science to war was to most younger scientists “the worst prostitution of their profession”; nonetheless the one positive benefit of the assimilation of science into the modern war machine (“more than anything else”) was that it has “made scientists look beyond the field of their own inquiries … to the social uses to which their discoveries are put.”
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It was an infuriating enough argument—in effect, the real reason to fight Hitler was because it would hasten the longed for collectivization of science—that it provoked John Baker, an Oxford zoologist, to a furious and swift rejoinder. “Bernalism,” he wrote in the
New Statesman
, “is the doctrine of those who profess that the only proper objects of scientific research
are to feed people and protect them from the elements, that research workers should be organized in gangs and told what to discover, and that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake has the same value as the solution of crossword puzzles.”
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