Blackett's War (17 page)

Be that as it may, Bernal in late 1938 produced a memorandum entitled “Science and National Defence,” which he sent to B. H. Liddell Hart, the military correspondent of
The Times
. Almost exactly reversing his previous stance, this new manifesto called for the full wartime mobilization of British scientists. Bernal wrote an editorial for
Nature
advocating the same policy. The Association of Scientific Workers, a white-collar trade union dominated by Marxists who improbably tried to identify university professors and Ph.D. scientists as members of the working class (Bernal had helped revitalize the group in the 1930s and Blackett would assume its vice presidency in 1939 and its presidency in 1943), likewise dropped its previous opposition to the application of science to war. The association adopted a resolution in November 1938 stating, “While we regard war as the supreme perversion of science, we regard anti-democratic movements as a threat to the very existence of science.… We draw attention to the fact that the most efficient utilisation of science in time of emergency necessitates in time of peace a much wider application of science to all productive forces and social services.”
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The Royal Society added its support for the compilation of a Central Register of British scientists who could be called upon to assist the war effort, a proposal quickly accepted by the government; some 7,000 scientists were enrolled, including 1,175 physicists.
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THE DEVELOPMENT OF
Britain’s radar defense system was meanwhile rapidly forging deeper ties between the scientists and the military. In the summer of 1936 Tizard began pressing the air force to conduct realistic trials of the entire fighter defense system to see how it would work in practice. He was acutely aware that the early warning provided by radar was only as good as the system for relaying, synthesizing, and acting on that information. The air force reluctantly agreed to the tests, even though they were a huge drain on manpower, equipment, and fuel at a time when there was little of any of those to spare.

The trials, based at Fighter Command’s Biggin Hill airfield just southeast of London, immediately showed that the procedures for filtering out contradictory
data, funneling reports to the relevant operations centers, plotting the tracks of enemy bombers, allocating targets to various fighter units, calculating the courses the fighters should be instructed to fly to intercept were—in Tizard’s words—“quite hopeless.”
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The 1936 tests were supposed to last a few months but instead went on for nearly two years. In the spring of 1938 more radar stations were coming online in the chain of stations being erected along Britain’s southern and eastern coasts, and the need for additional scientists who could help train operators and work out the kinks in the equipment was becoming all too apparent. Tizard invited John Cockcroft, a leading member of the Cavendish staff, to lunch at the Athenaeum Club in London and explained the situation. Cockcroft promptly agreed to help, and eighty physicists from the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester, Birmingham, and London, duly sworn to secrecy but unpaid, were enlisted to spend the long vacation in the summer of 1939 at the air force’s Bawdsey Research Station learning about radar.

Bawdsey, on the Suffolk coast near Felixstowe, was one of a number of bizarrely ornate nineteenth-century manor houses conscripted by the military for use in the war. Its grounds were the site of one of the radar stations of the Chain Home network, and it was chosen to be headquarters of the main radar research unit as well; Watson-Watt had been brought in as superintendent and A. P. Rowe as assistant superintendent. To both Tizard and Rowe it was manifest that the work on improving operational procedures of the radar defense system that had begun in the Biggin Hill trials needed to continue. Rowe assigned a small team under Eric C. Williams, who had been the first of the young scientists from a university to join the staff at Bawdsey, to analyze and compare the performance of the several control stations that had been established to see if he could determine what accounted for the differences in their ability to successfully intercept targets.
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This was something entirely new for scientists working for the military; as an “indirect but very real achievement” of the Tizard Committee, this new form of scientific-military cooperation would in retrospect rank in Blackett’s view as every bit as important as the invention of radar itself. Blackett had moved from London to the University of Manchester in 1937, taking his 11-ton magnet with him, but continued to play an active part in defense affairs through the Tizard Committee, which had now taken on a larger responsibility within the Air Ministry as reflected in its new name, the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Warfare. The Biggin Hill study, Blackett explained, was

The traditional military view was that the scientists’ role was to develop “weapons and gadgets,” hand them over, and that was that. But now scientists were intimately involved in what previously had been the exclusive purview of military commanders: the running of operations.

The mutual confidence forged in the process broke down barriers on both sides; “so that,” wrote Blackett, “when need arose, and it did arise very soon, many of the best academic research workers flocked out of the universities into radar stations, and later into service experimental establishments, where they became a vital part of the brilliantly creative, and sometimes obstreperous, teams, whose work had so profound an effect on the waging of the war.” He continued:

Rowe, sometime in 1937, came up with a name for this new kind of scientific investigation into the business of running a war: “operational research.” Williams’s group was entered on the organizational chart at Bawdsey as the “Operational Research Section.”
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IN THE SUMMER OF 1939
the final stations of the radar network were completed to form an unbroken sentry line, a chain of spidery steel towers
standing guard against the nightmare threat of Britain’s annihilation from the air by the Nazi war machine. Of the RAF’s thirty-five fighter squadrons available for the defense of the island, twenty-nine were now equipped with the new fast monoplane Spitfires and Hurricanes in place of the biplanes that had filled their ranks just a few years earlier. Blackett left for a vacation, renting a cottage for the first of many summers he would spend in a beautiful spot in the Welsh mountains where many other leftish intellectuals had vacation homes, Bertrand Russell the most notable. “In our Welsh cottages,” the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote many years later with a certain good-natured self-mockery, “we voluntarily lived under the sort of conditions we condemned capitalism for imposing on its exploited toilers.” (“How Left-Wing Was My Valley” was the title of his reminiscence.)
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In August, Blackett wrote from Wales to a scientific friend, Michael Polanyi, admitting he was stunned by the news that Stalin had just signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler—adding that Polanyi, who had never shared Blackett’s starry-eyed admiration for the Soviets, no doubt felt a certain degree of “Schadenfreude” over the anguish this act of Soviet expediency was causing the British left.
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By then appeasement was dead beyond all possible doubt, trampled by the long trail of German perfidy that reached its end with Hitler’s betrayal of his pledge given at Munich, in September 1938, that the absorption of German-speaking regions of Czechoslovakia was his “last territorial claim” upon Europe. Five months later, Hitler sent his troops to seize the rest of Czechoslovakia and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced that Britain was prepared to guarantee Poland’s security.

In response, Hitler denounced the Anglo-German Naval Treaty. “The basis for it has been removed,” he declared on April 28, 1939, in a long sarcastic speech to a snickering Reichstag in which he ridiculed a message from President Franklin D. Roosevelt seeking Germany’s assurances of her peaceful intentions toward her neighbors. But Hitler solemnly disavowed any German plans to attack Poland (such reports, he said, were “mere inventions of the international press”).
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The British prime minister had been genuinely shocked by Hitler’s betrayal of the Munich pact, and took it personally. “In spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face,” Chamberlain said, “I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.”
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ON THE EVE OF WAR
Britain’s naval experts remained serenely confident that the U-boat menace had been vanquished for good. “The submarine,” a 1937 British naval staff report concluded, “should never again be able to present us with the problem we were faced with in 1917.”
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Such confidence was the chief reason the Admiralty had been so untroubled at the prospect of Germany’s acquiring the force of fifty to sixty U-boats permitted her under the Anglo-German Naval Treaty.

There were two main arguments that led to this reassuring conclusion. One was convoys: however reluctant the Admiralty had been in first adopting the practice, their effectiveness in 1917 and 1918 had been so decisive as to remove all doubt. The naval staff had drawn up extensive contingency plans for taking over the control and movement of all merchant shipping should war come again, and by the summer of 1939 a Shipping Defence Advisory Committee had been meeting monthly with shipowners to work out the practical details.
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The other source of British confidence was asdic, or sonar as it was now known in America. British, French, and American scientists had all been working on the idea at the time of the Armistice. Hydrophones, underwater microphones that passively detected sounds beneath the surface, had been instrumental in only four kills of German submarines during the war, but asdic promised much better results. Like radar, asdic worked by transmitting
pulses of energy—high-pitched sound waves in the case of asdic—and then recording the time it took for an echo to return from a target; the longer the time, the greater its distance.

Had the war lasted another six months the system would have been ready for operational deployment on Royal Navy warships. The development of asdic had incidentally provided another example for Churchill’s belief that military heads required substantial knocking to get them to accept new ideas. The work had been shepherded by a board of civilian scientists set up by the Admiralty in July 1915—this was the group that Rutherford had been brought in to help with—and was headed by Churchill’s outspoken and like-minded ally Jacky Fisher. It was officially known as the Board of Invention and Research; Fisher’s many enemies among the regular navy’s tradition-minded officers called it the Board of Intrigue and Revenge. It earned little but suspicion and hostility at first. Nonetheless, the researchers made substantial progress in working out both the basic physical facts of undersea acoustics and the technology of a practical system for active detection of submarines by sound waves, and just before the end of the war the first prototype asdic set was fitted on a British research vessel for sea trials.

By 1921 senior naval officers were so enthusiastic about the new invention that they were convinced it had upended naval strategy altogether, pronouncing it an “epoch-making achievement” that would allow escorts to protect convoys on long passages through hostile waters and even permit the Royal Navy’s mighty surface ships to “keep to the sea as in the golden days,” rather than cowering in protected bases or skulking along behind a sprawling defensive screen of destroyers when they did sally forth. The standard asdic sets installed on British warships between the wars had a detection range of up to 5,000 yards and were equipped with a range recorder that used chemically treated paper, much like that of early facsimile machines, to draw a plot tracing the movement of a detected submarine.