Blackett's War (26 page)

He encountered mixed results throughout the war trying to teach military officers such basic realities of probability and statistics. Another time, when he tried to explain that success in most operations is the sum of many attempts whose individual probability of success may be small, he was accosted a few days later by the pleased officer. “I say, Blackett,” the officer began, “I am so glad you explained to me all about probability. As soon as the war is over I am going straight to Monte Carlo and then I really will win.”
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THROUGHOUT THE FALL
of 1940 the U-boat onslaught continued. On September 20, Kapitänleutnant Prien intercepted HX 72, a convoy of forty-one ships steaming from Halifax. BdU ordered in reinforcements, and over two nights the assembled wolf pack sank eleven ships in wave after wave of relentless torpedo attacks, many delivered at point-blank range. On October 17, SC 7, a convoy from Sydney, Cape Breton, consisting of thirty-five slow freighters barely able to make 7 knots, was beset by a pack of seven U-boats that proceeded to sink twenty of them, a shocking and demoralizing toll. “The danger of Great Britain being destroyed by a swift, overwhelming blow has for the time being very greatly receded,” Churchill wrote Roosevelt in early December. “In its place there is a long, gradually maturing danger, less sudden and less spectacular, but equally deadly. This mortal danger is the steady and increasing diminution of sea tonnage.” He warned that “the crunch of the whole war” was the Atlantic Ocean: “The decision for 1941 lies upon the seas.”
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In an attempt to breathe some life into the foundering anti-U-boat campaign, the War Cabinet decided to transfer operational control of RAF Coastal Command to the Admiralty. The new commander was Air Marshal Sir Philip Joubert de la Ferté, the assistant chief of the air staff, who was keenly aware of the success of radar in the Battle of Britain—and equally, the lack of any truly effective means yet for attacking U-boats from the air. He asked if Blackett could be transferred to his new command to tackle these urgent problems. In March 1941, with a salary of £1,000 a year that the Treasury deemed “appropriate to outside scientists of distinction employed in special posts,” Blackett became head of the new Operational Research Section, Coastal Command. “They have stolen my magician,” lamented Pile.
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ONE OF THE FIRST SCIENTISTS
Blackett brought in to work with him at Coastal Command was E. J. Williams, a thirty-eight-year-old Welshman whose fierce bushy eyebrows and short, stocky, powerful build made his colleagues agree that he looked more like a wrestler than a physicist.

Growing up in the village of Cwmsychpant in the heart of rural Wales, he had spoken Welsh at home and did not learn English until age five. His father, a master stonemason, “possessed in full degree the passion for education which is so marked a feature of the Welsh people,” Blackett would later write. On the wall of the Williams home hung a sampler embroidered by his mother with the words of a Welsh proverb,
Gwell Dysg Golud
, “Better Learning Than Riches.” One evening in 1919, shortly after graduating from high school, Williams saw a notice in the local newspaper announcing four open scholarships at Swansea Technical College. The examination was the next day and the last train was gone, but Williams talked his brother into driving him the fifty miles on his motorcycle. He won the scholarship. Around this time he announced to a friend that he intended to win an 1851 Exhibition fellowship just as Rutherford had, attain a doctorate in physics, and be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society while still in his thirties. All had subsequently happened. Williams spent 1933 in Copenhagen working with Niels Bohr. At Manchester and the Cavendish Laboratory he carried out a series of theoretical and experimental studies on cloud chamber tracks that
documented the discrepancies between classical and quantum mechanics in atomic collisions.

Suffering, Blackett thought, from “crippling inhibitions” that prevented him from forming any truly close friendships, Williams tended to veer from shyness to argumentativeness; he had a “wildness and unexpectedness in his behavior” that would burst out in startling ways with those he got to know. He drove a car, Blackett said, “with a complete disregard of the laws of dynamics.” Another friend recalled that his sense of time “was practically non-existent.” Williams would not uncommonly work until three or four in the morning and then phone a friend excitedly, only to be overwhelmed with remorse upon discovering he had awakened his victim.
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Blackett had brought Williams to the Royal Aircraft Establishment in early 1940 to work on a magnetic detection device for submarines, an idea that had been discussed at the Tizard Committee a few months earlier. In a short time Williams built a prototype airborne sensor, and for the first test Blackett and Williams loaded it aboard an Anson patrol plane and had the pilot buzz the large metal airplane sheds at Farnborough at a few hundred feet to see if it could detect their magnetic gradient. The device worked in principle, and the advantage of magnetic detection of a submerged submarine was that magnetic fields were unaffected by water—unlike radio waves, which was why radar could not be used beneath the surface. The trouble was that magnetic gradients dropped off with distance to the fifth power, so for practical purposes a metallic object the size of a submarine could not be detected more than 200 or 300 feet away. (American scientists were at the same time developing a different approach to magnetic detection that would prove more feasible and lead to the device known as the magnetic anomaly detector, which would play a role in the fight against the U-boats later in the war.)

Under Blackett’s direction at Coastal Command, Williams now began work on what would subsequently become the single most cited example of operational research applied to war. When Blackett arrived at the command in March 1941 it was just beginning to receive aircraft and weapons that had a prayer of doing actual damage to a U-boat. At the start of the war the standard antisubmarine aircraft was the obsolete Anson, a forty-two-foot-long light transport plane whose only tangible contribution to the war effort would be as a trainer for bomber crews. The Anson could carry two 100-pound bombs and had a useful range from shore of roughly 250 miles at best. “Indeed the primary role of Coastal Command was reconnaissance
and squadrons engaged in anti-submarine war were mainly intended to shadow and report the presence of U-boats to base and the Naval forces in the area,” a 1944 Coastal Command lecture acknowledged.
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The situation was so desperate at the start of the war that in December 1939 the command took to sending unarmed “scarecrow” patrols of open-cockpit Tiger Moth biplane trainers and Hornet Moth touring planes over the coasts for a few months in the hopes of forcing U-boats to waste time by submerging. Coastal Command had since replaced the Ansons with Hudson, Whitley, and Wellington twin-engine medium bombers and a small number of Sunderland flying boats, and was now, in 1941, receiving the first of the promised help from America of longer range Catalina flying boats and four-engine B-24 Liberators.

Frustrations with the ineffective 100-pound antisubmarine bombs had continued. Someone finally had the wit to consult British submariners about their own experiences on the receiving end of German air attacks. An August 18, 1940, memorandum noted that even near misses from bombs failed to do any serious damage; only in the case of a direct hit on a surfaced submarine could an attacker hope to inflict a lethal blow with an air-dropped bomb. “This itself is unlikely,” the memorandum noted, “as any well trained submarine will be at least at 30’ when the bomb is dropped”—having initiated a crash dive as soon as the approaching aircraft was spotted.

By contrast, a series of “disastrous” German air attacks on British submarines off Norway were almost certainly due to air-dropped depth charges, “of which our submarines have almost positive evidence.”
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Because of the dangers of the aircraft being hit by the blast from its own bomb, antisubmarine bombs had to be dropped from at least several hundred feet. There were no low-level bombsights, and accuracy was poor. A depth charge, by contrast, could be dropped from a plane just skimming the surface. That month Coastal Command acquired 700 of the navy’s Mark VII 450-pound depth charges, hastily adapted with fins and a rounded nose fairing for aircraft use.

Still, as the British aviation historian Alfred Price concluded, “During 1940 aircraft had caused no more than a mild harassment to enemy submarines.”
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Pressure was mounting to produce results. U-boats, mines, surface raiders, and the Luftwaffe’s four-engine Focke-Wulf 200 Condor bombers, based in France, together destroyed a half million tons of shipping in March 1941. The average number of U-boats at sea in the Atlantic and Mediterranean on any one day continued to mount steadily, reaching almost twenty
in April and nearly double that by summer 1941. Since the start of the war, losses to Allied and neutral shipping had consistently outstripped the pace of new construction; the 40 million tons of shipping capacity available in 1939 had been whittled down to 35 million. “My thought had rested day and night upon this awe-striking problem,” Churchill later wrote. “This mortal danger to our life-lines gnawed my bowels.” On March 6 he issued a “Battle of the Atlantic Directive” ordering commanders “to take the offensive against the U-boat” and began convening weekly meetings of a cabinet-level Battle of the Atlantic Committee. The transfer of Coastal Command to Admiralty control was part of the shake-up, as was the relocation of Western Approaches Command from Plymouth to Liverpool, where it would be closer to the center of action in the war between the convoys and their attackers.

Churchill worked out a budget allocating available shipping to Britain’s vital needs—it reminded him, he said, of the chancellor of the exchequer’s exercise of allocating government funds to the various departments—and the outlook was, he told an aide, “terrifying.” The country needed 35 million tons of imports a year; if imports fell under 31 million tons, cuts in food supplies would be unavoidable. For the first few months of 1941 imports were running at an annual rate of 28 million tons. Each day Churchill received a report on the latest shipping statistics. He would write in his memoirs of this period in early March 1941, “How willingly would I have exchanged a full-scale attempt at invasion for this shapeless, measureless peril, expressed in charts, curves, and statistics!”
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Rationing of food was tightened. A plan for communal canteens, much like that proposed in Zuckerman’s left-wing scientific manifesto, was implemented to help stretch supplies; though Churchill, characteristically, instructed his minister of food, “I hope the term ‘Communal Feedings Centres’ is not going to be adopted. It is an odious expression, suggestive of Communism and the workhouse. I suggest you call them ‘British Restaurants.’ Everybody associates the word ‘restaurant’ with a good meal, and they may as well have the name if they cannot get anything else.”
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The prime ministerial attention to the U-boat problem was as usual a mixed blessing. There were signs, however, that even Churchill was beginning to weary of Lindemann’s enthusiasm for clever gadgets and wonder weapons. In April his pet scientist sent the prime minister his latest brainstorm for yet another fantastic invention, this one to detect submerged submarines: an airplane or destroyer would drop a large number of tiny
magnets fitted with electric lights or self-igniting gas that would glow when they stuck to a metallic object. Churchill impatiently wrote back, “This seems to be rather far-fetched. If the aeroplanes or destroyers were as close to the submarine as necessary it would surely be better to throw explosives by bomb or depth-charge.”
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With an entire war to run, Churchill was finding he had bigger problems to worry about than the Prof’s clever toys.

BLACKETT HAD LONG SINCE
concluded that the way scientists could really improve things was not by trying to invent new tools anyway but by figuring out how to better use the tools already in hand. He set down his philosophy in a presentation on operational research he gave to an Admiralty panel later that year. Reprinted subsequently many times, “Scientists at the Operational Level” would become a sort of Magna Carta of operational research, and the crux of it was a plea to get scientists out of the laboratory and into operational units where they could do more good: