Authors: Stephen Budiansky
Blackett's War (47 page)
But the glow soon began to fade there, too. In some ways operational research simply became a victim of its own success; ideas that had once been innovative and the special purview of scientifically trained consultants were now commonplace and part of what every business manager learned in MBA programs (as did every military officer at the service academies and war colleges).
24
Yet what was unique and valuable about the wartime operational researchers was in any event precisely that they were
not
professionals, and were doing something never done before. They were some of the most brilliant scientific minds of their generation, out not to make a career of advising the military but to win the war against Hitler. They brought a scientific outlook and a fresh eye to problems that had often been dealt with until then only by tradition, prejudice, or gut feeling.
As the official British history of the scientific contribution to the war observed, it was this more than anything that ultimately defeated Hitler, a man “who had a romantic view of war.… Hitler and his generals failed to produce any operational research comparable to the British development. If they had, they would probably have won the submarine campaign and the war.”
25
Few men did more to win that campaign, and that war, than Patrick Blackett, E. J. Williams, and Cecil Gordon. Even Air Marshal Slessor, who had made the crack about strategy by slide rule, paid them an unqualified tribute in a foreword to C. H. Waddington’s history of OR in Coastal Command:
A few years ago it would never have occurred to me—or I think to any officer of any fighting Service—that what the R.A.F. soon came to call a
“Boffin,” a gentleman in grey flannel bags, whose occupation in life had previously been something markedly unmilitary such as Biology or Physiology, would be able to teach us a great deal about our business. Yet so it was. No one who knows the true facts can have any doubt that a great deal of the credit for what is perhaps still not generally recognised as the resounding victory it was, namely the Battle of the Bay and the defeat of the U-boat in 1943, is due to men like Blackett, Williams, Larnder, Baughan, Easterfield and Waddington.
26
They did it by an abiding faith in rationality, a basic confidence in the enduring power of arithmetic and simple probability, and a determination to vanquish an evil that they took to heart as a personal duty. Their idealism was all of a piece. If their larger political views were at times utopian, those convictions welled from the same source of rationality, scientific thinking, and acute sense of responsibility for the injustices of the world.
As human beings they were prideful, touchy, opinionated, and sometimes mistaken, human failings too widespread to merit much condemnation. They were also selfless, incorruptible, and absolutely determined to let the facts lead where they will and damn the consequences, human virtues so rare as to seem, at times, almost otherworldly to the men burdened by politics and plans and career ambitions, to whom they showed the way to victory.
Abbreviations
| AAF | Army Air Forces |
| AIP | American Institute of Physics, Emilio Segrè Visual Archives (College Park, Md.) |
| A/S | Anti-submarine |
| ASV | Anti–Surface Vessel radar |
| ASW | Antisubmarine Warfare |
| ASWORG | Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group |
| CSAWG | Cambridge Scientists’ Anti-War Group |
| CSSAW | Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Warfare |
| DF | Direction Finding |
| GC&CS | Government Code and Cypher School |
| IWM | Imperial War Museum (London, U.K.) |
| NARA | National Archives and Records Administration (College Park, Md.) |
| NDRC | National Defense Research Committee |
| NSA | National Security Agency |
| ONI | Office of Naval Intelligence |
| ORS | Operational Research Section |
| PRO | Public Record Office, The National Archives of the United Kingdom (Kew, U.K.) |
| VLR | Very Long Range aircraft |
1.
King-Hall,
North Sea Diary
, 229–30.
2.
“Twenty U Boats Given Up,”
The Times
, November 21, 1918; King-Hall,
North Sea Diary
, 231.
3.
King-Hall,
North Sea Diary
, 232–35, 237–38, 241–42.
4.
Tarrant,
U-Boat Offensive
, 77.
5.
“Deutschland in the Thames,”
The Times
, October 14, 1919.
6.
Sueter,
Evolution of the Submarine
, 36–38.
7.
Budiansky,
Perilous Fight
, 249.
8.
“The Escaped Fenians in New-York,”
New York Times
, August 20, 1876.
9.
Whitman, “Holland”; Morris,
Holland
, 29–42, 50.
10.
Morris,
Holland
, 37.
11.
Ibid., 46–47.
12.
Senate,
Submarine Boat Holland
, 5.
13.
Sueter,
Evolution of the Submarine
, 294–95, 303.
14.
Ibid., 326–28.
15.
Senate,
Submarine Boat Holland
, 6–11.
16.
Scheer,
High Sea Fleet
, 12–14; Manchester,
Last Lion
, 1:433–35.
17.
Van der Vat,
Atlantic Campaign
, 37.
18.
Tarrant,
U-Boat Offensive
, 169–70.
19.
Ibid., 7.
20.
Ibid., 12.
21.
Scheer,
High Sea Fleet
, 36.
22.
Ibid., 222–23.
23.
Scott, ed.,
Diplomatic Correspondence
, 45.
24.
Bell,
Blockade of Germany
, 423.
25.
Churchill,
World Crisis
, 70.
26.
Davies, “Selborne Scheme,” 19–23.
27.
Manchester,
Last Lion
, 1:437–38, 443; Massie,
Dreadnought
, 405, 408.
28.
Davies, “Selborne Scheme,” 24, 26, 32–33; Hore, “Blackett at Sea,” 55.
1.
“Biographical Notes,” Blackett Papers, PB 1/10A; Stevenson,
British Society
, 32–34.
2.
Nye,
Blackett
, 16.
3.
Blackett, “Education of an Agnostic,” 296.
4.
“Biographical Notes,” Blackett Papers, PB 1/10A.
5.
Nye,
Blackett
, 17; Lovell, “Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett,” 3; Alastair Graham to P. M. S. Blackett, November 23, 1967, Blackett Papers, PB 1/11.
6.
Hore, “Blackett at Sea,” 56–64.
7.
Budiansky,
Battle of Wits
, 49–50.
8.
Blackett,
Studies of War
, 27.
9.
“Extracts from Diary Kept from 1914 to 1916,” pp. 3–5, Blackett Papers, PB 1/10A.
10.
Gilbert,
First World War
, 252.
11.
Ibid., 259.
12.
Ibid., 257.
13.
Shackleton,
South
, 208.
14.
Wells,
Autobiography
, 569.
15.
Churchill,
Early Life
, 65.
16.
Gilbert,
First World War
, 256.
17.
Scott, ed.,
Diplomatic Correspondence
, 92.
18.
Scheer,
High Sea Fleet
, 248–52.
19.
Padfield,
Dönitz
, 10–12, 19–20, 23, 27.
20.
Ibid., 53–54, 56, 78; Scheer,
High Sea Fleet
, 253–54.
21.
Sims,
Victory at Sea
, 3–4, 7–10.
22.
Tarrant,
U-Boat Offensive
, 40; Sims,
Victory at Sea
, 106–11.
23.
Sims,
Victory at Sea
, 102–3; Tarrant,
U-Boat Offensive
, 51.
24.
Van der Vat,
Atlantic Campaign
, 61–63; Lloyd George,
War Memoirs
, 3:93.
25.
Dönitz,
Memoirs
, 4.
26.
Tarrant,
U-Boat Offensive
, 69.
27.
Terraine,
To Win a War
, 180–84.
28.
Ibid., 199, 213.
29.
Ibid., 236–37.
30.
Ibid., 219, 232
n
67.
31.
Shirer,
Rise and Fall
, 31–32.
1.
Brown, “Blackett at Cambridge,” 97–98.
2.
“Professor the Lord Blackett, O.M.,” typescript of article for Magdalene College Magazine by “I.A.R.” [Ivor A. Richards], Blackett Papers, PB 1/3.
3.
Blackett, “Boy Blackett,” 11–12.
4.
H. E. Piggott to Blackett, February 25, 1957, Blackett Papers, PB 1/11.
5.
Cathcart,
Fly in the Cathedral
, 20.
6.
Rhodes,
Making of the Atomic Bomb
, 36, 49–50.
7.
Clark,
Rise of the Boffins
, 8.
8.
Cathcart,
Fly in the Cathedral
, 10–11; Oliphant,
Rutherford
, 19.
9.
Brown, “Blackett at Cambridge,” 109
n
18.
10.
Quoted in ibid., 106.
11.
Slatterly, “Postprandial Proceedings. I,” 180.
12.
Cathcart,
Fly in the Cathedral
, 112–16.
13.
Williamson, ed.,
Making of Physicists
, 57.
14.
Blackett, “Boy Backett,” 9.
15.
Brown, “Blackett at Cambridge,” 101.
16.
“Professor the Lord Blackett, O.M.,” Blackett Papers, PB 1/3; Zuckerman,
Six Men
, 13.
17.
Bullard, “Blackett.”
18.
Cathcart,
Fly in the Cathedral
, 42–43.
19.
Ibid., 21–22, 115–16; Rhodes,
Making of the Atomic Bomb
, 46, 157.
20.
Nye,
Blackett
, 173.
21.
Brown, “Blackett at Cambridge,” 102.
22.
Blackett, “Wilson,” 270–71.
23.
Brown, “Blackett at Cambridge,” 102.
24.
Lovell, “Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett,” 12; Bullard, “Blackett.”
25.
Lovell, “Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett,” 6–10; Brown, “Blackett at Cambridge,” 102–3.
26.
Bullard, “Blackett”; Zuckerman,
Six Men
, 17.
27.
Bullard noted that when teased by left-wing friends about accepting a peerage late in life, Blackett riposted that at least he had remained “Mr. Blackett” throughout his working life.
28.
Nye,
Blackett
, 27.
29.
Lovell, “Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett,” 11.
30.
G. P. S. Occhialini, in Hodgkin et al., “Blackett Memorial,” 145.
31.
Ibid., 16, 25.
32.
Lovell, “Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett,” 76.
33.
Wohl,
Generation of 1914
, 223.
34.
Sassoon,
Siegfried’s Journey
, 160.
35.
Stevenson,
British Society
, 103–7.
36.
Graves and Hodge,
Long Week-End
, 16.
37.
August,
Working Class
, 178–80, 184; Stevenson,
British Society
, 267.
38.
Roberts,
A Woman’s Place
, 95.
39.
Quoted in Wohl,
Generation of 1914
, 292–93n36.
40.
Stevenson,
British Society
, 332–33, 415; Graves and Hodge,
Long Week-End
, 42.
41.
“The Art of the Jazz,”
The Times
, January 14, 1919; “Jazz Dancing—a Canon’s Denunciation,”
The Times
, March 15, 1919.
42.
“Better Plays,”
The Times
, August 22, 1919; “A New Shylock,”
The Times
, October 10, 1919.
43.
Wohl,
Generation of 1914
, 105, 115–16.
44.
Stevenson,
British Society
, 95.
45.
Manchester,
Last Lion
, 1:791–804; Nye,
Blackett
, 26; “Rush to Aid Government,”
New York Times
, May 4, 1926; “Both Sides Are Obstinate,”
New York Times
, May 7, 1926.
46.
Werskey,
Visible College
, 250; Nye,
Blackett
, 31.
47.
Werskey,
Visible College
, 215–16.
48.
Blackett, “Frustration of Science,” 129.
49.
Ibid., 137, 144.
50.
Nye,
Blackett
, 27–28; Zuckerman,
Six Men
, 18; Cathcart,
Fly in the Cathedral
, 121.
51.
Wohl,
Generation of 1914
, 234.
52.
Manchester,
Last Lion
, 2:60–63; Corum,
Luftwaffe
, 76, 115–17.
53.
Padfield,
Dönitz
, 107–9.
54.
Ibid., 96.
55.
Ibid., 101, 111; van der Vat,
Atlantic Campaign
, 83–86.
