In terms of propaganda, however, there was to be a sea-change in attitude within ten years of the Armistice. Many of the claims of German atrocities and barbarism were rapidly discredited. Arthur Ponsonby argued in Falsehood in Wartime, a highly influential book published in 1924, that British propaganda had repeatedly lied to the people, especially about the atrocities. Ex-soldiers wrote about the contrast they felt between life at the front, where many of them grew to respect their enemy, and the hysterical anti-German mood they found when they came home on leave.31 But, elsewhere, very different conclusions were drawn from the use of propaganda in the First World War.
The Germans continued to argue that British propaganda had been used very successfully against them. The German War Minister, General von Stein, said that ‘In propaganda the enemy is undoubtedly our superior.’ General Ludendorff, commander-in-chief on the Western Front in 1918, wrote in his memoirs:
We were hypnotised by Allied propaganda as a rabbit is by a snake. It was exceptionally clever and conceived on a grand scale … many people were no longer able to distinguish their own impressions from what enemy propaganda had told them … with the disappearance of our moral readiness to fight everything changed completely. We no longer battled to the last drop of our blood. Many Germans were no longer willing to die for their country … The attack on our home front and on the spirit of the Army was the chief weapon with which the Entente intended to conquer us, after it had lost all hope of a military victory.32
What this demonstrates is the beginning of the argument that the German army was stabbed in the back in November 1918 by the collapse of morale at home. This was a theme later picked up and exploited powerfully by Adolf Hitler, who wrote in Mein Kampf of ‘the very real genius of British propaganda’. Part of Hitler’s appeal derived from his claim that Germany had not lost the war on the battlefield but the German people had been betrayed by the demoralised peacemakers at home. In Nazi Germany these lessons would not be forgotten. Joseph Goebbels at the Propaganda Ministry in the late 1930s would take the science of propaganda to new heights, introducing radio and sound films to create one of the most powerful propaganda campaigns of the century.
On the other hand, in Britain, propaganda became a dirty word. The falsehoods that had been put out, and the lies that had been believed, greatly discredited its use. There was a continuing belief in some of the methods used successfully in 1918, so that for several months at the start of the Second World War the RAF dropped on Germany nothing but millions of leaflets. But there was a big difference between the mood of imperial Germany at the end of a long, exhausting war, and that of Nazi Germany where people felt buoyant and supreme at the start of another. This time the leaflets were completely ignored. Equally, the Second World War Ministry of Information put a lot of emphasis on film, as it had been so effective in the First. As a consequence, film-makers like Humphrey Jennings and Harry Watt produced some great film classics. But more profoundly, the pendulum had swung. If they thought it was propaganda, British people no longer believed what they were being told. When genuine atrocities, such as the Nazis’ gassing and burning of millions of innocent civilians in the extermination camps, were revealed, many therefore dismissed them as alarmist propaganda. One of the cruel ironies of propaganda in the twentieth century was that people readily believed what was false and sometimes disregarded what was dreadful but true.
Epilogue:
The First Boffins
The work done by the scientists and mavericks called on to contribute to the progress of the war between 1914 and 1918 would help lay the foundations for much scientific and technological progress in the following decades. Some of these changes would no doubt have happened anyway. Others were very much a consequence of a war which, as so often in history, brought about immense technological developments.
For instance, the world of aviation had been transformed. In 1914, the armed services possessed 272 aircraft. By 1918, the RAF had over 22,000 machines. Aircraft powered by engines of only a few horsepower that were blown backwards in the face of a heavy wind in 1914, had developed by 1918 into formidable flying machines with engines of 250–350 hp. The four-engined Handley Page bombers designed to bomb Berlin drew on a total of 1500 hp, had a wingspan of 126ft, could carry 7500 lb of bombs and remain airborne for seventeen hours.
After the war, the heavy bombers were adapted for civilian use and helped to create a new industry. In June 1919, Captain John Alcock and navigator Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown made the first pioneering flight across the Atlantic in a converted Vickers bomber. After sixteen hours struggling with bad weather and the difficulty of navigating across a featureless sea, they came down in an Irish bog near Clifden on the coast of County Galway In that same year the first regular aviation service in Europe started between London and Paris using a converted Handley Page bomber carrying ten passengers. Later in the year direct flights to Brussels began. Soon a host of small airlines were flying converted bombers around Britain and Europe.
In 1924 the government brought several of these airlines together in Imperial Airways, which was tasked with developing air links between Britain and the empire. Five years later the first passenger service from London to Karachi was inaugurated in a flying boat built by Short Brothers, a company that had been in at the beginning of flying in Britain, at their base in Rochester, Kent. Before long, small groups of passengers were flying on routes across the Mediterranean, over the Pyramids, then either south across the savannahs of Kenya to South Africa, or east across the desert of Iraq to India and all the way to Australia. By the 1930s, Imperial Airways had become a by-word for luxury. The cabins of their Short flying boats were beautifully furnished, while barmen from top London clubs would mix cocktails for passengers about to be served meals freshly cooked in a galley kitchen in true silver service on laundered linen tablecloths. It was a long way from John Moore-Brabazon bouncing across a field in Kent at fifty feet, followed by his dog, only thirty years before.
Radio technology had improved consistently through the war. Although there had been no revolutionary advances, there were considerable developments in the use of thermionic valve transmitters; more importantly, a huge number of servicemen in the army, navy and air force had become proficient in the use of wireless technology. When peace came, a group of enthusiasts argued that this technology could be put to new uses to communicate music and information to audiences across large areas. As a result, in October 1922, an alliance of manufacturing companies including Marconi, Metropolitan Vickers and the General Electric Company came together with the General Post Office to form a new organisation with the purpose of broadcasting an experimental service. Transmitting from a station known as 2LO, based in Marconi House on the Strand in London, it was called the British Broadcasting Company. As transmissions improved, so listeners around the country began to tune in, many of them ex-servicemen who built their own receivers from crystal kits. Meanwhile, the first large ‘wireless’ sets were mass produced for the domestic market. It was soon clear that the experiment had been a success and that there was a national market for a broadcast service. A series of government committees explored how to bring this about and under the guiding hand of the first powerful and dominating general manager, John Reith, the government decided to re-form the organisation without the commercial interests. Renamed the British Broadcasting Corporation, it went on air on 1 January 1927 as a public broadcaster established under a Royal Charter and funded by a licence fee to be paid by everyone who had a wireless set.
A completely new medium of mass communication thus came into being. Within three years the BBC was broadcasting a national programme from London and a regional service from other cities around the country, and by the 1930s the BBC had become a much-loved public institution. Whole families would gather around the wireless to listen to popular broadcasts of music programmes, talks and entertainment, or, at times of crisis, to the nine o’clock evening news. By the Second World War, 23 million Britons liste
ned regularly to the BBC radio news. A new cultural force had been created out of the remnants of the electronics technology of the Great War.
In Britain, the foundations of a new chemical industry had been established during the war from the need to develop antiseptics, home-grown explosives, poison gases and compounds such as acetone. In 1926 four large companies including the descendant of British Dyes, created by the Ministry of Munitions during the war, came together in a merger to form Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). For many decades this was to be the largest manufacturing company in Britain, and in addition to its continuing association with explosives, it produced a broad range of products including fertilisers, insecticides, dyes, artificial fibres and paints. The company continued to come up with new products into the 1930s; among these innovations were perspex, polyethylene and, at the end of the decade, nylon. From 1931, in association with DuPont, ICI produced the alkyd and polyester based paint known as Dulux and created a new advertising jingle, ‘Say Dulux to your decorator’.
In the United States, developments in these parallel fields were determined entirely by entrepreneurs in the marketplace. Juan Trippe founded Pan American Airways as a private company and built up a network first linking Latin and South America and then extending around the globe. In broadcasting, advertising revenues funded vast new communication empires like the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), which were soon making huge profits and were quite different organisations to the BBC. In the chemical industry, American companies eclipsed the German pre-war giants and emerged as the biggest global players. But in post-war Britain the state played a role in encouraging developments in the country’s newest industries: civil aviation, broadcasting and electronic goods, and chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Wartime controls and attitudes were becoming a permanent feature of government. William Beveridge, then a newly appointed official at the Board of Trade, wrote, ‘We have … under the stress of war made practical discoveries in the art of government almost comparable to the immense discoveries made at the same time in the art of flying.’1
Meanwhile, a generation of doctors and nurses had seen more injuries and treated more wounds and trauma in four years than had their predecessors in a lifetime. The process of blood transfusion developed on the battlefield by Canadian and Australian doctors came into regular use, while the chemical and pharmaceutical industries started marketing new drugs. Alexander Fleming’s experience with antiseptics at the Base Hospital in Boulogne helped him with the discovery of penicillin. Psychology became a mainstream subject of study, and work was done on exploring the subconscious and the libido. Having advanced the new form of treatment known as plastic surgery, Harold Gillies in the inter-war years developed this further to make available for wealthy clients cosmetic surgery of various types; he even carried out the first gender reassignment surgery.2 A report of the Medical Research Committee concluded that the war had been ‘a great stimulus’ providing ‘unequalled opportunities for study and research, of which the outcome may bring lasting benefits to the whole future population’.3
Behind the closed doors of Whitehall, the code breaking performed under the auspices of the Admiralty in Room 40 was transferred in 1922 to the Foreign Office, which somewhat reluctantly picked up the mantle of reading other nations’ cables and signals. The Government Code and Cypher School created by the Admiralty at the end of the war continued to monitor the activities of the nation’s enemies, and also those of many of its friends. With war clouds gathering in the late 1930s it was decided to relocate the school from central London to a larger and more suitable base outside the capital, and officials found a country house near a railway line with good links into London. In 1939, the school moved to Bletchley Park and thereby into a new and even more distinguished phase of intelligence gathering, code breaking and technological development that ultimately ushered in the computer age.
After the Second World War, the Code and Cypher School continued its top secret work of monitoring communications but was renamed the Government Communications Headquarters or GCHQ. During the Cold War a close link was formally established between GCHQ and the National Security Agency in the USA, a link that was only publicly disclosed in 2011. The incredible revelations in the internet age of the scale of government surveillance on both sides of the Atlantic thus have a direct lineage from the pioneering code breaking work in Room 40 of the Admiralty, through the Government Code and Cypher School to Bletchley Park and then to GCHQ. The legacy of the signals intelligence work that produced such extraordinary breakthroughs in the First World War is the technology behind today’s surveillance state.
In all of these fields, the role of science would gain a higher profile in the Second World War, when the public became more aware of the work done by the ‘boffins’, a word unknown in the Great War but one that became popular in the Second. The term ‘boffin’ initially appeared in RAF slang as an affectionate word for the scientists who worked quietly in the background to develop new military technologies. They were also known as the ‘backroom boys’. The word boffin was first used to refer to the civilian scientists who came up with the concept of radar, but came to have a much broader meaning and to include servicemen as well as civilians. The word also carried with it associations of eccentricity and unusual behaviour, of someone labouring long and hard in secret to invent devices incomprehensible to most people but which had revolutionary military applications.
The origins of the word ‘boffin’ are obscure. There was a strange character in the Dickens novel Our Mutual Friend called Nicodemus Boffin, while jokes abounded that the word represented the offspring of two unusual creatures, a puffin and a baffin. However, it was more likely to have begun as an acronym for the words ‘back office intern’. During the Second World War most of the boffins were unknown, working quietly behind the scenes and recognised only by their peers. But three boffins did achieve fame during that war, becoming household names and popularising the role of the wartime scientist to a wider public. And all three men had done important pioneering work during the First World War, early in their careers. Their stories provide an illustration of the link between the little-known work of the Great War scientists and the better-known achievements of the Second World War boffins.
Frederick Lindemann was probably the most famous scientist of the Second World War, and also the most controversial. In true eccentric form, he always appeared wearing a bowler hat and a long black Melton coat, carrying an umbrella whenever he went outside, in winter or summer, rain or shine. Universally known simply as ‘the Prof, he was a close friend and confidant of Winston Churchill and in May 1940, when Churchill entered Downing Street, he appointed Lindemann as head of his Statistical Office. Lindemann became what today would be called a ‘special adviser’, although the term was not then in use. Acting for Churchill like the head of an independent think tank, Lindemann had a roving commission to dig into any aspect of the wartime government and administration. He met with Churchill almost daily, advising him on scientific matters, military issues of all sorts, logistical problems, and the economy. Most weekends, Lindemann joined Churchill and his entourage at Chequers. And he sometimes accompanied Churchill when he travelled abroad.
Lindemann had been born in Baden-Baden to a German father from the Alsace border region and a half-American mother. But his parents lived in England, where his father, a successful businessman and part-time scientist of distinction, had settled and was later naturalised. Lindemann grew up in Sidmouth, Devon where he learned to love the English countryside. From his early years he developed a formidable memory for numbers and was supposedly able to recite the number pi (π) to 300 decimal points. In 1900, aged thirteen, he and his brother were sent to Darmstadt in Germany to finish their education and he went on to enter one of Germany’s superb technical universities, a Technische Hochschule, where he began to excel at science. While there he also became a tennis champion; mixing in high social circles, he played tennis w
ith both the Kaiser and, on one of his visits to the town, with the Tsar. In 1908, the young Lindemann went to Berlin, the scientific capital of the world at the time, as research student to the great German scientist Walther Nernst. In Berlin, Nernst introduced Lindemann to many of the scientific luminaries of his day, including Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Marie Curie. He performed important research for Nernst on specific heat, calculating the amount of energy needed to increase one gram of several different substances by one degree centigrade. From the results it was possible to gain an important understanding of the substances’ atomic structures. His work for Nernst brought him international acclaim and invitations to lecture in Britain, France and America.
Lindemann had spent fourteen years in Germany when the prospect of war suddenly interrupted his life in the summer of 1914. He was playing in an international tennis championships at Zoppot on the Baltic and had just qualified for the finals when, to avoid being interned, he returned to England immediately in order to reclaim the British side of his character. As Europe divided he seems to have had no hesitation about asserting his British identity. Within weeks he had offered his services to the War Office and the Admiralty but received no reply from either. In March 1915, Mervyn O’Gorman at the Royal Aircraft Factory in Farnborough asked him to join a group of young scientists to continue the scientific work on aeronautics started by the Advisory Committee before the war. But since he had spent so many years in Germany, questions were raised about Lindemann’s nationality and his loyalty to Britain. Amid the prevailing hysteria, some of his colleagues even privately feared at first that Lindemann was a German spy in their midst. Shaken by this, he was thereafter rather cagey about his background and was always keen to prove himself as more British than the next man.
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