The committee consulted Watson-Watt, who recalled stories of GPO engineers recording that their high-frequency radio signals were disrupted when an aircraft flew overhead. Using the cathode ray oscilloscope as a visual display, Watson-Watt laid on a demonstration to show how radio signals bounced back after they had hit a metal object like an aeroplane and how this could be measured to identify the position of the distant aircraft. In a single four-page memo to the committee in February 1935, he outlined the basis of radio direction finding, later to be known by the American term radar.
A group of talented young scientists working for him, first at Orford Ness and then at Bawdsey Manor on the Suffolk coast, began to develop the increasingly efficient use of radar, which was later called ‘the invention that changed the world’.15 By 1940 the radar shield known as the Chain Home system had been constructed along the east coast of Britain from the Orkneys to the Isle of Wight. Put in place in the nick of time, the system enabled the RAF to defend the country in what became a turning point of the Second World War, the Battle of Britain. Watson-Watt has been described as the ‘father of radar’ and after the war he was given a substantial financial award for his invention. To twist Churchill’s well-known phrase, never in the field of human history has so much been owed by so many to such a tiny number of boffins.
There were other fields in which research carried out in the First World War laid the foundations for the innovations of the Second. One of the most interesting is what later became known as operational research (known in America as operations research). Archibald Vivian Hill was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1914, a young scientist who in the four years before the war had done important work in the university’s Physiological Laboratory on heat production in nerves and muscles during contractions. Using mathematical formulae for analysing his research, he helped to promote the new science called biophysics. He became world famous for this and after the war, in 1922, was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work. In 1914 he joined the army and became a captain in the Cambridgeshire Regiment, but the following year he was put in charge of an Anti-Aircraft Experimental Station under the aegis of the Ministry of Munitions. He recruited several other young scientists to work with him, among them R.H. Fowler and E.A. Milne, both of whom went on to become distinguished Fellows of the Royal Society. Analysing a variety of different techniques for targeting antiaircraft guns in order to assess which had greater accuracy, and looking at the optimum layout for the guns to maximise the concentration of fire, they used mathematics to observe, assess, review and ultimately to improve military operations.
In the next war a group of boffins would build on this use of mathematics in the field of military problem solving. Among them was Professor Patrick Blackett, a seventeen-year-old naval cadet in 1914 who went on to serve in the navy during the Great War, taking part in the Battle of Jutland and later inventing a new gunnery device for the navy. After the war he went up to Cambridge where he worked with Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory and, specialising in quantum mechanics, helped to build the new science of nuclear physics. During the Second World War he was to establish the discipline of operational research as a tool for improving military techniques. Initially called in to help improve the accuracy of antiaircraft guns in the Battle of Britain, he worked afterwards for both the RAF and the Admiralty. Tall, striking and with a natural flair for inspiring those with whom he worked, he surrounded himself with a team of young physicists and mathematicians who became known as ‘Blackett’s Circus’. He defined his role as one of bringing scientific techniques and numerical assessments to the improvement of traditional military operations in order ‘to avoid running the war on gusts of emotion’.16 In the small world of interwar science, Blackett had like Hill been a member of Tizard’s committee in 1935, and had worked with Watson-Watt on the introduction of radar and the building of the Chain Home network. Together these men formed the nucleus of boffins during the later war.
The conventional view for many years has been that the armed services went into a spectacular decline after the First World War and that, in an era of massive cuts in defence budgets followed by the policy of appeasement in the 1930s, much of the progress made during the war went into reverse. It is argued that this entailed a substantial decline not only in numbers of personnel in the three services but also in the scientific research that brought innovation and new technologies to the military. The notion is usually illustrated by reference to the fact that the RAF still had fighters in the mid-1930s that looked like the biplane fighters of the Great War; that the army ignored the development of tank warfare even though it had played a major role in the victory of autumn 1918; that the Royal Navy failed to develop anti-submarine weaponry and seek improvements in radio and navigation; and that the armaments industry as a whole and the aircraft industry in particular turned its back on research and development and found itself ‘in a position of chronic penury and sometimes on the very verge of bankruptcy’.17
David Edgerton has argued in recent years that this ‘declinist’ view of inter-war Britain is entirely wrong and that the country still had a powerful armaments industry, a strong navy, a small but efficient army and one of the best air forces in the world.18 He also shows how the influence of the Great War scientists lived on in the public sector during the 1920s and 1930s. Whereas in 1914 military men had frequently questioned the value of consulting outside experts – engineers, chemists, physicians, doctors, psychiatrists and propagandists – the Great War banished this attitude for ever. Science had arrived in the military and in state planning, and it had come to stay.
We have seen how after the war the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, under the leadership of men like Sir Frank Heath and Sir Henry Tizard, brought together defence scientists and industrial chiefs. In addition, each of the armed services in the postwar era created its own Director of Scientific Research (DSR). In the Admiralty, the DSR was supported by a team of naval advisers who reviewed new techniques for ship construction. The gunnery school at HMS Excellent and the torpedo school at HMS Vernon in Portsmouth became centres for naval research and development. A new Admiralty Research Laboratory was established alongside the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington where work was done on improving underwater sonar, Asdic. The Army DSR oversaw developments in explosives, gunnery, ballistics and signalling at Woolwich. Anew chemical warfare research station was established at Porton Down in Wiltshire, in 1920, on the site where experiments had taken place with chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas during the war. The government was determined not to be caught off guard again and by the mid-1920s at least sixty scientists were permanently based there.19
In the Air Ministry, the DSR from 1925 to 1937 was Henry Wimperis, a Cambridge engineer who had spent the war in the Royal Naval Air Service. In 1935 he brought together the committee that oversaw the development of radar and its introduction as a practical tool to guide RAF fighters to approaching fleets of enemy bombers. During the 1920s and 1930s there was much movement between scientists in uniform who would take time out to work in the universities, and civilian scientists who would consult with the armed services. Moreover, the public sector employed some 6500 technicians and scientists on a regular basis during the inter-war years.20
With hindsight, knowing the strength of the enemy Britain would come up against in Europe from 1939 and in Asia from 1941, the research divisions in the pre-war army and navy might be judged to have been inadequate for the purpose. However, that cannot be said of the vast pool of scientific research that continued to contribute to the world of aviation. The Air Ministry was the largest publicly funded organisation for research and development in Britain. In 1932 the budget for the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough (the post-war name of the Royal Aircraft Factory) amounted to £430,000 (roughly equivalent to £30 million in 2014). This compares to a total spend on research and development across the board in ICI of only a little more, at £500,000.21 Under its chair, the ubiquitou
s Sir Henry Tizard, the Aeronautical Research Committee brought some of the best scientific brains in the country to bear on the challenges of aviation. Not only did such scientists develop the revolutionary concept of radar, but Frank Whittle, a young RAF apprentice who was sent to Cambridge on a RAF studentship, patented the concept of the gas turbine jet engine in 1930. Although it took many years to produce a functioning model of such an engine, Whittle and the RAF had laid down a marker for the future of aviation technology into the second half of the twentieth century and beyond.22
Of the three services, the RAF was most open to new scientific ideas. Obviously, an aircraft flies through the sky only by the continuous application of science to power the engines, provide the lift and control the aeronautics, and to allow navigation in three-dimensional space. And, being the youngest of the three services, the RAF was still creating new traditions and not living off old ones. So it was the Air Ministry and the RAF that did most to bring to the fore the boffins of the Second World War.23 Speaking of the war in general, but of aviation in particular, Tizard reported to a parliamentary committee in 1942 that ‘you could hardly walk in any direction in this war without tumbling over a scientist.’24
The links between the scientists of the First World War and the boffins of the Second were considerable. War was becoming increasingly technical through the twentieth century, and the experience of fighting the Great War had, despite initial opposition, put scientists at the centre of planning for future technologies. There they would remain for the rest of the century and beyond.
The technological changes to which the scientists of the Great War made such a contribution, helped to change the world in which most people lived. Consider the life of a boy born towards the end of the nineteenth century, say in 1890. He would have been born into an era dominated by the horse and carriage, in which city streets often swirling with sulphurous fog were lit by gaslight, and in which only a tiny minority of homes had been touched by electricity. He might have had a bicycle, but unless he was from a wealthy family he would be unlikely to travel far from the parish or town of his birth. While still a boy he might have seen the first motor car drive through his town; and, in great excitement, as he watched it pass he would probably have been splashed by the muck and mud thrown up from its wheels. Still a boy, he might have seen the first flickering moving picture shows projected in a penny arcade. His parents probably bought cheap newspapers for the first time and he would have seen the advertisements for new brands of food and drinks.
As a teenager he might have become more aware of some of the technical changes offered by the growing use of electricity. Streets and even a few houses were now lit by electric light bulbs and if he visited London he would have seen the first electric trains crossing the city. The internal combustion engine was everywhere by now, powering vehicles on the road and buses in the cities. He might also have stood in awe, looking up to see and hear a pioneer aviator splutter across the sky in a canvas and wire box kite.
With the surprise coming of war in his twenties he might have rushed to volunteer, or later have been conscripted into the armed forces. Perhaps he was taught how to use wireless communications while his wife or girlfriend filled shells with liquid chemicals. If he had been wounded in the trenches he might have seen a modern operating theatre for the first time in a Casualty Clearing Station. He could have been treated with drugs that would have been rare before the war. And assuming he survived to return home, he would have experienced a series of tumultuous changes. If moderately wealthy, his home might have a vacuum cleaner, a telephone, a gramophone; it would almost certainly possess one of the wireless sets that would soon take pride of place in most living rooms. He probably went to the cinema at least once a week to watch films featuring glamorous stars from Hollywood.
During yet another war he would have been too old to fight, but he would have heard about radio beams that patrolled the skies, and he might have experienced bombs and then missiles falling from above. In his mid-fifties he would have seen in the newsreels pictures of the first atom bombs being dropped, and he would have heard about the harnessing of an entirely new source of energy. As he approached retirement he might have bought a television set to watch moving images of the coronation of the new Queen, live from Westminster Abbey. He would have heard about jet planes crossing the Atlantic in a few hours and satellites circulating the globe in space.
That boy’s life would have spanned the era from the horse and carriage to a world living in the shadow of nuclear weapons. It was a period in which science and war proved to be fine bedfellows and, for good or ill, had transformed the landscape of the twentieth-century world.
Who’s Who of the Secret Warriors: key scientists and scholars who contributed to the war effort, 1914–1918
Details of professional careers pre-and
post-Great War that are relevant to work
carried out during the war
Abbreviations:
BMA
British Medical Association
CH
Companion of Honour
Dir
Director
Exec
Executive
FBA
Fellow of British Academy (date created a Fellow)
FRAS
Fellow of Royal Aeronautical Society (date created a Fellow)
FRS
Fellow of Royal Society (date created a Fellow)
GHQ
General Headquarters of the British Army in France, 1914–18
Inst
Institute
Lieut
Lieutenant
Min
Ministry
Pres
President
RAMC
Royal Army Medical Corps
Regt
Regiment
RCS
Royal Chemical Society
RS
Royal Society
Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook (1879–1964) Businessman, newspaper baron and propagandist
Born: Ontario, Canada, son of Scottish Presbyterian minister who had migrated to Canada in 1864.
Educ: local schools, Newcastle, New Brunswick; failed entrance to Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
1900–10: business interests in Canada, including buying and selling bonds and assets; dabbled in newspapers; became very wealthy.
1910: emigrated to England following rumours about dodgy dealing in creation of the Canada Cement Company; became Liberal MP for Ashton-under-Lyne. 1911: bought country estate near Leatherhead, Surrey.
1915: appointed Canadian ‘Eye-Witness’ reporter on Western Front; set up Canadian Records Office. 1916: acquired the Daily Express. 1918: Feb-Oct Minister of Information.
Post-war: leading press baron; circulation of the Daily Express increased from 0.4 million (1919) to 2.3 million (1937). 1923: bought Evening Standard. 1928: started Scottish Daily Express; led several political crusades including those for Empire Free Trade and appeasement.
1940: appointed Minister of Aircraft Production and member of War Cabinet by Churchill; galvanised aircraft industry. 1941: Minister of Supply; resigned (1942).
Post-WW2: took up several controversial causes, suggesting more distant relationship with America and opposing European union.
Knighted 1911. Created Baron Beaverbrook, 1916.
Patrick Blackett (1897–1974) Physicist and founder of operational research
Born: Kensington, London, son of a stockbroker.
Educ: Royal Naval Colleges at Osborne and Dartmouth (1907–14); Magdalene College, Cambridge (1919–21).
1914: naval cadet, took part in battles of Falkland Islands (1914) and Jutland (1916); invented new form of gunnery device.
Post-war: 1919: finished his education at Cambridge. 1921: researcher for Rutherford at Cavendish Laboratory. 1923: Fellow, Kings College, Cambridge. 1924–5: Gottingen University; studied quantum mechanics and helped Rutherford to establish nuclear physics. 1933: Birkbeck College,
London. 1937: succeeded W.L. Bragg [q.v.] as Langworthy Prof of Physics, Manchester University.
1935: member of Tizard [q.v.] Committee that encouraged the development of radar.
1940: adviser to head of Anti-Aircraft Command; devised more efficient and accurate use of anti-aircraft weapons. 1940–1: member of the Maud Committee investigating the possibility of developing an atomic bomb.
1941: adviser to RAF Coastal Command; applied mathematical techniques to improving anti-submarine tactics. 1942–5: adviser at Admiralty; devised more efficient forms of hunting U-boats; with group of mathematicians known as ‘Blackett’s Circus’ established techniques of operational research to observe, assess and improve military tactics.
Post-WW2: awarded Nobel Prize for pre-war work (1948); hostile to nuclear weapons; believer in expansion of universities and application of science and new technology; encouraged development of computer industry; scientific adviser to the Labour Party; Pres of RS 1965–70.
FRS 1933. Created life peer, Baron Blackett, 1969.
Sir Anthony Bowlby (1855–1929) Surgeon
Born: Namur, Belgium, where his father was correspondent for The Times.
Educ: Durham School; St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, qualified 1879. 1880: house surgeon; for twenty years successful London surgeon.
1899–1901: volunteer army surgeon in South Africa during Boer War.
1908: commissioned in the new Territorial Medical Service.
1914–16: Consulting Surgeon to army. 1916–18: Consulting Surgeon to the British Army in France and Belgium with rank of Maj-General; made changes to practice of military surgery and major improvements in organisation of Casualty Clearing Stations. Known as a fine administrator.
Secret Warriors Page 38
