by Lynne Olson
Jack’s mother, Daisy, the Dowager Countess of Suffolk, was as disapproving of her son’s escapades as Queen Victoria had been of the exploits of his ancestors. Yet Daisy was hardly a model of conformity herself. The youngest daughter of Levi Leiter, a multimillionaire businessman from Chicago, she was one of a flock of American heiresses, labeled “the buccaneers” by the novelist Edith Wharton, who had crossed the Atlantic in the Victorian era to marry members of the English nobility. Daisy’s eldest sister, Mary, had scored one of the biggest catches of all—Lord Curzon, the brilliant, temperamental peer who became British viceroy to India and later foreign secretary.
During a visit to her sister in India, Daisy met and fell in love with Henry Paget Howard, the 19th Earl of Suffolk, a dashing sportsman and aide-de-camp to Curzon. The couple was married in 1904. Like her husband, Daisy was addicted to excitement and adventure—fast cars, speeding planes, and hunting to hounds or on safari. The marriage produced three children and lasted almost thirteen years; in 1917, Henry Howard was killed fighting the Turks near Baghdad in World War I.
Eleven years old when he inherited his father’s title, Jack Howard had no interest in pursuing what he viewed as the self-indulgent, pleasure-seeking lifestyle of English aristocrats. He hated hunting and shooting and was bored by the thought of devoting his life to the upkeep of the Suffolks’ ancestral home—a forty-room Elizabethan mansion and 10,000-acre Wiltshire estate known as Charlton Park. “Jack was a rebel against everything in his own past and against everything the society he was born into stood for,” one friend remarked.
When his mother sent Jack to the Royal Naval College at Osborne, the sixteen-year-old lasted barely a year. He loved the idea of going to sea—but on his terms, not the Royal Navy’s. A short time later, after attending Radley College, he signed up as a common deckhand on a clipper ship bound for Australia. “I don’t see how you can fit yourself to any great position in life unless you have spent time roughing it and learning what the other fellow goes through,” he later declared. He spent much of the next six years in Australia in a variety of jobs, from cowboy to sawmill worker. Toward the end of his time there, he became part owner of a large sheep station in Queensland. When he returned to England to take over the management of his estate, he sported a beard, a pet parrot, and tattoos of a snake and skull-and-crossbones on his arms. His mother broke down in tears when she saw him.
Once again, though, his restlessness got the better of him, and he enrolled at the University of Edinburgh to study chemistry. At the age of twenty-eight, the Earl of Suffolk had finally found a field that truly absorbed him. Graduating from the university with a first-class degree, he went to work at the Nuffield Laboratory at Oxford as a research chemist.
When war broke out in 1939, he tried to enlist in the army but was turned down because of a childhood bout with rheumatic fever. In early 1940, his fluent French and scientific expertise won him the job of liaison between Dautry and the British Ministry of Supply. Herbert Gough, who was Suffolk’s boss at the ministry, later recalled that he had been “won over completely” by the earl’s “tremendous enthusiasm, infectious personality, and buccaneering spirit”—traits that, in the chaos of France’s defeat, would yield huge benefits for the British and Allied cause.
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IN MID-JUNE 1940, with his cargo of diamonds, machine tools, and scientists secure, Suffolk headed south to Bordeaux, hoping to commandeer a ship that would transport them all to Britain. When he arrived, he discovered a city in chaos. Hordes of fleeing French soldiers and civilian refugees had swollen the population from 300,000 to 900,000 virtually overnight. Food, water, and lodging were extremely scarce, and millionaires from Paris camped in the city’s public square alongside shopkeepers and factory workers. “The single thought in everyone’s mind was escape,” an American journalist observed.
Forced to sleep in his car, Suffolk haunted the Bordeaux docks for three days trying to find a captain willing to make the journey across the Channel. He had no luck until the morning of the fourth day, when, thanks to a tip from the British commercial attaché, he located an old Scottish freighter called the Broompark. Its skipper agreed to take the job, provided they left as soon as possible. German planes, which had been strafing refugees on the roads leading to Bordeaux, had begun bombing ships in the harbor; later that afternoon, in fact, a freighter tied up alongside the Broompark would be hit by a bomb and severely damaged.
Meanwhile, Joliot-Curie and his colleagues, along with the heavy water canisters, had arrived in Bordeaux, under orders from Dautry to leave with Suffolk. Having fought their way through the massive crowds clogging the docks, the Collège de France team stared in wonderment at the fantastic bearded figure, looking like “an unkempt pirate,” who greeted them at the Broompark’s gangplank. Stripped to the waist, his arms covered with tattoos, Suffolk ushered them aboard the ship, swinging a riding crop and shouting to the crew to begin loading the heavy water.
Before dawn on June 19, the Broompark weighed anchor and headed for England. Lew Kowarski and Hans von Halban were among the couple dozen scientists aboard; Frédéric Joliot-Curie was not. Despite intense pressure from Suffolk, he decided at the last minute that he could not leave his homeland. Above all, he could not bear the thought of abandoning his wife, who was ill with tuberculosis, and his two young children, who were living with relatives. Before the ship sailed, however, he instructed Kowarski and Halban to work closely with the British in continuing their nuclear fission experiments.
Throughout the uneventful voyage, Lord Suffolk plied the scientists with champagne to settle their nerves. On June 21, the Broompark tied up at the Cornish port of Falmouth, and Suffolk, with his usual panache, somehow procured a special train and armed guard to transport the scientists, diamonds, machine tools, and heavy water to London.
Early on the morning of June 22, Harold Macmillan, the future prime minister who then was parliamentary secretary to the minister of supply, was awakened at his flat by a phone call and told to report to his office immediately. There he found “a young man of somewhat battered appearance, unshaven…yet distinguished by a certain air of grace and dignity.” It was his first meeting with Lord Suffolk, who briefed him on the valuable cargo he had rescued in France, which included, in Macmillan’s words, “something called heavy water.” As Macmillan recalled years later, “I did not know at the time what heavy water was, and I was too confused to inquire.” What he remembered most about that encounter was Suffolk himself, whom he described as “a truly Elizabethan character.” In his memoirs, Macmillan would write, “I have had the good fortune in my life to meet many gallant officers and brave men, but I have never known such a remarkable combination in a single man of courage, expert knowledge and charm.”
The following day, Suffolk escorted Halban and Kowarski to a meeting with leading British scientists at London’s Great Western Hotel. In the mid- to late 1930s, a number of physicists in Britain, including several refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria, had also been conducting experiments to determine the possibility of nuclear fission. But once the war broke out, more pressing matters occupied their attention, including creating a radar system to detect the approach of enemy aircraft. Nonetheless, in early 1940, half a dozen of the country’s top scientists persuaded the British government that development of a nuclear bomb was a distinct, if distant, possibility. Thus was born the MAUD (Military Applications of Uranium Detonation) Committee, which, like its German government counterpart, began overseeing uranium-related research in laboratories throughout the country. In their discussions with Halban and Kowarski, British scientists realized how much further ahead Joliot-Curie’s team was in such work than they were. They immediately invited the Collège de France nuclear physicists to join their efforts.
Meanwhile, Suffolk and his colleagues at the Ministry of Supply were debating where to store the heavy water, which, according to one ministry official, “may prove to be the most important scientific contribution to our w
ar effort.” After depositing the canisters briefly in cells at Wormwood Scrubs prison in suburban London, ministry officials finally found the perfect spot for them: with the permission of King George VI, they were stashed with the British crown jewels in a heavily guarded hiding place somewhere deep inside Windsor Castle.
Kowarski and Halban were given space at Cambridge University’s renowned Cavendish Laboratory, which had been largely evacuated because of fears that Cambridge would be in the direct path of an expected German invasion. During the remainder of 1940, as the Battle of Britain raged overhead, the two physicists used some of their cache of heavy water to continue their nuclear fission experiments. By early 1941, their research had convinced British leaders that, with enough uranium and heavy water, a nuclear reactor—and a bomb—could be built in time to affect the course of the war. “I remember the spring of 1941 to this day,” recalled James Chadwick, Britain’s foremost physicist, who won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the neutron. “I realized then that a nuclear bomb was not only possible. It was inevitable.”
But the war-battered British did not have the enormous economic and industrial resources it would require to undertake such a massive project. For that, they had to turn to the neutral United States, where nuclear fission research was also being conducted in a number of laboratories. Only the physicists at the Columbia University lab, Enrico Fermi and Harold Urey among them, could be considered serious rivals to the Collège de France team. Yet although Fermi, Urey, and their colleagues recognized that reactors could be used to produce bombs, they were not yet as advanced in their research as Kowarski and Halban.
In mid-1941, the MAUD Committee sent a report to the U.S. government urging the development of a nuclear bomb. A few months later, Harold Urey visited Britain for discussions with Kowarski, Halban, and British physicists and engineers. That report and those consultations in turn led to the Manhattan Project—and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
“Had the British not taken up fission in earnest in 1940 and 1941…and had they not then pushed the Americans to act, it is likely that no nuclear weapon would have been ready before the end of the war,” the science historian Spencer Weart has noted. He added, “If von Halban and Kowarski had not come to Britain in June 1940, there almost certainly would have been no British reactor program at all.”
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SINCE THE RESCUE OF the French scientists and the heavy water was considered top secret at the time, no public recognition was given to Lord Suffolk for his crucial role in bringing it about. In a closed session of Parliament on June 27, 1940, Herbert Morrison, the minister of supply, informed MPs that a mission had been mounted in France to save valuable materials, “some of them of almost incalculable scientific importance.” He added only that a Ministry of Supply official, whom he did not name, had been responsible for the rescue.
Within a few months, Suffolk would take on another vital and even more perilous mission for the government. This time, the British public would be made fully aware of what he had done.
Having conquered most of western Europe by the end of June 1940, Germany was now ready to direct its “whole fury and might,” as Winston Churchill put it, against his small island nation. “What General Weygand called the battle of France is over,” Churchill told Parliament on June 18. “I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin.”
By the first days of July, Germany had transferred more than 2,500 fighters and bombers to captured bases in northwestern France as well as to Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and Holland. Luftwaffe head Hermann Göring assured Hitler that his fearsome air fleet would wipe out the RAF by the beginning of autumn. And once that job was finished, he said, Germany would have no trouble bombing Britain into submission or launching the cross-Channel invasion, code-named “Sea Lion,” that the Führer was now considering.
As it prepared to square off against this utterly confident, seemingly invincible enemy, RAF’s Fighter Command struggled to rebuild its forces, shattered in the debacle in France. Lacking combat experience and steeped in fly-by-the-book procedures, the British pilots sent to fight there had had no idea what they were getting into. For that matter, neither had their superiors. In just three weeks, more than three hundred British fighter pilots had been killed or reported missing—close to a third of the command’s overall strength. More than a hundred had been taken prisoner. During the Dunkirk operation alone, the RAF had lost some eighty pilots and one hundred planes. Altogether almost a thousand aircraft, about half the RAF’s frontline strength, had been destroyed.
In mid-July, the Luftwaffe began attacking British ship convoys in the Channel as well as targets on England’s southern coast. The RAF warded off these limited assaults fairly well, but against an all-out German air attack, it would be able to send up a combined total of only about seven hundred fighters—Hurricanes and the faster Spitfires. Worse, fewer than two pilots per plane were available. It would take a good many more of both for the British to maintain control of their skies. New Hurricanes and Spitfires were being turned out as fast as possible, and Hugh Dowding, the head of Fighter Command, was doing everything possible to make up the shortfall in men.
Among other things, he was now pirating pilots from the RAF Bomber and Coastal commands as well as ordering mere trainees to prepare for combat—youngsters “with blond hair and pink cheeks,” wrote the American journalist Virginia Cowles, “who looked as though they ought to be in school.” Many of them had fewer than ten hours of flying time in either Hurricanes or Spitfires. Barely 10 percent had undergone rigorous gunnery practice. Few knew how to sight their guns: when attacking, they tended to open fire at ranges of 500 yards or more, then break away just as they were getting close enough to actually hit something. They learned their lessons quickly in combat, but a good many died before they could put the lessons to use.
Even with all his foraging, Dowding still came up short and had to turn to fliers from other countries to fill his depleted ranks. As a result, fully 20 percent of the RAF pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain were not British. About half that number—250 in all—came from British Commonwealth countries, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Many more were needed, however, and the RAF, much against its will, was forced to use pilots who had escaped to Britain from occupied Europe.
Dowding himself was highly doubtful about the wisdom of what he called “the infiltration of foreign pilots into British squadrons.” His definition of “foreign,” as it turned out, was highly elastic. Although he clearly would have preferred to use only homegrown or British Commonwealth fliers, he did assign several dozen western European pilots, including thirty Belgians and eleven Frenchmen, to undermanned RAF squadrons early in July.
But that was as far as he was initially prepared to go. Like other top officials in the RAF and Air Ministry, Dowding wanted nothing to do with the Poles and Czechs, who made up the lion’s share of the European pilots in Britain. Indeed, he insisted that he would dissolve British squadrons before allowing the eastern Europeans to join them. Dire as the situation was, Britain, in his view, did not need the help of a couple of benighted countries that, to most Britons, were little more than “names on a map.”
Neville Chamberlain had spoken the truth in September 1938 when he had noted that to most Britons, including himself, Czechoslovakia was “a faraway country” populated by “people of whom we know nothing.” Similarly, Poland was, for most Englishmen, “the other Europe”—exotic, unknown, a bit savage. According to Geoffrey Marsh, an RAF officer who taught English to Polish fliers, the average Englishman imagined that Poland “was some one hundred years behind” Britain and that “its inhabitants lived in a state of superlative ignorance.” RAF commanders, for their part, regarded the Poles and Czechs as being on “a rung or two lower on the ladder of civilization.”
When Germany crushed Poland in September 1939, its victory merely confirmed British prejudices about the alleged fecklessn
ess of the Polish war effort. As in the United States and most of the rest of Europe, Britons accepted as truth Germany’s claims that the Poles had demonstrated both military ineptness and lack of will in their fight against the Reich. Neither charge was true: the Poles in fact had managed to inflict relatively heavy losses, killing more than 16,000 German troops and wounding some 30,000.
Senior RAF officers, meanwhile, were highly doubtful about the flying skills of Polish pilots, who they believed had lost their nerve in confronting the Luftwaffe. “All I knew about the Polish Air Force was that it had only lasted about three days against the Luftwaffe, and I had no reason to suppose that [it] would shine any more brightly operating from England,” noted Flight Lieutenant John Kent, one of the RAF’s hottest test pilots, who, much to his chagrin, would be named deputy commander of an RAF Polish squadron.
While the Poles were distrusted because of their defeat, the Czechs were scorned because they hadn’t defended their country at all when the Germans had occupied it. British officials seemed oblivious to the fact that the Czechs’ failure to fight had in no small part been due to the British and French betrayal of their country at the 1938 Munich conference. Before Munich, Czech president Edvard Beneš had declared that his nation would resist if German troops marched into the Sudetenland. The highly trained, well-equipped Czech army—more than a million men in all—had been mobilized, as had the air force. The country’s already formidable fortifications had been strengthened; all main roads and bridges had been blocked and mined. “The country was poised for action, calm and determined in full preparedness for the expected bloody struggle,” a Czech government official recalled.
