Maverick Genius

by Phillip F. Schewe

  Dyson’s last days in Cambridge were pleasant. His best college friend, Oscar Hahn, was confined to a wheelchair owing to polio. Dyson was a guest at Hahn’s home, where he was exposed to Jewish customs for the first time, including a Passover Seder.29 The young men decided to leave Cambridge in style, by walking. Having worked up to the feat, hiking ten miles each day before breakfast, on the final day the two friends departed Cambridge at 3 a.m., Dyson pushing Hahn. Covering fifty miles they reached London at 11 p.m. Part of the fun for Dyson was to refrain from telling his parents quite what he’d done. They thought he’d taken the train.30

  CROOKED MUSIC

  As a prelude to seeing Freeman Dyson in action during the war, we will observe a different Dyson and a different Freeman fighting the previous war, the Great War of 1914–1918.

  George Dyson and Freeman Atkey were good friends. Both taught at the Marlborough School, George in music and Freeman in classics. When the war came in 1914 both men went into the army. Freeman became a fine officer and seems to have thrived on army life. He regularly wrote his sister Mildred, known as Muff.31 So near the presence of death, Freeman never felt so much alive.

  Meanwhile, young George, the musician, found himself inadvertently in charge of training men in the making and using of grenades. Good thing he was the son of a blacksmith. To help the men learn the skill he wrote a list of guidelines. This tract was exactly the thing required. It was so successful that the army turned it into the official manual for grenades. The text was sent to America, where (in book form) it became a minor bestseller, earning its author a fair bounty.

  In due course both George Dyson and Freeman Atkey found themselves in the front lines. Both had become captains. Both the musician and the classicist had become well versed in bombardment. Both wrote letters home. One letter from Freeman to his father was practically merry: “We are sleeping entirely in the open, last in a field, the night before in a wood, as it has been lovely weather it has been very jolly and we have done our marching at night when it is cool.”32 Two weeks later a telegram arrived announcing the death of Freeman Atkey. He’d been shot by a sniper.

  George Dyson was luckier. One fine day the horse he was riding got blown out from under him by an exploding shell. He himself was not harmed, except to suffer thereafter from the mental condition that came to be called shell shock. Out of the war and back in Britain he met up with Muff and they consoled each other.

  On November 17, 1917, George Dyson (1883–1964), son of John William Dyson (1859–1923) and Alice Greenwood (1854–1943), married Mildred Lucy Atkey (1880–1975), daughter of Frederick Walter Atkey (1844–1922) and Ellen Louise Haynes (1852–1908). Along came a daughter, Alice. Three years later, on December 15, 1923, their son, Freeman John Dyson, was born, the name Freeman coming from his deceased uncle and the name John coming from his father’s father. His place of birth was the town of Crowthorne in the county of Berkshire, thirty miles southwest of London.

  Almost twenty years later Freeman John Dyson found himself also in the bombardment business, and he too wrote home frequently. He was fighting in, but not exactly at, a war front. There had been several war fronts so far: the front against the Germans in Western Europe, which collapsed with the fall of France and the evacuation of British forces from Dunkirk in 1940. There was the Battle of Britain, named for the defensive air war over Britain, where RAF fighters grappled with German bombers and stalled a possible invasion. The Battle of the Atlantic consisted of the duel between Allied convoys bringing supplies to Britain and the aggressive German submarine force deployed across the ocean. Largest of all was the Eastern Front, featuring epic infantry and tank battles between colossal German and Russian armies.

  Finally there was the Allied strategic bombing front against the Fascist enemy. The generals of this aerial combat viewed the campaign as more than an adjunct to the fighting on land and at sea. They hoped actually to end the war outright through bombing. They figured a land invasion of Europe from the west might not be needed. They wanted to ensure that another Battle of the Somme—the engagement in 1916 that had cost more than a million British, German, and French lives—would not have to be fought. In the new combined air war the Americans bombed during the day, the British after dark.

  So night bombing rather than night climbing would now be Freeman Dyson’s concern. He was employed as a civilian not directly by the air force but rather by the Ministry of Aircraft Production. He worked at the Bomber Command headquarters in the town of High Wycombe, halfway between London and Oxford. He had a desk job in the Operations Research Section, which examined facts surrounding bombing missions and supposedly rendered independent recommendations to General Sir Arthur Harris.

  Dyson’s office was located in a heavily wooded area where the layout of buildings presented no apparent target for German planes. This might have been what kept the bombs from falling his way; on the other hand, it was dark all the time. He lived in an underheated house in the town of Hughenden and went to work pedaling a bike five miles uphill. On the way up he was often passed by Sir Arthur’s limousine.33 At the end of the day Dyson coasted back downhill, often thinking about mathematics.

  Should he instead enlist and go up in the planes? He’d think more about this and decide again that it was better if he stayed on the ground. That’s what his mother had said, and he was inclined to agree. Surely his intelligence and training were making a greater contribution to the war than if he were aloft as a crewman. Even if he wasn’t using rigorous higher-level mathematics, his remarkable problem-solving ability would serve the air force well. That’s also how it was explained to him by his superiors, and it was easy to concur. Still, staying back left very little for him to say to the other nineteen- or twenty-year-old men, men he saw every day at the airbase, young men who were going up on the night flights over Berlin.34 Many failed to return.

  The main activity at Wycombe was the going and coming of bombers. Dyson could easily imagine them flying over their targets. The journey, 600 miles out to Germany and 600 miles back, was filled with peril, chiefly the German antiaircraft batteries firing from below and the Messerschmitts firing from above. Dyson’s job did not require him actually to fly in the Lancaster bombers, but it did require him to visualize the experience. To be effective, he had to do some mental night climbing. He had to picture the odyssey into the hostile German airspace and back out. Only then could he effectively quantify risks, weigh alternative crew procedures or aircraft design, and recommend action. He was good at these things.

  One of his early assignments was to evaluate MONICA, a radar system for collision avoidance among the bombers flying in formation. Unfortunately, MONICA’s warning system, consisting of a squeal coming over the intercom when planes approached each other too closely, had a habit of going off at the wrong time. Crews often disabled the system. Dyson’s elaborate mathematical treatment of MONICA—looking at the way it was used by a variety of aircraft for a variety of bombing missions—was an early version of meta-analysis, the process by which epidemiologists ponder the efficacy of drugs by running a variety of clinical trials.35

  Indeed, this was applied mathematics of the highest order. Dyson’s numerical figurings, instead of merely sitting on a page, now related to events unfolding in the sky at speeds of 300 miles per hour and involving hundreds of lives. For example, after tallying the statistical reports, he decided that the collision rate among bombers should be higher than it was. In raids over Germany the Royal Air Force was losing only about one bomber per thousand sorties because of wing-to-wing bang-ups. Dyson thought the number of collisions should be more like five.

  Why would more collisions be better than fewer collisions? Where is the logic in that? Well, plane losses from midair collisions stood at one-tenth of a percent per mission, whereas losses from attacking German fighter planes stood at 4 percent. The solution? Convoy the bombers more closely, allowing the bombers’ return fire to be more concentrated, thus making defense against the fighters mo
re effective. This bit of provocative advice from a junior analyst, surprisingly, was accepted by Bomber Command. The result? Collisions went up, but losses from fighters went down even more. The crews who had to fly those planes didn’t like the anxiety of the close-in flying, but they went along anyway.

  Some findings could be sensible but impractical. That is, a particular modification in procedure might save lives and yet be bad for morale. Example: Dyson and his operations colleagues determined that the chances of a bomber surviving would improve by reducing the number of guns used to fend off German fighters. Improving aerodynamics and reducing weight resulted in higher speed and maneuverability, more than compensating for the loss of guns. Unlike the proposals addressing bomber bunching, however, this expedient of trading armament for speed was not tried, since middle-level officials felt that the commander-in-chief, or the crewmen themselves, could hardly be expected to accept a plan, even one that might save lives, that removed the chance, however ineffectual, of shooting back at the enemy.

  Young as he was, Dyson knew more than most cabinet officials and even many operations officers about the general course of the air campaign.36 One of the things he knew and others did not was that as the war continued the loss rate for British crewmen was increasing (until very late in the war). Contrary to what the fliers were told, length of experience was not a major factor in enhancing survivability. The reason for this was an innovation called Schrage Musik, or “Crooked Music.” The Germans had mounted upward-firing guns on some of their fighter planes, allowing them to fly underneath the British bombers without themselves being seen. Crooked Music, Dyson believed, was the German weapon that kept British bomber losses high. He argued later that if the head of operations research, a man named Basil Dickens, had advocated the alternatives (such as removing some gun turrets from Lancasters) pushed by Dyson and his colleagues, thousands of crewmen’s lives would have been saved.37 But Dickens, and many like him, tended to tell commanding generals only what they wanted to hear.38

  The survival rate for airmen was bad enough for a standard thirty-mission tour. But many pilots signed up for a second tour anyway. The resulting death rate for crewmen was about 40 percent, one of the highest for any major fighting force. Young servicemen think about numbers like this, even if the numbers aren’t officially public. Without being told, they knew the odds.

  Dyson better than anyone knew the odds. Should he put himself in harm’s way by joining up? The question kept presenting itself. How could he go on looking these boys in the eye, boys his own age, who journeyed off after dark toward Berlin? Should he put on a uniform and ride with them? He did not. He would eventually own up to himself that he had been a coward.39

  Actually, Dyson had been up in planes. He had been flown around, at various hours and various altitudes, to measure the brightness of the night sky. His plane was unheated and unpressurized, but he realized that he could breathe unassisted even at altitudes of 20,000 feet.40 But these were not combat missions. No German bullets were directed at him. Dyson was no Frank Thompson. Dyson had not volunteered, as Thompson had, for work behind enemy lines. Thompson was eventually caught and executed. Dyson’s close Cambridge friend, Peter Sankey, also perished in the war.

  Were things better because of Dyson’s work? Had he saved any lives? Many of his calculations and recommendations had been ignored. With grim precision Dyson reviewed his own slide down a moral slope. First he had been a pacifist. When war came to Britain he joined the military without necessarily condoning the bombing. Then, when it was explained to him that this was total war and that Hitler had been the first to attack London, Dyson acquiesced to the bombing of German cities. He had become part of the killing machine. In effect, Dyson’s exercise in applied mathematics had helped to kill women and children. The bombs falling on Berlin were partly his bombs. The specter of G. H. Hardy—who feared that mathematics could be used to kill people—haunted Dyson.

  LEST YE BE JUDGED

  G. H. Hardy believed that the discoveries made by mathematicians actually constitute a reality separate from human minds, a sort of absolute reality. For example, when Pythagoras asserted, in the sixth century B.C.E., that the sum of the squares of the sides of a right-angled triangle equals the square of the third side, this was equivalent to finding a new chemical element or locating a new planet. No wonder Hardy loved mathematics so passionately. Whatever else society did to itself, it was comforting to know that the logic and integrity of mathematics was impervious to doubt or corruption.

  Even if you accept this idea, it’s not so easy to extend it to the rest of human experience. It can sometimes be difficult to tell right from wrong, especially during wartime. In established cultures it’s wrong to take the life of another. During war, however, we encourage killing, at least certain kinds of killing. Moreover, in most circumstances we are careful with our bodies and discourage risky behavior. During war, however, this is turned upside down. Schoolboy things like steeplechase and Latin orations and differential equations are put aside and replaced by guns and tents. Military maneuvers are plotted by high-ranking authorities but carried out by ordinary folks.

  Consider the July 1943 raid over Hamburg, code-named Operation Gomorrah, in which, in addition to the direct destructive effect of the bombs themselves, a firestorm was unleashed, a burning tornado. The devastation has been referred to as Germany’s Hiroshima. Here is Dyson’s succinct description, written many years after the event: “On the night of July 24 we killed forty thousand people and lost only twelve bombers, by far the best we had ever done.” Killing forty thousand, many by asphyxiation, was the “best” we had done. Naturally, he was ambivalent about this. By not actually flying in the planes, by not taking the bombs to Germany, by not sharing the risk, Dyson was afraid he’d not done enough. But in his appointed job at Operations Research, in the act of helping kill all those civilians, he felt perhaps he’d done too much.41

  Years later, Dyson would repeatedly return, in essays, to examine his wartime exploits and the organization for which he worked. It formed a baseline encounter with technology and the motivation behind it, its costs, its efficiency, and its consequences. Why, Dyson wanted to know, did it take three tons of bombs for the British to kill one German, whereas it took the Germans only one ton to kill a Briton? 42 The goals of strategic bombing were largely not met, Dyson argued. The threat of ruination from the air was supposed to deter Germany from starting a war in the first place. But the Germans were not deterred. Once war began, the goals of strategic bombing became more acute: sap German morale, curtail German war production, and (grandest of all aspirations) win the war. Indeed Bomber Command’s motto was “Victory Through Air Power.”

  But German war production was not curtailed substantially; manufacturing often resumed in bombed factories within days. German morale did not fail, at least not until late in the war. Strategic bombing did not by itself win the war; it did not spare the Allies from having to thrust a million soldiers into France. Dyson estimates that strategic bombing consumed one-fourth of Britain’s war budget. The cost of the British offense was far higher (in money and in crew—47,000 killed) than the corresponding cost of the German defense. Germany may have run out of oil but it never ran out of weapons. Spend less on dropping bombs into German cities and spend more for the navy to pursue German submarines, he suggested, and the war might have been shortened considerably, with a great saving of lives.43 Poor aiming or not, lots of people died because of British bombs. The number over five years of bombing Germans was 400,000, many women and children.

  Dyson had learned mathematics from the best teachers at Winchester and Cambridge. Bomber Command was to be his school for morals. His job had been to make bombing more lethal and efficient. This was the applied mathematics that Hardy abhorred. After the war he read about the trials at Nuremberg, where officials who had helped to make the German war machine more efficient and lethal were being judged. Dyson wryly compares his situation with theirs:

 
The main difference was that they were sent to jail or hanged as war criminals, while I went free. I felt a certain sympathy for these men. Probably many of them loathed the SS as much as I loathed Bomber Command, but they, too, had not had the courage to speak out. Probably many of them, like me, lived through the whole six years of war without ever seeing a dead human being.44

  Killing 40,000 was the “best” they had ever done? And that was one raid. Dyson again: “In war, there are few real criminals, just a lot of ordinary people who do disgusting things because they’re told to.”45

  Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel about the Allied bombing of Dresden. That book, Dyson thought, was so artful and truthful that another book no longer needed to be written. Dyson did, however, create a kind of internal horror story. He began to have a nightmare—repeated at various times over many years—in which he was a bystander to a plane crash. In the dream he was prevented by a paralyzing fear from going to the aid of those inside the burning airplane.

  The Allies defeated the Germans without Freeman Dyson flying in a Lancaster. He did not enlist. Mathematics had gotten him through school and now it had gotten him through war. He’d been an analyst instead of a tail gunner. Freed from its commitments against Berlin, Bomber Command steered its aim toward obliterating the remaining Axis power in Tokyo. The British were to be part of an intensified air war in Asia, in preparation for what looked like an invasion of the Japanese home islands. The Royal Air Force, and Dyson along with it, prepared to go to Okinawa. His assignment would continue on the other side of the world.

  In the First World War the chemists’ most notorious contribution had been poison gas. In the Second World War the end-all technology was supplied by physicists. Things ended in a hurry because of two bombs dropped a few days apart, bombs of stupendous explosive power.