While Watson Watt was the father of radar, physicist Patrick Blackett claims the title of father of OR. Blackett had served in the Royal Navy before the war and witnessed the Battle of Jutland. He deplored warfare but knew Nazi victory could not be stopped with pacifism. Initially he worked on bomb sites for the RAF, but as the Battle of Britain raged he was moved to Anti-Aircraft (Ack Ack) Command to work on gunnery efficiency. While radar had been invented, the best doctrine for the new technology had yet to be discovered.
Blackett and his “circus” of engineers, physiologist and other scientific folks worked hard alongside serving officers to find the best way to make the AA command efficient in the cash strapped service. But what started out as a simple job turned into not just the calculation of predicting future enemy positions to use the guns, but also the creation of plotting machines that could be made quickly, modifying the existing ones to be fixed manually, and creating a school to teach all these specifics.
While some soldiers bristled at being pushed around and told their job by scientists, General Sir Frederick Pile, Commander in Chief of Ack Ack, was glad to have Blackett. “He spoke his mind clearly, and was always ready to admit the fact that the most desirable thing may be inadvisable.” The hard truth was “radar was too tricky for the ordinary man,” and the need for scientists grew, including civilian American scientists. “Their enthusiasm and help had to be seen to be believed.” Accuracy increased dramatically. Before the circus, 20, 000 shells were expended for each German “bird” shot. By the time they left, the number had been reduced to 4,000. Blackett was soon transferred to the Admiralty, and when Pile heard the news he exclaimed, “They have stolen my magician!”
Next, Blackett used his scientific magic on the troubled convoys in the Atlantic. After intensive research, he discovered that large convoys generated less causalities and “calculated that convoys with nine escorts had experienced 25 per cent less sinking than those with six. This led him to the conclusion that for each extra escort vessel, between two and three merchant ships could be saved annually.” Blackett soon bumped against naval tradition. His research from 1941-42 revealed that the “small convoys with an average size of 32 ships had suffered a loss of 2.5 percent; whereas the large convoys with an average of 54 ships had suffered a loss of 1.1 percent. Large convoys appeared to be in fact more than twice as safe as large convoys.” Naval doctrine and experience in the Great War argued the opposite: smaller convoys of less than 40 ships were safer, but ones of 60 ships or more were ripe for attacking.
So Blackett pushed back with intensive analysis, including from prisoners of war from sunken U-boat “wolf packs.” Three facts emerged a) the chance that the convoy in which it sailed would be sighted; b) the chance that a U boat would penetrate the screen depended only on the linear density of the escorts, that is, on the number of escort vessels for each mile of perimeter to be defended; and c) that when a U-boat did penetrate the screen the number of merchant ships sunk was the same for both large and small convoys—“simply because there were always more than enough targets.”
Blackett pushed hard and his idea of reducing the number of convoys, but increasing the number of ships per convoy. By spring of 1943 onward, the convoy numbers increased. Sadly, the first “large” convoys lost a lot of ships, but by the summer of 1944 the Admiralty proclaimed many successes of this approach including a successful crossing of the Atlantic by a record 187 ships in a convoy.
WIZARDS OF FIGHTER COMMAND
Another dynamic use of OR scientists also took place during the Battle of Britain. The ORS at Fighter Command challenged not just operations, but strategy. The most critical case concerned a French request for ten squadrons of RAF fighters to assist against the German invasion of May 1940: an invasion that was headed toward conquest. General Hugh Dowdings, CinC of Fighter Command, warned Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill that agreeing to this request would cripple Fighter Command’s ability to defend Britain. Churchill ignored him, hoping to give the French as much aid as possible. On 15 May 1940 Dowding asked Canadian engineer and OR innovator Harold Larnder and his team for assistance in making their analysis clear.
With less than two hours before the next Cabinet meeting, the team produced documents to bolster Dowding’s case. Larnder credits physicist E. C. Williams with initiating the research, which showed that with the current loss rate of three squadrons every two days, a depletion of ten squadrons would essentially leave Britain defenseless against the Luftwaffe. Larnder, though, realized they needed to make the data have impact.
Feeling that the findings relating losses, time, and force level were not easily comprehended when expressed in tabular form, I transferred the findings to graph form, and attached these to William’s report. The next morning, when asked if our findings had been of any help, Dowding replied “They did the trick.”
Churchill, seeing the visual data of his country rendered defenseless, denied the request. Britain could not save the French, but they could save themselves to fight the Axis another day. Larnder did not want OR scientists taking sole credit for victory in the Battle of Britain, but they were decisive in avoiding defeat at this desperate hinge point of the war. If those ten squadrons had been sent, the final victory in the skies would have been nearly impossible.
THE DARK HORIZON OF BOMBER COMMAND
Not all OR sections were championed by their commanders, however. In Bomber Command, Commander Sir Arthur Harris agreed to include an OR section led by physicist B. G. Dickins. The section itself included many brilliant minds, including a young Freeman Dyson. But Harris had detested scientists since the First World War, and with some reason. “While I was on anti-Zeppelin defense at Northolt I had a good deal of trouble, as I have said from time to time throughout my life,” he recalled, “with lunatic inventors of weapons who too often obtain the ear of the authorities.” These included a harpoon, cable and grenade contraption for destroying zeppelins created by a mad scientists who was “but one of a legion.”
The major controversy in Harris’s OR unit concerned analysis of the effects of strategic bombing of civilian targets, one of the most heated debates of the war. Basically, the Allies had to decide what was more safe, effective, and efficient: hitting industrial targets to cripple the German war machine, or area bombing cities to kill civilians and defeat the national will. Harris believed area bombing would win the war without need for an allied invasion of France. His staff collected the data on their bombing runs, and Harris argued that their calculations proved Bomber Command could break the enemy’s will by virtually destroying whole cities. Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill’s science advisor, Lord Cherwell, himself a physicist and power broker in the War Cabinet, supported Harris and his calculations.
Blackett disagreed. He and a cadre of other scientists examined the impact of bombing on the British population as well as in Germany. They contradicted Harris OR team’s assessment. If England had only stiffened their resolve when bombed, why would the Germans be any different? Freeman Dyson, who was responsible for collecting data and analyzing Bomber command’s losses, recalled “[i]t was my judgment at the time, and remains so today, that the cost of Bomber Command in men and resources was far greater than its military effectiveness,” costing about one quarter of the British war effort. It cost Britain more in lives and material lost than to what was gained against Germany. He also had no patience for the theories of area bombing. “The notion that bombing would cause a breakdown of civilian morale turned out to be a fantasy. And the notion that bombing would cause the breakdown of weapons production was also a fantasy.” While damaging such technical infrastructure slowed and impeded the German war effort, it was never as “wiped out” as Harris assessed. Bomber Command’s OR section was lambasted for telling their commander what he wanted to hear, instead of collecting the data to find the results first.
When the war ended, many of these scientists were celebrated. Some returned to academia to pursue their original career. Others saw
the potential for OR in civilian life, and formed organizations dedicated to using its practices in industry and business. Some stayed on in government service, where their skills were becoming integral to the growing technological tapestry of war and science in the Cold War. Blackett, the father of OR, retreated from military work and became involved in peace and disarmament work dealing with nuclear weaponry.
OR has grown into many forms and variants, especially statistical analysis, but lost the limelight of its wartime efforts. But those scientific advisors made a distinct contribution to allied victory in the Second World War. These magicians of math, sorcerers of science, and boffins of medicine proved to the senior officers their value in solving complex problems by observing how things were done, assessing how they could be done better, and proving it to a tough audience. Charles Goodeve, whose work on naval weapons systems made him an OR pioneer, once reflected that OR was really just “scientific common sense.” A very Vulcan sentiment, even if it came from a human.
About the Author
Jason S. Ridler is the author of the Spar Battersea thrillers (Death Match and Con Job) and the short story collection Knockouts. He has also published over 50 stories in such magazines and anthologies as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Brain Harvest, Not One of Us, Chilling Tales, Tesseracts Thirteen, and more. His nonfiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Dark Scribe, and the Internet Review of Science Fiction. A former punk rock musician and cemetery groundskeeper, Mr. Ridler holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada. His doctoral thesis on Dr. Solandt will be published under the title Maestro of Science: Omond McKillop Solandt and Government Science in War and Hostile Peace by the University of Toronto Press.
Giving Birth to the Dark Monster: A Conversation with J. M. McDermott
Jeremy L. C. Jones
Never Knew Another, the first novel in J. M. McDermott’s Dogsland Trilogy, opens with a husband and wife placing a head on a rock face high on a hill so that the half-demon blood won’t poison the earth. The novel and its sequel, When We Were Executioners, get progressively and deliciously weirder from there.
Both novels take off with dark exuberance and follow a dream-like logic in such a way that the richly textured prose seems to slip and slither on one level while soaking in slowly on another. The Dogsland novels track the lives of Corporal Jona and the fugitive Senta Rachel Nolander through a world of hatred and violence.
Due to the sale and asset transfer of Night Shade Books, these titles faced an uphill battle before publication. The second book was not included in the company catalog and was ultimately sacrificed to a distribution crossover. With the sale of Night Shade, a new opportunity arose to breathe life into the series. The third part of the trilogy, We Leave Together, published by Word Horde will be available later this year.
As McDermott discusses below, the Dogsland Trilogy is rooted in childhood loss and speaks to the basic human need for empathy and understanding.
McDermott is also the author of such novels as Last Dragon and Nirvana Gates (set in Philip Athans’ Fathomless Abyss universe), as well as the collection Women and Monsters and Disintegration Visions. His first novel was shortlisted for a Crawford Prize, on Locus Magazine’s Recommended Reading List for Debuts, and on Amazon.com’s Year’s Best SF/F of 2008 list. Subsequent work has appeared on numerous year’s best lists, as well.
Below, McDermott and I talk about the joys of writing, his process, and giving birth to the dark monster.
The last time we spoke, you had all the elaborate ways of using technology in your writing process. Its been a few years, what sort of gadgets are you using these days? Has your process changed much?
These days, I still use Excel a lot. I also use my Gmail account for most of my early writing. I can leave drafts up for a long time, and scribble into them from any device I happen to have handy at the time. I haven’t attempted to write a whole novel this way, just pieces of a novel. It brings me back in time to when I was writing the novels Never Knew Another and When We Were Executioners while temping.
I had a depressing permatemp position that required internet use. I cheated and e-mailed early versions of scenes and sketches to myself while I was supposed to be working. This time, I’m not hiding out on the job, though. I’m keeping everything auto-saved as a “draft” and letting the whole story run long and long and long. When it’s ready, I’ll hit send, to myself, and have a nice, saved version of the story ready to be sent to on-line magazines that require them in the e-mail. I can also cut-and-paste straightaway into Google Drive, with ease.
What do you enjoy about writing fiction?
I don’t know if enjoyment is the right word. Writing is what I do. I communicate better with a keyboard than I do with my own voice. I communicate better when I’m putting on the mask of style and voice than when I speak plain. I guess most writers strive for honesty with what they do, and I get that and do it in my way, but I feel like there’s a depth that happens when what we say is not spoken with sentences, but with programmatic language of fiction that runs in people’s imaginations.
I could just tell you, “Hey, be a good person, and try not to hurt other people, and be a good steward of the planet,” but that’s hardly a message you’ll believe. It’s too intellectual to become part of your identity. Writing Dogsland, though, I can spin the weave of fiction, and you’ll feel the empathy for Rachel, who tries so hard to be good despite her own demonic heritage betraying her every step, and feel the loneliness of Jona as he drifts through the violent streets, and this will mark you and make you see others in a new light, Jona’s and Rachel’s hiding in plain sight not just on the page, but in your city streets, where biology betrays them beneath the facade of a normal life.
Did you have as much fun in Phil Athan’s Fathomless Abyss as it seemed like you did? How was it working in someone else’s world instead of your own?
Oh, that world is a blast! When I was writing Nirvana Gates, I was thinking about the monster from Gene Wolf’s Book of the New Sun, the Alzabo, and how I could take that idea and do something interesting with it. I came up with Nirvana Gates. You see, to me, when most people say the word “My soul” they are not referring to the part of them that will be immortal after death, but are instead referring to memory and identity. In this case, when memory and identity can be preserved, it would be no great stretch to interpret it as immortality, or even a kind of heaven. But, it is a heaven that only comes when you walk into the mouth to be eaten. Working alongside some of the most imaginative minds in speculative fiction challenges me to really bring my “A” game and get creative. It’s a fun challenge, and I can’t wait to see what the rest of the group comes up with, next!
If you had to pick one scene, one moment from your body of work that best captures you as a writer, which scene (or scenes) would it be?
In my forthcoming novel, Maze, slated for release in early 2014 from Apex, I’m actually one of the characters in the novel. The whole novel began as a dream I had, after coming home a little tipsy from my ten year high school reunion. I transcribed the dream as best I could in the daylight. Fort Worth was (and remains) a post-industrial ruin.
A light floated through the air and whispered to me. It said . . . She said, “My name is Jenny. Put me in your lung. Breathe deep.” I did. As a writer, I am that person who will follow the muse, even when it makes demands that seem insane. I will breathe deep, and give birth to the dark monster that will hide in my apartment until it devours whomever I bring home. I will follow down the pipes into the new landscape of the maze, where whatever I encounter on the side of that portal will test me, and—honestly—I will fail. Every book is a failure, to me. Every book never matches the amazing dream I wish it could be. I just try to get better, and get closer next time.
I’ll live my life, just as Joseph in the novel did, lost in the maze, writing and writing.
What’s at the heart of The Dogsland Trilogy? And did that change over the course of over writing of the book?<
br />
I think the heart of Dogsland is homosexuality and HIV. We lost one of my uncles back when I was in the 8th grade. At the time, I had never met him. It’s a long story, and full of personal details I try to avoid in the immortal record of the internet, but needless to say it is a thing that marked me. Living as I did in the ultra-religious, ultra-right-wing suburban wasteland between Dallas and Fort Worth, it occurred to me that if I were gay, it would be very hard to go out to the store and buy bread, because I would never know who would be waiting to spew hatred upon me, if they suspected I wasn’t what I appeared.
It’s a horrible way to live. I get to live on the easiest difficulty setting, so to speak, but I have met enough people and loved enough people that I can appreciate how hard it is for others, and how wrong that difficulty is. I’m glad times are changing, but . . . When I was writing this world, I knew that if I wrote gay characters, the people who most needed these stories wouldn’t read them. People who have that twinge of homophobia, whether they admit to it or not, will see a story about a gay person, and just assume it’s not for them. They’re people who need to experience empathy for the hidden.
The power of fantasy gives us a way of speaking that remains locked in step with the rigid, bad, old days, here. I can write about the partially-human children of demons, instead, and make the presumed reality of some sort of evil in the blood a visceral reality, and show you—you who most needs this message and would not listen to it any other way, without even announcing that this is what we’re talking about—and demonstrate how hiding changes people, and how awful and lonely it must have been for so much of human history, to be different inside but to have to put on this other face that is not you . . . People who learn who you are can hurt you, blackmail you, or even love you.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 82 Page 11
