If no protective contrivance can be found and we are reduced to a policy of reprisals, the temptation to be “quickest on the draw” will be tremendous. It seems not too much to say that bombing aeroplanes in the hands of gangster Governments might jeopardize the whole future of our Western civilization.
To adopt a defeatist attitude in the face of such a threat is inexcusable until it has definitely been shown that all the resources of science and invention have been exhausted. The problem is far too important and too urgent to be left to the casual endeavours of individuals or departments. The whole weight and influence of the Government should be thrown into the scale to endeavour to find a solution. All decent men and all honourable Governments are equally concerned to obtain security against attacks from the air, and to achieve it no effort and no sacrifice is too great.16
Lindemann was Oxford’s professor of experimental philosophy and director of its Clarendon Laboratory, which as a center of physics research was but a distant rival to Rutherford’s Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. But much more important, Lindemann was a member of Churchill’s growing circle of official and unofficial contacts who shared his alarm over the increasing threat of Nazi Germany and who provided him with a steady stream of expert knowledge with which to challenge the government’s policies.
It would be hard to imagine a man more unlike Churchill in his personal tastes. An ascetic bachelor, Lindemann was a strict vegetarian who did not smoke or drink. He had met Churchill when he partnered Mrs. Churchill at a charity tennis tournament, and the two men immediately hit it off despite their superficial differences. The son of a wealthy Alsatian who settled in England and took British citizenship, Lindemann was rich, very conservative, and in Zuckerman’s words “enigmatic and ‘grand.’ ” He reveled moving in important social and political circles. He had a solid reputation as a physicist, though had not done any significant original research of his own for some time. More exceptionally, he had conducted some astonishingly daring flying experiments during the First World War to develop a method for recovering from a tailspin. Rejected by the army for his German parentage, Lindemann had been taken on by the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough to work on scientific problems related to flight; despite a vision defect he took flying lessons, and then personally made a series of flights in which he deliberately put his plane into a spin and coolly recorded what happened each time. From 1932 on he was a regular visitor of Churchill’s, motoring his Rolls-Royce over from Oxford for weekends at Churchill’s country estate, Chartwell, where the men would often talk into the small hours of the morning, discussing the gathering threats in the world. “Lindemann,” said Churchill, “became my chief adviser on the scientific aspects of modern war.”17
A few weeks after his letter to The Times, Lindemann and Churchill traveled to Aix-les-Bains, the French lakeside resort where Baldwin (then the Conservative leader in the coalition government) was vacationing, to press the idea for government action on a scientific study of air defense. Lindemann followed up with two more letters to The Times answering a rejoinder from a pacifist who objected that improved air defenses would only make disarmament less urgent. “World opinion is definitely opposed to burglars,” Lindemann replied, “yet Mr. Mander, I have no doubt, does not consider it superfluous to lock his front door at night.”18
Churchill thought that the job should be given to a high-level body outside usual department channels and proposed establishing a special subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence, the board that coordinated all of the military services. But in the meanwhile the Air Ministry’s own scientific civil servants had been pushing the issue as well. The problem of defending population centers and other targets against enemy bombers was actually never quite so bleak as popular opinion held. It was true enough that since the end of the war the RAF had placed the greatest emphasis on building up its bomber force and that its overarching strategy was very much in line with Douhet’s thinking about retaliation as the linchpin of air strategy. But it had not entirely neglected fighter defenses. Yearly war games that pitted the RAF’s Air Defence of Great Britain Command against a mock force of attacking bombers had shown that the bomber did not always get through: in the 1932 exercise, 50 percent of the daytime raids and 25 percent of the nighttime raids were successfully intercepted. The real problem was timely and accurate early warning. During the Great War a system had been developed to relay observer reports along the coast via dedicated telephone lines to a command center in London, which in turn could dispatch fighters from airfields around the city. The trouble was that London’s proximity to the coast left little time to react, and indeed nothing in England was more than seventy miles from the coast. The new, much faster bombers entering service cut the margin even closer.
In June 1934 the Air Ministry’s director of scientific research, H. E. Wimperis, had asked his assistant A. P. Rowe to look into what was being done from a scientific standpoint to improve the air defense situation, and as Rowe recalled he reached exactly the same conclusion that Lindemann had—almost nothing:
It was clear that the Air Staff had given conscientious thought and effort to the design of fighter aircraft, to methods of using them without early warning, and to balloon defences. It was also clear however that little or no effort had been made to call on science to find a way out. I therefore wrote a memorandum summarizing the unhappy position and … said that unless science evolved some new way of aiding air defence, we were likely to lose the next war if it started within ten years.19
Even in the air force and navy, services that certainly by the 1930s depended upon scientific innovation for their very existence, the suspicion of science and scientists ran extraordinarily deep. England’s scientists may or may not have been “united” in disdaining war work, as J. D. Bernal claimed, but uniformed officers were at least as united in disdaining civilian scientists, even the ones who did work for them. Rowe himself had received a vivid introduction to traditional military attitudes when he joined Wimperis’s staff in the mid-1920s and tried to have a bomb tested in the wind tunnel at Farnborough, only to be told that the directorate of scientific research was to limit its inquiries to aeronautical questions; armaments were not its business. After a long bureaucratic struggle Wimperis was made an associate member of the interservice Ordnance Board, whose chairmanship rotated among an admiral, a general, and an air marshal. Rowe was sent as the scientific directorate’s representative. Noticing that he was the sole civilian in the room, he took what he hoped was an inconspicuous spot at the table. It did not work. The chairman opened the meeting by announcing, “And today we have with us Mr. Rowe of the Air Ministry. Now perhaps, Mr. Rowe, you would like to let us know what you have to say.” Rowe replied modestly that he had come to listen, not to speak. “In that case, Mr. Rowe,” replied the chairman, “we need not detain you any longer.”20
Now, ten years later, Wimperis took what Rowe rightly called “a bold step” for a civilian bureaucrat in the military services in this climate, and submitted directly to the Air Staff and the secretary of state for air, Lord Londonderry, a detailed and forceful proposal that a Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence be established with a wide-ranging mandate “to consider how far recent advances in scientific and technical knowledge can be used to strengthen the present methods of defence against hostile aircraft.” To ensure that this was more than just a rubber-stamp committee or a cover for business as usual, Wimperis urged that three outside experts—all distinguished scientists with military experience and unimpeachable integrity and independence—be brought in to serve on the committee. For the chairman he proposed Henry Tizard, a physical chemist at Oxford; the other two members would be A. V. Hill, a professor of biology at University College, London, and P. M. S. Blackett, “who was a Naval Officer before and during the War, and has since proved himself by his work at Cambridge as one of the best of the younger scientific leaders of the day.” Rowe and Wimperis would make up the rest of the committee.21<
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“The five men who met under Tizard’s chairmanship in Room 724 of the Air Ministry from 11 a.m. until 1.45 on the morning of 28 January 1935 were to help transform Britain’s defences between 1935 and the outbreak of the war,” states Tizard’s biographer Ronald W. Clark.22 They would also, it is no exaggeration to say, revolutionize the model of the application of scientific expertise to the art of war.
Tizard was a friend of Lindemann’s—he had helped secure Lindemann’s Oxford appointment—and like Lindemann had rather improbably learned to fly during the war to conduct scientific research for the air force. Tizard worked out a brilliant system that combined radio signals, sequential photography, and a pen recorder to precisely track the release and fall of a bomb from an airplane as part of the successful effort to develop the Royal Flying Corps’ first practical bombsight. (Like Lindemann, too, he suffered from poor vision, the result in his case of a boyhood accident that left one eye damaged. He had been rejected for service by the navy for that reason. But he was accepted by the army, transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in 1915, and talked the authorities into letting him take flying lessons by proposing to fly only on days when the weather was too bad for the regular student pilots to go up.)
Tizard’s ability to speak the language of airmen and understand their problems would carry weight. He also had a tough, skeptical, independent mind. As a student at Oxford he had learned an invaluable lesson about questioning received wisdom when his chemistry tutor had suggested he ought to do some serious reading during the long vacation:
Observing perhaps a lack of enthusiasm on my face, he turned to his shelves and picked out a new-looking book entitled Chemical Statics and Dynamics. “This is an important subject,” he said, “but the book is rather too mathematical for me. I wish you’d take it away and see how many mistakes you can find in it.” I believe this was the first time that any senior man had indicated that I might know more than he did about something that was worth knowing, and the first time that anyone had suggested to me that there might be mistakes in a printed book of science.23
Tizard quickly did find a mistake (which “aroused a detective spirit”) and by the time he was done he had a long list of corrections, which he duly sent off to the author, receiving a gracious acknowledgment in return. During the war, after his work on the bombsight, he carried out a study of Allied bombing operations in France and concluded that there were so many sources of error, besides just aiming—target selection, navigation problems, poor visibility, difficulties in identifying the target—that the chance of a bomb ending up anyplace where it would have an actual effect on the enemy was “small,” not exactly what his superior officers in the RFC wanted to hear.
The third outsider on the committee, A. V. Hill, was another man cut from the same straight-talking mold. He had shared the 1922 Nobel Prize in medicine for studies of muscle physiology. In the war, he had done groundbreaking work on statistical analysis of antiaircraft fire for the army.
In Wimperis’s memorandum to Lord Londonderry he had urged that “no avenue, however seemingly fantastic, must be left unexplored” in the search for improved air defenses that could protect Britain’s population centers. In preparation for the committee’s first meeting Wimperis decided to try to get a definitive answer about one such fantastic avenue that had a long history. For years the Air Ministry had been pestered by inventors who promised that with sufficient time and money (“particularly money,” Rowe noted) they could develop a “death ray.” Hoping to get them out of their hair the ministry had offered £1,000 for the successful demonstration of such a device that could kill a sheep at 100 yards. Unfortunately this only encouraged more cranks when word got around about the promised cash prize. In the first week or two of January 1935, Wimperis phoned Robert Watson-Watt, who directed the National Physical Laboratory’s Radio Research Section, and asked him if such a ray that could disable an aircraft or its crew was a physical possibility. Watson-Watt had his assistant A. F. Wilkins work out the numbers and it was immediately apparent that the amount of energy required was so vast as to be impractical. “Well, I wonder what else we can do to help them,” Watson-Watt then said to Wilkins. The two talked over a few ideas and recalled reports that radio signals sometimes fluttered when an airplane flew nearby. Wilkins then did another calculation to see how much energy would be needed to bounce a radio signal off an airplane and receive an echo. The results were distinctly promising.24
Lindemann and Churchill meanwhile were still lobbying hard for a higher-level committee to be established and were suspicious when they learned the Air Ministry had beaten them to the draw in setting up its own panel. Churchill thought that entrusting the job to the same department that had failed so miserably to date was to guarantee just more inaction. In fact, the Tizard Committee moved with a speed that probably still holds an all-time record in the annals of military bureaucracy. At their first meeting Wimperis reported Watson-Watt’s preliminary findings; at the second meeting, on February 21, they reviewed a full report that they asked Watson-Watt to prepare; and five days after that Watson-Watt, Wilkins, and Rowe were huddled before an oscilloscope watching the green trace rise and fall as a Heyford bomber flew through the radio signal from a nearby BBC shortwave transmitter. A week later Wimperis sent a memorandum to Air Marshal Hugh Dowding, the member of the Air Staff responsible for research and development, which began, “We now have in embryo a new and potent means of detecting the approach of hostile aircraft, one which will be independent of mist, cloud, fog, or nightfall.”25 Wimperis proposed that the Air Ministry provide £10,000 to continue the research. Dowding approved it on the spot. It was the beginning of the radar system that five years later would save the nation in the Battle of Britain, with Dowding himself in command as the commander-in-chief of Fighter Command.
Two months later, in April 1935, Churchill’s political persistence paid off and his Air Defence Research SubCommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence was established, with himself as one of the members. Lindemann was added to the Tizard Committee. To confuse matters further, Tizard’s committee was decreed to be simultaneously an Air Ministry committee and a technical sub-sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence.
Churchill’s enthusiasm for things scientific was genuine, if naive. He had a Victorian-era fascination with technology and statistics, which was fine; more troublesome, he had a weakness for the picture of the lone amateur inventor upending establishment thinking with a revolutionary idea that required a courageous champion to see it through. As first lord of the Admiralty he had played a real part in championing the development of the tank in 1915 against the resistance of the army (“Winston’s Folly” it was called in Whitehall), which only confirmed his belief in his ability to pick a winning idea and become its patron. Soon Churchill and Lindemann were bombarding Tizard with all sorts of half-baked schemes, the loopiest of which were aerial mines that would intercept enemy bombers with a curtain of explosives drifting down on parachutes, and a device to create artificial updrafts to flip an airplane over in mid-flight. Another Lindemann-Churchill pet project was infrared detection of aircraft, which while not ridiculous in principle had been shown already to be extremely difficult in practice given the ease with which heat emissions from an aircraft engine could be shielded.
Tizard, Hill, and Blackett became increasingly incensed by Lindemann’s efforts to push these hobby horses, especially since it would mean giving less attention to the crucial technology of radar. Blackett described how the issue came to a head the following year:
It was not long before the meetings became long and controversial; the main point of dispute concerned the priorities for research and development which should be assigned to the various projects which were being fathered by the Committee.… On one occasion Lindemann became so fierce with Tizard that the secretaries had to be sent out of the committee room so as to keep the squabble as private as possible. In August 1936, soon after this meeting, A. V. Hill and I decided
that the Committee could not function satisfactorily under such conditions; so we resigned.26
Lindemann’s defenders would later assert that he and Churchill were always fully behind radar and were merely pressing for other promising ideas to receive attention as well. A thick file in the Air Ministry’s archives labeled “Correspondence with W. S. Churchill, M. P. Air Defence Research Committee” suggests otherwise; it shows Churchill and Lindemann single-mindedly pursuing the aerial mine and infrared detection schemes and lambasting Tizard and the committee for their “halfhearted” and “slow-motion” efforts on these two projects. R. V. Jones, Lindemann’s former student, recalled Lindemann mocking his rivals at this time with a parody of Omar Khayyám: “Something along the lines of ‘The Blackett and the Tizard keep the courts where Trenchard once did sleep,’ ” Trenchard being the first chief marshal of the RAF. Following Hill’s and Blackett’s resignations, Lindemann smugly wrote the secretary of state for air that with those two obstacles out of the way, he was confident “this extremely important work will now be pursued more effectively and with due energy.”27
Zuckerman observed that he could “not imagine any two people less likely to trust or like each other” than Blackett and Lindemann—Blackett “straightforward, leftish, Bohemian and unconventional,” Lindemann high Tory, patrician, and calculating. The same went for Hill and Lindemann. And Tizard, though an old friend, found his patience wearing thin, too, especially when he discovered that Lindemann was repeatedly working through Churchill to revive in his Committee of Imperial Defence subcommittee ideas that had already been shot down on technical grounds by the Tizard Committee. “The trouble about Lindemann is that he is getting so infernally unscientific,” Tizard wrote at one point. “He takes no trouble to examine even his own proposals properly, let alone anyone else’s.”28
Tizard, by contrast, saw that developing mutual trust with the air force’s officers and researchers was key to getting anything done. Early on, Tizard admonished Lindemann that if he could not abide by the committee’s decisions and understand the damage he was doing, he should not be a part of it. “What disturbed me in our conversation the other day,” Tizard wrote him, “was your attitude that the people at the various Research Establishments were sure to be unhelpful, and slow to work out any ideas but their own.” Just before the meeting that prompted Blackett’s and Hill’s resignations, Tizard again chastised Lindemann that “far from ‘accelerating progress’ you are retarding it.… If you want to have the work pressed with greater vigour, at the expense of other important work, you must surely start by convincing willing colleagues of the wisdom of doing this, instead of complaining to other people that they are slackers.”29
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