Blackett's War

by Stephen Budiansky

  This was something entirely new for scientists working for the military; as an “indirect but very real achievement” of the Tizard Committee, this new form of scientific-military cooperation would in retrospect rank in Blackett’s view as every bit as important as the invention of radar itself. Blackett had moved from London to the University of Manchester in 1937, taking his 11-ton magnet with him, but continued to play an active part in defense affairs through the Tizard Committee, which had now taken on a larger responsibility within the Air Ministry as reflected in its new name, the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Warfare. The Biggin Hill study, Blackett explained, was

  the first official recognition that the actual operations of modern war are so complicated and change so fast that the traditional training of the serving officers and personnel is inadequate. In fact, many of the operational problems which arise when new equipment comes into service require for their solution the aptitudes of the scientific research worker: for he is trained to apply scientific methods to elucidate hitherto unknown and complex phenomena.

  The traditional military view was that the scientists’ role was to develop “weapons and gadgets,” hand them over, and that was that. But now scientists were intimately involved in what previously had been the exclusive purview of military commanders: the running of operations.

  The mutual confidence forged in the process broke down barriers on both sides; “so that,” wrote Blackett, “when need arose, and it did arise very soon, many of the best academic research workers flocked out of the universities into radar stations, and later into service experimental establishments, where they became a vital part of the brilliantly creative, and sometimes obstreperous, teams, whose work had so profound an effect on the waging of the war.” He continued:

  These developments implied a great measure of mutual trust and understanding between the senior service officers and the often brash and initially very ignorant scientists—ignorant, that is, of most things that went on outside a university research department.… Hitler’s Third Reich saw no such collaboration. No doubt the almost unbroken German military successes of the first war years confirmed the highly competent military staffs in the view that they had no need to seek help from outside scientists, however brilliant. When the tide of war swept against Germany it was too late. Luckily for the Allies, Germany never produced its Tizard.45

  Rowe, sometime in 1937, came up with a name for this new kind of scientific investigation into the business of running a war: “operational research.” Williams’s group was entered on the organizational chart at Bawdsey as the “Operational Research Section.”46

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1939 the final stations of the radar network were completed to form an unbroken sentry line, a chain of spidery steel towers standing guard against the nightmare threat of Britain’s annihilation from the air by the Nazi war machine. Of the RAF’s thirty-five fighter squadrons available for the defense of the island, twenty-nine were now equipped with the new fast monoplane Spitfires and Hurricanes in place of the biplanes that had filled their ranks just a few years earlier. Blackett left for a vacation, renting a cottage for the first of many summers he would spend in a beautiful spot in the Welsh mountains where many other leftish intellectuals had vacation homes, Bertrand Russell the most notable. “In our Welsh cottages,” the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote many years later with a certain good-natured self-mockery, “we voluntarily lived under the sort of conditions we condemned capitalism for imposing on its exploited toilers.” (“How Left-Wing Was My Valley” was the title of his reminiscence.)47 In August, Blackett wrote from Wales to a scientific friend, Michael Polanyi, admitting he was stunned by the news that Stalin had just signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler—adding that Polanyi, who had never shared Blackett’s starry-eyed admiration for the Soviets, no doubt felt a certain degree of “Schadenfreude” over the anguish this act of Soviet expediency was causing the British left.48

  By then appeasement was dead beyond all possible doubt, trampled by the long trail of German perfidy that reached its end with Hitler’s betrayal of his pledge given at Munich, in September 1938, that the absorption of German-speaking regions of Czechoslovakia was his “last territorial claim” upon Europe. Five months later, Hitler sent his troops to seize the rest of Czechoslovakia and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced that Britain was prepared to guarantee Poland’s security.

  In response, Hitler denounced the Anglo-German Naval Treaty. “The basis for it has been removed,” he declared on April 28, 1939, in a long sarcastic speech to a snickering Reichstag in which he ridiculed a message from President Franklin D. Roosevelt seeking Germany’s assurances of her peaceful intentions toward her neighbors. But Hitler solemnly disavowed any German plans to attack Poland (such reports, he said, were “mere inventions of the international press”).49

  The British prime minister had been genuinely shocked by Hitler’s betrayal of the Munich pact, and took it personally. “In spite of the hardness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face,” Chamberlain said, “I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word.”50

  Remedial Education

  ON THE EVE OF WAR Britain’s naval experts remained serenely confident that the U-boat menace had been vanquished for good. “The submarine,” a 1937 British naval staff report concluded, “should never again be able to present us with the problem we were faced with in 1917.”1 Such confidence was the chief reason the Admiralty had been so untroubled at the prospect of Germany’s acquiring the force of fifty to sixty U-boats permitted her under the Anglo-German Naval Treaty.

  There were two main arguments that led to this reassuring conclusion. One was convoys: however reluctant the Admiralty had been in first adopting the practice, their effectiveness in 1917 and 1918 had been so decisive as to remove all doubt. The naval staff had drawn up extensive contingency plans for taking over the control and movement of all merchant shipping should war come again, and by the summer of 1939 a Shipping Defence Advisory Committee had been meeting monthly with shipowners to work out the practical details.2

  The other source of British confidence was asdic, or sonar as it was now known in America. British, French, and American scientists had all been working on the idea at the time of the Armistice. Hydrophones, underwater microphones that passively detected sounds beneath the surface, had been instrumental in only four kills of German submarines during the war, but asdic promised much better results. Like radar, asdic worked by transmitting pulses of energy—high-pitched sound waves in the case of asdic—and then recording the time it took for an echo to return from a target; the longer the time, the greater its distance.

  Had the war lasted another six months the system would have been ready for operational deployment on Royal Navy warships. The development of asdic had incidentally provided another example for Churchill’s belief that military heads required substantial knocking to get them to accept new ideas. The work had been shepherded by a board of civilian scientists set up by the Admiralty in July 1915—this was the group that Rutherford had been brought in to help with—and was headed by Churchill’s outspoken and like-minded ally Jacky Fisher. It was officially known as the Board of Invention and Research; Fisher’s many enemies among the regular navy’s tradition-minded officers called it the Board of Intrigue and Revenge. It earned little but suspicion and hostility at first. Nonetheless, the researchers made substantial progress in working out both the basic physical facts of undersea acoustics and the technology of a practical system for active detection of submarines by sound waves, and just before the end of the war the first prototype asdic set was fitted on a British research vessel for sea trials.

  By 1921 senior naval officers were so enthusiastic about the new invention that they were convinced it had upended naval strategy altogether, pronouncing it an “epoch-making achievement” that would allow escorts to protect convoys on long passages through hostile waters and even permit the Royal Navy’s
mighty surface ships to “keep to the sea as in the golden days,” rather than cowering in protected bases or skulking along behind a sprawling defensive screen of destroyers when they did sally forth. The standard asdic sets installed on British warships between the wars had a detection range of up to 5,000 yards and were equipped with a range recorder that used chemically treated paper, much like that of early facsimile machines, to draw a plot tracing the movement of a detected submarine.

  British officials were divided over whether to make this new secret weapon known to rival powers. Political leaders thought disclosure would help peace efforts by convincing other navies that submarines were obsolete, and thus to accept British proposals to restrict their numbers if not abolish them outright. The Admiralty’s director of intelligence pointed out the logical inconsistency in this thinking: either submarines were a threat to Britain’s great surface fleets or they were not, and if the government truly believed that asdic had rendered the threat impotent then there was no need to care whether other naval powers kept building submarines; indeed, “if this country really had an antidote then we would let other nations waste their resources on submarines.” In the end the policy of keeping asdic under wraps as long as possible prevailed; the very word remained an official secret until 1929.3

  That did not, however, prevent the German navy from learning of the technology, and Dönitz more cannily played the game in reverse. “According to the English Press, England apparently believes herself equal to the U-boat danger on the grounds of her detection apparatus,” he observed in early 1939. “Our goal must be under all circumstances to leave England in this belief.”4 In any event, the British naval staff was far more worried about Hitler’s newly constructed fleet of surface raiders, built around the two fast “pocket” battleships Deutschland and Admiral Graf Spee. These were warships of a new and intimidating design, powered by diesel engines that delivered a formidable cruising range of 21,500 miles and a speed of 28 knots, armed with six 11-inch guns, and they consumed an inordinate share of the British navy’s planning and attention. In the judgment of the Royal Navy’s official historian Stephen Roskill, it was probably the greatest mistake of the war that the Admiralty made.

  IN TRUTH, Hitler’s senior naval officers were deeply worried themselves.

  On August 15, 1939, Dönitz received a message that a “submarine officers’ reunion” would be held four days later. It was a coded instruction for his U-boat force to put to sea at once and take up war stations around England. Two weeks later, in the early morning hours of Sunday, August 27, Hitler held a bizarre conversation at the Reich Chancellery with a Swedish businessman, Birger Dahlerus. A friend of the Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring, Dahlerus had become an unofficial emissary between Germany and Britain in the final days leading to Germany’s invasion of Poland. Shuttling back and forth between Berlin and London, he saw himself as someone who understood both sides and could avert war where the professional diplomats had failed. Dahlerus had lived in England, and tried to convince Göring that Britain would this time stand by her commitments. Likely sincere though hopelessly naive (he would later testify as a character witness for Göring at Nuremberg), Dahlerus was in reality little better than a dupe of the Nazi government’s effort to drive a wedge between Britain and Poland.

  This time he came bearing a letter from Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary and the man in Chamberlain’s government whom Hitler had quite accurately picked out as the most likely to still be eager to grasp a “peaceful solution”—meaning a sellout of Poland that once again would let Hitler gobble up a neighboring territory without having to fight for it. Hitler, awakened by Göring at midnight to receive the self-appointed envoy, proceeded to deliver a twenty-minute harangue, pacing the floor, testifying to his sincere efforts to come to an understanding with the British and their incomprehensible refusal to grasp his proffered hand of friendship. Then, suddenly, the Führer stopped in the middle of the room and stood there staring, “his behavior that of a completely abnormal person,” Dahlerus thought. Hitler started almost chanting an incantation of what he would do if there should be a war: “Ich U-boote bauen, U-boote bauen, U-boote, U-boote, U-boote, U-boote!” (“I will build U-boats, build U-boats, U-boats, U-boats, U-boats, U-boats!”) Dahlerus glanced nervously at Göring to see how he was reacting to this display of the Führer’s phantasmic temper, “but he did not turn a hair.”5

  Despite these threats, Hitler was profoundly equivocal about the U-boat arm. He had early on secured the loyalty of the Kriegsmarine’s officer corps with the lavish promise of an expansive naval construction program, and the navy quickly became the most ardently pro-Nazi of the military services in Germany. Under the latest construction program—the Ziel (“Target”) Plan, or Z Plan, which Hitler approved in January 1939—the navy was to grow by 1945 to a powerful fleet of 10 battleships, 4 aircraft carriers, 3 battle cruisers, 3 pocket battleships, 5 heavy cruisers, 48 light cruisers, and 68 destroyers.6 It was a force that would, as in the last war, directly seek to challenge the Royal Navy’s command of the North Sea, and even waters beyond. Both Raeder and Hitler rejected an alternative proposal to concentrate on quickly building up a large force of raiders, both U-boats and pocket battleships, to strike at British commerce.

  The emphasis on conventional, big-ship sea power was the dominant German naval policy throughout the Nazi buildup, so much so that Dönitz had at first despaired upon being assigned to the U-boat force again: “I saw myself pushed into a siding,” he said, when he learned in July 1934 that he was being moved from command of the cruiser Emden to the submarine arm.7 Although the Z Plan also called for 249 submarines, the reality on the eve of the war was far short of anything approaching that figure. There were a total of only 57 U-boats in service on September 1, 1939, only 26 of those the oceangoing types capable of operating in the open waters of the Atlantic.

  The outbreak of war found the rest of the German navy equally short of the ambitious goals of the Z Plan, with only 2 battle cruisers, 3 pocket battleships, 3 heavy and 5 light cruisers, and no main battleships or aircraft carriers at all completed. A gloomy assessment by Raeder noted that the navy “was in no way very adequately equipped for the great struggle with Great Britain”—a war, he pointedly added, “which according to the Führer’s previous assertions, we had no need to expect before about 1944.” In the short time since 1935, the submarine arm had become a “well-trained and suitably organized” force. But, Raeder continued,

  The submarine is still much too weak, however, to have any decisive effect on the war. The surface forces, moreover, are so inferior in number and strength to those of the British Fleet that, even at full strength, they can do no more than show that they know how to die gallantly and thus are willing to create the foundations for later reconstruction.8

  Dönitz concurred, adding his own pessimistic appraisal. “We cannot expect the number of U-boats now on operation to be more than a petty annoyance to British commerce,” he wrote. Of the 26 boats suitable for operation in the Atlantic, 3 were in the Baltic and 5 were not yet ready for active duty or were undergoing trials, leaving a total of 18 that had been able to take up stations for the fight against Britain as of September 1. He had sent every available boat to sea to be in a position to deliver the strongest possible opening shot at the onset of hostilities, but in a sustained fight the number on station at any time would quickly fall to about one third of the total available force, to allow for repair and resupply. Even the currently planned construction of new U-boats over the next six years would yield a force of less than half the number of operational boats that Dönitz calculated would be necessary to achieve a decisive result against the enemy’s merchant shipping.9

  That magic number was 300, Dönitz said, and Germany’s failure ever to produce an operational fleet of oceangoing U-boats of that size would subsequently be cited by Dönitz himself as the chief reason he lost the Battle of the Atlantic. Many historians since have bought that assertion; scarcely a bo
ok written about the U-boat war does not cite the figure of 300 boats as the force Germany required. In fact, the number was almost purely arbitrary, based on no real analysis at all; Dönitz probably chose it as the largest figure he thought he could sell to Raeder and Hitler at the time. Commanders from time immemorial have sought to cover in advance the possibility of their failure by complaining of inadequacies in the men, arms, and supplies provided them. And Dönitz was if anything more optimistic than his superiors on the naval staff, some of whom argued that it would be irresponsible to send the U-boats to sea at all against such one-sided odds. Dönitz countered in memorandum after memorandum that he was confident the U-boats could hold their own.

  Some of his confidence—though surprisingly little—stemmed from improvements in U-boat designs and technology that had taken place since the end of the last war. The new boats were certainly more solidly constructed, with welded components replacing rivets. The horsepower of their engines had doubled, increasing the top surface speed of the oceangoing boats from about 13 knots to 17 or 18. A system allowing both propeller shafts to be driven by one of the two engines at a time when cruising at low speed allowed for much more efficient fuel use.10 But overall the design of the boats had changed remarkably little. The basic shape, functional layout, and sea performance of the U-boats that entered the war in 1939 were hardly different from those of the fleet surrendered at Harwich at the end of the last war.