Blackett's War

by Stephen Budiansky

  In January 1940 Tizard suggested to Rowe that an expanded OR section might be created to study questions for the air force not immediately connected with the radar system. “I had hoped that Blackett would be able to devote a lot of time to the work,” Tizard wrote, “he is the ideal man for the job.”8 Nothing immediately came of the suggestion, but the idea of applying science to war at a very fundamental level clearly was much on Blackett’s mind at the time. Zuckerman would later claim with only slight exaggeration that it was the Tots and Quots—and Science in War—that brought operational research to the fore: “Operational research was, to a significant extent, the creation of our members.”9 The passage in Science in War making the case for giving to scientists a comprehensive role in the development of military strategy and tactics did not use the term “operational research,” but that was what it was unmistakably referring to:

  In the actual business of warfare, science has been used up to now almost exclusively on the technical side—for example, to improve weapons, transport, and communication. It has hardly been used, at least by us, on the more general, and the more vitally important question of strategy and tactics. These, on paper, depend on the special discipline of military science, which, however, has little or no relation to the natural and social sciences. The true scientific departments of the Services concentrate either on detailed technical problems as they arise, or on general technical questions, such as the improvement of the ballistic properties of guns, or of the speed and fighting power of aeroplanes. Yet the use of these weapons and the organization of the men who handle them are at least as much scientific problems as is their production. The waging of warfare represents a series of human operations carried out for more or less definite ends. Seeing whether these operations actually yield the results expected from them should be a matter of direct scientific analysis. The ultimate answer is provided by victory or defeat, but failure to understand the factors contributing to that victory or defeat, and the degree to which each contributes, removes any secure ground for organizing further success. A naïve belief in invincibility may have some value in morale, but, as experience in France has shown, it is a dangerous guide in strategy.

  It is possible to reduce many of the factors in military operations to numerical values. Doing so provides problems capable of definite solution. This has, indeed, been done to a certain extent with the tactical problems of naval and air fighting, but it could be extended to many more. The scientific staffs of the Services need to play a much larger part than they seem to do in the formulation and solution of strategical and tactical problems.… The disadvantage until now has been that scientists of sufficient ability have not been made aware enough of the situation to be of any greater use than other amateur strategists. There is, however, little doubt that geographic and economic knowledge, and the assistance of great modern developments in mathematics, could lead, in a minimum of time, to a revolution in strategy far greater than that introduced by Napoleon.10

  The anonymity of the book’s authors allowed Zuckerman, Huxley, and J. G. Crowther, a member of the Tots and Quots who was the science correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, to shamelessly plug their own book in laudatory reviews they published in Nature and the Guardian. Whatever the ethics of that, it helped to secure attention in high places. Within weeks of the publication of Science in War, urgent questions were being raised in Parliament about the use of scientists in the war.11

  ———

  TWO DAYS AFTER the surrender of France on June 21, 1940, a convoy of trucks departed the German U-boat base at Wilhelmshaven. Loaded with torpedoes, mines, spare parts, and supplies, its first stop was Paris, where Dönitz had temporarily set up his headquarters while he personally conducted a survey of the French ports on the Bay of Biscay. A few days later the convoy headed on to L’Orient. As a base for the U-boats, the port was 450 miles closer to the Atlantic shipping lanes. Dönitz commandeered for his new operating headquarters a splendid villa near one of the eighteenth-century stone forts that commanded the north bank of the river opposite L’Orient. Lemp’s U-30, the boat that had torpedoed the Athenia, was the first to put in at the new base, on July 7. Other Biscay ports were soon readied to receive the U-boats: Brest, Bordeaux, Saint-Nazaire, La Pallice.

  With the Royal Navy’s destroyers withdrawn to the Channel, standing vigil against Hitler’s threatened invasion of England, the Atlantic was left wide open to German submarines. Dönitz had ordered the faulty magnetic torpedo pistols replaced with a redesigned contact detonator, and on a five-week cruise in late May and early June U-37 successfully dispatched four ships with the revamped torpedoes, restoring confidence to U-boat commanders throughout the fleet.12 Meanwhile the Kriegsmarine’s radio intelligence bureau, the Beobachtungsdienst (“observation service,” B-dienst for short), was supplying a steady stream of information on British convoy sailings and routes. Due to appallingly sloppy cipher-security procedures employed by the Royal Navy, the B-dienst had long been able to read all but the most high-level British naval radio traffic. British communications with convoys and escorts employed a relatively simple code book system known as the Naval Cypher, and the B-dienst was routinely breaking 50 percent of these messages during this period.13 Dönitz had further honed his command procedures to emphasize central control of all U-boats directly by BdU headquarters in order to organize a “wolf pack” attack once a convoy was located. The confluence of all of these forces in the summer of 1940 swept a tide of good fortune to the U-boat service. In the three months from July to September the U-boats sank more than 150 ships, close to a million tons in all. The U-boat commanders had a name for this period: the “Happy Time.”

  Just as in the previous war, the U-boat captains presented to the German public the sort of heroes otherwise missing in a war of anonymous mass mobilization. Not that there was anything terribly chivalrous about firing torpedoes in the dark at unsuspecting civilian cargo ships; nonetheless, the U-boat commanders were young and daring and individually identifiable, which was what mattered. Goebbels’s propaganda celebrated them as the “gray wolves.” “Aces” who sank 50,000 tons were showered with medals, and more publicity. Günther Prien of Scapa Flow fame was among the first, sinking eight ships in one two-week period in late June. Otto Kretschmer of U-99, sailing from L’Orient at the end of July, a golden horseshoe riveted to his conning tower for good luck, set a record by sinking seven ships totaling 65,000 tons in a single two-week period.

  Though many later writers (and many of the surviving U-boat officers themselves, after the war) would portray the U-boat men as nonpolitical professional soldiers who even questioned Hitler and the Nazi leadership, they were, at least at the start, as devoted and fanatical as they come. In the beginning the U-boat crews were still all volunteers, their ardent pro-Nazism mirroring their personal swagger and arrogance. The British interrogators of one captured crew noted, “The usual undigested propaganda was repeated verbatim and ad nauseam.” The hero treatment in turn cemented their loyalty to the regime. When Kretschmer’s U-99 was sunk the following March of 1941, the British interrogation report of the captured Germans observed: “The crew … had an exaggerated idea of their importance and dignity; these inflated opinions were no doubt due to the extraordinary degree of public adulation to which they had become accustomed.” (The interrogators did, however, find that Kretschmer’s own political views “were less extremely Nazi than had been assumed,” and though a national hero he had “become weary of the war some time ago.” The junior officers were generally more “typical Nazis.”)14

  With their extra allowances, the U-boat crews earned about twice the pay of other officers and men in the German navy, and Dönitz saw to it that ashore they received the best provisions, rest and relaxation in requisitioned luxury hotels and chateaux in the French countryside, and the chance to blow off copious quantities of steam. Raucous parties, rivers of champagne, and accommodating Frenchwomen were always available in abundance. In L’Orient a favorite ha
unt was a bar called Les Trois Soeurs, known to the U-boat crews as Die Sechs Titten. “Living like a God in France” was how the submariners described their life between cruises.15 During cruises, they had an excellent opportunity of dying for the Führer: one in three U-boats did not even make it back from their first war patrol.

  ———

  WITH CHURCHILL’S MOVE to No. 10 Downing Street, Lindemann’s influence reached new—and to Tizard and many of the other scientists maddening—heights. Tizard was now officially the principal scientific adviser to the Air Staff as well as chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Study of Air Warfare, but Lindemann started showing up at his meetings and stepping on his toes constantly. Tizard, Blackett, and A. V. Hill rightly saw that Lindemann meant to refight the match he had lost against them in 1936 when he had been ousted from the air defense committee; now, with the prime minister’s backing, Lindemann clearly was out to wrest control of all government scientific advice from his old rivals. In particular it was clear he meant either to cut out the CSSAW’s influence in scientific decisions or simply take effective control of the committee himself. He continued to push his aerial mine scheme and other slightly crackpot ideas, notably a plan to employ incendiary phosphorous pellets to set fire to German crops—a scheme that the War Cabinet, without any serious discussion, approved £1 million to develop. Tizard believed that on technical grounds alone it would almost certainly fail, never mind the moral questions it raised. But with the prime minister’s ear and confidence, the Prof’s dogmatic and opinionated views increasingly had no check.

  Hill drew up a secret memorandum which was endorsed by Tizard and other leading scientists alarmed at the Rasputin-like role Lindemann had secured for himself at Churchill’s side:

  It is unfortunate that Professor Lindemann, whose advice appears to be taken by the Cabinet in such matters, is completely out of touch with his scientific colleagues. He does not consult with them, he refuses to co-operate or to discuss matters with them, and it is the considered opinion, based on long experience, of a number of the most responsible and experienced among them that his judgment is too often unsound. They feel indeed that his methods and his influence are dangerous.…

  I realise that Professor Lindemann’s presence may be indispensable to the Prime Minister, and the prestige and influence of the Prime Minister are now so important to the nation that some compromise may be necessary. It is impossible, however, for the present situation to continue.… The whole trouble is not due to one person, but that a system has grown up of taking sudden technical decisions of high importance without, or against, technical advice.16

  Disastrously, just as this confrontation with Lindemann was coming to a head in the summer of 1940, Tizard made a rare scientific blunder. Worse, he did so in Churchill’s presence, and it largely sealed his fate. The issue was the growing evidence, though still highly speculative, that the Germans were using some sort of highly accurate radio guidance device to steer their bombers to their targets in night raids over British cities. Lindemann, with his free-roving brief from the prime minister, had summoned R. V. Jones, his former student who was now looking into the problem at the Air Ministry, and picked his brains. Lindemann sent a note to Churchill outlining the evidence. “With your approval I will take this up with the Air Ministry and try to stimulate action,” Lindemann wrote. Churchill scrawled a reply at the bottom: “This seems most intriguing and I hope you will have it thoroughly examined.”17

  Jones had had his own run-ins with Lindemann while working at his Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford, and had experienced firsthand Lindemann’s stubborn insistence on sticking to erroneous conclusions once he had leapt to them and his arrogant dismissal of technical objections to his ideas as “defeatism.” He also was deeply indebted to Tizard, having been hired to head the government’s scientific intelligence program as a direct result of the Tizard Committee’s recommendation: Noting with concern the near-complete absence of any information about the Germans’ efforts to apply science to military use, the committee in April 1939 had convinced the Air Ministry to create a new staff position dedicated to that task, and proposed Jones for it.

  Jones, though only twenty-seven at the time, was in many ways the perfect candidate for the job. He had a solid grounding in experimental physics. He also had a brash and outgoing personality, along with an extremely quick sense of humor that he liked to put to the test with high-risk practical jokes. One day, while discussing the many possibilities of telephone hoaxes with a fellow physics graduate student at Oxford, he offhandedly suggested it ought to be possible to induce the victim of such a joke to place his telephone into a bucket of water. His friend immediately proposed to take him up on the challenge. They agreed that Jones would ring the friend’s flat in a few minutes; the friend rushed home to observe the proceedings. After first ringing and hanging up a few times to simulate some trouble with the connection, Jones got one of his friend’s flatmates on the line. He explained in a convincing Cockney accent that he was a telephone engineer; a fault had been reported on the line; they would not be able to send someone out until the next day to repair it; it was just possible, however, that they could fix the trouble by performing a few tests right now. Would he have a few minutes to help?

  The victim obligingly agreed, and Jones proceeded to lead him through a series of increasingly absurd “tests,” supposedly to trace a leak to ground that he said seemed to be shorting out the line. Finally Jones said that one final test was required; for this they needed a good ground. “Have you got such a thing as a bucket of water?” he asked. The victim was just about to place the phone in the bucket as directed by Jones when his flatmate decided things had gone far enough and tried to pull the receiver out of his hand. A struggle ensued until he finally shouted, “It’s Jones, you fool!” (The victim—a “manifest sportsman,” in Jones’s words—collapsed in laughter.)18

  The point was that Jones was not only an able physicist; he also was quick on his feet and instinctively grasped human nature and psychology. When offered the scientific intelligence job he had leapt at it: “A man in that position could lose the war,” he exclaimed. “I’ll take it!”19

  The evidence for the German’s radio guidance system was far from certain. But Jones brilliantly pieced together a case from a string of circumstantial clues. A scrap of paper found in a Heinkel 111 bomber that had crashed in England in March 1940 contained a cryptic reference to a radio beacon called “Knickebein.” A decoded German radio signal also mentioned Knickebein along with a particular latitude and longitude corresponding to a point over England. Two German prisoners taken from another crashed He-111 were interrogated about Knickebein and revealed nothing, but when they were alone afterward they were secretly monitored, and one was overheard saying that no matter how hard the British searched the plane “they would never find it.”

  That last clue had prompted Jones to ask the engineer who had gone over the German bomber if there was anything odd about the plane’s Lorenz receiver, a standard device used for “blind landings” at night and in bad weather. The Lorenz system worked by broadcasting a narrowly focused radio beacon from a transmitter at the end of an airport runway; a receiver in an approaching airplane detected the signal and gave the pilot an indication if the plane was centered along the line of the radio beam, and thus in line with the runway, or to the left or right of its proper course. Jones’s notion was that the same basic concept could be used to guide the German bombers as they flew away from the beacon, following the radio beam toward their targets in England. The Lorenz receiver was the only piece of otherwise innocent-looking equipment he could think of that might conceivably be suitable for such a “blind bombing” guidance system. The engineer pondered Jones’s question for a moment and replied, “No … But now that you mention it, it is much more sensitive than they would ever need for blind landing.”20

  Tizard had largely been cut out of the discussion. When he did hear about it he was profoundly skeptical. Both
he and Blackett argued that a radio beam from a transmitter on the continent would spread out far too much to be of use for accurate location of a bombing target by the time it reached England. But Jones saw a way it could work, with two beams aimed at slightly different angles; the receiver on the airplane could then detect the very narrow band—it could be as little as 100 yards wide even at a distance of 200 miles from the transmitters—where the two signals overlapped.

  In retrospect it was clear that Tizard’s mounting fury about Lindemann’s takeover of the whole wartime science enterprise was clouding his judgment. Worse followed. On June 21, Jones arrived at his office to find a note on his desk: “Squadron Leader Scott-Farnie telephoned and says will you go to the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street.” Jones was, of course, certain that this was retaliation from one of his officemates for one of his own many practical jokes. But a few phone calls quickly convinced him otherwise; he leapt into a taxi and arrived twenty-five minutes into a meeting Churchill had summoned to consider the beam question. Tizard sat on one side of the room, Lindemann on the other; Jones tactfully ignored Lindemann’s gesture to take a place next to him and found a spot on neutral ground at the end of the table.