Blackett's War

by Stephen Budiansky

  Scientists were by nature mavericks when it came to authority, and a willingness to plunge through accepted dogma and maintain independence was a part of the job that came naturally to most. Andrew Huxley remembered Blackett advising him that it was better not to accept a commission as an officer since “the great advantage of being a civilian was that you could answer back to the senior officers.”21 As T. E. Easterfield, a New Zealander fresh out of Cambridge with a Ph.D. in pure mathematics who joined the Coastal Command ORS in 1942, recalled, being a civilian also meant that the scientists could go around and talk to NCOs and officers alike on an informal basis, and get the real story. Indeed, establishing good working relations throughout the command was an essential part of getting anything done, the scientists quickly discovered. Easterfield recalled that Harold Larnder, who took over as director of Coastal Command ORS in 1943, had a “marvelous gift for hob-nobbing with senior officers, picking up what was in the air, and spotting problems before they were formulated by the officers themselves.” Easterfield added: “We lived at the HQ of the Coastal Command, ate in the same mess, and drank in the same bar. For some people (not me), the latter provided a very big part of the contact.” Easterfield recalled one of his colleagues declaring, “Ninety percent of operational research is beer!”22

  RITCHIE CALDER, the science correspondent for the Daily Herald, was a member of the Tots and Quots and had gotten to know many of the operational research scientists. In the 1940s it was still possible to publish a newspaper that appealed to a large working-class readership with serious articles about left-wing politics, literature, economics, and science; the Daily Herald had been a hard-left antiwar voice in the First World War, had supported the Russian Revolution, and was later owned by the Trades Union Congress. George Lansbury, the pacifist Labour Party leader of the 1930s, was its editor during and after the First World War; Siegfried Sassoon was literary editor. (In the 1960s the paper would be bought by Rupert Murdoch, renamed The Sun, and continue its mass appeal as a tabloid best known for featuring on page 3 each day a photograph of an attractive and stark-naked young woman.)

  One day in 1941 Calder dropped in on Cecil Gordon, a geneticist he knew at the University of Aberdeen. Gordon was busy counting the hairs on the antennae of fruit flies searching for mutations he had been hoping to induce. The next time Calder heard of him, Gordon was at Coastal Command working out the mathematics of aircraft flying and maintenance schedules. Calder was struck by the same scientific detachment he brought to both tasks. “Gordon,” he said, “treated Costal Command as though it were a colony of his pet drosophila.”23

  Keeping a certain emotional distance from one’s subject was scientific habit; when the subject was the lives and deaths of thousands of men it was also probably a necessity. By 1941, the war at sea was already driving the men who knew its cruel realities firsthand to the breaking point. The monotony and constant strain of station keeping in a convoy of merchant ships stretched out in ordered lines across miles of ocean was relieved only by the terror of a torpedo exploding without warning in their midst when a U-boat broke through the always overstretched escort screen. Many of the crewmen were raw, inexperienced, and not infrequently terrified. They were quickly disabused of any ideas they might have had about the romance of life at sea; merchant ships had none of the spit and polish and ritual of the regular navy that at least gave a pretense of esprit de corps and a glimmer of a nobler age. An American seaman fresh out of merchant marine school remembered reporting for his first watch at sea. Approaching the chief mate on the bridge he saluted briskly and barked out, “Relieving the watch, Sir!” That was what he had been taught to do at school. The chief mate stared at him dumbfounded for a moment before muttering, “Oh my, how lovely.”24

  The more experienced hands offered some cynical comfort to their new messmates about what they could do to increase their odds of surviving a U-boat attack. On a ship carrying a heavy cargo like iron ore or steel plate, you slept on deck because the ship would sink like a rock if it were torpedoed and you had only seconds to scramble overboard. On a ship carrying a lighter load you slept belowdecks but left your clothes on and the door open to give yourself a chance of getting out quickly. If you were aboard a tanker, or a freighter loaded with ammunition, you got undressed, shut the door, and got a good night’s sleep because you didn’t have a prayer anyway if the ship were hit.

  Worse was what frequently happened to the survivors who did manage to get out of their sinking ship in time. It did not take long to learn that stopping even briefly to try to pick up survivors just made another ship in the convoy a sitting duck; there was nothing to do but steam on. Some convoys had a rescue ship that followed astern to retrieve survivors but many did not, and in any case the Germans seemed to be deliberately targeting them; so many were torpedoed by 1942 that there were only enough available to accompany one convoy in four. The image of passing literally within feet of helpless men left to die in the dark and freezing waters of the North Atlantic was a horror few would forget. “I saw it first in HMS Alaunia in 1940,” wrote Hal Lawrence, a sailor in the Canadian navy:

  They shout, even cheer, as you approach; the red lights of their life jackets flicker when they are on the crest of a wave and are dowsed as they slip into the trough; their cries turn to incredulous despair as you glide by, unheeding, keeping a stoical face as best you can. But the cold logic of war is that these men in the water belong to a ship that has bought it and that a couple of dozen more ships survive and must be protected.… Each time was as bad as the first. We never got used to it.25

  The small corvettes Churchill had ordered hastily into construction to fill the gaping shortage of escort vessels were, in his own words, “cheap and nasty.” They weren’t so cheap, but no one disputed the other part of Churchill’s description. A scant 200 feet long, they carried a single 4-inch gun on the bow and racks of depth charges in the open stern. The bridge was open to the elements, too, save for a small enclosed wheelhouse and another boxlike cabin holding the asdic set. The Royal Navy’s theory was that fresh air kept the watch awake and on their toes and that an enclosed bridge hindered visibility. In fact, in any bad weather standing watch was “sheer unmitigated hell,” said one young Canadian officer. The ships were originally planned for a complement of 29 officers and men but that was increased to 47 and then 67, with the result that 55 enlisted men shared two 20-by-14-foot compartments, two toilets, one urinal, and three wash basins. There was no forced ventilation system and the first fifty ships that were built had no insulation either, which caused the walls to sweat with heavy condensation, causing epidemics of pneumonia and TB among their crews. In rough weather water simply slammed down through the standing ventilator pipes, flooding the mess decks and wardroom and washing up a tide of spilled food, sodden clothes, and loose gear in chaotic piles.26

  The food was abominable. The only passage from the small galley, at the rear of the superstructure, to the bridge and the forward crew quarters was across an open well deck which was frequently swept by heavy seas, which meant meals arrived cold, if they arrived at all. The galley’s small refrigerator could hold only five days’ worth of fresh meat and vegetables, after which the menu settled into an invariable and dreary procession of canned sausages, canned corned beef, canned stew, hard biscuits, and tea. (The canned stew came in an ornate container labeled OLD MOTHER JAMESON’S FARM HOUSE DINNER. “I must remember never to go to dinner at Mrs. Jameson’s,” one officer sardonically remarked.)

  To add insult to injury, the corvettes had all been given the names of flowers: HMS Gladiolus, HMS Periwinkle, HMS Buttercup … It almost seemed like a bad joke. The sharpest evocation of life aboard one of these small Atlantic escort vessels is found in the lightly fictionalized novel The Cruel Sea, by Nicholas Monsarrat, a journalist who joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserves in response to a call at the start of the war for gentlemen yachtsmen. In one vivid passage he captured the sheer unseaworthy ugliness of the Flower-class corvette
his fictional alter ego joins as a new RNVR sublieutenant: “Broad, chunky, and graceless … not much more than a floating platform for depth charges … She would be a natural bastard in any kind of seaway, and in a full Atlantic gale she would be thrown about like a chip of wood.” The ships barely made 16 knots, slower than a surfaced U-boat. On a shakedown cruise, running down to the Isle of Arran in a very moderate sea her first time out of harbor, Monsarrat’s fictional HMS Compass Rose achieved a mind-boggling 40-degree roll.27

  But what Monsarrat evokes most of all is the endless complications of turning tactical theory into anything approaching successful practice where human beings, with all of their vanities and frailties and endless personal crises, are involved—the entire sphere of warfare that lay beyond the realm of equations and analysis and rationality of Blackett, Gordon, and the other operational scientists. Early on, Monsarrat’s Sublieutenant Lockhart realizes that everything he has read and learned and taken to heart about naval tradition, duty, procedures, and tactics is being “destroyed and poisoned” by the bastard of a lieutenant he is stuck with. The lieutenant is a bully and a shirker and an opportunist who sloughs off every responsibility he can to the junior officers and covers up for his incompetence with hectoring fault finding. The crew, for its part, is mostly able and willing but beset with the sad domestic dramas of the poor; one sailor goes AWOL for seventeen days and refuses to explain until the captain sympathetically coaxes his story out of him: a pal in his North London neighborhood had sent him a letter telling him all about his wife’s increasingly notorious goings-on with a commercial traveler in his absence.28

  As in his real life, Monsarrat’s character is by the end of the war a captain in command of a destroyer and has had several daring successes in epic depth charge battles with U-boats. But even these victories seem almost to defy the larger truth of the story—that war, up close, is mostly chaos and chance and fear. Many of the Flower-class corvettes were manned by inexperienced crews of the Royal Canadian Navy, which like the British navy had disregarded the submarine threat and been woefully unprepared for escort duty. In all, Canadian shipyards would build 130 escort vessels in the course of the war; by May 1941 the RCN had enough ships available to take over full responsibility for escorting convoys from Newfoundland to a line running through 35° west longitude, where the ships would be turned over to British escorts while the Canadians would take charge of a westbound convoy for the return voyage.

  The Canadian vessels, though, did not even have the advantage of modifications the Royal Navy had since made that mitigated some of the worst flaws of the original design. The Canadian crews were almost all ex–merchant mariners and hastily recruited reservists; many of the latter came from Canada’s prairie provinces and literally had never seen the ocean before. “We were all badly trained, scared stiff, and most of the time wished to God we had joined the air force,” said one.29

  THERE WAS AN EERIE SYMMETRY between hunter and hunted. The Type VII Atlantic U-boats were almost exactly the same length as the corvettes that sought to find and destroy them, and carried a crew of almost identical size, living in equally deplorable conditions. It would fall to a German novelist, Lothar-Günther Buchheim, to render the most vividly impressionistic sense of life on the U-boats, just as Monsarrat had on the other side. Buchheim was a journalist, too; in 1940 he had volunteered for the Kriegsmarine and been assigned as a war correspondent in the navy’s propaganda unit. The following year he was ordered to sail with U-96 on her seventh patrol and produce a stirring story, with photographs, of the brave men of the U-boat arm in action. Thirty years later he wrote what he intended to be a far more honest and gritty account in his autobiographical novel Das Boot. The book opens in 1941 and already the experienced U-boat men are prematurely gray and cracking up. They have all, at least once, returned limping into port with boats whose continued seaworthiness seemed to defy the laws of physics—“upper deck demolished by aircraft bombs, conning tower rammed in, stoved-in bow, cracked pressure hull.” But,

  each time they did come back, they were standing bolt upright on the bridge, acting as though the whole mission had been mere routine. To act as though everything were a matter of course is part of the code. Howling and chattering of teeth are not allowed. U-boat Headquarters keeps the game going. For Headquarters, anyone who still has a neck and a head and all four extremities attached to his torso is all right. For Headquarters, you’re certifiable only when you start to rave. They should long ago have sent out fresh, unscathed men to replace the old commanders in the frontline boats. But, alas, the unscathed novices with their unshaken nerves happen to be far less competent than the old commanders.… But that’s the way it goes: U-boat Headquarters has been struck by blindness. They don’t see when someone is on his last legs, or don’t want to see.30

  The U-boat men increasingly relieve the strain in total dissipation ashore. At a bacchanalia the night before their departure, the officers of the boat Buchheim’s narrator is assigned to are soon far beyond inebriation, staggering back and forth between a nightclub and the nearby whorehouses of the French port town. One officer passes out in the lavatory in a pool of urine and vomit; another solemnly pours beer into the piano; another pulls out his service revolver and sends the rest of the drinkers diving under their tables as he shoots out, one by one, the classical mythological figures tastefully depicted on a mural over the orchestra platform. Gestapo officers morosely but silently watch the proceedings.

  If the corvettes were little more than floating depth charge platforms, the Type VII U-boats were little more than seagoing torpedo platforms. Each boat carried twelve torpedoes, each twenty-three feet long and weighing two tons. The torpedoes were the boats’ raison d’être and imperative and everything gave way to their needs—comfort, space, payload, work schedules. The foremost compartment of the boat was where most of the regular seamen bunked but its name was the torpedo room, which accurately reflected priorities. Four torpedoes were kept loaded in their firing tubes; six reloads had to be accommodated on and beneath the deckplates, taking up space in the already impossibly cramped room, barely ten feet wide and not tall enough for a man to stand up in. In what space was left over twelve bunks hung in rows, shared by twenty-four men who took turns sleeping in them in shifts—“hot bunking.” The torpedoes, almost like living things, demanded constant nursing and tending. Every few days their delicate mechanisms had to be checked and adjusted, batteries charged, guidance and depth-setting systems inspected. When that happened, the bunks had to be stowed away, the deckplates pulled up, the torpedoes in their tubes manhandled partway out and the whole room became more machine shop than living space.

  The officers and petty officers occupied only slightly more roomy compartments farther aft. Every compartment doubled as passageway, mess room, and workspace; sleep was constantly being interrupted by the mechanics and seamen passing to and from the engine room, control room, or bridge for their watches, by tables being folded out for mealtimes (when the lower bunks served as benches), by deckplates being wrested up to get at batteries or other equipment. The control room at the center of the boat was an incredible maze of cable chases, compressed air pipes, gauges, and dials that gave one the feeling of crawling through the innermost workings of a power plant or factory. There were two toilets for the forty-four officers and men, but the one next to the galley was inevitably given over to the more pressing needs of storage and was usually crammed with crates of vegetables, potatoes, cheese, cans of coffee, bottles of fruit juice. (“More space for food and less for shitting! You try to make sense out of it!” the bosun boisterously declares to Buchheim’s narrator.) At the start of a cruise, moving anywhere meant ducking or dodging around hanging provisions: sausages and sides of bacon suspended from the ceiling of the control room, loaves of bread filling hammocks in front of the radio room.

  Whenever the boat was running on the surface four men stood watch on the bridge, each assigned one quadrant to scan constantly; in even a small
chop waves crashed over the deck drenching the lookouts. Still, the fresh air was a welcome relief for most; below the stench was a constant presence; it hit you like a physical force, a mixture of diesel fumes, lubricating oil, engine exhaust, damp rot, cooking odors, and the acrid and omnipresent fug of unwashed bodies, ineffectually masked with cologne. After a few weeks green mold grew on leather belts, black mildew on shirts, thick crusts of yellow fuzz covered the bread, and faces and arms were pocked with infected scabs and boils.31

  The discomforts of day-to-day life were nothing compared to Buchheim’s descriptions of experiencing a depth charge attack: hours on end of cat and mouse, lying still hundreds of feet down, the churning propellers of destroyers and corvettes growing steadily louder, followed by the relentless rain of blasts, each of which could split the pressure hull open like a can opener, with certain death to follow.

  FOR THE THREE MONTHS preceding Churchill’s Battle of the Atlantic Directive, British escorts had not sunk a single U-boat. That changed on March 7, 1941—the very day following the prime minister’s order to “take the offensive.” The corvette Camellia, escorting a westbound convoy south of Iceland, sighted a U-boat on the surface. A second corvette, HMS Arbutus, joined the attack, and over the next four hours the ships repeatedly depth-charged a spot where air bubbles were seen rising to the surface. Survivors from the U-boat—she would turn out to be U-70, under the command of Kapitänleutnant Joachim Matz—later told their British captors that the explosions had started a leak that sent the boat sinking out of control. The depth gauge hit 200 meters—its maximum reading—and still the boat kept dropping farther as cracking sounds rent the hull and paint began flaking off the sides of the walls. With only a small quantity of compressed air in reserve and the stern down at an angle of 45 degrees, the crew huddled in the forward compartment to try to bring her on an even keel, set the electric motors full ahead, and blew the tanks. As the boat broke the surface the crew opened the scuttling vents and spilled out of the conning tower. The British ships fished Matz and twenty-five of his officers and men out of the water; twenty others were lost.32