Blackett's War

by Stephen Budiansky

  FOLLOWING GERMANY’S ATTACK on Russia on June 22, 1941, Hitler had again sought to buy time in the Atlantic. At a conference with Admiral Raeder the day before, he told his naval commander-in-chief that he desired “absolutely to avoid any possibility of incidents with the U.S.A. until the development of Operation Barbarossa”—the invasion of the Soviet Union—“becomes clearer.” A month later he reiterated that he wanted “to avoid having the U.S.A. declare war while the Eastern Campaign is still in progress.”45

  But incidents were taking place regardless of any restraint Hitler was inclined to show as the U.S. Navy asserted a steadily mounting presence in the Atlantic. Following his election to an unprecedented third term as president, Roosevelt had taken another huge step toward war. In March 1941 he secured congressional passage of the Lend-Lease Act, which allowed the United States to provide whatever arms Britain needed on credit. Even more important, the act lifted the old neutrality laws’ prohibition on transporting armaments on U.S. merchant ships. American cargo vessels now were plying the dangerous waters of the Atlantic carrying tanks, planes, trucks, fuel, and steel to keep the British war machine running.

  In July, U.S. Marines landed in Iceland to take over bases that the British had manned since Hitler’s invasion of Denmark, which owned the island. Admiral Harold Stark, the chief of naval operations, drafted the proposed order and sent it to the White House for approval. He wrote in a covering note to Harry Hopkins: “I realize that this is practically an act of war.”46 U.S. Navy warships began convoying merchant ships to Reykjavik; though nominally independent of the interlocking Canadian and British convoy system, the American convoys were open to any neutral vessels that wished to join them. To bolster the force available for escort duty, the U.S. Navy shifted from the Pacific three battleships, an aircraft carrier, four light cruisers, and two destroyer squadrons. American warships were instructed not to attack U-boats they sighted but they could pass on the information to the British—and could defend themselves if attacked.

  On September 4, 1941, U-652 was doggedly pursued by the U.S. destroyer Greer for three hours. A British Hudson bomber from Coastal Command dropped three depth charges on the U-boat, which responded by firing two torpedoes at the Greer, which responded in turn with a depth charge attack of her own. No damage was done on either side, but it gave FDR an opportunity to commit America further. Playing down the Greer’s initial pursuit of the U-boat, he denounced the German action in a fireside chat a week later as “piracy legally and morally” and offered a stark warning: “When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him.” Two days later he officially ordered the U.S. Navy to begin escorting Canadian convoys from Halifax as far as the Iceland meridian—a plan already secretly worked out by the British and American naval staffs—and to shoot on sight any German U-boats encountered along the way. The move immediately freed up forty British destroyers and corvettes. Far more important, it was another giant step toward intervention in the war by the United States.47

  British government exasperation over the failure of America to formally enter the war was mounting, but Churchill told the War Cabinet that American opinion under Roosevelt’s leadership had moved far faster than anyone could have expected and it was important to understand “the peculiarities of the American Constitution,” which reserved to Congress the power to declare war: it was unwise for a president of the United States to get too far ahead of public feeling. London and Washington were still heaving a collective sigh of relief over the bare one-vote margin by which the U.S. House of Representatives in August passed an eighteen-month extension to the one-year army draft approved the year before. The next month the isolationist bloc in the Senate almost succeeded in scuttling an amendment to the Neutrality Act that the president sent up following his speech, to permit the arming of American merchant ships and the convoying of shipping all the way to British ports. Privately, though, Churchill shared the frustrations. “The American Constitution was designed by the Founding Fathers to keep the United States free of European entanglements,” he told one of his private secretaries that fall, “and by God it has stood the test of time.”48

  But the plain fact was America already was at war in the Atlantic, declared or not. On October 20 the U.S. Navy destroyer Reuben James was torpedoed by a U-boat while escorting a convoy 600 miles west of Ireland. The ship literally broke in two, the bow section plunging under the sea instantly, the stern half five minutes later. Of the 160 men aboard, 45 were rescued out of the freezing, oil-slicked waters.

  The folksinger Woody Guthrie, like other American communists, had been volubly denouncing the struggle between Britain and Germany as an “Imperialist War” that America should stay out of, adding a strident antiwar voice on the left to the anti-Semitic-tinged isolationism of Charles Lindbergh’s America First movement, the Chicago Tribune, and others on the American right. In the first months of 1941, while America First members marched in front of the British embassy in Washington protesting Lend-Lease with placards that read BENEDICT ARNOLD HELPED ENGLAND TOO, Guthrie and the Almanac Singers were belting out protest songs denouncing Roosevelt and the war, too:

  Now the guns of Europe roar

  As they have so oft before

  And the warlords play their same old game again.

  While they butcher and they kill

  Uncle Sammy foots the bill,

  With his own dear children standing in the rain.49

  But with Germany’s attack on Russia in June, the Almanac Singers had literally changed their tune. Now the sinking of the Reuben James gave them the opportunity to turn their talents for agitprop to a flag-waving, full-throated, patriotic appeal for America to get into the fight. Set to the tune of the old Carter Family standard “Wildwood Flower,” their song about brave Americans going down in the cold icy waters of the Atlantic was soon heard everywhere. Pete Seeger was probably the most talented member of the group, and he came up with the chorus to “Reuben James” that everyone remembered:

  Tell me, what were their names?

  Tell me, what were their names?

  Did you have a friend on the good Reuben James?50

  Baker’s Dozen

  THE JAPANESE SPARED FDR the need to exercise his powers of persuasion any further on an isolationist and war-wary public. “We are all in the same boat now,” the president told Churchill when the British prime minister reached him by telephone the evening of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

  A formal declaration of war against Germany still depended upon what Hitler would do; there were four tense days in Washington waiting to see what would happen. On December 11, Hitler addressed the Reichstag with a vituperative personal attack on the American president that he had been obviously holding in for months. He called Roosevelt a hypocrite, a Freemason, a rich financial speculator who surrounded himself with Jews, a “man who, while our soldiers are fighting in snow and ice, very tactfully likes to make his chats from the fireside.” He ended to thundering applause with a declaration of war against the United States. Roosevelt sent a message to Congress the same day asking for a declaration that a state of war with Germany existed; it passed unanimously.

  In London, Churchill felt nothing but unconcealed relief. “So we had won after all!” was his first thought. “No American will think it wrong of me,” he later wrote, “if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy”:

  Many disasters, immeasurable cost and tribulation lay ahead, but there was no more doubt about the end. Silly people—and there were many, not only in enemy countries—might discount the force of the United States. Some said they were soft, others that they would never be united. They would fool around at a distance. They would never come to grips. They would never stand bloodletting. Their democracy and system of recurrent elections would paralyze their war effort. They would be just a vague blur on the horizon to friend or foe. Now we should see the weakness of t
his numerous but remote, wealthy, and talkative people. But I had studied the American Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch.… I thought of a remark which Edward Grey had made to me more than thirty years before—that the United States is like “a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.”1

  The day after war began between Germany and the United States, Hitler ordered Raeder to send six of the large Type IX U-boats to the east coast of America “as quickly as possible.”2 The news that America was officially in the war was as welcome to Dönitz as it was to Churchill. The British successes over the last several months in evading and destroying his submarines—the product both of the British scientific breakthroughs in operational research and cryptanalysis, and of a growing organizational ability to put those discoveries promptly to use—had severely checked the U-boat offensive in the Atlantic. For the second half of 1941 merchant shipping losses to U-boats were averaging under 125,000 tons a month. More than that, the individual effectiveness of U-boats had dropped dramatically. Each boat at sea had sunk an average of four ships a month during the “Happy Time”; that figure was now down to less than one per month.3

  On January 13, 1942, Dönitz’s advance force of six U-boats reached their positions and from BdU headquarters received a transmitted code word, Paukenschlag, “drumbeat,” or maybe more precisely “timpani crash.” It was the signal to begin the war with the United States. The result was mayhem. Only five of the Type IX boats had successfully completed the voyage across the Atlantic but over the next two weeks they sank thirty-five ships totaling more than 200,000 tons. Tankers billowing thick columns of black smoke could be seen each morning in plain view off the shores of Cape Cod, New Jersey, the Virginia Capes, and Cape Hatteras.

  In February a second wave of U-boats arrived to take over from the first five, which were by then running low on fuel, torpedoes, and supplies; the new arrivals included some of the standard medium-range Type VII Atlantic boats with extra fuel tanks crammed in every available space to extend their cruising distance. They, too, found a U-boat paradise awaiting them. It was, the U-boat captains said, the “Second Happy Time.” Freighters crawled along the coast singly, often with lights on, or silhouetted against the blazing lights of coastal cities that had yet to order blackouts. In his war diary Dönitz described conditions on the American coast as “almost of a peacetime standard,” with “single-ship traffic, clumsy handling of ships, few and unpracticed sea and air patrols and defenses.” The pickings were so rich that his commanders could coolly let freighters in ballast pass by and wait for a more lucrative tanker or laden freighter to appear, as it inevitably would. The first of the U-boat captains to return reported that there were so many targets available he could not possibly engage them all: “At times up to ten ships were in sight sailing with lights on peacetime courses.”4 The rampage extended into the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. In March sinkings reached a half million tons. Dönitz was promoted to full admiral.

  The slaughter would have been far worse if Hitler, who never could quite grasp naval strategy, had not at that moment persuaded himself that the Allies were planning a move against Norway. By spring of 1942 the total number of U-boats in the German fleet was approaching 300 thanks to an ever-accelerating tempo of new construction; 170 or so were undergoing training and trials, but that left more than 100 available for operations. About 50 boats were now at sea at any given time. In vain Dönitz pleaded to throw them all into the western Atlantic. But with his eyes on Norway, Hitler overrode Dönitz, holding back a sizable force to repulse the Baltic thrust that never came. Still, even with one hand tied behind his back by his Führer, Dönitz was delivering a terrible pounding to Britain’s new ally. One day that March, the MIT physicist Philip Morse was on a ferry from Delaware to Newport News, Virginia, when the ship passed a tanker limping to port with a ten-foot gash torn through her hull near the bow, obviously the victim of a German torpedo attack. Morse wondered who was analyzing the U-boat threat for the U.S. Navy.

  AS MORSE HIMSELF would learn a few weeks later, the answer was no one, though it had not been for want of admirable intentions. In 1940, at the same time Vannevar Bush was securing the president’s blessing for his plan for the NDRC, Frank Jewett was enlisting the support of the secretary of the navy for the creation of a National Academy of Sciences committee to advise the navy on scientific matters. In December 1940 the academy’s Naval Advisory Committee organized a subcommittee to look specifically at problems of antisubmarine warfare; Jewett chose as its head Edwin H. Colpitts, a former vice president of Bell Labs. The Colpitts Committee dutifully spent two months touring naval facilities and examining the navy’s existing technical programs. In its final report, the committee recommended that the government institute a broad-based scientific program on oceanography and underwater acoustics, explore new devices based on centimeter-wave radar and magnetic locators that had been neglected to date due to a shortage of funds, and improve training and maintenance so that sonar equipment already in the field could be properly employed, which it frequently was not.

  One of the Colpitts Committee’s additional recommendations to the navy was the formation of a committee to investigate the entire problem of submarine detection. The fix was in on this: even before the committee reported, Bush had written Jewett that the antisubmarine problem was “absolutely the kind of thing on which NDRC ought to take off its coat and get busy,” and Jewett and Colpitts fully intended that NDRC would get the job. In April 1941 Jewett arranged for a formal request from the navy to NDRC to implement the Colpitts Committee’s recommendation. Bush and Jewett chose John T. Tate, dean of the University of Minnesota, professor of physics, and editor of the prestigious Physical Review, to head the new Section C-4 of NDRC that was created to take on the navy assignment. Columbia University was asked to serve as the contracting agent, and by the summer of 1941 about $1.5 million in contracts was flying out the door to researchers in various universities and industries, including General Electric, RCA, Harvard, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the University of California.5

  Following up on a suggestion by Tizard during his visit to the United States the previous year, Tate and Louis B. Slichter, an MIT geophysicist who had worked on submarine detection in the First World War, left for a visit to England on April 7, 1942, to continue the technical liaison between American scientists and the Admiralty. They returned a month later with a bagful of notes and technical documents: drawings of hydrophones, plans for an “attack trainer” to teach escort ship crews how to use asdic, a booklet on underwater vibration patterns of propeller blades.6

  It was all important information, but like the focus of Section C-4 itself it was heavy on the technical details of apparatus and acoustical phenomena with little about actual antisubmarine tactics and strategy. Most of the NDRC’s contracts involved basic scientific research in oceanography, underwater sound transmission, and magnetic and optical principles of detection. Phil Morse was brought into the work of Section C-4 in the summer of 1941 via his background in acoustics, and it did not take long for him to chafe at the narrow, technical confines of the tasks being portioned out to the scientists by their navy patrons.

  Morse was then thirty-eight years old. A dapper midwesterner who sported a Clark Gable mustache and pin-striped suits, he was always caught in photographs with an ever-so-slight look of wry amusement in his eyes. He came from a family of “three generations of technical men, builders, and planners,” in his words; his ancestors included a railroad surveyor and a telephone engineer, a builder and architect, and several committed abolitionists and social activists. Morse had found MIT a perfect home. He had been on the physics faculty for a decade, arriving in 1931 as part of MIT president Karl Compton’s ambitious plan for the United States to begin training its own scientists, rather than relying on English and German universities as it always had before. Compton was especially eager to convince industry that physicists, as scien
tific generalists, could help them solve any technological problem. It was an approach that was beginning to pay off; under Compton’s presidency the physics department expanded rapidly. When Morse arrived there were about a dozen physics graduate students; six years later there were sixty.

  Morse had been Compton’s student at Princeton, which he had chosen for graduate school knowing little more about the place than the fact that Princeton had offered him a $700 scholarship, versus Harvard’s offer of $450. Under Compton he had done an experimental study involving electrical discharges in gases. He spent months blowing glass and building electrical devices and assembling a mercury vapor vacuum pump. Earlier, as an undergraduate at the Case engineering school in Cleveland, he had helped pay his way when his family ran short of money by taking a year off and working as a partner in a radio store where the owners assembled much of the equipment themselves. But his experiences in grad school convinced him that he was not a natural experimentalist, and he found himself increasingly drawn to the theoretical side of physics.7

  At MIT it dawned on him that he wasn’t a theoretician either, at least not the kind who would ever win a Nobel Prize. “It was clear to me,” he later wrote, “that I was no Einstein.” (“This realization,” he added, “came slowly enough to cushion disappointment.”) But Morse was becoming just the kind of generalist that Compton thought made physicists so useful. Morse recognized that his own skill was “not the sort of deep-thinking ability that wins prizes and fame,” he admitted, but rather the ability to look across many areas, find the connections, the promising leads, and see how the insights in one field could be applied to another. He enjoyed teaching, writing textbooks, guiding graduate students, working on an interesting problem for a few weeks, then moving on to something new. “Breadth rather than depth was best for me,” he concluded. Morse’s interest in acoustics had come about that way, by noticing that the mathematical techniques of quantum mechanics could address interesting questions in sound propagation.8