Blackett's War

by Stephen Budiansky

  His years at MIT in the 1930s, he later thought, were “a happy untroubled time of a sort that has never since returned.” He was earning $7,500 a year by 1939 from his salary as a full professor plus consulting fees and textbook royalties; he was settled in a happy marriage, with a home in the comfortable and affluent Boston suburb of Belmont that his in-laws helped the couple buy, and his wife had just given birth to their first child, a daughter; he had time to indulge his restless and eclectic hobbies—mountain climbing, wood turning, a voracious appetite for reading, usually five books a week, history, archaeology, and biography mostly.

  Much like Blackett, though, he was at least at times struck by the disconcerting gap between scientific progress and the hardships suffered in society at large. Struggling in the Depression back in Cleveland, his mother took in boarders; his father was out of work and ended up taking a job with the WPA, planning a building that never got built. A broken and discouraged man, he aged rapidly and died in 1939. “At MIT I was helping to discover new things,” Morse wrote of one of his moments of self-doubt, “while the country was not able to use the ample resources and technology it already had to feed and house its people.” He had been apolitical like many of his fellow scientists, believing there was little he could do to influence public events. He was also a pacifist. Like many of his British counterparts, he was shaken out of both beliefs by the rise of Nazi Germany. He reached two conclusions. One was that he would contribute whatever he could to the war effort. His corollary was that if scientists were to play a role, it was essential that “scientific work for the war effort should not be entirely controlled by the military and that scientists must have a part in deciding, at the highest levels, what direction their work would take.”9

  Morse spent the summer of 1941 shuttling between Cambridge, Cape Cod, and various navy laboratories developing a noise-making device that could be towed behind a ship to counter acoustically triggered mines the Germans were reportedly developing. His design, two hollow parallel steel pipes that generated a deafening cavitation noise—the sound produced by water pulling away then smacking back against an underwater surface—won the record for the loudest sound per weight of any of the devices tested. But by the end of 1941 “some of the glamour had left the project for me,” Morse found:

  True, we had done what we had been asked to do, and had done it quickly. We were proud to be able to show what scientists could do. Most of us liked to build equipment and were enjoying the chance to put to use new knowledge and techniques amassed during the past fifteen years. However, some of us wondered whether the only thing trained scientists were good for in a war was to do the measurements and design work thought up for them by the supply departments of the armed services. Having become acquainted with many of the officers in charge of projects, I entertained a faint doubt as to whether these officers were always asking us to do the right things.10

  Morse shared his frustrations with Tate, an old friend. Tate listened sympathetically but said little. Tate’s tight lips were themselves a symptom of the deeper problem, Morse realized. The navy fundamentally distrusted sharing its secrets with civilians, and Tate was having to walk an extremely fine line between trying to expand the role of the scientists and not alarming naval officers that he was poking into areas where he had no authority; that meant he had to keep his mouth shut far more often than he otherwise would have liked to.

  TATE WAS in fact quietly thinking about Morse’s complaint. A few months later, in mid-March 1942—not long after Morse had spotted the crippled tanker from the Newport News ferry—Tate asked him to pay a call on Captain Wilder D. Baker at the navy’s First Naval District headquarters in Boston. Baker’s office was in the office building at North Station, the terminal of the Boston & Maine Railroad across the Charles River from the Charlestown Navy Yard. Morse was favorably impressed with the navy captain the moment he walked in the door: “steel-gray eyes, gray hair, a look of decisiveness.”

  Baker was in many ways a completely conventional and unremarkable career navy man. He had a reputation as a demanding, stern, but fair and direct commander; when he promised to do something, he did it. His father had been a newspaperman in Topeka, Kansas; the family later moved to Bay City, Michigan, and on graduation from high school he had applied for admission to the Naval Academy. He graduated in the middle of his class at Annapolis: his entry in the 1914 Lucky Bag, the academy yearbook, has a joking allusion to his being more interested in sleeping than studying, as well as some good-natured ribbing about his inability to keep step with the drum on parade and his popularity with girls (“yes, the girls fight for him”). His other off-duty interests were almost stereotypically conventional. He was an avidly enthusiastic—though, his son recalled, “terrible”—golfer; he went shooting and fishing. His career had followed the standard progression of promotion through increasingly responsible sea commands. As a lieutenant in the 1920s he commanded the submarines S-11 and S-13; he was a lieutenant commander on the battleship Wyoming in the 1930s; and on October 1, 1941, he was promoted to captain and given the command of Destroyer Squadron 31 in the Atlantic. That last sea command had given him at least one very direct encounter with U-boat warfare: the Reuben James was one of the nine ships in his squadron when she was torpedoed later that month.

  There were a few byways in his career, though, that hinted of a man with broader experiences and outlooks. In 1934 and 1935 he was assigned as a naval attaché in London, his real job being to observe the Italian-Ethiopian war. And in 1938 he was sent by the navy to New Haven, Connecticut, to head naval science instruction for Yale’s ROTC program. “He was only a commander, just coming off sea duty, and it was a challenge for him” to be thrust into such an academic environment, his son said. “But he treasured those two years and the friendships he formed there more than any in his life.” He became close friends with a number of Yale’s leading faculty and administrators.11

  On February 7, 1942, Baker took over the command of the newly established AntiSubmarine Warfare Unit of the Atlantic Fleet.12 It was, remarkably, the U.S. Navy’s first attempt at coordinating and supervising antisubmarine training and tactical doctrine. Baker’s first step was to spend about a month in England seeing what he could learn from the British experience fighting the U-boats. One of the people he met there was Patrick Blackett, who two months earlier had become chief advisor on operational research to the Board of Admiralty.

  ———

  BLACKETT’S MOVE to the Admiralty was a belated recognition by the British navy of the revolution in antisubmarine warfare that Blackett and his group had already been effecting at Coastal Command. It had come about almost completely as a result of his “Scientists at the Operational Level” paper, which he had presented in September 1941 to an Admiralty scientific advisory panel chaired by the physicist E. V. Appleton. The panel afterward recommended that Blackett be brought in to do for the navy as a whole what he had done already for Coastal Command. At last fully awakened to the importance of operational research, the Admiralty on December 10, 1941, created the new position and Blackett moved into his new office in Room 74 of the Old Admiralty Building.

  As usual, it was a bureaucratic improvisation. Blackett was officially an adviser to the board while also reporting to the controller of the Admiralty and the vice chief of the Naval Staff; the other scientists working with him were attached to other parts of the navy, such as the gunnery, antisubmarine warfare, and signals divisions; the entire operations research group was meanwhile, and simultaneously, a subdepartment of the navy’s Scientific Research and Experiment Department. The navy was not willing to allow him more than three senior scientists plus a few junior scientists, a much smaller group than he had at Coastal Command, and an almost comically lengthy exchange of minutes went on for months wrangling over the details of his salary and concerns over the bureaucratic precedent that would be set were he to receive the same pay as a director of a much larger research establishment. It was finally agreed that he woul
d receive a “special allowance” of £200 in addition to his salary of £1,000, and that the University of Manchester would make up an additional £500 of his pay.13

  Blackett’s arguments and his “Scientists at the Operational Level” paper impressed Baker as they had the British Admiralty. Baker returned to Boston in March 1942 with a copy of Blackett’s now increasingly famous manifesto, which he quoted from at length in a memorandum proposing that the U.S. Navy follow the British example and assemble a team of eminent scientists to undertake a thorough examination of operational tactics in the antisubmarine war. Writing to Rear Admiral J. A. Furer, the U.S. Navy’s coordinator of research and development, on March 16, Baker argued that while any experienced officer could assess the results of a single attack, developing consistently effective methods to counter the U-boats required building up a body of accurate records and statistics—and having men who were trained to analyze those results and sift them for patterns and trends. “I do not suppose that any really good naval officer is qualified for mathematical or scientific analysis (he would not be a good naval officer if he were),” Baker wrote, “and that therefore the man selected to organize and run this group had better be left to do only that.”14

  There was little doubt that Baker had been completely sold on Blackett’s vision of what operational research was, and what it could do for the navy. In his memorandum to Furer—apparently written just before his first meeting with Morse—he almost directly echoed Blackett’s words:

  The analytical section should be outstanding men of reputation with broad vision and receptive minds, able quickly to comprehend the needs and problems with which we are confronted, and experienced in utilizing the abstract as well as the material tools of science in solving such problems.15

  At their first meeting, Baker and Morse warily sized each other up. They began by talking in generalities about the work each was doing. Baker apparently decided that Morse was all right, because after a few minutes he abruptly shifted gears and explained what he was really after. It was, Morse later remembered, by far the longest speech he would ever hear the normally terse navy man deliver. It did not take Morse long to jump at the offer. It was also apparent to him that Baker was taking a huge personal risk. Though for convenience the scientists would be paid through the NDRC and Columbia University under an existing navy contract, operationally they would be part of Baker’s unit, which was a distinct departure for the navy. As Morse recalled:

  Baker was willing to give me a chance to show what a civilian task force could do. To let nonmilitary persons participate in even minor operational decisions was, of course, heretical to many officers, especially those in the Navy, with their tradition that the commander of the ship or the fleet was the absolute master. But Baker had seen enough, in Britain, of the urgency and complexity of antisubmarine warfare to convince him that traditional policies were inadequate here.… He never said so explicitly, but it was soon apparent to us that he had put his career on the line; if our group didn’t pay off, Captain Baker would never be Admiral Baker.16

  As in Britain, many physicists in America had already been snapped up to work on radar—principally at MIT’s new Radiation Laboratory—and on the preliminary research on the atomic bomb already under way at Columbia, Chicago, and Berkeley. “It is emphasized that it is quite difficult to obtain men of the proper qualifications who are also cleared, since such men are invariably at present at work on other defense jobs,” Morse reported a few weeks later. At Tate’s suggestion, Morse hired his former student William Shockley, now a researcher at Bell Labs, as his assistant supervisor. Morse also had the inspired thought of recruiting insurance actuaries, who were all mathematicians thoroughly versed in probability theory and experienced in applying it to practical questions. By July he had a staff of 13 in place: inevitably they were dubbed “Baker’s Dozen.” By the following year the group would grow to 44 with a makeup as eclectic as that of Blackett’s Circus: 6 mathematicians, 14 actuaries, 18 physicists, 3 chemists, 2 biologists, and an architect. The sign on their door at the navy’s Boston office identified them only as “Columbia Group M” (Morse said he thought the “M” might stand for Morse, but was never sure).17 That name was just a cover, however, used for the Columbia contract and unclassified paperwork. Internally, they had now an official designation that declared their mission to the rest of the navy loud and clear. The American scientists decided to call their new discipline “operations research,” slightly shortening the preferred British term “operational research,” and Morse’s group was dubbed the AntiSubmarine Warfare Operations Research Group, ASWORG.

  THE COMMAND STRUCTURE of the U.S. Navy was a holy mess. Responsibility for antisubmarine warfare was split up among a dozen different commands; no one was in charge. Actual operational control of antisubmarine patrols along the Atlantic coast rested with the admirals who commanded the separate naval districts based at each of the major ports (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Norfolk, Charleston, and Miami), but the ships themselves belonged to the Atlantic Fleet. The commander of the fleet was supposed to be in charge of all antisubmarine training but had no authority to issue orders to the district commandants. Overlapping the naval districts, another layer of authority had been hastily added in 1941: the “sea frontiers,” which were a halfhearted attempt to establish higher-level coordination for the defense of shipping lanes on the approaches to the American coast. The Eastern Sea Frontier was based in New York, with responsibility for the coast from Maine to Florida; there was also a Gulf Sea Frontier and a Caribbean Sea Frontier. The launch of the U-boat offensive along the American coast had thrust the Eastern Sea Frontier front and center, but in 1942 it was still little more than a paper command, with an office on the fifteenth floor of the Federal Building at 90 Church Street in lower Manhattan. Though administratively equal to the Atlantic Fleet, the sea frontier commanders, like the naval district commanders, had no destroyers or other ships permanently assigned to them; they could only “request” the Atlantic Fleet to detach ships to them. Overall responsibility for developing antisubmarine doctrine and procedures rested in yet another place, the staff of the U.S. Fleet commander in Washington.

  The position of commander-in-chief, U.S. Fleet—CominCh—was also something new in the navy command structure. FDR had ordered the creation of the post in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor; for the first time, it gave direct operational authority over the entire navy to a single top admiral, based in Washington. While a much needed step in theory, in practice the immediate effect was to sow even more chaos and confusion in the lines of authority throughout the navy, the antisubmarine campaign in particular.

  Some but not all of that chaos stemmed from the personality of the man chosen for the job. Admiral Ernest J. King was brilliant, capable, and confident. He was also bullheaded, ruthless, and vindictive. In 1939 everyone in the navy, King included, had been certain his career was over. Passed over for the position of chief of naval operations, the service chief of the navy, he had been shunted off to the General Board, the place where over-the-hill admirals were put out to pasture, whiling away their few years before retirement writing studies that sat unread on the shelves of the secretary of the navy’s office.

  At age sixty, King had made almost nothing but enemies in his four-decade career in the service. He bad-mouthed rivals, contemptuously dismissed subordinates, bristled at even mild advice from superiors; off hours he drank like a fish and remorselessly chased fellow officers’ wives. “His appeal to women was most unusual,” remarked one wondering officer.18 The appeal was apparently that he could be charming on social occasions, was a good dancer and an intelligent and interesting conversationalist, and did not hesitate to proposition any attractive woman who came along. His wife remained installed in a home in Annapolis he had purchased shortly after they were married in 1905 and raised the couple’s six daughters and a son while King followed his naval career, and other pursuits.

  There was no doubt, though, that King got thin
gs done. He was always more determined, more energetic, more demanding than anyone around him. His sheer stamina was legendary. He was no intellectual but nonetheless possessed a formidable natural intellect, and the drive to put it to use when required. At age forty-seven he had earned his wings so that he could command an aircraft carrier. After a moment of despair upon being assigned to the General Board, he astonished everyone by taking the job seriously, throwing himself into a series of complex studies, putting in improbable hours at his desk in Washington. “They’re not done with me yet,” he told an acquaintance he ran into in a Navy Department corridor.19

  In December 1940 Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox was looking for a commander to take charge of Atlantic escort operations and decided to bring King off of the sidelines—for one last tour. King immediately put his ships on a war footing and made it clear they were going to take the offensive in the Atlantic in the as yet undeclared war with the Nazi U-boats. In the aftermath of the destroyer Greer’s depth charge battle with a U-boat in September 1941, he called in the ship’s commander to reassure him. “As long as I command the Atlantic Fleet,” King told him, “no one is going to nail your tail to the mast because you defended yourself.”20