Blackett's War

by Stephen Budiansky

  Dönitz remained unshakable in his loyalty to Hitler to the end. The Kriegsmarine’s sole duty, Dönitz declared, was “to stand fanatically behind the National Socialist State … each deviation from this is a laxness and a crime.” In February 1945, as Germany’s military position was collapsing on all fronts, Albert Speer, Hitler’s confidant and master planner, drew Dönitz aside after one conference with the Führer and appealed to him desperately that something had to be done to save Germany from complete catastrophe. The Grossadmiral snapped back, “The Führer knows what he is doing.”3

  Hitler rewarded his naval commander’s loyalty by naming him his successor. Even in the last days of the Reich, Dönitz issued mad orders to fight on. He issued a secret decree to the naval police, who were even more dreaded than the SS for their summary executions of suspected deserters, to show no mercy to those who failed to do their duty:

  We soldiers of the Kriegsmarine know how we have to act. Our military duty, which we fulfill regardless of what may happen to right or left or around us, causes us to stand bold, hard and loyal as a rock of the resistance. A scoundrel who does not behave so must be hung and have a placard fastened to him, “Here hangs a traitor who by his low cowardice allows German women and children to die instead of protecting them like a man.”4

  Succeeding Hitler as the Reich’s last Führer on April 30, Dönitz went on the air the next day to exhort the German people to resist not only the Russians on the Eastern Front but the “Anglo-Americans” as well—who, he explained, were now fighting “not for their own peoples but solely for the spreading of Bolshevism in Europe.” After the surrender, Dönitz even more improbably imagined the Allies would let him stay in charge of postwar Germany; he wrote Eisenhower on May 15 declaring his intention to hold trials in German courts for those responsible for the concentration camps—which he vehemently insisted no one in the armed forces had known of. Eisenhower did not write back. A week later Dönitz was under arrest. By then he had decided that all the reports about the camps had been “largely exaggerated and were propaganda.”5

  At Nuremberg he and Raeder were tried for war crimes and the prosecution devoted much of its case attempting to prove that Dönitz had issued orders to the U-boat crews to fire on survivors in lifeboats and in the water. The evidence for that was admittedly circumstantial, based on some disputed hearsay and the ambiguities in his written order instructing U-boat commanders to “be severe.” The less disputable fact that Dönitz had violated the laws of war by ordering his U-boats to torpedo merchant vessels without warning and not to rescue survivors was effectively countered by the testimony of American officers who acknowledged that U.S. Navy submariners had done exactly the same in the Pacific against Japanese freighters and their crews. Dönitz received a sentence of ten years imprisonment, the lightest punishment imposed by the court.

  Dönitz’s insistence that his U-boat men had fought “a heroic struggle,” from which they emerged “unbroken and unbesmirched,” as he declared in a final message radioed to the U-boats just before the surrender, would be echoed by his apologists over the years; they have included more than a few American naval officers who felt their opposing commander had been railroaded at Nuremberg.6 That sentiment would more disturbingly appear in the latter-day hero worship of U-boat “aces” among a cult of history hobbyists fascinated with everything related to the Third Reich.

  Yet even if there were nothing criminal in the German navy’s U-boat war—a highly debatable proposition in itself—there was nothing heroic about it at all. It was a squalid and pitiless fight that sent 2,800 ships to the bottom of the cold Atlantic and took the lives of tens of thousands of civilian seamen. On the German side, it was little more than suicide dressed up in Nazi propaganda of sacrifice for the Fatherland. Over the course of the war 830 U-boats took part in operations; 784 of them—94 percent—were lost. Of the 40,000 men who served on U-boats, 26,000 were killed and 5,000 taken prisoner.7

  The only other theater that offered similarly appalling odds was the Allied bomber offensive against Germany, which cost the United States and Britain 8,000 large aircraft apiece and took the lives of 76,000 Allied airmen. It also killed an estimated 600,000 German civilians. It was the final irony of the modern industrialized slaughter of the Second World War that the two fronts about which so much romantic and heroic nonsense would be spilled were the most barbaric and pitiless, for the men who fought upon them and their victims alike.8

  BLACKETT, Zuckerman, Bernal, Watson-Watt, Gordon, and others on the scientific left briefly entertained great expectations that their wartime triumphs had opened the door to the scientifically planned society they had long dreamed of, one in which central planning would organize industry and the economy for the benefit of all. Bernal exultantly proclaimed that the harnessing of science to the war effort had proved everything he had been saying for years: “All that I had thought and written about the possibilities of the ordered utilization of science, I now saw enacted in practice, and I saw that where I had erred was not in overestimating, but in underestimating the constructive power of science,” he wrote right after the war.

  The key now was to keep that same institutional foothold within government with the return to peace. Bernal thought that science, as it had been employed in the war, would help make socialism palatable by “removing the arbitrary and despotic elements which many persons of genuine liberal feeling imagine to be inherent in all planning.” The Association of Scientific Workers enthusiastically issued a report urging the marshaling of production for social needs in peacetime; just as scientific management had supplied the armed services the material they had needed during the war, so “in peace time we shall require the same techniques to study the most efficient ways of utilising the country’s resources for the satisfaction of the consumer’s needs and desires.”9 At the 1947 annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a session on “Operational Research in War and Peace” featured Watson-Watt, Zuckerman, Bernal, and other leading scientists who had been a part of the wartime operational research effort calling for wider civilian applications of OR.

  It was perhaps inevitable that hopes of duplicating in peacetime the unique wartime success of the scientists who had beat the U-boats would be disappointed. Neither on a personal nor on an institutional level did the wartime camaraderie and enthusiasm survive. Most of those involved in the scientific war against the U-boats quickly drifted away, returning to their old jobs, getting on with lives and careers, forgetting about their brief foray into a world where mathematical equations stood for life and death. A deadpan report by the Admiralty’s operational researchers a year after the war’s end offered a bit of cynical commentary on their conviction that their contributions had already been forgotten. The report solemnly calculated to several decimal places the proportion of knighthoods, honors, and awards bestowed upon scientists in various branches of government; it found that while 8.6 per 1,000 scientists in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research had been awarded knighthoods and 22.8 per 1,000 had received lesser honors, the corresponding figures in the Department of Naval Operational Research were 1.0 and 7.0.10

  With only a handful of exceptions, the British and American scientists literally took up where they left off in their research interests before the war. Six would win Nobel Prizes for their scientific discoveries in physics, chemistry, and physiology. Among them was William Shockley, who had a bizarre and tragic end to a brilliant career: after sharing the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956 for the invention of the transistor, he abysmally failed to make the fortune he might have out of that discovery and grew increasingly withdrawn and obsessive, spending his final years delivering lectures on the racial inheritance of IQ and the intellectual inferiority of blacks.

  E. J. Williams, probably the most capable of the operational researchers, survived the war by barely a month, dying from cancer at age forty-two. He had rejoined Blackett at the Admiralty in early 1943 as one of his senior scienti
sts in the Department of Naval Operational Research. Like Blackett he drove himself at a relentless pace; an American visitor found both of the men “tired and exhausted from too many seven day weeks.” By April 1945, when he knew he would die, Williams asked his doctor to try to give him as many “effective working days” as possible. “By great will-power over great pain,” Blackett recalled, Williams was able to spend his final months that summer completing an article on atomic collision processes for a special issue of Reviews of Modern Physics in honor of Niels Bohr’s sixtieth birthday. “Throughout E.J.’s illness the most painful element was the sense of wanton frustration and waste—his grief for his work was so acute and it would comfort him to know that others could feel this angle of his tragedy,” recalled a close friend. “There was much he wanted to do.”11

  CECIL GORDON WAS one who put his career where his convictions were, becoming the head of a unit the postwar Labour government established in the Board of Trade with the explicit aim of applying operational research to save British industry and expand export markets. His appointment was greeted in the press with headlines declaring HE SHOWED RAF HOW TO DO IT. AND NOW FOR INDUSTRY …

  At the Board of Trade’s Special Research Unit, Gordon launched studies on productivity, consumer needs, the incorporation of operational research into industry. It all went predictably nowhere amid the relieved return to peace and normalcy—and the simple fact that what worked for a centrally organized enterprise where the government was the sole customer had little applicability to the diversity of the consumer marketplace.12 In 1948 Gordon gave it up, joining the animal genetics faculty at Edinburgh at the invitation of C. H. Waddington, and proceeded to have a miserable falling out with his former Coastal Command ORS colleague. Waddington had set up a sort of left-wing commune in a large country house on the outskirts of the town; ten families shared the house, ate meals together, and carpooled to work. “It provided many anecdotes, usually of a wry kind, and a novel,” noted the author of a memorial minute of Waddington for the Royal Society. Gordon was incensed by Waddington’s favoritism in the lab and his misuse of university property, and after he gave evidence to an official inquiry into these complaints, he arrived at work a few days later to find he had been moved into a basement room at the genetics institute. The secretary of the university agreed that Gordon was in the right and Waddington in the wrong on almost every matter in the dispute. But he added that Gordon might not spend quite so much of his energy on “smelling out sin.”

  Gordon then abandoned genetics for community medicine, studying class-based inequalities in health, sickness among Scottish railway workers, and the health care needs of the elderly. Frustrated and unhappy, he died at age fifty-three in 1960. At the time of his death he was chairman of the local Labour Party and representative of the Association of Scientific Workers on the Edinburgh Trades Council, still a committed if now deeply disappointed Marxist.13

  Blackett also found himself increasingly an odd man out in postwar Britain. His undimmed admiration for the Soviet Union, and a growing antipathy toward American military and foreign policies, had already marked him as a security risk by the summer of 1945. A delegation of thirty British scientists had been invited to Moscow by the Soviet Academy of Science to celebrate the victory over Germany and mark the 220th anniversary of the academy. The night before their scheduled departure on June 14, Blackett, Bernal, and six others were handed back their passports with the exit visas to Russia canceled. An official explanation published in The Times the next day stated that the eight “were engaged on work of the greatest importance in the production of war materials and research.” Unofficially, there were whispers that Churchill and Cherwell were worried about information on the atomic bomb project being leaked to the Soviets. Blackett, furious, declared he would refuse to participate in any more war work until he received assurances that the government would stop trying to limit his freedom to travel or contact scientists in other countries. “To see Blackett marching out of the Admiralty was a magnificent sight,” wrote Nevill Mott, another British physicist (and future Nobel Prize winner) who was barred from making the trip.14

  Blackett was never as doctrinaire as Bernal, who in 1949 traveled to Moscow, praised Soviet science, and called Lysenko’s theories on the inheritance of acquired characteristics a democratic response to “bourgeois” science and a refreshing contrast to the situation in Britain, where “science is in the hands of those who hate peace, whose only aim is to despoil and torture people, so that their own profits can be assured.” Bernal airily dismissed reports of the Soviet gulags as “allegations from professed anti-Soviet sources which are unverifiable.” On Stalin’s death in 1953 Bernal hailed the Soviet dictator, explaining that “the true greatness of Stalin as a leader was his wonderful combination of a deeply scientific approach to all problems with his capacity for feeling and expressing himself in simple and direct human terms.”15 The same year the Soviet Union awarded Bernal the Stalin Peace Prize.

  Still, Blackett remained far left and pro-Soviet enough to alarm even the new Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, who had appointed Blackett to an Advisory Committee on Atomic Energy in 1945 and immediately regretted it. Blackett had succeeded Bernal as president of the Association of Scientific Workers, holding the position from 1943 to 1947, and in an address to the 1945 meeting of the association he called admiring attention to the fact that the Soviet delegation to the International Congress of Trade Unions meeting in London that year included at least three scientists. (“Applause,” noted the transcript of his speech at that point.) On the government’s atomic energy committee, Blackett wrote a minority report urging a neutral position for Britain and advising against the country’s acquiring atomic weapons of its own. That prompted Prime Minister Attlee to respond: “The author, a distinguished scientist, speaks on political and military problems on which he is a layman.”16

  In 1948, the same year Blackett was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, he published Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy (the subsequent American edition was titled Fear, War, and the Bomb), which strongly endorsed the emerging left-wing credo that America, not the Soviet Union, was now the real threat to world peace. He cast the American-sponsored Baruch Plan to place atomic weapons and atomic energy under international control as a conspiracy to deny the Soviets access to atomic research, and asserted that the atomic bombing of Japan was carried out “not so much as the last military act of the Second World War, but as the first act of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.”17 (Bernal offered an even more rabid view of America and the bomb in an article for the Daily Worker several years later in which he made Cherwell the original villain, calling him an “ultra reactionary” whose advocacy of strategic bombing against Germany—“the doctrine of those who hate and despise common people”—now “survives in an infinitely more horrible and militarily futile form in the era of the atom bomb.” That and a similar depiction of Cherwell in a 1960 lecture by C. P. Snow on the Tizard-Cherwell rift prompted Zuckerman, who certainly had no love for Cherwell, to counter that he could not “see the Prof as some kind of Second World War Dr. Strangelove.”)18

  Blackett’s book earned him a glowing review in Pravda, the attention of the FBI, and a place on a list George Orwell supplied the British government naming thirty-eight journalists, writers, and actors who were “crypto-communists, fellow travellers or inclined that way.”19 When Blackett traveled to a scientific conference on cosmic rays in Mexico in 1951 he knew he might have trouble getting a visa to the United States, so arranged to take a Trans-Canadian Air Lines flight from Toronto to Mexico City. On the return trip the plane stopped in Tampa, Florida, to refuel; he and his wife were taken off by U.S. immigration officials, questioned whether they were carrying any subversive literature and what their views on America were, and detained for a few hours before being allowed to depart on the next flight out. Blackett took a slight sardonic amusement from the incident—he subsequently sent his erstwhile jailer a pi
cture postcard from Niagara Falls—but it clearly rankled.20

  IN BOTH BRITAIN AND AMERICA the war did secure a permanent institutional foothold for scientific advice in government. With the Labour victory in 1945, Henry Tizard returned to Whitehall as the new government’s chief scientific adviser. Solly Zuckerman had a distinguished postwar career as the top scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence in the 1950s and later to the government of Labour prime minister Harold Wilson in the early 1960s. But both were keenly aware of the limitations of scientists as public policy advisers in the business-as-usual world of peace. The great contribution of the operational research scientists to the war effort was, as they often themselves remarked, their ability to ask the right question. But that was within a framework where what constituted success—U-boats sunk, merchant ships saved—was usually clearly understood and widely agreed regardless of preconceived notions or political inclinations. On the great issues of political economy and social policy, though, the question frequently is the answer: one can get any scientifically logical and mathematically rigorous answer one wants depending on what criterion of success one chooses to measure.

  Blackett often seemed unable to tell the difference. R. V. Jones ran into this right after the war when Blackett chaired a committee to decide on the future of scientific intelligence in the military services. “Blackett had been a hero of my undergraduate days,” Jones wrote, and his contributions in the war “had been great.” But, Jones continued, “I had seen him make mistakes”:

  He tended to jump into a new field, thinking that his fresh ideas were better than those who had worked in the field for some time. Sometimes they were, but not always. He was given to “rational” solutions of problems which sometimes completely overlooked the human aspects involved, and he would then press these solutions with a fervour that belied their apparent rationalism.… I always hoped that if the world were collapsing, Blackett and I would find ourselves fighting side by side in the last ditch, but the routes by which we got there would have been very different.