Blackett concluded that each of the three military services as well as MI6, the British secret service, should have its own scientific intelligence staff; even worse, he decided that all of the separate scientific intelligence staffs should be housed together in a new location, away from the existing ministries. It was, Jones argued in vain, an “organizational disaster,” the absolute worst of both worlds, both fragmenting the work and isolating it from the service staffs. But Blackett refused to allow any further discussion and dismissed Jones’s objections. Jones had promised the members of his scientific intelligence group at the Air Staff he would stay on through “the dull days of peace” to keep the nucleus of their organization together should trouble threaten again, but decided there was now no point and sadly resigned. With the help of recommendations from Cherwell and Churchill, he was named to the chair of natural philosophy at the University of Aberdeen.21
Blackett returned to the University of Manchester to head its physics department. A colleague recalled that “some of us certainly thought of him as an admiral” with his air of command, and sometimes harsh intolerance of mistakes. A student remembered being “awestruck by his stately procession down the main stairs for lunch. He always walked in the dead centre of the staircase, disdaining the banisters. He held his hands, naval fashion, in his jacket pockets, with thumbs protruding. He had no nickname: he was Professor Blackett.”
In 1953 Blackett moved to Imperial College, London, and in the 1960s served as president of the Royal Society for five years, by most accounts having “mellowed considerably” in his later years. He still was as intensely private and serious a man as ever, however. When a staffer from the American Institute of Physics came to interview him for its oral history project, Blackett refused to allow him to turn on his tape recorder or take any notes, made short work of the list of prepared questions the poor man had brought with him by dismissing each as irrelevant or ill conceived, and then impatiently told him he did not have any more time to waste on the matter. “Why should I tell about my personal life?” he demanded.22
IN AMERICA, where the scientists were never quite so political as they were in Britain, there were also hopes that the operational research successes of the war would be the seed of a new scientific discipline that would revolutionize both industry and military science. Phil Morse and George Kimball wrote a textbook drawing on many examples from the antisubmarine war to show how the basic methods of operational research might be applied to other problems. A professional society, the Operations Research Society of America, was established in 1952 and grew to 500 members in its first year; MIT launched a program in OR the same year and began accepting students and was soon studying problems such as easing traffic congestion, scheduling shifts for police and fire departments, and regulating releases of water on the Columbia River dams. For a while there was great enthusiasm in the business world for operational research’s promise of quantitative solutions to management problems in organizing workflows, maximizing manufacturing efficiency, and eliminating bottlenecks in production and distribution.23
But the glow soon began to fade there, too. In some ways operational research simply became a victim of its own success; ideas that had once been innovative and the special purview of scientifically trained consultants were now commonplace and part of what every business manager learned in MBA programs (as did every military officer at the service academies and war colleges).24 Yet what was unique and valuable about the wartime operational researchers was in any event precisely that they were not professionals, and were doing something never done before. They were some of the most brilliant scientific minds of their generation, out not to make a career of advising the military but to win the war against Hitler. They brought a scientific outlook and a fresh eye to problems that had often been dealt with until then only by tradition, prejudice, or gut feeling.
As the official British history of the scientific contribution to the war observed, it was this more than anything that ultimately defeated Hitler, a man “who had a romantic view of war.… Hitler and his generals failed to produce any operational research comparable to the British development. If they had, they would probably have won the submarine campaign and the war.”25
Few men did more to win that campaign, and that war, than Patrick Blackett, E. J. Williams, and Cecil Gordon. Even Air Marshal Slessor, who had made the crack about strategy by slide rule, paid them an unqualified tribute in a foreword to C. H. Waddington’s history of OR in Coastal Command:
A few years ago it would never have occurred to me—or I think to any officer of any fighting Service—that what the R.A.F. soon came to call a “Boffin,” a gentleman in grey flannel bags, whose occupation in life had previously been something markedly unmilitary such as Biology or Physiology, would be able to teach us a great deal about our business. Yet so it was. No one who knows the true facts can have any doubt that a great deal of the credit for what is perhaps still not generally recognised as the resounding victory it was, namely the Battle of the Bay and the defeat of the U-boat in 1943, is due to men like Blackett, Williams, Larnder, Baughan, Easterfield and Waddington.26
They did it by an abiding faith in rationality, a basic confidence in the enduring power of arithmetic and simple probability, and a determination to vanquish an evil that they took to heart as a personal duty. Their idealism was all of a piece. If their larger political views were at times utopian, those convictions welled from the same source of rationality, scientific thinking, and acute sense of responsibility for the injustices of the world.
As human beings they were prideful, touchy, opinionated, and sometimes mistaken, human failings too widespread to merit much condemnation. They were also selfless, incorruptible, and absolutely determined to let the facts lead where they will and damn the consequences, human virtues so rare as to seem, at times, almost otherworldly to the men burdened by politics and plans and career ambitions, to whom they showed the way to victory.
Notes
Abbreviations
AAF Army Air Forces
AIP American Institute of Physics, Emilio Segrè Visual Archives (College Park, Md.)
A/S Antisubmarine
ASV Anti–Surface Vessel radar
ASW Antisubmarine Warfare
ASWORG AntiSubmarine Warfare Operations Research Group
CSAWG Cambridge Scientists’ AntiWar Group
CSSAW Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Warfare
DF Direction Finding
GC&CS Government Code and Cypher School
IWM Imperial War Museum (London, U.K.)
NARA National Archives and Records Administration (College Park, Md.)
NDRC National Defense Research Committee
NSA National Security Agency
ONI Office of Naval Intelligence
ORS Operational Research Section
PRO Public Record Office, The National Archives of the United Kingdom (Kew, U.K.)
VLR Very Long Range aircraft
1. An Unconventional Weapon
1. King-Hall, North Sea Diary, 229–30.
2. “Twenty U Boats Given Up,” The Times, November 21, 1918; King-Hall, North Sea Diary, 231.
3. King-Hall, North Sea Diary, 232–35, 237–38, 241–42.
4. Tarrant, U-Boat Offensive, 77.
5. “Deutschland in the Thames,” The Times, October 14, 1919.
6. Sueter, Evolution of the Submarine, 36–38.
7. Budiansky, Perilous Fight, 249.
8. “The Escaped Fenians in New-York,” New York Times, August 20, 1876.
9. Whitman, “Holland”; Morris, Holland, 29–42, 50.
10. Morris, Holland, 37.
11. Ibid., 46–47.
12. Senate, Submarine Boat Holland, 5.
13. Sueter, Evolution of the Submarine, 294–95, 303.
14. Ibid., 326–28.
15. Senate, Submarine Boat Holland, 6–11.
16. Scheer, High Sea Fleet, 12–14; Manchester, Last Lion, 1:433–35.
17. Van der Vat, Atlantic Campaign, 37.
18. Tarrant, U-Boat Offensive, 169–70.
19. Ibid., 7.
20. Ibid., 12.
21. Scheer, High Sea Fleet, 36.
22. Ibid., 222–23.
23. Scott, ed., Diplomatic Correspondence, 45.
24. Bell, Blockade of Germany, 423.
25. Churchill, World Crisis, 70.
26. Davies, “Selborne Scheme,” 19–23.
27. Manchester, Last Lion, 1:437–38, 443; Massie, Dreadnought, 405, 408.
28. Davies, “Selborne Scheme,” 24, 26, 32–33; Hore, “Blackett at Sea,” 55.
2. Cruelty and Squalor
1. “Biographical Notes,” Blackett Papers, PB 1/10A; Stevenson, British Society, 32–34.
2. Nye, Blackett, 16.
3. Blackett, “Education of an Agnostic,” 296.
4. “Biographical Notes,” Blackett Papers, PB 1/10A.
5. Nye, Blackett, 17; Lovell, “Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett,” 3; Alastair Graham to P. M. S. Blackett, November 23, 1967, Blackett Papers, PB 1/11.
6. Hore, “Blackett at Sea,” 56–64.
7. Budiansky, Battle of Wits, 49–50.
8. Blackett, Studies of War, 27.
9. “Extracts from Diary Kept from 1914 to 1916,” pp. 3–5, Blackett Papers, PB 1/10A.
10. Gilbert, First World War, 252.
11. Ibid., 259.
12. Ibid., 257.
13. Shackleton, South, 208.
14. Wells, Autobiography, 569.
15. Churchill, Early Life, 65.
16. Gilbert, First World War, 256.
17. Scott, ed., Diplomatic Correspondence, 92.
18. Scheer, High Sea Fleet, 248–52.
19. Padfield, Dönitz, 10–12, 19–20, 23, 27.
20. Ibid., 53–54, 56, 78; Scheer, High Sea Fleet, 253–54.
21. Sims, Victory at Sea, 3–4, 7–10.
22. Tarrant, U-Boat Offensive, 40; Sims, Victory at Sea, 106–11.
23. Sims, Victory at Sea, 102–3; Tarrant, U-Boat Offensive, 51.
24. Van der Vat, Atlantic Campaign, 61–63; Lloyd George, War Memoirs, 3:93.
25. Dönitz, Memoirs, 4.
26. Tarrant, U-Boat Offensive, 69.
27. Terraine, To Win a War, 180–84.
28. Ibid., 199, 213.
29. Ibid., 236–37.
30. Ibid., 219, 232n67.
31. Shirer, Rise and Fall, 31–32.
3. Cambridge
1. Brown, “Blackett at Cambridge,” 97–98.
2. “Professor the Lord Blackett, O.M.,” typescript of article for Magdalene College Magazine by “I.A.R.” [Ivor A. Richards], Blackett Papers, PB 1/3.
3. Blackett, “Boy Blackett,” 11–12.
4. H. E. Piggott to Blackett, February 25, 1957, Blackett Papers, PB 1/11.
5. Cathcart, Fly in the Cathedral, 20.
6. Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 36, 49–50.
7. Clark, Rise of the Boffins, 8.
8. Cathcart, Fly in the Cathedral, 10–11; Oliphant, Rutherford, 19.
9. Brown, “Blackett at Cambridge,” 109n18.
10. Quoted in ibid., 106.
11. Slatterly, “Postprandial Proceedings. I,” 180.
12. Cathcart, Fly in the Cathedral, 112–16.
13. Williamson, ed., Making of Physicists, 57.
14. Blackett, “Boy Backett,” 9.
15. Brown, “Blackett at Cambridge,” 101.
16. “Professor the Lord Blackett, O.M.,” Blackett Papers, PB 1/3; Zuckerman, Six Men, 13.
17. Bullard, “Blackett.”
18. Cathcart, Fly in the Cathedral, 42–43.
19. Ibid., 21–22, 115–16; Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 46, 157.
20. Nye, Blackett, 173.
21. Brown, “Blackett at Cambridge,” 102.
22. Blackett, “Wilson,” 270–71.
23. Brown, “Blackett at Cambridge,” 102.
24. Lovell, “Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett,” 12; Bullard, “Blackett.”
25. Lovell, “Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett,” 6–10; Brown, “Blackett at Cambridge,” 102–3.
26. Bullard, “Blackett”; Zuckerman, Six Men, 17.
27. Bullard noted that when teased by left-wing friends about accepting a peerage late in life, Blackett riposted that at least he had remained “Mr. Blackett” throughout his working life.
28. Nye, Blackett, 27.
29. Lovell, “Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett,” 11.
30. G. P. S. Occhialini, in Hodgkin et al., “Blackett Memorial,” 145.
31. Ibid., 16, 25.
32. Lovell, “Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett,” 76.
33. Wohl, Generation of 1914, 223.
34. Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey, 160.
35. Stevenson, British Society, 103–7.
36. Graves and Hodge, Long WeekEnd, 16.
37. August, Working Class, 178–80, 184; Stevenson, British Society, 267.
38. Roberts, A Woman’s Place, 95.
39. Quoted in Wohl, Generation of 1914, 292–93n36.
40. Stevenson, British Society, 332–33, 415; Graves and Hodge, Long WeekEnd, 42.
41. “The Art of the Jazz,” The Times, January 14, 1919; “Jazz Dancing—a Canon’s Denunciation,” The Times, March 15, 1919.
42. “Better Plays,” The Times, August 22, 1919; “A New Shylock,” The Times, October 10, 1919.
43. Wohl, Generation of 1914, 105, 115–16.
44. Stevenson, British Society, 95.
45. Manchester, Last Lion, 1:791–804; Nye, Blackett, 26; “Rush to Aid Government,” New York Times, May 4, 1926; “Both Sides Are Obstinate,” New York Times, May 7, 1926.
46. Werskey, Visible College, 250; Nye, Blackett, 31.
47. Werskey, Visible College, 215–16.
48. Blackett, “Frustration of Science,” 129.
49. Ibid., 137, 144.
50. Nye, Blackett, 27–28; Zuckerman, Six Men, 18; Cathcart, Fly in the Cathedral, 121.
51. Wohl, Generation of 1914, 234.
52. Manchester, Last Lion, 2:60–63; Corum, Luftwaffe, 76, 115–17.
53. Padfield, Dönitz, 107–9.
54. Ibid., 96.
55. Ibid., 101, 111; van der Vat, Atlantic Campaign, 83–86.
56. Quoted in Werskey, Visible College, 216.
57. Hodgkin et al., “Memorial of Blackett,” 145.
58. Ibid., 144.
59. Nye, Blackett, 152, 175.
60. Eiduson, Scientists, 105–6.
61. “Professor the Lord Blackett, O.M.,” Blackett Papers, PB 1/3.
62. Blackett and Occhialini, “Tracks of Penetrating Radiation,” 699.
63. Brown, “Blackett at Cambridge,” 107; “Atomic Discovery Hailed,” New York Times, February 18, 1933; “Finds Cosmic Rays Have Odd Particle,” New York Times, February 17, 1933; Nye, Blackett, 50–53.
64. Zuckerman, Six Men, 37–38; Brown, “Blackett at Cambridge,” 108; Bullard, “Blackett.”
65. Nye, Blackett, 29, 54.
4. Defiance and Defeatism
1. Werskey, Visible College, 339–41.
2. Brown, J. D. Bernal, 57–58.
3. Churchill, Second World War, 1:71, 73, 77, 111; Manchester, Last Lion, 2:100.
4. Manchester, Last Lion, 2:102–3.
5. Ibid., 2:92, 145.
6. Ibid., 2:95; Air Ministry, “Expansion of the Royal Air Force,” 12; Churchill, Second World War, 1:169–70.
7. Manchester, Last Lion, 2:99.
8. Wohl, Generation of 1914, 105.
9. Fussell, Great War, 33, 139; Charles Carrington, quoted in Wohl, Generation of 1914, 109.
10. Wohl, Generation of 1914, 109, 230.
11. Werskey, Visible College, 217–18; “Scientific Workers and War,” Nature, May 16, 1936, 829–30.
12. Quoted in Bialer, Shadow of the Bomber, 158.
13. Douhet, Command of the Air, 9.
14. Quoted in Werskey, Visible College, 227–28.
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15. Quoted in Smith, British Air Strategy, 46–47; Bialer, Shadow of the Bomber, 14.
16. “Science and Air Bombing,” The Times, August 8, 1934.
17. Zuckerman, Six Men, 20–21; Churchill, Second World War, 1:79–80.
18. “Aerial Bombing,” The Times, August 15, 1934.
19. Rowe, One Story of Radar, 4–5.
20. Clark, Rise of the Boffins, 15–16.
21. Clark, Tizard, 111.
22. Ibid., 116.
23. Ibid., 11.
24. Ibid., 113.
25. Hough and Richards, Battle of Britain, 50.
26. “Tizard and the Science of War” in Blackett, Studies of War, 105–6.
27. F. A. Lindemann to Lord Swinton, September 23, 1936, Tizard Papers, HTT 111; Churchill to Kingsley Wood, June 9, 1928, PRO, AIR 19/25; Jones, Wizard War, 16.
28. Zuckerman, Six Men, 20–21; Tizard to D. R. Pye, February 7, 1939, Tizard Papers, HTT 99.
29. Clark, Tizard, 127, 141.
30. “Anglo-German Naval Discussions,” June 7, 1935, C.P.’s Nos. 86(35) to 140(35), pp. 167–71, PRO, CAB 24/255.
31. Churchill, Second World War, 1:140; Padfield, Dönitz, 149.
32. Shirer, Rise and Fall, 281.
33. Van der Vat, Atlantic Campaign, 101; Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War, 1:45.
34. Padfield, Dönitz, 150–57.
35. Quoted in Zimmerman, “Society for the Protection of Science,” 35.
36. Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb, 191.
37. Zimmerman, “Society for the Protection of Science,” 30–36.
38. Woolf, Journey Not the Arrival, 139.
39. Bernal, Social Function of Science, 186.
40. Werskey, Visible College, 192–93; Baker, “Counter-blast to Bernalism,” 174.
41. “Resolution Adopted at the Council Meeting of the Association of Scientific Workers Held on 19th November, 1938,” Blackett Papers, PB 5/1/3.
42. Clark, Rise of the Boffins, 56–57; Nye, Blackett, 35.
43. “Third Progress Report, 3 October 1946,” Special Interception Experiments at Biggin Hill, Part I, PRO, AIR 16/179.
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