by Peter Watson
Radar was an American name for a British invention. During the war, the fundamental notion came to have a great number of applications, from antisubmarine warfare to direction finding, but its most romantic role was in the Battle of Britain in 1940, when the advantage it provided to the British aircrews may just have made all the difference between victory and defeat. As early as 1928, one of the physicists at the Signals School in Portsmouth, England, took out a patent for a device that could detect ships by radio waves. Few of his superior officers believed in the need for such a piece of equipment, and the patent lapsed. Six years later, in June 1934, with the threat of German rearmament becoming clearer, the director of scientific research at the Air Ministry ordered a survey of what the ministry was doing about air defence. Collecting all fifty-three files bearing on the subject, the responsible bureaucrat saw ‘no hope in any of them.’26 It was the bleak picture revealed in this survey that led directly to the establishment of the Tizard Committee, a subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence. Sir Henry Tizard was an Oxford chemist, an energetic civilian, and it was his committee, formally known as the Scientific Survey of Air Defence, that pushed radar research to the point where it would make a fundamental contribution not only to Britain’s fate in World War II, but also to aircraft safety.
Three observations came together in the development of radar. Ever since Heinrich Hertz had first shown that radio waves were related to light waves, in 1885, it had been understood that certain substances, like metal sheets, reflected these waves. In the 1920s a vast electrified layer had been discovered high in the atmosphere, which also acted as a reflector of radio waves (originally called the Heaviside Layer, after the scientist who made the discovery, it later became known as the ionosphere). Third, it was known from experiments with prototype television sets, carried out in the late 1920s, that aircraft interfered with transmission. Only in 1935 were these observations put together, but even then radar emerged almost by accident. It happened because Sir Robert Watson-Watt, in the radio department of the National Physical Laboratory in Middlesex, was researching a ‘death ray.’ He had the bloodthirsty idea that an electromagnetic beam might be created of sufficient energy to melt the thin metal skin of an aircraft and kill the crew inside. Calculations proved that this futuristic idea was a pipe dream. However, Watson-Watt’s assistant, A. F. Wilkins, the man doing the arithmetic, also realised that it might be practicable to use such a beam to detect the presence of aircraft: the beam would be re-radiated, bounced back toward the transmitting source in an ‘echo.’27 Wilkins’s ideas were put to the test on 26 February 1935 near the Daventry broadcasting station in the Midlands. Tizard’s committee, closeted in a caravan, saw that the presence of an aircraft (though not, at that stage, its exact location) could indeed be detected at a distance of about eight miles. The next steps took place on the remote East Anglian coast. Masts some seventy feet high were erected, and with their aid, aircraft up to forty miles away could be tracked. By now the Tizard Committee realised that ultimate success depended on a reduction of the wavelength of the radio beams. In those days wavelengths were measured in metres, and it was not thought practicable to create wavelengths of less than 50 centimetres (20 inches). But then John Randall and Mark Oliphant at Birmingham University came up with an idea they called a cavity magnetron, essentially a glass tube with halfpennies at each end, fixed with sealing wax. The air was sucked out, creating a vacuum; an electromagnet provided a magnetic field, and a loop of wire was threaded into one of the cavities ‘in the hope that it would extract high-frequency power’ (i.e., generating shorter waves). It did.28
It was now 21 February 1940.29 Anticipating success, a chain of coastal radar stations, stretching from Ventnor on the Isle of Wight to the Firth of Tay in Scotland, had been begun, which meant that once the cavity magnetron had proved itself, radar stations could monitor enemy aircraft even as they were getting into formation in France and Belgium. The British were even able to gauge the rough strength of the enemy formations, their height, and their speed, and it was this ‘which enabled the famous “few,” Britain’s fighter pilots, to intercept the enemy with such success.’30
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May 1940 was for Britain and its close European allies the darkest hour of the war. On the tenth of the month German forces invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, followed by the surrender of the Dutch and Belgian armies, with King Leopold III being taken prisoner. On the twenty-sixth, the evacuation of 300,000 British and French troops trapped in northeast France was begun at Dunkirk. Oswald Mosley and 750 other British fascists were interned. Neville Chamberlain resigned as prime minister, to be replaced by Winston Churchill.
Though the war dominated everyone’s thoughts, on Saturday, 25 May, two scientists in Oxford’s University Pathology Department conducted the first experiments in a series that would lead to ‘the most optimistic medical breakthrough of the century’. Ernst Chain was the son of a Russo-German industrial chemist, and an exile from Nazi Germany; N. G. Heatley was a British doctor. On that Saturday, they injected streptococci bacteria into mice and then administered some of the mice with penicillin. After that, Chain went home, but Heatley stayed in the lab until 3:30 the next morning. By then every single untreated mouse had died – but all of the treated mice were alive. When Chain returned to the pathology lab on Sunday morning, and saw what Heatley had seen, he is reported to have started dancing.31
The age of antibiotics had taken a while to arrive. The word antibiotic itself first entered the English language at the turn of the century. Doctors were aware that bodies have their own defences – up to a point – and since 1870 it had been known that some Penicillium moulds acted against bacteria. But until the 1920s, most medical attempts to combat microbial infection had largely failed – quinine worked for malaria, and the ‘arsenicals’ worked for syphilis, but these apart, there was a general rule that ‘chemicals’ in therapy did as much damage to the patient as to the microbe. This is why the view took hold that the best way forward was some device to take advantage of the body’s own defences, the old principle of homeopathy. A leading centre of this approach was Saint Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, in London, where one of the doctors was Alexander Fleming. To begin with, Fleming worked on the Salvarsen trials in Britain (see chapter 6). However, he dropped into the lab in Paddington one day in the summer of 1928, having been away for a couple of weeks on holiday, and having left a number of cultures in the lab to grow in dishes.32 He noticed that one culture, Penicillium, appeared to have killed the bacteria in the surrounding region.33 Over the following weeks, various colleagues tried the mould on themselves – on their eye infections, for example – but Fleming failed to capitalise on this early success. Who knows what Fleming would or would not have done, but for a very different man?
Howard Walter Florey (later Lord Florey, PRS; 1898–1968) was born in Australia but came to Britain in 1922 as a Rhodes scholar. He worked in Cambridge under Sir Charles Sherrington, moving on to Sheffield, then Oxford. In the 1930s his main interest was in the development of spermicidal substances that would form the basis of vaginal contraceptive gels. Besides the practical importance of the gels, their theoretical significance lay in the fact that they embodied ‘selective toxicity’ – the spermatozoa were killed without the walls of the vagina being damaged.34 At Oxford, Florey recruited E. B. (later Sir Ernst) Chain (1906—1979). Chain had a Ph.D. in chemistry from the Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin. Being Jewish, he had been forced to leave Germany, also relinquishing his post as the distinguished music critic of a Berlin newspaper, yet another example of the ‘inferior’ form of life that Hitler considered the Jews. Chain and Florey concentrated on three antibiotica – Bacillus subtilis, Pseudomonas pyocyanea, and Penicillium notatum. After developing a method to freeze-dry the mould (penicillin was highly unstable at ordinary temperatures), they began their all-important experiments with mice.
Encouraged by the remarkable results mentioned above, Florey and Chain
arranged to repeat the experiment using human subjects. Although they obtained enough penicillin to start trials, and although the results were impressive, the experiment was nonetheless spoiled by the death of at least one patient because Florey, in wartime, could not procure enough antibiotics to continue the study.35 Clearly this was unacceptable, even if the shortage was understandable in the circumstances, so Florey and Heatley left for America. Florey called in on funding agencies and pharmaceutical companies, while Heatley spent several weeks at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s North Regional Research Laboratory in Peoria, Illinois, where they were expert at culturing microorganisms. Unfortunately, Florey didn’t get the funds he sought, and Heatley, though he found himself in the company of excellent scientists, also found them anti-British and isolationist. The result was that penicillin became an American product (the pharmaceutical companies took Florey’s results but did their own clinical trials). For many, penicillin has always been an American invention.36 Without the help of the U.S. pharmaceutical companies, penicillin would no doubt not have had the impact it did (or have been so cheap so early), but the award of the Nobel Prize in 1945 to Fleming, Florey, and Chain showed that the intellectual achievement belonged to the British-Australians and the Russo-German Jew Chain.
Montignac, a small town in the Dordogne region of France, about thirty miles southeast of Périgueux, straddles the Vézère River where it has carved a narrow gorge through the limestone. On the morning of 12 September 1940, just after the Blitz had begun in London and with France already sundered into the occupied and unoccupied zones, five boys left town looking for birds and rabbits to shoot. They headed toward a wooded hill where they knew there were birch, hazel, and the small oaks that characterised the region. They saw rabbits aplenty, but no pheasant or partridge.37
They moved slowly and silently so as not to disturb the wildlife. Shortly before midday they came to a shallow depression, caused some decades before when a large fir tree had been toppled in a storm. This was known to the locals as the ‘Donkey Dip’ because a donkey had once strayed into the area, broken its leg, and had to be put down. Passing the Dip, the boys moved on; the trees grew denser here, and they hoped for some birds. However, one of the boys had brought a dog, Robot, a mongrel with a dark patch over one eye. Suddenly, he was nowhere to be seen (this part of the account is now disputed – see references).38 The boys were all fond of Robot and began calling for him. When he didn’t respond, they turned back, calling and whistling. Eventually, as they returned to the vicinity of the Dip, they heard the dog’s barks, but they were strangely muffled. They then realised that Robot must have fallen through a hole in the floor of the forest; there were caves all over the area, so that wasn’t too much of a surprise. Sure enough, the barking led them to a small hole, through which they dropped a stone. Listening carefully, they were surprised it took so long to fall, and then they heard it crack on other stones, then plop into water.39 Breaking branches off the birch and beech trees, they hacked at the hole until the smallest of the boys could scramble down. He had taken some matches, and with their aid he soon found the dog. But that was not all he found. By the light of the matches he could see that, below ground, the narrow passage that Robot had fallen through opened out into a large hall about sixty feet long and thirty feet wide. Impressed, he called to the others to come and see. Grumbling about the birds they were missing, the others joined him. One of the things that immediately caught their eye was the rock formation in the ceiling of the cave. They were later to say that these ‘resembled nothing so much as rocky clouds, tortured into fantastic shapes by centuries of underground streams coming and going with the storms’. Alongside the rocks, however, was something even more surprising: strange paintings of animals, in red, yellow, and black. There were horses, deer, stags, and huge bulls. The deer had delicate, finely rendered antlers; the bulls were stippled, some of them, and up to their knees in grass. Still others seemed to be stampeding across the ceiling.40
The matches soon gave out, and darkness returned. The boys walked back to the village but told no one what they had discovered. Over the following few days, leaving the village at ten-minute intervals so as not to attract attention and using a makeshift torch, they explored every nook and cranny in the cave.41 Discussing the matter among themselves, they decided to call in the local schoolteacher, M. Léon Laval. At first he suspected a practical joke. Once he saw the cave for himself, however, his attitude changed completely. In a matter of only a few days, the caves at Lascaux were visited by none other than the Abbé Breuil, an eminent archaeologist. Breuil, a French Catholic priest, was until World War II the most important student of cave art. He had visited even the most inaccessible sites, usually on muleback. Arrested as a spy in Portugal in World War I, he had carried on his research regardless, under armed guard, until he was cleared of all charges.42 At Montignac Breuil was impressed by what he saw. There was no question that the Lascaux paintings were genuine, and very old. Breuil said that the cave the boys had found was bettered only by Altamira in Spain.
When it occurred, the discovery of Lascaux was the most sensational find of its kind this century.43 Prehistoric art had first been identified as such in 1879 at Altamira, a cave hidden in the folds of the Cantabrian Mountains in northern Spain. There was a personal sadness associated with this discovery, for the man who made it, Don Marcelino de Sautuola, a Spanish aristocrat and amateur archaeologist, died without ever convincing his professional colleagues that what he had found in Altamira was genuine. No one could believe that such vivid, modern-looking, fresh images were old. By the time Robot fell through that hole in Lascaux, however, too many other sites had been found for them all to be hoaxes.44 In fact, there had been so many discoveries of cave art by the time of World War II that two things could be said with certainty. First, many of the caves with art in them were concentrated in the mountains of northern Spain and around the rivers of central France. Since then, prehistoric art has been found all over the world, but this preponderance in southern France and northern Spain still exists, and has never been satisfactorily explained. The second point relates to dating. Lascaux fitted into a sequence of prehistoric art in which simple drawings, apparently of vulvas, begin to occur around 30,000— 35,000 years ago; then came simple outline drawings, 26,000—21,000 years ago; then more painted, three-dimensional figures, after 18,000 years ago. This ‘creative explosion’ has also been paired with the development of stone tools, beginning about 31,000 years ago, and the widespread distribution of the so-called Venus figurines, big-breasted, big-buttocked carvings of females found all over Europe and Russia and dating to 28,000—26,000 years ago. Archaeologists believed at the time Lascaux was discovered that this ‘explosion’ was associated in some way with the emergence of a new species of man, the Cro-Magnon people (after the area of France where they were found), formally known as Homo sapiens sapiens, and which replaced the more archaic Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals. Related discoveries suggested that these peoples were coming together in larger numbers than ever before, a crucial development from which everything else (such as civilisation) followed.45 Breuil’s view, shared by others, was that the Venus figurines were fertility goddesses and the cave paintings primitive forms of ‘sympathetic magic.’46 In other words, early man believed he could improve his kill rate in the hunt by ‘capturing’ the animals he wanted on the walls of what would be a sacred place, and making offerings to them. After the war, at another French site known as Trois Frères, a painting of a figure was discovered that appears to show a human wearing a bison skin and a mask with antlers. Was this ‘sorcerer’ (as he became known), a primitive form of shaman? If so, it would support the idea of sympathetic magic. One final mystery remains: this explosion of creative activity appears to have died out about 10,000 years ago. Again, no one knows why.
Halfway across the world, much rarer evidence relating to man’s remote past became a direct casualty of hostilities. China and Japan had been at war since 1937. The
Japanese had invaded Java at the end of February 1941 and were advancing through Burma. In June, they attacked the U.S. Aleutian chain – China was being encircled. Among these great affairs of state, a few old bones counted for not very much. But in fact the hominid fossils from the cave of Zhoukoudien were just about as important as any anthropological/archaeological relic could be.
Until World War II, such evidence as existed for early man had been found mainly in Europe and Asia. The most famous were the bones and skulls unearthed in 1856 in a small cave in the steep side of the Neander Valley (Neander Thal), through which the river Düssel reaches the Rhine. Found in sediments dating to 200,000 to 400,000 years old, these remains raised the possibility that Neanderthal man was our ancestor. More modern-looking skulls had been found at Cro-Magnon (‘Big Cliff) in the valley of the Vézère River in France, suggesting that modern man had lived side by side with Neanderthals.47 And the anatomical details of Raymond Dart’s discovery, in South Africa in 1925, of Australipithecus africanus, ‘the man-ape of South Africa,’ implied that the find spot, a place called Taung, near Johannesburg, was where the apes had first left the trees and walked upright. But more discoveries had been made in Asia, in China and Java, associated with fire and crude stone artefacts. It was believed at that stage that most of the characteristics that made the early hominids human first appeared in Asia, which made the bones found at Zhoukoudien so significant.
