by Andrew Brown
I may join, but with a slight difference, the notes of your various Establishment friends on your OM. I am sure that scientifically and technically it was fully deserved, I saw you demonstrating it in France and the Med, but I at least must deplore the uselessness of so much good science being devoted to the war science even when used against the Nazis… At any rate, as you can see, I am without the means or time to do the job myself so reluctantly must give it up. I must pass it back to you. Anyhow it was good fun while it lasted. So in memories of past work together. D.
It was oddly expressed, but plainly affectionate in tone. Zuckerman wrote to Margaret about what a strange letter it was, which prompted her graphic description of how Sage had been ravaged by the two strokes. Several years later Zuckerman was preparing to write the first volume of his memoirs, and had obviously talked to Margaret about them. She wrote him a note saying, ‘I have been saddened, loving you both, by your bitterness about Des, though I can to some extent understand it as well as understanding his total unawareness of having caused it. I hope it won’t be too strongly perpetuated in your memoirs.’20 Zuckerman replied immediately to assure her that most references to Bernal would be written with admiration.
In the autumn of 1977, Zuckerman discussed Bernal’s role in Operation Overlord with Tom Hussey, the naval captain who had been the CXD (Coordinator of Experiments and Development) at Combined Operations HQ, to whom he and Bernal first reported. Hussey made some enquiries and confirmed to Zuckerman that ‘Bernal crossed to Normandy, disguised as a badly dressed junior naval officer on or about D-Day+4. He wanted to see the damage done by air bombardment and, in particular, rockets. Also, of course, slopes of beaches and their bearing capacities.’21 Hussey wrote again in December to cast further doubt on Bernal’s role.
As regards Bernal, I agree with all you say. My directorate had NO knowledge of the plans for the landings in Normandy apart from the knowledge that they would take place somewhere around Arromanches – no date or time or fireplan was known to us.
Our job was to answer any problems put by the planners as how to overcome beach obstacles, mines, flat beaches and so on. In these problems Bernal was hard working and useful.22
About a year later, Maurice Goldsmith, who was writing a biography of Bernal, contacted Zuckerman and inadvertently fuelled the obsession with Bernal’s wartime roles. Goldsmith had met Bernal in the early 1950s when he was working at UNESCO in Paris. Subsequently he had written a number of books on science and technology, and a biography of Joliot-Curie. He co-edited with Alan Mackay The Science of Science, a collection of essays to mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Social Function of Science. Goldsmith had told Bernal towards the end of his life that he was going to write his biography. Sage made it clear to Eileen, Margot and others that he did not want Goldsmith as his biographer. When Goldsmith started his research, he was able to interview many of Bernal’s friends, colleagues and lovers, but then in his words ‘the order came to pull down the curtain on me’.23 He was refused permission to look at Bernal’s papers, C.P. Snow was engaged to persuade him not to discuss Sage’s love life and a letter was sent round to likely contacts asking them not to cooperate with Goldsmith.
Goldsmith sent Zuckerman a draft of his chapter on Bernal’s wartime exploits, and Zuckerman sent him critical, detailed, comments in return. The core of these concerned Operation Overlord.
COHQ was concerned with many of the technical matters relating to an invasion – some major ones like Mulberry – but I am practically certain that no Combined Ops. Officer and certainly no COHQ civilian had anything whatever to do with the operational planning in which the Navy, Army and Air Force had to get together.
Bernal was never on the ULTRA list. Nor was he on the list called BIGOT which had to do with the actual planning. Not only was Bernal not on the two lists, neither was the senior officer on whose staff he served. Apart from Mountbatten himself, very few people in COHQ were cleared for ULTRA. In the five months of planning for the invasion, beginning on 1 January 1944, in which I was involved with Tedder and Leigh Mallory, I hardly ever met Bernal, to whom I had been warned not to talk.
The account which you give… is, I can recognize, taken partly from a memorandum Bernal wrote and gave to Margaret Gardiner sometime after the landings, partly on the paper he gave in Caen in the 1950s, and partly on what he told Bernard Fergusson.
Some time ago I had occasion to check the first document and I am afraid it turned out to be very fanciful… You say that he did not go in with the first assault troops but he went in later that afternoon. He didn’t. What is more, Bernal would not have known before D-Day that the assault was going to take place when it did. Bernal was not taken over to France until D+4; he would have been shot by our own troops had he done what he said he did in the document, namely to wander off on his own two miles inland, not knowing about mine fields etc. I have checked all these points with the man who is described as the ‘Commodore’ who took Bernal to France.
… I have always been puzzled by the Walter Mitty in Bernal, coming out as it did in that piece he wrote for Margaret Gardiner and some of the things he did later. That his memory played him false was clear when, in the early 1960s, he wanted me to join him in an attack on Cherwell.24
When Goldsmith attempted to keep a dialogue with Lord Zuckerman, he received a withering response implying that Zuckerman was merely trying to prevent him making a fool of himself by writing about matters he did not understand.
What is wrong with what you are proposing is that you could not know that Bernal was not cleared for ULTRA: nor do I believe you would know how to set about the research to discover whether he was; nor do I believe you would have known about BIGOT. Unless you are prepared to do your own research, I fear that you cannot use my information in the way you suggest in your note 2. So far as note 1 is concerned it is not a ‘suggestion’ that Bernal was not taken over to France until D-Day+4. It happens to be a fact. What is more, I did not, in my contribution to the Memorial meeting in 1972, make any reference to Bernal’s visit to the Normandy beaches; that is your own embellishment.25
Zuckerman knew that Goldsmith had been in touch with Mountbatten, and he wrote to him (‘My dear Dickie’) to warn him that he was ‘somewhat circumspect as I had had one or two exchanges with him [Goldsmith] in the past, and as I also happen to know that his enterprise was not welcomed by at least one of Bernal’s “widows”’.26
I am sure you have never seen the fanciful document, which Bernal wrote and gave to one or two of his girl-friends shortly after D-day. It is clearly the document from which Goldsmith got the view that Bernal had taken charge of a boat that was foundering, etc. etc. I saw this imaginative piece of writing because it was sent to me in protest about a sentence which I included in my contribution to a Memorial Meeting about Bernal, and in which I said Bernal’s main contribution was his immense intellectual power and the fact that he was a ferment in so far as he kept asking questions and making people think. I added that Bernal neither planned any operations nor went on any. It was this remark which resulted in my being sent the document which he had written after D-Day, and in which he claimed to have gone over with somebody who he described as ‘the Commodore’.
As the Commodore was obviously Tom Hussey, and as I know that Bernal was regarded as a security risk, and that he was neither on any of the operational planning staffs (whose papers were code-named BIGOT-TOP SECRET), and as I was practically certain that Bernal had never been cleared for ‘ULTRA’, I got in touch with Tom in order to check my memory.27
Zuckerman enclosed copies of Hussey’s letters and pointed out that ‘Bernal could never have known when D-Day was going to be since the decision was, as you know, taken at the last moment by Eisenhower, but with all ships loaded and waiting.’ Zuckerman also wrote to Hussey to put him on guard about Goldsmith, ‘an author for whom I haven’t got much time’.28
In the face of this concerted campaign and with very limited access to
any primary documents, it is not surprising that Goldsmith was persuaded that Bernal’s own accounts of D-Day were unreliable. In his book he wrote: ‘Was there something of the Walter Mitty in him? I am satisfied that he did not go over on D-Day.’29
When a Fellow of the Royal Society dies, one of his colleagues writes an authoritative biographical memoir, detailing his life and scientific achievements. In Sage’s case, this task fell to Dorothy Hodgkin, and it was one she laboured over for nearly a decade. Zuckerman wrote to her just before she finished it, explaining that he and Sage ‘parted rather abruptly’ after the war.30 He warned her that he had carefully checked Bernal’s D-Day diaries and his version of events ‘is perhaps fifty percent fact and fifty percent fiction’. She was in a quandary because she had written the original obituary for The Times, in which she credited Sage not only with a leading role in planning DDay, but even suggested that he had taken part in the secret reconnoitres of the beaches before the invasion. She was well aware of the resentment caused by Zuckerman at the memorial service, and was now faced with a restatement of his view – given after ‘a most careful check’. She turned to Mountbatten for help and he provided his own memories of Bernal’s war work. But Mountbatten had also been subjected to Zuckerman’s forceful opinions and had seen all the correspondence with Hussey. He wrote a detailed account of Bernal’s activities up to the Quadrant Conference in 1943, but could not rely on his memory after that, because, of course, he went to South East Asia then. He concluded instead by saying that he thought Bernal’s natural generosity had led to his great contribution to the war effort not being properly appreciated, ‘but those of us who really knew what he did have an unbounded admiration for his contribution to our winning the war’.31
So was Zuckerman correct that Bernal’s account of D-Day was largely fantasy? The contemporaneous documents would suggest not. First there are the cryptic notes in a filofax that show from August 1943 onwards Bernal was aware of Overlord and frequently prepared briefings, beach tests and charts in connection with it. There were frequent references to TIS (Theatre Intelligence Section) where he worked on maps and examined aerial photographs, and there were meetings with senior military figures such as Admiral Ramsay at the Chiefs of Staff Supreme Allied Command. Although Zuckerman and Bernal did not see much of each other in the first part of 1944, Bernal’s diary shows that both men met with the Chief of Combined Operations on 11th April. Further, despite Hussey’s remark that Bernal had no knowledge of any fire plan, the diary entry for 16th April records a discussion with Zuckerman ‘on bombing policy for Overlord, analysis of fire plan and damage to beaches and on preparations for operational research’.32 He met again with Zuckerman on 25th April ‘on mines, intelligence and bombardments’. Logan Scott-Bowden, who so courageously carried out the beach surveys and samplings, told me ‘Bernal was crucial to the planning of DDay. He was in charge of it in a way.’33 His assessment is amply supported by the documentary evidence.
This still leaves the question as to whether Bernal landed on the beaches on D-Day+2, as he claimed in his account. Hugh Bunting, a young crop scientist who knew Bernal from the Association of Scientific Workers, remembered catching a train at Basingstoke to go to London, just before D-Day. By mistake, he got into the first-class buffet or club car where he saw ‘the extraordinary sight of Bernal in naval uniform with lots of brass and a cap too small for him’.34 Bunting reasoned that Bernal ‘had been dressed for a possible situation in which it was necessary (Geneva Convention) that he should appear, if captured, as an officer, not as a civilian. And on a train coming from the south-west, at a time when it was well known that preparations for a second front were underway, the possible conclusions were obvious. But not a word was said – we were too far from each other even for a verbal greeting. And I skeedaddled out of the coach as fast as I could.’
There was one other incidental witness – Peter Danckwerts who shared an office at COHQ with Sage during 1944. Many years later, Danckwerts recalled that Bernal’s desire to be on the beaches by D-Day+1 almost caused a breach of security. He also said that even after having his hair shorn and kitted-out with boots and battledress, Sage did not cut ‘a particularly military figure’.35
Bernal’s diary for 1944 provides the strongest evidence to support his version of events. There is one entry for D-Day: ‘Fragmentation panel (mechanical engineers)’. Presumably this was a committee appointment that day. For nearly every day up to 6th June, the diary is crammed with notes. For the period 7– 15th June the diary is essentially blank, after which the events of everyday are recorded again. Sage realized that he could have been taken prisoner, in which case he would not want to have a diary in his pocket, showing that he was privy to the military plans. On Sunday 18th June, Bernal’s diary indicates that he embarked for Normandy a second time with Capt Menzies and Mr Monk. There is a photograph of him in uniform on what appears to be a motor launch. At the British Mulberry harbour, he transferred to a cruiser, HMS Mauritius, where for the next three days he rode out the great midsummer storm that completely destroyed the American Mulberry harbour. He was unable to land and the Mauritius sailed for England on 21st June, arriving at 18.00hr when the sea was still so rough that it was ‘impossible to get a boat alongside’.36 Sage eventually got ashore and returned to London. The next day he records a meeting with ‘Capt. Hussey, the Commodore and CCO on further investigations in relation to possible future landings’.37
In Bernal’s account of his trip to Normandy immediately after D-Day (which is so detailed and vivid that to invent it would have required a talent for fiction that was never expressed anywhere else in Bernal’s writings), he referred to the Commodore who accompanied him. Zuckerman assumed that the Commodore was Hussey (he wrote to Mountbatten, ‘the Commodore was obviously Tom Hussey’38) and when Hussey denied sailing with Bernal on D-Day, in Zuckerman’s mind, Bernal’s account was disproved. But the diary entry for 22nd June plainly indicates that Capt. Hussey and the unnamed Commodore were two different people.
In November 1944, COHQ issued a series of reports on the technical aspects of the landing. They were cogently written and included fresh details that would have been quickly obliterated by the fighting and breakout from the beachhead. Bernal’s diary for September 1944 shows that one of his top priorities before leaving for Burma was preparing Overlord reports.
Zuckerman convinced himself that Bernal invented his D-Day role because he wanted to believe it. Having done so, he took deliberate steps to make sure that Bernal’s first biographers dared not contradict his opinion. Nor was Bernal the only major scientist from that era to earn a posthumous smear from Zuckerman. Writing of Blackett, another scientist he admired, Zuckerman implied that he, like Bernal, was a well-recognized security risk by 1944. But Bernal’s diary is littered with references to Blackett leading up to D-Day, with the last one coming on 25th May, ‘discussions with Blackett on the assault’.
Both Bernal and Blackett were members of the Tizard committee during 1944–5 that reported to the Chiefs of Staff on weapons development and the future of warfare, strongly suggesting that they had not been labelled as security risks. When Julian Lewis was working on his Oxford DPhil history thesis ‘British Military Planning for Post-War Strategic Defence, 1942–47’ he approached Zuckerman about Bernal’s involvement in the highly sensitive revision of the Tizard report that examined the consequences of a nuclear exchange between Britain and the USSR. Zuckerman wrote to him saying Bernal could not possibly have taken any active part ‘because by 1945 he was certainly regarded as a security risk’.39 Lewis stood his ground and replied that ‘it is clear that Bernal was fully involved in the revision of the Tizard report – as COHQ representative and a member of the original ad hoc committee… I am fairly sure that the security aspect was simply overlooked.’40
Zuckerman was a vain man, whose talent and ambition propelled him to achieve all the honours that England has traditionally bestowed on her best scientists. Having arrived from South Af
rica as a penniless medical student, half a century later he was in the House of Lords, retained his own office in the Cabinet Office and was a confidant of the Royal Family. Yet it was not enough for Solly to succeed – he needed his friends to fail. In the 1966 book review, before rightly crediting Zuckerman with huge influence on the air strategy that made the invasion of Europe successful, Bernal reminded readers that ‘Solly Zuckerman was a distinguished scientist in his own right before he became involved in the last war.’41
His work on the sexual life of the primates was cited by his commanding officer at Combined Operations, Lord Mountbatten, to the late King George VI as having annoyed the Archbishop of Canterbury – a joke His Majesty failed to appreciate. He has also done valuable work on the sexual cycle of woman, one of the subjects which is now in the forefront of the controversy on the pill. His work in these fields brought him the Chair of Anatomy at Birmingham University, where he reorganized the whole course of medical education.42
By contrast, Zuckerman devoted not one word to Sage’s scientific achievements at the 1972 memorial service. He knew that, as a scientist, he was not in the same class as Bernal (or Blackett) and it bothered him. But Bernal was a scientists’ scientist. From the rarefied ranks of Nobel Laureates who knew him, I have compiled the following list of those who expressed admiration or even awe of Bernal’s creativity and vision as a scientist: Lawrence Bragg, Albert Szent-Györgyi, Hermann Muller, Patrick Blackett, Linus Pauling, Francis Crick, John Kendrew, Max Perutz, James Watson, Maurice Wilkins, Dorothy Hodgkin and Aaron Klug. There may well be others one should add to this dozen, such as his close friends Frédéric Joliot-Curie and Cecil Powell, but I have just not come across any encomiums from them. Pauling, whose unique achievement of winning both Chemistry and Peace Prizes might well have been emulated by Sage, said it best in the obituary he wrote.
