Tizard arranged for the ‘U-bomb subcommittee’ to be chaired by his Imperial College colleague G. P. Thomson in any spare time he could muster.32 The first meeting, on 10 April, was low-key and sparsely attended. Only Mark Oliphant, John Cockcroft and Philip Moon joined Thomson, who had to write his own notes, as he had not been provided with a secretary. After the formalities, he introduced a guest, Jacques Allier, a debonair Frenchman well versed in the chain-reaction research that had been pursued in France, then leading the world in the field. Allier, an intelligence officer, knew that the Germans wanted to get their hands on supplies of heavy water, a possible moderator of chain reactions, which was at that time produced only in one factory, in Norway. A month earlier, he had masterminded an audacious midnight raid, removing virtually the entire global supply of heavy water – 185 kilograms of it – from the factory. Later, he helped to ensure that the heavy water was eventually out of harm’s way in Windsor Castle, depositing it briefly in Wormwood Scrubs in the care of the librarian.33
The meeting helped to convince G. P. Thomson that it was worth taking seriously the idea of a bomb made from pure 235U. A few days later, he wrote to Chadwick about ‘Oliphant’s suggestion’ and commented that ‘although at first it seems a bit wild, it is not so impossible when you come to look into it’.34 But it was not Oliphant’s suggestion, it was Frisch and Peierls’s, and they were livid to have been excluded from the meeting. They had been deemed too much of a security risk to discuss the very idea they had conceived.35 They had not received a written acknowledgement that their report had arrived in Whitehall and they were not even allowed to know the name of the chairman of the committee following up their work.36 Peierls knew, however, that it was Thomson, and soon afterwards wrote him an exasperated note about the committee’s progress. ‘I feel I cannot permit myself the luxury of reserve,’ Peierls began, writing with the slightly florid politeness of an English gentleman – which he now was, having been granted British nationality a few weeks before.37 Thomson was sympathetic, and sought permission to involve the two Birmingham scientists.38
At around this time, Frisch became a lodger in the Peierls’s home after their children had been evacuated.39 The three adults got on well – at weekends, they often took the train and went out to the countryside around Birmingham to take long, restorative walks. One of these hikes was especially memorable for Peierls.40 It took place in the late spring and there was a lot to talk about: Neville Chamberlain’s tottering premiership, Mark Oliphant’s packing his family off to Australia after concluding that Britain was two weeks from a Nazi invasion, the recent flurry of secrecy-busting newspaper articles on the American project to harness nuclear energy.41 Worst of all, the British government was running the scientific civil service with what their temperate friend John Cockcroft had described as ‘incredible incompetence’.42
Frisch and the Peierlses had counted on staying overnight in a village hotel, but they were turned away by the proprietor, perhaps because of their foreign accents. Having a drink afterwards in a local pub, they heard a politician talking impressively on the radio, giving a speech so compelling that no one left the room until it ended. That unmistakable voice was, as the writer A. P. Herbert once remarked, ‘like an organ filling [a] church’, sending the congregation out ‘refreshed and resolute to do or die’.43 It was their new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.
At last, here was a leader of authority and boldness, one who prided himself on his understanding of the value of new science to the military effort. Britain had become the first country in the world to be led by someone who had shown clear signs of being a nuclear visionary.
MAY AND JUNE 1940
Churchill has more pressing problems
‘Overnight it was revealed that . . . Winston was the Angel Gabriel and not, after all, Beelzebub. There has been no more startling transformation since the Creation.’
JOSEPH MALLALIEU, politician and author, 19501
When Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940, the war was going so badly for Britain that he had to invest all his energies in the desperate task of defeating the Nazis. In the first months of his premiership, while a few scientists worried frantically that Hitler might be acquiring nuclear weapons, only a few memos on the subject reached the Cabinet office, and it is conceivable that Churchill read none of them. He was, however, as determined as ever to support the military with the latest science and technology, especially through devices that promised to give a quick and effective advantage.
In the scientific field, Churchill had only a few close advisers, with Lindemann by far the most influential. It was ultimately the narrowness of his advice on these matters that led Churchill to make such an uncharacteristically flat-footed response to the most powerful explosive his scientists devised.
Churchill could easily have failed to become Prime Minister. At eight in the morning on Friday 10 May, a few hours before he was appointed, he was at a meeting of the War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff. The grim news arrived of the Nazis’ blitzkrieg attack on neutral Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, which were overrun. France was next – the panzer divisions began to move across its border that morning. With war now blazing in Europe, Chamberlain had decided to resign, and the most popular choice to take over from him was Lord Halifax, favoured as leader by all three of the main political parties, by the King and most members of the House of Lords.2 After Halifax had turned down the job, Churchill emerged as the only acceptable candidate.
A few hours later, after a tense Cabinet meeting at 8 a.m., Churchill became, in C. P. Snow’s phrase, ‘the last aristocrat to rule – not just preside over, rule – this country’.3 It was not a popular appointment in the Conservative Party, as Churchill saw three days later when he walked into the Commons chamber for the first time as Prime Minister. Labour and Liberal MPs applauded him, while his Conservative colleagues remained almost silent. In the White House, Churchill’s promotion was welcomed warmly, with one reservation – Roosevelt remarked privately that the new Prime Minister ‘was the best man England had, even if he was drunk half of his time’.4 The President almost certainly knew that he had been the subject of one of Churchill’s essays in the collection Great Contemporaries, where he had been gently criticised for several of his New Deal policies. Churchill had, however, concluded that ‘it is certain that Franklin Roosevelt will rank among the greatest [Presidents]’.5
Churchill formed his government with a caution that belied his impetuous reputation. His administration was a coalition, always a congenial arrangement to him, with Lord Halifax as Foreign Secretary and the Labour leader Clement Attlee as Lord Privy Seal. Neville Chamberlain was given the face-saving role of Lord President of the Council, officially responsible for science, but everyone knew that Churchill – assisted by Lindemann – was to all intents and purposes going to run this area of policy, in addition to the other responsibilities he had given himself: Leader of the Commons and the new post of Minister of Defence.
One of the few pieces of cheering news for Churchill during his first month as Prime Minister was the success of the scientists and mathematicians at Bletchley Park in breaking the Germans’ Enigma codes. Later, the defence of the Allies’ vital North Atlantic sea-lanes depended almost entirely on the Bletchley teams’ ability to read the instructions to U-boat commanders in the area.6 Churchill, who had for decades championed the value of military intelligence,7 was overjoyed. He made the Cabinet’s Joint Intelligence Committee responsible for coordinating all the relevant information pouring into Whitehall, with excellent results.
Most of the news he received that month was, however, terrible – on 15 May, only five days after he took office, he first fully appreciated the scale of the crisis he was facing. At 7.30 in the morning he was awoken by a phone call from the French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud, evidently under stress, declaring, ‘We have been defeated. We are beaten; we have lost the battle.’8 Scarcely able to believe that the French had been able to summon so little r
esistance, Churchill was dumb-founded. The news from France was no better in the coming weeks, as Hitler’s armies blasted their way towards the coast, backed by heavily armoured tanks and an imperious Luftwaffe. The British Expeditionary Force, more than three hundred thousand-strong, was by late May bottled up around Dunkirk, and extremely vulnerable.
Churchill brought a new belligerency to the British campaign and a much-needed urgency to the running of the government, firing off a stream of pugnacious memos, many of them bearing the red label ‘ACTION THIS DAY’.9 Most importantly, he was able to turn his long-honed literary gifts into a powerful weapon of war – Churchill the writer was supporting Churchill the politician.10 Through the relatively new technology of ‘the wireless’ – not available as a national medium during the previous conflict – he could speak directly into the homes of the British people and across the Empire. From the day he became Prime Minister until the end of the year he made seven broadcasts, most of them brief, all of them inspirational.11 Many of his parliamentary colleagues had been sniffy about the amount of time he had spent away from Westminster – reading, writing and giving speeches – but these diversions now paid handsome dividends. Although his language was in many ways old-fashioned and sentimental, it struck a chord with his listeners in 1940. Betraying no sense of the doubt he sometimes felt, he brilliantly made his case over the heads of his dithering and sometimes defeatist colleagues, in words as imperishable as his self-belief. Gibbon and Macaulay would have been proud of him.
Yet many MPs were unconvinced that Churchill, with his long record of impulsiveness and poor judgement, was capable of providing the steady, determined leadership the country obviously needed. Out of his earshot, resentful colleagues and eye-rolling officials muttered that he might be the most popular politician in Britain, but he was only a stopgap Prime Minister.12
With the arrival of Churchill in Downing Street, Frederick Lindemann became the most influential scientist ever to work at the heart of the British government. Each of the two men had the role he had wanted for many years, and each had achieved his political ambition without being elected to his high office. Unlike the more generous-spirited Churchill, however, the Prof was not disposed to meet his old enemies and heal the breach. When his protégé R. V. Jones passed him another request from Tizard to work together amicably for the duration of the war, Lindemann declined icily: ‘Now that I’m in a position of power a lot of my old friends have come sniffing around.’13
Among Churchill’s earliest instructions to Lindemann were orders to ‘scrutinise and push forward small inventions’ and to establish a committee ‘to investigate scientific and technical war devices’.14 The idea of setting up such a group had little appeal to Lindemann, who replied that it would be better if he were given personal responsibility to call for experts as and when he saw fit. As usual, the Prof got his way. Churchill encouraged him to interrogate every minister and all their officials on every aspect of policy except military strategy, a licence that Lindemann used without the tact needed to make the role welcome. Whitehall insiders regarded him as Churchill’s snooper.15
The Prof sat for hours in his armchair with a large blotting pad on his knees, amending draft minutes to Churchill, excising every unnecessary word and every dispensable qualification.16 His hard-pressed staff in the Statistical Department supported him loyally, keeping him stocked with new material that he used to supply Churchill with a constant stream of facts, figures, graphs and concise commentary.17 Outside his own bailiwick, entire government departments spent weeks preparing reports that Lindemann would condense for the Prime Minister into half a typewritten page. By the time the war ended, Lindemann had written some two thousand of these notes – an average of almost one for every day of the conflict – on a wide range of subjects, from shipping and troop movements to economics and food supplies.18 In this correspondence, the possibility of a nuclear bomb was the subject of only a few dozen minutes, many of them critically important influences on British nuclear policy and, indirectly, on the American programme.
Lindemann was especially interested in a report in the 7 May edition of The Times suggesting that the Germans were working on nuclear weapons.19 The piece, drawn to his attention by an alarmed colleague, was based on a front-page report two days before in the New York Times, which claimed that leaks had revealed that the Nazi government had ordered German scientists in the field ‘to drop all other experiments and devote themselves to this work alone’.20 He seems not to have taken any specific initiatives as a result of this article, but he kept an eye on the reports of the U-bomb subcommittee. Always a conscientious reader of such documents, he is likely to have perused the Ministry of Supply’s report on the consequences of dropping a uranium bomb on a large British city. But he does not seem to have been much concerned, his intuition telling him that nuclear explosives were unlikely to be viable.21
The Prof devoted more of his time to new weapons that were, in his view, likely to make a significant difference to the war. This was why he encouraged Churchill’s interest in the small government department MD1, set up in early 1939 at Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire, to work largely outside the usual civil-service system on the development of unorthodox new weapons. Churchill behaved ‘like a small boy on holiday’ when he visited it, the technical staff saw, and was always ready to protect them from the interferences of the Whitehall bean-counters.22 He could not resist the pleasure of seeing an ingenious new gadget demonstrated in front of him and was known to make bulk orders for such devices on the spot.23 It seems that his temperament was less well suited to the long haul of developing the uranium bomb.
The second half of May 1940 was no less disastrous for Churchill than the first. Allied troops were under such pressure from the Nazis that the Prime Minister agreed to a mass evacuation of British and French soldiers from Dunkirk and adjacent beaches: between 26 May and 4 June, some 335,000 troops were withdrawn on a motley armada of some nine hundred small boats, most of them designed for quite different purposes.24 The British government was riven with disagreements about the way ahead, with Halifax and others showing clear signs of defeatism. Churchill would have no truck with this: presented with a draft recommendation that the warring nations might meet in conference to negotiate a peace settlement, he crossed it out in red ink and dismissed the idea as ‘rotten’.25
Churchill was determined to ‘drag the United States in’ to the conflict, as he commented to his son.26 It was not going to be easy: Roosevelt had any number of warm words for the Allies but offered little in the way of concrete support. On the night of 19 May, Churchill wrote to the President pleading with him to help Britain by supplying desperately needed fighter aircraft. ‘Here’s a telegram for those bloody Yankees,’ the Prime Minister told his Assistant Private Secretary Jock Colville.27 Churchill was in no mood to agree with the prominent scientist A. V. Hill, who was arguing that Britain should donate technical information to the United States in the confident hope that it would encourage a spirit of cooperation, much as his friend Rutherford had done during the First World War.28 Although Lindemann seemed sympathetic to Hill’s case,29 Churchill flatly refused the request, as he had done earlier when asked to share British radar secrets. Britain seemed to be some way ahead of the US in many aspects of military technology, so it made no sense to him simply to give away secrets ‘unless we can get something very definite in return’, as one of his assistants put it.30 After further pressure, he climbed down a few weeks later in a single-sentence memo that included a grudging ‘I concur’, though he soon regretted it.31
The resistance of the French was crumbling before Churchill’s eyes. After a meeting with demoralised French leaders on 12 June, he told his military Chief of Staff ‘Pug’ Ismay that it looked like Britain would be fighting the war alone. When Ismay commented, ‘We’ll win the Battle of Britain,’ Churchill gave him a look and said, ‘You and I will be dead in three months.’32 The German army marched into Paris unopposed two days later, an
d Churchill was infuriated to hear that the remaining British forces in the country were in retreat. After the French surrendered on 22 June, it was obvious that Britain would be next in line for invasion. With fears of an attack escalating, Churchill’s government intensified its policy of interning without trial any foreigner deemed to be a security threat, including many Jewish refugees, sending the internees to detention camps or deporting them to Canada and Australia. Privately he lamented the crude management of this policy, though not enough to put a stop to it.33
Churchill was now under more pressure than any British Prime Minister since William Pitt took on Napoleon. The stress was beginning to show. In late June, his wife Clemmie wrote him a letter – as affectionate as it was cautionary – warning him that his ‘rough sarcastic and overbearing manner’ might lead to his being ‘generally disliked’ by his colleagues and subordinates.34 Yet he retained the respect and admiration of his staff, including his Private Secretary John Martin, who one night visited him in his room and witnessed an example of his sometimes disconcertingly informal behaviour: ‘I found him dressed only in a vest, pacing up and down. I gave my report. He turned angrily away from me, picked up the pot from under the bed and made noisy use of it.’35 After a bout of obnoxious aggression, the Prime Minister could defuse resentment with winning charm, as Martin saw at the end of one especially fraught evening, when Churchill put a hand on his shoulder and said: ‘You know, I may seem to be very fierce, but I am fierce with only one man – Hitler.’
While displaying a rather cloying loyalty to his king, Churchill himself in many ways behaved as a monarch, expecting unswerving loyalty from every one of his huge complement of staff. They had to dance to his tune, at every hour of the day, often well into the night, in meetings that his colleagues called ‘midnight follies’.36 The responsibilities he shouldered, together with his punishing workload, also entitled him to live royally, eating and drinking as well as he did in peacetime. Churchill knew that power is a borrowed robe, but he was going to make full use of all his entitlements while they lasted. One of the privileges he thought he deserved was his right to have his courtiers, such as Lindemann, at the heart of his government, even if they occupied posts that would have been better suited to others. The Prof was never going to be comfortable until his arch-enemy Tizard had been shorn of all his influence, and it was only a matter of time before Churchill administered the coup de grâce, six weeks after he took office.
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