The plan was for Tizard to be accompanied by representatives of the services and by two radar experts, ‘Taffy’ Bowen and John Cockcroft, who would have to take time off from his work on the MAUD committee, widely agreed to be more important. In the two weeks before they set off for the United States, Cockcroft and Bowen collated plans, blueprints, circuit diagrams and samples relating to all the most sensitive British secrets: plans for the jet engine, gyroscopic gun sights, submarine detection devices and – the prize exhibit – one of the twelve prototypes of the cavity magnetron invented in Birmingham. This device generated ten-centimetre microwaves with ten thousand times the power of older devices, a revolution in radar technology and certain to be snapped up by the Americans.30 This and other material were stored in a black box, a japanned tin trunk Cockcroft had bought at the Army & Navy Stores in Westminster.31
There was a chance that the idea of a close nuclear collaboration with the United States could be seeded during the Tizard mission, though Sir Henry was sure to focus on promoting Britain’s radar technology. Although he knew of Frisch and Peierls’s findings, he believed they would not be useful in the war – for him, it was essential to concentrate on the technologies most likely to make a difference to the military outcome.32 The best hope for the advocates of building the Bomb was Cockcroft, who had attended four of the first five MAUD meetings. Yet even he was sceptical that such a weapon could affect the outcome of the war, as he told a group of sailors on board the Duchess of Richmond on his way to join the mission. Asked to entertain the troops with an impromptu lecture, he decided to talk about radioactivity and the energy stored in atomic nuclei. In one part of his presentation he used an argument advanced earlier by Rutherford, that there was sufficient energy in a cup of water to raise a battleship high enough out of the sea to break its back.33 This was ‘a very safe subject to talk about’, Cockcroft assured his audience, as ‘There was no hope at all that such a thing would be achieved during the present war.’
Tizard and his colleagues first gathered together on 6 September at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington DC, as they prepared to give away some of their country’s most valuable secrets, asking nothing in return except American goodwill. The morning had brought the news that the Luftwaffe was now bombing London in massed raids, killing hundreds of civilians, in retaliation for British bombers’ recent targeting of Berlin. The Washington Post featured three articles on the ‘Battle of Britain’, reporting that Nazi bombers had just staged their longest raid on London, lasting over seven hours.34 A German pilot had used a vapour trail to draw a swastika in the sky over Westminster, thumbing his nose at Parliament. After Tizard read the reports he feared the worst, and bet Cockcroft five dollars that Britain would be invaded within a month.35
The Washington Post and most other leading American newspapers reported on the speech Churchill gave after the German bombers had left. He told Hitler, ‘We can take it,’ and went out of his way to thank America for its recent support – a feeble deal whereby Roosevelt supplied a few dozen ancient destroyers, in return for which Britain made available sites for US naval and air bases. The President was now beginning his re-election campaign and the Prime Minister took care not to embarrass him. He referred to America’s ‘non-belligerency’ rather than to its neutrality, but avoided publicly pressing for it to enter the war. The reports of his speech drew another surge of sympathy for the British and helped to make Tizard and his colleagues even more welcome. It seemed to the British physicist Ralph Fowler, now running the British Central Scientific Office in Washington DC, that the flow of information was going to be largely one way. He confided to A. V. Hill, then under the bombs in London, that the Americans talked big about their military technology but ‘have damned little to offer’.36
While Tizard and his colleagues were on their mission in America, the MAUD committee was approaching the end of its investigations and preparing to set out its conclusions. One of the crucial roles Thomson played was to prepare the ground for the committee’s report, to try to ensure that it was given a sympathetic hearing. In a well-coordinated programme of lobbying, Chadwick and Peierls spoke with Lindemann – sure to be the most influential reader of the report – to explain why the nuclear bomb had to be taken seriously.37 Peierls had explained the case to the sceptical Prof and urged him to send copies of all the files on the project to North America, in case Britain was overrun. Lindemann’s responses were limited to a series of inscrutable grunts.38
There was controversy among the MAUD committee members on the central question of whether, if the Bomb were to be built, Britain should go it alone or try to work with the United States. If collaboration was agreed to be the best way ahead, Tizard’s mission might prepare the ground, always assuming that it was successful. The strategy had seemed rather implausible to Churchill, though he was far too busy to pay it much attention now that the Nazi blitzkrieg had begun.
AUGUST 1940 TO AUGUST 1941
In his finest hour, Churchill begs America for help
‘[Churchill] has pulled himself together. He is pulling us all together . . . It is like awakening from a nightmare to think of what might have happened to my country without him.’
H. G. WELLS, November 19401
It was now total war. The London sky was the theatre for the highest-technology aerial conflict the world had ever seen, the terrible climax of the Air Ministry’s research and development programme that Churchill had been promoting for years. It was also the fruition of poetic prophecy, he pointed out on the rooftops of Admiralty House to his staff and two American guests he invited along ‘to watch the fun’, as Jock Colville put it.2 He quoted some of his favourite lines from Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’, written over a century before:
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue
But even Tennyson’s imagination had not envisaged the sheer violence of the spectacle: the drone of the bombers, the hacking cough of anti-aircraft fire, the dancing pencils of the searchlights, the bone-shaking thud of the explosions, the stench of the burning buildings, the fires blazing in Turneresque patches of colour across the city.3 As Churchill surveyed the skies with his binoculars, he may have given a thought to H. G. Wells’s description of aerial battles in Anticipations, written three years before the first human flight: ‘Everybody, everywhere, will be perpetually looking up.’4
The harder German bombers hit the city, the more Churchill’s popularity grew. Within a month of his becoming Prime Minister a cartoon in the Daily Express portrayed him as a bulldog, his prominent jowls declaiming his defiance – the felicity of the image had quickly made it a cliché.5 Reservations about him melted away as he repeatedly demonstrated that he was confidently in command and could keep his country’s chin up – he had the ability of a star actor to hold the stage, whether in Cabinet, in the Commons or in a bombed-out community in East London.
He gave several of the finest speeches the Commons had ever heard, precisely when he needed to. Among the best was the one he delivered on 20 August 1940 in praise of Britain’s pilots: ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,’ recycling a phrase he had first used forty-one years before.6 Radar helped the overstretched squadrons of the Royal Air Force during daylight hours, when operators could locate the incoming aircraft, but in darkness the new technology was a blunt instrument. The Luftwaffe soon got wise to this and made most of their raids at night, much reducing the accuracy of their bombing.7 Later, however, the radar technology matured, and by 1944 it would have made a second Blitz impossible.8
In the middle of September, Hitler stopped trying to win control of London’s skies, and what became known as ‘the Battle of Britain’ ended in a draw.9 The Luftwaffe nevertheless continued its bombing campaign, attacking some twenty cities besides London, including Birmingham, Bristol, Coventry, Glasgow, Liverpool, Plymouth and Southampton. There had been f
ears that the German bombs might be spiked with radioactive material, but these proved groundless. By the autumn, the attacks on Britain were killing an average of four thousand civilians a month, a terrible figure but nowhere near the predictions of the Home Office experts. In the brutal political calculus of war, Britain could sustain losses on this scale quite comfortably – the Luftwaffe had done little to hobble the country’s ability to fight.10
Churchill’s leadership won the admiration of many who previously doubted him. H. G. Wells declared himself entirely won over: ‘I will confess I have never felt so disposed to stand by a man through thick and thin as I do now in regard to him.’11 Like most Londoners, Wells did his best to ignore the bombing (‘Why should I be disturbed by some wretched little barbarian in a machine?’12). He refused to move from his boarded-up home near Regent’s Park, from where he occasionally fired off letters of advice to Churchill, and soon afterwards began his final bid for respect as a scientist, by researching ‘The Illusion of Personality’ for a doctorate, later awarded to him by the University of London.13
For almost a year after the Battle of Britain, Churchill appears to have given no thought to nuclear weapons – he was much too busy to spend time on what seemed to be a minor matter, satisfactorily delegated to and overseen by his trusted science adviser. During this period, however, he took several initiatives that later proved important when the plans to build nuclear weapons took shape, especially his project to bring the United States into the war. Much less significant, but still important, was his tense relationship with many of his academic scientists, who wanted as much as he did to secure American involvement, but who favoured – in the field of science – a different way of going about it.
Still under pressure from the mortally ill Neville Chamberlain and A. V. Hill to give more breadth and depth to scientific advice in Whitehall, Churchill agreed to set up a Scientific Advisory Committee. It was to be chaired by Lord Hankey, a contemporary of Churchill and Britain’s most respected senior civil servant, with shrewd grey eyes, a huge domed forehead and the manner of a country solicitor coasting to retirement. He was often called ‘Whitehall’s Man of a Million Secrets’.14 It was, however, no secret in Westminster that he had little time for Churchill and disapproved of Lindemann’s influence over him. Despite this, Churchill enabled Hankey to become one of the chief nurturers of Britain’s plans for a nuclear weapon.
Hankey knew the Prime Minister was not going to tolerate a bunch of scientists intent on muscling their way to the top table. Churchill implied precisely this when he wrote a short minute to Chamberlain: ‘As I understand it, we are to have an additional support from the outside, rather than an incursion into the interior.’15 He almost certainly sensed a plot to subvert or dilute the Prof’s influence, and it was canny of him to give his discontented academic scientists the forum of an officially recognised committee, albeit one with more prestige than power. The committee, comprising mainly Royal Society officials such as A. V. Hill and Rutherford’s successor William Bragg, first met on 10 October and was welcomed by The Times as ‘a kind of scientific powerhouse’ from which great things could be expected.16 Behind the scenes, however, it was proving no easier for these scientists to influence the Prime Minister.
A few days later, Churchill received a report on the work of the Tizard mission, which had scarcely touched on the possibility of a uranium bomb during its discussions with American officials.17 In the document, Tizard urged the government to capitalise on the success of the visit by redoubling its efforts to collaborate with American scientists, who wanted to help.18 Churchill was unimpressed – in his opinion, there was no need to help the Americans develop military technology. In the War Cabinet’s discussion about disclosing secret information to the United States, the focus was not on the central recommendations of Tizard’s report but on his aside that ‘on the whole, the United States had much less to tell us than we had to tell them’.19 After the Foreign Secretary remarked that it would be ‘disastrous’ if the American authorities believed Britain lacked confidence in them, Churchill concluded that the British Ambassador Lord Lothian should be quite frank with President Roosevelt: ‘We should say that we do trust them, but they would appreciate that we were fighting for our lives,’ so ‘There was some information which we could not possibly divulge.’
These words were unlikely to go down well in the United States. The Tizard mission had been an unqualified success – American scientists had been ‘extraordinarily appreciative’ and had acknowledged that the British were ‘at least two years ahead’ in developing new military technology, as Lindemann’s brother Charles had seen at the British Embassy in Washington, where he was working.20 So when Roosevelt heard that Britain had to keep some technical secrets from America, it probably seemed that Churchill was blowing hot and cold about scientific collaboration. From Churchill’s point of view, however, America’s support for Britain’s entire war effort was disappointing – half-hearted and parsimonious. The inactivity in the White House since Roosevelt’s re-election in November had left Churchill ‘rather chilled’.21
The tide appeared to turn at the very end of the year. On 30 December, Churchill heard reports of Roosevelt’s latest fireside chat, broadcast over the radio networks, promising that the United States would become ‘the arsenal of democracy’, and making clear his support for Britain.22 In the following year, the Prime Minister tried still harder to draw Roosevelt and his country into the war, putting out the flags for every American visitor who showed the slightest sign of having an influence on Capitol Hill. The first guest, Roosevelt’s adviser and confidant Harry Hopkins, was especially welcome – after his visit was announced on 3 January, it drew a comment from 10 Downing Street that this was the ‘next best thing to Mr Roosevelt himself coming’.23
Formerly a social worker, and later Roosevelt’s leading New Deal enforcer, Hopkins was a slight, shambling figure whose frailty belied his intensity of purpose and the huge influence he had in the White House. During his month-long stay in London – twice as long as planned – he stayed at Claridge’s Hotel in Mayfair. He was escorted from one lavish dinner to another, and was even presented to the King.24 Hopkins became a popular figure, especially with Churchill, who regaled his guest with compliments and panegyrics about the President’s greatness, and emphasised the huge stock he put in American support. Having braved one alcohol-soaked midnight gathering with Churchill in commanding form, Hopkins returned to his room at 2 a.m. and sat by his fireside exhausted, muttering ‘Jesus Christ! What a man!’25
Convinced of Britain’s need and that Churchill was the only person the President should bother with, Hopkins wrote to Roosevelt with recommendations of support for Britain that were so strong and concrete that Churchill could almost have written them himself. A few weeks later, Churchill waited anxiously to see if legislators on Capitol Hill would pass Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease Bill, which sought to provide Britain and other allies with goods and supplies, ending the pretence of American neutrality.
A few days after Hopkins had checked out of Claridge’s, another of Roosevelt’s delegates checked in – Harvard’s President James Conant,26 recently appointed as Vannevar Bush’s deputy on the US National Defense Research Committee. This time, the President’s brief was narrower and less to Churchill’s liking: to encourage ‘the exchange of information on recent scientific developments of importance to national defense’. The gangly, tweed-suited Conant was a top-notch chemist, with the stooped shoulders of a man who had spent too many hours leaning over his test tubes. Although he had ‘a smile as quick as a traffic cop can frown’, as one journalist put it, Conant took life seriously and spoke out on difficult questions even when his views were bound to make him unpopular.27 He was even known as a player on the national stage, mainly through an outspoken national radio broadcast in May 1940 urging Americans to support Britain immediately, to prevent the spread of Nazism to the United States.28
During his six-week visit, Conant met Churc
hill three times, though it seems they barely touched on the details of how British and American scientists might collaborate more closely. The Prime Minister had bigger fish to fry. Fixated on the passage of the Lend-Lease Bill at their first meeting, he grilled Conant when they lunched in the bomb-proof dining room in the basement of 10 Downing Street with Clemmie Churchill and Frederick Lindemann.29 Ten days later, after the Lend-Lease Bill had passed, Churchill was back on his sprightliest and most agreeable form. During a Sunday-night dinner party at Chequers, he charmed Conant and several other American guests with entertaining reflections on the American Civil War (‘The men who can win a war can never make a peace’).30 The Prime Minister shone at gatherings like these, the Pol Roger flowing freely, the conversation alternating easily between sensitive diplomatic matters and personal chit-chat. A grand, rations-busting dinner was usually followed by the playing of a few scratchy gramophone records and an undemanding movie, such as Churchill’s favourite, the Olivier–Leigh vehicle That Hamilton Woman or a Donald Duck cartoon.31
Five weeks later, when Conant called on Downing Street to say farewell, he arrived during a crisis – the Germans had just invaded and overwhelmed Yugoslavia. After ushering Conant into the Cabinet room, Churchill said simply, ‘Here we are, standing alone,’ adding plaintively after a pause, ‘What is going to happen?’ When Conant, moved by all the destruction he had seen in London, returned to the US he became an even more outspoken supporter of the British cause.32
In the early summer of 1941, the war was going badly on every front. Churchill was still completely dominant, unwilling to delegate responsibility or to meet any visitor he deemed unimportant. He made one exception on 12 June – probably as a sop to his disgruntled scientists – when he joined a short ceremony in the Cabinet room, to be admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society and thus become a member of Britain’s scientific elite. A month before – backed by Hill, Tizard and J. B. S. Haldane – Churchill had been elected under the statute of the Society that enables it to appoint people it deems to have given special service to science or whose election would be of signal benefit to the Society.33 This was good old-fashioned realpolitik, if perilously close to cynicism.
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