After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Henry Tizard (1885–1959)7 combined the gifts of an imaginative research scientist with those of a patient administrator. He had been a key figure in the election of Frederick Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell, to the leadership of the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford. During the First World War he had been both a scientist, developing research into aeronautics, and a courageous test pilot. In the 1920s he had been a pioneer of research into aircraft fuel, originating the term ‘toluene number’ to express the detonation characteristics of each fuel, gauging what we would call octane numbers, and assessing, basically, what fuel would enable a plane to stay in the air for the longest distance.

  As well as being a research scientist, Tizard was also passionately concerned to create more British scientists and engineers, and it was with this evangelical mission that he went to the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, first as assistant permanent secretary, then as permanent secretary. He was largely responsible for establishing the Chemical Research Laboratory at Teddington (later the National Chemical Laboratory) and as rector of Imperial College from 1929 to 1942 he did more than anyone of his generation to foster scientific education, including schemes for entrance scholarships for children – boys, almost invariably – who had not specialized in science at school.

  Tizard, though only fifteen years old when Queen Victoria died, was, in other words, yet another of those dutiful, high-minded Victorians who believed in bettering the human race by means of institutions and education. With his pince-nez and formal clothes he was almost as much a throwback to the nineteenth century as Churchill himself.

  The nature of his intellectual interests, however, was very far from antiquated. From early manhood he had been interested in aircraft, and engines, and defence. During the 1930s, two great areas of hostility opened up for Tizard. On the one hand he was concerned with the possibility of a Continental war, and saw the vital role that science would play in it. On the other hand, he managed to offend Lindemann, and the two had one of those feuds which academic life seems to foster with particular ease. Harry Wimperis, at the Air Ministry, asked Tizard to chair a small committee to encourage technical advance in air warfare. Lindemann, when he wrote to the Air Minister in December 1934 suggesting the creation of just such a committee, was furious to discover that it had already been formed, with Tizard in its chair; he persisted in believing that the Air Ministry and Tizard were involved in a plot to circumvent him. It was a very important committee, and it gave encouragement to such vital work as Frank Whittle’s pioneering of the jet engine, and Robert Watson-Watt’s development of radar.

  As early as January 1935, Watson-Watt had told Tizard’s committee that it might be possible to detect the presence of aircraft by radio beam. In other words, Baldwin’s ominous prophecy of November 1932, that ‘the bomber will always get through’, was not necessarily true. By the late 1930s, Lindemann’s plottings had led to Tizard’s resignation from the committee. Lindemann had, among other things, arranged for a meeting between Watson-Watt and Churchill, who was then still in the political wilderness, and anxious to use for political ends Watson-Watt’s view that not enough was being spent on air defence.

  The importance of Watson-Watt’s development of radar is something we have already noted in our description of the Battle of Britain. By the summer of 1940, Tizard was convinced that Britain could not develop its inventions fast enough, or in sufficient quantity, to withstand German assault. One of the great technical miracles that changed the course of the war was the invention by John Randall and Henry Boot, at the university of Birmingham, of a copper disc capable of generating high power, 10 kilowatts, and a very short wavelength, 10 centimetres. This was the cavity magnetron, and it revolutionized radar. Randall and Boot had a prototype ready by November 1939. It was not the basis for static radar installations, and efficient airborne radar for night fighters could be made without using it, as the Germans showed to British cost on many a night-time raid when the bombing began. Its real, and revolutionary, value was that it could distinguish buildings from ordinary ground; it could scan the Earth’s surface, not just the sky. It was the most efficient tool developed for locating cities by night, so that they could be bombed. If Watson-Watt’s development of radar was the primary tool in British defence against airborne attack, Randall and Boot’s cavity magnetron was a vital tool of aggression.

  It was an invention which could establish British superiority in a coming air war, but only if the ‘resonant magnetron’ could be produced and developed on an industrial scale. When tested the magnetron delivered 400 watts on a 9-cm wavelength. The magnetron was passed to the research department of General Electric, who increased its power to 10 kw.

  Watson-Watt was sure that Britain could do it alone, without American help. Tizard disagreed. By the summer of 1940, Churchill was Prime Minister and Tizard’s arch-enemy Lindemann was the chief scientific and technological adviser to the government. Lindemann happily acquiesced in the idea of sending Tizard to America with a group of six men. What came to be known as the Tizard Mission consisted of Brigadier F. C. Wallace, a distinguished army officer who had been in charge of anti-aircraft defences at Dunkirk; Captain H. W. Falkner, Royal Navy, and Group Captain F. L. Pierce, Royal Air Force. There were two scientists: John Cockcroft, the Cambridge physicist, and Edward (Taffy) Bowen, one of the youngest of those working on radar. Arthur Woodward-Nutt, a civil servant from the Air Ministry, came as secretary. The mission was composed of men at the top of their military and scientific fields, but they might as well have been mendicant monks with begging bowls.

  Tizard had the statutory interview with Roosevelt, being ushered in at the back door so as not to attract the attention of the Press. In some ways more crucial, however, was the encounter he had with Alfred Lee Loomis, the Wall Street tycoon and amateur scientist whose laboratory in Tuxedo Park, a guarded enclave of rich men’s houses in the foothills of the Ramapo Mountains some forty miles northwest of New York City, was made available for scientific war work.

  Loomis (1887–1975) was first cousin to Henry Stimson, the Army Secretary in Roosevelt’s administration, and one of the most pro-British and most anti-isolationist of American statesmen. Loomis’s lab at Tuxedo Park was not just a rich man’s plaything. He had been gathering round himself pioneers of the atomic bomb, though of course during the late 1930s American research in this respect lagged far behind that of the British, the Danish, the French and the exiles from Germany. Loomis had the money and the political influence to make things happen. It was in his house that Taffy Bowen and John Cockcroft produced a rough wooden box, and showed their American hosts the coppery disc which was the prize of their many scientific secrets. ‘The atmosphere was electric,’ Bowen recalled. ‘They found it hard to believe that such a small device could produce so much power and that what lay on the table in front of us might prove to be the salvation of the Allied cause.’8 Within days of Tizard’s departure from the United States, Loomis had placed a production order with the Bell Telephone Company for an exact copy of the magnetron.9

  What the Tizard Mission did was very simple. With the authority of Churchill, it put at the disposal of the Americans every single patented and secret device which had been pioneered by British scientists and engineers. The pattern was established which came to be known as the Brain Drain, of British technological and scientific expertise being drawn inexorably towards the magnet of superior American resources.

  There can be no doubt that technology allied to American industrial muscle won the Second World War for the Allies. The pooling of Anglo-American skills won the war in the air. It was also vital in the war at sea. The detection of U-boats, thanks to largely British technological skill developed in the United States, led to a decisive victory in the Atlantic; and the failure of the Japanese to develop anti-submarine weapons or tactics led to the slower, but no less inexorable victory in the Pacific, with 4,859,634 tons of Japanese shipping sunk for the loss of 44 American submarines.10

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p; Without American help – which included the political good will of Roosevelt, Stimson and others, as well as scientific expertise and industrial resources – the technological victories over Japan and Germany would not have been possible. But the victory was exacted at a price, namely the loss of British scientific pre-eminence.

  Tizard’s Mission with his scientists is matched and mirrored by John Maynard Keynes’s wartime journeys to America to negotiate the future economic relations between the two allies.

  Churchill owed his very existence on this planet to the widespread aristocratic belief that when an Englishman was living beyond his means, the simplest solution to his liquidity problems was to marry an American. As an extravagant young subaltern in the 4th Hussars, he had shamelessly spent more than his income. When his army pay and his allowance ran out, he would write to his American mother for more.11 The habit of mind remained with him, as did the optimistic belief that it would always be possible to increase income rather than reduce spending. His personal life had been conducted on that basis since his days as a young Victorian spendthrift, and it was the way he chose to conduct the war economy. His earliest statement as Prime Minister had looked forward to the moment when ‘the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the liberation of the old’.12 He could have added, with all its dollars, just as when in his famous imprecation to the Americans he asked for the tools, he really meant ‘Give us the money and we’ll finish the job.’ Not everyone in the US Treasury saw the exchange in quite such one-sided terms.

  The Americans in fact got a good deal out of Lend Lease, the scheme by which they provided money in exchange for deferred payments, services, construction work, especially the building of American bases in Australia, India and Britain, military stores and petrol. Some parts of the Empire – New Zealand, for instance – actually supplied more aid to the US than they got back. All the tyres and inner tubes used by the US forces in the South Pacific were manufactured in Australia with rubber from Ceylon. So it was by no means entirely a question of Americans supplying the British with hardware in exchange for loaned cash in the case of tanks, transport aircraft and landing craft. The overall budget was $30,073 billion of American aid to the British Empire, with $7,567 billion being paid back.13

  By the time the Battle of Britain had been won, and Roosevelt re-elected – that is, by the end of 1940 – British gold and dollar reserves were in danger not merely of running low, but of running out altogether. The Secretary to the US Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, was warned by the British ambassador – still Lord Lothian: Halifax had not yet arrived – of the situation. Morgenthau’s view that was ‘the longer we keep them going’ (i.e. the British) ‘that much longer we stay out of this war’.14 Morgenthau could also see, however, that the faster the gold and dollar reserves ran out in London, the stronger was Washington’s position to bring about the financial ruin of Britain and the dismantlement of that British Empire which he and Roosevelt so much detested. Morgenthau told the British ambassador that Britain could place orders ‘for anything they wanted if they said they had money to pay for it’; a policy interpreted by Kimball thus: ‘Roosevelt gave the green light to Great Britain to make commitments they could not meet.’15

  Morgenthau put pressure on the British to sell off their big American companies – Shell Oil, Lever Brothers, Williamson Tobacco. John Maynard Keynes was dispatched to negotiate with Morgenthau. The two men did not get along; their first meeting was a disaster. ‘I have seldom struck anything stickier than my first interview,’ Keynes said, and, on his return to London, he confided: ‘I always regard a visit to the USA as in the nature of serious illness to be followed by convalescence.’16

  The negotiations between Keynes and the US Treasury, most notably with Treasury adviser Harry Dexter White, have been described as ‘one of the grand political duels of the Second World War’.17 White and Morgenthau continually had their eyes fixed on the postwar world order. They envisaged, and brought about, an end to Imperial Preference, that is preferential tariffs within the trading area of the British Empire, and an extension of American economic influence beyond the two Americas into Europe and Asia. Unknown either to Keynes or to Morgenthau was the fact that White was a Soviet agent, passing all the private information he negotiated with Keynes back to his communist masters.18 Keynes was not by any means an extreme imperialist, but he felt it was crazy for Britain to promise, in advance of an unknown postwar situation, to abolish any system of economic or trading controls. This, however, was the price exacted, in his long and frequent negotiations with them, by the Americans. Even the mustachioed, tweedy Anglophile Dean Acheson was adamant about this, though he could see that the terms imposed by Morgenthau at the Treasury would be as ruinous to America’s European allies as to their enemies.

  When Morgenthau, after a visit to England in 1944, told the President that England was broke, Roosevelt replied: ‘Very interesting. I had no idea that England was broke. I will go over there and make a couple of talks and take over the British Empire.’19 Of course it was a joke, but there was more to it than mere verbal tomfoolery.

  It is not simply the revisionist historians who see the British alliance with the United States during the war as self-defeating. Many complained at the time that Churchill was getting too close to Roosevelt. Few went as far as one intelligence adviser with an office next to Churchill’s Cabinet Room who said that the Prime Minister’s devotion to the President was ‘almost homosexual’ and that it had blinded him to Roosevelt’s wish to ‘overthrow the British Empire’.20 Yet many objectors noted the emotional intensity of Churchill’s response to diplomatic encounters. Before the American entry into the war, Roosevelt sent his close colleague Harry Hopkins to sound out Churchill, get his measure. After four or five weeks of getting the measure of wartime Britain, Hopkins gave a dinner for Churchill at the North British Hotel in Glasgow. (He had been to Clydeside to inspect the shipyards.) He ended his speech with a quotation from the Book of Ruth: ‘Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest I will lodge. Thy people will be my people and thy God my God’. Even before Hopkins had completed the quotation with ‘even unto the end’, Churchill was weeping copiously.

  When he finally got to know Roosevelt, the two men got on well enough, and the President said: ‘It is fun to be in the same decade with you’ on his sixtieth birthday. But Roosevelt was jealous of Churchill’s personal charisma, and found him, much of the time, extremely tiresome.

  Those who see Churchill as having sold out British interests to the Americans disregard the very wide number of issues about which he and Roosevelt, and the governments of the two countries, disagreed, often noisily. The Tizard Mission gave every British technological and scientific secret to the Americans, and the tough bargaining of Keynes could not bend Morgenthau’s will to bankrupt the British after the war. But in the matter of foreign policy and war strategy, Churchill was a highly effective disputant with his American allies. Roosevelt’s, and after him Truman’s, hostility to the idea of the British Empire no doubt played some small part in loosening the ties between Britain and India, but the final dissolution of the Raj can hardly be laid at America’s door. In the question of other British colonial interests in the East, Roosevelt was adamant that Britain should hand back Hong Kong to China and give Malaya independence when the Japanese were defeated. Churchill successfully resisted both – Hong Kong did not become Chinese until 1997, and there were many Hong Kong Chinese residents who wished it had not, just as many residents of Singapore pine for the days of the British Empire.

  Over the conduct of the war itself, Churchill resisted every pressure from the Americans, and later from the Russians, to open up a Second Front against the Germans in France. He saw the possibility of a repetition of the First World War, with enormous casualties and indecisive battles. The Americans wanted to fight the Germans where they were – in France, Holland, Belgium. Churchill was prepared for the long slog, first by defeating them in North Africa and dominati
ng the Mediterranean, then by moving slowly and inexorably through Sicily and up into Italy until the Third Reich was weakened, and the Allies had amassed sufficient forces and landing craft to make possible the Normandy landings of the summer of 1944.

  It was an achingly slow war, and historians sixty years on can indulge in the luxury of wondering whether Churchill’s policy was vindicated.

  Some idea of what might have happened had the Americans had their way, and Operation Overlord (the invasion of the Normandy coast) been attempted before the summer of 1944, could be derived from reading what happened to the force of 6,100 British, Canadians and Free French who attempted a beach landing on an eleven-mile stretch near the French port of Dieppe on 19 August 1942. The Germans were ready for them. Landing craft – which Churchill always saw to be the key to a successful landing on the French beaches – were inadequate. The Canadians bore the brunt of the attack, with 907 dead and 1,496 taken prisoner.

  The painful incident raised two questions, one tactical, the other strategic. The tactical question was how this war was ever going to be won. Landing an army on the French coast was a stupendously difficult task, however much Roosevelt, and later Stalin, might clamour for it, and to do so too soon, and without sufficient fire power or defence from the air, would simply be suicidal. The second, and in a way even more taxing question facing the Allies, now that they were indeed comrades in arms, was what was the aim of the war? Churchill had said at the beginning that it was Victory at all costs. But was Victory at all costs for the Allies the same as outright defeat, or unconditional surrender, for the Germans?

  Herein lies one of the central questions governing the story of the Special Relationship between Britain and the United States. If Germany had changed its government, if, for the sake of argument, some anti-Nazi group had seized power from Hitler, would it have been in a position to negotiate with the British and American governments? The British position was always a little vague about this, since, after all, the likelihood of such a coup or putsch succeeding was slight. However, the German resistance movement would have been greatly strengthened if the Allies had signalled a willingness to cooperate with it. And this cooperation, or the remotest likelihood of it, was destroyed when America entered the war.