Blackett's War

by Stephen Budiansky

  ———

  ON APRIL 9, 1917, two commonplace-looking gentlemen in civilian clothes arrived at Liverpool on the American passenger steamer New York and were quickly hustled aboard a special train, which departed at once for London. It was three days after America’s declaration of war, which President Wilson said his country had at last been driven to as a direct consequence of Germany’s abandonment “of all restraints of law or of humanity” in its submarine campaign.

  During the voyage over an alert steward had noticed that the initials embroidered on one of the men’s pajamas did not match his name on the passenger list and reported him to the captain as a suspicious character. The captain had a quiet laugh; he was in on the secret that the two suspicious passengers, sailing under the names S. W. Davidson and V. J. Richardson, were in fact two American naval officers, Rear Admiral William S. Sims and his aide, Commander J. V. Babcock, traveling incognito. Sims, up until a few weeks before the president of the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, had been hastily summoned to Washington in late March and, with war imminent, dispatched at once to England to establish high-level contacts with the U.S. Navy’s counterparts in the British Admiralty.

  Upon his arrival in London, Sims was immediately ushered in to see Admiral John Jellicoe, the first sea lord. The two admirals had known each other for years, having first crossed paths in China in 1901, and Sims found the British admiral the same calm, imperturbable, frank, and approachable man he remembered, “all courtesy, all brain,” betraying none of the immense burdens his job carried. British newspapers had been full of vaguely reassuring statements suggesting that the German U-boat offensive had already proved a failure and, as Sims would observe in the coming days, “this same atmosphere of cheerful ignorance” prevailed “everywhere in London society.” After a few preliminary pleasantries, the first sea lord took a paper out of his desk and handed it to Sims. “I never imagined anything so terrible,” Sims would recall. It was a record of actual British and neutral tonnage lost since the unrestricted U-boat campaign had begun, and it was a disaster. Sinkings had surpassed 500,000 tons a month in February and March; they would hit 900,000 tons in April if the current rate of destruction held. Sims, astonished, said that it looked like the Germans were winning the war. Jellicoe agreed. “They will win, unless we can stop these losses—and stop them soon.”

  “Is there no solution?”

  “Absolutely none that we can see now,” Jellicoe replied.21

  Actually there was a solution: Jellicoe himself had vetoed it. Jellicoe had arrived at the Admiralty the previous December determined to shake up the antisubmarine effort. Until then there was no single command responsible for the British response to the U-boats, and the new first sea lord moved swiftly to take charge and establish a new AntiSubmarine Division. A week later a new man arrived at 10 Downing Street equally determined to put new life into the British war effort: the venerable Liberal David Lloyd George had been chosen to take the helm of the national unity government in the face of waning confidence in Prime Minister Henry Asquith. Impressed by a cabinet paper arguing the effectiveness of convoying merchant ships as a way to protect them from submarine attack, Lloyd George pressed Jellicoe to look into the idea as the first appalling sinking statistics began to arrive in February 1917.

  Convoys were not, however, what Jellicoe had in mind. He thought they were impractical and ineffective, and the Admiralty’s experts concurred: “It is evident that the larger the number of ships forming the convoy, the greater the chance of a submarine being enabled to attack successfully, and the greater the difficulty of the escort in preventing such an attack.” Actually, exactly the opposite was the case; but Jellicoe was also swayed by the fact that the merchant shippers themselves opposed the idea, and at a conference at the Admiralty on February 23, 1917, both the navy men and ten merchant sea officers summoned to discuss the matter all agreed that merchant ships could not possibly manage to keep station in a large, zigzagging convoy. There were undeniable challenges in seamanship involved, but the shippers also just disliked the delays and nuisance of waiting for a convoy to assemble and having to sail under Admiralty orders, and navy officers disliked the idea of being reduced to ferrying a bunch of tubs back and forth across the ocean.22

  But Sims was a firm believer in convoys and he began to “emphatically” press the matter, too. Sims pointed out that “sailing vessels in groups, and escorting them by warships, is almost as old as naval warfare itself.” He pointedly added that the British navy already implicitly recognized the principle of convoying when it came to protecting their own battle fleets from submarines: battleships never moved without an accompanying destroyer screen shielding them. But his clinching argument was that a limited convoy system—euphemistically termed “controlled sailings”—had already been introduced at French insistence in February for colliers supplying coal to France, and had been a clear-cut success. Eight hundred colliers a month made the journey; in escorted convoys from February to April a total of five ships had been sunk by U-boats.23

  Lloyd George quickly discovered that the American admiral was an ally and had several lengthy discussions with Sims, then began pressing his “Lord High Admirals” (as he sarcastically referred to the Admiralty Board in his subsequent memoirs) even harder, finally announcing on April 25 that he would visit the Admiralty and personally straighten out the matter. The admirals’ most consistent objection had been that with 5,000 shipping movements a week at British ports, it was simply a numerical impossibility to organize convoys and provide escorts for them all. It turned out that the figure was a ridiculous exaggeration, arrived at only by counting every coming and going of vessels of every description. The actual number of large oceangoing ships that arrived and departed each week was 300. “The blunder on which their policy was based,” Lloyd George would later write of the Admiralty’s resistance to convoys, “was based on an arithmetical mix-up which would not have been perpetrated by an ordinary clerk in a shipping office.”24

  The institution of convoys over the next several months was nothing short of a revolution. Karl Dönitz, in his memoirs, recalled the sudden wind taken out of the U-boat offensive, “robbed of its opportunity to become a decisive factor”:

  The oceans at once became bare and empty; for long periods at a time the U-boats, operating individually, would see nothing at all; and then suddenly up would loom a huge concourse of ships, thirty or fifty or more of them, surrounded by a strong escort of warships of all types.… The lone U-boat might well sink one or two of the ships, or even several; but that was but a poor percentage of the whole. The convoy would then steam on … bringing a rich cargo of foodstuffs and raw materials safely to port.25

  By the summer of 1918, sinkings had fallen to less than 300,000 tons a month.26

  ———

  ON SEPTEMBER 26, 1918, British, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, and French troops launched a huge assault against the last German defensive position on the Western Front, a twenty-five-mile-deep system of fortifications and redoubts running through northern France known as the Hindenburg Line. German morale both at the front and at home was on the verge of total collapse. Three days later Ludendorff informed the astonished Kaiser and civilian leaders of the government—who up until then had heard nothing to make them doubt the inevitability of a German victory—that the army was defeated and Germany must seek an armistice without a moment’s delay if the empire was to be saved; the Kaiser must also immediately decree a parliamentary constitution to avert a revolution at home. Several days of confusion followed as the chancellor resigned and the government was without a leader capable of making a decision. On October 2 the high command’s demand that the civilian government sue for peace became a virtual ultimatum. An aide sent by Ludendorff put the situation starkly: “We cannot win the war … we must make up our minds to abandon further prosecution of the war as hopeless.”

  Ludendorff would later try to throw all of the blame for Germany’s s
urrender upon the civilian government, writing in his memoirs that he was “unable to understand how the idea ever arose that I said that the front would break if we did not have an armistice in twenty-four hours.” In fact the idea came from Ludendorff’s own increasingly panicked messages, including one which stated that “every twenty-four hours that pass may make our position worse, and give the enemy a clearer view of our present weakness,” with “the most disastrous consequences.” When the new chancellor, Prince Max of Baden—the Kaiser’s second cousin and the only liberal-minded member of the royal family—balked, suggesting that such a precipitous offer of an armistice, coming so completely out of the blue, would itself have the air of capitulation, Hindenburg and Ludendorff were adamant that no delay could be tolerated: the military situation demanded an end to the fighting at once. The next day the government drafted a note stating that Germany was prepared to accept Wilson’s Fourteen Points and requesting an immediate armistice and peace negotiations. (Ludendorff would later claim that he thought the message should have had “a more manly wording.”)27

  Over the next five weeks British and Commonwealth troops won a series of smashing victories, breaking through the final Hindenburg Line defenses on October 5 and then rolling forward five to ten miles a day as they captured thousands of prisoners and hundreds of enemy guns. In later years, amid the postwar mood of disillusionment and pacifism, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig would be remembered to history almost entirely as the man responsible for the disaster of the Somme, thus becoming the archetype of the unimaginative general who mindlessly sent millions to their slaughter. Few historians would deign to acknowledge that he was also the architect, in those final weeks, of the Allies’ victory; or that with the breakthrough had come a return not just of mobile warfare but of the kind of battlefield heroism that every generation before and since rightly venerated. The advance rolled on and on, beating off frequent German counterattacks and desperate rearguard actions. In a scene right out of medieval warfare, the New Zealand Division scaled the ramparts of the ancient walled city of Le Quesnoy on ladders to rout a sizable German force holding out inside, taking 2,500 prisoners and more than 100 guns.

  Well aware it would be all but impossible to resume fighting once the guns ceased firing, President Wilson insisted that an armistice incorporate all key Allied terms; so the fighting raged on as notes were exchanged between Berlin and Washington. The continuation of the U-boat campaign in the meanwhile threatened to scuttle the negotiations altogether. In the first two weeks of October, U-boats off Ireland torpedoed two passenger ships, taking more than 800 lives and setting off a rage of indignation in Britain and America that left the Allies in no mood to grant concessions. On October 14 Wilson delivered a withering reply to the latest German peace proposal, stating that the United States would never consent to an armistice “so long as the armed forces of Germany continue the illegal and inhuman practices which they still persist in” even as they were professing to seek peace. Finally, on October 20, the German government agreed to halt the U-boat campaign. Ludendorff would term “this concession to Wilson” the “heaviest blow” to the morale of the German armed forces.28

  What actually was demoralizing the German armed forces was the increasingly obvious fact that Germany had lost the war. The government’s delay in reaching a cease-fire agreement had in fact done exactly what Ludendorff had earlier warned it would, strengthening the Allies’ hand as Germany’s military and political situation crumbled. At the end of October, German battleship crews, ordered to steam forth in a final “death or glory” attack on the British Grand Fleet, mutinied. Soldiers sent to put down the rebellion joined the mutineers, and when the crews of the mutinying ships were broken up and transferred to other bases in an effort to stem the trouble the effect was only to spread the revolt throughout the fleet. The Kaiser was told by his ministers that the only hope now for averting a general revolution and saving the empire was his immediate abdication. “I have no intention of quitting the throne because of a few hundred Jews and a thousand workmen!” the Kaiser retorted. “Tell that to your masters in Berlin!”29 He gave in on November 9 as the German delegation at Compiègne was preparing to accept the stern terms demanded by the Allies and a revolutionary mob in Berlin was proclaiming a socialist republic from the steps of the Reichstag. Ludendorff’s successor at the high command explained to His Majesty that he no longer had an army that would obey his orders.

  It was Haig, almost alone among the Allied military and political leaders, who had expressed grave reservations about the wisdom of extracting humiliating concessions from Germany. “I think this is a mistake,” he wrote his wife, “and may encourage the wish for revenge in the future.” Haig was especially dismissive of the Admiralty’s reasoning that, since the German High Seas Fleet would surely have lost all of its modern warships had it ventured forth to do battle, it should therefore be required to turn over the entire fleet as one of the Armistice conditions.30 His was a voice in the wilderness.

  Within a year of the war’s end Ludendorff and Hindenburg were insisting without batting an eye that a valiant and undefeated German army had been “stabbed in the back” by a weak and treasonous civilian government, abetted by socialists and Jews. “One had to live in Germany between the wars,” wrote the newspaper correspondent William Shirer, “to realize how widespread was the acceptance of this incredible legend by the German people”—and how much it would drive Germany’s resurgent militarism.31

  Cambridge

  PATRICK BLACKETT ARRIVED in Cambridge on January 25, 1919, and stepped into a new world. Promoted to full lieutenant the previous May, he was one of 400 junior officers the British navy decided to send to the university for a six-month course at the end of the war “with the object of instilling into us some general culture which had been lacking among those who had been whisked to sea in 1914 when very young,” Blackett wrote. The officers were parceled out among the colleges of the ancient university and attended lectures in uniform, a striking enough picture that Rudyard Kipling was inspired to capture it in a slightly satirical (and largely forgotten) poem:

  Oh, show me how a rose can shut and be a bud again!

  Nay, watch my Lords of the Admiralty, for they have the work in train.

  They have taken the men that were careless lads at Dartmouth in ’Fourteen

  And entered them at the landward schools as though no war had been.

  They have piped the children off all the seas from the Falklands to the Bight,

  And quartered them on the Colleges to learn to read and write!1

  His very first night at Magdalene College, Blackett stayed up late talking with two other new students he had just met and who would become lifelong friends: Kingsley Martin, the future editor of the leftist New Statesman, and Geoffrey Webb, who would become one of England’s foremost art historians. Martin’s and Webb’s discussion that night about God, Marx, and Freud were, Blackett later recalled, the first intellectual conversation he had ever heard.2 Martin’s accounts of war in the trenches—a socialist and the son of a Congregationalist minister, Martin had declared himself a conscientious objector and been assigned to an ambulance unit in France—also made Blackett realize “how relatively comfortable the war at sea had been compared to the grim horrors of the Western Front.”

  Blackett had already had doubts about staying in the navy. During the last months of the war, assigned to a destroyer in Harwich Force, he had begun to read science textbooks with the idea of possibly getting a job with a scientific instrument company or going to university. He summarized his state of mind:

  I enjoyed my four years at sea during the war, but I was very doubtful if I would enjoy peace time Navy. There seemed to me to be two attitudes which I might take if I decided to stay in the Navy. I could treat the Navy as providing a pleasant way of life and an introduction to the best clubs around the globe, or I could take the technological problems of naval warfare very seriously and so become orientated towards fighting
another war. As I put it to myself rather crudely: I enjoyed shooting at the enemy during the war—would I enjoy shooting at targets? I decided I wouldn’t.

  A few days after arriving at Cambridge, Blackett wandered over to the university’s Cavendish Laboratory “to see what a scientific laboratory was like.”3 Three weeks later he marched into the office of his commanding officer at Cambridge, Commander H. E. Piggott, and announced that the “intellectual life of a place like Cambridge” was what he was cut out for; he couldn’t see himself going back to the peacetime navy, spending the rest of his life “walking up and down with a telescope under his arm.” Piggott replied that he did not see how he could further Blackett’s plans, “seeing that this would mean depriving the service of one who would likely prove one of her brightest senior officers,” but that if he was determined he should talk to his tutor at Magdalene and submit his application for resignation from the navy through the usual service channels.4 Blackett did so at once, and never looked back. He promptly enrolled as a regular undergraduate studying for the intensive Mathematical Tripos examination; he passed Part I in May, then switched to physics the following fall. In 1921 he received a first in physics and was accepted as a research fellow at the Cavendish, whose new director was the towering figure of the physics world, Ernest Rutherford.