If Blackett was an early convert to socialism, he was nonetheless part of what would become an unmistakable trend in Britain’s scientific community between the wars. Benjamin Farrington, an Irish classicist and Communist Party member who returned to London in the mid-1930s after teaching in South Africa for several years, said he had the impression that “at least half the Marxists whom I met were scientists.” The writer and scientist C. P. Snow estimated that three quarters of the 200 “brightest” young physicists in Britain in the interwar years would come to view themselves as on the political left.46
The reasons were complex. Most scientists, to be sure, were instinctively antiauthoritarian to begin with; science was in principle an open republic in which all could contribute equally based only on the quality of their work, regardless of standing or status, and in which truth was arrived at as the natural outgrowth of a vast mutual enterprise rather than dictated by received authority. Science tended to attract men and women who by their natures had little patience with conventional wisdom, social elitism, or the veneration of authority and who embraced progress as part of their basic credo.
But it was the growing contradiction between the revolutionary excitement of scientific advance and the stagnation of society and the economy that radicalized many young physicists in this period. “Living in Cambridge,” Snow would recall, “one could not help picking up the human as well as the intellectual excitement in the air.” The discoveries pouring out of the Cavendish Laboratory were “part of the deepest revolution in human affairs since the discovery of agriculture,” and the discoverers themselves were keenly aware of the fact.47 Blackett would put his finger on exactly this point in the opening words of a broadcast he presented in 1934 on the BBC, The Frustration of Science:
I think everyone will agree that the most striking fact about the present-day world is the contrast between the vast possibilities of prosperity and the appalling poverty of the majority of the population. Industry and science have made such huge advances that a large improvement in the standard of life, particularly of the workers, is now technically and immediately possible. But the social and economic structure of our western world is clearly of such a kind that we are unable at present to take full advantage of the technical progress which we have already achieved.48
The rest of the broadcast was a strange blend of sharp, original thinking and woolly cliches of Marxist class analysis and economic determinism (“it is very interesting to notice that the main popular support in any country for Fascism lies in the lower middle classes and peasantry, and that these classes have always been effectively anti-scientific”). But his basic conclusion was that the full potential of science was inevitably stifled by the capitalist system and its pursuit of profit; even “planned” capitalism would never fully put science to work, certainly not for the greatest common good. Capitalism, by the same token, would never give science the full support it needed to make further progress:
I believe that there are only two ways to go, and the way we now seem to be starting leads to Fascism; with it comes restriction of output, a lowering of the standard of life of the working classes, and a renunciation of scientific progress. I believe that the only other way is complete Socialism. Socialism will want all the science it can get to produce the greatest possible wealth. Scientists have not perhaps very long to make up their minds on which side they stand.49
On their return to Cambridge from Germany the two Pats had taken a house at 59 Bateman Street, one of a row of brick town houses facing the University Botanic Garden, about a mile from the Cavendish Laboratory. The couple were, thought Ivor Richards, “the handsomest, gayest, happiest pair in Cambridge.” Once a week the Blacketts held an open house for their “semi-bohemian and left-wing” friends and colleagues, regaling them with lemonade, biscuits, and movies extolling the achievements of the Soviet state in collectivizing agriculture and advancing industrial production.50
“BOTH THE POLICY OF APPEASEMENT supported by the Left in England and the policy of aggressive expansion adopted by Fascist Germany and Italy were expressions, in their own ways, of the … lessons learned on the battlefields of the Great War,” observes Robert Wohl.51 The growing propensity in Britain to view its victory in the war as a tragedy was matched by Germany’s willingness to regard its defeat as a crime.
Karl Dönitz returned to Germany in July 1919 as the country was being roiled by a series of right-wing putsch attempts led by irregular Freikorps of army and navy volunteers, many secretly supplied and organized by old-line officers who remained loyal to the monarchy even after they had pledged their allegiance to the new republic. The young U-boat captain had spent the last month of the war and the months since as a British prisoner of war. His last command, UB-68, was on patrol in the Mediterranean about 150 miles east of Malta when he had surfaced in the middle of a convoy to find destroyers bearing directly down on him. In the chaos of executing a crash dive to escape, the boat had gyrated out of control—either the ballast or the hydroplanes were mishandled—and the boat hurtled up and down several times, reaching a depth of 300 feet at one point and an angle of 45 degrees before rising again and breaking crazily above the surface stern-first. Dönitz gave the order to abandon ship and the crew leapt into the water just seconds before the boat went down for the last time. The engineer, who had gone below to open the seacocks to scuttle the boat, went down with her. Dönitz fell into a deep depression, blaming himself for the loss of the boat and the death of his engineer. He would later hint that he had feigned insanity in the prison camp to obtain an early release, but it may have been more than just good acting. In either case he was among the first German prisoners of war to be repatriated following the signing of the Versailles treaty.
The Social Democrats polled at the top in the first vote held for the new Reichstag but still fell far short of a majority; one of the chronic weaknesses of the new Weimar Republic was a complex system of proportional voting that ensured representation of small parties but undermined the emergence of a stable majority. In many ways, though, the real power of the state had already passed to the army. The high command had come weakly to the defense of the socialist government in crushing a communist uprising that attempted to declare a “soviet” in January 1919. In return the armed forces exacted what was in effect a free hand in military affairs—and, as would become clear only too late, political affairs as well. Their first order of business was evading the military terms of the Versailles treaty and beginning without delay to rebuild Germany’s army and navy.
This was an agenda that enjoyed overwhelming popular support, even from the broad center of German public opinion and the nation’s democratic centrist politicians. The progressive Jewish industrialist and statesman Walther Rathenau would be assassinated by right-wing hit men in 1922 while serving as foreign minister; yet he, a member of the social liberal German Democratic Party, had singlehandedly done more than probably anyone in Germany to lay the groundwork for the nation’s secret rearmament. Two months before his assassination, he had personally drafted a secret protocol to the Russo-German peace treaty allowing Germany to clandestinely construct and operate a military air base in Russia. (Under the Versailles treaty, Germany was permitted no air force at all.) At Lipetsk, about 250 miles southeast of Moscow, the German government poured out millions of reichsmarks a year to build and operate a modern airfield complete with two runways, hangars, and machine shops. Over the next ten years the Germans secretly trained hundreds of fighter and bomber pilots, refined aerial tactics, tested new weapons, and practiced dropping live bombs, and even poison gas, on simulated targets.52
Germany’s undimmed spirit of defiant militarism was hardly a secret, though; it was frequently on display, and often in deeply disturbing fashion, to anyone who cared to look. In 1921 one of the handful of war crimes trials that would take place in Germany came before the Supreme Court in Leipzig. The case involved a horrifying atrocity committed by the captain of U-86, Oberleutnant zur See Helmut
Patzig, on June 27, 1918. Patzig himself was not in court; he had vanished. But his two watch officers were standing trial for their part in the incident. There was little dispute about the facts. The Canadian hospital ship Llandovery Castle had been torpedoed by U-86 off the coast of Ireland. When Patzig learned the identity of the ship he had just sunk—he actually surfaced, approached several lifeboats, and interrogated the survivors—he attempted to sink the boats by running them down, then ordered his officers to open fire with the deck guns. After thus attempting to erase the evidence of his act, he had sworn the officers to secrecy and ordered the logbooks altered to place U-86 at a point far from where the sinking had occurred.
The court concluded that the excellent military skills possessed by German officers made it all but certain that the victims had not survived: “The universally known efficiency of our U-boat crews renders it very improbable that the firing on the boats, which by their very proximity would form an excellent target, was without effect.” Nor was it an acceptable defense that the officers were merely obeying orders; it was impossible for them not to have known that an order to fire on lifeboats was unlawful. Still, Patzig had clearly acted in a “state of excitement” and so “the deed cannot be called deliberate.” The court found the two officers guilty of homicide and sentenced them to four years’ imprisonment. Even that mild punishment provoked a public outcry and an outpouring of support for the men. Within six months both men “escaped” confinement, and that was the end of the business as far as Germany was concerned. As Dönitz’s biographer Peter Padfield would observe:
There could not have been a better example of the mood in leading circles, nor of how the ground was already prepared for Hitler: patriotism, expressed as defiance of the former enemy powers, was a higher value than justice; mass murderers of medical staff including nurses served terms which would have been lenient for petty larceny, while the officer who gave them their orders went free.53
On his return to Germany, Dönitz was unsure whether he would stay in the navy, serving the new socialist republic, but several influential and well-placed connections let him know in so many words that they did not expect the current state of affairs to last long. His father-in-law, a general from a venerable Prussian family, told him he had decided to stay in the army, adding, “You are not permitted to abandon the State!”
More compelling was the conversation he had with his former U-boat flotilla chief, Korvettenkapitän Otto Schultze, upon reporting back for duty.
“Are you going to stay with us, Dönitz?” Schultze asked.
“Do you think we shall have U-boats again?”
“Certainly I think so,” Schultze replied. “The ban will not remain forever. In about two years it is to be hoped we will have U-boats again.”54
Dönitz stayed. Within two years he was a Kapitänleutnant serving in what was for all intents and purposes the shadow U-boat force of an already rebuilding German navy. Under the Versailles treaty Germany was permitted to have torpedo boats, and the navy exploited that loophole to the hilt to train and develop tactics that would be just as applicable to submarine warfare. In the winter of 1921–1922 a staff exercise studied the use of night surface torpedo attacks by U-boats as a promising tactic to counter the defensive advantage of convoys. (“The coming war may or may not involve war against merchant shipping,” the study noted, but since an enemy warship was itself part of a defensive convoy, the same tactics would be applicable to that situation as well.) The torpedo boats also began practicing the technique of locating an enemy convoy by day, remaining at a distance until darkness allowed them to stealthily approach, then attacking and quickly escaping at high speed.
In April of 1922 a Dutch shipbuilding firm by the name of NV Ingenieurskantoor voor Scheepsbouw, or IvS, was established at The Hague. Its name translates as “Engineer Office for Shipbuilding.” In fact it was a dummy corporation set up by three German shipyards to begin building submarines to designs developed in Germany. Other German U-boat designs would be built in Finland, Spain, and Japan over the next several years, ostensibly for these or other foreign navies but with intimate German technical involvement. The naval high command in 1926 selected for development several U-boat designs to meet the requirements for “Case A,” a war with France and Poland. In the summer of 1930 a group of German “tourists” arrived in Finland for an extended holiday. They were the first contingent of active duty German naval officers to begin training in U-boats, and for the next three months they carried out trials on a new 500-ton Finnish submarine that had been designed by IvS, and completed in Finland under the supervision of German engineers.55
IN 1932 Blackett began the work that would lead to his winning the Nobel Prize in physics sixteen years later. It was work revealing both about his experimental and analytical intuition, and of a small but significant rigidity in his approach. Researchers in France and the United States had recently reported discovering cloud chamber tracks apparently created by cosmic rays randomly passing through the chamber at the moment the vapor mixture had been expanded and photographed. Cosmic rays were charged particles created in outer space, and by measuring the curvature of the tracks when a strong magnetic field was applied it was possible to calculate their energy and mass; most were apparently single protons or electrons.
Randomly snapping and developing cloud chamber photographs in the hopes that every now and then one might happen to coincide with the moment a cosmic ray passed through was obviously an inefficient way to conduct science. Giuseppe Occhialini, a young Italian physicist, had been doing some work on detecting cosmic rays with Geiger counters, and he arrived at the Cavendish for what was intended to be a three-week visit. He stayed for three years, collaborating with Blackett on a series of experiments that would in no small measure contribute to C. P. Snow’s exultant declaration that “1932 was the most spectacular year in the history of science.”56
Occhialini (known as “Beppe”) instantly fell under the spell of Blackett and his combination of “the superlative artisan and the dedicated scientist,” as Occhialini would describe him. He recalled Blackett as a scientific and a personal inspiration,
working with great efficiency and joyful intensity in the lab all day: going home in the evening to study, or to sit by the fire, fondling the ears of his sheepdog, Bo’sun, puffing his pipe and smiling patiently at the very confused English of a young Italian; striding out on Sunday mornings, rain or no rain, over the Cambridgeshire grass, with Bo’sun and I racing hard to keep up with his long legs.… For those of us who in one way or another were facing the problem of fighting fascism at home, Blackett represented a hope for the future, an assurance that we were not alone.… For me, and for the many exiles he helped and befriended, Blackett was England, an England that maybe only existed in his mind and ours, but which gave us courage and hope.57
Their idea for improving the process of capturing cosmic ray tracks was a melding of the techniques the two men had been working on independently. “The feeling between two partners in research is close to that between two mountain climbers on the same rope,” Occhialini said of their collaboration. Two Geiger counters, one above and one below the cloud chamber, were electronically linked to send an electric signal only when both detected a cosmic ray, indicating that the ray was passing through the plane of the chamber. The signal then operated a motor to expand the chamber and operate the camera shutter. If everything worked right, a cosmic ray track would show up on every photograph. “I can still see him, that Saturday morning when we first ran the chamber,” Occhialini wrote forty years later about Blackett’s reaction to that first test, “bursting out of the dark room with four dripping photographic plates held high, and shouting for all the Cavendish to hear, ‘One on each, Beppe, one on each!’ ”58
One of Blackett’s famous dictums to his students was, “You should treat your research like a military campaign.… Make sure you gather plenty of data!” With their automated system in place, Blackett and Occhialini proceeded to
do just that, taking more than 700 photographs over the following months. In a nomination letter to the Nobel committee in 1948, his Cambridge colleague J. D. Bernal would observe of Blackett, “Two features characterize his work: the importance placed on statistics of an adequate number of observations; and the minute, critical and accurate study of rare individual events.”59 The second point was just as critical: the ability to focus on the anomalous, odd event was one of the distinguishing features of great scientists—Rutherford’s “genius to be astonished,” or what one insightful psychological study of scientists termed an “overalertness to relatively unimportant or tangential aspects of problems,” which leads scientists to “look for and postulate significance in things which customarily would not be singled out.”
There was, this study went on to observe, something bordering on the “autistic” or even “paranoid” in the grandiosity of this kind of thinking that frequently leads successful scientists to impute great meaning to the seemingly trivial. Indeed,
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