Blackett's War

by Stephen Budiansky

were this thinking not in the framework of scientific work, it would be considered paranoid. In scientific work, creative thinking demands seeing things not seen previously, or in ways not previously imagined; and this necessitates jumping off from “normal” positions, and taking risks by departing from reality. The difference between the thinking of the paranoid patient and the scientist comes from the latter’s ability and willingness to test out his fantasies or grandiose conceptualizations … and to give up those schemes that are shown not to be valid. It is specifically because science provides such a framework of rules and regulations to control and set bounds to paranoid thinking that a scientist can feel comfortable about taking such paranoid leaps.60

  That was Blackett precisely. “In most of his undertakings Blackett combined versatility of imagination with tough scepticism. He was not easily convinced even by his own ideas,” said Ivor Richards.61 In examining the 700 cloud chamber plates, Blackett found 14 that were a bit odd. A competing scientist, Carl Anderson at Caltech, was on the same track; the price of Blackett’s skepticism and thoroughness was that Anderson would just beat Blackett and Occhialini to publication with a brief announcement of a major new discovery. But Anderson’s was quickly followed in February 1933 by Blackett and Occhialini’s publication of a twenty-seven-page article meticulously describing their new method of “making particles of high energy take their own cloud photographs,” combined with the far more convincing and decisive proof they had found for the existence of a bizarre new particle.62 It was the first bit of antimatter ever discovered: the so-called positive electron, or positron.

  The possibility that such a particle could exist had been raised a few years earlier by Paul Dirac, a shy, strange, and intense Cambridge theorist who had developed a mathematical formulation that combined quantum theory and relativity to explain the behavior of the electron. His equations did not actually predict the existence of an antielectron, but it was a curious feature of them that they worked just as well from a mathematical standpoint for such a hypothetical particle possessing a positive charge and negative energy. Blackett realized that the fourteen odd tracks were consistent with a particle having the mass of an electron. But under an applied magnetic field they curved in the opposite direction from most of the electron tracks—indicating that they were carrying a positive rather than a negative charge.

  Blackett would later explain his delay in publication by observing, a bit tongue in cheek, that no one had taken Dirac’s theory seriously at the time. But his own superabundance of caution was more to blame: determined to eliminate every other possible explanation, Blackett first carried out an exhaustive statistical analysis to establish how often positron-looking tracks might be produced by chance some other way. Finally satisfied, Blackett presented their findings at a meeting of the Royal Society on February 16, 1933. Unlike Anderson’s paper, Blackett and Occhialini’s explicitly made the connection to Dirac’s theory and also provided solid evidence of electrons and positrons being created simultaneously. Over the next two days the New York Times ran several stories about their discovery, reporting from London that it was being hailed by physicists as “one of the most momentous of the century.” Several nominating letters received by the Swedish Academy proposed that Anderson and Blackett share the Nobel Prize for their independent discovery of the positron. In the end, however, Anderson alone would receive the 1936 award for the milestone.63

  With Blackett’s growing renown came increasing friction with Rutherford. Zuckerman would say of Blackett that he was “brought up more to give orders than to seek counsel … a man to whom thought and action were the same.” If anything, Blackett and Rutherford were too much alike in that way. Later that year the final eruption came between the two. Blackett emerged one day from Rutherford’s office “white-faced with rage,” recalled a colleague, and announced, “If physics laboratories have to be run dictatorially, I would rather be my own dictator.” Another colleague thought that Blackett had also become fed up with the “still feudal-Victorian environment of Cambridge,” which he found politically oppressive for a man of his increasingly left-wing views.64 In the fall of 1933 he moved to London and a position at Birkbeck College. Recently integrated into the University of London, Birkbeck had originally been founded as the London Mechanics’ Institute and retained its proletarian character, serving part-time and evening students who were pursuing a degree while working a job. Blackett took a flat in Gordon Square, in the heart of Bloomsbury, and immediately began laying plans to expand his cosmic ray studies with a new detector incorporating a huge, 11-ton magnet to be installed 100 feet belowground in an abandoned platform of the Holborn Underground station. The London tabloid press, never at a loss for a cliché, hailed him as a new “Sherlock Holmes,” hunting beneath the streets of London for clues about the mysteries of the universe.65

  Defiance and Defeatism

  IF BLACKETT STOOD OUT from other left-wing intellectuals of the 1930s it was because he was no pacifist: for all of his political radicalization he always carried in his core a strand of the young naval cadet who had “enjoyed shooting at the enemy during the war.” But to most of his scientific colleagues, opposition to war and to the exploitation of science for war were part and parcel of their growing political activism. In June 1934, 40 percent of the physicists at the Cavendish Laboratory signed a letter circulated by the Cambridge Scientists’ AntiWar Group protesting the use of scientific research for military purposes.1

  The group’s founder was J. D. Bernal, who was carrying out pioneering work at the Cavendish in the new science of crystallography, using X-rays to explore the three-dimensional structure of complex biological molecules. He was also a communist so thoroughly committed to Soviet Marxism that he would defend not only Stalin’s purges but even the pseudo-scientific claptrap of Trofim Lysenko, the uneducated peasant’s son whose theories about plant breeding would become Soviet orthodoxy and lead directly to the persecution of a generation of Soviet geneticists who dared to point out the fallacies of Lysenko’s assertions.

  Bernal was, as well, a precocious social rebel of a type that would become tiresomely familiar in the 1960s, rationalizing a self-absorbed pursuit of sexual adventure as if he were somehow striking a blow for the liberation of mankind. Once, while his wife was six months pregnant, he managed to have affairs with three other women during a single two-week period. Neither his radical politics nor his personal morals won him many admirers in Cambridge.2

  The CSAWG, on the other hand, had attracted a broad spectrum of support since its founding two years earlier. Disarmament, renunciation of war, and even outright pacifism had become not merely respectable; they were seen by many from across the British political spectrum as the only sane course.

  “The virtues of disarmament were extolled in the House of Commons by all parties,” wrote Winston Churchill in his account of the “locust years” leading up to the Second World War. He did not dwell on the merciless personal attacks he came under in the House, and in the press, for even suggesting there might be danger in a rearming Germany. The German delegation to the 1932 Geneva Disarmament Conference had demanded the removal of all remaining restrictions imposed by the Versailles treaty on the size of its military forces, and support in Britain for that step was considerable. The Times, the staid voice of the establishment, called for “the timely redress” of Germany’s “grievances”; the left-wing New Statesman, now under the editorship of Blackett’s old friend Kingsley Martin, endorsed “the unqualified recognition of the principle of the equality of states.” Churchill, by then a backbencher who had split with his own Conservative Party over its policies on India, rose to attack the British government’s proposal at Geneva that would slash France’s army by 60 percent and allow Germany’s to grow to the same size. Years later he vividly recalled the “look of pain and aversion” on the faces all around him when he was done. Members of all three parties, Tory, Liberal, and Labour, leapt to their feet to denounce him as “a disappointed office seeker,�
�� a man on a “personal vendetta” out to “poison and vitiate the atmosphere” of peace and cooperation built at Geneva. He was a “scaremonger” and a “warmonger.”3

  Even after the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, The Times quickly reassured the British public that all the “shouting and exaggeration” in Germany was “sheer revolutionary exuberance.” So, too, did the British government, which went so far as to discredit the reports of its own diplomats throughout the spring of 1933 about the Nazi outrages taking place—attacks on synagogues, bonfires of books written by Jews, daily public beatings, clubbings, and even murders by Nazi storm troopers on the streets of Berlin—and sent conciliatory messages assuring the German government that no one in Britain believed such obviously exaggerated tales.4

  Not even Hitler’s subsequent open breach of the Versailles treaty shook the widespread belief that Britain needed to show the way to peace through its own example of disarmament. There was a lack of imagination in the British assumption that Germany must be like Britain in abhorring war. There was also a peculiarly British kind of self-admiration among the country’s professional diplomats, but also among the larger body politic, that looked upon being calm and reasonable as the right way to handle unpleasantness. Hysteria was un-British; the French, with their emotional hatred for the Boche, were obviously overreacting to developments in Germany. The British foreign secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, denounced “those people” who take “morbid delight in alarms and excursions”; Lord Lothian (who would be Britain’s charming and down-to-earth ambassador in Washington during Britain’s dark days in 1940) declared it “unpatriotic” for Britons to doubt Hitler’s “sincerity” in wanting peace.5

  The British left was instinctively antifascist but even its antifascism was no match for its pacifism, when it came to responding to Hitler’s military buildup. “We on our side are for total disarmament because we are realists,” the Labour leader Clement Attlee asserted. When the government proposed an extremely modest increase of the Royal Air Force, by three squadrons, Attlee replied, “The secretary of state for air is very carefully laying the foundation for future wars.” In June 1935 the League of Nations Union announced the results of a nationwide survey. Eleven million Britons had been asked to subscribe to a “Peace Ballot” calling for disarmament, including the entire abolition of military air forces. More than 92 percent agreed.6

  Churchill laid at least some of the blame for the embrace in Britain of such “defeatist doctrines” upon “the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals.”7 He was right. It was an enduring peculiarity of memories of the Great War that they reversed the usual process of nostalgic amnesia; the passage of time had made the war more terrible, not less. The years 1929 and 1930 brought, in the words of Robert Wohl, a spate of “pessimistic, cynical, and sometimes very bitter and brutal” books and plays about the war.8 The men in All Quiet on the Western Front (which sold 250,000 copies in its English translation the first year), Good-bye to All That (which made Robert Graves a small fortune), Journey’s End (which became the smash hit of the London stage in 1929, running 594 performances at the Savoy), and dozens of similar works that came out that year bore no relation to conventional war heroes of literature. They die ridiculous, meaningless, gruesome deaths assaulting pointless objectives; honorable officers anesthetize themselves in rivers of alcohol; patriotism and heroism exist only to evoke horse laughs; even courage has no rational meaning since men are as likely to be killed no matter what they do.

  A few perceptive critics noted that all of these portrayals of war were strongly shaped by a superimposed romantic narrative that elevated the experience of the individual soldier to the exclusion of any larger understanding of how or even why the war was fought. Though they purported to offer an unvarnished account of the “real war” in all its gritty horror and eschewing the sentimentality of clichés about valor and heroism, they were just as chockful of their own kinds of sentimentality and clichés of memory. (“It would be impossible to count the number of times,” notes the critic Paul Fussell, that “the Valley of the Shadow of Death” and “the Slough of Despond” are invoked by these authors to describe the morasses of mud, ice, and bodies in the trenches.) That the Allies had won a series of smashing victories in the summer and autumn of 1918, in often brilliantly planned and commanded operations, or even the fact that the Allies had won the war, was lost in a personal narrative of gore and horror in the trenches.

  One veteran vainly tried to point out that the war had not really seemed so bad at the time as it did now; nor was the almost universal trope of a halcyon and pastoral prewar England, contrasted with the hell of the front, even a very accurate picture. “One was not always attacking or under fire,” he complained. “And one’s friends were not always being killed.… And friendship was good in brief rests in some French village behind the line where it was sometimes spring, and there were still fruit trees to bloom, and young cornfields, and birds singing.”9 But, as Wohl observes, the literary version of the war easily won out:

  By the end of the 1920s, most English intellectuals believed that the war had been a general and unmitigated disaster, that England’s victory was in reality a defeat, and hence that the men who had caused England to enter the war and to fight it through to the bloody end were either mercenary blackguards or blundering old fools. Such ideas could rally radicals as well as reactionaries.

  There was another important political consequence to this line of reasoning: “In England the partisans of appeasement and peace at any cost found it useful to present themselves as the authentic representatives and heirs of the men who manned the trenches.”10 The Cambridge antiwar groups had gotten their start with a 1933 Armistice Day march to the town’s war memorial to lay a wreath bearing the motto, “To the Victims of a War They Did Not Make, from Those Who Are Determined to Prevent All Similar Crimes of Imperialism.” (Despite the bit about “Imperialism,” the march attracted not just the hard left. There were also a significant number of Christian pacifists in the group.) By 1935 the Cambridge Scientists’ AntiWar Group had graduated to staging protests against the RAF’s annual air show at nearby Duxford airfield and issuing manifestos, frequently mailed to the prominent scientific journal Nature, signed by long lists of Cambridge scientists calling on their fellow “scientific workers” to refuse to lend their technical know-how to the cause of war. “The practical working of modern civilisation depends so largely on technical knowledge that if everyone with scientific training were to act for one common aim, that aim could be achieved,” began one statement signed by Bernal and twenty-one other Cambridge scientists. “Probably the majority of scientific workers the world over prefer peace to war, and there can be no doubt that English scientific workers as a body are united in this matter,” they declared.11

  ADDED TO THE ACCEPTED HORRORS of the old war was a new horror, destruction from the air. During the 1930s, Harold Macmillan would recall many years later, “we thought of air warfare … rather as people think of nuclear warfare today.”12 The theories of Giulio Douhet, an Italian army officer whose ideas became well known when his book The Command of the Air was widely translated after his death in 1930, foresaw a not very distant future in which wars would be decided by the massive bombardment of civilian population centers by opposing air forces in the opening instant of a conflict. “Nothing man can do on the surface of the earth can interfere with a plane in flight, moving freely in the third dimension,” wrote Douhet. “All the influences which had conditioned and characterized warfare from the beginning are powerless to affect aerial action.”13

  It was a theme widely picked up in newspaper articles and popular books as yet another reason why war had become unthinkable as a means of resolving differences between nations. “A bombardment with a mixture of thermite, high explosives and vesicants would kill large numbers outright, would lead to the cutting off of food and water supplies, would smash the system of sa
nitation and would result in general panic,” wrote Aldous Huxley in the Encyclopaedia of Pacifism. “The chief function of the army would not be to fight an enemy, but to try to keep order among the panic-stricken population at home.” The Cambridge Scientists’ AntiWar Group carried out a number of rather amateurish experiments aimed at “proving” the impossibility of protecting the urban populace against gas attack.14

  But, again, it was hardly just the left and committed pacifists that embraced this apocalyptic view of modern war. The General Strike of 1926 reinforced the view of Britain’s ruling elite that modern industrial society was held together only by the slenderest of threads; the urban working class in particular could not be relied upon in a crisis. “Who does not know that if another great war comes our civilisation will fall with as great a crash as that of Rome?” asked Prime Minister Baldwin. But it was another observation of Baldwin’s that would crystallize the nearly universal conventional wisdom for avoiding war, no matter what Hitler might do: “No power on earth can protect the man in the street from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.”15

  On August 8, 1934, amid a spate of articles about the terrors that awaited a nation plunged into modern aerial warfare, a letter appeared in The Times from Professor F. A. Lindemann of Oxford University:

  Sir,—In the debate in the House of Commons on Monday on the proposed expansion of the Royal Air Force, it seemed to be taken for granted on all sides that there is and can be no defence against bombing aeroplanes and that we must rely entirely upon counterattack and reprisals. That there is at present no means of preventing hostile bombers from depositing their load of explosives, incendiary materials, gases, or bacteria upon their objectives I believe to be true; that no method can be devised to safeguard great centres of population from such a fate appears to me profoundly improbable.