Blackett's War

by Stephen Budiansky

  That was particularly evident in the British intelligence services, which had a deeply ingrained culture of genteel amateurism. The Government Code and Cypher School, responsible for breaking enemy code systems, was a sort of old boy network of its own, dominated by Cambridge and Oxford art historians, professors of medieval German, lecturers in ancient Greek, and other distinctly nonscientific types. The first mathematician to be hired by GC&CS, Peter Twinn, joined the staff of the code-breaking unit only in 1938; he was told later that there had been grave doubts about hiring a mathematician at all, as they were regarded as “strange fellows notoriously impractical.” If having someone with scientific training “were regretfully to be accepted as an unavoidable necessity,” as Twinn humorously described the prevailing attitude, the general thought was “it might not be better to look for a physicist on the grounds that they might be expected to have at least some appreciation of the real world.”37 Of the twenty-one academics brought in to GC&CS during the first few weeks of the war, only three were mathematicians. All of the rest were from the humanities, and came through the usual channels; they had, in the words of GC&CS’s head, Alastair Denniston, been recruited by “men now in senior positions” at Oxford and Cambridge who “had worked in our ranks during 1914–1918.”38 A few things had changed in the rest of the world since then. Not least was the advent of machine-generated ciphers like the Enigma, which by the time the job was done would demand the services of literally thousands of engineers, scientists, and mathematicians to crack.

  With the coming of war, GC&CS had established itself at another of those bizarre nineteenth-century manor houses built in a cacophony of architectural styles, Bletchley Park, located about fifty miles northwest of London. A tiny group under a brilliant, cantankerous, and very old-school cryptographer named Alfred Dillwyn Knox, known as “Dilly,” had made some small progress on the Enigma problem before the war, but had been largely stymied. Their first major break came from an eleventh-hour handoff of a treasure trove of discoveries made by three young code breakers—all mathematicians—in the Polish army’s cipher bureau, the Biuro Szyfrow, who just weeks before the Nazi invasion summoned their British counterparts to Warsaw to reveal what they had managed to do. Among other prodigies, they had pulled off the mind-boggling analytic feat of reconstructing, sight unseen, the internal wiring of the machine’s scrambler rotors. The mathematics required was something called permutation theory, and it was not for the mathematically faint of heart. Using these methods the Poles had been able to read German army Enigma messages on a regular basis for several extended periods going back to 1933. They had even constructed a primitive mechanical computer to help unlock each day’s changing setting of the Enigma rotors and plugs.

  The Poles had made some theoretical progress on the much more difficult naval Enigma, but had essentially given it up in the face of the extreme difficulties that arose from the navy’s use of printed code lists to choose and encode the “indicator” groups at the start of each message that specified the rotor setting. At Bletchley, even after the Poles had turned over the fruits of their research, the naval Enigma problem was viewed as simply impossible—literally not worth wasting any time or effort on. Alan Turing, one of the three mathematicians who arrived at Bletchley in September 1939, and who would later achieve renown for laying the mathematical and logical groundwork of the modern digital computer, began working on the naval Enigma, he admitted later, only “because no one else was doing anything about it and I could have it to myself.”39

  Even when the British code breakers did produce results tackling other enemy code systems during the first year of the war, they had a hard time getting anyone in the military to pay attention. The Admiralty was in many ways the worst. Harry Hinsley, a young Cambridge student, arrived at Bletchley in October 1939. By December he was, in his definitely ironic words, “the leading expert outside Germany on the wireless organization of the German Navy.” It was a claim, he quickly added, that did “not amount to much,” given how little work was being done. Every once in a while Hinsley would crank the handle on a telephone that linked him to the Admiralty and report to an ostentatiously bored naval officer on the other end of the wire something he had discovered. By the spring, the Bletchley code breakers had managed to read some paper-and-pencil ciphers the German navy used for its more routine communications. In the first week of April 1940 Christopher Morris, a fellow of King’s College who had joined the German navy group, deciphered a message in the German merchant navy code. It ordered ships heading for Bergen to report their positions at stated intervals to the War Office in Berlin. Morris dutifully reported this intriguing finding, and was told he obviously did not know what he was talking about, as ships report to naval headquarters, not army headquarters.40

  The subsequent explanation was simple and appalling. They were troopships, and the Admiralty had just missed receiving the only warning it would have that Hitler was about to invade Norway.

  ANYONE WHO LIVES THROUGH a war knows that its moments of intense excitement are no match for the endless stretches of monumental boredom. The boredom of the opening months of the war in Britain, however, seemed to be of a different class altogether: vast, encompassing, incomprehensible. The American war correspondents who had flocked to Europe to cover all the excitement promptly dubbed it the “phony war,” or the “Bore War.” France, her entire military plans and strategy built upon the defensive might of the Maginot Line, did nothing and waited. The Luftwaffe bombers expected to rain poison gas upon London in the opening moments failed to appear, night after night. One in five Britons, a Gallup poll reported a few months into the war, had been injured on the blacked-out streets at night, stumbling on sidewalks, hit by cars, colliding with other pedestrians. A stifling heat wave that hit London in September gave way to a cold gray fall and then to the bitterest winter in forty-five years. Coal was in short supply, water pipes burst, trains stalled in snowdrifts, the Thames froze to solid ice. Leonard Woolf compared the feeling of living in wartime Britain to “endlessly waiting in a dirty, grey railway station waiting-room, a cosmic railway station waiting-room, with nothing to do but wait endlessly for the next catastrophe.”41

  The one front where things were happening through the winter and spring of 1940 offered up regular catastrophes, but they remained hidden from most Britons by the mists and waves of the dark seas where Churchill’s war of “groping and drowning” took its steady toll. Despite an epidemic of torpedo malfunctions that caused the weapons to explode prematurely or not at all, the U-boats had already taken a voracious bite out of Britain’s ocean lifeline. The torpedo failures were traced to defects in the design of the magnetic pistol that was supposed to trigger the warhead when it passed under the hull of its target. It turned out that it had been tested a total of two times before the war, and that variations in the earth’s magnetic field plus the rigors of wartime conditions (including diving far deeper than the U-boats had been permitted to do during training) upset the trigger’s delicate mechanism. An investigation demanded by Dönitz also found that the torpedoes tended to run too deep, a fact it turned out the designers were aware of but thought would not matter given the magnetic triggering system. “The result is staggering,” Dönitz wrote in his war diary. “I do not believe that ever in the history of war men have been sent against the enemy with such useless weapons.” He estimated that nearly half of the unsuccessful torpedo shots had been due to failures in the magnetic pistols. “In practice the boats are unarmed,” he wrote in another moment of exasperation. “Of 22 shots fired in the last few days at least 9 have been premature detonations which have in turn caused other torpedoes fired at the same time to explode prematurely or miss.”42

  Even with the failures, which Dönitz calculated had robbed him of a third of a million tons of British shipping, his U-boats had sunk nearly a million tons by the time they were withdrawn for the Norway invasion. That was with an average of only six of the oceangoing U-boats at sea each day for the fi
rst six months of the war. Being forced to institute convoys had alone resulted in a reduction of 25 percent in British imports. Even with the loss of seventeen U-boats to a variety of causes during that time, the picture for the future was distinctly encouraging to BdU. At the steeply accelerating rates of new construction currently planned, there would be ten times as many U-boats available to bring to the war against British trade by the spring of 1942.43

  Blackett’s Circus

  IN MAY 1940 Hitler sent his panzers and 2 million men streaming into the Low Countries and France; Chamberlain resigned and Churchill became prime minister. A few weeks later the first night attacks by Luftwaffe bombers began over Britain. Meanwhile, the scientists fretted.

  Shortly after the start of the war Blackett had been appointed a scientific officer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, where he was now spending two days a week working to develop a new bombsight. But most of his colleagues were growing increasingly impatient at having heard nothing about the promised mobilization of scientists. “From the time of the Munich crisis in 1938,” Solly Zuckerman recalled, “there had been all manner of talk … that given a war, all we would have to do was wait until told what our battle-stations were. Nothing happened.”1

  Zuckerman, back in 1931, had started a London dining club of like-minded scientific colleagues. It was called the Tots and Quots, derived from the Latin tag “Quot homines, tot sententiae”: “As many opinions as there are men.” The group had petered out after a few years, but with the coming of the war Zuckerman revived it; they met once a month at a Soho restaurant and usually invited a distinguished guest who would open the after-dinner discussion. Increasingly the main topic of discussion now was the underutilization of scientists in the war effort.

  Zuckerman was from a South African Jewish family and had come to London in 1925 on a scholarship to complete his medical education. He almost immediately made a splash with a series of anatomical and hormonal studies of the estrous cycle of baboons in the London Zoo, and after qualifying as a doctor shifted his career completely to primatology. In 1932, at the age of twenty-eight, he published The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes, a standard work that would be repeatedly reprinted over the next half century. Two years later he joined the Department of Human Anatomy at Cambridge.

  As a boy he had been aloof, withdrawn, and reserved; in London and Cambridge, as a rising scientific star, he seemed almost to explode with enthusiasm for his subject and for the social milieu in which he found himself suddenly immersed. From that point on he assiduously collected famous friends, from literary and artistic circles as well as scientific ones—E. E. Cummings, Alfred Hitchcock, George and Ira Gershwin, and H. G. Wells among them. A physiology student of his during this time recorded his impression of Zuckerman as “an almost incoherently enthusiastic young man who danced around and told us doubtful stories about the sexual cycles and activities of baboons. None of us guessed at the time what a breakthrough it was.” Many colleagues noted how Zuckerman was, in the words of one, “dazzlingly quick to grasp a point”; in fact he usually could grasp a point faster than he could explain it. Another said: “He was intolerant of people he regarded as less clever than himself—a very large group.”2

  The Tots and Quots had an unmistakably young, left, and bohemian slant. Blackett was a regular member, as was Bernal, and the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley. Another regular was Conrad Hal Waddington, a biologist and fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Waddington was another polymath. Brought up in England by relatives from age four while his parents remained on their tea estate in India, he devoted himself to a series of enthusiastic pursuits including hunting for fossils and conducting chemistry experiments as a boy; at university his extremely serious interests included Morris dancing, rock climbing, avant-garde art and architecture (his friends included Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, and Walter Gropius), and philosophy (he would recount long and mysterious debates he had at Cambridge with Ludwig Wittgenstein about the nature of language and reality). In his later career, after the war, Waddington would become a leader in the field of evolutionary genetics, making major experimental and theoretical contributions, though as a young scientist he was by his own reckoning somewhat adrift and unfocused. He had become almost completely bald at age twenty-one, which had the effect of making “many people think he was much older than he actually was,” recalled one friend. “Sometimes, when throwing out half-formed hypotheses or ideas he seemed surprised at being taken seriously.”3

  For the June 12, 1940, meeting of the Tots and Quots, Zuckerman invited as a guest Allen Lane, the publisher of Penguin paperbacks. It would prove to be one of those quirky pivotal events that change everything. It certainly changed Zuckerman’s future. “I was moved along by one accident after another with little idea of who I was or of what I would become and with little notion of what the morrow would bring,” Zuckerman later said. “Up to the time of the Second World War I should have laughed if anyone had suggested that in the years ahead I would become involved in public events.”4 Lane was fascinated by the discussion that took place about what science could do to help win the war, and on the spur of the moment made the group an offer. If they would write up their argument—and get it to him in two weeks—he would publish it immediately. The scientists delivered their manuscript eleven days later and in late July a small 140-page “Penguin Special” appeared bearing the title Science in War. On a plain orange and white cover was a block of stark text that began: “The full use of our scientific resources is essential if we are to win the war. To-day they are being half used.”

  As Julian Huxley subsequently noted in a review in Nature, the book’s one-month production schedule was an “abbreviated gestation more characteristic of a rodent than of a human being or a book.”5 But Lane’s instincts had been right: the timing could not have been better. Science in War reached bookstores and newsstands just as the German air attack on Britain was beginning in earnest. Priced at six pennies, it immediately sold thousands of copies. The book largely restated the case the scientific left had been making for years. Industry and society had failed to put to use the advances of science that could vastly increase production and efficiency. The war now made it more urgent than ever—essential, in fact—for scientific methods to be brought to bear on every aspect of society. Indeed, the strains created by wartime shortages of materials and skilled labor and the disruption of normal business made it all the more impossible to leave decision making to tradition, gut feeling, emotion, or guesswork.

  The authors gave numerous examples of how science could be put to work: improving public and occupational health to increase workers’ productivity; using scientific organizational concepts to streamline management and optimize factory workflows; providing better treatments for wounded soldiers; developing new methods of mass food production such as aquaculture; boosting meat and milk yields with growth hormones. Some of the ideas veered, slightly chillingly, into Orwellian social engineering. Psychological methods could be put to use to produce more effective home front propaganda; communally organized kitchens and feeding stations could eliminate the wasteful duplication of home meal preparation. But mainly the authors emphasized that effective use of science, especially in wartime, could come about only through vigorous government planning and direction. The entrenched attitude of “Victorian Liberalism,” bureaucratic caution, and “laissez-faire … Government non-interference” that characterized the civil service was the major obstacle that had to be overcome.6 It was, in short, a call for government to take charge and put science to work in the interests of all, just as Blackett had urged in his 1934 BBC broadcast The Frustration of Science. The war now provided the justification that socialist idealism had, as yet, failed to.

  SCIENCE IN WAR was published anonymously, the authors described only as “twenty-five scientists.” Blackett almost certainly wrote the section of the book devoted to operational research. The accomplishments of Eric C. Williams’s operational resea
rch group at Bawdsey had strongly reaffirmed Blackett’s conviction that this was a model for a greatly expanded role for scientists in the war. During the 1939 summer air exercises, which were the first complete test of the radar defense system in the hands of RAF operators, Williams’s team had closely observed the work of the “Filter Rooms,” where data from the various radar stations was correlated. The Filter Rooms had the job of reconciling and triangulating sometimes contradictory radar data to determine the height, location, direction, and size of an incoming raid. The scientists on the scene were able to spot bottlenecks, devise procedural changes, and introduce some simple probabilistic rules to help the operators eliminate data that was likely to be erroneous.

  A second scientific team was stationed at the fighter group operations rooms where the tracks passed on by the Filter Rooms were plotted and orders issued to the fighter squadrons under their command; the members of this team, too, found themselves focusing as much on organization and procedures as on technical matters directly related to the operation of the radar equipment. One key problem they pinpointed was that tracks were frequently lost when a raid passed from one section to another, and they recommended giving one control room officer the sole job of maintaining continuity.

  The radar researchers at Bawdsey were evacuated to Dundee in Scotland at the start of the war but the operational research teams had already sufficiently impressed the top officers at Fighter Command with their on-the-scene indispensability that Air Chief Marshal Dowding, the commander-in-chief, asked for them to be kept behind. The two groups were combined in a single Operational Research Section (as it would later be renamed, in 1941) under the direction of a Canadian physicist, Harold Larnder, at Stanmore, the Fighter Command headquarters located at one of the highest points of London, about ten miles northwest of the city center. Dowding gave the ORS his unreserved support, sending Larnder appreciative notes every time one of the sporadic Luftwaffe daylight raids that took place through the fall and winter of 1939–1940 was successfully intercepted—almost as if the ORS had accomplished the feat itself. A postwar RAF report concluded, “The high state of efficiency reached by the radar stations by the time of the Battle of Britain was to a large extent due to the fact that, from the time of the Firth of Forth raid in October 1939 onwards, the ORS analysed almost every failure to intercept daylight raids,” and figured out ways to improve performance the next time.7