Blackett's War

by Stephen Budiansky

  Baker forcefully urged combining all of these separate ASW units and appointing a single commander of antisubmarine warfare in Washington, where he would have direct access to the Convoy and Routing Section and other central functions of the navy, including intelligence and communications. The new commander should be given the unequivocal authority to develop and enforce proper antisubmarine training and procedures throughout the Atlantic theater. Subordinate commanders expected to do the actual fighting should “have no other duties than fighting.”36

  Baker then presumably held his breath and waited for the explosion.

  BAKER’S OTHER PROBLEM WAS his rapidly growing team of scientists, who refused to behave as expected. No one in the navy seemed to know how to handle them or what to do with them. As Morse observed, the regular navy men at first could not even figure out whether the scientists were the equivalent of officers or ordinary seamen: “They didn’t know whether to ask us or order us to do things.” The scientists, in any case, rebelled almost immediately, Morse recalled:

  Almost as soon as we arrived … we were shown a room full of reports of all actions by or against enemy submarines, real or imagined. I suppose we were expected to file quietly in, to studiously digest all the reports, and once in a while to emerge to deliver some oracular pronouncement, which would then be implemented by the officers—provided they agreed with us. Our reaction to this unspoken assumption was unanimous, although we hadn’t had the prescience to discuss it beforehand. We looked at a few reports and talked to some of the officers who had participated in U-boat sightings and attacks. And we said we wanted to think about the problem before we started to read. It must have seemed like procrastination to the officers, but they weren’t sure how far they could order us around.37

  Morse’s team then “went into a one-week huddle” while they worked out, from first principles, a mathematical theory of submarine search. They were aiming to come up with a set of equations that would clarify what the key factors were that determined how often a submarine would be found by an aircraft conducting a visual or radar search over the ocean, or by a surface vessel scanning the water below with sonar. With that mathematical model, they could then start making recommendations for how much air coverage was needed to attain a given probability of finding a U-boat, what the optimal search patterns were, and other basic tactical and operational questions. ASWORG Report No. 1, “Preliminary Report on the Submarine Search Problem,” was completed on May 1, 1942.38

  Only when they were done did they compare their model to the data in the attack reports. One problem was immediately clear: the reports, which were filed after every possible submarine contact by a ship or plane, did not contain much of the quantitative data that was really needed to address the basic questions of search effectiveness. But even the data that was available agreed only poorly with the theoretical predictions from their model of how often a U-boat should have been sighted. “Our reaction to this disheartening discovery was just as unanimous, and just as visceral, as our first reaction,” Morse wrote. Audaciously, “We believed our theory. We didn’t believe the reports.”39

  The scientists went to Baker and explained that they wanted to go to the antisubmarine bases themselves, talk to the pilots, go out on some patrols if possible, and see if they could find out what was going on while also starting to collect more accurate data of the kind they already knew they needed. Baker countered by suggesting that officers could be brought in from time to time to the office to be interviewed. Morse held firm. Finally Baker agreed to see if he could get permission for the scientists to make some field visits. It was part inspection trip and part missionary work, Morse realized, and he knew if they blew it the scientists would not be permitted in the field again. As he would write later in a procedure manual on organizing an operations research section, a scientist on a field visit had to be free to ask questions and poke his nose into every aspect of the actual operations, but at the same time had to behave with “considerable delicacy” to avoid creating the suspicion on the part of the base commander that he had been sent as “a sort of spy” to check up on things. The best way to avoid trouble, Morse recognized, was to get the base commander on their side from the start by promising him that any recommendations or reports ASWORG produced would go directly to him for approval and distribution.40

  The other way was to pick his first batch of field representatives with considerable attention to their personalities. Morse set the rules down in a mimeographed set of instructions that he made required reading. “To be read by each member at least once a month” stated the cover sheet. Morse admonished his staff that an ASWORG member’s “usefulness in his job will depend at least as much on his tact and trustworthiness as on his scientific ability”:

  Our job is to help win the war, not to run it ourselves. We are novices at a task which has been worked at and thought about for many years. Our sole value is due to our specialized scientific ability.… We begin to be useful when we can combine with our scientific training a practical background gained from contact with operating personnel. This practical background can only be obtained when the operating personnel trust us and like us.

  Scientists did not as a rule often care if anyone liked them, but Morse hammered at the point. Military rules and traditions might seem arbitrary, illogical, even idiotic, but if the scientists flouted them—security procedures were an obvious point of possible conflict—they would be finished before they even started: “A single slip by one of us could destroy the usefulness of the whole group.”41

  In the first week of April, Morse’s deputy William Shockley had already made a preliminary trip to bases in Norfolk and Langley Field, Virginia, where he spoke to several B-18 pilots and flew on one patrol over Cape Hatteras, which he noted was “simply littered with wrecks and oil from wrecks” of torpedoed tankers and freighters. By June, Philip J. McCarthy, a mathematician, was stationed at Eastern Sea Frontier headquarters, and Arthur F. Kip, a physicist, at the Gulf Sea Frontier HQ in Miami; the next month another mathematician, Robert F. Rinehart, was sent out to the Caribbean Sea Frontier in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

  Their immediate aim was to get better data coming in on a routine basis. The scientists posted in the field made a point of explaining their work, what they were trying to do, and what kinds of reports they needed. As they suspected, no one had paid much attention to the matter previously. After Kip gave his spiel to a group of pilots, one said, “Hell, I didn’t think anyone ever read those damned reports.”42

  Meanwhile ASWORG had moved its remaining staff from Boston to Washington in June. The Navy Department headquarters building, known familiarly as “Main Navy,” was a First World War–era monstrosity, intended originally as temporary office space to cope with the nation’s sudden military mobilization. It was plunked down right smack on the Mall, along with an identical building for the Army’s Bureau of Ordnance known as the Munitions Building. They were sprawling comb-shaped structures whose teeth formed multiple parallel corridors; the back of each comb faced Constitution Avenue while the teeth projected nearly all the way to the Reflecting Pool, which stretched east from the Lincoln Memorial. Franklin Roosevelt, as assistant secretary of the navy in 1917 and in his own mind an architectural authority, originally proposed putting the Navy Department building on the Ellipse, right in front of the White House, on the theory that it would thus be such an eyesore that “it would just have to be taken down at the end of the war.” It hadn’t worked out that way. President Woodrow Wilson objected that the sawing and hammering would disturb his concentration and Roosevelt reluctantly agreed to move the site a half mile down the Mall, to Potomac Park. The temporary buildings became permanent just as Roosevelt feared; in 1941, he remarked at a press conference that “it was a crime for which I should be kept out of heaven, for having desecrated the whole plan of, I think, the loveliest city in the world.” (The last of the “temporary” structures was finally torn down in 1970.)

  The ASWORG staff was
at first accommodated in one of the even more temporary “T Buildings” the navy occupied across the street, but by the end of the summer they were installed on the third deck of Main Navy, Rooms 4303 to 4313.43 Even the main building was dreary, distinctly un-air-conditioned, with water-stained ceilings, creaking doors, and walls and floors that would shake when anyone walked down the corridor, setting the bottles in the Coke machines rattling. But in 1942 it was undeniably where the seat of power of the U.S. Navy was to be found.

  Washington was bursting at the seams with an influx of war workers and finding a place to live was a legendary trial, the source of countless personal sagas and black-humor jokes. Morse was commuting to Washington from Boston each week and he and Shockley ensconced themselves in a suite at the posh Hay-Adams Hotel near the White House; George Kimball, a former postdoctoral fellow of Morse’s at MIT who had joined ASWORG at the end of July as the senior man in the Washington office, in charge of physical research and editing the reports, joined them there. Later Shockley took a room at the University Club on 16th Street, which had been a rather stodgy and creaky establishment until the wartime boom suddenly reversed its sagging fortunes and a long waiting list grew for membership.44 The junior scientists were left to scramble to find a room with all the other clerks, typists, and other new arrivals who had suddenly doubled the city’s population, to over one million, from just a year before. Some rooms were available in private homes after the city suspended zoning rules that prohibited renting out single bedrooms in residential neighborhoods; those less lucky doubled or tripled or quadrupled up in one-room apartments. A city housing inspector reported finding “Dickensian” conditions in many rooming houses. NEWCOMERS DISCOVER PRIVATE BATHS WENT OUT WITH HITLER, read a headline in the Washington Post.45

  One of the first studies the ASWORG scientists began with their new trove of data was the optimal search and convoy escort patterns for patrol aircraft to fly. The actual sighting data allowed them to relate the factors that affected the visibility of a surfaced U-boat from the air—the aircraft’s height, meteorological visibility, distance from the target—to its probability of being seen. They then worked out the most efficient patterns for an aircraft to orbit a convoy to sweep the maximum buffer area around the escorted ships. Shortly after arriving in San Juan, Rinehart obtained permission to have the local squadrons test the escort plans, which he had had a large part in devising. After some more tinkering, they were issued as an official U.S. Fleet doctrine, remaining in force throughout the war.

  Another early ASWORG study showed that the wide discrepancy—as much as a factor of seven—in the number of flying hours per U-boat sighted by different air units was largely the result of inefficient overflying of the same space by the poorer-performing squadrons. Early studies also employed the sighting theory to develop what the scientists termed “gambit” tactics: a U-boat that quickly escaped by submerging when first sighted could sometimes be lulled into resurfacing after its crew was convinced the patrol plane had abandoned the search. The scientists calculated how long the plane should stay away from the area after the first sighting and then where to focus the patrol to have the best chance of intercepting the boat when it resurfaced.46

  Whether it was an independent discovery or simply cribbed from the earlier British finding, ASWORG achieved its most attention-getting early success by recommending a change in the depth setting of air-delivered depth bombs from 75 to 25 feet. In his memoirs Morse attributed the discovery to Shockley, though at some point the American scientists definitely had in their hands a copy of E. J. Williams’s Coastal Command ORS Report No. 142, which had reached the same conclusion a year earlier. In any case, within two months of ASWORG’s Report No. 11 on August 2, 1942, “Aircraft Attacks on Submarines,” the shallower depth settings were producing the same dramatic results they had in Britain. That success “gave us the beginnings of a reputation,” Morse said.47

  The first ASWORG report had been typed up like a college term paper but their subsequent publications started appearing with blue covers and professional hand-block-lettered titles and filled with sharply rendered maps and colored diagrams, the contribution of the architect who had joined the group, Donald A. MacCornack.48 A few of the reports also sported whimsical cartoons on the back cover depicting a bare-breasted mermaid turning her back on Adolf, perched atop a U-boat with arms outstretched. The reports still had a limited distribution and Morse was careful to make sure not to step on any toes at CominCh; copies were circulated to ASWORG members in the field but it was up to Admiral King’s staff to decide if anyone else in the navy received one.

  His discretion paid off. Despite King’s aversion to dictums from on high instructing subordinate commanders on matters of “how,” nearly all of ASWORG’s study results from its first few months of existence were shortly thereafter incorporated into a comprehensive “Tentative Doctrine for AntiSubmarine Warfare by Aircraft” being drafted directly by the CominCh staff. The document specified a 25-foot setting for depth bombs, attacking submarines only that had been submerged for less than 30 seconds, a tight stick spacing of 40 to 60 feet, and laid out the detailed aerial escort plans and “gambit” procedures developed by ASWORG. The whole tenor of it was a radical departure. It was simple and to the point; but it reflected in virtually every detail the scientific conclusions of men who had been with the navy for a few months rather than the traditional views of officers going back decades.49

  Closing the Gaps

  SINCE THE START of the war, Patrick Blackett had been living in a flat in Tufton Court, just a few hundred feet from Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. In 1942 he moved to the calmer and leafier town of Ruislip, a medieval parish to the northwest of the city that had been developed into a commuter suburb around the turn of the century with the extension of the Metropolitan Line of the London Underground. Much of the land of the parish was owned by King’s College, Cambridge, which decided to sell it off for development; a member of the Royal Society of Arts picked out which ancient buildings were worthy of preservation (the Great Barn, which dated from the thirteenth century, the local public house) and the rest of the town was leveled to make way for new suburban villas. Blackett’s new home overlooked the ancient parish common, kept as open parkland.

  At the Admiralty, Blackett almost immediately found himself plunged into a controversy that tested where impartial scientific advice ended and the more fraught currents of grand strategy and politics began. The shifting of Dönitz’s U-boat offensive to the easy pickings on the east coast of the United States through the winter and spring of 1942 had set off a scramble to find additional antisubmarine air forces. But there was a larger strategic question that had been growing for some time—and which would intensify through 1942 as the U-boats returned to their familiar haunts in the mid-Atlantic—about the most effective allocation of air power. By midsummer some 300 planes had joined the antisubmarine fight along the American coast; together with the crucial and continuing improvements in training and doctrine and the institution—at last—of an interlocking convoy system along the entire length of the coast it spelled the end of the “Second Happy Time.”

  The American aircraft hastily diverted to antisubmarine squadrons in the first half of 1942 included some 140 U.S. Army bombers, but nearly all of these were light and medium twin-engine planes such as the obsolescent B-18 and A-29 Hudson.1 It had not been a very painful sacrifice for the Army Air Forces. The larger fight now about to be rejoined was over the allocation of the advanced, long-range, four-engine planes like the B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-24 Liberator now starting to roll out of factories across the American heartland.

  The air force had them designed and built with one purpose in mind, to take the war directly to the enemy in a crushing application of strategic air power. The bomber barons were absolutely convinced that the way to win the war was to keep building up a mighty strategic force of heavy bombers that could attack the German heartland directly. Major General Carl
Spaatz, commander of the U.S. Eighth Air Force and later of all U.S. strategic air forces in Europe, declared on more than one occasion that strategic air power would make an invasion of the continent and the conquest of Germany by ground troops simply unnecessary: the war would be over by then.2 The American airmen were not so persuaded by Douhet’s theories about the collapse of civilian morale through the bombing of enemy population centers. But they had worked out a detailed scheme of targeting vital war industries, transportation hubs, and fuel supplies which in their view would even more surely bring about the disintegration of the enemy war machine, by precision bombing carried out with vast air armadas flying at 30,000 feet over the enemy’s territory.

  The impatience in Britain to find some way to lash back at the Germans for the pounding the Luftwaffe had visited upon British cities and towns gave an extra impetus to getting the Allied strategic air campaign under way. When Churchill visited devastated neighborhoods of London’s East End during the Blitz, walking amid piles of rubble left from the German bombers, crowds greeted him everywhere with the same cry: “We can take it, but give it ’em back!”3 Churchill frequently asserted that the fight against the U-boats was the only theater where Britain could now lose the war; he also had come to the conclusion that the strategic air campaign was, at least possibly, the only one where the Allies could win, certainly the only way they could get in some blow against the enemy while the massive buildup for a landing on the European continent slowly proceeded. As early as July 1940 Churchill observed in a minute to his minister of aircraft production:

  When I look round to see how we can win the war I see that there is only one sure path. We have no Continental army which can defeat the German military power.… But there is one thing that will bring him back and bring him down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland. We must be able to overwhelm them by this means, without which I do not see a way through.4