J D Bernal

by Andrew Brown

  Within days, a new spirit of determination radiated from London. Churchill’s pugnacious resilience was fully tested over the next few weeks as the wave of the Nazi invasion rolled into France and threatened the catastrophic loss of the British Expeditionary Force, miraculously avoided at Dunkirk. Two weeks after Dunkirk, the Tots and Quots held their June dinner in Soho with Kenneth Clark, the art historian now at the Ministry of Information, and Allen Lane, publisher of Penguin Books, as the guests. The general opinion amongst the Tots and Quots was that although Britain would soon be facing Hitler’s war-machine alone and then the prospect of an invasion, fewer than half of her scientists were engaged in active war work. Bernal thought that this was partly the fault of the scientists, who were not initiators but ‘yes’ men. A lengthy debate ensued about the need to galvanize the scientific community and also to raise the public’s awareness that this was going to be a war in which technology would be a key component. Suggestions were made about encouraging questions in parliament and for club members to write articles for the press. At the end of the evening, Allen Lane said how much he had enjoyed the discussion and it was a pity that no record had been kept because it would have been good to publish it as a special Penguin paperback. Zuckerman immediately suggested that each participant should write down his contribution and this could form the basis of such a book. A deal was struck there and then: the deadline for the production was to be four weeks – half the time devoted to writing and editing and half to production. Zuckerman functioned as the editor-in-chief, assisted by Bernal, Crowther, the science journalist, and Edward Carter, Librarian to the British Institute of Architects.

  The book, Science in War, duly appeared a month later, an ‘abbreviated gestation’, as Julian Huxley remarked, ‘more characteristic of a rodent than of a human being or a book’.31 The book had twenty-five anonymous contributors, who apart from giving numerous suggestions of how science could be used in the war effort, were insistent that a scientific approach was needed in all facets of the war – military strategy and tactics, the supply of materials and food, even questions of propaganda and morale. There was an ignorance and mistrust of science in many important quarters – business, farming, the Civil Service and the military authorities – which meant that scientists were usually relegated to a lowly advisory role, ‘on tap but not on top’, providing answers to whatever questions were put to them. But as Huxley pointed out ‘as every research worker knows, half the battle in science consists in asking new questions which the non-scientist cannot be expected to think of’. Huxley’s was one of many, generally favourable reviews, and the book certainly succeeded in raising the level of awareness in many quarters of the role that science could play in the war. The same issue of Nature that carried Huxley’s review led off with a battle cry, ‘Men of science and the war’, encouraging scientists to ‘Go to it’ and to ‘force on an unscientific administration their reading of the dangers and of the means for counteracting them’.

  In the wake of Science in War and the public debate it spurred, the membership of the Association of Scientific Workers expanded rapidly, and Brenda Ryerson, by now Sage’s London lover, became its organizing secretary. Sage would still attend weekend meetings, when he was able, but when he was unavailable Brenda would often go to Blackett for advice. On one occasion, Blackett became irritated and said to her, ‘It’s no good, I’m not like Bernal, I can’t switch my mind about from one thing to the other, I need to concentrate.’32

  One of the many problems confronting Sir John Anderson as Minister for Home Security at the outbreak of war was what should be done with German and Austrian aliens living in Britain. Anderson, an imperturbable and fair-minded man, understood that the great majority of these aliens were refugees from Nazi oppression and were implacable opponents of fascism. He did, however, take the precaution of having each alien appear before a one-man legal tribunal, as a result of which 569 were interned out of a total of over seventy thousand interviewed. Anderson sought to balance the need for national security against the private rights of the individual, and was concerned not to ‘be stampeded into an unnecessarily oppressive policy’.33 As the disasters of 1940 unfolded, especially an invasion of Norway aided by ‘Quislings’ and stories of German spies disguised as priests and housemaids plotting the collapse of Holland, Anderson’s principled position became untenable. Public calls to intern all aliens intensified, and on 11th May, as the new Home Secretary in Churchill’s Coalition, Anderson was approached by the military authorities who recommended to him that ‘in view of the imminent risk of invasion, it was… of the utmost importance that every male alien between 16 and 70 should be removed forthwith from the coastal strip’.34 Anderson accepted the logic of their argument; once he ordered the first three thousand men from coastal areas to be interned, the pressure to round up the rest became irresistible.

  Max Perutz’s name was amongst the next three thousand in category B (absolute reliability uncertain). He was arrested by a solitary policeman, in Cambridge, one ‘cloudless Sunday morning in May’.35 After being herded together with several hundred other men in the same predicament, including many Jews and a surprising number of scientists, Perutz embarked on a harrowing sea voyage from Liverpool, which took him to Canada, where he was treated as a civilian prisoner of war. The week after Perutz’s arrest there was an editorial in Nature stating that ‘It seems impossible that any man of science, no matter what his political or other views may be, could, in the extremely grave circumstances and in view of the amazing revelations concerning the activities of “fifth columnists” in other countries, take exception to the internment of alien scientific workers and students.’36

  One man of science who did take exception was Sage. As soon as he found out where Perutz was, he started to write letters trying to get him a position in the United States. He wrote to Pauling, saying that Perutz had been ‘sent over to Canada with a batch of anti-fascist internees’. He thought Pauling would find him a very useful addition to his lab ‘as he is particularly adept in preparing, mounting, and photographing protein crystals, as well as being a good all-round chemist’. Sage pointed out that in addition to having a very large amount of unpublished material on haemoglobin, Perutz, as a sideline, had ‘probably settled the problem of the transformation of snow into glacier ice’ from work he had carried out at the Jungfraujoch. After regretting that such ability should be wasted when Perutz could help ‘real experimental protein crystallography take root in the States’, Sage told Pauling that he had ‘left the field myself for the duration and spend my time being an engineer, architect, and explosives expert. Ce n’est pas magnifique mais c’est la guerre.’37

  As the Luftwaffe’s offensive intensified that summer, Sage devoted more time to becoming an expert on bombs. At an early meeting of the Civil Defence Research Sub-Committee A in June 1939, Wing Commander Crawford from the Air Ministry stated it was probable that the most bombs likely to be dropped on England ‘would not be fitted with delayed-action fuses of any appreciable duration (longer than 1/40th sec)’.38 The Air Ministry’s opinion was optimistic in the light of German patents on electric time-fuses from the early 1930s and would have been disputed by witnesses of the devastating effect of delayed-action bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe on Madrid and Barcelona. As soon as a few German bombs were found on the east coast in the opening months of the war, it became plain that the clearance of unexploded bombs (UXBs) was to be a major task. The German electrical condenser resistance (ECR) fuses were set to arm the bomb only after it had been released from the bomb-rack.39 A bomb dropped from an altitude over one thousand feet would detonate instantaneously on impact, whereas those dropped from a lesser height would not be fully charged on hitting the ground and would lie buried in a dormant state until a subsequent jolt caused them to explode. An unexploded bomb (UXB) committee was set up by the Ministry of Supply in February 1940, with Stradling as one of its original members, to coordinate efforts and to develop new techniques. The Research a
nd Experimental Branch at Princes Risborough designed a prototype apparatus for neutralizing the fuse without activating the sensitive trembler-contact that would cause the bomb to explode. Unfortunately, changes in bomb design rendered the apparatus obsolete very quickly.

  The alternative to disarming unexploded bombs was to blow them up where they lay, but of course this would be equivalent, in many instances, to doing the Luftwaffe’s work for them – causing damage to industrial plants and to arteries of transportation and communication. By the early summer of 1940, twenty-five small bomb disposal sections were formed, with most men being drawn from the Royal Engineers, and although the number of bombs they had to deal with at that stage was relatively small, their casualty rates were ‘shockingly high’.40 Stradling was all too aware of this through his membership of the UXB Committee and encouraged as much research into possible solutions at Princes Risborough. Naturally, Sage was drawn into these discussions and ‘hit in a few minutes on a solution derived from schoolboy egg-blowing. It consisted simply of emptying the explosives out of the bomb with steam from a safe distance and thus making it harmless regardless of the fuse.’41 There may have been some previous attempts to boil out the explosive by heating the whole bomb, but Bernal’s new idea was communicated to the UXB Committee by one of his colleagues at the Research and Experimental Branch, suggesting ‘a Mark 2 drilling and steaming apparatus which should result in considerable saving of time re Mark 1 apparatus for boiling out the main filling’.42 This Mark 2 apparatus became known as the steam-sterilizer and, as Bernal recalled, under wartime conditions was adopted very quickly – the first production order was made in June 1940.43

  A less subtle technique for dealing with delayed-action bombs was promoted by the Earl of Suffolk. He had returned to England after the fall of France in June on a commandeered ship from Bordeaux, bringing with him some of France’s leading physicists, canisters of heavy water and a cache of industrial diamonds (stolen by him at pistol-point). Once back in England, he had inserted himself into the ramshackle bomb disposal services as an expert in unexploded bombs – especially those with novel features. He would arrive at the scene of the UXB having been driven through blacked-out streets by Mr Harts, his chauffeur. He preferred to work with a blacksmith’s leather apron covering his otherwise bare chest and would call out details of the device to be dealt with to Miss Morden, his glamorous blonde secretary, taking notes a few yards away. The trio quickly became legendary throughout the bomb disposal sections and was known as ‘The Holy Trinity’.44 Suffolk’s original technique for disarming many bombs was to fire a bullet through the fuse-head to disrupt the electric circuitry and stop the timer; it was a method which did not attract many followers and which even Suffolk had to abandon when the Germans changed the design so that the clock was no longer uppermost.

  As German bombing of the airfields in the Home Counties intensified during the Battle of Britain, the organization of bomb disposal and the collection of information about bomb sizes, fuses and safe disposal techniques became a matter of supreme urgency. By early September, when the Blitz of London itself started, there were already 2,500 UXBs waiting to be dealt with in south-east England.45 It soon became apparent that not all these were delayed-action bombs and many were just duds. In terms of the allocation of skilled disposal teams and to avoid unnecessary disruption, it was extremely important to be able to distinguish between the two. Lord Suffolk undertook many field trials to this end, in a remote area of Richmond Park, where he was often joined by Sage. Sage saw these explosions as a good opportunity to test the resistance of various shelter designs. Before the war, an inter-service committee had made an arbitrary decision that for brick shelters, the walls should be two to three times thicker than the roof.46 In Richmond Park, Sage came to the conclusion that the concrete roof should be reinforced to reduce the chance of a bomb penetrating into the shelter. On one occasion, Sage took along the Bomb Disposal Officer to the Port of London, Peter Danckwerts, a recent Oxford chemistry graduate. It seemed to Danckwerts that the purpose of the trial was ‘to show that air-raid shelters built to government specifications were death-traps’ because when the German UXB was detonated the shelter duly collapsed. What impressed him more was that ‘there was a perceptible interval between the explosion and the time at which Bernal ducked down into our shelter trench. He explained that he knew the velocity of the bomb-fragments and could calculate their time of arrival in his head.’47 It should be noted that Danckwerts himself was an extremely cool-headed and courageous young man. He was later awarded the George Cross for neutralizing many magnetic mines dropped on London in the Blitz, using his own improvised technique that depended on having a good ball of string available to yank the fuse out of its mounting.48

  Daylight bombing of London started on 7th September, and one of the early raids took place while Bernal was at Civil Defence Headquarters in Whitehall, with Zuckerman and Stradling. News reached them that St. Pancras Station had been closed because of an unexploded bomb, and Bernal said to Zuckerman, ‘That’s for us.’49 Sage set off with Zuckerman and after negotiating many blocked streets arrived to find a great throng outside the station. They were people who had been trying to leave the city and now found their way blocked by huge iron gates. Sage mused that whoever ‘put up the gates had forgotten the Mediaeval requirement that if you want to let only one person in you must have a small postern gate in the big gate’.50 He and Zuckerman fought their way to the front and identified themselves to the policemen inside, who then pushed the gates open just enough to let them through. Sage asked to be taken to the stationmaster, who had sensibly taken cover with other station workers in a deep shelter. He told Sage that the bomb was on Number One platform, ‘so I went along, and sure enough at the end of the platform there was a large hole where the bomb had gone in. But that hole had suspicious blackening around it and a few fragments, and I was very soon able to identify the thing as not a bomb at all; it was a shell from the anti-aircraft batteries… so I came back very cheerful and I had the pleasure of telling the Stationmaster, “You can start all your trains again…”.’51

  Such identification problems became more critical as the bombs rained down heavily, and Bernal began touring the London boroughs, especially in the East End, to give lectures to Air Raid Wardens ‘on how to tell a dud from an unexploded delayed-action bomb, or how to tell whether a bomb, which had penetrated deep into the ground, had exploded. These lectures used to be illustrated by practical examples which could be found all around at the time.’52 As a teacher, he was inordinately pleased when visiting a bombed building in central London, and the warden recognized him and asked ‘Are you the Professor who gives those lectures?’ Sage confirmed that he was and was even more delighted when the warden had remembered the content of his lecture correctly. The warden had found a UXB in one of the rooms still standing and said to himself, ‘What did the Professor say?’ It was the kind of bomb that did not normally carry a delayed-action fuse and so the warden had already moved it down below. When Sage went down, he could see ‘the bomb was lying on a small handcart, and a violent argument was going on between my photographer and the officer in charge. They belonged to two different departments – Bomb Disposal and Home Security – and naturally each of us considered that we had a right to information about the bomb. In the end I decided that the argument was not a very healthy one, we were both standing by the bomb, and I was not as sure as the warden had been that my estimate about its non-explodability was correct. So in the end, I got my photograph surreptitiously and departed.’53

  Sage regarded it as his business to go round looking for all kinds of unexploded bombs. It was dangerous work, not just because of the risk of explosion, but because many of the evacuated buildings he entered to survey were on the point of collapse. He seemed fearless – C.P. Snow described him as ‘by long odds’54 the bravest man he had ever known. Zuckerman, the anatomist who was engaged in some grisly experiments with human cadavers to understand the
pathology of explosions and penetrating wounds, remembered going with Bernal to see his first real bomb damage. A factory in Luton had been hit and ‘a few men had been blown to bits, and some pieces of human flesh – I particularly remember a piece of brain – had not been completely cleared from the fallen masonry. I was deeply impressed both by the incident and by Bernal’s objectivity as he tried to reconstruct exactly what had happened when the bomb burst.’55

  The daily German bombing raids that hot September stretched the RAF fighters to their limits and caused severe damage to London. In the early hours of the 25th, Birkbeck College was hit by a number of incendiary bombs so that the lecture rooms were open to the sky. Civilian deaths climbed to one thousand per week and the War Cabinet started to meet in reinforced rooms below ground. The Tots and Quots decided that it would be foolish to risk meeting in London: their August dinner had been disturbed by a stray stick of bombs falling on Soho, causing their guest of honour, H.G. Wells, to make his one memorable contribution as he looked at his glass and then at the ceiling and announced: ‘At the last I could say I was drinking good old Empire.’56 The most prescient opinions expressed at that dinner had come from Haldane, who was concerned that no attention was being paid to the brutal Japanese occupation of China, and predicted that ‘further disaster could not be prevented while the eastern and western conflicts remained separate’.57

  At the September dinner, moved to the peaceful surroundings of Magdalen College, Oxford, Haldane was operating ‘on a London ration of sleep and an Oxford ration of port’.58 He scribbled this clerihew on the back of his menu and passed it to Sage.