by Andrew Brown
Desmond Bernal
Is not eternal
He may not escape from
The next bomb
In early December, Bernal made the first public disclosure of what he and others had learned about the physics of air raids, at a special afternoon lecture at the Royal Institution. He warned his audience that his would be no more than a broad outline of the work, both because of ‘its intricate nature and even more because of the requirements of secrecy’.59 He illustrated how an explosion gives rise to an initial shock wave, with a steep rise in pressure, and this is followed by a longer phase of sub-atmospheric pressure or suction. His work with Zuckerman had shown that people were directly injured by blast when the peak pressures rise to about one hundred lb per square inch (through blunt trauma to the lungs) and the suction phase did no direct harm. Such high pressures only occurred very close to explosions and because the shock wave was of short wavelength, it could not pass around even quite small objects. So ‘to have even a small garden wall between oneself and the bomb is practically to be secure from direct effects of blast. On the other hand, an open doorway is a danger and the necessity of putting baffles in front of Anderson shelter entrances applies to the blast as much as it does to the splinters.’60
He explained how shock waves could be reflected from tall buildings and how in narrow streets, the reflected suction wave might be much stronger than the original suction wave of the bomb and ‘may produce violent effects on windows and doors in lower stories, drawing them out towards the street’. Reminding his listeners that the great majority of bombs explode either underground or inside buildings, he explored the consequences in these situations with his customary clarity. Such an authoritative lecture from a man, who could calmly separate the underlying processes from the all too familiar instant violence of explosions, was a rare example of informed discourse in the siege conditions of London. His remarks were picked up by the press, and one reporter described Sage as ‘young, with a shock of yellow hair, and a collar that followed no scientific law’.61
The year ended with a huge Luftwaffe raid centred on St Paul’s Cathedral, on the night of 29th December. Hundreds of incendiary bombs were dropped and although several landed on St. Paul’s, it did not burn, unlike the Guildhall and eight other Wren churches in the city. Bernal watched the great fires, fanned by high winds, wandering around Lincoln’s Inn Fields on the very edge of the inferno.62 The Blitz brought disorder and danger, but also excitement that dispelled social restraints and dignity. Tom Hopkinson, the editor of Picture Post who had witnessed Sage’s disquisition on Cyril Connolly’s new religion, on another occasion asked Sage for simple precautions to increase the chances of surviving an air raid. He was told to lie face down in the gutter: ‘gutters give good protection – blast and splinters will almost certainly fly over you.’63
Sage himself, on at least one night during the Blitz, took shelter in the basement of a flat owned by Lord Rothschild at 5 Bentnick Street, just off Oxford Street. Two of Rothschild’s tenants were the Cambridge communists, Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, who gave the premises ‘the air of a rather high-class disorderly house, in which one could not distinguish between the staff, the management and the clients’.64 Burgess was working at the War Office and Blunt in MI5, alongside Rothschild who had recruited him. Malcolm Muggeridge, also working as a wartime intelligence officer, was taken to the flat once and found ‘John Strachey, J.D. Bernal, Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, a whole revolutionary Who’s Who’.65 Muggeridge, ever the sharp-eyed moralist, felt a visceral repulsion for this millionaire’s nest, ‘Sheltering so distinguished a company – Cabinet Minister-to-be, honoured Guru of the Extreme Left-to-be, Connoisseur Extraordinary-to-be, and other notabilities, all in a sense grouped round Burgess; Etonian mudlark and sick toast of a sick society, as beloved along the Foreign Office corridors, in the quads and the clubs, as in the pubs among the pimps and ponces and street pickups, with their high voices and peroxide hair.’66 He did not sense conspiracy in the room as much as ‘decay and dissolution’.
The irresistible question arises as to whether there was any intrigue going on between Sage and Blunt and Burgess, who were later exposed as spies and were passing information to the Soviets during the war. Sage had known Rothschild since the latter became a Fellow of Trinity in 1935. Rothschild was a member of the Apostles, and he, Burgess and Blunt would all have been aware of Sage as one of Cambridge’s leading communists. The flat was therefore a natural meeting place for like-minded Cambridge men, and there were even two left-wing Cambridge women living there, who might have been responsible for Sage’s presence. It seems improbable that the Soviets during their recruitment drive of the 1930s in Cambridge would have overlooked Bernal, and his fervent communism, emotional detachment and ability to compartmentalize life would all seem to be good qualities for a spy.
Recent publication of the Venona decrypts has exposed both J.B.S. Haldane and Ivor Montagu as secret agents, who actively passed information to the Soviets early in the war, but there has been no suggestion that Sage was involved.67 He had detailed knowledge of civil defence and bomb disposal, which would have been useful to the Nazis, to whom it could have been passed via the Soviets, if he had divulged any information to Blunt or Burgess in 1940 or early 1941. The circumstantial evidence for such indiscretions is nonspecific, but colourful. Goronwy Rees, a journalist friend of Burgess who had joined the Army in 1939, recalled that visitors to Bentinck Street ‘all appeared to be employed in jobs of varying importance, some of the highest, at various ministries; some were communists or ex-communists; all were a fount of gossip about the progress of the war, and the political machine responsible for conducting it… to spend an evening at Guy’s flat was rather like watching a French farce which has been injected with all the elements of political drama. Bedroom doors opened and shut; strange faces appeared and disappeared down the stairs where they passed some new visitor on his way up; civil servants, politicians, visitors to London, friends and colleagues of Guy’s, popped in and out of bed and then continued some absorbing discussion of political intrigue, the progress of the war and the future possibilities of the peace.’68
For most of his life, Sage championed the Soviet Union and, with the possible exception of the period of the Hitler–Stalin pact, would have vigorously supported the unchecked flow of information from London to Moscow. As we shall see after the war, his pro-Soviet stance led him to become an increasingly controversial figure, despised by some, but his return to England in 1939 should be to his eternal credit. As a citizen of the Irish Free State, especially one with an American mother, he could have easily stayed in New York or California and secured a prestigious, well-financed, university post. But that would have been to miss the excitement and the endless diversity of the wartime challenges, which suited him so well.
10
Bombing Strategy
Although the crucial Battle of Britain was won by the magnificent few of Fighter Command, the RAF from its inception had been intended as an offensive bomber force. Sir Hugh Trenchard, the first Chief of Air Staff, pointed out to his fellow chiefs in 1929 that an air force held an advantage over an army or navy in being able to take the fight directly to the enemy nation, without needing to defeat its armed forces first. It could therefore ‘attack direct the centres of production, transportation and communication from which the enemy war effort is maintained’.1 Even more than the physical damage that an air force could wreak, Trenchard was aware of the fear that would be induced by heavy bombing and estimated that ‘the moral effect of bombing stands undoubtedly to the material effect in a proportion of twenty to one’. Although the RAF’s strategists preferred to avoid the unpalatable truth that the undermining of enemy morale by bombing required the indiscriminate killing of civilians, one of their political masters, Stanley Baldwin, made no bones about his vision of future warfare in a House of Commons debate in 1932. Baldwin’s speech is famous for the phrase ‘the bomber will always get through’, a co
nclusion that was based on the impossibility of intercepting more than the odd plane flying through the vast volume of the skies, and led him to the terrible prophecy that to save your country, ‘you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy’.2
While Baldwin’s words were heartfelt, they projected a mood of defeatism and fed an unrealistic hope for international disarmament. Churchill’s riposte at the time that as soon as the disarmament negotiations in Geneva failed, the National Government should take ‘measures necessary to place our Air Force in such a condition of power and efficiency that it will not be worth anyone’s while to come here and kill our women and children in the hope that they may blackmail us into surrender’3 served only to reinforce his reputation as a warmonger. Instead, Ramsay MacDonald and Baldwin showed their faith in the ideal of European disarmament by reducing the RAF and quickly losing air parity with Germany.
A vigorous challenge to Baldwin’s fatalistic attitude appeared in a letter to The Times in August 1934. The writer disapproved of the prevailing assumption that there could be no defence against the bombing of cities. While agreeing that there was no present means of ‘preventing hostile bombers from depositing their loads of explosives, incendiary materials, gases or bacteria upon their objectives… [to suppose] that no method can be devised to safeguard great centres of population from such a fate appears to be profoundly improbable… It seems not too much to say that bombing aeroplanes in the hands of gangster Governments might jeopardize the whole future of our Western civilization. To adopt a defeatist attitude in the face of such a threat is inexcusable until it has been definitely shown that all the resources of science and invention have been exhausted.’ The letter was signed F.A. Lindemann, Professor of Experimental Philosophy, University of Oxford.
Frederick Lindemann was a prickly man, whose cynicism and cutting manner did not encourage easy friendship. Tall and athletic, he was a forbidding figure, habitually dressed in a dark suit with a bowler hat and tightly rolled umbrella to complete a most unlikely uniform for an English physicist of the interwar period. Indeed it was as though he needed to establish his Englishness through his appearance. His family was from Alsace, and his father emigrated to Devon after the Franco-Prussian War. His mother was American, but was at Baden-Baden taking the waters when Frederick was born in 1886. The family was very wealthy and not hidebound by any longstanding traditions. His father decided that the best scientific education for his sons would be in Germany and after attending schools in Darmstadt, Frederick became a doctoral student of Walter Nernst at the University of Berlin in 1908. While there, he got to know the giants of quantum theory such as Max Planck and Albert Einstein.
Lindemann was refused a commission in the British Army in 1914, his strong German connections being the unspoken reason, but was accepted the following year into a group of extremely talented young scientists at the Royal Aircraft Factory, Farnborough: ‘It was the first time since leaving prep school that he had lived with his British contemporaries and he seems to have been uneasy, initially, lest he should not be fully accepted.’4 Lindemann made his name at Farnborough by first his theoretical analysis and then his practical demonstration of the problem of a spinning aircraft. In order to test his theory, Lindemann took flying lessons and then proceeded, with reckless courage, to put a small biplane into a deliberate tailspin and to extricate it before it crashed. In the particular plane he used, with canvas-covered wings supported by wire struts, the ground below would have appeared to rotate every four seconds or so, and Lindemann would have experienced a force of 2.5g as the plane fell about 430 feet per turn.5
After the war, Lindemann was elected Dr Lee’s Professor of Experimental Philosophy and became the head of the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford – ‘a magnificent mausoleum’,6 which could boast none of the pioneering research accomplishments nor the depth of talent that Rutherford found when he took over the Cavendish Laboratory the same year. Just as Lindemann felt himself rootless as an Englishman, so he was an outsider in the world of British physics. He shared with Bernal the distinction of being one of the two men that Rutherford actively disliked. Lindemann did not possess the creativeness of either Rutherford or Bernal as a scientist, but he did succeed in guiding the Oxford physics department into the first rank through his astute leadership. His most important hiring of research staff was done after travelling to Germany in his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce to see Nernst. That was in May 1933, and he simply asked Nernst, ‘Have you got anyone for me?’7
The fastidious, teetotal, vegetarian, non-smoking Lindemann did make one friend in the 1920s, who turned out to be even more powerful than Rutherford – Winston Churchill. He shared Churchill’s Conservative politics, but what brought them together was Lindemann’s broad knowledge of science (Einstein once described him as ‘the last of the great Florentines’ to emphasize his Renaissance quality), and his ability to explain the applications of science to the famously impatient statesman. Churchill described Lindemann, whom he invariably referred to as ‘the Prof’, as his ‘chief adviser on the scientific aspects of modern war and particularly of air defence, and also on questions involving statistics of all kinds’.8 Churchill’s daughter, Sarah, remembered the Prof as being a constant part of their lives at Chartwell, at a time when Churchill was in the political wilderness. On one occasion after dinner, Churchill challenged the Prof to explain the quantum theory ‘in words of one syllable and in no longer than five minutes… without any hesitation, like quicksilver, he explained the principle and held us all spellbound. When he had finished, we all spontaneously burst into applause.’9
Churchill and Lindemann kept up a ceaseless two-man campaign to rectify what they saw as official complacency in the face of the growing threat from German air power; they were especially distrustful of the British Air Ministry. In the summer of 1934, they went on holiday together in France and called in on the hapless Baldwin to remind him again of the need for a more active air defence policy. Lindemann wrote to Baldwin in November calling for a non-departmental committee with a chairman of Cabinet rank to be set up ‘to find some method of defence against air bombing other than counter-attack and reprisals’.10 On 28th November 1934, Churchill made a powerful speech, embarrassing the Government as he pointed out that the Luftwaffe was rapidly approaching parity with the RAF (a fact that was denied by Baldwin when winding up the debate). Churchill said that while not accepting the ‘sweeping claims’ of some alarmists, he believed that in a week or ten days’ intensive bombing of London no less than ‘30,000 or 40,000 people would be killed or maimed’ and in the subsequent panic three or four million people would be ‘driven out into the open country’.11 In December, Lindemann wrote again to Lord Londonderry, the Secretary of State for Air, still lobbying for a non-departmental committee. Londonderry, feeling the political heat from Churchill and one or two others, was relieved to be able to tell Lindemann that an Air Ministry Committee was being set up under the chairman-ship of ‘Mr Tizard’ and Lindemann should get in touch with him.
Londonderry’s letter was the first that Lindemann had heard about what quickly became known as the Tizard Committee, and may have sown the first seeds of distrust between two old but wary friends. Lindemann and Henry Tizard had first met in Nernst’s department in Berlin, where Tizard, an impoverished Oxford chemistry graduate was in Lindemann’s shadow academically and socially. Their subsequent war experiences were remarkably similar – Tizard was a scientific adviser to the Royal Flying Corps and also learned to fly himself (again managing to survive a tailspin). He was instrumental in setting up the first programmes to test flying equipment and a pioneer in quantifying the accuracy, or inaccuracy, of aerial bombardment. After the First World War, Tizard became an Oxford don and it was he who first put forward Lindemann’s name for the Clarendon appointment.12 The two men met at the Royal Society in November 1934 and Lindemann told Tizard of his proposal for a high-level committee on air defence; Tizard apparently offered his support, but did not
mention to Lindemann that plans were already well advanced inside the Air Ministry for a Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence. Tizard’s reticence is understandable – his name was already being proposed as the chairman but he had not decided whether to accept – and he did not want to complicate matters or to make himself appear indiscreet by inviting Lindemann’s interest. Although Lindemann still thought of Tizard as ‘a good man’, he implied to Churchill that he might have been tainted by his contact with the Air Ministry; nor was he reassured by the fact that the leading physicist on the Tizard Committee was to be Patrick Blackett, an inveterate socialist.
With Churchill’s support, Lindemann set about securing a position for himself on the Tizard Committee, while continuing to push for the creation of a rival board under the Committee of Imperial Defence. In the words of Tizard’s biographer, the Tizard Committee eventually became ‘the custodian of the country’s safety’ through its successful adoption of the radar early warning system. The origin of radar was a memorandum on ‘The detection and location of aircraft by radio methods’ presented to the Committee at its first meeting in February 1935. The author was Robert Watson-Watt, a persuasive Scot, who was the head of the government’s Radio Research Station in Slough. By the time Lindemann attended his first meeting in the summer of 1935, Watson-Watt had successfully demonstrated his prototype apparatus to Air Chief Marshal Dowding, and further experiments had confirmed the inventor’s initial conviction of its worth. The harmony of the Tizard Committee was rudely shattered by Lindemann’s first input in July 1935. He failed to grasp the overwhelming significance of the radar work and instead pressed his own ideas on Tizard – ideas, which the latter wryly commented, ‘depend largely on two pre-conceived notions, both wrong’.13 Following this inauspicious start, relations between Lindemann and the rest of the Committee worsened to the extent that the following summer the three original independent members, Blackett, A.V. Hill and Tizard himself, all resigned rather than continue to work with the Prof.