J D Bernal

by Andrew Brown

  Against these disasters, Bomber Command was the only way to demonstrate a continued will to fight. Churchill remarked to Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of Air Staff on 13th March, that while the raids on Germany were ‘not decisive’ they were ‘better than doing nothing, and indeed a formidable method of injuring the enemy’.65 With the foreknowledge of German plans, Churchill wanted to mount the heaviest British air offensive against Germany possible to take ‘the weight off Russia’.66 Cherwell was aware of all these factors and his most important role was to give Churchill continued encouragement. It was a time when any call for restraint would have seemed like defeatism. Even if Bernal and Zuckerman had been allowed to present their own findings directly to Churchill and the Defence Committee, it is doubtful whether the outcome would have been different. Their one-page summary of conclusions could easily have been accepted at face value, but the rejoinder would have been that if the present level of bombing was ineffective, it needed to be stepped up. Indeed, this was the nub of the Air Ministry’s response in early May to the Ministry of Home Security report. It dismissed the raids on Birmingham as ‘light’ and suggested that Bernal and Zuckerman’s data collected from a year earlier were no longer relevant: ‘what was true of England then is not true of England now, still less of Germany.’67 As the official history of the RAF offensive against Germany concluded, ‘The Air Staff… had already devised this theme [of area bombing] towards the end of 1941 and Lord Cherwell had added little that was new. All the same because of the position which he occupied and the time at which he submitted the minute, Lord Cherwell’s intervention was of great importance. It did much to insure the concept of strategic bombing in its hour of crisis.’68

  Later in 1942, following some success for the allies, Sir Charles Portal the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command turned his mind to the question of what scale of bombing would be required to undermine the Nazi industrial and economic war machine, so that Germany could be conquered by relatively small land forces. He persuaded his fellow Chiefs of Staff to the view that ‘the heavy bomber will be the main weapon’ in this endeavour and should therefore have ‘absolute priority of Anglo-American production’.69 The Chiefs of Staff (COS) also expressed confidence that with the technical improvements now in place, the performance of Bomber Command would be far superior to the limited results attained since 1940. These statements represented a notable endorsement of the Air Staff, but after two weeks of harmony the Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Dudley Pound, began to have second thoughts. On reflection, he was unconvinced by some of Portal’s estimates of what Bomber Command could achieve and suggested that an ‘objective scientific analysis’ be carried out by a committee which would include Cherwell, Tizard, Bernal and Blackett amongst its membership. Portal disagreed on the basis that the proposed members of the committee ‘would probably roam about over a very wide field’ and he doubted ‘whether they would agree with one another or we with them’.70 If the COS really wanted further scientific advice, ‘Lord Cherwell should be asked to give or obtain an authoritative opinion.’

  Bernal wrote a perceptive note to Blackett on area bombing soon after the war: ‘I think’, he said, ‘it might be stressed that air staffs on neither side had really worked out the quantitative aspects of strategic bombing: the Germans possibly because they did not intend to use it, ourselves because the then level of staff thinking had not got around to quantitative aspects. I still remember being told that the high level of Bomber Command was not interested in the results of bombing. The tragedy is that this excuse will not hold for the policy on German cities which was adopted later in the war. We had ample and numerical information from the Bomb Survey in R. and E. [Ministry of Home Security]. The fact is the policy was decided for three closely interrelated reasons: (a) it was an RAF policy: the old Trenchard policy justifying the separation of the RAF from the Army; (b) the attitude of Churchill and Cherwell, who felt that little could be done with the Army and that they must concentrate on the RAF and consequently on strategic bombing; (c) the desire to provide an alternative for the Second Front.’71

  Bernal felt that Cherwell ‘twisted the results’ of the Ministry of Home Security survey to suit his purposes, by arguing that since the degree of bombing by Germany had a negligible effect on production in the English cities, ‘much heavier bombing of German cities was bound to have an enormous effect’. He thought Cherwell’s worst fault was ‘his deliberate and dishonest neglect of what we came to call the operational factor: the ratio found between what happens in the field and what happens in trials under the best possible conditions or even worse what is supposed to happen.’72 It was Cherwell’s betrayal of scientific truth that Bernal, Blackett and Tizard found unforgivable. In the wartime disputes, Bernal thought Tizard was at a great disadvantage because he could never promise such returns as Cherwell did and ‘had much less appeal to the totally unquantitative and romantic mind of Churchill’.73

  11

  Combined Operations

  In 1941 the BBC began a weekly radio programme called the Brains Trust. It was to prove popular and uplifting to a nation straining to resist the Nazis. The undoubted star was ‘Professor’ Cyril Joad, the head of Birkbeck’s philosophy department, but not in fact a professor of the University. To give himself time to answer a question, he would invariably start with the gambit, ‘It all depends what you mean by…’ Bernal was another regular member of the Trust, and was valued, amongst other qualities, as being a match for the populist Joad. The Brains Trust on 7th December 1941 comprised Joad, Bernal, Cyril Connolly (the essayist), a clergyman and a naval commander.1 Sage was in his element. The first question about the Aurora Borealis, from a twelve-year-old boy, was naturally his to answer. The next, ‘What service does the speculator on the Stock Exchange render to the community?’ found no takers and so Bernal offered an opinion. After giving a textbook economics answer on competitive markets arriving at the ideal value of a security ‘by a mystical concourse of wills’, he went on to say that he did not believe a word of it: the speculator was either gambling or attempting to corner the market.

  He apologized to his fellow panelists when the next question was ‘What do scientists mean by an expanding universe?’ before discussing the Milky Way, red shift, and the idea he credited to Abbé Lemaître that ‘the whole universe started as just one atom that just exploded and went in all directions’. More philosophical questions followed, such as ‘What is the nature of evil?’ which Joad and the clegryman clearly regarded as their bailiwick. Sage chimed in at the end with a relativist view that must have unsettled an audience who thought the answer was probably ‘Hitler’. He said, ‘I don’t think evil has any objective existence at all. I think the reason behind the myth is that in society, when people started living together, they didn’t always suit each other. Out of that grew the harmonious thing we call good, and the disharmonious or conflict-producing thing which we call evil. And there is no need to invoke myths or any remoter explanations for a very simple sociological fact.’

  The final question was on a subject dear to Bernal’s heart – should there be a temporary ban on applied science research to allow humanity to recover from the devastation of war. While understanding the sentiment behind the question, Bernal took the opposite tack of calling for more research. He said ‘we haven’t begun to see what science could do for human beings’ and blamed scientists for staying in their ivory towers, believing that it was their job to find things out but no concern of theirs what was done with their discoveries afterwards. During the broadcast, Bernal displayed a breadth of knowledge and an ability to talk brilliantly that none of the other panelists could match.

  Cyril Connolly came to stay at Fingest that Christmas. Prompted perhaps by his dazzling performances on the Brains Trust, Connolly asked Sage to write an essay for his new magazine, Horizon, setting out his thoughts on man and the world at that pivotal moment in history. The result was ‘The freedom of necessity’2 – Bernal’s reaction to the precarious interna
tional situation. The tone he adopted was that of a secular prophet, who saw the present conflict as ‘the most terrible and at the same time the most hopeful of wars’ which marked a change in human affairs ‘more important than any that has happened for many thousands of years’. The great social transformation taking place was, in his view, the culmination of four centuries of increased power over nature through the use of science that had brought humans to the point where they could begin to control the conditions of their lives. With this new freedom brought by knowledge, came new responsibilities greater than those borne by any previous generations, and the realization that human cooperation was a necessity because it was the only alternative to increasing poverty, insecurity and death. The possibility for human unity was again the result of scientific progress leading to increased communication and economic interdependence.

  It appeared to Sage that the whole world was becoming Marxist because ‘in wartime, we are coming naturally to think and act in terms of directed economic and social organisation… In every industrial region of the world today – and non-industrial countries can have no effective say in world affairs – there exists a form of planned economy determining the quantity and quality of production, fixing the movements and the occupations of the population. More and more the capitalist states are showing an external similarity, in their means of control of production and distribution, to the planned socialist economy of the Soviet Union.’3

  Sage credited Hitler with understanding the nature of the historical social transformation to communism and reasoned that Hitler’s appeal to aggressive nationalist feelings was an attempt to thwart the ultimate establishment of a democratically organized or socialist ‘world order’. Sage was anxious to avoid the pitfalls of seeking utopia, and, rather than set out ideals for society, suggested what was needed was a greater understanding of the process of transforming society, ‘sufficient to enable us to see which things are worth attempting and which are doomed because of the inherent contradictions which they contain’.4 The inherent contradiction that could never endure was a society where ‘one class has a definite advantage over others [because] that class is bound either to sweep away or to evade its constitutional limitations and to generate among the rest of the population an antagonism that sooner or later comes to revolution or war’. While a new society should address the universal demand for justice, it was more important to establish the right social and economic conditions and assume that individual human rights would follow. This was what had happened in the Soviet Union where the ‘constitution not only guarantees the liberal rights of equality before the law, but also the new rights of employment, of education and of security in illness and in old age’. Such a constitution could be drawn up only ‘after the achievement of a socially operated and controlled productive system’. The USA, by contrast, lacked ‘the economic and political basis that could secure and guarantee’ President Roosevelt’s promise of freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

  Sage’s faith in the Soviet system as the model for the post-war world was unshakeable when he wrote ‘The freedom of necessity’. The quotes above praising the Soviet Union are but a few examples of the many contained in the essay, which ran to nearly sixty pages. The sting in the tail was reserved for ‘the ruling class of this country [who] did not go into the war to save democracy; they do not know what democracy is and if they did they would not like it. They went into the war to save their status, their pockets and their skins, and even in the war they have not forgotten that their position has to be secure, not only against the enemy, but against each other and against the Common people… Class-vested interests in the civil service and the fighting services have resulted in our slow and unadaptable response to modern fighting conditions on land, sea and in the air… We have failed for eighteen months to assist the only ally that can resist and has resisted the Nazis. Ostensibly this is for tactical reasons; we are told we have been unprepared and we are still unprepared for a second front in Europe. The way things are going, and with the people we have directing them, there is no guarantee that we will not always be in this state.’ Nor did Sage spare the Trade Unions and the Labour Party who had allowed themselves to be bought off by marginal increases in real goods for the working class, and would not face up to the need for violent action on occasion to produce the necessary disruption of the existing system. ‘Neither the people nor their leaders had any social philosophy, and the latter were even proud of the fact and spent what little intellectual energy they had in attacking Marxism, which presented the only coherent account of society and its changes.’5

  The Association of Scientific Workers (AScW) held a two-day conference on science and the war effort in January 1942. The speakers were mostly rank-and-file scientists engaged in practical work in factories as well as in research laboratories. Discussion ranged over issues of training and efficiency, and covered a wide variety of subjects such as agriculture and food, building and housing, and air-raid precautions (ARP). There were many grievances of a general nature, and in particular the perceived lack of contact between the Services and scientific workers. In his summary of the proceedings, Bernal ‘stated that if the truth could be told, the situation would seem to be even worse than that described by the speakers from their first-hand experience’; in his view, ‘the opposition to scientific workers in the last few months is equivalent to sabotage, and perhaps something rather stronger’.6

  In ‘The freedom of necessity’, Sage seemed to exclude Churchill from his strictures about the ruling class; although not naming him, he did remark that ‘it is not enough to have a great leader’.7 In general though, he felt that the ruling class, while not active traitors, ‘will not press things unduly, they will not take risks, they will not demand the impossible’. These concerns do not seem to have given Sage any pause when, in April 1942, he was approached by Lord Louis Mountbatten to join Combined Operations (CO). Mountbatten was one of Queen Victoria’s great-grandchildren, and for two decades had combined a playboy existence with a career in the Royal Navy. At the outbreak of war, he held the rank of captain, and after a period commanding destroyers, which demonstrated both his courage and his questionable judgement, he was suddenly appointed by Churchill as Chief of Combined Operations (CCO). In his new role, he became a junior member of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, and in order to carry the necessary authority in any discussions about Commando activity, Churchill promoted him Vice-Admiral with the honorary ranks of General and Air Marshal. Without question a member of the ruling class, Mountbatten loved risk-taking and would prove to have quite a taste for the impossible.

  An unlikely affection developed between the royal sailor and the communist scientist. Sage thought Mountbatten ‘had the habit that great commanders have of acting first and thinking afterwards’,8 a judgement fondly meant, but one which could provide ammunition to those modern historians who have come to view him as a vainglorious and reckless commander. On his appointment as CCO, Mountbatten’s first move was to bring along some of his own courtiers such as the Marquis de Casa Maury, a Cuban who shared his love for speed in cars and polo ponies, whom he appointed as head of intelligence, and Sir Harold Wernher, one of the richest men in England, as his chief of procurement. In March 1942, Mountbatten received a letter from Leo Amery, a member of the War Cabinet, recommending the services of Geoffrey Pyke, the spat-wearing eccentric, whom Sage had first met at a Bloomsbury soiréein the 1920s. Pyke had pursued a characteristically wayward course in the darkening European scene before the war. He set up the Voluntary Industrial Aid society during the Spanish Civil War, which amongst other contributions, sent Harley-Davidson motorcycles modified with side-cars to serve as field ambulances. Just before Germany invaded Poland in the summer of 1939, Pyke had been in Germany with a group of researchers, in the guise of visiting English golfers carrying out surveys of public opinion towards the Nazis and their prospects for military success.9 Pyke, in fact, would have been turned awa
y at the door of most English golf clubs: his already spare frame had become emaciated as a result of chronic lung disease, his dark beard was untrimmed and he did not possess a tie. Pyke arrived at the ducal townhouse that served as Combined Operations Headquarters (COHQ) in a particularly scruffy pair of trousers – ‘flannels that had no turn-ups and were inches above his battered crepe-soled shoes’. He was shown in to see the immaculately dressed Rear-Admiral and lost no time in presenting his credentials, announcing, ‘Lord Mountbatten you need me on your staff because I am a man who thinks.’10

  Mountbatten had been given the task of harrying the Nazis in occupied Europe by staging dramatic raids, with the ultimate objective of launching the largest ever sea-borne invasion across the Channel. He decided that he needed unorthodox thinkers like Pyke to supplement the input of more conventional minds schooled in the military staff colleges. He discussed his plans with Henry Tizard, saying that he ‘wanted to get two first-rate scientists who would be put on to the operational analysis of devices and equipment and techniques for the landing that was to come’.11 Tizard suggested the names of Bernal and Zuckerman, who were fast becoming the boffin equivalent of Gilbert and Sullivan. Mountbatten wrote to them both. Sage replied that he would accept as long as Zuckerman came too. When they arrived at COHQ in Richmond Terrace close by Scotland Yard, morale was buoyant as a result of the brilliantly executed Bruneval Raid at the end of February. RAF reconnaissance planes had gathered photo-reconnaissance evidence of a German Wuerzburg radar installation at Bruneval, near Le Havre. A company of men from the 1st Parachute Brigade was dropped on a moonlit night, inland of the target, and succeeded in overrunning the installation, removing vital parts of the equipment and capturing its operator before being picked up on a nearby beach by navy boats. The time spent on French soil was about two hours, and the British casualties and missing were fifteen in total.12