by Andrew Brown
The formal memo on OR organization in South-East Asia was just over two pages long and contained five headings:
Physiological effects of tropical conditions, including disease.
Physical effects of tropical conditions on equipment, etc.
Transport. Land, sea and air.
Sea conditions.
Topographical and anthropological intelligence.9
It was a typically wide-ranging effort by Sage (who at the same time was supervising the survey work for the Overlord beaches); he was particularly concerned to relate these subjects to conditions that Mountbatten’s forces would encounter. So, for example, while acknowledging that there was a medical section at SEAC interested in malaria, he was worried that they were not thinking about ‘actual conditions that face armies in the field, and… their requirements for insect fighting and the treatment of malaria and other diseases’. Bernal recommended that small local research stations should be established for each of the five subject areas, manned jointly by American and British scientists and including Indian colleagues where possible. In the case of sea conditions, which the Admiralty acknowledged were largely unknown, Bernal suggested ‘a sea and swell station, run in connection with the meteorological station… initially situated in Ceylon and later at advanced bases’. Their role would be ‘to predict swell and surf at places and times required for operations, and to work in conjunction with the landing craft experimental station to find what conditions of sea were admissible for operations’.
Bernal was so preoccupied with work on Neptune and Overlord that it was impossible for him to take these ideas any further for the moment. He did have a discussion with Blackett and Ralph Fowler in early February on operational research in South-East Asia and air attacks on Japan.10 A short time later, he received a letter from Kendrew in Delhi, giving his impressions of the state of operational research at SEAC. After expressing his great disappointment that Bernal would not be able to visit soon, Kendrew reported that ‘research at the Supreme Command level is going very much at half-cock at the moment’.11
What Kendrew would have found on taking up his new posting was that aerial reconnaissance was still a fledgling activity. Prior to April 1943, the RAF had no planes of their own available and made do with a few Tiger Moths chartered from Indian Air Survey and Transport Ltd.12 Even though a more concerted effort was now being undertaken, the distances involved were enormous – they were trying to survey an area equivalent in size to ‘France, Germany, the Low Countries and Italy’.13 The monsoon meant that reconnaissance was impossible between April and October. In his letter, Kendrew listed the work in progress – mainly on the corruption of signals traffic, and the problems of supply drops and air transportation in mountainous tropical forests. Perhaps as a result of what he had learned in North Africa, he was concerned about the correct selection of weapons for particular purposes. He gave as an example the fact that ‘4,000 and 1,000 lb. bombs are being used for attacking dispersal areas on airfields; and I am told by the Army O[perational]R[esearch]G[roup] that the Army in the forward area made a written statement to the effect that “for the attack of ground close-support objectives, the larger the bomb the better, under all circumstances”.’ Kendrew intended to carry out a fact finding survey of the present use of weapons in the South-East Asia theatre so that he could see where ‘education is necessary’.14
While Kendrew’s plans were exactly the sort of thing that Bernal supported, he had no time to reply to the letter and seems not to have thought seriously about SEAC again until after D-Day. Even then his major concern was to collect as much information as possible to analyse the D-Day landings; he was worried that the commanders at SHAEF (the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) were pressing on with future plans without incorporating any recent results. On 23rd June, Bernal visited Bentley Priory (where much of the D-Day planning was done), with Blackett and Zuckerman to lobby for the establishment of a SHAEF Operational Research Group; they were not successful.15 That morning, he and Pyke had appeared before the Chiefs of Staff to present the Power-Driven Rivers scheme, which had now been augmented by Pyke to include the movement of soldiers, enclosed in cylinders with oxygen tanks, through large-bore pipes. Even Pyke admitted that the ‘idea of transporting human beings inside the pipe has a slightly imaginative and speculative quality about it’,16 and the Chiefs discarded it rather quickly.
Bernal recorded in his diary for 7th September, ‘need to proceed directly to S.E. Asia’.17 Mountbatten was in London in August to press the case for an amphibious attack (Operation Dracula) across the Bay of Bengal to take Rangoon. Churchill managed to persuade his doubtful Chiefs of Staff that enough men and landing craft could be transferred to SEAC from Europe to make this feasible; after a year of inactivity, Mountbatten was desperate to break out of the military doldrums. Some rapid planning advice would be needed, and there was no one better qualified than Sage to provide it. Mountbatten’s headquarters were now in Kandy on the island of Ceylon, close to the Fleet, but many hundreds of miles away from the fighting in Burma. Just as his earlier appointment as CCO had been soon followed by an inexplicable expansion in staff numbers, so Mountbatten’s new HQ took on the trappings of a royal court and attracted some powerful criticism. Writing to the Admiral of the Fleet, the naval chief in Ceylon, Sir Charles Layton, wondered ‘if it is right that one Commander should collect together 7,000 able-bodied men and women to plan and supervise operations the scale of which is not settled’.18
Untroubled by such considerations, Bernal travelled to Oxford to discover what he could about sources of intelligence on tropical forests and swamps. He talked to forestry experts at Princes Risborough, where he was also putting the finishing touches to reports on Overlord for the Ministry of Home Security. In early October he took off, landing first in Gibraltar, and then flying on over the Algerian desert. He made an unscheduled stop on the island of Djerba, off the coast of Tunisia, because of mechanical problems with the plane. By chance, a party of senior Indian scientists was also marooned there, and Bernal had long conversations with them about the possibilities for science in India after the war.19 He met some local sponge fishermen and hired a ‘very expensive dhow’20 from which he enjoyed the sun and sea breezes. After a pleasant few days on Djerba, he reached Cairo, where he stayed long enough to contract food poisoning, before heading over the Dead Sea and Arabian Desert to Mesopotamia. He visited Babylon and Ur on 14th October, and the next day flew down the Persian coast of the Gulf, over the mountains of Oman, landing in Karachi. Following a one-day break for sightseeing, October 17th was a long day during which he flew down over the Western Ghats, refueling at Bangalore and Madras before finally arriving at Colombo. Then he took a slow night train up to Kandy, where he was installed in the Queen’s Hotel, overlooking a lake and very close to the holy Tooth Temple that is said to house Lord Buddha’s tooth.
Mountbatten’s headquarters were in the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens, an incongruously beautiful and sedate setting for planning warfare. It was there, during a long afternoon meeting, that Sage learned Operation Dracula had been postponed by Churchill for at least six months because ‘the German resistance in France and Italy has turned out to be far more formidable than we had hoped. We must clean them out first.’21 Relieved of a definite objective, Sage now became an itinerant OR consultant and could roam wherever he wished over the subcontinent. He stayed for a few days in Ceylon, holding meetings with Kendrew and representatives from the Army and Navy operational research groups. He then flew up to Bombay for a conference, where he took part in a discussion on using Weasels to cross mangrove swamps; (Weasels had their origin in Pyke’s recommendation for a fast track-vehicle to transport troops across snow and ice in Norway). While in Bombay, Bernal was able to visit the Hindu temples cut into the rock on Elephanta Island – his ‘first impression of Indian sculpture’.22
From Bombay he made his way north to Delhi, delighting in the sunrise over the Ghats and the chance to se
e Indian villages at dawn. Delhi was cooler and he spent a day at the Maharajah of Bikaner’s palace, which was ‘entirely decorated with tiger skins’. The atmosphere of unreality extended to the staff: ‘five servants and a bearer – a groom with no horse, a cook with no food, a gardener with no garden, a boy to look after the other servants, most of the time sleeping outside my door.’23 Returning to Kandy on the 4th November, he was asked to involve himself in the research Kendrew had initiated into the best type of bomb for jungle use. Kendrew gave the following exposition:
The problem under study in the bombing trials concerned methods of bombing troops in the jungle, because the RAF having run out of the proper fragmentation bombs was using naval depth charges instead. These made a much louder bang than fragmentation bombs and therefore the Army thought them tremendously effective; in fact they were more or less completely useless (having only a very thin casing). Mountbatten was subjected to enormous pressure from the Army to continue using depth charges even after new supplies of fragmentation bombs arrived, so he asked Bernal and myself to arrange trials in the jungle.24
Bernal suggested a small-scale trial of the effect of depth charges in the jungle. The Army representatives resented him as a ‘high-powered bod throwing his weight around without any experience of local conditions’.25 Kendrew contacted the official rat catcher of Kandy, who deposited a writhing sack containing about a hundred rats on his desk one morning. On the 9th November they drove about 35 miles down the valley from Kandy to the jungle. For Kendrew, it was a day that changed his life. Sage was ‘interested and expert in everything around him – the war, Buddhist religion and art, the geological specimens he would retrieve from every ditch, the properties of mud, luminous insects, the ancestry of cycads, but his recurrent theme was the fundamentals of biology and of the enormous developments just becoming possible through the advances in the physical and chemical techniques of the 1930s.’26 His message came through very clearly to Kendrew, a young scientist removed from the laboratory by the war and uncertain what to do next. Like Perutz before him, he understood from Sage that the ‘central challenge was to apply the methods of physics to gain a deeper understanding of the complexity and the beauty of life and, more specifically, that the key problem then becoming ripe for a solution was to understand the architecture of proteins, those enormously complex molecules whose versatility of function lay behind every activity of every living organism.’27
The depth charges were carried into the jungle by elephants, to be detonated at chosen places. The rats were placed into cages and suspended at varying distances from the explosions; even those very close were totally unharmed, as predicted. Just ‘before one of the bombs was detonated Bernal pulled his slide rule out of his pocket and calculated that he and [Kendrew] were at a safe distance; there followed the most enormous explosion and we rapidly dived into the nearest ditch with rocks and earth flying overhead. Bernal emerged brushing earth out of his hair and looking very puzzled, saying that he thought he must have got the decimal point in the wrong place.’28
With the postponement of Dracula, the liberation of Rangoon in the south of Burma would have to be left to the Army divisions, now under the brilliant command of General Slim. Mountbatten decided that Sage should visit the frontline on the Arakan peninsula. His first view of Burma was on 18th November; after camping in a mountain forest, he saw wild elephants come to the river at dawn to bathe. The next few days were spent with Army planners at their HQ on the Naf River, and travelling around the narrow coastal plain mostly by boat. He took walks in the jungle covering the Mayu hills and saw enormous spiders, leeches, shrieking monkeys and brilliantly coloured birds. He also found the time to write a paper over the course of three days.29 After five days in Burma and one last meeting with Army planners, Bernal took his seat on an overloaded plane that struggled to take off in heavy rain. After a short hop, he breakfasted on two fried eggs and transferred to another plane for Calcutta. In Calcutta, he was offered two more eggs, as he was at every stop made that day, so that by the time he finally landed in Ceylon, he had consumed sixteen eggs!30 Undaunted, he drove to Kandy from Colombo and had dinner with Hal Waddington, the geneticist. The next day was spent talking ‘infinite shop’ with Kendrew, Waddington and other operational research scientists.
On 27th November, Bernal was involved with staff meetings with Mount-batten and his commanders. They discussed a limited amphibious attack to secure the island of Akyab, about halfway down the long Arakan peninsula. An overland attack on Rangoon would need air cover, and possession of Akyab would give vital airfields to the RAF, less than 350 miles from Rangoon.31 After what Bernal described as a ‘Council of War at HQ preparing for landing at Akyab’32 he left Kandy on 1st December and returned to Army HQ in north Burma. He wrote to Mountbatten (‘Dear Supremo’) from there to say that he had accomplished all the important things he had to do.33 Bernal advised that the landing force should aim to take the ‘fairly hard southern beach’ on Akyab because ‘the bomb evidence seemed conclusive that there was deep mud over most of the other beaches’. An unusual note of irritation then crept in, as Sage explained that the bombing trials had been unnecessary because Intelligence had unearthed ‘rather at the 11th hour a BOAC man who knew all the beaches, had built the pier, and possessed a detailed chart of the beach, which Intelligence had not considered it worthwhile to bring. I am sorry to harp,’ he continued, ‘but it would have saved enormous time and labour if the information which has been available for three years had been produced earlier. Could it be made clear that we are interested in all charts and beach information for ports along the coast.’34
The man who had led the Cambridge Scientists Anti-War Group just a decade earlier and who had fulminated against the prostitution of science in the pursuit of military advantage was now so deeply immersed in the push for victory that he wrote the following passage without apparent hesitation.
With the bombardment plan I am also in general agreement. We have less and less to do it with and I have been convinced by the operational research workers here that the Napalm fire bombs represent the most efficient use of our heavy bomber effort. Even on a very conservative view they should be three times as effective as H.E. against Japs in pill boxes or foxholes.35
Sage closed by saying how much he had enjoyed his prolonged and varied visit, and hoped that he had been of some use. He should not have had any doubts after receiving Mountbatten’s affectionate reply.
PERSONAL & SECRET
23rd December 1944
My dear Bernal,
Thank you so much for your letter of the 11th December, which I found on my arrival at Calcutta.
Wherever I went I found you were being quoted as the Bible on beach Intelligence, and several senior officers remarked that they did not know what they would have done if you had not come out to help on this aspect… Do not forget that we want to see you out here again yourself in the near future.
I am investigating the possibility of using Commando raids to obtain beach and airfield construction Intelligence where we at present lack this.
It was so nice seeing you again; I always find discussion with you stimulating and refreshing.
Yours very sincerely,
LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN
Bernal flew out of Calcutta on 12th December, and after ‘ambling’ back via Cairo, he spent the week before Christmas catching up with developments at COHQ. He reported to various groups on his recent findings, and held several meetings with Blackett to discuss the operational research needs of SEAC and the Pacific theatre.36 On the day Bernal left India, General Slim commenced his historic Arakan offensive. Akyab was recaptured in early January without a shot being fired because the Japanese had withdrawn; the landing on the southern beach became a flawless technical exercise. Slim, with guaranteed air cover and some measure of mosquito control thanks to DDT spraying, executed a masterly campaign that culminated in the liberation of Mandalay in March and Rangoon in April 1945, just before the monsoon br
oke.
Soon after the New Year, Bernal, as one of four principal scientific advisers to the Services, was appointed to a sub-committee to be chaired by Tizard. Like Bernal, the other scientists were Cambridge men (Blackett representing the Admiralty, Charles Ellis now at the War Office and Sir George Thomson for the Air Ministry). The sub-committee was to report to the Joint Technical Warfare Committee (JTWC) which had been established under the aegis of the Chiefs of Staff in November 1943 to ‘co-ordinate and direct the technical study of… operational projects and problems’.37 Bernal had attended JTWC meetings irregularly, depending on his whereabouts and availability, as he conducted his preparatory research for Overlord. The new sub-committee, confusingly known as another Tizard Committee, was instructed by the Chiefs of Staff ‘to review the position and to forecast to the best of their ability developments in weapons and methods in each important field of warfare during the next 10 years, having regard both to the theoretical possibilities and also to the practical limitations at present foreseeable’.38 The members of the Tizard Committee were free to consult other technical experts of their choosing, and were also to receive submissions from the Services about the defence needs and ‘industrial war making capacity of the country against aggression’ before issuing their report.
Solly Zuckerman had become the most influential scientific adviser to the Allied Expeditionary Air Force; before D-Day, he had been an outspoken dissenter from suggestions on bombing policy promoted within the JTWC.39 Against the opposition of such weighty figures as ‘Bomber’ Harris and Lord Cherwell, Zuckerman persuaded the top decision-makers that the strategic bombing of the French railway system to prevent German reinforcements flooding into Normandy was more vital than the continued destruction of targets in Germany.40 When Paris was liberated in August 1944, Zuckerman was installed there by Air Marshal Tedder to carry out frontline analysis of bombing damage through his Bombing Analysis Unit. Zuckerman also took the opportunity to examine the records of the French railway system, which showed that the disruption caused by the bombing campaign before D-Day had been more complete than anyone had predicted.