A Summer Bright and Terrible (12 page)

At any rate, the banner was picked up in the
following decade by Sir Oliver Lodge. A physicist like Crookes, he was no less
respected and no less willing to investigate phenomena that most scientists
felt were beyond the pale. In 1884 (when Dowding was a child), Lodge attended
several seances with an established Italian medium and reported that “there is
no further room in my mind for doubt. Any person without invincible prejudice
who had had the same experience would come to the same broad conclusion, viz.,
that things hitherto held impossible do actually occur.”

Well, why not? For a scientist, this was only
the beginning. In the years that followed, the law of conservation of energy
seemed to be repealed by the Curies, the absolute space that formed the basis
of Newton’s gravity was abolished, time grew curvatures, electrons disappeared
and materialized with impunity, and invisible microbes infected us all.

In 1915 Lodge’s son Raymond was killed in
action. In the following months, both he and his wife received many messages
from Raymond, all of which they accepted as real, and his book
Raymond
was later accepted by Dowding, as it was by so many others, as whole truth and
the sine qua non of spiritualism. Shortly before Sir Oliver’s death, when he
was asked to speak before the Modern Churchmen’s Conference, he declared: “If I
find myself an opportunity of communicating [after my death] I shall try to
establish my identity by detailing a perfectly preposterous and absurdly
childish peculiarity which I have already taken the trouble to record with some
care in a sealed document deposited in the custody of the English S.P.R. I hope
to remember the details of this document and relate them in no unmistakable
fashion [thus proving the continuation of life after death].” Unfortunately, no
such communication was ever received.

Nevertheless, the scientific researches of
Oliver Lodge and William Crookes gave a cover of respectability to the claims
of the spiritualists, and Hugh Dowding grew up in an atmosphere in which communication
with the dead was rather routinely accepted, just as today most people (at
least in the United States) believe in a God that guides our nation. This
acceptance of things unseen was buttressed immeasurably by the host of
scientific discoveries previously referred to, as Dowding grew up and the
nineteenth century turned over into the twentieth. These discoveries had
nothing to do with spiritualism per se, but raised the spectre of things unseen
yet absolutely real: those mysterious rays called X, the even more mysterious
emanations of radioactivity, and Einstein’s proclamation that space and time
itself could be warped. And there was more, much more. Lord Rutherford found
alpha particles bouncing in all directions from invisible atoms, while Max Planck
suggested that energy was a quantized sort of thing that nobody understood at
all. Anyone who cared to take the trouble, it seemed, could be attuned “to
strange sights, things invisible to see.” Clearly, mere communication with
spirits was nothing to get upset about.

So when Watson-Watt tells him that invisible
rays can detect an aircraft, does Dowding dismiss this as the ravings of a
madman? Of course not. On the other hand, does he believe him? No, he does not;
instead, he asks for a demonstration. Then, when Mr. A. P. Rowe tells him that
he has seen it work, he does believe. So why should he not believe two of the
world’s top scientists, Lodge and Crookes, when they tell him they have seen
people communicate with the dead?

Just as the reported demonstration of the
invisible rays of radar gave him hope that England was not doomed, the reports
of Lodge and Crookes gave Dowding hope that Clarice was not lost to him
forever.

But it is one thing to believe, for example,
the testimony of others that a man named Jesus lived, and quite another to
believe you are Jesus. It would be a few more years before he would take that
next step, which would lead him right around the bend.

Twelve

On August 8, 1934, the
Times
published a letter headed “Science and Air Bombing”:

Sir,

In the debate in
the House of Commons on Monday on the proposed expansion of our Air Forces, it
seemed to be taken for granted on all sides that there is, and can be, no
defence against bombing aeroplanes and that we must rely entirely upon
counter-attack and reprisals. That there is at present no means of preventing
hostile bombers from depositing their loads of explosives, incendiary
materials, gases, or bacteria upon their objectives I believe to be true; that
no method can he devised to safeguard great centres of population from such a
fate appears to me to be profoundly improbable.

If no protective
contrivance can be found and we are reduced to a policy of reprisals, the
temptation to be “quicker on the draw” will be tremendous. 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 definitely
been shown that all the resources of science and invention have been exhausted.
The problem is far too important and too urgent to be left to the casual endeavours
of individuals or departments. The whole weight and influence of the Government
should be thrown into the scale to endeavour to find a solution. All decent men
and all honourable Governments are equally concerned to obtain security against
attacks from the air and to achieve it no effort and no sacrifice is too great.

The letter was signed
F. Lindemann,
a
man who would seem to be a strong advocate of Dowding’s policies. The reality
turned out to be quite different. Frederick Lindemann was professor of
experimental philosophy, which was what physics was called at the time, at
Oxford University. He was a man of great controversy. Some gave him credit for
establishing Oxford as the second-best physics school in the country, others
gave him credit for establishing Cambridge as the very best (by chasing away
from Oxford the best students and professors). “He was an amateur among
professionals, which is how Rutherford (the head of the Cambridge laboratory)
always regarded him,” asserted scientist-novelist C. P. Snow.

In
Fringes of Power,
John Colville
(Churchill’s private secretary) describes Lindemann: “To those he liked he was
generous, helpful and entertaining. Against those who had displeased him he
waged a vendetta. . . . He looked with contempt on Jews and coloured people; he
was arrogant and impervious to argument when his mind was made up. Yet he was
good company when in the mood, never boastful of his achievements, and a loyal
friend.”

Not being “boastful of his achievements” took
on a rather singular form, exemplified by a legendary incident. As a recent
biography puts it, “during the First World War he turned his experimental skill
to warplanes, which he learned to fly to prove his theoretical method of
recovering from an aircraft’s spin.” The story is that the “spin” was the
terror of the skies, death to any pilot who slipped into one. This would happen
when the airplane would stall and, if the wings were not kept absolutely level,
one of them would dip and the airplane would fall over on that side. The other
wing would flip over and the plane would plummet earthward, spinning faster and
faster as it fell uncontrollably. Once in a spin, no one had any idea how to
get out of it; the result was inevitably a fatal crash.

Lindemann worked out a theoretical description
of the forces operating on the plane, and then he figured out how to counteract
them. He thought that the instinctive response of pulling back on the stick
(which normally points the aircraft’s nose upward) was absolutely wrong;
instead the pilot should first straighten out the aircraft by the use of the
rudder pedals while keeping the airplane in a dive until the spin stopped and
flying speed picked up. Only then should the pilot pull back on the stick.

This advice was counterintuitive to every
pilot, and so to prove his theory, Lindemann decided that he should learn to
fly. He did, and then he took off, climbed to fourteen thousand feet, pulled
back on the stick, and held it pressed into his stomach as the nose rose and
rose and the speed fell and fell, until with a shudder the plane stalled and
fell out of the sky. As it did, he flipped the control stick over to one side
so that the wing fell, and very quickly he was in a spin. As the earth rushed
up toward him, he pushed the stick forward, straightened out the wings, and
held it in a dive until the speed built up. Then he pulled back on the stick
and zoomed back up into the sky.

From that day forward, his technique became the
standard method of recovering from a spin, and the spin itself then became a
standard method of escaping from an uneven combat, a frightening but routine manoeuvre
taught to every fledgling pilot.

Or so the story goes. Whenever it was repeated
in his presence—and, being such a lovely story, it was repeated over and over
again—he never confirmed it, never boasted about it, merely smiled and went on
sipping his tea. The problem is, he also didn’t deny it, and the story isn’t
true.

In 1916 Harold Balfour, later Lord Balfour of
Inchrye and Permanent Under-Secretary of the Air Staff, was a flying instructor
in the RFC, and it was he who taught Lindemann to fly. In 1973, Balfour wrote: “The
legend has been perpetrated that Professor Lindemann pioneered the spin and the
technique of recovery. He never did anything to contradict this story, but it
is just invention.”

At the time he was teaching Lindemann to fly,
Balfour said, the RFC pilots already knew how to come out of a spin: “Spinning
was a normal and essential feature of air combat. We taught it to all our
pupils.” The technique had been worked out some four years previously, in 1912,
by a Lt. Wilfred Parke of the Royal Navy. He had accidentally fallen into a
spin, and as he said later, he knew at that point he was going to die. He tried
the normal manoeuvre of pulling back on the stick, which didn’t work. Then,
resigned to death, somehow he tried the very thing that instinct told him not
to do: He pushed the stick hard forward, dropping the nose even more
vertically. This caused the airspeed to pick up enough for the wings to provide
lift, and he was able to straighten them and recover.

Balfour concluded, “I saw Smith-Barry spin
Avros while Lindemann was still wetting his instructional nappies in the front
seat of an Avro in which I was trying to teach him how to fly.”

Lindemann dressed formally, in a black suit
and bowler hat, no matter what the occasion, and always carried an umbrella. He
was an inveterate snob and at the same time a top athlete, once winning the
tennis championship of Sweden. It was these two qualities that transformed him
from a scientist of questionable reputation into a man of great influence on
the coming war.

Many scientists are intellectual snobs, but
Lindemann was a social snob. It was said of him that “he thinks his only peers
are peers,” and so he was happy to accept an invitation to a weekend at the
Duke of Westminster’s palatial Eaton Hall, where the Duchess had paired him
with Churchill’s wife, Clementine, who was a keen and competitive player.
Winston wasn’t there, but Lindemann and Clementine got along so famously that
the Duke arranged a quiet evening at home for the two men to meet.

It was a match made in heaven—or perhaps in
hell. Churchill admired Lindemann’s brains and bravery, as exemplified by the
story of the spinning airplane, a story that Lindemann didn’t bother to deny.
Lindemann, for his part, admired Churchill’s pedigree and the sense of power
that flowed through the air around him.

The combination nearly destroyed England.

In the 1930s, the position of Winston
Churchill was unique. Way back before the First World War, he had been the
youngest man in history to hold a post in the governing cabinet, but he had
lost the position because of a military fiasco at Gallipoli. Now, as Hitler
rose to power, Churchill was still a member of Parliament but had not held a
cabinet post for nearly a decade. He saw the threat of Nazism early on and
tried to rally England, which was disarming while Germany was rearming. He held
little influence in Parliament, but as Hitler sent his armies into the Ruhr and
then Austria and finally Czechoslovakia, Churchill’s prestige among the public
rose.

I must admit that if I had been there, not
knowing the future, I would probably have taken Prime Minister Chamberlain’s
side against Churchill. There are several reasons for this. First, it had been
only fifteen years since the Great War ended, and that had been a most horrible
war. Millions of people had been slaughtered.
Millions,
and for no good
reason, which would have been the second of my reasons: Nothing had been
accomplished by that war. There had been no military or political aims, save
victory. As Kipling, the great jingoist himself, put it after his son was
killed in action: “If any ask why we died / Tell them our fathers lied.” The
only fruit of that war, labelled for want of any other purpose the War to End
All Wars, would be if indeed there were no further wars.

Finally, nothing like Hitler had ever been seen
before. He embodied a horror that was, literally, unbelievable—until it
engulfed us all. To see it coming would have required second sight (which
Churchill, but hardly anyone one else, had). Today we look back on the
appeasers as cowards, ignorant of what was happening. But who of us would have
reacted differently?