A Summer Bright and Terrible (13 page)

And so Churchill spoke out again and again,
warning of the danger, blasting complacency, and only a few listened.

Thank God . . .

C. P. Snow, in the Godkin Lectures at
Harvard University, 1960: “Nearly everyone I knew of my own age who was
politically committed, that is, who had decided that fascism had at all costs
to be stopped, wanted Churchill brought into the government [in the late 1930s].
. . . We wanted a government which would resist [the Nazis]. . . . But if
Churchill
had
been brought back to office? . . . Lindemann would have
come with him . . . different technical choices would have been made . . . and without
getting radar in time we should not have stood a chance in the war that finally
arrived.”

As Dowding was preparing England to resist,
Churchill and Lindemann would appear to have been his natural compatriots.
Lindemann chaired one of the two best physics laboratories in the country, and
Churchill wanted above all else to resist the coming Nazi hordes and to prepare
England for the inevitable struggle. But Lindemann’s personality intruded.

As already noted, he was generous, arrogant,
full of contempt, good company, prejudiced, and a loyal friend. He showed these
different sides to different people, and unbelievably, his appearance seemed to
change as well. John Colville thought “he had a distinguished presence. His
deep-set eyes looked out beneath gently arching brows and a curving,
well-developed forehead. His nose was of noble Roman shape, his moustache was
flat and neatly trimmed, his mouth suggested refinement. . . . He wore
beautifully cut clothes, out of date in design . . . spotlessly clean, almost
clinically so.” But according to Snow, he was “pallid, heavy featured . . . [with]
a faint Teutonic undertone to his English, to his inaudible, constricted
mumble.” Lord Birkenhead thought him “an offensive man of alien extraction . .
. spending too much time ingratiating himself with exalted people.”

In more than physical appearance, Lindemann was
a man of contrasts. He presented different aspects of character, personality,
and intelligence to different people. He was “a very odd and a very gifted man
. . . he was savage, he had a suspicious malevolent sadistic turn of what he
would have called humour. . . . If one was drawn to him at all, one wanted to
alleviate it” (Snow); he “had an ear for music and [was] a skilled pianist, he
was modest . . . and his knowledge of almost all periods of history was
impressive” (Colville); he had “no interests in literature nor in any other art”
(Snow); he had “a beautiful brain” (Winston Churchill); “he made himself unnecessarily
objectionable to a large number of people, although . . . he rarely committed
the sin of being rude by accident” (Ronald Clark); and, finally, “what fun it
was to see him!” (Clementine Churchill).

On one point everyone agreed: He had a great talent
for explaining difficult scientific problems in simple language, and this knack
nearly defeated all Dowding’s efforts.

England’s hope of winning any coming war
rested entirely on technologic change. The technologies involved were difficult
for a layperson to understand, especially for an impatient man like Churchill,
with a world of troubles on his mind. Churchill was famous for instructing his
helpers to give him a written evaluation of any problem on one page. How could
one explain the complexities of radar to a layman—especially one with “astonishing
gaps of total ignorance”—on one page?

Well, Lindemann could, with his talent of
explaining complex subjects in a simple manner. But this ability led to
problems. The first problem was that he didn’t explain the material correctly.
The second problem, which probably accounts for the first, is that he—Lindemann—hadn’t
thought of the idea of radar himself. The third problem, which melds the first
two into an insuperable obstacle, was his arrogance: If he hadn’t thought of
the technique, it probably wasn’t worth being thought of. As a result, in his
own mind, the technical problems inevitable in any new process gyrated and grew
and roiled insolvably. Instead of trying to address these problems, he thought
of new, different ideas. New ideas were desperately wanted, but his were
totally impracticable.

Churchill’s regard for him, and the manner of
his influence, are illustrated by a story told by General Sir James
Marshall-Cornwall about a dinner party at Chequers when Churchill had become
prime minister. The news from the military men at the dinner was not good, and

the PM leant
across me and addressed my neighbour on the other side: “Prof! What have you
got to tell me today?” The other civilians present were wearing dinner-jackets,
but Professor Lindemann was attired in a morning-coat and striped trousers. He
now slowly pushed his right hand into his tail-pocket and, like a conjuror,
drew forth a Mills hand-grenade. An uneasy look appeared on the faces of his
fellow-guests and the PM shouted: “What’s that you’ve got, Prof, what’s that?” “This,
Prime Minister, is the inefficient Mills bomb, issued to the British infantry.
It is made of twelve different components which have to be machined in separate
processes. Now I have designed an improved grenade which has fewer machined
parts and contains a fifty per cent greater bursting charge.” “Splendid, Prof,
splendid! That’s what I like to hear. CIGS! Have the Mills bomb scrapped at
once and the Lindemann grenade introduced.” The unfortunate CIGS [Commander of
the Imperial General Staff] was completely taken aback; he tried to explain
that contracts had been placed in England and America for millions of the Mills
bombs, and that it would be impracticable to alter the design now, but the
Prime Minister would not listen. . . .

It turned out, finally, that Lindemann’s
grenade didn’t work. At the time of the dinner, he hadn’t actually made one,
but had just formed an idea of how it could be done. At Churchill’s insistence,
many man-hours were devoted to firming up the design and manufacturing several
for testing, but it all came to naught. This was typical of both Lindemann and
Churchill: To Lindemann (nicknamed “the Prof,” by many), an idea was as good as
a finished product if the idea were his, and to Churchill, whatever the Prof
said was gold.

Unfortunately it often wasn’t. As mentioned
earlier, Wimperis had formed a Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air
Defence and had put it under the chairmanship of T. H. Tizard, a universally
respected scientist who had learned to fly with Lindemann and who had been his
friend and colleague. More recently, however, Tizard had joined the list of the
Prof’s enemies for no other reason than Tizard’s increasing reputation in
government circles, envy being another of Lindemann’s characteristics.

When Churchill heard about the committee, he
insisted on Lindemann’s inclusion. Although Churchill had no official authority
to do so, such was the force of his personality that Tizard reluctantly agreed.
The result was instant chaos.

We turn again to C. P. Snow, who as both
scientist and politician knew well how things worked in England in those days
(and perhaps still do today). There would have been “a great deal of that apparently
casual to-ing and fro-ing by which high English business gets done. As soon as
the Tizard committee thought there was something in radar, one can take it that
Tizard would lunch with [Sir Maurice] Hankey at the Athenaeum; Hankey, the
secretary of the Cabinet, would find it convenient to have a cup of tea with
(Lord) Swinton (Secretary of State for Air) and [Prime Minister] Baldwin. If
the Establishment had not trusted Tizard as one of their own, there might have
been a waste of months or years. In fact, everything went through with the
smoothness, the lack of friction, and the effortless speed which can only
happen in England when the Establishment is behind one.”

At the committee’s first meeting, Wimperis had
presented them with Watson-Watt’s (actually, Wilkins’s) idea, and they had
agreed that Wimperis should take it to Dowding. At subsequent meetings,
Wimperis reported that Dowding had asked for a demonstration, and, later, that
the demonstration had been a success and that Dowding had initiated funding.
The committee was unanimous in backing the development of radar as a most
propitious—and indeed the only—hope of protecting their homes from enemy
bombers. From that moment on, “everything went through with the smoothness, the
lack of friction, and the effortless speed which can only happen in England
when the Establishment is behind one.”

And then Lindemann dropped in. One is reminded
of a couple of couplets referring to Newton and Einstein. The first one was
written by Alexander Pope:

All was
clothed in darkness and night.

God said, “Let
Newton be!” and all was light.

And then in the twentieth century,
Anonymous wrote this one:

The devil,
howling “Ho!

Let Einstein
he!” restored the status quo.

Replace
Newton
with
the committee,
and
Einstein
with
Lindemann,
and there you have the situation.
The Prof burst into the committee and scattered their unanimity like so much
chaff. He immediately saw everything that might go wrong with radar, presented
all these problems as insoluble, and then swept on to present his own proposals.

Some measure of the value of his ideas may be
gained by an anecdote told by Sholto Douglas, who would later replace Dowding
as Commander in Chief of Fighter Command. During the First World War, one of
the pilots in Douglas’s squadron got the bright idea of tying a hand grenade to
a long wire and trying to fly just above an enemy plane, lowering the wire so
that it would tangle in the enemy’s propeller and explode the grenade. The
scheme never worked. “It was an idea that smacked all too strongly of the
flavour that I came to know later of some of the schemes put forward in all
seriousness during the second war by Professor Lindemann with the backing of
Winston Churchill.”

The first of these schemes was one Lindemann
had filched from R. V. Jones, a graduate student in his laboratory. He quickly
managed to convince himself that he had thought of it himself, in much the same
way that Watson-Watt had appropriated Wilkins’s idea. Instead of building
transmitters to produce radiation and then receivers to detect the echoes, why
not detect the natural infrared radiation produced by the aircraft engines,
thus cutting the problems in half?

It was an interesting proposal, and it
eventually worked—some thirty years later, in Vietnam. Lindemann was right that
with infrared they wouldn’t have the problems involved in transmitting, but
they would have the additional problems associated with differentiating the
aircraft’s infrared from all the other natural infrared radiation in the world.
For radar, they could use a single frequency, one that commercial radio
stations did not use, but every warm object in the world produces a spectrum of
infrared radiation.

Lindemann brushed aside any such problems, but
the rest of the committee felt strongly that radar would be much more likely to
work. After much argument and wasted time, Lindemann finally announced that he
was willing to compromise: Both radar and infrared should be pursued. But
splitting the scarce research funds between the two projects would have meant
that neither would have been ready in time.

Tizard told him: “I think the way you put the
facts is extremely misleading, and may lead to entirely wrong decisions being
reached, with a consequent disastrous effect on the war. I think, too, that you
have got your facts wrong.” Lindemann shrugged that off and blithely came up
with other ideas. He appropriated the World War I idea that British airplanes
could fly in front of and above the incoming bombers and drop strands of wire
with grenades attached. But he made it even better: They could drop bombs onto
the enemy formations! Even as the committee members began bringing up the
obvious objections that you couldn’t expect the enemy to fly straight and
level, and that it would be easy for them to evade such weapons, he came up
with other ideas. Antiaircraft shells could be fit with fuses that would
magnetically detect when they came close to an airplane and would then explode.
This would mean that the shells didn’t have to actually hit an airplane to
destroy it.

Colville recorded some of these conversations
in his diary that summer: “I talked to the Prof about his secret weapons . . . he
thinks these may be really effective next year and if they are, there is a
distinct possibility that aircraft will be ruled out as a weapon of war.” In
fact, the proximity fuse for antiaircraft shells did become effective late in
the war, but wasn’t even close to being ready that summer, when it was needed,
or even the next year, as Lindemann had predicted. And of course it didn’t mean
that aircraft were ruled out as a weapon of war.

Lindemann’s other projects were eventually
tried, when Churchill became prime minister and brought Lindemann along with
him into the cabinet, but they never worked. All they succeeded in doing was
wasting time and money and turning the committee meetings into roiling
controversy instead of amiable cooperation. Finally, the problem was solved by
dissolving the committee, and the next day reforming it.