Blackett's War (12 page)

Many in the Cambridge and Oxford communities volunteered to serve with the strikebreakers (there is a minor but memorable scene in Evelyn Waugh’s novel
Brideshead Revisited
of Charles Ryder and his Oxford friends forming a “high-spirited, male party” that signs up for duty with a volunteer militia, convoying milk deliveries around London and “looking for trouble”). Blackett was one of the few members of his university who visibly took a stand on the other side, driving to London to pick up and distribute copies of the strikers’ newspaper, the
British Worker
.

After ten days the strike fizzled out. Churchill, who had built a remarkably progressive record on social policy in his years in public office even as a member of Conservative governments, had been strongly sympathetic with the miners and supported their right to strike; he had confidentially dispatched fellow Conservative MP Harold Macmillan to Newcastle to investigate the situation and had been deeply moved by Macmillan’s account of the deplorable living conditions and suffering of the workers and their families. But he saw a general strike as a revolutionary challenge to the rule of law and was determined to see it crushed. With the newspapers not publishing, the government stepped in to print its own official paper; if the
British Gazette
was little better than propaganda it was largely because of the man who leapt in to edit it. Churchill threw himself into the job with his trademark gusto. “He butts in at the busiest hours and insists on changing commas and full stops until the staff is furious,” noted one bemused observer. But he also dictated lengthy editorials and ordered up stories accusing the strikers of fomenting revolution, referring to them as “the enemy,” calling a Labour MP who spoke up to support the strike “a wild Socialist.” Kingsley Martin triumphantly declared that Churchill had been “discredited” once and for all by this fusillade of belligerent and often dishonest rhetoric. The episode left a residue of bad blood between Churchill and the intellectual left that never completely vanished.
⁴⁵

If Blackett was an early convert to socialism, he was nonetheless part of what would become an unmistakable trend in Britain’s scientific community
between the wars. Benjamin Farrington, an Irish classicist and Communist Party member who returned to London in the mid-1930s after teaching in South Africa for several years, said he had the impression that “at least half the Marxists whom I met were scientists.” The writer and scientist C. P. Snow estimated that three quarters of the 200 “brightest” young physicists in Britain in the interwar years would come to view themselves as on the political left.
⁴⁶

The reasons were complex. Most scientists, to be sure, were instinctively antiauthoritarian to begin with; science was in principle an open republic in which all could contribute equally based only on the quality of their work, regardless of standing or status, and in which truth was arrived at as the natural outgrowth of a vast mutual enterprise rather than dictated by received authority. Science tended to attract men and women who by their natures had little patience with conventional wisdom, social elitism, or the veneration of authority and who embraced progress as part of their basic credo.

But it was the growing contradiction between the revolutionary excitement of scientific advance and the stagnation of society and the economy that radicalized many young physicists in this period. “Living in Cambridge,” Snow would recall, “one could not help picking up the human as well as the intellectual excitement in the air.” The discoveries pouring out of the Cavendish Laboratory were “part of the deepest revolution in human affairs since the discovery of agriculture,” and the discoverers themselves were keenly aware of the fact.
⁴⁷
Blackett would put his finger on exactly this point in the opening words of a broadcast he presented in 1934 on the BBC,
The Frustration of Science:

The rest of the broadcast was a strange blend of sharp, original thinking and woolly cliches of Marxist class analysis and economic determinism (“it is very interesting to notice that the main popular support in any country for
Fascism lies in the lower middle classes and peasantry, and that these classes have always been effectively anti-scientific”). But his basic conclusion was that the full potential of science was inevitably stifled by the capitalist system and its pursuit of profit; even “planned” capitalism would never fully put science to work, certainly not for the greatest common good. Capitalism, by the same token, would never give science the full support it needed to make further progress:

On their return to Cambridge from Germany the two Pats had taken a house at 59 Bateman Street, one of a row of brick town houses facing the University Botanic Garden, about a mile from the Cavendish Laboratory. The couple were, thought Ivor Richards, “the handsomest, gayest, happiest pair in Cambridge.” Once a week the Blacketts held an open house for their “semi-bohemian and left-wing” friends and colleagues, regaling them with lemonade, biscuits, and movies extolling the achievements of the Soviet state in collectivizing agriculture and advancing industrial production.
⁵⁰

“BOTH THE POLICY OF APPEASEMENT
supported by the Left in England and the policy of aggressive expansion adopted by Fascist Germany and Italy were expressions, in their own ways, of the … lessons learned on the battlefields of the Great War,” observes Robert Wohl.
⁵¹
The growing propensity in Britain to view its victory in the war as a tragedy was matched by Germany’s willingness to regard its defeat as a crime.

Karl Dönitz returned to Germany in July 1919 as the country was being roiled by a series of right-wing putsch attempts led by irregular
Freikorps
of army and navy volunteers, many secretly supplied and organized by old-line officers who remained loyal to the monarchy even after they had pledged their allegiance to the new republic. The young U-boat captain had spent the last month of the war and the months since as a British prisoner of war.
His last command,
UB-68
, was on patrol in the Mediterranean about 150 miles east of Malta when he had surfaced in the middle of a convoy to find destroyers bearing directly down on him. In the chaos of executing a crash dive to escape, the boat had gyrated out of control—either the ballast or the hydroplanes were mishandled—and the boat hurtled up and down several times, reaching a depth of 300 feet at one point and an angle of 45 degrees before rising again and breaking crazily above the surface stern-first. Dönitz gave the order to abandon ship and the crew leapt into the water just seconds before the boat went down for the last time. The engineer, who had gone below to open the seacocks to scuttle the boat, went down with her. Dönitz fell into a deep depression, blaming himself for the loss of the boat and the death of his engineer. He would later hint that he had feigned insanity in the prison camp to obtain an early release, but it may have been more than just good acting. In either case he was among the first German prisoners of war to be repatriated following the signing of the Versailles treaty.

The Social Democrats polled at the top in the first vote held for the new Reichstag but still fell far short of a majority; one of the chronic weaknesses of the new Weimar Republic was a complex system of proportional voting that ensured representation of small parties but undermined the emergence of a stable majority. In many ways, though, the real power of the state had already passed to the army. The high command had come weakly to the defense of the socialist government in crushing a communist uprising that attempted to declare a “soviet” in January 1919. In return the armed forces exacted what was in effect a free hand in military affairs—and, as would become clear only too late, political affairs as well. Their first order of business was evading the military terms of the Versailles treaty and beginning without delay to rebuild Germany’s army and navy.

This was an agenda that enjoyed overwhelming popular support, even from the broad center of German public opinion and the nation’s democratic centrist politicians. The progressive Jewish industrialist and statesman Walther Rathenau would be assassinated by right-wing hit men in 1922 while serving as foreign minister; yet he, a member of the social liberal German Democratic Party, had singlehandedly done more than probably anyone in Germany to lay the groundwork for the nation’s secret rearmament. Two months before his assassination, he had personally drafted a secret protocol to the Russo-German peace treaty allowing Germany to clandestinely construct and operate a military air base in Russia. (Under the Versailles
treaty, Germany was permitted no air force at all.) At Lipetsk, about 250 miles southeast of Moscow, the German government poured out millions of reichsmarks a year to build and operate a modern airfield complete with two runways, hangars, and machine shops. Over the next ten years the Germans secretly trained hundreds of fighter and bomber pilots, refined aerial tactics, tested new weapons, and practiced dropping live bombs, and even poison gas, on simulated targets.
⁵²

Germany’s undimmed spirit of defiant militarism was hardly a secret, though; it was frequently on display, and often in deeply disturbing fashion, to anyone who cared to look. In 1921 one of the handful of war crimes trials that would take place in Germany came before the Supreme Court in Leipzig. The case involved a horrifying atrocity committed by the captain of
U-86
, Oberleutnant zur See Helmut Patzig, on June 27, 1918. Patzig himself was not in court; he had vanished. But his two watch officers were standing trial for their part in the incident. There was little dispute about the facts. The Canadian hospital ship
Llandovery Castle
had been torpedoed by
U-86
off the coast of Ireland. When Patzig learned the identity of the ship he had just sunk—he actually surfaced, approached several lifeboats, and interrogated the survivors—he attempted to sink the boats by running them down, then ordered his officers to open fire with the deck guns. After thus attempting to erase the evidence of his act, he had sworn the officers to secrecy and ordered the logbooks altered to place
U-86
at a point far from where the sinking had occurred.

The court concluded that the excellent military skills possessed by German officers made it all but certain that the victims had not survived: “The universally known efficiency of our U-boat crews renders it very improbable that the firing on the boats, which by their very proximity would form an excellent target, was without effect.” Nor was it an acceptable defense that the officers were merely obeying orders; it was impossible for them not to have known that an order to fire on lifeboats was unlawful. Still, Patzig had clearly acted in a “state of excitement” and so “the deed cannot be called deliberate.” The court found the two officers guilty of homicide and sentenced them to four years’ imprisonment. Even that mild punishment provoked a public outcry and an outpouring of support for the men. Within six months both men “escaped” confinement, and that was the end of the business as far as Germany was concerned. As Dönitz’s biographer Peter Padfield would observe:

On his return to Germany, Dönitz was unsure whether he would stay in the navy, serving the new socialist republic, but several influential and well-placed connections let him know in so many words that they did not expect the current state of affairs to last long. His father-in-law, a general from a venerable Prussian family, told him he had decided to stay in the army, adding, “You are not permitted to abandon the State!”

More compelling was the conversation he had with his former U-boat flotilla chief, Korvettenkapitän Otto Schultze, upon reporting back for duty.

“Are you going to stay with us, Dönitz?” Schultze asked.

“Do you think we shall have U-boats again?”

“Certainly I think so,” Schultze replied. “The ban will not remain forever. In about two years it is to be hoped we will have U-boats again.”
⁵⁴

Dönitz stayed. Within two years he was a Kapitänleutnant serving in what was for all intents and purposes the shadow U-boat force of an already rebuilding German navy. Under the Versailles treaty Germany was permitted to have torpedo boats, and the navy exploited that loophole to the hilt to train and develop tactics that would be just as applicable to submarine warfare. In the winter of 1921–1922 a staff exercise studied the use of night surface torpedo attacks by U-boats as a promising tactic to counter the defensive advantage of convoys. (“The coming war may or may not involve war against merchant shipping,” the study noted, but since an enemy warship was itself part of a defensive convoy, the same tactics would be applicable to that situation as well.) The torpedo boats also began practicing the technique of locating an enemy convoy by day, remaining at a distance until darkness allowed them to stealthily approach, then attacking and quickly escaping at high speed.