Blackett's War (22 page)
Authors: Stephen Budiansky
IN MAY 1940
Hitler sent his panzers and 2 million men streaming into the Low Countries and France; Chamberlain resigned and Churchill became prime minister. A few weeks later the first night attacks by Luftwaffe bombers began over Britain. Meanwhile, the scientists fretted.
Shortly after the start of the war Blackett had been appointed a scientific officer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, where he was now spending two days a week working to develop a new bombsight. But most of his colleagues were growing increasingly impatient at having heard nothing about the promised mobilization of scientists. “From the time of the Munich crisis in 1938,” Solly Zuckerman recalled, “there had been all manner of talk … that given a war, all we would have to do was wait until told what our battle-stations were. Nothing happened.”
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Zuckerman, back in 1931, had started a London dining club of like-minded scientific colleagues. It was called the Tots and Quots, derived from the Latin tag
“Quot homines, tot sententiae”
: “As many opinions as there are men.” The group had petered out after a few years, but with the coming of the war Zuckerman revived it; they met once a month at a Soho restaurant and usually invited a distinguished guest who would open the after-dinner discussion. Increasingly the main topic of discussion now was the underutilization of scientists in the war effort.
Zuckerman was from a South African Jewish family and had come to London in 1925 on a scholarship to complete his medical education. He
almost immediately made a splash with a series of anatomical and hormonal studies of the estrous cycle of baboons in the London Zoo, and after qualifying as a doctor shifted his career completely to primatology. In 1932, at the age of twenty-eight, he published
The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes
, a standard work that would be repeatedly reprinted over the next half century. Two years later he joined the Department of Human Anatomy at Cambridge.
As a boy he had been aloof, withdrawn, and reserved; in London and Cambridge, as a rising scientific star, he seemed almost to explode with enthusiasm for his subject and for the social milieu in which he found himself suddenly immersed. From that point on he assiduously collected famous friends, from literary and artistic circles as well as scientific ones—E. E. Cummings, Alfred Hitchcock, George and Ira Gershwin, and H. G. Wells among them. A physiology student of his during this time recorded his impression of Zuckerman as “an almost incoherently enthusiastic young man who danced around and told us doubtful stories about the sexual cycles and activities of baboons. None of us guessed at the time what a breakthrough it was.” Many colleagues noted how Zuckerman was, in the words of one, “dazzlingly quick to grasp a point”; in fact he usually could grasp a point faster than he could explain it. Another said: “He was intolerant of people he regarded as less clever than himself—a very large group.”
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The Tots and Quots had an unmistakably young, left, and bohemian slant. Blackett was a regular member, as was Bernal, and the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley. Another regular was Conrad Hal Waddington, a biologist and fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Waddington was another polymath. Brought up in England by relatives from age four while his parents remained on their tea estate in India, he devoted himself to a series of enthusiastic pursuits including hunting for fossils and conducting chemistry experiments as a boy; at university his extremely serious interests included Morris dancing, rock climbing, avant-garde art and architecture (his friends included Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, and Walter Gropius), and philosophy (he would recount long and mysterious debates he had at Cambridge with Ludwig Wittgenstein about the nature of language and reality). In his later career, after the war, Waddington would become a leader in the field of evolutionary genetics, making major experimental and theoretical contributions, though as a young scientist he was by his own reckoning somewhat adrift and unfocused. He had become almost completely bald at age twenty-one, which had the effect of making “many people
think he was much older than he actually was,” recalled one friend. “Sometimes, when throwing out half-formed hypotheses or ideas he seemed surprised at being taken seriously.”
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For the June 12, 1940, meeting of the Tots and Quots, Zuckerman invited as a guest Allen Lane, the publisher of Penguin paperbacks. It would prove to be one of those quirky pivotal events that change everything. It certainly changed Zuckerman’s future. “I was moved along by one accident after another with little idea of who I was or of what I would become and with little notion of what the morrow would bring,” Zuckerman later said. “Up to the time of the Second World War I should have laughed if anyone had suggested that in the years ahead I would become involved in public events.”
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Lane was fascinated by the discussion that took place about what science could do to help win the war, and on the spur of the moment made the group an offer. If they would write up their argument—and get it to him in two weeks—he would publish it immediately. The scientists delivered their manuscript eleven days later and in late July a small 140-page “Penguin Special” appeared bearing the title
Science in War
. On a plain orange and white cover was a block of stark text that began: “The full use of our scientific resources is essential if we are to win the war. To-day they are being half used.”
As Julian Huxley subsequently noted in a review in
Nature
, the book’s one-month production schedule was an “abbreviated gestation more characteristic of a rodent than of a human being or a book.”
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But Lane’s instincts had been right: the timing could not have been better.
Science in War
reached bookstores and newsstands just as the German air attack on Britain was beginning in earnest. Priced at six pennies, it immediately sold thousands of copies. The book largely restated the case the scientific left had been making for years. Industry and society had failed to put to use the advances of science that could vastly increase production and efficiency. The war now made it more urgent than ever—essential, in fact—for scientific methods to be brought to bear on every aspect of society. Indeed, the strains created by wartime shortages of materials and skilled labor and the disruption of normal business made it all the more impossible to leave decision making to tradition, gut feeling, emotion, or guesswork.
The authors gave numerous examples of how science could be put to work: improving public and occupational health to increase workers’ productivity; using scientific organizational concepts to streamline management and optimize factory workflows; providing better treatments for
wounded soldiers; developing new methods of mass food production such as aquaculture; boosting meat and milk yields with growth hormones. Some of the ideas veered, slightly chillingly, into Orwellian social engineering. Psychological methods could be put to use to produce more effective home front propaganda; communally organized kitchens and feeding stations could eliminate the wasteful duplication of home meal preparation. But mainly the authors emphasized that effective use of science, especially in wartime, could come about only through vigorous government planning and direction. The entrenched attitude of “Victorian Liberalism,” bureaucratic caution, and “
laissez-faire
… Government non-interference” that characterized the civil service was the major obstacle that had to be overcome.
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It was, in short, a call for government to take charge and put science to work in the interests of all, just as Blackett had urged in his 1934 BBC broadcast
The Frustration of Science
. The war now provided the justification that socialist idealism had, as yet, failed to.
SCIENCE IN WAR
was published anonymously, the authors described only as “twenty-five scientists.” Blackett almost certainly wrote the section of the book devoted to operational research. The accomplishments of Eric C. Williams’s operational research group at Bawdsey had strongly reaffirmed Blackett’s conviction that this was a model for a greatly expanded role for scientists in the war. During the 1939 summer air exercises, which were the first complete test of the radar defense system in the hands of RAF operators, Williams’s team had closely observed the work of the “Filter Rooms,” where data from the various radar stations was correlated. The Filter Rooms had the job of reconciling and triangulating sometimes contradictory radar data to determine the height, location, direction, and size of an incoming raid. The scientists on the scene were able to spot bottlenecks, devise procedural changes, and introduce some simple probabilistic rules to help the operators eliminate data that was likely to be erroneous.
A second scientific team was stationed at the fighter group operations rooms where the tracks passed on by the Filter Rooms were plotted and orders issued to the fighter squadrons under their command; the members of this team, too, found themselves focusing as much on organization and procedures as on technical matters directly related to the operation of the radar equipment. One key problem they pinpointed was that tracks were
frequently lost when a raid passed from one section to another, and they recommended giving one control room officer the sole job of maintaining continuity.
The radar researchers at Bawdsey were evacuated to Dundee in Scotland at the start of the war but the operational research teams had already sufficiently impressed the top officers at Fighter Command with their on-the-scene indispensability that Air Chief Marshal Dowding, the commander-in-chief, asked for them to be kept behind. The two groups were combined in a single Operational Research Section (as it would later be renamed, in 1941) under the direction of a Canadian physicist, Harold Larnder, at Stanmore, the Fighter Command headquarters located at one of the highest points of London, about ten miles northwest of the city center. Dowding gave the ORS his unreserved support, sending Larnder appreciative notes every time one of the sporadic Luftwaffe daylight raids that took place through the fall and winter of 1939–1940 was successfully intercepted—almost as if the ORS had accomplished the feat itself. A postwar RAF report concluded, “The high state of efficiency reached by the radar stations by the time of the Battle of Britain was to a large extent due to the fact that, from the time of the Firth of Forth raid in October 1939 onwards, the ORS analysed almost every failure to intercept daylight raids,” and figured out ways to improve performance the next time.
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In January 1940 Tizard suggested to Rowe that an expanded OR section might be created to study questions for the air force not immediately connected with the radar system. “I had hoped that Blackett would be able to devote a lot of time to the work,” Tizard wrote, “he is the ideal man for the job.”
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Nothing immediately came of the suggestion, but the idea of applying science to war at a very fundamental level clearly was much on Blackett’s mind at the time. Zuckerman would later claim with only slight exaggeration that it was the Tots and Quots—and
Science in War
—that brought operational research to the fore: “Operational research was, to a significant extent, the creation of our members.”
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The passage in
Science in War
making the case for giving to scientists a comprehensive role in the development of military strategy and tactics did not use the term “operational research,” but that was what it was unmistakably referring to:
In the actual business of warfare, science has been used up to now almost exclusively on the technical side—for example, to improve weapons, transport,
and communication. It has hardly been used, at least by us, on the more general, and the more vitally important question of strategy and tactics. These, on paper, depend on the special discipline of military science, which, however, has little or no relation to the natural and social sciences. The true scientific departments of the Services concentrate either on detailed technical problems as they arise, or on general technical questions, such as the improvement of the ballistic properties of guns, or of the speed and fighting power of aeroplanes. Yet the use of these weapons and the organization of the men who handle them are at least as much scientific problems as is their production. The waging of warfare represents a series of human operations carried out for more or less definite ends. Seeing whether these operations actually yield the results expected from them should be a matter of direct scientific analysis. The ultimate answer is provided by victory or defeat, but failure to understand the factors contributing to that victory or defeat, and the degree to which each contributes, removes any secure ground for organizing further success. A naïve belief in invincibility may have some value in morale, but, as experience in France has shown, it is a dangerous guide in strategy.
It is possible to reduce many of the factors in military operations to numerical values. Doing so provides problems capable of definite solution. This has, indeed, been done to a certain extent with the tactical problems of naval and air fighting, but it could be extended to many more. The scientific staffs of the Services need to play a much larger part than they seem to do in the formulation and solution of strategical and tactical problems.… The disadvantage until now has been that scientists of sufficient ability have not been made aware enough of the situation to be of any greater use than other amateur strategists. There is, however, little doubt that geographic and economic knowledge, and the assistance of great modern developments in mathematics, could lead, in a minimum of time, to a revolution in strategy far greater than that introduced by Napoleon.
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The anonymity of the book’s authors allowed Zuckerman, Huxley, and J. G. Crowther, a member of the Tots and Quots who was the science correspondent for the
Manchester Guardian
, to shamelessly plug their own book in laudatory reviews they published in
Nature
and the
Guardian
. Whatever the ethics of that, it helped to secure attention in high places. Within weeks of the publication of
Science in War
, urgent questions were being raised in Parliament about the use of scientists in the war.
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