Blackett's War (28 page)

The physical chemist E. C. Baughan, who joined Coastal Command ORS later that year after returning from Princeton (where he had been a visiting professor when the war broke out) catalogued the first members of Blackett’s staff there, and if there were no lawyers or chess players, they were indeed an eclectic bunch: “Three physicists (and one physical chemist), three communications experts (one Australian), four mathematicians, two astronomers (both Canadian), and about eight physiologists and biologists, including an expert on the sex life of the oyster.” He added: “It was not clear which background was the best.” A subsequent list would have included a classical archaeologist, several economists and statisticians, and one botanist. John C. Kendrew, who would win the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1962, was an early member of the group; C. H. Waddington joined the following year and served as its head from 1944 to mid-1945. Other famous members of the Coastal Command group would include the mathematician J. H. C. Whitehead and the geneticist Cecil Gordon.

Leonard Bayliss thought that the large number of physiologists and biologists in the operational research sections was not a coincidence. It was true that most physicists had already been siphoned up for radar work (and some would later be drawn into the Manhattan Project), which partly explained the predominance of scientists from other fields in the operational research sections. But Bayliss thought “biologists were more accustomed to making the best of very imperfect and inadequate data, and drawing some sort of conclusions from them; physicists would be more likely to throw in their hands until the apparatus was improved and adequate data was provided.” Baughan recalled one of the mathematicians in the group sarcastically proposing a definition of operational research as “an Experimental Science where a number is equal to its square root.” It certainly required a tolerance for uncertainty and approximation. But Baughan noted that many of the most dramatic results the scientists produced were based on calculations that employed extremely rough estimates of the underlying data.
²⁰

Scientists were by nature mavericks when it came to authority, and a willingness to plunge through accepted dogma and maintain independence was a part of the job that came naturally to most. Andrew Huxley remembered Blackett advising him that it was better not to accept a commission as
an officer since “the great advantage of being a civilian was that you could answer back to the senior officers.”
²¹
As T. E. Easterfield, a New Zealander fresh out of Cambridge with a Ph.D. in pure mathematics who joined the Coastal Command ORS in 1942, recalled, being a civilian also meant that the scientists could go around and talk to NCOs and officers alike on an informal basis, and get the real story. Indeed, establishing good working relations throughout the command was an essential part of getting anything done, the scientists quickly discovered. Easterfield recalled that Harold Larnder, who took over as director of Coastal Command ORS in 1943, had a “marvelous gift for hob-nobbing with senior officers, picking up what was in the air, and spotting problems before they were formulated by the officers themselves.” Easterfield added: “We lived at the HQ of the Coastal Command, ate in the same mess, and drank in the same bar. For some people (not me), the latter provided a very big part of the contact.” Easterfield recalled one of his colleagues declaring, “Ninety percent of operational research is beer!”
²²

RITCHIE CALDER,
the science correspondent for the
Daily Herald
, was a member of the Tots and Quots and had gotten to know many of the operational research scientists. In the 1940s it was still possible to publish a newspaper that appealed to a large working-class readership with serious articles about left-wing politics, literature, economics, and science; the
Daily Herald
had been a hard-left antiwar voice in the First World War, had supported the Russian Revolution, and was later owned by the Trades Union Congress. George Lansbury, the pacifist Labour Party leader of the 1930s, was its editor during and after the First World War; Siegfried Sassoon was literary editor. (In the 1960s the paper would be bought by Rupert Murdoch, renamed
The Sun
, and continue its mass appeal as a tabloid best known for featuring on page 3 each day a photograph of an attractive and stark-naked young woman.)

One day in 1941 Calder dropped in on Cecil Gordon, a geneticist he knew at the University of Aberdeen. Gordon was busy counting the hairs on the antennae of fruit flies searching for mutations he had been hoping to induce. The next time Calder heard of him, Gordon was at Coastal Command working out the mathematics of aircraft flying and maintenance schedules. Calder was struck by the same scientific detachment he brought to both tasks. “Gordon,” he said, “treated Costal Command as though it were a colony of his pet
drosophila
.”
²³

Keeping a certain emotional distance from one’s subject was scientific habit; when the subject was the lives and deaths of thousands of men it was also probably a necessity. By 1941, the war at sea was already driving the men who knew its cruel realities firsthand to the breaking point. The monotony and constant strain of station keeping in a convoy of merchant ships stretched out in ordered lines across miles of ocean was relieved only by the terror of a torpedo exploding without warning in their midst when a U-boat broke through the always overstretched escort screen. Many of the crewmen were raw, inexperienced, and not infrequently terrified. They were quickly disabused of any ideas they might have had about the romance of life at sea; merchant ships had none of the spit and polish and ritual of the regular navy that at least gave a pretense of esprit de corps and a glimmer of a nobler age. An American seaman fresh out of merchant marine school remembered reporting for his first watch at sea. Approaching the chief mate on the bridge he saluted briskly and barked out, “Relieving the watch, Sir!” That was what he had been taught to do at school. The chief mate stared at him dumbfounded for a moment before muttering, “Oh my, how lovely.”
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The more experienced hands offered some cynical comfort to their new messmates about what they could do to increase their odds of surviving a U-boat attack. On a ship carrying a heavy cargo like iron ore or steel plate, you slept on deck because the ship would sink like a rock if it were torpedoed and you had only seconds to scramble overboard. On a ship carrying a lighter load you slept belowdecks but left your clothes on and the door open to give yourself a chance of getting out quickly. If you were aboard a tanker, or a freighter loaded with ammunition, you got undressed, shut the door, and got a good night’s sleep because you didn’t have a prayer anyway if the ship were hit.

Worse was what frequently happened to the survivors who
did
manage to get out of their sinking ship in time. It did not take long to learn that stopping even briefly to try to pick up survivors just made another ship in the convoy a sitting duck; there was nothing to do but steam on. Some convoys had a rescue ship that followed astern to retrieve survivors but many did not, and in any case the Germans seemed to be deliberately targeting them; so many were torpedoed by 1942 that there were only enough available to accompany one convoy in four. The image of passing literally within feet of helpless men left to die in the dark and freezing waters of the North Atlantic was a horror few would forget. “I saw it first in HMS
Alaunia
in 1940,” wrote Hal Lawrence, a sailor in the Canadian navy:

The small corvettes Churchill had ordered hastily into construction to fill the gaping shortage of escort vessels were, in his own words, “cheap and nasty.” They weren’t so cheap, but no one disputed the other part of Churchill’s description. A scant 200 feet long, they carried a single 4-inch gun on the bow and racks of depth charges in the open stern. The bridge was open to the elements, too, save for a small enclosed wheelhouse and another boxlike cabin holding the asdic set. The Royal Navy’s theory was that fresh air kept the watch awake and on their toes and that an enclosed bridge hindered visibility. In fact, in any bad weather standing watch was “sheer unmitigated hell,” said one young Canadian officer. The ships were originally planned for a complement of 29 officers and men but that was increased to 47 and then 67, with the result that 55 enlisted men shared two 20-by-14-foot compartments, two toilets, one urinal, and three wash basins. There was no forced ventilation system and the first fifty ships that were built had no insulation either, which caused the walls to sweat with heavy condensation, causing epidemics of pneumonia and TB among their crews. In rough weather water simply slammed down through the standing ventilator pipes, flooding the mess decks and wardroom and washing up a tide of spilled food, sodden clothes, and loose gear in chaotic piles.
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The food was abominable. The only passage from the small galley, at the rear of the superstructure, to the bridge and the forward crew quarters was across an open well deck which was frequently swept by heavy seas, which meant meals arrived cold, if they arrived at all. The galley’s small refrigerator could hold only five days’ worth of fresh meat and vegetables, after which the menu settled into an invariable and dreary procession of canned sausages, canned corned beef, canned stew, hard biscuits, and tea. (The canned stew came in an ornate container labeled
OLD MOTHER JAMESON’S FARM HOUSE DINNER
. “I must remember
never
to go to dinner at Mrs. Jameson’s,” one officer sardonically remarked.)

To add insult to injury, the corvettes had all been given the names of
flowers: HMS
Gladiolus
, HMS
Periwinkle
, HMS
Buttercup
 … It almost seemed like a bad joke. The sharpest evocation of life aboard one of these small Atlantic escort vessels is found in the lightly fictionalized novel
The Cruel Sea
, by Nicholas Monsarrat, a journalist who joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserves in response to a call at the start of the war for gentlemen yachtsmen. In one vivid passage he captured the sheer unseaworthy ugliness of the Flower-class corvette his fictional alter ego joins as a new RNVR sublieutenant: “Broad, chunky, and graceless … not much more than a floating platform for depth charges … She would be a natural bastard in any kind of seaway, and in a full Atlantic gale she would be thrown about like a chip of wood.” The ships barely made 16 knots, slower than a surfaced U-boat. On a shakedown cruise, running down to the Isle of Arran in a very moderate sea her first time out of harbor, Monsarrat’s fictional HMS
Compass Rose
achieved a mind-boggling 40-degree roll.
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But what Monsarrat evokes most of all is the endless complications of turning tactical theory into anything approaching successful practice where human beings, with all of their vanities and frailties and endless personal crises, are involved—the entire sphere of warfare that lay beyond the realm of equations and analysis and rationality of Blackett, Gordon, and the other operational scientists. Early on, Monsarrat’s Sublieutenant Lockhart realizes that everything he has read and learned and taken to heart about naval tradition, duty, procedures, and tactics is being “destroyed and poisoned” by the bastard of a lieutenant he is stuck with. The lieutenant is a bully and a shirker and an opportunist who sloughs off every responsibility he can to the junior officers and covers up for his incompetence with hectoring fault finding. The crew, for its part, is mostly able and willing but beset with the sad domestic dramas of the poor; one sailor goes AWOL for seventeen days and refuses to explain until the captain sympathetically coaxes his story out of him: a pal in his North London neighborhood had sent him a letter telling him all about his wife’s increasingly notorious goings-on with a commercial traveler in his absence.
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As in his real life, Monsarrat’s character is by the end of the war a captain in command of a destroyer and has had several daring successes in epic depth charge battles with U-boats. But even these victories seem almost to defy the larger truth of the story—that war, up close, is mostly chaos and chance and fear. Many of the Flower-class corvettes were manned by inexperienced crews of the Royal Canadian Navy, which like the British navy had disregarded the submarine threat and been woefully unprepared for
escort duty. In all, Canadian shipyards would build 130 escort vessels in the course of the war; by May 1941 the RCN had enough ships available to take over full responsibility for escorting convoys from Newfoundland to a line running through 35° west longitude, where the ships would be turned over to British escorts while the Canadians would take charge of a westbound convoy for the return voyage.

The Canadian vessels, though, did not even have the advantage of modifications the Royal Navy had since made that mitigated some of the worst flaws of the original design. The Canadian crews were almost all ex–merchant mariners and hastily recruited reservists; many of the latter came from Canada’s prairie provinces and literally had never seen the ocean before. “We were all badly trained, scared stiff, and most of the time wished to God we had joined the air force,” said one.
²⁹

THERE WAS AN EERIE SYMMETRY
between hunter and hunted. The Type VII Atlantic U-boats were almost exactly the same length as the corvettes that sought to find and destroy them, and carried a crew of almost identical size, living in equally deplorable conditions. It would fall to a German novelist, Lothar-Günther Buchheim, to render the most vividly impressionistic sense of life on the U-boats, just as Monsarrat had on the other side. Buchheim was a journalist, too; in 1940 he had volunteered for the Kriegsmarine and been assigned as a war correspondent in the navy’s propaganda unit. The following year he was ordered to sail with
U-96
on her seventh patrol and produce a stirring story, with photographs, of the brave men of the U-boat arm in action. Thirty years later he wrote what he intended to be a far more honest and gritty account in his autobiographical novel
Das Boot
. The book opens in 1941 and already the experienced U-boat men are prematurely gray and cracking up. They have all, at least once, returned limping into port with boats whose continued seaworthiness seemed to defy the laws of physics—“upper deck demolished by aircraft bombs, conning tower rammed in, stoved-in bow, cracked pressure hull.” But,