Blackett's War (32 page)

Morse had been Compton’s student at Princeton, which he had chosen for graduate school knowing little more about the place than the fact that Princeton had offered him a $700 scholarship, versus Harvard’s offer of $450. Under Compton he had done an experimental study involving electrical discharges in gases. He spent months blowing glass and building electrical devices and assembling a mercury vapor vacuum pump. Earlier, as an undergraduate at the Case engineering school in Cleveland, he had helped pay his way when his family ran short of money by taking a year off and working as a partner in a radio store where the owners assembled much of the equipment themselves. But his experiences in grad school convinced him that he was not a natural experimentalist, and he found himself increasingly drawn to the theoretical side of physics.
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At MIT it dawned on him that he wasn’t a theoretician either, at least not the kind who would ever win a Nobel Prize. “It was clear to me,” he later wrote, “that I was no Einstein.” (“This realization,” he added, “came slowly enough to cushion disappointment.”) But Morse was becoming just the kind of generalist that Compton thought made physicists so useful. Morse
recognized that his own skill was “not the sort of deep-thinking ability that wins prizes and fame,” he admitted, but rather the ability to look across many areas, find the connections, the promising leads, and see how the insights in one field could be applied to another. He enjoyed teaching, writing textbooks, guiding graduate students, working on an interesting problem for a few weeks, then moving on to something new. “Breadth rather than depth was best for me,” he concluded. Morse’s interest in acoustics had come about that way, by noticing that the mathematical techniques of quantum mechanics could address interesting questions in sound propagation.
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His years at MIT in the 1930s, he later thought, were “a happy untroubled time of a sort that has never since returned.” He was earning $7,500 a year by 1939 from his salary as a full professor plus consulting fees and textbook royalties; he was settled in a happy marriage, with a home in the comfortable and affluent Boston suburb of Belmont that his in-laws helped the couple buy, and his wife had just given birth to their first child, a daughter; he had time to indulge his restless and eclectic hobbies—mountain climbing, wood turning, a voracious appetite for reading, usually five books a week, history, archaeology, and biography mostly.

Much like Blackett, though, he was at least at times struck by the disconcerting gap between scientific progress and the hardships suffered in society at large. Struggling in the Depression back in Cleveland, his mother took in boarders; his father was out of work and ended up taking a job with the WPA, planning a building that never got built. A broken and discouraged man, he aged rapidly and died in 1939. “At MIT I was helping to discover new things,” Morse wrote of one of his moments of self-doubt, “while the country was not able to use the ample resources and technology it already had to feed and house its people.” He had been apolitical like many of his fellow scientists, believing there was little he could do to influence public events. He was also a pacifist. Like many of his British counterparts, he was shaken out of both beliefs by the rise of Nazi Germany. He reached two conclusions. One was that he would contribute whatever he could to the war effort. His corollary was that if scientists were to play a role, it was essential that “scientific work for the war effort should not be entirely controlled by the military and that scientists must have a part in deciding, at the highest levels, what direction their work would take.”
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Morse spent the summer of 1941 shuttling between Cambridge, Cape Cod, and various navy laboratories developing a noise-making device that could be towed behind a ship to counter acoustically triggered mines the
Germans were reportedly developing. His design, two hollow parallel steel pipes that generated a deafening cavitation noise—the sound produced by water pulling away then smacking back against an underwater surface—won the record for the loudest sound per weight of any of the devices tested. But by the end of 1941 “some of the glamour had left the project for me,” Morse found:

Morse shared his frustrations with Tate, an old friend. Tate listened sympathetically but said little. Tate’s tight lips were themselves a symptom of the deeper problem, Morse realized. The navy fundamentally distrusted sharing its secrets with civilians, and Tate was having to walk an extremely fine line between trying to expand the role of the scientists and not alarming naval officers that he was poking into areas where he had no authority; that meant he had to keep his mouth shut far more often than he otherwise would have liked to.

TATE WAS
in fact quietly thinking about Morse’s complaint. A few months later, in mid-March 1942—not long after Morse had spotted the crippled tanker from the Newport News ferry—Tate asked him to pay a call on Captain Wilder D. Baker at the navy’s First Naval District headquarters in Boston. Baker’s office was in the office building at North Station, the terminal of the Boston & Maine Railroad across the Charles River from the Charlestown Navy Yard. Morse was favorably impressed with the navy captain the moment he walked in the door: “steel-gray eyes, gray hair, a look of decisiveness.”

Baker was in many ways a completely conventional and unremarkable career navy man. He had a reputation as a demanding, stern, but fair and
direct commander; when he promised to do something, he did it. His father had been a newspaperman in Topeka, Kansas; the family later moved to Bay City, Michigan, and on graduation from high school he had applied for admission to the Naval Academy. He graduated in the middle of his class at Annapolis: his entry in the 1914
Lucky Bag
, the academy yearbook, has a joking allusion to his being more interested in sleeping than studying, as well as some good-natured ribbing about his inability to keep step with the drum on parade and his popularity with girls (“yes, the girls
fight
for him”). His other off-duty interests were almost stereotypically conventional. He was an avidly enthusiastic—though, his son recalled, “terrible”—golfer; he went shooting and fishing. His career had followed the standard progression of promotion through increasingly responsible sea commands. As a lieutenant in the 1920s he commanded the submarines
S-11
and
S-13;
he was a lieutenant commander on the battleship
Wyoming
in the 1930s; and on October 1, 1941, he was promoted to captain and given the command of Destroyer Squadron 31 in the Atlantic. That last sea command had given him at least one very direct encounter with U-boat warfare: the
Reuben James
was one of the nine ships in his squadron when she was torpedoed later that month.

There were a few byways in his career, though, that hinted of a man with broader experiences and outlooks. In 1934 and 1935 he was assigned as a naval attaché in London, his real job being to observe the Italian-Ethiopian war. And in 1938 he was sent by the navy to New Haven, Connecticut, to head naval science instruction for Yale’s ROTC program. “He was only a commander, just coming off sea duty, and it was a challenge for him” to be thrust into such an academic environment, his son said. “But he treasured those two years and the friendships he formed there more than any in his life.” He became close friends with a number of Yale’s leading faculty and administrators.
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On February 7, 1942, Baker took over the command of the newly established Anti-Submarine Warfare Unit of the Atlantic Fleet.
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It was, remarkably, the U.S. Navy’s first attempt at coordinating and supervising antisubmarine training and tactical doctrine. Baker’s first step was to spend about a month in England seeing what he could learn from the British experience fighting the U-boats. One of the people he met there was Patrick Blackett, who two months earlier had become chief advisor on operational research to the Board of Admiralty.

———

BLACKETT’S MOVE
to the Admiralty was a belated recognition by the British navy of the revolution in antisubmarine warfare that Blackett and his group had already been effecting at Coastal Command. It had come about almost completely as a result of his “Scientists at the Operational Level” paper, which he had presented in September 1941 to an Admiralty scientific advisory panel chaired by the physicist E. V. Appleton. The panel afterward recommended that Blackett be brought in to do for the navy as a whole what he had done already for Coastal Command. At last fully awakened to the importance of operational research, the Admiralty on December 10, 1941, created the new position and Blackett moved into his new office in Room 74 of the Old Admiralty Building.

As usual, it was a bureaucratic improvisation. Blackett was officially an adviser to the board while also reporting to the controller of the Admiralty and the vice chief of the Naval Staff; the other scientists working with him were attached to other parts of the navy, such as the gunnery, antisubmarine warfare, and signals divisions; the entire operations research group was meanwhile, and simultaneously, a subdepartment of the navy’s Scientific Research and Experiment Department. The navy was not willing to allow him more than three senior scientists plus a few junior scientists, a much smaller group than he had at Coastal Command, and an almost comically lengthy exchange of minutes went on for months wrangling over the details of his salary and concerns over the bureaucratic precedent that would be set were he to receive the same pay as a director of a much larger research establishment. It was finally agreed that he would receive a “special allowance” of £200 in addition to his salary of £1,000, and that the University of Manchester would make up an additional £500 of his pay.
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Blackett’s arguments and his “Scientists at the Operational Level” paper impressed Baker as they had the British Admiralty. Baker returned to Boston in March 1942 with a copy of Blackett’s now increasingly famous manifesto, which he quoted from at length in a memorandum proposing that the U.S. Navy follow the British example and assemble a team of eminent scientists to undertake a thorough examination of operational tactics in the antisubmarine war. Writing to Rear Admiral J. A. Furer, the U.S. Navy’s coordinator of research and development, on March 16, Baker argued that while any experienced officer could assess the results of a single attack, developing consistently effective methods to counter the U-boats required building up a body of accurate records and statistics—and having men who were trained to analyze those results and sift them for patterns and trends.
“I do not suppose that any really good naval officer is qualified for mathematical or scientific analysis (he would not be a good naval officer if he were),” Baker wrote, “and that therefore the man selected to organize and run this group had better be left to do only that.”
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There was little doubt that Baker had been completely sold on Blackett’s vision of what operational research was, and what it could do for the navy. In his memorandum to Furer—apparently written just before his first meeting with Morse—he almost directly echoed Blackett’s words:

At their first meeting, Baker and Morse warily sized each other up. They began by talking in generalities about the work each was doing. Baker apparently decided that Morse was all right, because after a few minutes he abruptly shifted gears and explained what he was really after. It was, Morse later remembered, by far the longest speech he would ever hear the normally terse navy man deliver. It did not take Morse long to jump at the offer. It was also apparent to him that Baker was taking a huge personal risk. Though for convenience the scientists would be paid through the NDRC and Columbia University under an existing navy contract, operationally they would be part of Baker’s unit, which was a distinct departure for the navy. As Morse recalled:

As in Britain, many physicists in America had already been snapped up to work on radar—principally at MIT’s new Radiation Laboratory—
and on the preliminary research on the atomic bomb already under way at Columbia, Chicago, and Berkeley. “It is emphasized that it is quite difficult to obtain men of the proper qualifications who are also cleared, since such men are invariably at present at work on other defense jobs,” Morse reported a few weeks later. At Tate’s suggestion, Morse hired his former student William Shockley, now a researcher at Bell Labs, as his assistant supervisor. Morse also had the inspired thought of recruiting insurance actuaries, who were all mathematicians thoroughly versed in probability theory and experienced in applying it to practical questions. By July he had a staff of 13 in place: inevitably they were dubbed “Baker’s Dozen.” By the following year the group would grow to 44 with a makeup as eclectic as that of Blackett’s Circus: 6 mathematicians, 14 actuaries, 18 physicists, 3 chemists, 2 biologists, and an architect. The sign on their door at the navy’s Boston office identified them only as “Columbia Group M” (Morse said he thought the “M” might stand for Morse, but was never sure).
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That name was just a cover, however, used for the Columbia contract and unclassified paperwork. Internally, they had now an official designation that declared their mission to the rest of the navy loud and clear. The American scientists decided to call their new discipline “operations research,” slightly shortening the preferred British term “operational research,” and Morse’s group was dubbed the Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Research Group, ASWORG.