Blackett's War (21 page)

Little substantive progress had been made since. The navy insisted that it needed its own radar research laboratory to address the special problems of operating and maintaining the equipment at sea, and had engaged in a lengthy bureaucratic fight with Watson-Watt, who wanted all radar research centralized at the air force facility he directed at Bawdsey. The navy won, but funding remained pathetic and by the outbreak of war only two operational warships, the cruiser
Sheffield
and the battleship
Rodney
, were equipped with radar (known at the time in Britain by the cover name “radio direction finding,” RDF for short). Those first shipborne units were designed to scan the skies for enemy aircraft. But Churchill was well aware that radar also offered the only hope of detecting surfaced submarines at night. In his first week on the job at the start of September 1939, he confronted Rear Admiral
Bruce Austin Fraser, the third sea lord and controller of the navy, responsible for naval construction, about the matter. “The fitting of R.D.F. in HM ships, especially those engaged in the U-boat fighting, is of high urgency,” Churchill wrote. “Do you know about this? If not, see Professor Tizard, and put him in contact with Admiral Somerville.”
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The first anti–surface vessel, or ASV, radars would begin arriving in spring 1941. Installed on the corvettes and other escort vessels, they made an immediate impact on the battle—especially given the tactical importance that night surfaced attacks assumed in Dönitz’s plans.

Churchill also told Fraser, in a September 28 minute headed “Urgent,” to assist the RAF with some experiments it wanted to begin to see if airplanes could carry and drop depth charges. The idea apparently had not occurred to anyone in the navy, but Churchill had no time for turf battles: “Will you kindly make available for Commander Anderson RAF sometime tomorrow a depth-charge case, empty, together with a statement of the weight with which it should be filled, so that the experiments can be made.… Commander Anderson will call for it, and take it to his Squadron.”
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The real problems with bringing science into the war effort went far deeper than anything that one energetic first lord, and his tame scientist, could possibly accomplish by themselves even on their good days. The Admiralty, and the anti-U-boat effort in particular, simply lacked either the organization or the institutional culture to make use of scientific expertise in any systematic fashion. The radar program was about the only thing on the scientific front that
was
moving relatively quickly. In the first week of the war the Admiralty Signal Establishment enrolled 200 physicists and electrical engineers from the Central Register list, bypassing the usual civil service procedures and arranging for security clearances in as little as twenty-four hours. But with that sole exception, the movement of scientists into the military bureaucracies even with the start of the war was “a slow and haphazard business,” noted Tizard’s biographer Ronald Clark.
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Some of the fault lay in simple chaos; much lay in the fact that the conventional lines of military authority made no provision for civilian scientists to do anything more than offer advice, even about the direction and organization of scientific research within the services. The Tizard Committee had relied almost entirely on unofficial string pulling to get its job done. Lacking the power to order anyone in the Air Ministry to do anything, Tizard had shepherded the radar program over the previous four years with a combination of personal political connections, friendships with top RAF
officers, and scientific contacts he, Blackett, and Hill had with colleagues in the air force’s various research establishments. But such informal arrangements were completely unequal to mobilizing an army of scientific workers to fight a war.

Meanwhile, the old prejudices against scientists, not to mention intellectuals in general, ran deep through the services; as did the more fundamental impatience toward civilians who presumed to tell military men how to fight their war for them. Most officers still saw no good reason why they should hire scientists, or listen to them once they had been hired. The lingering class snobbery that equated the sciences or the possession of professional expertise with “trade” even played a part.

That was particularly evident in the British intelligence services, which had a deeply ingrained culture of genteel amateurism. The Government Code and Cypher School, responsible for breaking enemy code systems, was a sort of old boy network of its own, dominated by Cambridge and Oxford art historians, professors of medieval German, lecturers in ancient Greek, and other distinctly nonscientific types. The first mathematician to be hired by GC&CS, Peter Twinn, joined the staff of the code-breaking unit only in 1938; he was told later that there had been grave doubts about hiring a mathematician at all, as they were regarded as “strange fellows notoriously impractical.” If having someone with scientific training “were regretfully to be accepted as an unavoidable necessity,” as Twinn humorously described the prevailing attitude, the general thought was “it might not be better to look for a physicist on the grounds that they might be expected to have at least some appreciation of the real world.”
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Of the twenty-one academics brought in to GC&CS during the first few weeks of the war, only three were mathematicians. All of the rest were from the humanities, and came through the usual channels; they had, in the words of GC&CS’s head, Alastair Denniston, been recruited by “men now in senior positions” at Oxford and Cambridge who “had worked in our ranks during 1914–1918.”
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A few things had changed in the rest of the world since then. Not least was the advent of machine-generated ciphers like the Enigma, which by the time the job was done would demand the services of literally thousands of engineers, scientists, and mathematicians to crack.

With the coming of war, GC&CS had established itself at another of those bizarre nineteenth-century manor houses built in a cacophony of architectural styles, Bletchley Park, located about fifty miles northwest of London. A tiny group under a brilliant, cantankerous, and very old-school
cryptographer named Alfred Dillwyn Knox, known as “Dilly,” had made some small progress on the Enigma problem before the war, but had been largely stymied. Their first major break came from an eleventh-hour handoff of a treasure trove of discoveries made by three young code breakers—all mathematicians—in the Polish army’s cipher bureau, the Biuro Szyfrow, who just weeks before the Nazi invasion summoned their British counterparts to Warsaw to reveal what they had managed to do. Among other prodigies, they had pulled off the mind-boggling analytic feat of reconstructing, sight unseen, the internal wiring of the machine’s scrambler rotors. The mathematics required was something called permutation theory, and it was not for the mathematically faint of heart. Using these methods the Poles had been able to read German army Enigma messages on a regular basis for several extended periods going back to 1933. They had even constructed a primitive mechanical computer to help unlock each day’s changing setting of the Enigma rotors and plugs.

The Poles had made some theoretical progress on the much more difficult naval Enigma, but had essentially given it up in the face of the extreme difficulties that arose from the navy’s use of printed code lists to choose and encode the “indicator” groups at the start of each message that specified the rotor setting. At Bletchley, even after the Poles had turned over the fruits of their research, the naval Enigma problem was viewed as simply impossible—literally not worth wasting any time or effort on. Alan Turing, one of the three mathematicians who arrived at Bletchley in September 1939, and who would later achieve renown for laying the mathematical and logical groundwork of the modern digital computer, began working on the naval Enigma, he admitted later, only “because no one else was doing anything about it and I could have it to myself.”
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Even when the British code breakers did produce results tackling other enemy code systems during the first year of the war, they had a hard time getting anyone in the military to pay attention. The Admiralty was in many ways the worst. Harry Hinsley, a young Cambridge student, arrived at Bletchley in October 1939. By December he was, in his definitely ironic words, “the leading expert outside Germany on the wireless organization of the German Navy.” It was a claim, he quickly added, that did “not amount to much,” given how little work was being done. Every once in a while Hinsley would crank the handle on a telephone that linked him to the Admiralty and report to an ostentatiously bored naval officer on the other end of the wire something he had discovered. By the spring, the Bletchley code breakers
had managed to read some paper-and-pencil ciphers the German navy used for its more routine communications. In the first week of April 1940 Christopher Morris, a fellow of King’s College who had joined the German navy group, deciphered a message in the German merchant navy code. It ordered ships heading for Bergen to report their positions at stated intervals to the War Office in Berlin. Morris dutifully reported this intriguing finding, and was told he obviously did not know what he was talking about, as ships report to
naval
headquarters, not army headquarters.
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The subsequent explanation was simple and appalling. They were troopships, and the Admiralty had just missed receiving the only warning it would have that Hitler was about to invade Norway.

ANYONE WHO LIVES THROUGH
a war knows that its moments of intense excitement are no match for the endless stretches of monumental boredom. The boredom of the opening months of the war in Britain, however, seemed to be of a different class altogether: vast, encompassing, incomprehensible. The American war correspondents who had flocked to Europe to cover all the excitement promptly dubbed it the “phony war,” or the “Bore War.” France, her entire military plans and strategy built upon the defensive might of the Maginot Line, did nothing and waited. The Luftwaffe bombers expected to rain poison gas upon London in the opening moments failed to appear, night after night. One in five Britons, a Gallup poll reported a few months into the war, had been injured on the blacked-out streets at night, stumbling on sidewalks, hit by cars, colliding with other pedestrians. A stifling heat wave that hit London in September gave way to a cold gray fall and then to the bitterest winter in forty-five years. Coal was in short supply, water pipes burst, trains stalled in snowdrifts, the Thames froze to solid ice. Leonard Woolf compared the feeling of living in wartime Britain to “endlessly waiting in a dirty, grey railway station waiting-room, a cosmic railway station waiting-room, with nothing to do but wait endlessly for the next catastrophe.”
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The one front where things were happening through the winter and spring of 1940 offered up regular catastrophes, but they remained hidden from most Britons by the mists and waves of the dark seas where Churchill’s war of “groping and drowning” took its steady toll. Despite an epidemic of torpedo malfunctions that caused the weapons to explode prematurely or not at all, the U-boats had already taken a voracious bite out of Britain’s
ocean lifeline. The torpedo failures were traced to defects in the design of the magnetic pistol that was supposed to trigger the warhead when it passed under the hull of its target. It turned out that it had been tested a total of two times before the war, and that variations in the earth’s magnetic field plus the rigors of wartime conditions (including diving far deeper than the U-boats had been permitted to do during training) upset the trigger’s delicate mechanism. An investigation demanded by Dönitz also found that the torpedoes tended to run too deep, a fact it turned out the designers were aware of but thought would not matter given the magnetic triggering system. “The result is staggering,” Dönitz wrote in his war diary. “I do not believe that ever in the history of war men have been sent against the enemy with such useless weapons.” He estimated that nearly half of the unsuccessful torpedo shots had been due to failures in the magnetic pistols. “In practice the boats are unarmed,” he wrote in another moment of exasperation. “Of 22 shots fired in the last few days at least 9 have been premature detonations which have in turn caused other torpedoes fired at the same time to explode prematurely or miss.”
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Even with the failures, which Dönitz calculated had robbed him of a third of a million tons of British shipping, his U-boats had sunk nearly a million tons by the time they were withdrawn for the Norway invasion. That was with an average of only six of the oceangoing U-boats at sea each day for the first six months of the war. Being forced to institute convoys had alone resulted in a reduction of 25 percent in British imports. Even with the loss of seventeen U-boats to a variety of causes during that time, the picture for the future was distinctly encouraging to BdU. At the steeply accelerating rates of new construction currently planned, there would be ten times as many U-boats available to bring to the war against British trade by the spring of 1942.
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