Authors: Stephen Budiansky
From the discussion taking place Jones realized that none of the august personages assembled had quite grasped the matter, so when Churchill at one point called on him to explain a technical point that had arisen, Jones courageously seized the moment. “Would it help, Sir,” he asked, “if I told you the story right from the start?” The prime minister was taken aback for a second but quickly replied, “Well yes it would!” Churchill would later write with unabashed admiration of the young “Mr. Jones … unrolling his chain of circumstantial evidence the like of which for its convincing
fascination was never surpassed even by the tales of Sherlock Holmes or Monsieur Lecoq.”
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The prime minister asked what should be done next; Jones replied that an aircraft should be sent up to try to detect the beams. The prime minister so ordered. The next day the hard evidence was in hand, and work began at once to devise a series of successful jammers and countermeasures to throw off the German system.
Tizard had strongly opposed Jones and Lindemann at the critical cabinet meeting, a fact Churchill never forgot. “If we had listened to Sir Henry Tizard in 1940,” he remarked on one occasion two years later, “we should not have known about the beams.”
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Recognizing the hopelessness of his own position, and the now total eclipse of the influence of the CSSAW by Lindemann, Tizard immediately wrote out his resignation as both chairman of the committee and scientific adviser to the Air Ministry. It had become impossible, he explained, to continue when he no longer had the confidence of the prime minister, and his authority and responsibility was being undercut all the time. Privately he wrote Hill: “The fact is that Winston is trying not only to be Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief, but also, through his pets, to control all the scientific work of the Department.… If this goes on we are bound to lose the war.” Blackett and Hill both resigned from the committee as well; Tizard recommended the CSSAW be disbanded given that all of its effective power had been absorbed by Lindemann.
Dowding wrote to say he was “very resentful” of Tizard’s treatment but understood: “The present witch doctor is firmly established for the time being.”
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SINCE THE WAR BEGAN
Tizard had been thinking about ways to cultivate ties with American scientists. “Bringing American scientists into the war before their government” was how he privately described it. At Tizard’s suggestion Hill was sent to the British embassy in Washington in February 1940 to make contact with the scientists he knew in the United States, and to discuss possible areas of cooperation; officially Hill was an assistant air attaché though the Royal Society continued to pay his salary and the Air Ministry covered only his expenses.
Hill quickly concluded that an exchange of technical information would benefit both sides. It was in British interests to help American defense preparations by sharing their technical knowledge; likewise there was much that
American science and industry could do to help Britain. The main obstacle was British standoffishness, plus the usual obsession with secrecy in the military services. “Our impudent assumption of superiority, and a failure to appreciate the easy terms on which closer American collaboration could be secured, may help to lose us the war,” he complained:
My main thesis is that
we could get much more help in the U.S. and Canada if we were not so damnably sticky and unimaginative
. There is an intense eagerness to help which we do not exploit: (a) because we are such bloody asses, or (b) because we are so sure we can win without anybody’s help.
Hill had returned to London in June and joined Tizard in an appeal that Churchill propose directly to the president of the United States a formal exchange of technical information. Their key recommendation was that no strings be attached: “The essential point of this is that we should offer any information desired,
without condition
, since we realise that America is fundamentally engaged in the same struggle for civilization as we are.”
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Tizard’s campaign to continue and expand these scientific exchanges with the Americans found a natural ally in the new prime minister. Churchill, too, had been hatching all manner of schemes to nudge the United States off its isolationist fence-sitting from the moment he became prime minister. The most visible in the summer of 1940 was his request to the United States for the loan of fifty First World War–era destroyers to help make up Britain’s dire shortfall in escort vessels. The need was real enough, but Churchill was arguably more interested in the symbolic value, and the precedent it would set. As he candidly told the House of Commons, the destroyer deal would ensure that the two countries would henceforth be “somewhat mixed up together.” More cooperation would inevitably follow, all to the good. “I could not stop it if I wished,” he declared. “No one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll on. Let it roll on—full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.”
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Behind the scenes, Churchill was prodding his military chiefs to share intelligence and technical data with their counterparts in the U.S. Army and Navy on a scale unheard of before, to exactly the same end.
So he needed little convincing to approve Tizard’s new proposal to open a direct channel between Britain’s and America’s leading scientists. In August, Tizard had a personal interview with the prime minister and came away with Churchill’s blessing for him to travel to the United States
and offer “all the assistance I can on behalf of the British Government to enable the armed forces of the U.S.A. to reach the highest level of technical efficiency.” Tizard told the other members of what was now officially known as the British Technical and Scientific Mission to the United States that their main object was to create goodwill, not strike deals.
With typically comical penny-pinching, the Treasury then informed Tizard that the government would be unable to pay his out-of-pocket expenses for the trip; regulations permitted paying “outside people” only when “traveling for short periods in this country on official business.” He was booked on a flying boat whose passenger seats had been stripped out and whose captain had never crossed the Atlantic before. Tizard tried to take the discomforts in stride, content with the knowledge that he was embarked on a mission of unprecedented importance. The delegation carried with them a large black-enameled metal trunk, purchased at London’s posh Army & Navy Stores, and it was filled with some of the most priceless fruits of British military research. The prize was something called the cavity magnetron, developed by physicists at the University of Birmingham; it was a revolutionary, highly compact device that generated powerful radar signals at unprecedentedly short wavelengths, centimeters rather than meters. It opened up the possibility of installing radar sets on aircraft, something almost unimaginable with the standard metric-wave radar transmitters, which required correspondingly sized aerials, and amplifiers filled with power supplies and vacuum tubes weighing hundreds of pounds.
Tizard reached Washington on August 22, 1940, and four days later was taken by the British ambassador, Lord Lothian, to see President Roosevelt at the White House. They slipped in the back door to avoid the camera crews and had a cordial meeting; Roosevelt “talked generalities” but Tizard fell under the FDR charm as so many others did. “A most attractive personality,” he noted. The American military officers were a bit warier in their meetings with Tizard but the magnetron proved to be the icebreaker, convincing the Americans that “we were putting all our cards on the table,” as the physicist John Cockcroft, who had joined the mission, put it. “From then on we had no difficulties.” American scientists had been independently working on centimeter-wave radar and had built a 10-watt transmitter using a vacuum tube called the klystron. The cavity magnetron instantly increased the power that could be generated by a factor of 1,000. It was, in the words of the official historian of the U.S. wartime research organization, probably “the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores.”
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The American scientific leadership needed no convincing; they fully shared Tizard’s agenda as their own. That was especially true of Vannevar Bush, who had come to Washington as the war approached with one specific intention in mind: to create a national scientific research organization that could focus America’s considerable civilian scientific talents on military needs, and to ensure that the military used them. To get himself to Washington, Bush had declined an offer of the presidency of MIT, accepting instead the top position at the Carnegie Institution, which the industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie had established in Washington in 1901 to support basic scientific discovery. Bush was an electrical engineer from an old New England family; to colleagues at MIT who came from elsewhere in the country he seemed the quintessential Yankee. His characteristic pose was leaning back in his chair, feet on his desk, “interspersing puffs of smoke from his eternal pipe with bits of dry humor or laconic wisdom, spoken in his Yankee twang,” in the recollections of one colleague.
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The image of the droll Yankee cracker-barrel philosopher was a bit misleading. Bush was a brilliant engineer, having designed and built at MIT the first calculating machine that could solve differential equations. He was also a masterful and instinctive politician. In Washington he seemed to know everyone. When the war began he brought together a group of the country’s recognized scientific leaders to press his plan. They were Frank Jewett, president of Bell Telephone Laboratories, who was also president of the National Academy of Sciences; James Bryant Conant, a chemist and the president of Harvard University; Richard Tolman, a professor of physical chemistry and mathematical physics and dean of graduate studies at Caltech; and Karl T. Compton, the president of MIT. As Bush recounted:
We were agreed that the war was bound to break out into an intense struggle, that America was sure to get into it in one way or another sooner or later, that it would be a highly technical struggle, that we were by no means prepared in this regard, and finally and most importantly, that the military system as it existed, and as it had operated during the First World War, which we all remembered, would never fully produce the new instrumentalities which we would certainly need.
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Bush drafted a plan for an organization he called the National Defense Research Committee. It would come directly under the president of the
United States, rather than the military services, and have its own source of funding. In early June 1940 he made the rounds of official Washington selling the idea. Bush understood enough about the political scene to know that the way to get to the man who really mattered, President Roosevelt, was through his aide Harry Hopkins. Short, intense, chain-smoking, devotedly loyal to his boss, Hopkins was a source of enduring resentment and jealousy among other members of the White House inner circle for his close relationship with the president. He had been with Roosevelt since FDR’s days as governor of New York, had been administrator of the Works Progress Administration early in the New Deal, and Roosevelt valued him for his fearless ability to cut through existing lines of authority and get things done. Roosevelt once explained to his defeated Republican opponent Wendell Willkie why he kept Hopkins around, despite all the ill will he generated: “Someday you may well be sitting here where I am now. And when you are, you’ll be looking at that door over there and knowing that practically everybody who walks through it wants something out of you. You’ll learn what a lonely job this is, and you’ll discover the need for somebody like Harry Hopkins, who asks for nothing except to serve you.”
Bush and Hopkins were almost exact opposites in personality, politics, even looks. But as Bush recalled, “something meshed” when the two men met. On June 12 Hopkins took him in to see the president. Bush had with him his plan for the NDRC “in four short paragraphs in the middle of a sheet of paper.” He left with Roosevelt’s “OK—FDR” at the bottom of the sheet. “And all the wheels began to turn.”
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As chairman of the new organization, Bush met Tizard on September 27 to work out ways to expand the exchange of scientific and technical information between the two countries. Meanwhile in London the charm offensive was continuing as British officials turned over an avalanche of technical information to an astonished delegation of visiting American admirals and generals—a “gold mine,” reported Brigadier General George V. Strong in a cable to General George C. Marshall, the army chief of staff. At one point during the visit Rear Admiral Robert L. Ghormley, who was the assistant chief of naval operations, received a cabled request from the Navy Department in Washington to discreetly probe the British Admiralty for any information about Japanese defenses in the Mandated Islands in the Pacific. Ghormley inquired and received a polite but noncommittal reply from his British counterpart, who said he would see what he could do. That afternoon
a motorcade pulled up, sirens screaming, at the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, messengers escorted by armed guards marched in, and, Ghormley’s astonished aide recalled, “plunked down on my desk the entire portfolio of the Far East from the British Admiralty and asked me to sign a receipt for it.”
Not long after, General Strong tentatively suggested an exchange of cryptologic information about German and Japanese cipher systems. This time it was the turn of the British to be astonished, but within a few months Churchill had personally signed off on the proposal and a team of American code breakers was in Britain to deliver a copy of the Japanese Purple cipher machine they had reproduced, and to receive in return briefings on British progress against the German Enigma. Although continuing British reluctance to share all of the important details about the Enigma with the Americans would become a point of serious friction between the two allies in 1942, this initial exchange of cryptologic secrets was nonetheless an unprecedented step: each side was broaching a wall of previously inviolable secrecy surrounding its most closely guarded intelligence work.
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