Blackett's War (14 page)

Even after the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933,
The Times
quickly reassured the British public that all the “shouting and exaggeration” in Germany was “sheer revolutionary exuberance.” So, too, did the British government, which went so far as to discredit the reports of its own diplomats throughout the spring of 1933 about the Nazi outrages taking place—attacks on synagogues, bonfires of books written by Jews, daily public beatings, clubbings, and even murders by Nazi storm troopers on the streets of Berlin—and sent conciliatory messages assuring the German government that no one in Britain believed such obviously exaggerated tales.
⁴

Not even Hitler’s subsequent open breach of the Versailles treaty shook the widespread belief that Britain needed to show the way to peace through its own example of disarmament. There was a lack of imagination in the British assumption that Germany must be like Britain in abhorring war. There was also a peculiarly British kind of self-admiration among the country’s professional diplomats, but also among the larger body politic, that looked upon being calm and reasonable as the right way to handle unpleasantness. Hysteria was un-British; the French, with their emotional hatred for the Boche, were obviously overreacting to developments in Germany. The British foreign secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, denounced “those people” who take “morbid delight in alarms and excursions”; Lord Lothian (who would be Britain’s charming and down-to-earth ambassador in Washington during Britain’s dark days in 1940) declared it “unpatriotic” for Britons to doubt Hitler’s “sincerity” in wanting peace.
⁵

The British left was instinctively antifascist but even its antifascism was no match for its pacifism, when it came to responding to Hitler’s military buildup. “We on our side are for total disarmament because we are realists,” the Labour leader Clement Attlee asserted. When the government proposed an extremely modest increase of the Royal Air Force, by three squadrons, Attlee replied, “The secretary of state for air is very carefully laying the foundation for future wars.” In June 1935 the League of Nations Union announced the results of a nationwide survey. Eleven million Britons had been asked to subscribe to a “Peace Ballot” calling for disarmament, including the entire abolition of military air forces. More than 92 percent agreed.
⁶

Churchill laid at least some of the blame for the embrace in Britain of such “defeatist doctrines” upon “the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals.”
⁷
He was right. It was an enduring peculiarity of memories of the Great War that they reversed the usual process of nostalgic amnesia; the passage of time had made the war more terrible, not less. The years 1929 and 1930 brought, in the words of Robert Wohl, a spate of “pessimistic, cynical, and sometimes very bitter and brutal” books and plays about the war.
⁸
The men in
All Quiet on the Western Front
(which sold 250,000 copies in its English translation the first year),
Good-bye to All That
(which made Robert Graves a small fortune),
Journey’s End
(which became the smash hit of the London stage in 1929, running 594 performances at the Savoy), and dozens of similar works that came out that year bore no relation to conventional war heroes
of literature. They die ridiculous, meaningless, gruesome deaths assaulting pointless objectives; honorable officers anesthetize themselves in rivers of alcohol; patriotism and heroism exist only to evoke horse laughs; even courage has no rational meaning since men are as likely to be killed no matter what they do.

A few perceptive critics noted that all of these portrayals of war were strongly shaped by a superimposed romantic narrative that elevated the experience of the individual soldier to the exclusion of any larger understanding of how or even why the war was fought. Though they purported to offer an unvarnished account of the “real war” in all its gritty horror and eschewing the sentimentality of clichés about valor and heroism, they were just as chockful of their own kinds of sentimentality and clichés of memory. (“It would be impossible to count the number of times,” notes the critic Paul Fussell, that “the Valley of the Shadow of Death” and “the Slough of Despond” are invoked by these authors to describe the morasses of mud, ice, and bodies in the trenches.) That the Allies had won a series of smashing victories in the summer and autumn of 1918, in often brilliantly planned and commanded operations, or even the fact that the Allies had won the war, was lost in a personal narrative of gore and horror in the trenches.

One veteran vainly tried to point out that the war had not really seemed so bad at the time as it did now; nor was the almost universal trope of a halcyon and pastoral prewar England, contrasted with the hell of the front, even a very accurate picture. “One was not always attacking or under fire,” he complained. “And one’s friends were not always being killed.… And friendship was good in brief rests in some French village behind the line where it was sometimes spring, and there were still fruit trees to bloom, and young cornfields, and birds singing.”
⁹
But, as Wohl observes, the literary version of the war easily won out:

There was another important political consequence to this line of reasoning: “In England the partisans of appeasement and peace at any cost found
it useful to present themselves as the authentic representatives and heirs of the men who manned the trenches.”
¹⁰
The Cambridge antiwar groups had gotten their start with a 1933 Armistice Day march to the town’s war memorial to lay a wreath bearing the motto, “To the Victims of a War They Did Not Make, from Those Who Are Determined to Prevent All Similar Crimes of Imperialism.” (Despite the bit about “Imperialism,” the march attracted not just the hard left. There were also a significant number of Christian pacifists in the group.) By 1935 the Cambridge Scientists’ Anti-War Group had graduated to staging protests against the RAF’s annual air show at nearby Duxford airfield and issuing manifestos, frequently mailed to the prominent scientific journal
Nature
, signed by long lists of Cambridge scientists calling on their fellow “scientific workers” to refuse to lend their technical know-how to the cause of war. “The practical working of modern civilisation depends so largely on technical knowledge that if everyone with scientific training were to act for one common aim, that aim could be achieved,” began one statement signed by Bernal and twenty-one other Cambridge scientists. “Probably the majority of scientific workers the world over prefer peace to war, and there can be no doubt that English scientific workers as a body are united in this matter,” they declared.
¹¹

ADDED TO THE ACCEPTED HORRORS
of the old war was a new horror, destruction from the air. During the 1930s, Harold Macmillan would recall many years later, “we thought of air warfare … rather as people think of nuclear warfare today.”
¹²
The theories of Giulio Douhet, an Italian army officer whose ideas became well known when his book
The Command of the Air
was widely translated after his death in 1930, foresaw a not very distant future in which wars would be decided by the massive bombardment of civilian population centers by opposing air forces in the opening instant of a conflict. “Nothing man can do on the surface of the earth can interfere with a plane in flight, moving freely in the third dimension,” wrote Douhet. “All the influences which had conditioned and characterized warfare from the beginning are powerless to affect aerial action.”
¹³

It was a theme widely picked up in newspaper articles and popular books as yet another reason why war had become unthinkable as a means of resolving differences between nations. “A bombardment with a mixture of thermite, high explosives and vesicants would kill large numbers outright, would lead to the cutting off of food and water supplies, would smash
the system of sanitation and would result in general panic,” wrote Aldous Huxley in the
Encyclopaedia of Pacifism
. “The chief function of the army would not be to fight an enemy, but to try to keep order among the panic-stricken population at home.” The Cambridge Scientists’ Anti-War Group carried out a number of rather amateurish experiments aimed at “proving” the impossibility of protecting the urban populace against gas attack.
¹⁴

But, again, it was hardly just the left and committed pacifists that embraced this apocalyptic view of modern war. The General Strike of 1926 reinforced the view of Britain’s ruling elite that modern industrial society was held together only by the slenderest of threads; the urban working class in particular could not be relied upon in a crisis. “Who does not know that if another great war comes our civilisation will fall with as great a crash as that of Rome?” asked Prime Minister Baldwin. But it was another observation of Baldwin’s that would crystallize the nearly universal conventional wisdom for avoiding war, no matter what Hitler might do: “No power on earth can protect the man in the street from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.”
¹⁵

On August 8, 1934, amid a spate of articles about the terrors that awaited a nation plunged into modern aerial warfare, a letter appeared in
The Times
from Professor F. A. Lindemann of Oxford University:

Lindemann was Oxford’s professor of experimental philosophy and director of its Clarendon Laboratory, which as a center of physics research was but a distant rival to Rutherford’s Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge. But much more important, Lindemann was a member of Churchill’s growing circle of official and unofficial contacts who shared his alarm over the increasing threat of Nazi Germany and who provided him with a steady stream of expert knowledge with which to challenge the government’s policies.

It would be hard to imagine a man more unlike Churchill in his personal tastes. An ascetic bachelor, Lindemann was a strict vegetarian who did not smoke or drink. He had met Churchill when he partnered Mrs. Churchill at a charity tennis tournament, and the two men immediately hit it off despite their superficial differences. The son of a wealthy Alsatian who settled in England and took British citizenship, Lindemann was rich, very conservative, and in Zuckerman’s words “enigmatic and ‘grand.’ ” He reveled moving in important social and political circles. He had a solid reputation as a physicist, though had not done any significant original research of his own for some time. More exceptionally, he had conducted some astonishingly daring flying experiments during the First World War to develop a method for recovering from a tailspin. Rejected by the army for his German parentage, Lindemann had been taken on by the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough to work on scientific problems related to flight; despite a vision defect he took flying lessons, and then personally made a series of flights in which he deliberately put his plane into a spin and coolly recorded what happened each time. From 1932 on he was a regular visitor of Churchill’s, motoring his Rolls-Royce over from Oxford for weekends at Churchill’s country estate, Chartwell, where the men would often talk into the small hours of the morning, discussing the gathering threats in the world. “Lindemann,” said Churchill, “became my chief adviser on the scientific aspects of modern war.”
¹⁷

A few weeks after his letter to
The Times
, Lindemann and Churchill traveled to Aix-les-Bains, the French lakeside resort where Baldwin (then the Conservative leader in the coalition government) was vacationing, to press the idea for government action on a scientific study of air defense.
Lindemann followed up with two more letters to
The Times
answering a rejoinder from a pacifist who objected that improved air defenses would only make disarmament less urgent. “World opinion is definitely opposed to burglars,” Lindemann replied, “yet Mr. Mander, I have no doubt, does not consider it superfluous to lock his front door at night.”
¹⁸

Churchill thought that the job should be given to a high-level body outside usual department channels and proposed establishing a special subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence, the board that coordinated all of the military services. But in the meanwhile the Air Ministry’s own scientific civil servants had been pushing the issue as well. The problem of defending population centers and other targets against enemy bombers was actually never quite so bleak as popular opinion held. It was true enough that since the end of the war the RAF had placed the greatest emphasis on building up its bomber force and that its overarching strategy was very much in line with Douhet’s thinking about retaliation as the linchpin of air strategy. But it had not entirely neglected fighter defenses. Yearly war games that pitted the RAF’s Air Defence of Great Britain Command against a mock force of attacking bombers had shown that the bomber did
not
always get through: in the 1932 exercise, 50 percent of the daytime raids and 25 percent of the nighttime raids were successfully intercepted. The real problem was timely and accurate early warning. During the Great War a system had been developed to relay observer reports along the coast via dedicated telephone lines to a command center in London, which in turn could dispatch fighters from airfields around the city. The trouble was that London’s proximity to the coast left little time to react, and indeed nothing in England was more than seventy miles from the coast. The new, much faster bombers entering service cut the margin even closer.