Authors: Stephen Budiansky
Lindemann sided strongly with the Air Staff. Faced with Zuckerman and Bernal’s conclusive finding that bombing did not inflict very many casualties, Lindemann decided with magnificently circular reasoning that bombing must therefore be effective for
other
reasons. He proposed that the real purpose of strategic bombing was to “dehouse” the enemy workforce; this would cause production and morale to collapse. On March 30, Lindemann—now Lord Cherwell, having been rewarded by Churchill with a peerage—circulated a memorandum to the War Cabinet in which he concluded that one third of the entire population of Germany could be “turned out of their house and home” by an Allied strategic bombing offensive that employed a force of 10,000 heavy bombers to target the fifty-eight German cities with a population of 100,000 or more:
Investigation seems to show that having one’s house demolished is most damaging to morale. People seem to mind it more than having their friends or even relatives killed. At Hull signs of strain were evident, though only one-tenth of the houses were demolished. On the above figures we should be able to do ten times as much harm to each of the 58 principal German towns. There seems little doubt this would break the spirit of the people.
17
It was only after the war that Zuckerman and Bernal discovered how completely Cherwell had misrepresented their findings about civilian morale in Hull and Birmingham. Their study, which Cherwell had asked for a preliminary report on, had concluded almost exactly the opposite of what he was arguing in his memorandum.
Blackett went to see him. Cherwell, he recalled, did not try to dispute Blackett’s calculations about the direct effects of bombing. But it was clear he was once again enraptured with one of his pet ideas. It was the first time Blackett was fully confronted with this side of the Prof’s character, “his almost fanatical belief in some particular operation or gadget to the almost total exclusion of wider considerations,” Blackett later wrote. “Bombing to him then seemed the one and only useful operation of the war.… Never have I encountered such a fanatical belief in the efficacy of bombing.” Cherwell went so far as to insist that
any
diversion of aircraft to
any
other purpose would be a “disastrous mistake.”
18
When Cherwell’s paper proposing the air campaign to “dehouse” the German population was circulated to the Admiralty on April 8 for official comment, Blackett was asked by Admiral Godfrey, the director of naval intelligence, to prepare a “full factual examination of this problem” in his capacity as chief advisor for operational research. Blackett in his response reiterated the calculations he had shown Tizard earlier and also presented some new data concluding that if even a quarter of the 4,000 bomber sorties which could be flown each month by the summer of 1942 were diverted instead to antisubmarine operations, it would save a million tons of Allied shipping a year.
19
Tizard and Blackett also realized that Cherwell had hugely overstated—by
600
percent—the quantity of bombs that could be delivered against German cities even if the entire forecasted production of heavy bombers over the following eighteen months was devoted exclusively to the job. Cherwell had in effect assumed that every bomber scheduled to be produced would be instantly available and by the end of the eighteen months would already have carried out the twenty bombing missions that were the average operational life of each aircraft. It was a ridiculous arithmetical mistake. Again, subsequent history showed that Blackett and Tizard had been too cautious in their critique: Cherwell had overestimated not by 600 percent but by more than 1,000 percent.
20
It all fell on deaf ears. “I do not think that, in secret politics, I have ever seen a minority view so unpopular,” C. P. Snow would write of the episode.
21
Blackett made a wan joke that if anyone at the Air Ministry during this time “added two and two together to make four,” suspicions would arise that “he has been talking to Tizard and Blackett” and was “not to be trusted.”
22
Blackett began keeping a file of sardonic observations about official attitudes and the military mind; a quotation he had run across in a Spanish
anarchist newspaper he thought might perfectly summarize the reaction he had received to one study: “Let us have no more of these miserable statistics, which only paralyse the brain and freeze the blood.”
23
He also filed away an anonymous and extremely incendiary paper he had been sent around this time that was full of an insider’s scathing appraisal of Churchill; it noted how Churchill used his dazzling oratorical skills to avoid hard facts, how he browbeat his military advisers to agree with his decisions and then used them as scapegoats when things went wrong, how he worried subordinates about small details and demanded immediate answers or reports which frequently turned out to be wrong because of the haste with which they were prepared, how even his wide knowledge and experience was often more a danger than an asset: “His judgment is very unreliable and in spite of his study and past service he has never understood naval warfare, in which his interest is extremely doubtful.”
24
The hard feelings—and a sense of failure—about the fight over strategic bombing haunted Blackett the rest of his life. As he wrote in an article in
Scientific American
in 1961, it was his one great regret about his wartime service:
So far as I know, it was the first time a modern nation had deliberately planned a major military campaign against the enemy’s civilian population rather than against his armed forces. During my youth in the Navy in World War I such an operation would have been inconceivable.… If the Allied air effort had been used more intelligently, if more aircraft had been supplied for the Battle of the Atlantic and to support the land fighting in Africa and later in France, if the bombing of Germany had been carried out with the attrition of enemy defences in mind rather than the razing of cities to the ground, I believe the war could have been won half a year or even a year earlier. The only major campaign in modern history in which the traditional military doctrine of waging war against the enemy’s armed forces was abandoned for a planned attack on its civilian life was a disastrous flop, and I am sure that Tizard felt the same way. If we had only been more persuasive and had forced people to believe our simple arithmetic, if we had fought officialdom more cleverly and lobbied ministers more vigorously, might we not have changed this decision?
25
With the War Cabinet’s approval for a campaign “focussed on the morale of the enemy population,” Harris proceeded to put into practice his conviction
that the only way to destroy
anything
in a city was to destroy
everything
in it, by setting huge conflagrations with tons of incendiary bombs. Harris was disappointed that two subsequent 1,000-plane raids he mounted following the attack on Cologne—the Ruhr cities of Bremen and Essen were hit in June 1942—were not as successful. Even the Cologne raid, he felt, ought to have done more destruction. But then the average bomb load of his planes was only a ton and a half; most of the force available to Bomber Command was still two-engine medium bombers. Harris was confident that once the new heavy bombers began to arrive in numbers, his program for “the elimination of German industrial cities,” as he put it, would swiftly be accomplished.
26
WITH BLACKETT’S DEPARTURE
to the Admiralty in December 1941, E. J. Williams had taken over as head of the Coastal Command Operational Research Section, and within a few months he believed he had figured out a way to dramatically increase the effectiveness of the antisubmarine air forces even without prising a single new airplane away from Bomber Command. Based on some preliminary theoretical calculations, Williams sent Air Marshal Joubert a memorandum proposing an urgent study of maintenance and flying schedules of the aircraft in the command, and in June 1942 assigned a single member of his now twelve-person ORS staff, Cecil Gordon, to the task.
27
Gordon, leaving behind his drosophila in Aberdeen, had just joined the unit that summer. He was pudgy, Jewish, abrasive, and communist. “Definitely not officer material,” noted his Admiralty file. He had a high-pitched, grating voice, an awkward walk, a nervous fidget, and an unkempt appearance that was a source of wonder even to his left-wing scientist friends, not exactly known for fastidious dressing themselves. Once Gordon tried to donate some of his old clothes to a secondhand shop: the shop rejected them.
Gordon had literally been a card-carrying communist, joining the party in the 1930s and resigning apparently only just before he was hired by Coastal Command. His Marxist convictions nonetheless remained deep and indelible. Growing up in an impoverished Russian immigrant family in South Africa—his father was a fabulously unsuccessful peddler of geegaws in the native areas—Gordon had been powerfully influenced at the University of Cape Town by the antiestablishment views of Lancelot Hogben, the head of the zoology department where Gordon studied and later taught as a lecturer.
Hogben was a socialist, militant atheist, ardent feminist, and outspoken critic of eugenics and the theories of scientific racism. In 1931 Gordon followed Hogben to the London School of Economics, where his mentor had just been appointed professor of social biology; he then completed his Ph.D. in genetics at University College London under another famous left-wing biologist, J. B. S. Haldane, before rejoining Hogben at Aberdeen. Gordon was thoroughly steeped in left-wing politics during his time in London and Aberdeen. He met his future wife at a socialist student dance; he chaired a British-Soviet Unity Campaign; a story made the rounds that he had been seen outside the Finchley Road tube station, dressed in dinner jacket, peddling copies of the
Daily Worker
one evening while on his way to dine with his wife’s wealthy parents.
He was also impatient, vociferous, opinionated, and domineering in conversations. His mind was always “temporarily one-track,” a colleague remembered, whatever obsession of the moment taking over his thoughts and conversation “to the exclusion of everything else for the time being.” He could be brilliant and fascinating, relating some novel idea he had pulled from his enormous range of reading. When the topic of his momentary obsession was a problem of work, however, he could be “monotonous,” and when it was one of his many grievances, “a bore.” Even his enemies and detractors, though, acknowledged that he had a fierce intellectual and moral honesty, which he applied as ruthlessly to himself as to others.
28
Within three weeks of being assigned to the maintenance problem Gordon had worked out the basic mathematical concepts and had thrown himself into an experimental field test of the ideas he had devised. The calculations did not require more than algebra but were lengthy and incorporated vast amounts of data that Coastal Command had collected about the work of the maintenance shops: the number of man-hours spent on various tasks, the intervals between inspections, the average time of failure of various components.
Gordon’s basic conclusions, though, were simple and stunning. First was that there were strangling bottlenecks in the maintenance chain: the availability of skilled labor was the limiting factor at several choke points, which meant that while some repair departments worked constantly others were left idled with nothing to do. The analysis suggested that maintenance crews were accomplishing only three quarters of the work they could have in the total man-hours they had available if the work were more rationally organized. It was the four-washtub problem writ large.
29
But a far greater obstacle to increasing the number of flying hours per month, Gordon realized, had to do with the RAF’s “serviceability” policy that set a goal of having 75 percent of the aircraft of every squadron ready for operational duty at all times. The counterintuitive mathematical result Gordon discovered was that by accepting a lower serviceability rate, the total number of monthly flying hours would
increase
. The best policy would in fact be to ignore serviceability altogether; it was the wrong quantity to be measuring or even paying attention to. A serviceability standard made sense for fighter defense squadrons, which had to be ready at any time to put as large a force in the air as possible with minimal warning. But for the squadrons of Coastal Command, which had a steady day-to-day mission of patrolling against a constant enemy presence, the insistence on keeping a large portion of aircraft ready at any time could only be met by holding back a significant number that could otherwise be flying useful missions.
The reductio ad absurdum of this policy, Blackett later observed, would be never to fly at all: that would achieve a serviceability rate of 100 percent. (Blackett drew an analogy to an incident he recalled a friend relating in the years between the wars: arriving at a rural train station one night, he approached the lone taxi waiting out front and asked to be driven to his destination. The taxi driver refused—explaining that a local police ordinance required one taxi to be waiting at the station at all times.) Gordon’s numbers suggested that if all serviceable aircraft were flown every day when weather permitted, the serviceability rate would sink to 30 percent, but monthly flying hours would substantially increase. The other way to think about it was that to get the most out of a squadron’s aircraft, the best plan was to fly enough to ensure that the maintenance shops were fully employed at all times. To get more flying hours, in other words, you had to
increase
the breakdown rate. That would mean more aircraft needed repair at any given time, but the total throughput of the maintenance shops would increase.
Implementing Gordon’s scheme for what would come to be called “Planned Maintenance, Planned Flying” was a prime case where supreme tact was required; in its bare outline it sounded like nothing so much as a criticism of the efficiency of a unit and a slap at workers for sitting around and doing nothing. Gordon was hardly tactful. But his sheer force of intellect seemed to make up for it. It also helped that Churchill was right on top of his work. On July 5 the prime minister asked the Air Staff for a copy of Gordon’s initial report and quickly requested the first lord of the Admiralty and the secretary of state for air to sign off on the proposal to put it to a
test: Churchill especially warned that until Coastal Command fully implemented Gordon’s ideas to increase the number of sorties per squadron, “there can be no case for transferring additional squadrons from Bomber Coastal Command.” Churchill also, significantly, grasped at once the essential point that “it is true the standard of serviceability in Coastal Command will fall off if the aircraft make more frequent sorties,” but that this was an acceptable trade-off.
30