Blackett's War (9 page)

What actually was demoralizing the German armed forces was the increasingly obvious fact that Germany had lost the war. The government’s delay in reaching a cease-fire agreement had in fact done exactly what Ludendorff had earlier warned it would, strengthening the Allies’ hand as Germany’s military and political situation crumbled. At the end of October, German battleship crews, ordered to steam forth in a final “death or glory” attack on the British Grand Fleet, mutinied. Soldiers sent to put down the rebellion joined the mutineers, and when the crews of the mutinying ships were broken up and transferred to other bases in an effort to stem the trouble
the effect was only to spread the revolt throughout the fleet. The Kaiser was told by his ministers that the only hope now for averting a general revolution and saving the empire was his immediate abdication. “I have no intention of quitting the throne because of a few hundred Jews and a thousand workmen!” the Kaiser retorted. “Tell that to your masters in Berlin!”
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He gave in on November 9 as the German delegation at Compiègne was preparing to accept the stern terms demanded by the Allies and a revolutionary mob in Berlin was proclaiming a socialist republic from the steps of the Reichstag. Ludendorff’s successor at the high command explained to His Majesty that he no longer had an army that would obey his orders.

It was Haig, almost alone among the Allied military and political leaders, who had expressed grave reservations about the wisdom of extracting humiliating concessions from Germany. “I think this is a mistake,” he wrote his wife, “and may encourage the wish for revenge in the future.” Haig was especially dismissive of the Admiralty’s reasoning that, since the German High Seas Fleet would surely have lost all of its modern warships had it ventured forth to do battle, it should therefore be required to turn over the entire fleet as one of the Armistice conditions.
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His was a voice in the wilderness.

Within a year of the war’s end Ludendorff and Hindenburg were insisting without batting an eye that a valiant and undefeated German army had been “stabbed in the back” by a weak and treasonous civilian government, abetted by socialists and Jews. “One had to live in Germany between the wars,” wrote the newspaper correspondent William Shirer, “to realize how widespread was the acceptance of this incredible legend by the German people”—and how much it would drive Germany’s resurgent militarism.
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PATRICK BLACKETT ARRIVED
in Cambridge on January 25, 1919, and stepped into a new world. Promoted to full lieutenant the previous May, he was one of 400 junior officers the British navy decided to send to the university for a six-month course at the end of the war “with the object of instilling into us some general culture which had been lacking among those who had been whisked to sea in 1914 when very young,” Blackett wrote. The officers were parceled out among the colleges of the ancient university and attended lectures in uniform, a striking enough picture that Rudyard Kipling was inspired to capture it in a slightly satirical (and largely forgotten) poem:

His very first night at Magdalene College, Blackett stayed up late talking with two other new students he had just met and who would become lifelong friends: Kingsley Martin, the future editor of the leftist
New Statesman
, and Geoffrey Webb, who would become one of England’s foremost art historians. Martin’s and Webb’s discussion that night about God, Marx, and
Freud were, Blackett later recalled, the first intellectual conversation he had ever heard.
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Martin’s accounts of war in the trenches—a socialist and the son of a Congregationalist minister, Martin had declared himself a conscientious objector and been assigned to an ambulance unit in France—also made Blackett realize “how relatively comfortable the war at sea had been compared to the grim horrors of the Western Front.”

Blackett had already had doubts about staying in the navy. During the last months of the war, assigned to a destroyer in Harwich Force, he had begun to read science textbooks with the idea of possibly getting a job with a scientific instrument company or going to university. He summarized his state of mind:

A few days after arriving at Cambridge, Blackett wandered over to the university’s Cavendish Laboratory “to see what a scientific laboratory was like.”
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Three weeks later he marched into the office of his commanding officer at Cambridge, Commander H. E. Piggott, and announced that the “intellectual life of a place like Cambridge” was what he was cut out for; he couldn’t see himself going back to the peacetime navy, spending the rest of his life “walking up and down with a telescope under his arm.” Piggott replied that he did not see how he could further Blackett’s plans, “seeing that this would mean depriving the service of one who would likely prove one of her brightest senior officers,” but that if he was determined he should talk to his tutor at Magdalene and submit his application for resignation from the navy through the usual service channels.
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Blackett did so at once, and never looked back. He promptly enrolled as a regular undergraduate studying for the intensive Mathematical Tripos examination; he passed Part I in May, then switched to physics the following fall. In 1921 he received a first in physics and was accepted as a research fellow at the Cavendish, whose new director was the towering figure of the physics world, Ernest Rutherford.

In a scant half century since its founding in 1874, with a bequest from the Duke of Devonshire, the Cavendish had become the preeminent physics laboratory in the world, catapulting British science to the forefront of the exciting new fields of radiation and atomic physics. Its first four directors were, and still are, legendary names in the history of modern science. James Clerk Maxwell, the first director, formulated the basic laws of electromagnetism that laid the basis for modern electronics and communications technology. Lord Rayleigh, his successor, made pioneering discoveries in light and sound and was the discoverer of the element argon. Rutherford’s immediate predecessor, J. J. Thomson, had discovered the electron.

Rutherford arguably surpassed them all. Born to a homesteading family struggling to make a go of life on the rough frontier of New Zealand, Rutherford combined brilliance, ambition, and apparently inexhaustible energy to rise to this preeminent position in British science. He had won a series of scholarships as a young student, culminating in the prestigious 1851 Exhibition scholarship that brought him to Cambridge. He swiftly made a name for himself with original work on radio waves, switching fields abruptly after the discovery of radioactivity in 1896; the next year, at age twenty-seven, he became a professor at McGill University in Canada, where he proceeded to carry out groundbreaking studies of the transmutation of elements via radioactive decay which won him the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1908.

Unlike virtually every other Nobel Prize winner in history, Rutherford then went on to make his greatest scientific discoveries
after
the work that won him the prize. Success never spoiled him; he was unstoppable. A colleague who had been a fellow student at the Cavendish with Rutherford was asked many years later if he and Rutherford had become friends back then. He replied, “One can hardly speak of being friendly with a force of nature.”
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Perhaps more to the point was what another colleague observed: Rutherford never lost “his genius to be astonished.”

In 1911 he announced the results of some experiments that astonished everyone. The accepted model of the atom at the time pictured electrons evenly distributed through a cloud of positive charge. Rutherford had tried to probe the structure of this atomic space by shooting a stream of heavy alpha particles through a thin layer of gold foil and then measuring the small deflection of the particles from their course as they emerged on the other side. A thin layer of zinc sulfide spread on a glass plate served as a detector; alpha particles striking the coating created tiny, glowing tracks—“scintillations”—that could be seen through a microscope and individually
counted. Looking for the tracks was tedious and difficult work. At one point, out of what his assistant thought an excess of experimental thoroughness, Rutherford suggested placing the zinc sulfide detector on the same side of the gold foil target as the alpha particle source. To his amazement, the detector glowed on that side, too: some of the alpha particles were rebounding directly off the target. “It was,” Rutherford said, “quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my entire life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.”
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He realized that the only way to explain such a ricochet was if the entire positive charge of the atom were concentrated in an extremely small space, creating an enormous repulsion force as the positively charged alpha particle passed near it. He had discovered the nucleus—and the structure of the atom itself.

In 1919 Rutherford nearly equaled that monumental discovery in an experiment in which he bombarded nitrogen gas with a beam of alpha particles, chipping off a stream of protons from the target atoms. Rutherford was at the time serving on a committee of scientists exploring methods of detecting submarines underwater by sound—what would be the genesis of sonar—and he wrote Karl Compton, the chairman of the committee, a letter of apology explaining that he would be late for their next meeting, scheduled to take place in Paris: he had apparently just split the atom, and was in the midst of carrying out a second experiment to confirm the result. “If this is true,” he wrote Compton, “it is a fact of far greater importance than the war.”
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The Cavendish was remarkable not just for its scientific preeminence but for its existing at all in the ivory-tower world of Cambridge, with its traditional disdain for the practical, much less the mechanical. The laboratory occupied a nondescript, three-story, gray stone Victorian building in a crooked medieval alley that ran behind one of the older colleges. Its facade, in the words of one observer, could have “graced any Scottish hotel.” The building bore no clue to its identity beyond a statue of its benefactor bearing the Latin inscription
Magna opera Domini exquisita in omnes voluntates ejus
: “The works of the Lord are great, searched out by all who have delight in them.” Inside, the building was even less prepossessing, “uncarpeted board floor, dingy varnished pine doors and stained plastered walls, indifferently lit by a skylight with dirty glass.”
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The physicist Max Born, who would flee Germany and the Nazis for Cambridge in 1933, noted with amusement the British academic gentility
that insisted on calling theoretical physics “applied mathematics”; by analogous reasoning, he suggested, the Cavendish should be called the Department of Applied Glass Blowing.
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The allusion to glassblowing was not a joke, though: every student and researcher at the lab was expected to master such practical hands-on skills, and it was part of the indoctrination of all new members of the lab to put in a stint in the “Nursery,” a course for newcomers held in a cramped attic room filled with bits of miscellaneous equipment, where they learned the basic techniques. There was clearly a sort of in-group pride among the physicists in possessing skills so different from their fellow rarefied academics. Patrick Blackett, in an essay he would write upon his departure from Cambridge—titled “The Craft of Experimental Physics,” it remains a classic exposition—underscored the satisfaction he and his fellow physicists took in being able to combine the mental and the manual in their daily work: