scientists at war. Science and technology played much greater parts in the Second World War than in any of its predecessors. There was much more scientific knowledge to be applied, and there were more scientists available to follow the trail already blazed in the
First World War, where the onset of
chemical warfare, the military use of the submarine and the aeroplane, and the discovery of radio waves, had all resulted in both sides of the conflict seeking the aid of scientists. The discovery of germs and new drugs enhanced the fighting potential of armies, and the use of X-rays in surgery enabled wounded men to be more effectively treated. Science during the First World War also became important to
economic warfare, in Germany at least, through such inventions as the Bosch-Haber process for fixing atmospheric nitrogen, which enabled Germany to counter the economic blockade that threatened to starve it of
explosives.
However, because the unique contribution that science could make was not at first apparent to governments, many scientists on both sides, from 1914 onwards, enlisted to serve in the front line. In the UK they included at least five future Nobel Prizewinners: E. V. Appleton (physics, Infantry),
P. M. S. Blackett (physics, Royal Navy), W. L. Bragg (physics, Artillery), A. V. Hill (physiology, Infantry) and G. P. Thomson (physics, Infantry). These, fortunately, all survived; but H. G. J. Moseley, a certain Prizewinner in physics had he lived, enlisted in the Royal Engineers and was killed at Gallipoli in 1915. His death helped to ensure that British scientists were more wisely employed in the Second World War.
The rise of Nazi Germany after 1933 led to calls in the UK for the aid of science in countering the bomber, the submarine, and the naval mine. Renewed attention needed to be paid to chemical warfare, on the precedent of its use in the First World War; and
biological warfare, particularly with anthrax and botulism, appeared possible. Prominent among the men of science who concerned themselves were those who had been involved in the First World War, particularly
F. A. Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell) and
H. T. Tizard, who, as former test pilots, were especially concerned with air defence.
In 1935 the British air ministry formed the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence, and Tizard was made its chairman after Lindemann, in association with Churchill, had provided the main public drive for something to be done. Lindemann and Tizard, previously good friends, now fell out; but the ensuing enmity was fortunately little bar to progress, and the invention of
radar and its development from 1935 onwards under
R. A. Watson-Watt came just in time for a working system to be ready for the
battle of Britain. Fighters would have been far too few for continuous patrols in strength to intercept incoming bombers; the early warning given by radar enabled fighters to be ‘scrambled’ only when and where necessary. By thus multiplying the effective strength of Fighter Command, it turned the balance in the battle.
The UK was not, of course, the only country to develop radar. But in the USSR development was handicapped because the chief researcher was falsely imprisoned in 1937 as a result of Stalin's purges (see
USSR, 6(a)), while Japanese research and development were seriously hindered by inter-service
rivalries, for which the Japanese navy and army were notorious. German radar in 1939 was in some respects technically superior to the British but it was not used so effectively in operation. This was because there was little prospective pressure on the German defences, and serving officers and scientists were not driven together by an imminent threat as were their British counterparts. American thoughts on how best to use radar lagged for the same reason, as Tizard himself noted: ‘we were, however, a very long way ahead in its practical application to war. The reason was that scientists and serving officers had combined before the War to study its tactical uses. This is the great lesson of the last war’.
Tizard's Committee on Air Defence was so successful that a further committee, on Air Offence, was formed, with Tizard again as chairman. But the new committee was not nearly as effective, because Bomber Command staff were far less receptive than their Fighter Command counterparts, complacent as they were in the belief that the bomber ‘will always get through’ and needed no ‘adventitious aids’ such as science might provide. Later in the war, when bomber losses began to mount, and when it became evident that targets could rarely be found without
electronic navigation systems such as the beams that had guided German bombers in
the Blitz, Bomber Command, too, began to value scientific aid. So besides Tizard's ‘great lesson’ the British also learned that help can rarely be effective unless the potential recipient realizes that he needs it.
The help that scientists could provide was twofold in nature. First they could conceive new devices, such as the
cavity magnetron, in response to a need to generate shorter radio wavelengths to improve the sharpness of radio beams for radar. Second, they could conduct objective study of operations to improve their effectiveness. What, for example, was the best flight pattern for an aircraft to cover as large an area of ocean as possible in searching for U-boats? Or what telephone line circuitry and capacity were necessary to deal with the flow of plots on incoming bombers from the radar stations back to Fighter Command headquarters? This latter problem was one of the first to be studied by a small detachment from the radar research station at Bawdsey which was sent to Fighter Command in 1937. Its work became known as
operational research, and the Operational Research Section at Fighter Command was later followed by similar sections at the other RAF Commands, and in the Admiralty and in the army. Ultimately, under the title ‘Operations Research’, the activity also spread throughout the American services.
Operational Research attracted some of the best intellects among British men of science. The nuclear physicist P. M. S. Blackett, for example, became director of Operational Research at the Admiralty, with E. C. Bullard, a geophysicist, as his chief lieutenant. Another nuclear physicist, E. J. Williams, took over at Coastal Command after Blackett had left for the Admiralty. J. D. Bernal became a scientific adviser to
Vice-Admiral Mountbatten, chief of
Combined Operations; and the South African physicist B. F. J. Schonland, became scientific adviser to
General Montgomery and head of the Army Operational Research Group, among whose members was the theoretical physicist, N. F. Mott. J. C. Kendrew, who like Blackett and Mott was later to win a Nobel Prize, was in operational research with the RAF, and the anatomist S. Zuckerman became scientific adviser to
Air Chief Marshal Tedder, the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander.
Another need for scientific aid emerged when the Tizard committee found in 1939 that the British intelligence services knew little about new German applications of science to warfare. R. V. Jones was accordingly transferred to air intelligence from infra-red research on 1 September 1939. This appointment led to the detection in June 1940 of the impending German use of radio beams to guide bombers to their targets. Radio counter-measures were thereupon devised, and although they were not always successful they proved the only effective means of blunting the German attacks in the Blitz until fighters and guns could be equipped with effective radar. The episode demonstrated the value of scientific intelligence, which grew into a major factor in
electronic warfare, both defensive and offensive, in countering Hitler's
V-weapons and in watching for German nuclear and other developments. In November 1940 F. C. Frank joined R. V. Jones who also acted as
MI6's chief scientific adviser, and towards the end of the war F. H. C. Crick (later to share a Nobel Prize for elucidating the structure of DNA) was appointed by the Admiralty. H. P. Robertson, the relativist, who had been sent to London by the US
Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1943, provided powerful support from the American side.
Relations between the Allies in science became so extensive as the war proceeded that scientific attachés were appointed, notably in Washington, starting with A. V. Hill, and in Chungking, where J. Needham's appointment resulted in the monumental scholarship enshrined in his
Science and Civilisation in China.
Some distinguished scientists served in the resistance movements, including L. Tronstad (Norway), Y. Rocard (France), A. Michels (Netherlands), and J. Groszkowski (Poland): all these contributed to scientific intelligence, as did H. F. Mayer (see
Oslo report) and P. Rosbaud (Germany). Tronstad provided intelligence concerning the output of heavy water in Norway, Rocard investigated a new German radio navigational system, Michels ran a technical intelligence service among Dutchmen working in German factories, and Groszkowski analysed the fuels remaining in the V-1s and V-2s which had been fired in trials in Poland. Rosbaud, the anti-Nazi science editor of a German publishing firm, was allowed to travel to neutral countries because of his job, and he was therefore able to feed the Allies occasional information as to the whereabouts of
Heisenberg's group of nuclear physicists.
The technology of intelligence was itself greatly advanced by the efforts of mathematicians and scientists. The German cipher machine,
ENIGMA, was first broken in 1932 by a Polish team of mathematicians led by M. Rejewski; in 1939 they presented their work to their British counterparts at
Bletchley Park, where other mathematicians such as G. Welchman, M. Newman, and
A. Turing made outstanding contributions. Turing's work was instrumental in the development of computers, and the crucial electronic circuitry evolved from the scale-of-two counter devised for nuclear physics by the physicist C. E. Wynn Williams.
Many British scientists were directly concerned with the invention and development of new weapons; and just as the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) at Farnborough had attracted a galaxy of talent in the
First World War, so did the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE), first at Swanage and then at Malvern, in the Second. The RAE, of course, continued as the research centre for aeronautics, as did the Chemical Warfare Research Establishment at Porton for chemical and biological warfare.
Most of the research and development for radar was done in the government establishments at Malvern, Portsmouth (Admiralty Signals Establishment), and Christchurch (Air Defence Research Establishment), where the pre-war staffs were powerfully augmented by the scientists who came in from the universities. Among those who went to TRE were the nuclear physicists P. I. Dee and W. B. Lewis, the zoologist J. W. S. Pringle, and two more future Nobel Prizewinners, M. Ryle (physics) and A. L. Hodgkin (physiology). Another future Nobel Prizewinner in physiology, A. F. Huxley, worked on the development of naval radar, and yet another, G. Porter (chemistry), became a naval radar officer.
While many ideas and inventions originated in government establishments and universities (radar in the Radio Research Station, for example, and the cavity magnetron in Birmingham University), a third source was industry which, besides manufacturing the weapons and devices conceived in establishments and universities, sometimes offered inventions of its own. Radar itself owed much to the electronic circuits invented by A. D. Blumlein in the EMI laboratories, while E. C. S. Megaw and his team at the laboratories of the General Electric Company (GEC) took the cavity magnetron into large-scale production; and the development of the jet engine, conceived by A. A. Griffith and F. Whittle, owed much to S. G. Hooker at Rolls-Royce. Another major invention, the
proximity fuze, was due as much to the Salford Electrical Instrument Company as to the Air Defence Research Establishment.
In contrast with its part in the First World War, chemistry was much less militarily prominent in the Second, partly because—against what appeared likely in 1939—neither side resorted to chemical warfare. This was fortunate for the UK, because in Germany G. Schraeder had in 1936 invented the first ‘nerve gas’, Tabun, and then the even more lethal Sarin. Although these were manufactured in quantity, Hitler withheld their use, partly because he erroneously thought that the British might have them too—an example of effective, if self-inflicted, deterrence.
While the UK was well behind in chemical warfare, it would by 1944 have been armed for biological warfare, thanks to the work of the bacteriologist P. G. Fildes who joined Porton in 1940 and developed bombs for distributing anthrax spores. Anthrax threatened a devastating form of warfare, but despite the precedent set by a German attempt to infect mules, cattle, and sheep with it in Romania and Argentina in the First World War, both sides withheld its use in the Second. Half a million doses fatal to cattle and half a million anthrax bombs had been made in the UK and USA as a deterrent should the Germans threaten to cross the divide into biological warfare. A happier outcome from bacteriology was the discovery and production of penicillin by Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey (see
medicine).
Japan and the USSR, too, developed biological warfare agents. Techniques for spreading anthrax, glanders, and paratyphoid were tried by the Japanese, who also dropped plague-infected fleas on civil populations in China; and the notorious Unit 731 under General Ishii Shiro experimented on
prisoners-of-war.
The main fields in which Germans excelled in applying science were aerodynamics (especially supersonics with A. Busemann),
guided weapons with anti-aircraft missiles, using infra-red and radar homing devices, under development, and rocketry (where
von Braun's V-2 rocket set the pattern for intercontinental missiles and space flight). Though leads in all these fields were achieved in Germany, most scientific advances, and the exploitation of them, occurred in the UK and USA as the ideologies of Germany and Italy—and the suspicion and dislike that the Japanese military establishment had for Japanese scientists because many of them were western educated—meant that Axis scientists were not properly mobilized. Many Italian scientists (see
Fermi, for example) fled Mussolini's fascist regime well before the war, and the Nazis' hostility towards Jewish scientists is well known— Einstein's Theory of Relativity was declared invalid because he was a Jew—and there was an exodus of them. There was no single German agency or individual to oversee the scientific war effort which was concentrated into three main groups: the 30 research institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft, the research departments of the large industrial firms such as I. G. Farben, Siemens, and Krupp, and the research establishments of the Wehrmacht's three services; co-operation between these groups was almost unknown and, indeed, was discouraged. A short war having been anticipated, little effort was made to organize scientists for war until 1942 and it was not until the spring of 1943 that the Kriegsmarine-Arbeitsgemeinschaft (Naval Study Group) was formed to tackle problems of
submarine warfare. Only from 1943 onwards was there a serious effort to co-ordinate the scientific effort in Germany, when
Göring installed Professor W. Osenberg, a mechanical engineer from Hanover, as head of the Reichsforschungsrat Planungsamt (State Research Council's Planning Office), but his appointment came too late to have much effect.
By contrast, the scientific effort in the UK was well co-ordinated from 1939 onwards, and the fact that so many scientists found suitable, even agreeable, niches was partly due to the Central Register of Scientists, headed by C. P. Snow, that had been started before the war to ensure that scientific talent would be employed to best effect, and such tragic losses as that of Moseley in 1915 should be avoided.
At the highest level, Churchill himself had his own scientific adviser, his close friend of 20 years' standing, Lindemann, whose advice sometimes differed from that of Tizard, whose influence—though still important—declined with the ascendancy of Lindemann after June 1940.
In the same month, observing developments in Europe, the Americans set up the National Defense Research Committee, renamed
Office of Scientific and Research Development in 1941, with Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) as its chairman and K. T. Compton, J. B. Conant, J. B. Jewett, and R. C. Tolman as its scientific members. In September 1940 Tizard headed a British mission to the USA with Churchill's authority ‘To tell them (the Americans) what they want to know, to give them all the assistance I can on behalf of the British government to enable the Armed Forces of the USA to reach the highest level of technical efficiency.’
An immediate result of the Tizard mission was the realization by Bush and his colleagues of how much could be learned from the British in defence science, and great efforts were made to catch up and to convert new ideas and devices into well-engineered military products. But there were relatively few government laboratories in the USA with the necessary competence, and so the Americans decided to graft new defence laboratories on to the academic scientific institutions in which they excelled such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Thus, whereas in the UK many scientists had been drawn from universities into government establishments such as TRE, the pattern in the USA was for scientists to join new and specially created laboratories such as the Radiation Laboratory at MIT for radar under the directorship of Lee DuBridge, the Radio Research Laboratory (RRL) for Radio Countermeasures, at Harvard under C. G. Suits, and the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins. The RRL at Harvard also ran the American British Laboratory (ABL 15) under V. H. Fraenkel attached to TRE in Malvern for joint work on radio counter-measures with the British.
The difference between the American and British patterns in defence research had an important legacy after the war. The British continued to build up government establishments at the expense of the universities, and so tended to lock up research staffs in establishments where they had no part in bringing on new generations of students, while in the USA the universities kept research, even of the most applied kind, and teaching together.
Another legacy of the war was the way in which politicians and the public regarded science and technology because of their manifest effects, both good and ill, on human life at all social levels from the international to the personal. The heavy bombing of cities, by both conventional and nuclear weapons, and the prospect of biological warfare in particular, raised questions of conscience for many scientists, and each had to answer them for himself. Some of us were grateful to discover Francis Bacon's classic response: ‘Let none be alarmed at the objection of the Arts and Sciences becoming depraved to malevolent or luxurious purpose or the like, for the same can be said of every worldly Good: Talent, Courage, Strength, Beauty, Riches, Light itself, and the rest. Only let mankind regain their rights over Nature assigned to them by the gift of God and obtain that power whose exercise will be governed by right Reason and true Religion.’
In the UK, at least when fighting a Nazi-dominated Germany, the answer was clear for most of us; but the dropping of
atomic bombs on Japanese cities would have been long debated had the decision been left to scientists alone. Also, the effort to build the nuclear bomb raised questions of organizational doctrine. General Leslie Groves, in supreme charge, organized the effort into compartments so tight that any one scientist, except at the highest level, knew only a small part of the whole programme, and might not even know the ultimate purpose of what he was being asked to do. By contrast, in radar in the UK, workers at all levels were encouraged to debate ideas and progress at the ‘Sunday Soviets’ at Malvern, where air marshals could be questioned by junior scientific officers. While such open informality could risk endangering security, it was more in the spirit of true science than the rigid compartments of the nuclear project: but it has to be admitted that General Groves achieved results. Perhaps only in wartime would scientists for long endure working in closed environments.
R. V. Jones
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