Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Closely related to all this, both in the war and in the postwar period, have been advances in science. Here, also, the great impetus came from the struggle for victory in the war and the subsequent permeation of all aspects of life by attitudes and methods (in this case science) which had been peripheral to the experience of most people in the prewar period. The consequences of this revolution now surround us on all sides and are obvious, even to the most uncomprehending, in television and electronics, in biology and medical science, in space exploration, in automation of credit, billing, payroll, and personnel practices, in atomic energy, and above all in the constant threat of nuclear incineration which now faces all of us. In much of this the fundamental innovations were British, or at least European, but their full exploitation and production processes have been American.

The mobilization of these processes under the OSRD and NDRC by those two Massachusetts Yankees, Bush and Conant, is one of the miracles of the war. In sharp contrast with the OSS, it achieved its goals with a minimum of administrative friction, by the use of existing agencies, except in the few cases, such as the atom bomb, where no agency had existed previously. Probably no new group in the history of American government achieved so much with such a high degree of helpful cooperation. Most of this was the result of Bush’s broad vision, tact, and total lack of desire for personal celebrity. Much of it was done quietly in individual discussions and unpublicized committee meetings. For example, as chairman of the Joint Committee on New Weapons and Equipment (JNW) of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from its founding in May 1942 to the end of the war, Bush achieved wonders, not only in persuading military men to use new weapons and new techniques but also in persuading the different services to integrate their introduction of new methods and their future plans.

The impetus to the use of science in many fields came from the British. This began in World War I when men like (Sir) Henry T. Tizard, (Sir) Robert A. Watson-Watt, and Professor Frederick A. Lindemann (Lord Cherwell after 1956) studied aviation problems scientifically. This link between government and science in aviation was maintained in Britain, as it was in the United States, during the Long Armistice. After Hitler came to power, Dr. H. E. Wimperis, Director of Scientific Research at the Air Ministry, and his colleague A. P. Rowe, set up a Committee on Research on Air Defence, with Tizard as chairman and Rowe as secretary, with Professors A. V. Hill and P. M. S. Blackett as members, and Watson-Watt as consultant. Professor Hill, physiologist, had won the Nobel Prize in 1922, while Blackett, ex-naval officer and nuclear physicist, was the initiator of Operational Research and won a Nobel Prize in physics in 1948. Watson-Watt may be regarded as the chief discoverer of radar.

In sharp contrast with OSRD and NDRC in America, this committee had a stormy life. In 1908, while studying physics in Berlin with Walther Nernst (Nobel Prize, 1920), Tizard met a fellow student, F. A. Lindemann, who was born and educated as a German, but held a British passport from his wealthy father’s naturalization in England before his birth. Lindemann became a moody, driving, uncompromising, and erratically trained amateur scientist who devoted his best hours and energy to upper-class English social life, and combined intermittent flashes of scientific brilliance with total lack of objectivity and consistently poor judgment. Tizard, a fairly typical English civil servant, was, nonetheless, attracted to Lindemann, and in 1919 helped secure for him an appointment as professor of experimental philosophy at Oxford. At the time, science was at a low ebb at Oxford, and Lindemann, over the next two decades, built up its Clarendon Laboratory toward the high level which the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University had achieved under Lord Rutherford. During this period Lindemann became the close friend and scientific adviser of Winston Churchill. Through Churchill’s influence, Lindemann was forced on Tizard’s Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence, where he acted as a disruptive influence from July 1935, until the three scientific members (Hill, Blackett, and Wimperis) forced him off in September 1936 by resigning together. The whole committee was then dissolved and reappointed under Tizard without Lindemann. The latter reversed the tables four years later when Churchill became prime minister with Lindemann as almost his only scientific adviser. Tizard was dropped from the committee in June 1940. But by that time the great work in radar was done.

The Tizard Committee, with only £ 10,000 for research, held its first meeting on January 28, 1935, and by June 16th (before Lindemann joined) had a radar set on which they followed a plane 40 miles. On March 13, 1936, they identified a plane flying at 1,500 feet 75 miles away. In September 1938, five stations southeast of London followed Chamberlain’s plane flying to the Munich Conference, and on Good Friday 1939, as Mussolini was invading Albania, a chain of twenty stations began continuous operations along the eastern coast.

One of the chief advances here was Watson-Watt’s use of a cathode vacuum tube (such as we now use in television) to watch the returning radio signal. This signal, sent out from a radio vacuum tube in pulses, returned through a crystal detector to appear as a “blip,” or spot, on the cathode tube’s fluorescent screen. The shorter the ‘wavelength of the sending wave, the sharper and more accurate the returning signal, the shorter the necessary aerial, and the lower the transmitting tower; but vacuum tubes could not broadcast waves less than 10 meters in length (300,000 kilocycles). Just as the war began, Professor John T. Randall, at the University of Birmingham, invented the resonant-cavity magnetron, an object no bigger than a fist, which broadcasts high-power, very short, radio waves. This ended interference from ground reflections or reflections from the ionosphere, and allowed sharp discrimination of objects without need for long antennae or high towers. By the time the magnetron came into use (1941), broadcasting from tubes had been improved to allow use of 1.5 meter waves, but the magnetron was developed for 0.1 meter waves. All subsequent radar development was based on it. At the same time, great advances were being made in crystals for detectors. This later grew into the use of artificial crystals (transistors) for amplification in receivers as well as for detection.

In August 1940, Sir Henry Tizard, ousted from his committee by Lindemann, led a British scientific mission to Washington. He brought a large box of blueprints and reports on British scientific work, including radar, a new explosive (RDX, half again as powerful as TNT), studies on gaseous diffusion of uranium isotopes for an atom bomb, and much else. This visit gave a great impetus to American scientific work. As one consequence of it, 350 men from the United States were working in the radar net stations in England by November 1941 (a month before Pearl Harbor).

Of the many inventions which emerged from science in World War II, we have space here to mention only a few: shaped charges, proximity fuses, medical advances, and the atom bomb.

Six hundred years of ordnance research on artillery had brought guns to a high state of excellence long before World War II, but artillery, with all its advantages of range and accuracy, had three intrinsic disadvantages: the backward thrust of the explosive gases of propulsion gave it a violent recoil; the same gases corroded and wore down the inside of the barrel very rapidly; and the projectile, on hitting the target, dispersed its explosive force, sending most of it backward into the air from the resistance of the target itself. A rocket avoids the first two of these problems because it directs the recoil forward to push the rocket, and needs no container barrel at all. The Russians, who had greatly developed the use of rockets, used them in large numbers against the Germans in 1941. Since rockets need no barrel to shoot through but merely require a holder until they can fully ignite, rockets allow an infantryman to supply his own artillery support, especially against tanks. By the end of the war, American rockets were delivered for use in individual, disposable plastic launchers which were thrown away after the rocket inside had been fired.