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The exciting history of a small group of British and American scientists who, during World War II, developed the new field of operational research to turn back the tide of German submarines—revolutionizing the way wars are waged and won.
In March 1941, after a year of unbroken and devastating U-boat onslaughts, the British War Cabinet decided to try a new strategy in the foundering naval campaign. To do so, they hired an intensely private, bohemian physicist who was also an ardent socialist. Patrick Blackett was a former navy officer and future winner of the Nobel Prize; he is little remembered today, but he and his fellow scientists did as much to win the war against Nazi Germany as almost anyone else. As director of the World War II antisubmarine effort, Blackett used little more than simple mathematics and probability theory—and a steadfast belief in the utility of science—to save the campaign against the U-boat. Employing these insights in unconventional ways, from the washing of mess hall dishes to the color of bomber wings, the Allies went on to win essential victories against Hitler’s Germany.
Here is the story of these civilian intellectuals who helped to change the nature of twentieth-century warfare. Throughout, Stephen Budiansky describes how scientists became intimately involved with what had once been the distinct province of military commanders—convincing disbelieving military brass to trust the solutions suggested by their analysis. Budiansky shows that these men above all retained the belief that operational research, and a scientific mentality, could change the world. It’s a belief that has come to fruition with the spread of their tenets to the business and military worlds, and it started in the Battle of the Atlantic, in an attempt to outfight the Germans, but most of all to outwit them.
- Sales Rank: #373046 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-02-19
- Released on: 2013-02-19
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"Little-known story of the Allied scientists whose unconventional thinking helped thwart the Nazi U-boats in World War II. . . . An excellent, well-researched account." ---Kirkus Starred Review
About the Author
Stephen Budiansky is a military historian and the author of several books about military history, intelligence and espionage, science, and the natural world, including Battle of Wits, The Bloody Shirt, and Her Majesty's Spymaster.
John Lee has read audiobooks in almost every conceivable genre, from Charles Dickens to Patrick O'Brian, and from the very real life of Napoleon to the entirely imagined lives of sorcerers and swashbucklers. An AudioFile Golden Voice narrator, he is the winner of numerous Audie Awards and AudioFile Earphones Awards.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Preface
From 1941 to 1943, a small group of British and American scientists, almost entirely without military experience or knowledge, revolutionized the way wars are run and won.
Applying the basic tools of their trade—a thoroughly scientific mind--set backed by little more than simple mathematics and probability theory—they repeatedly demonstrated to disbelieving admirals and generals ways to double or triple the effectiveness of the faltering Allied campaign against the German U--boats. In the grim fight for control of the Atlantic during those years of uncertainty, the scientists’ unconventional insights achieved the near--miraculous in a battle crucial to the larger struggle to defeat Hitler’s Germany.
The scientists who beat the U--boats never numbered more than a hundred in all, a fraction of the thousands who worked to achieve the two far better known triumphs of science in the war: the breaking of the German Enigma cipher and the making of the atomic bomb. Yet they were a collection of scientific talent the likes of which probably has never been seen before or since, certainly the oddest such collection ever assembled in one place: among them were physicists, chemists, botanists, physiologists, geneticists, insurance actuaries, economists, mathematicians, and astronomers. Six would win the Nobel Prize, in physics, chemistry, or medicine. Most were far to the left in their politics: some of the best were out-and-out Marxists, and more than a few had been committed pacifists who had come to see the defeat of the Nazis as a cause that overrode their abhorrence of war. Many were almost caricatures of the sort of unmilitary, awkward, overly intellectual civilians that military men routinely viewed with undisguised contempt.
That they were there when they were so desperately needed was the extraordinary result of a confluence of events and circumstances that I have set out to describe in the following pages: the onrush of devastating reality after decades of complacency toward the submarine menace, a political awakening of scientists brought about by the Great Depression and the rise of fascism, struggles within the militaries of Britain and the United States that pitted tradition against technical innovation and social change, and the appearance in the right place of a few unconventional political and military leaders who respected science—-and of a few phenomenally accomplished scientists of great moral courage and unshakable intellectual integrity.
Patrick Blackett, a British physicist, ex–naval officer, future Nobel winner, and ardent socialist, stood at the forefront of those scientists of penetrating insight and courage. It is no exaggeration to say that few men did more to win the war against Nazi Germany than Patrick Blackett. Certainly, few who did as much as he did have been so little remembered. Partly that is because he was a difficult, private, and inner--directed man whose political views and personality did not age well in the postwar world. Most people today—-myself included—-will find his uncritical admiration for Stalin’s Soviet Union and his doctrinaire social Marxism painfully naive, at best. But it is worth remembering that that same naïveté was the source of an idealism that we can only wish there was more of today: whatever else, Patrick Blackett was fired by a sense of justice, righteousness, and self--sacrificing courage that drove him to serve his country, and the cause of civilization itself, at the time of their utmost need.
As director of the antisubmarine analysis effort for the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy during World War II, Blackett not only helped win that battle, and the war, but in so doing founded the new science of operational research; it has been an indispensable part of military training and planning ever since, a revolution in the application of science to the art of warfare.
It is far from clear that he or any of his colleagues from those perilous and heroic days of the scientific war against the U--boats would have the chance to make such an original contribution today. The bureaucratic machinery of war has become too vast and cumbersome to leave room for the gifted improvisation and iconoclastic thinking that Blackett and his colleagues brought to bear; today’s routine incorporation of science in military affairs, which they themselves helped to bring about, has ironically sharpened the lines between military and civilian expertise; and science itself has become ever more narrow, specialized, and competitive, to the point that few scientists with the intensity to achieve discoveries worthy of a Nobel Prize have time left to think about much else.
Which is our loss, and which makes their story all the more worth telling.
Chapter 1
An Unconventional Weapon
On the evening of november 19, 1918, eight days after the armistice that ended the war to end all wars, a train from London pulled into the depot at Parkeston Quay, just outside the East Anglia port town of Harwich, and a mob of reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen spilled out onto the platform. Harwich had seen its ups and downs as a small North Sea port. In the Middle Ages the town prospered shipping bales of wool to the continent and importing French wines. In the seventeenth century, its dockyards served as an important supply and refitting base for the Royal Navy during the Dutch Wars; Samuel Pepys, the secretary to the Board of the Admiralty and keeper of the vain and ingenuous diaries that remain the most revealing account of life in Restoration England, represented the town in Parliament; and Harwich’s thriving private shipyards may, or may not, have built the merchant ship Mayflower, which carried the Pilgrim Fathers to America.
A slow decline in the nineteenth century—-the royal dockyards closed in 1829—-was abruptly reversed in the 1880s when the Great Eastern Railway Company developed a large new port on reclaimed land a mile up the River Stour from the town center. The railway was rerouted to a new station from which passengers could transfer directly to ferries that took them on to Gothenburg, Hamburg, and the Hook of Holland; there were freight yards, a hotel, and rows of terraced housing for workers. With the coming of war in 1914 the Royal Navy requisitioned the entire port—-quays, hotel, workshops, and all—-and a force of destroyers and light cruisers and the 8th and 9th Submarine Flotillas moved in to guard the northern approaches to the English Channel.
And so Harwich, with its men who knew submarines and its facilities for handling them and its proximity to Germany’s North Sea naval bases, was chosen as the place where an unprecedented event in the history of naval warfare was to take place on the morning of November 20, 1918. The terms of capitulation the German government had agreed to were extraordinary and humiliating, a measure of the desperation that the swift collapse of Germany’s military situation had left her leaders facing. Fourteen articles of the Armistice dealt with the German navy. In addition to disarming all her warships and agreeing to have 10 battleships, 6 battle cruisers, 8 light cruisers, and 50 destroyers “of the most modern type” interned in neutral or Allied ports, Germany was to surrender outright “all submarines at present in existence . . . with armament and equipment complete.” Article 22 continued:
"Those that cannot put to sea shall be deprived of armament and equipment and shall remain under the supervision of the Allies and the United States. Submarines ready to put to sea shall be prepared to leave German ports immediately on receipt of wireless order to sail to the port of surrender, the remainder to follow as early as possible. The conditions of this Article shall be completed within fourteen days of the signing of the Armistice."
Along with the horde of reporters, British submarine officers and men had been summoned from every port to be on hand to take charge of the enemy boats as they arrived. Accommodations at Parkeston, which included three moored depot ships, were packed far beyond capacity that evening of the 19th. The one “lady reporter” in the group was chivalrously offered the hotel billiard table as a bed for the night.
A heavy fog shrouded the harbor the next morning as the destroyers Melampus and Firedrake, carrying the boarding parties and their attendant pack of press hounds, got under way at 7 a.m. heading for the point where the surrender was to take place; it was the southern end of the shipping channel known as the Sledway, about eight miles east--northeast of Harwich. A British airship droned out of the mist and passed to the north, quickly vanishing again in the fog. Then a few minutes before 10 a.m. a British light cruiser suddenly came into sight in the distance, then two German transports flanked by more British warships.
And then there they were: a line of unmistakable, long thin hulls breaking the dark surface of the water, topped by domed conning towers, proceeding in straggling order. Two airships and three flying boats kept a continuous watch over the procession, passing and repassing low over the enemy boats as they came on slowly toward the rendezvous point. Lieutenant Stephen King--Hall, a British submarine torpedo officer, groped to find words to capture the incredulity he felt as he witnessed the scene from aboard the Firedrake: the dangerous and reclusive predator he and his comrades had hunted and feared and loathed, now meekly chivvied along like a few tame sheep. “Try and imagine what you would feel like,” he wrote, “if you were told to go to Piccadilly at 10 a.m. and see twenty man--eating tigers walk up from Hyde Park Corner and lie down in front of the Ritz to let you cut their tails off and put their leads on—-and it was really so.”
A signal was given to the transports to anchor, and one by one the line of twenty U--boats joined them under the guns of the British destroyers. Motor launches came alongside the Firedrake and the Melampus, and the British boarding crews, two or three officers and fifteen men for each U--boat, scrambled aboard. Not sure what to expect, the officers all carried sidearms. “We were prepared for any eventuality except that which actually took place,” recalled King--Hall. “We were not prepared to find the Huns behaving for once as gentlemen.”
King--Hall’s boarding of U--90 went by the book, with punctilious correctness. The German officers saluted; the salutes were duly returned; the German captain presented the signed terms of surrender—-all equipment intact and in working order, all ballast tanks blown, torpedoes on board but disarmed, no booby traps—-and the submarine’s officers seemed almost pathetically eager to be helpful, offering explanations of the operation of the boat and its gear. The same scene was being repeated all along the line. “My Hun,” remarked one of the British officers back in Harwich that evening, “might have been trying to sell me the boat, the blighter tried to be so obliging.”
As the submarines raised anchor the British crews ran up the white flag for the final transit into port. A strict order had been issued by the port commander that there would be no cheering or other demonstrations, and as the captured U--boats passed the ships in the harbor, crowded with spectators, they were greeted by silence. By 4 p.m. they were moored to buoys at the head of the harbor (at what “the reporters now say we call ‘U--boat Avenue,’ ” King--Hall sarcastically noted); a motor launch came alongside and the Germans, who had meanwhile changed into civilian garb that made them look more like peacetime caricatures of German tourists, green felt hat and all, than officers of a fierce and proud militarist state, were told to gather their belongings and get aboard. The launch took them to one of the British destroyers, which delivered them to the German transports for the trip back home, without ever having set foot on British soil.
Over the next eleven days the scene was repeated in daily succession as ninety--four more U--boats surrendered at Harwich, all without incident. Some of the German sailors inquired pathetically of the boarding crews if they thought they might be able to find work as merchant seamen in China or Japan, if Germans were now unwelcome anywhere closer to home. Two refused to return to Germany and insisted on staying in England, where they hoped to find “work and good food.” Many of the surrendering boats were commanded by junior and plainly nervous young officers, their regular captains apparently having refused to make the humiliating voyage; others flew the red flag of the revolutionaries who had seized parts of the German fleet in the waning days of the war, their captains elected by the crews and holding commissions signed by the Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Committee; in other boats the crews sullenly refused to obey orders of their regular officers except when it was clear that the order would be backed up by the British officer on board. Most, especially the older men who were members of the naval reserve and had been merchant sailors before the war, seemed simply relieved that it was over, and bade farewell to their boats with dry eyes and no apparent regrets.
In December 1918 the Allied Naval Commission discovered 62 additional seaworthy U--boats and another 149 still under construction at German bases and yards and ordered the immediate surrender of any that could sail or be towed and the destruction of the rest. The German government was warned that failure to turn over all of its U--boats intact would be answered by the Allies with the permanent occupation of its island naval base of Heligoland. The captured fleet, 176 boats in the end, was parceled out among the victors, most going to Britain and France, with token specimens awarded to the other Allies; Italy received 10, Japan 7, the United States 6, Belgium 2.
One of the behemoths of the German U--boat fleet—-the “super--submarine” Deutschland, originally constructed as a blockade-runner with a cargo capacity of 750 tons—-was scheduled to be broken up. But at the urging of members of Parliament it was instead towed to the Thames in October 1919 and exhibited to raise money for the King’s Fund for Sailors. “Poetic justice,” one member of Parliament declared with satisfaction.
But the real satisfaction to those who had battled this new undersea menace had come four months earlier, with the German signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919. Among its hundreds of detailed military stipulations, specifying everything from the maximum number of officers permitted in the headquarters of a cavalry division (15) to the number of rounds of ammunition that could be stocked per rifle or carbine (400), was Article 191, which declared: “The construction or acquisition of any submarine, even for commercial purposes, shall be forbidden in Germany.” In the course of the war Germany’s submarines had sunk over 5,000 Allied merchant vessels, totaling 12 million tons of shipping. No one before the war had imagined that the submarine, barely more than an inventor’s crackpot dream a few years earlier, would have been capable of bringing Great Britain, and its mightiest fleet on earth, to the edge of catastrophe in 1917; no one had imagined the inhumanity that the submarine would make routine and inevitable once it was unleashed in the only way it could be truly effective as a weapon of total war. But what man’s sordid ingenuity for destruction had created, the majesty of international law as decently dreamed of by Woodrow Wilson, and cynically seconded by his more worldly wise allies in London and Paris, would nobly or ignobly contain.
Most helpful customer reviews
29 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
How Civilian Intellectuals Helped to Win the Battle of the Atlantic
By Frank G. Splitt
This book is a very well-written history of submarine warfare that reads like a page-turning novel. Although the book centers on Patrick Blackett, it is by no means a biography.
The author makes a compelling argument to the effect that during World War II, Allied civilian intellectuals -- scientists and other professionals such as physicists, chemists, biologists, actuaries, and mathematicians -- made remarkable contributions to winning the war in Europe. For example, they developed a new discipline, Operations Research (OR), as well as microwave (10-centmeter/3-gigahertz) radar and other breakthroughs that are still in use today.
These civilians applied scientific thinking to battlefield situations -- teaching Allied military leaders to use their resources in as optimum a fashion as possible. They asked penetrating questions that challenged accepted naval and air-force thinking. In so doing, they revolutionized anti-submarine warfare (ASW) and made a significant contribution to winning the Battle of the Atlantic -- the linchpin for the winning of the war.
Real heroes abound. To begin there is Winston Churchill, who in the mid-1930s was a powerless Parliament backbencher. Churchill, a first Lord of the Admiralty in World War I, was a skeptic of military ways and means as well as a firm believer in scientific methods. He made the acquaintance of the Oxford University physicist F.A. Lindemann. "Lindeman became my chief adviser on the scientific aspects of modern war," said Churchill. He lectured Churchill on ways science might help protect Britain against aerial bombardment. Churchill then pressed the government to bring in scientific advisers on military affairs as early as 1934. This led to the formation of the Air Ministry Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence.
The formation of the committee opened the way for the civilians. Henry Tizard, a physical chemist at Oxford, chaired the committee that included H. E. Wimperis, the Air Ministry's director of scientific research, and his assistant A. P. Rowe, A. V. Hill, a biologist at University College, and Patrick Blackett, a future Nobel Prize-winning physicist, who was a Naval Officer during World War I and went on to prove himself to be one of the best scientific leaders of the day via his work at Cambridge under Ernest Rutherford . Much to the discomfort of many line officers, hundreds more civilian intellectuals followed in their footsteps.
The scientists were meant not so much to invent new devices as to improve the way war was waged with weapons and procedures already at hand . This was a tough assignment requiring relationship skills, because it involved telling generals and admirals how to better do their jobs. Churchill, who became prime minister in May 1940, provided strong support so that the civilians could embed themselves in military units to study real operational problems. The scientists were not very well received at the Admiralty. The civilians needed to keep a low profile. The job as Blackett would say after the war, "is to improve matters if he can, and if he cannot, to say nothing." But invent things they did.
In 1935, a group of these civilian experts began exploring the embryonic concept of "a new and potent means of detecting the approach of hostile aircraft, one which will be independent of mist, cloud, fog, or nightfall." The outcome of their efforts became known as radar--radio detecting and ranging. Churchill and the Air Ministry saw to it that England's south coast was lined with tracking stations by the time Great Britain and Germany went to war in September 1939. The Royal Navy's tradition and inbred conservatism made it uninterested in radar that was one of the keys to winning the Battle of Britain--an attitude that would deprive it of a potential early advantage against the German Navy.
Churchill's excitement over technical ideas would often get the better of him. Motivated by Lindemann, he insisted that the scientists pursue a rash of worthless, time-consuming ideas such as aerial mines that could intercept bombers and a device to create an updraft that would flip an attacking airplane upside-down.
The author rightfully claims that the scientists' greatest contribution to the war effort was forcing the military to make decisions based on data instead of tradition and intuition. Nowhere was this more important than in the Battle of the Atlantic, where German U-boats were waging a devastating war on merchant shipping - threatening the lifeline to England and the build-up for D-Day.
U-boats often operated on the surface, and were frequently spotted at close range by Royal Navy ships escorting convoys. The escorts were trained to drop depth charges 250 feet apart and set to explode 100 to 150 feet underwater and were having negligible success against the subs. Blackett, then working for the Navy's Coastal Command, asked a physicist named E.J. Williams to take on the issue. Williams showed mathematically why an escort ship following the Navy's instructions was unlikely ever to hit a U-boat. He recommended that the defenders ignore any U-boat that had been beneath the surface for more than 15 seconds. But U-boats that had just dived were to be attacked immediately with closely spaced depth charges set to explode at only 25 feet. The kill rate rose by a factor of 10.
The Coastal Command tracked the estimated location of every U-boat believed to be in the Atlantic and used a fleet of patrol planes to search for them. Knowing that U-boats usually traveled on the surface, Blackett calculated the number of sightings the planes should report. The actual number was far less, because U-boats were spotting the planes and diving before being seen. Blackett determined that the Coastal aircraft were black -- having been shifted from night bomber duty to ocean patrol. Painting the undersides of the wings reflective white made the planes harder to see, and the rate of U-boat sightings doubled.
Some of the contributions the author recounts are well known, notably the cracking of the German army Enigma codes and the more complex naval Enigma codes. It began with the help of discoveries made by three code breakers in the Polish army's cipher bureau who turned over the results of their work -- including a reverse-engineered army version of the Enigma coding machine -- to their British counterparts in Warsaw just prior to the Nazi invasion. Code breaking was an ongoing task that allowed the Coastal Command to site and map U-boat deployments, including wolf-pack formations, and so re-direct convoys out of harms' way. For good measure, the convoys were optimally designed via OR re: size and escort configuration.
The author helps the reader understand how and why OR developed as a scientific enterprise. Blackett and his fellow British scientists, and, from 1940, their American counterparts under the National Defense Research Committee headed by Vannevar Bush, showed how careful quantitative analysis could provide far better guidance for decision makers than tradition, prejudice, and gut feeling. Concepts such as probability and optimization, honed in studies analyzing the placement of antiaircraft batteries and the flight patterns of planes on patrol at sea, eventually made their way into business operations.
Finally, the civilian heroes of World War II are seen by the author as having "an abiding faith in rationality, a basic confidence in the enduring power of arithmetic and simple probability, and a determination to vanquish an evil that they took to heart as a personal duty."
72 of 81 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting Accounting of Major Contributions
By Loyd Eskildson
From 1941 - 43, a small group of British and American scientists, almost entirely without military experience or knowledge, changed how wars are fought and won. Six would win the Nobel Prize for their other work, most were far left in their politics (some even Marxists or pacifists). Patrick BLackett, British physicist and ex-naval officer, future Nobel winner, and ardent socialists led the British efforts in this dimension.
On average, there were 2,000 Britishs merchant ships at sea at any given time. German U-boats at the beginning of WWII were faster and more fuel efficient than their predecessers. Their torpedoes were also new - electric, that no longer gave off a tell-tale stream of air bubbles. Since England's vaunted new asdic (sonar) detection system was then effective for up to 5,000 yards, Admiral Donitz changed strategy to focus on night attacks while the submarines were on the surface, redering the Brits new detection tool useless. Concentrated targets (Allied convoys) were contered by concentrated U-boats, brought together from loose groups via radio signals.
Churchill's ascendancy brought a search for new ideas. One of his early ideas, creating 'hunting groups' that roamed the oceans searching for U-boats, was a failure. Eventually others convinced him that the place to look for U-boats was where their prey was - around convoys. A second Churchill ideas was even worse - assigning two obsolete carriers and their planes to the U-boat hunt - despite the fact that their torpedoes and bombs were useless once a submarine dived. One of those carriers was very quickly sunk by a U-boat.
A third idea from Churchill was much more useful - directing the installation of anti-survace vessel radars on escort vessels, as was his directing the RAF to determine if its planes could carry and drop depth charges.
British intelligence had been a good-old-boy network, dominated by non-scientists (eg. art historians, experts on ancient Greece and medieval Germany); the first mathematician/statistician was not brought into the group until 1938. During the first weeks of the war, only three of the academics were mathematicians, and the rest came from the humanities. Fortunately, early successes by Polish army mathematicians convinced the British that they needed more themselves.
Donitz was hampered by defective magnetic triggers in early U-boat torpedoes. Considerable time was lost while the problem was diagnosed and eliminated via new equipment. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe came close to toppling Britain's RAF in the mid-August 1940 by concentrating on its airfields and radar stations. However, Goering failed to follow up at that point by diverting attention to daylight London raids in retaliation for Britain's having carried out two small night attacks on Berlin that same month. The time lost allowed Britain's RAF the chance to recoup.
Shortly before the night raids began, the British general in charge of anti-aircraft fire asked to have Blackett assigned as an advisor - his problem was particularly acute during evenings when the bombers couldn't be seen. Blackett found their new radars weren't connected to the guns, and though reasonably accurate when readings were averaged out, not that useful at any single moment in time. Blackett's group worked out a means of averaging the radar readings and inputting the resulting data to the guns. Since the thirty anti-aircraft groupings near London had to share 15 radars, Blackett also suggested consolidating the anti-aircraft guns into 15 groups since their night-time effectiveness without radar was essentially non-existent. Blackett also resisted the pull to move the guns to the shore - shore batteries claimed a shoot-down rate about 2X that for inland sites; thinking about the topic and talking to others, Blackett realized that the reason for the data difference was not that the coastal sites were more effective, but simply due to their claims being mostly unverifiable. Another problem - the British general was continually upset with the variation in shoot-down rates from one evening to another; one night it would be 5, another night only 2, etc. Blackett convinced him that this was simply random variation and not attributable to better efforts on one night vs. another. Results: The British went from needing to fire 20,000 shells to bring down a German bomber to only 4,000.
The group Blackett assembled eventually became known as 'Blackett's Circus.' One of his attributes that had endeared him to the general was his willingness to make do with what was available, rather than pursue theoretical perfection.
Improving 'kill rates' vs. German U-boats was probably the highest priority assigned Blackett's group. E.J. Williams was assigned the lead role in this effort, and quickly determined that airplanes were spending too much time on targets that had been submerged over 15 seconds. He also concluded that it was important to change their depth charge settings from 100 - 150 feet to 25 feet, as well as narrowing the spacing between depth charges from 250 feet to 40 - 60 feet. After technical adjustments, the percentage sank rose from 1 - 2% to 10%.
Another improvement came from Blackett's asking why U-boat sightings/plane were only about one-fourth what he estimated they should be. Either the U-boats were underwater much more than he believed (contrary to intelligence from captured crews), or the U-boats were seeing approaching planes and diving prior to being spotted. Blackett then realized the planes being used had been painted black underneath for night bombings - having them repainted white reduced by about 20% the distance at which they could be seen. Sightings of U-boats jumped from one/700 hours of flying to one/350 hours.
Pursuit of a German radio ship trawler, the capture of other documents from a U-boat, and the use of early tab machine computers allowed the Allies to break Germany's naval code, even though the keys were changed daily. U-boat effectiveness dropped from sinking an average of four ships/month to less than one.
America's military was late to recognize the value of operations research personnel, and further hampered their naval operations by decentralized control of anti-submarine efforts (slow, uncoordinated). Another problem - it took far longer than it should have to convince America's Navy to utilize convoys - convoys from Key West to the Hatteras cut sinkings from 25% of ships to 2%. Meanwhile, Blackett eventually convince the British to increase convoy size because the perimeter needing protection lengthened much more slowly than the size of the convoy. Thus, increasing convoy size by 50% also reduced sinkings by 50%.
Bottom-Line: Blackett's group, along with others elsewhere, made significant contributions to the Allied victory. Amazingly, some of their best contributions required very little mathematical skills. Unfortunately, efforts to achieve similar improvements in social policies by the same personnel were unsuccessful - politics was more important than objective performance measures (eg. U-boats sunk).
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Boffins Against the U-Boat Menace
By Rob Hardy
Science has enabled us to do a lot of things better, and unfortunately, given the way people and nations conduct themselves, it has enabled wars to be fought with more effectiveness. When we think of scientific contributions to warfare, we think of gadgets, from better guns to better bombs. Hitler had his scientists, and we had ours, and we can all be thankful that ours were part of the effort that brought us victory. One of the scientists who deserves our thanks is Patrick Blackett. If your reaction is, "Who?" that was my reaction too, but he is the central subject of _Blackett's War: The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-Boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare_ (Knopf) by Stephen Budiansky. The author writes, "It is no exaggeration to say that few men did more to win the war against Nazi Germany than Patrick Blackett," and he makes a persuasive case. Blackett would later go on to win a Nobel Prize in physics for work he started before the war, examining cosmic ray tracks within cloud chambers, but his work during the war did not have to do directly with gadgetry or physics. Rather, he championed taking data from battle procedures and formulating tactics based on the data, an idea that seems obvious in retrospect. Blackett is acknowledged as the founder of the discipline known as Operations Research, which has had far broader applications than just warfare.
Budiansky's book is a broad history of the foundation of ideas in OR rather than a biography of Blackett, but of course Blackett's life is recounted. Churchill was an enthusiast for scientific ideas, and was perhaps overeager to promote the next scientific gadget. Blackett's circle was not involved in gadgetry, but were posted, often against the wishes of generals and admirals, into the military units to see directly the operational problems of warfare. Taking data and analyzing it was their role, and it changed the way the war was fought. For example, Royal Navy ships were dropping depth charges at about 125 feet underwater for boats that had gone under for extended times. Mathematically, Blackett's team was able to show that U-boats that had dived for more than fifteen seconds should simply be ignored; those that had just gone down were to be attacked immediately with a close pattern of depth charges set to explode at only 25 feet. The kill rate increased by ten.
Operations research as advocated by Blackett and his team was not originally in accord with the way the military wanted to do things. Military men derided it originally as "strategy by slide rule," but it became clear that using numbers increased the effectiveness of military effort. While operations research is now commonplace in military education, and also in MBA programs, it was innovative at the time, as was the idea of having scientists advise on an overall war effort. These were not scientists bent on careers as military advisors, but men who wanted to help win the war against Hitler. And they played a huge role in the victory. Toward the end of this revelatory book, one that should bring renewed admiration for some forgotten scientific heroes, Budiansky writes, "They did it by an abiding faith in rationality, a basic confidence in the enduring power of arithmetic and simple probability, and a determination to vanquish an evil that they took to heart as a personal duty."
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