BOFFIN vs. BOFFIN

See Also: BOMBER COMMAND; WINSTON CHURCHILL; THE SANDMAN & THE ZUCKERMAN; THE SECOND WORLD WAR The Scientists

Frederick Lindemann and Henry Tizard first encountered one another in 1908 in the Berlin laboratory of Walter Nernst.¹ The two Britons became close friends. While Tizard felt he gained a considerable amount from his time in Germany, he chose to return to the University of Oxford after having spent only a few months there. Lindemann opted to remain and finished a Ph.D. before taking up a position amidst the dreaming spires.

Of the pair, it was Lindemann had the more profound scientific mind. His contemporary academic reputation has not survived because his relative weakness as a mathematician led him to write only a limited number of papers. However, he compensated for this trait by having exceptional conceptual flair. This was combined with an ability to think across a range of fields. He was spoken to as an equal by the likes of Albert Einstein, Lord Rutherford, and Max Planck. Tizard was a very able research chemist. However, his greater gift was his capacity to identify problems and to draw out solutions of them from others.

Tizard s First World War service at the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough led to his being appointed as the Air Ministry's acting Controller of Research & Experiments by the time that the conflict ended. He briefly returned to Oxford, served as a mandarin at the Department of Scientific & Industrial Research, and in 1929 was appointed to be the Rector of Imperial College. All the while, he was a member of the government s Aeronautical Research Committee. During his spell back at Oxford, he carried out some consultancy work for Shell on improving fuels. This led to his becoming knowledgeable about internal combustion engines, which he extended into a technical understanding of aero-engines. In 1933 he was appointed to be the ARC's chairman.

During the conflict Lindemann also served in the Factory. His work there included understanding the nature of aircraft spin and developing procedures that created the opportunity for a plane to be extricated from one. He did this by risking his own life in order to assess whether or not his solution to the problem worked. After the war, Tizard engineered his friend s appointment as the Dr Lee Professor of Experimental Philosophy at Oxford. Despite its name the position was a chair in physics. Lindemann was to be closely associated with the university for the rest of his life.

The Prof came from a very wealthy haute bourgeoisie family and was given to socialising with rich and titled people. In 1921 he and Winston Churchill - who was neither rich nor titled - were introduced to one another. The two men became firm friends. The academic, whose politics were to the right of the politician's, became the latter s principal scientific adviser. In 1933 the Nazis took control of the German state. For all his own political beliefs, the Prof was not a fascist and he soon understood the potential menace that a Nazi Germany posed to Europe.

In 1934 the Royal Air Force conducted a series of air exercises. These simulated hostile bombing raids against London and Coventry. It was appreciated that bombers were accelerating their top-speeds relative to those of fighters. This meant that the latter s ability to detect and counter the former was declining. Harry Wimperis, the Air Ministry's Director of Scientific Research, proposed that a departmental sub-committee on aerial defence should be established, that its membership should be composed of scientists, that Albert Rowe should be its secretary, and that Tizard should be its chairman. The body was constituted accordingly.

Lindemann was unaware of the Tizard Defence Committee's existence. In August 1934 he wrote a public letter to The Times newspaper in which he called upon the Committee of Imperial Defence to establish such a body. Towards the end of the year he learnt of what the Ministry had already done. He chose to regard the establishment of the body as having been a ploy that had been intended to forestall his own proposal. The two men's friendship ruptured. Each now tended to interpret the other's actions in a negative light. The Prof preferred to use political means in order to try to achieve his ends, whereas the Rector was a technocrat par excellence.

The Tizard Committee met for the first time at the start of 1935. Its membership included the Birkbeck College physicist Patrick Blackett and the University College physiologist A.V. Hill. The body endorsed Robert Watson-Watt s proposal to create a radio location system. Wimperis persuaded Air Marshal Dowding to have Fighter Command finance the project's initial development.

During 1936 the ministry succumbed to pressure from Churchill and placed the Tizard Defence Committee under the Committee of Imperial Defence's supervision. Lindemann became a member of the former body. He endorsed its support of Watson-Watt s efforts. However, he himself proved to be given to championing technologies that were either unrealistic or impractical. His conduct on the body was deeply disruptive. Ultimately, it prompted a number of his colleagues on it to tender their resignations. The Committee was dissolved and then reconstituted without him. His replacement was the University of Cambridge physicist Edward Appleton.

On 3 September 1939 Britain entered the Second World War. Churchill was appointed to be the First Lord of the Admiralty; Lindemann was no longer in the wilderness. On 10 May 1940 Churchill became Prime Minister; the Prof became the most influential governmental adviser. Sir Archibald Sinclair was appointed to be the Secretary of State for Air. He was a close friend of the premier and accepted Lindemann's counsel. Tizard resigned from all of his Air Ministry positions bar the Aeronautical Research Committee. The wheel of fortune had enabled the political approach to trump the technocratic one.

While Churchill accepted Lindemann's counsel, and indeed used him for numerous non-scientific matters, he also appreciated the Rector's abilities. At the prime minister's behest, Tizard led a scientific mission to North America. This sought both to engender a measure of goodwill and co-operation from the United States, by revealing some of the technologies that were being developed in Britain, and to encourage portions of Canada's scientific community to undertake war work. Upon his return to Britain he resumed both his association with the Air Ministry, but at a greater distance than he had been before, and his involvement in radar research. He and Lindemann maintained their capacity to mutually antagonise one another. Upon occasion it was necessary for the premier to smooth the former's ruffled feathers.

Within the government there was a debate both about how resources should be assigned to the three-armed services and about how they should be used once they had been allocated. This prompted Lindemann to initiate a War Cabinet Secretariat investigation into the accuracy of the R.A.F.'s bombing of Germany. David Benusan-Butt concluded that less than 10% of British bombs were hitting their targets. The Butt Report was issued in August 1941.

In early 1942 the Prof commissioned the academic scientists J.D. Bernal and Solly Zuckerman to assess what impact the Allied bombing campaign was having. By extrapolating from Britain's experience, the pair concluded that the aerial bombing of German cities was having a limited impact on the Nazi state's war economy. Yet in March Lindemann, anticipating what he thought would be their conclusion, sent Churchill a memorandum that advocated a bombing campaign that sought to dehouse Germany's urban population. He argued that this would destroy morale and thereby enable the war to be won. Tizard, Blackett, and Hill opposed this proposal. The Cabinet backed it. It was to remain in place until almost the war's end.²

Location: Adastral House, 1 Kingsway, WC2B 6AN. The Air Ministry left the building in 1952. (blue, red)

¹. Lindemann not only had a German sounding surname he had also been born in Baden-Baden. He was English, having patrilineally descent from an Alsatian family. His mother had been visiting the town's spa as a tourist at the time of his birth.

². Following the establishment of peace, it was to be appreciated that this approach had been flawed by the fact that German buildings had tended to be sturdier than British ones.

David Backhouse 2024