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The First World War is often seen as a conflict dominated by mud, barbed wire, and trenches, where men went forward in human waves to be cut down by machine-guns and artillery shells. This suf-fering and sacrifice should never be forgotten. But there was another side to the war, which saw incredible advances in science, from aviation to surgery, from chemicals to communication, and from understanding mental health to the development of the mass media. In 1915, Professor John Ambrose Fleming, one of the top scientists of the day, said, ‘It is beyond any doubt that this is a war of engineers and chemists quite as much as of soldiers.’ Though Winston Churchill’s achievements have been widely celebrated – and are now being remembered again, in honour of the 150th anniversary of his birth on 30 November 1874 – what is perhaps less well known is that he was also a leading player in this scientific aspect of the war.
Visions of the future
In March 1902, Churchill – then a young, ambitious Conservative MP – had met H G Wells, the famous science-fiction writer, for dinner. Churchill, an ex-soldier and war reporter, was talkative, energetic, and an imperialist to his core. H G Wells, a socialist, was already known as the successful author of such classics as The Time Machine and The Invisible Man.
Wells’ vision of the future was one in which scientists and engineers would prevail, and new technologies would dominate. His book Anticipations, a work of non-fiction published at the end of the previous year, looked at technology and warfare. Wells predicted that future wars would not be run by generals obsessed with tradition, but by technical experts committed to the use of new technologies. Two years before the Wright Brothers had even launched the era of powered flight, he foresaw that aircraft would play a central role in military conflict, and that control of the skies would be essential for victory. Despite coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum, Churchill and Wells found much to talk about.
Churchill left the Conservative party to join the Liberals in 1904, and served in the radical, reforming Liberal government as Home Secretary, helping to lay the foundations of the welfare state, providing basic state pensions and improving the lot of working people. But in October 1911, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith offered Churchill the opportunity to become First Lord of the Admiralty, a powerful position when Britannia still ruled the waves. Churchill enthusiastically became one of the great reformers of the Royal Navy. He created a Naval War Staff to determine future naval strategies. He improved the lot of sailors below deck. He launched a new class of battleship, the Queen Elizabeth class – faster than Dreadnoughts and equipped with new 15-inch guns. Churchill also began the process of converting the navy from using home-produced coal to vessels fuelled by oil, a massive transition that would take years to complete.
In addition, he became a keen advocate of naval flying. So enthusiastic was he that he even asked some naval officers to teach him to fly. But flying then was still a dangerous activity. One in every 5,000 flights ended in a fatal accident. Churchill’s friends begged him to desist. But he carried on taking flying lessons until 1912, when his wife Clemmie (pregnant with their third child) finally persuaded him reluctantly to give up his dangerous pastime.
He continued to support naval aviation, however, and that year an aircraft took off from a wooden deck erected on HMS Hibernia – the first plane to take off from a moving ship. And, in 1913, a naval aircraft dropped a torpedo for the first time. In the following year, in the months before war, Churchill oversaw the formation of the Royal Naval Air Service with a newly designed uniform to distinguish naval fliers from their army brothers in the Royal Flying Corps.
In 1914, aviation was only just beyond its infancy, and flying was still a seat-of-the-pants activity. There were few engines that could provide more than 100hp. The fastest aircraft flew at about 80mph and could only stay airborne for 40 or 50 minutes. The dramatic progress in the science of aeronautics during the war meant that four years later some aircraft could draw on 1,500hp engines, carry a heavy bomb load and stay airborne for up to 17 hours. Churchill in the Admiralty, and as Minister of Munitions from 1917 to 1919, continued to be a keen advocate of air power and helped to make some of H G Wells’ predictions come true.
The rise of the tank
Another way in which Churchill gave positive, indeed decisive, support to new technology in the First World War was in the encouragement he gave at the Admiralty to the development of the tank. By the end of 1914, Churchill was preoccupied by the stalemate generated by artillery, machine-guns, and barbed wire in a modern industrial conflict. He realised that something entirely new to the arsenal of war was needed to penetrate enemy lines. He had read Wells’ short story called ‘The Land Ironclads’ published in The Strand Magazine in 1903. Once again, with remarkable prescience, Wells predicted the deadlock of trench warfare and envisioned how to break through the enemy lines by imagining a huge ‘ironclad cruiser, crawling obliquely to the first line of the trenches and firing shots out of portholes to its side’.
On 5 January 1915, Churchill wrote to the Prime Minister suggesting that the army should take up the idea of building a set of land ironclads. He was astonished when, seven weeks later, he received a letter from the War Office rejecting the idea as ‘not likely to lead to success’.
Churchill decided to go ahead anyway, and on 20 February he formed a Landships Committee at the Admiralty under the chair of Eustace Tennyson d’Eyncourt – a naval engineer who could not, in the first instance, see what any of this had to do with him. But d’Eyncourt would become one of the key drivers of the project over the coming months. Churchill authorised the use of £70,000 of Admiralty funds to make prototypes. Stung by the War Office rejection and feeling that someone needed to get the wheels rolling, as it were, he pushed ahead. It was fortunate that he did.
From these small beginnings at the Admiralty, the War Office finally came on board. Many months after Churchill had been forced out of politics, the first experiments with what became known as the ‘tank’ were carried out. In February 1916, the prototype machine, Mother, was shown off to a group of VIPs. The tank passed through a variety of obstacles, traversed shell holes, and crossed an imagined trench. Bouncing about slowly, it met the two main conditions of being able to climb a vertical face 5ft high and cross a ditch 8ft wide. Everyone seemed impressed. Only Lord Kitchener was unconvinced: he was heard to say that the war would never be won by ‘pretty mechanical toys’.
The first use of the tank in September that year, during the Battle of the Somme, was not a success, however. Only 49 tanks were ready for action, not enough to make much difference, even if they had all performed magnificently. Of these, 17 broke down or failed to get to their starting positions. The remaining tanks rumbled slowly forward as best they could. A few did creditably well, but many others endured mechanical faults or got stranded in shell holes or trenches. It was an inauspicious beginning for a new weapon of war. Later, when more tanks were available, and when crews were better trained and tactics had been refined, their use did lead to a great victory at the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917. And the German commander Erich Ludendorff credited the Allied use of tanks in part for the German defeat in the autumn of 1918. By the end of the war, the armoured mobile tank was a permanent fixture in the arsenal of war. Although it had not been the machine that won the war, it had certainly helped.
THE SCIENTIFIC LEGACIES OF WORLD WAR I
The First World War is not usually perceived as a scientific war – but there were many lasting effects brought about by the developments in wartime science, often under the active encouragement of Churchill in his various roles.
The huge wartime advances in aeronautics made Britain a leading player in the aviation industry. The armed services possessed only 272 aircraft in 1914. By 1918, the RAF had more than 22,000 machines. Passenger flights using adapted wartime bombers saw a dramatic rise in the 1920s, and in 1924 Imperial Airways was formed – beginning a process of linking the empire and the world by air.
Out of the Admiralty’s codebreaking expertise in Room 40 (see main text) came the Government Code and Cypher School as a permanent feature in intelligence-gathering, and in 1939 this moved to Bletchley Park. Here the now famous work was carried out of breaking the German Enigma codes in World War II.
In the chemicals industry, several companies set up during the war came together in 1926 as Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), which provided the backbone for the production of materials ranging from fertilisers to dyes, and from new plastics to Dulux paint.
Advances in radio communications, and the huge number of veterans who gained experience of wireless technology in the war, prompted several commercial interests to establish an experimental national radio service called 2LO. This was renamed the British Broadcasting Company, and was finally reformed by the government as a public broadcaster in 1927: the British Broadcasting Corporation. By the time of World War II, 23 million Britons regularly listened to the BBC radio news.
From chemicals to codes
Churchill also helped lay the foundations of a new chemical industry, as the country had been reliant on German chemical production pre-war. Factories were turned over to start producing antiseptics and other medicines. Churchill personally supported a Russian Jewish immigrant at Manchester University to develop a new way of producing acetone, a key ingredient in the manufacture of high explosives. His name was Chaim Weizmann. Later the founder of an internationally famous scientific research establishment in Palestine, he would become the first President of the State of Israel in 1948.
Churchill’s influence over the scientific war even penetrated the shadowy world of codebreaking. Britain’s first offensive act of the war had been to cut the German undersea cables linking that country with much of Europe and the New World. This forced Germany to send its communications via radio – and radio waves could, of course, be intercepted and deciphered. But it took several months to construct a listening station, in a coastguard hut at Hunstanton in Norfolk – located to pick up German naval radio signals sent out across the North Sea. Staffed by GPO engineers, the nation’s first ‘Y Service’, or wireless listening service, was created. It soon began to intercept a growing number of signals. While this was happening, three German naval codebooks fell into the hands of the Admiralty. One was captured by the Australian navy; one by the Russians; and one was found thrown overboard in a lead-lined chest off the Dutch coast by some fishermen who brought it up in their nets. All three codebooks were delivered to London in November 1914.
With these codebooks, a small team in an obscure corner of Churchill’s Admiralty began to decode German naval signals. They used a first-floor office at the end of a corridor, known innocuously by the number the Admiralty had given the office: Room 40. It would remain at the heart of British codebreaking for the rest of the war. The Head of Naval Intelligence, Captain Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, recruited a set of codebreakers from a variety of backgrounds: many were academics; some were from the City; a few of them, as linguists, were women – to the horror of the Admiralty ‘old guard’. A bit like the mavericks who were recruited to Bletchley Park a generation later, the men and women of Room 40 included a variety of brilliant eccentrics who now set about decoding not only German naval signals but also diplomatic mail from Berlin that was transmitted by radio because the severed cables had also been used to send telegrams overseas.
While it was natural for the Admiralty to read German naval messages, it might have seemed a bit odd that Hall would also read many diplomatic messages flooding out from Berlin – for the Foreign Office avoided this sort of activity. It was widely felt that ‘gentlemen did not read each other’s mail’, and that there was something vulgar and improper about decoding messages. So ‘Blinker’ Hall and his cryptanalysts in Room 40 were the only officials spying on the enemy’s diplomatic mail. Much later in the war, it would be Room 40 that decoded the infamous Zimmerman Telegram that helped to bring the United States into the war in April 1917: the note revealed a German plan to form an alliance with Mexico and Japan if America declared war on Germany, and its publication caused outrage in the US.
Armed with the German codebooks, ‘Blinker’ Hall’s Room 40 codebreakers started to decipher a vast amount of German naval signals traffic. Winston Churchill became obsessed with the high-grade intelligence that Room 40 was beginning to supply him. He had always been interested in espionage, and he got a thrill from reading enemy signals in the raw. However, such intelligence is only of real value if it is interpreted properly, and Churchill made a fundamental error in how he organised this process at the Admiralty. He failed to realise the need for the material to be properly analysed and put into context by experienced intelligence experts, and believed that simply having the decrypts was good enough in itself. Total secrecy was the rule he imposed, and as few people as possible were allowed to see the decrypts. Handwritten instructions were drawn up by Churchill – too secret even for typists to see. Churchill told the Prime Minister of the existence of Room 40, but did not tell the rest of the Cabinet. And there followed a series of ‘blunders’, not in the deciphering of German signals, but in the use of the intelligence that was gleaned from them.
In December 1914, when a German naval raiding party came out from their base at Wilhelmshaven, the Admiralty failed to pass on key information that allowed the German ships to get away after shelling Scarborough and Hartlepool on England’s north-east coast. The same happened in the Battle of Dogger Bank in January 1915. Churchill and a small team of elderly admirals were hanging on to information that had been decoded without allowing analysts to pass it on to naval commanders at sea. Dogger Bank had not shown up a failure of gathering intelligence, but revealed a failure to process intelligence.
The lessons of war
With the collapse of the Liberal government in May 1915 and the formation of a coalition, the Conservatives (who had never forgiven him for changing sides 11 years before and who regarded him as a class traitor for his welfare reforms) made Churchill’s removal from the Admiralty a condition of their joining the new government. He was unfairly blamed for the fiasco of the failed naval offensive to secure the Dardanelles in 1915. He was thrown into despair and suffered a series of depressions, which he called his ‘black dog’. He began to think his career might be over, and took up painting. For a while he left politics to command a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front. However, when his friend and colleague David Lloyd George replaced Asquith as Prime Minister at the end of 1916, his star slowly began to turn. Finally, in July 1917, he returned to government, this time as Minister of Munitions.
The Ministry of Munitions was one of the vast new departments of state created during the war. Three million workers were involved in producing and supplying munitions. During the great German offensive in the spring of 1918, Churchill used every device and stratagem he could to deliver the munitions and the weapons needed to replace the losses in France. He slept in his office and worked, literally, day and night, pushing and cajoling industry to increase its output to the limit. By the end of April, the British Army had replacements for every gun, tank, and aircraft lost during the German offensive. Sir Douglas Haig wrote in his diary that Churchill had ‘certainly improved the output of the munitions factories very greatly, and is full of energy’.
Churchill himself learned several lessons from the experience of the First World War that would be invaluable when it came to leading the war effort in the Second. He developed a healthy suspicion of admirals and generals who hid behind traditions and outdated custom and practice, and who failed to look for new solutions to new battlefield challenges. With this in mind, Churchill gave enormous encouragement in the Second World War to boffins, inventors, and mavericks – anyone who could offer Britain an advantage over a seemingly all-powerful enemy.
Taylor Downing’s new book The Army that Never Was: D-Day and the Great Deception is out now.
In the next issue of MHM: The extraordinary story of Churchill’s scientific adviser during World War II.
All images: Wikimedia Commons, unless otherwise stated
