Blackett's War Read Free

21.
    Blackett’s staff produces a pivotal study demonstrating that ships are twice as safe from U-boat attack in large convoys as in small convoys, January 27.
    Dönitz is named commander-in-chief of the German navy, January 30.
    Atlantic Convoy Conference convenes in Washington and recommends reallocating 260 very-long-range aircraft to the antisubmarine campaign, March 1–12.
    A temporary blackout in the reading of Enigma traffic causes two eastbound Atlantic convoys to fall prey to a devastating attack by forty U-boats, March 16.
    Blackett engages in a bitter dispute with Lindemann and Air Marshal Arthur Harris over bombing priorities, March.
    Centimeter-radar-equipped aircraft sink their first U-boat, March 22.
    Admiral Ernest King establishes the Tenth Fleet to consolidate U.S. antisubmarine operations (and subsequently names himself commander), May 20.
    Dönitz withdraws U-boats from the North Atlantic convoy lanes, May 23.
    U.S. Army Air Forces agrees to turn over all antisubmarine air operations to the navy, July 9.
    Air attacks on U-boats transiting the Bay of Biscay intensify and the number of operational U-boats at sea drops for the first time in the war, falling to sixty (half the number in the spring), July–August.
    1944
    Admiral King announces that the U-boats have been reduced from “menace” to “problem,” April.
    Allied troops land in France on D-Day, June 6.
    1945
    Dönitz succeeds Hitler as Führer, April 30.
    Germany surrenders, May 8.
    1948
    Blackett is awarded the Nobel Prize in physics.
    Blackett publishes
Fear, War, and the Bomb
, opposing the American monopoly on atomic weapons and denouncing the policies of the United States as the chief threat to world peace.
    1952
    Operations Research Society of America is founded and enrolls 500 members in its first year.
    1965
    Blackett is appointed president of the Royal Society.
    1974
    Blackett dies, July 13.

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