Boffins at War
Tizard. By Ronald W. Clark. (Methuen, 50s.) TO service chiefs, to ministers and to armament engineers, Sir Henry Tizard seemed to be the fount of all scientific knowledge. Certainly he wag the embodiment of the popular conception of a scientist. In an incisive, slightly nasal tone of voice, he was perpetually asking awkward questions, perpetually throwing down impractic- able inventions and ill-considered ideas, per- petually slamming opinionated ignorance. In his correspondence, notes and memoranda, the word 'wrong' recurs like a refrain. Lord Cherwell is told that he has got his facts wrong, government policy on the bombing of German cities is wrong, the mathematics in some technical argu- ment are wrong. He had, as Mr. Ronald Clark puts it, no inhibitions about reporting unpleasant facts and he had no hesitation in chastising the foolish in sharp, wounding terms. He was much more the 'prickly scientist' Lord Newall called him than the 'good lubricator' of defence dis- cussions of Lord Portal's description.
Radar, jet engines and the Wallis dam-busting weapon: these were among the inventions which Tizard sponsored and supported. But his views, suggestions and criticisms coloured all aero- nautical progress for more than thirty years. The value of this book is that, through Tizard's activities, it passes in review the events, most of them secret at the time, which were the technical mainspring of the war effort, from radar to the atomic bomb. The author selects Tizard's efforts to give early effect to Watson-Watt's invention of radar as the 'greatest achievement of his life,' a judgment endorsed by Sir Solly Zuckerman in his foreword. But some of those who were actively engaged in aviation may think that Tizard's work in establishing the science of test flying upon foundations partly laid by Bertram Hopkinson was his greatest as it was his most broadly constructive achievement.
Like his enemy Lord Cherwell, Tizard some- times exhibited arrogance, but he had a streak of disarming humility and, unlike Cherwell, he respected and understood men of action and gained their admiration and affection. I first met him at Orfordness during the 1914-18 War. He had learnt to fly and had flown himself there in a Sopwith Dolphin which he asked me to try. Later I met him more often at the test station at Martlesham Heath and I came to like him and to .enjoy his dry, sarcastic brand of humour. He had no equal, I thought, in apply- ing scientific knowledge and scientific methods to war and it was on such work that he spent his life. This volume discloses that in later years he had a hankering for leafy lanes and quiet lawns in his capacity as President of Magdalen. Their quiet enticement, however, was not strong enough to take him away for long from the in- cessant, wearing round of committee meetings, visits to experimental stations, arguments with politicians and civil servants. Up to the time of his death at the age of seventy-four he was active, mobile, critical, monitory.
Little direct attention is paid in this book to his ordinary life. He is seen in a world populated exclusively by warmongering men. Yet from this careful, comprehensive and balanced compila- tion of the great enterprises in which he took part, his character emerges, indirectly perhaps, yet in relief; the prototype and paradigm of the scientist—objective, unemotional, critical. It i perhaps not to be wondered at that some found him cold and forbidding and that Sir Winston Churchill should have preferred Lord Cherwell, *ho was so often 'wrong.' Even Tizard's objec- tion to the bombing of German cities, often
cited as an instance of his humanitarian out- look, is here shown to have been the result of an objective study of the results that could be ob- tained with a given expenditure, human and industrial. He concluded that attacks on German U-boats would be militarily more profitable. In this he had the support of Professor Blackett, Director of Naval Operational Research at the Admiralty. But Churchill, Cherwell and the Air Staff, led by Portal, took the opposite view. Tizard never reconciled himself to the fact that bomber crews were expended on targets which were, objectively speaking, not worth the cost of their lives.
Tizard's propensity for the crushing comment must have lost him some friends. Of one Henley crew, most of whom had failed in their examina- tions, he said that they were 'eight men with but a single thought—if that.' But his integrity and his devotion to what he believed to be his duty gained him many others. Many of those with whom Tizard worked were better known to the public than he. Few of them had anything like as much influence upon the course of great events.
OLIVER STEWART
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