Science and War: Radical Scientists and the Tizard-Cherwell Area Bombing Debate in Britain

Abstract

Britain's decision in 1942 massively to bomb German cities followed heated debate waged among the armed forces, scientists and politicians. The skirmish between Churchill's scientific adviser Lord Cherwell and the brilliant Sir Henry Tizard, key scientist at the Air Ministry, has become the stuff of legend. After the Second World War controversy continued to rage over the operational success and ethics of 'area bombing', the largely indiscriminate blanket bombing of cities, the end-product of the Royal Air Force's almost hypnotic attraction to the concept of strategic bombing. After supplying briefly some context and narrative of events, this article will deal with the formative historiography of the area bombing debate. It will suggest that radical scientists-people who had been involved in leftist science movements in the 1930s,who wanted science to be socially responsible, an instrumental force for change-not only played a significant role in the events of 1942,but that some of them wrote foundation documents that shaped our present thinking about the issues. The most notable in this respect were Patrick Blackett, a pioneer of operational research, and C.P. Snow, wartime boffin and novelist. They, and sympathisers like J.D. Bernal, had been on the losing side in 1942.By dramatising the Tizard-Cherwell dispute, taking place within the very precincts of policy-making, Blackett and Snow retrieved retrospective victory from their wartime defeat. Tizard was rehabilitated, while the conservative 'outsider' Cherwell was found guilty of poor judgment or worse. On this last point, some intriguing evidence may be brought to bear from unused manuscript material in J.D. Bernal's papers at Cambridge University Library. Bernal, a great crystallographer and Marxist leader of the radical science movement in England, was co-author of a detailed bombing survey of Birmingham and Hull which Cherwell used to gain victory for his policy of saturation bombing. Bernal's papers show how strongly he felt that Cherwell had misused this scientific evidence. Why