Patton. Yamamoto. Montgomery. Zhukov. Rommel. Nimitz. Seven decades later, the names of the men who commanded the armies and navies in the great battles of World War II are still familiar. But as Stephen Budiansky shows persuasively in "Blackett's War," the outcome of the war hung on the work of a far more obscure group of fighters: the physicists, biologists and mathematicians who applied scientific thinking to battlefield problems. By teaching Allied military leaders to use their resources effectively and asking hard questions to challenge established wisdom, the scientists revolutionized warfare and contributed mightily to Germany's defeat. In the process, they created a new discipline, operations research, which plays a vital role in business to this day.
Fire down belowU.S. Coast Guardsmen aboard the cutter Spencer in the Atlantic watch the explosion of the depth charge that sank the German submarine U-175, 1943.
The real hero of this story is Winston Churchill, who in the mid-1930s was a powerless backbencher of Parliament. Churchill, who had been in charge of the British Navy in the early part of World War I and later minister of munitions, was thoroughly skeptical of military ways. At a tennis tournament, he made the acquaintance of the Oxford University physicist F.A. Lindemann, who had performed experiments aboard aircraft during the war. He lectured Churchill on ways science might help protect Britain against aerial bombardment.
Churchill, always an enthusiast for scientific ideas, pressed the government to bring in scientific advisers on military affairs as early as 1934. So it was that chemist Henry Tizard, biologist A.V. Hill and physicist Patrick Blackett entered the British defense establishment. Hundreds more scientists came after, much to the discomfort of many hidebound officers. The scientist's job, Blackett would say after the war, "is to improve matters if he can, and if he cannot, to say nothing."
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