Atlantic by Simon Winchester

Author:Simon Winchester
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

9. WHAT NO SUBMARINER SUPPOSED

The consequences of the Atlantic wars were many; among the least expected is that which links the ocean, albeit in a tenuous and speculative way, with the foundation of a state very far away from its shores, after a series of events that started to unfold in the autumn of 1915. This was when the Royal Navy began to have particular difficulty in repulsing a relentless series of German U-boat attacks—a problem that arose not from a lack of warships or poor training or any lack of political will, but as a simple matter of chemistry: the Royal Navy’s gunners did not have sufficient quantities of the smokeless explosive known as cordite to be able to attack the surfaced submarines.

Cordite is made from a mixture of nitroglycerine and guncotton, acetone and petroleum jelly; and it was in short supply in 1915 because Britain was unable to produce sufficient quantities of one of its key components—acetone.

In the early summer of 1916, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C. P. Scott,55 happened to have lunch with a middle-aged and avuncular White Russian émigré and science professor at the University of Manchester, a man named Chaim Weizmann. Over coffee after lunch, Weizmann mentioned to Scott that he had developed a new bacterial method for producing acetone in large quantities. The following week, and also at lunch, Scott—who knew about the navy’s problems—told all of this to his friend David Lloyd George, the politician (soon to be prime minister) who was then heading the Ministry of Munitions. Weizmann was in consequence hastily summoned down to London, given research space at a big London laboratory, and finally handed the keys to the disused Nicholson’s Gin Distillery in east London, where he could employ his new techniques to create the much-needed chemical. All he needed for his process to work, he declared, was a goodly supply of cellulose—something that could be found aplenty in maize, or even, he added, in chestnuts.

That autumn, schoolchildren all over England were asked to collect horse chestnuts, which they normally gathered for their ritual games of “conkers,” and thousands of tons of these soft nuts were brought to the gin factory and thrown into the hoppers and vats and stills. Within days pure acetone began to drip, then stream, then cascade, and finally gush into the carboys. Long tanker trains would take the acetone down to the Royal Navy’s top-secret cordite factory on the Dorset coast, and before long, boxes of the sticky high explosive of which it was so critical a component would be delivered to the naval dockyards, the ships’ guns would start firing once more, and the tide of the Great War’s Battle of the Atlantic would very slowly but surely begin to turn in Britain’s favor.

Storytelling and mischief-making, handmaidens to much in history, have since made a series of intriguing connections from the bare bones of this story. An oft-repeated yarn begins with British government circles deciding that Chaim Weizmann should be given an official honor for his role in so profoundly changing the direction of the Atlantic war.

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