Tuxedo Park by Jennet Conant

Author:Jennet Conant
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Chapter 9

PRECIOUS CARGO

But first will you let me introduce my guests to you when they are all together? Some scientists are like prima donnas, you know, and they may be getting pretty nervous.

—WR, from Brain Waves and Death

BY the summer of 1940, Britain was teetering on the edge of despair. Germany had begun relentless air attacks on England as a prelude to invasion, and Tizard, who was chairman of the key scientific committee on air defense, realized that they would not be able to stand alone for long. Hitler occupied a large part of Europe, and it was only a matter of time before England was outmatched by Germany’s productive power. Tizard foresaw, with greater clarity than either the politicians or the military leaders, that the war had become harnessed to technology and technical superiority. The ability to produce powerful new weapons was the key to victory.

Convinced that Britain simply could not win without the assistance of the United States in developing and building these new instruments of war, Tizard had been lobbying vigorously for an overall exchange of scientific information of military significance. His idea was not greeted with enthusiasm at first, and Robert Watson-Watt, Britain’s premier radar authority, went on record saying that the United States had nothing to offer. It did not help that an earlier fact-finding trip, headed up by the respected Nobel laureate Archibald Vivian Hill with the intention of gathering information about American science, had been a failure. Of course, with no secrets to barter and nothing to sweeten the pot, Hill had not been able to induce the Americans to divulge anything of value. But after France fell, and Hitler’s forces were encamped along the Channel coast, England’s new prime minister looked more favorably on Tizard’s plan.

In one of the great gambles of the war, Churchill decided to support the idea of a technical mission to America and personally undertook the negotiations with Roosevelt. Events necessitated that they move very quickly. By July, the arrangements were embodied in an aide-mémoire signed by President Roosevelt and British ambassador Lord Lothian. In early August, Tizard picked the six men who were to take part in the British Technical and Scientific Mission to the United States, informally known as the Tizard Mission: Brigadier F. C. Wallace (British Army), a distinguished officer who had been in charge of the antiaircraft defenses at Dunkirk and had been one of the last men to leave the beaches; Captain H. W. Faulkner (Royal Navy), who was just back from serving in the Atlantic during the Norwegian campaign; Group Captain F. L. Pierce (Royal Air Force), who had made the first of many bomb attacks on the German destroyers hiding in the Norwegian fjords; John Cockcroft, the respected Cambridge physicist, who had built one of the first proton accelerators and at the outbreak of war became head of army research; Edward “Taffy” Bowen, a young Welsh physicist who was one of England’s radar pioneers; and Arthur Woodward-Nutt, an Air Ministry official, who would serve as secretary.

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