Battling for Britain Prussian style

Spectator, The, Nov 8, 2003 by Carr, Raymond

Battling for Britain Prussian style PROF: THE LIFE OF FREDERICK LINDEMANN by Adrian Fort Cape, L18.99, pp. 377, ISBN 02244063170

During my first term at Oxford in 1938, when walking down the south side of the Christ Church quad, I passed a large man in a bowler hat and a smart London suit. The only persons in the college who wore bowlers were the porters and most dons followed David Cecil's advice to dress in Oxford as if staying in a modest country house. The large man was clearly a man of importance but he seemed out of place. I was no wiser when told that he was Professor Lindemann, the owner of a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and a private bathroom in his college rooms, both unheard of luxuries for a don.

Adrian Fort traces his rise to eminence in this scholarly book which provides fascinating, if sometimes disconcerting, glimpses of the world of science and government in the 1930s and 1940s. Roy Jenkins has remarked on Churchill's penchant for bizarre, even disreputable, friends. Lindemann was eminently respectable but an oddity in English society. Born in Baden in 1886, he remained a German citizen until 1904 when he became a British citizen to escape conscription in Prussia. Ever afterwards he made a persistent effort to be accepted without question as an English patriot and gentleman. But he had not acquired the automatic credentials provided by an English education. The family home was in Devon, but his father, a gifted amateur astronomer, sent him to Damstadt Technical High School rather than to a major public school and to Berlin University rather than to Oxford or Cambridge. He was given an allowance by his father of L30,000 a year and during his doctoral studies he lived in a suite in the Adlon Hotel, the Berlin equivalent of Claridges.

Prewar Germany was an exciting time for a young physicist as the Newtonian universe was being revolutionised by the quantum theory which Fort endeavours to explain to the lay reader, an almost impossible task. In Berlin Lindemann acquired not merely a reputation as a physicist but the conviction that was to dominate his whole life. He feared German aggressiveness and believed Germany's power was based on the readiness of imperial Germany to foster scientific research. If England was to survive it must follow suit. To force it to do so became his mission.

Fort acknowledges that he was ruthless in his desire for power and ready to toady to those who he conceived possessed it -particularly after he himself failed to enter politics as an MP for Oxford University; hence his resolute social climbing. His letters to his father are full of accounts of stays in great houses. A tennis player up to Wimbledon standards, he cultivated Clementine Churchill's friendship on the tennis courts of the rich. The rich only feel at ease with those as rich as themselves. Lindemann was very rich.

His friendship with Churchill was a genuine meeting of minds, between a bon viveur and a vegetarian who survived mainly on salads and white of eggs (his valet keeping a cow in Christ Church Meadow to supplement his needs in wartime England), who neither smoked nor drank and was, Fort asserts, 'essentially humourless'. As Churchill's chief scientific adviser at the Admiralty Lindemann supplied him with the statistics to justify his policies. His faith in his own judgment was absolute and those who opposed him were dismissed as fools or self-interested conspirators. Yet Rab Butler found him 'a more than slightly conspiratorial character'. He used his unrestricted access to the great man to furnish him with the statistical evidence to undermine the advice of civil servants, whom he despised. This entailed treading on other people's turf. P. J. Grigg found his intervention in the affairs of the War Office 'intolerable'. His many enemies -they included Sir Henry Tizard (responsible for the radar which saved our bacon in the Battle of Britain) found him 'prickly, an eccentric, opinionated, sarcastic and unco-operative'.

Lindemann had made his name in the first world war, when working at the RAF research establishment. With immense courage he tested his theory that the fatal spin of a plane could be cured by going into a steep dive himself. He and Churchill came together in their joint battle to waken Britain to the woeful inadequacy of our air defences during the years of appeasement. But to the Prof's host of critics this achievement was overshadowed by his advocacy of area bombing as the only way to bring Germany to its knees. That the deliberate killing of civilians and the destruction of Hamburg and Dresden were morally indefensible is indisputable. Fort argues that it was the only weapon available once precision bombing had proved ineffective and before Overlord and the Normandy landings. It would have been adopted by Churchill without Lindemann's enthusiastic support. Churchill was his own man. Lindemann had been an advocate of pursuing research on the atomic bomb in England; once the secret had to be shared with the US Lindemann drafted a minute to Churchill proposing the establishment of a form of international control of nuclear development. This was emphatically rejected by Churchill. In the last days of the war, Lindemann seriously underestimated the possibility of Germany producing an effective rocket bomb. But he displayed his characteristic faith in his own opinion. Churchill remarked sadly, 'Why did you stick your neck out so far?'