All posts tagged the Berlin Airlift

Foe to Friend: The British Army in Germany since 1945 @ the National Army Museum

The main exhibition space at the National Army Museum in Chelsea is currently hosting an exhibition titled ‘Foe to Friend: The British Army in Germany since 1945’. It is premised on one core fact: Germany has been at the heart of the British Army’s story since 1945.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum

Overview

The exhibition does what it says on the tin, giving a straightforward chronological account of the British Army’s time in Germany, from the closing battles of the Second World War (Germany unconditionally surrendered on 8 May 1945( through to the present day. It covers:

the British Army’s role in helping to rebuild a completely shattered and broken Germany
how this quickly evolved into providing protection and defence against possible attack by Russia during the long period of the Cold War (1945 to 1990)
how the well-trained battle-ready forces in Germany then became a base from which to deploy troops across the world, specifically during the first Gulf War (1990), the civil wars in Yugoslavia (1991 to 2001), then the wars in Iraq (2003 to 2011) and Afghanistan (2001 to 2021)
finally, the drawdown in British forces in Germany, whose presence officially ended in 2019

Movement Forwarding Office boxes

Dotted through the exhibition are replica Movement Forwarding Office boxes. These were the wooden boxes personnel’s belongings were sent to Germany in. Here they are stamped with information panels but are also the site of recordings of ordinary people’s voices from each of the five sections of the exhibition (see below). In other words, the exhibition isn’t silent but, as you move through it, you hear a whole range of voices describing their experiences, from the occupying soldiers of 1945 onwards.

Two aspects

The British Army had a significant presence in Germany from the country’s defeat in 1945 to its final departure in 2019, near enough 75 years. During that time more than two million British service personnel and their families called Germany home. Many were posted for significant periods of time, got married and lived with spouses and children

The exhibition has two aspects: one is to give a detailed account of the changing military situation, describing all aspects of what was at first a military operation and then changed into a defence function as part of NATO. The second aspect looks at the social history of these people and this period, at what it was like to serve and live in Germany, at the impact it had on those two million service personnel and their families, and at the many traditions and institutions which rose between Brits and locals.

The exhibition is divided into five themes:

1. Winning the Peace

On 8 May German forces surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. These nations – Britain, France, the USA, the USSR – divided the defeated nation into Zones of Occupation which they administered. The British forces were christened the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR).

German map of the occupation zones (1945)

The BAOR was confronted with enormous problems. They had to feed the impoverished population. They had to deal with the revelations of the Holocaust. They had to manage the millions of refugees and homeless people. They literally had to set about rebuilding roads, houses, factories, the entire infrastructure of a modern nation. The display includes:

maps of the zones of influence
a hand-written statistical record compiled by a British soldier detailing the state of inmates, numbers of deaths, burials and evacuations at the Belsen concentration camp
the BAOR supervised the rebuilding of the Volkswagen factory at Wolfsburg

In 1946 families were allowed to join the soldiers of the BOAR. Barracks were created. The British remained entirely segregated from the local population, using their own schools, their own currency, forbidden to fraternise with the enemy. The scale of the devastation and the task ahead were detailed in this 1946 documentary film.

Field Marshall Montgomery and Churchill took a victory parade of 10,000 British troops through the ruins of berlin on 21 July 1945. A series of letters from Montgomery give instructions on the strict non-fraternisation policy between Brits and Germans.

The athletics medals of Bevis Shergold, a veteran of the war in Europe who lived in Germany with her husband in the 1950s, indicate the thriving sporting and cultural scene that was established to cater to service personnel and their families. Many service personnel lived better in Germany, enjoyed better facilities, than back in Britain, much of which was also in ruins and subject to strict rationing.

‘Who was a Nazi?’ A major goal of the occupying forces was the denazification of Germany. Leaflets and pamphlets were written to help ordinary soldiers question German citizens and identify Nazis. Two million cases were investigated in the British Zone alone.

The Berlin airlift 1948 to 1949

Tensions with the Russians climaxed on 24 June 1948 when the Soviet authorities blockaded Berlin, in theory a city occupied by all four Allies but which was embedded deep in the Soviet Zone. The three Western Allies promptly set up airlifts to fly in food and other necessities. At its height a British or American plane was landing in one of Berlin’s three airports every 60 seconds. Eventually, after nearly a year, the Soviets abandoned their blockade on 12 May 1949.

Now it was clear for all to see who the enemy was, and the prolonged commitment of the Allies to Berlin changed the relationship between Germans and their occupiers. If it wasn’t obvious before, it was now, that the Germans were allies against the mightier threat, Russia.

2. Walls and Wire

Churchill had warned of an iron curtain dividing Europe as soon after the war as March 1946. The Berlin Airlift crystallised tension between the former Allies. But it wasn’t until 1961 that things took a further turn for the worse, when, on the night of 12 August, Soviet soldiers erected 100 miles of barbed wire around West Berlin, cutting it off from the outside world. In the weeks that followed the wire was followed by a concrete wall.

But the Berlin Wall was just a small forerunner of the bigger divided between east and West Germany. Eventually a wall, accompanied by barbed wire and guard towers, ran 866 miles from the Baltic Sea to Czechoslovakia. It eventually became, along with the border between North and South Korea, one of the most heavily militarised zones in the world.

The Berlin Airlift clarified the British commitment to Germany. The manpower of the British Army on the Rhine was set at 53 to 55,000. The sense of embattled threat from the East set the tone of British soldiers’ lives for the next 40 years. In Berlin itself, service life was dictated by a host of rituals, rules and regulations surrounding the Wall and the exhibition highlights many little known aspects.

For example, I didn’t know that the Queen visited British forces in Berlin on three separate occasions, in 1965, 1978 and 1987.

Westerners were only allowed to travel from the West to Berlin via one heavily monitored road and one heavily monitored railway line. The exhibition includes movement orders and information leaflets relating to both.

We learn about BRIXMIS, which was the British Commanders in Chief Mission to the Soviets in Germany. Officers from BRIXMIS held parties and receptions, but were also allowed to go on three-man fact-finding missions anywhere inside the Soviet sector. It was a small organisation, numbering just 31 people, yet had wide-ranging freedoms to travel in the Soviet sector. Despite their official status, members of the little BRIXMIS parties could still be subject to harassment and even violence from Soviet or East German troops.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum showing uniform and equipment used by the BRIXMIS unit.

The British Army presence in Berlin numbered 3,100, deployed in three infantry battalions, with a number of supporting units. They were rotated every two years.

In 1947 the BAOR instituted the Berlin Tattoo, two days of displays and pageantry. This was open to German citizens and became part of the city’s social calendar. It continued until 1990.

3. Active Edge

‘Active Edge’ was the term used by the Army for exercises that brought about fast mobilisation under the Soviet threat. This section documents the changing face of the BOAR during the Cold War years of the later 60s, 70s and 80s. During this period there was a growing threat from biological and nuclear weapons, with far-reaching consequences for training and equipment. It saw the inauguration of so-called ‘Survive to Fight’ training. Suits designed to protect against nuclear, chemical or biological weapons are on display.

The army’s readiness peaked with 1984’s Exercise Lionheart, the biggest British military exercise held since the Second World War, which involved 131,000 UK troops.

National Service ended in 1960 although the last national servicemen were only discharged in 1963. By the 1970s the BAOR had long ceased to be an army of occupation and was a smaller, more professional army which focused entirely on the possibility of having to fight a war of defence on the North German plain. Money was invested in better uniform, weapons and equipment, some of which are on display here.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum showing weapons used by the British Army on the Rhine during the 1970s and 80s

A magazine was set up for service personnel and titled ‘Threat’ which kept its readers up to date with intelligence about Soviet weapons, and their weaknesses, and likely battlefield tactics.

A video shows the Queen’s visit to the BAOR in 1977 to mark the jubilee of her reign, alongside photos and a commemorative mug. There’s an old-style push-button display which contains a dinky diorama of rolling landscape with half a dozen toy tanks scattered among it. When you press a button spotlights illuminate the different tanks and you have to press another button to identify the vehicle as friendly or enemy, using the list of profiles next to the buttons.

A surprisingly dominant display is of a mocked-up catering van, testament to an enterprising German, Wolfgang Meier, who spotted a commercial opening for someone to offer grub to hungry thirsty troops on the well-known Soltau-Lüneberg training range. For 25 years his bright blue catering vans offered hungry squaddies a menu including bratwurst, currywurst, fish and chips, chicken and chips, and Coke, Fanta or Sprite.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum showing a mock-up of one of Wolfgang Meier’s distinctive refreshment vans

4. Deployments

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was quickly followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw pact, which had glowered at NATO forces for 45 years. What now for the British Army? What was it for? What should it do?

In brief, the Army in Germany was cut in size by half. But as the 1990s progressed new types of threat or emergency emerged, notably:

Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait which triggered the Gulf War (2 August 1990 to 28 February 1991)
the wars in former Yugoslavia, consisting of:
- the Slovenian War of Independence (1991)
- the Croatian War of Independence (1991 to 1995)
- the Bosnian War (1992 to 1995)
- the Insurgency in Kosovo (1995 to 1998)
- the Kosovo War (1998 to 1999)

In Operation Granby an entire division of BAOR was deployed out of Germany as part of a multinational coalition that drove Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait. British forces based in Germany also made major contributions to operations in Bosnia and the wider Balkans. They were then involved in operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The BAOR came to be seen as a highly trained, highly motivated force which could be drawn on for operations in these other theatres.

This section examines the complete rethink about what the British Army in Europe was for, and contains mementos of the army’s involvement in some of these conflicts.

There’s a Seventh Armoured Brigade pennant from Kosovo. A copy of ‘Threat’ magazine, now focusing on Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi army rather than the Warsaw Pact. A road sign from Basra. A mannekin sporting a uniform worn by a Major in the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars in Kuwait.

Installation view of ‘Foe to Friend’ at the National Army Museum showing the uniform worn by a Major in the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars in Kuwait with the flag of 1(BR) Corps in the background

At the same time, this final section dwells more than previously on the social aspects of British military life in Germany. A case displays the wedding outfits of local girl Sigrid Krueger and British soldier Anthony Young whose marriage in 1990 symbolises the ever-closer ties between service personnel and locals. They met singing in an Anglo-German Choir in Rinteln and still live in Germany today. The harsh non-fraternisation policies outlined in Montgomery’s letters right at the start of the exhibition seem to come from another age.

There’s mention of the British Forces Broadcasting Service which began broadcasting in 1945 and kept going till the end. Generations of young Germans grew up listening to it, not least because it had lots of fashionable pop hits in the 60s and 70s.

There’s more about army schools, including a school uniform for a British forces-only school. Notes on the British Army Summer Show which developed in the town of Bad Lippspringe and became a regular part of the British Forces Germany calendar, with its live music, equestrian events, trade stands, car show and beer tents. A description of the NAAFI (Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) which ran pubs, clubs and supermarkets for the British. The biggest NAAFI in the world opened in Rheindahlen in 1972 and wives in particular would travel a hundred miles to stock up on British food and drink.

Grateful German municipalities sometimes awarded their local British forces a Fahnenband, the highest award that can be bestowed on a British unit by the German military, and several examples are on display here.

But the 1990s brought change on the social front, too. The first British Military Tattoo was held in Berlin in 1947. The last one was held in October 1992.

5. Legacy

In 2010 the Liberal-Conservative British government decided to reduce the size of the army from 112,000 to 82,000 with a reserve of 35,000. And plans were announced to withdraw the entire remaining 20,000 forces from Germany by 2020.

At the culmination of this 10-year drawdown, the British Army’s permanent deployment to Germany came to an end in September 2019. No British combat units now remain in Germany. It was the end of an era.

However, in November 2021 the Ministry of Defence announced that Germany would become one of three ‘Land Hubs’, along with Kenya and Oman, where the British Army can train abroad with NATO allies and partner nations. Significant numbers of British tanks, armoured cars and other vehicles remain in storage at a training area in Sennelager. A garrison support unit remains in Germany to to provide health service support, welfare and the British Forces Broadcasting Service. From the peak of 780,000 British troops in Germany in 1945, there are now just 135 Army personnel remaining in Germany, none of them combat forces.

In-depth walk through the exhibition (40 minutes)

More National Army Museum reviews

More National Army Museum reviews

Atomic by Jim Baggott (2009)

This is a brilliantly panoramic, thrilling and terrifying book.

The subtitle of this book is ‘The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb 1939-49‘ and it delivers exactly what it says on the tin. At nearly 500 pages Atomic is a very thorough account of its subject – the race to develop a workable atomic bomb between the main warring nations of World War Two, America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia – with the additional assets of a 22-page timeline, a 20-page list of key characters, 18 pages of notes and sources and a 6-page bibliography.

A cast of thousands

The need for a list of key characters is an indication of one of the main learnings from the book: it took a lot of people to convert theoretical physics into battlefield nuclear weapons. Every aspect of it came from theories and speculations published in numerous journals, and then from experiments devised by scores of teams of scientists working around the industrialised world, publishing results, meeting at conferences or informally, comparing and discussing and debating and trying again.

Having just read The Perfect Theory by Pedro Ferreira, a ‘biography’ of the theory of relativity, I had gotten used to the enormous number of teams and groups and institutes and university faculties involved in science – or this area of science – each containing numerous individual scientists, who collaborated and competed to devise, work through and test new theories relating to Einstein’s famous theory.

Baggott’s tale gives the same sense of a cast of hundreds of scientists – it feels like we are introduced to two or three new characters on every page, which can make it quite difficult to keep up. But whereas progress on the theory of relativity took place at a leisurely pace over the past 100 years, the opposite is true of the development of The Bomb.

This was kick-started when a research paper showing that nuclear fission of uranium might be possible was published in 1939, just as the world was on the brink of war (hence the start date for this book). From that point the story progresses at an increasing pace, dominated by a Great Fear – fear that the Nazis would develop The Bomb first and use it without any scruples to devastate Europe.

The first three parts of the book follow the way the two warring parties – the Allies and the Nazis – assembled their teams from civilian physicists, mathematicians and chemists at various institutions, bringing them together into teams which were assembled and worked with increasing franticness, as the Second World War became deeper and darker.

If the you thought the blizzard of names of theoretical and experimental physicists, mathematicians, chemists and so on in the first part was a bit confusing, this is as nothing compared to the tsunami of names of Army administrators, security chiefs, civil servants, bureaucrats and politicians who are roped in to create and administer the facilities which were established to research and build, first a nuclear reactor, then a nuclear bomb.

Baggott unfolds the story with a kind of unflinching factual pace which is extremely gripping. Each chapter is divided into sections, often only a page long, which explain contemporaneous events at research bases in Chicago, out in the desert at Los Alamos, in Britain, in German research centres, and among Stalin’s harassed scientific community. Each one of these narratives is fascinating, but intercutting them like this creates an almost filming effect of cutting from one exciting scene to another. Baggott’s prose is spare and effective, almost like good thriller writing.

The nuclear spies

And indeed the book strays into actual thriller territory because interwoven with the gripping accounts of the British, Russian, German and American scientists, and their respective military and political masters, is the story of the nuclear spies. I read Paul Simpson’s A Brief History of The Spy a few months ago and it gives good accounts of the activities of Soviet spies Klaus Fuchs, David Greengrass, Theodore Hall, as well as the Rosenbergs. But the story of their spying and the huge amounts of top secret information they handed over to the Russians is so much more intense and exciting when it is situated in the broader story of the nail-biting scientific, chemical, logistical and political races to build The Bomb.

German failure

As everyone knows, the Nazis were not able to construct a functioning bomb before they were militarily defeated in May 1945. But it wasn’t for want of trying, and the main impression from the book was the sense of vicarious horror from the thought of what they’d done if they had made a breakthrough in the final desperate months of spring 1945. London wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be here.

Baggott’s account of the German bomb is fascinating in numerous ways. Basically, once the leadership were told it wouldn’t be ready in the next few years, they didn’t make it a priority. Baggott follows the end of the war with a chapter on hos most of the German nuclear scientists were flown to England and interned in a farm outside Cambridge which was bugged. Their conversations were recorded in which they were at first smugly confident that they were being detained because they were so far in advance of the Allies. Thus they were all shocked when they heard the Allies had dropped an atom bomb on Japan in August 1945. At which point they began to develop a new line, one much promoted by German historians since, which is that they could have developed a bomb if they’d wanted to, but had morals and principles and so did all they could to undermine, stall and sabotage the Nazi attempt to build an A bomb.

They were in fact ‘good Germans’ who always hated the Nazis. Baggott treats this claim with the contempt it deserves.

Summary of the science

The neutron was discovered in 1932, giving a clearer picture of what atoms are made of i.e. a nucleus with at least one proton (with a positive electric charge) balancing at least one electron (with a negative charge) in orbit around it. Heavier elements have more than one neutron and electron (always the same number) as well as an increasing number of neutrons which give weight but have no electric charge. Hence the periodic table lists the elements in order of heaviness, starting with hydrogen with one proton and going all the way to organesson, with its 118 protons. Ernest Lawrence in California invented the cyclotron, a device for smashing sub-atomic particles into nuclei to see what happened. In 1934 Enrico Fermi’s team in Italy set out to bombard the nuclei of every known element with neutrons, starting with hydrogen (1) and going through the entire periodic table.

The assumption was that, by bombarding elements with neutrons they would dislodge one or two protons in each nucleus and ‘shift’ the element down the periodic table by one or two places. When the team came to bombard one of the heaviest elements, uranium, they were amazed to discover that the process seemed to produce barium, about half the weight of uranium. The bombardment process seemed to blast uranium nuclei in half. Physics theory, influenced by Einstein, suggested that a) this breakdown would result in the release of energy b) some of the neutrons within the uranium nucleus would not be required by the barium atoms and would themselves shoot out to hit other uranium nuclei, and so on.

The process would create a chain reaction.
Although the collapse of each individual atom would release a minuscule amount of energy, the number of atoms in such a dense element suggested a theoretically amazing release of energy. If every nucleus of uranium in a 1 kilogram lump was split in half, it would release the same energy as 22,000 tons of TNT explosive.

Otto Frisch, an Austrian Jewish physicist who had fled to Niels Bohr’s lab in Copenhagen after the Nazis came to power, heard about all this from his long-time collaborator, and aunt, Lise Meitner, who was with the German team replicating Fermi’s results. He told Bohr about the discovery. Frisch named it nuclear fission.

In early 1939 papers were published in a German science journal and Nature, while Bohr himself travelled to a conference in America. In the spring of that year fission research groups sprang up around the scientific world. In America Bohr realised anomalies in the experimental results were caused by the fact that uranium comes in two isotopes, U-235 and U-238. The numbers derive from the total number of neutrons and protons in an atom: U-238 has 92 protons and 146 neutrons; U-235 has three fewer neutrons. Slowly evidence emerged that it is the U-235 which breaks down. But it is much rarer than the stable U-238 and difficult to extract and purify. In March 1939 a French team summarised the evidence for nuclear chain reactions in a paper in Nature, specifying the number of particles released by disintegrated nuclei.

All the physicists involved realised that the massive release of energy implied by the experiments could theoretically be used to create an explosive device vastly more powerful than anything then existing. And so did the press. Newspaper articles began appearing about a ‘superbomb’. In April the head of physics at the German Reich Research Council assembled a group devoted to fission research, named the Uranverein, calling for the ban of all uranium exports, and for it to be stockpiled. British MP Winston Churchill asked a friend, Oxford physicist Frederick Lindemann, to prepare a report on the feasibility of a fission bomb. Soviet scientists replicated the results of their western colleagues but didn’t bring the issue to the attention of the authorities – yet. Three Hungarian physicists who were exiles from the Nazis in America grasped the military importance of the discoveries. They approached Einstein and persuaded him to write a warning letter to President Roosevelt, which was written in August 1939 though not delivered to the president until October. Meanwhile the Germans invaded Poland on 1 September and war in Europe began. At this point the Nazis approached the leading theoretical physicist in Germany, Werner Heisenberg, and he agreed to head the Uranverein, leading German research into an atomic bomb until the end of the war.

And so the race to build the first atomic bomb began! The major challenges were to:

isolate enough of the unstable isotope U-235 to sustain a chain reaction
to kick start the chain reaction somehow, not with the elaborate apparatus available in a lab, but with something which could be packed inside a contain (a bomb) and then triggered somehow
a material which could ‘damp’ the process enough so that it could be controlled in experimental conditions

From the start there was debate over the damping material, with the two strongest contenders being graphite – but it turned out to be difficult to get graphite which was pure enough – or ‘heavy water’, water produced with a heavier isotope of hydrogen, deuterium. Only one chemical plant in all of Europe produced heavy water, a fertiliser factory in Norway. The Germans invaded Norway in April 1940 and a spin-off was the ability to commandeer regular supplies from this factory. That is why the factory, and its shipments of heavy water, were targeted for the commando raid and then air raids dramatised in the war movie, The Heroes of Telemark. (Baggott gives a thorough and gripping account of the true, more complex, more terrifying story of the raids.)

Learnings

I never realised that:

In the end the Americans built the bomb because they were the only ones with enough resources. Although Hitler and Stalin were briefed about the potential, their scientists told them it would be three or four years before a workable bomb could be made and they both had more pressing concerns. The British had the know-how but not the money or resources. There is a kind of historical inevitability to America being the first to build a bomb.
But I never realised there were quite so many communist sympathisers in American society and that so many of them slipped across the line into passing information and/or secrets to the Soviets. The Manhattan Project was riddled with Soviet spies.
And I never knew that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man put in charge of the facilities at Los Alamos and therefore widely known as the ‘father’ of the atom bomb, was himself was such a dubious character, from the security point of view. Well-known for his left-wing sympathies, attending meetings and donating money to crypto-communist causes, he was good friends with communist party members and was approached at least once by Soviet agents to pass on information about the bomb project. No wonder elements in the Army and the FBI wanted him banned from the very project which he was in fact running.

Hiroshima

The first three parts of the book follow in considerable detail the story from the crucial discoveries on the eve of the war, and then interweaves developments in Britain, America and the USSR up until the detonation of the two A-bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945.

I was shocked all over again to read the idea that, on the eve of the first so-called Trinity test, the scientists weren’t completely confident that the chain reaction might not spread to the nitrogen in the atmosphere and set the air on fire.
I was dazzled by the casual way military planners came up with a short list of cities to hit with the bombs. The historic and (by all accounts) picturesque city of Kyoto was on the list but it was decided it would be a cultural crime to incinerate it. Also US Secretary of War Henry Stimson had gone there on his honeymoon, so it was removed from the list. Thus, in this new age, were the fates, the lives and agonising deaths, of hundreds of thousands of civilians decided.
I never knew they only did one test – the Trinity test – before Hiroshima. So little preparation and knowledge.

The justification for the use of the bomb has caused argument from that day to this. Some have argued that the Japanese were on the verge of surrendering, though the evidence presented in Baggott’s account militates against this interpretation. My own view is based on two axioms: 1. the limits of human reason 2. a moral theory of complementarity.

Limits of reason When I was a young man I was very influenced by the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Life is absurd and the absurdity is caused by the ludicrous mismatch between human claims and hopes of Reason and Justice and Freedom and all these other high-sounding words – and the chaotic shambles which people have made of the world, starting with the inability of most people to begin to live their own lives according to Reason and Logic.

People smoke too much, drink too much, eat too much, marry the wrong person, drive cars too fast, take the wrong jobs, make the wrong decisions, jump off bridges, declare war. We in the UK have just voted for Brexit and Donald Trump is about to become US President. Rational? The bigger picture is that we are destroying the earth through our pollution and wastefulness, and global warming may end up destroying our current civilisation.

Given all these obvious facts about human beings, I don’t see how anyone can accuse us of being rational and logical.

But in part this is because we evolved to live in small packs or groups or tribes, and to deal with fairly simple situations in small groups. Ever since the Neolithic revolution and the birth of agriculture led to stratified and much larger societies and set us on the path to ‘civilisation’, we have increasingly found ourselves in complex situations where there is no one obviously ‘correct’ choice or path; where the notion of a binary choice between Good and Evil breaks down. Most of the decisions I’ve taken personally and professionally aren’t covered by so-called ‘morality’ or ‘moral philosophy’, they present themselves – and I make the decisions – based purely on practical outcomes.

Complementarity Early in his account Baggott explains Niels Bohr’s insight into quantum physics, the way of ‘seeing’ fundamental particles which changed the way educated people think about ‘reality’ and won him a Nobel Prize.

In the 1920s it became clear that electrons, one of the handful of sub-atomic particles, behave like waves and like particles at the same time. In Newton’s world a thing is a thing, self-identical and consistent. In quantum physics this fixed attitude has to be abandoned because ‘reality’ just doesn’t seem to be like that. Eventually, the researchers arrived a notion of complementarity i.e. that we just have to accept that electrons could be particles and waves at the same time depending on how you chose to measure them. (I understand other elements of quantum theory also prove that particles can be in two places at the same time). Conceivably, there are other ways of measuring them which we don’t know about yet. Possibly the incompatible behaviour can be reconciled at some ‘deeper’ level of theory and understanding but, despite nearly a century of trying, nobody has come up with a grand unifying theory which does that.

Meanwhile we have to work with reality in contradictory bits and fragments, according to different theories which fit, or seem to fit, to explain, the particular phenomena under investigation: Newtonian mechanics for most ordinary scale phenomena; Einstein’s relativity at the extremes of scale, black holes and gravity where Newton’s theory breaks down; and quantum theory to explain the perplexing nature of sub-atomic ‘reality’.

In the same way I’d like to suggest that everyday human morality is itself limited in its application. In extreme situations it frays and breaks. Common or garden morality suggests there is one ‘reality’ in which readily identifiable ideas of Good and Bad always and everywhere apply. But delve only a little deeper – consider the decisions you actually have to make, in your real life – and you quickly realise that there are many situations and decisions you have to make about situations which aren’t simple, where none of the alternatives are black and white, where you have to feel your way to a solution often based in gut instinct.

A major part of the problem may be that you are trying to reconcile not two points of view within one system, but two or more incompatible ways of looking at the world – just like the three worldviews of theoretical physics.

The Hiroshima decision

Thus – with one part of my mind I am appalled off the scale by the thought of a hideous, searing, radioactive death appearing in the middle of your city for no reason without any warning, vaporising half the population and burning the other half to shreds, men, women and little children, the old and babies, all indiscriminately evaporated or burned alive. I am at one with John Hersey’s terrifying account, I am with CND, I am against this anti-human abomination.

But with another part of the calculating predatory brain I can assess the arguments which President Truman had to weigh up. Using the A-bomb would:

End a war which had dragged on too long.
Save scores of thousands of American lives, an argument bolstered as evidence mounted that the Japanese were mobilising for a fanatical defence to the death of their home islands. I didn’;t know that the invasion of the southern island of Japan was scheduled for December 1945 and the invasion of the main island and advance on Tokyo was provisionally set to start in march 1946. Given that it took the Allies a year to advance from Normandy to Berlin, this suggests a scenario where the war could have dragged on well into 1947, with the awesome destruction of the entire Japanese infrastructure through firebombing and house to house fighting as well, of course, of vast casualties, Japanese and American.
As the US commander of strategic air operations against Japan, General Curtis LeMay pointed out, America had been waging a devastating campaign of firebombing against Japanese cities for months. According to one calculation some two-and-a-half million Japanese had been killed in these air attacks to date. He couldn’t see why people got so upset about the atom bombs.

Again, I was amazed at the intransigence of the Japanese military. Baggott reports the cabinet meetings attended by the Japanese Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and the heads of the Army and Navy, where the latter refused to surrender even after the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. In fact, when the Emperor finally overruled his generals and issued an order to surrender, the generals promptly launched a military coup and tried to confiscate the Emperor’s recorded message ordering the surrender before it could be broadcast. An indication of the fanaticism American troops would have faced if a traditional invasion had gone ahead.

The Cold War

And the other reason for using the bombs was to prepare for after the war, specifically to tell the Soviet Union who was boss. Roosevelt had asked Stalin to join the war on Japan and this he did in August, making a request to invade the north island (the Russians being notoriously less concerned about their own troop losses than the Allies). the book is fascinating on how Stalin ordered an invasion then three days later backed off, leaving all Japan to America. But this kind of brinkmanship and uneasiness which had appeared at Yalta became more and more the dominant issue of world politics once the war was won, and once the USSR began to put in place mini-me repressive communist regimes across Eastern Europe.

Baggott follows the story through the Berlin Airlift of 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War (June 1950), while he describes the ‘second physics war’ i.e. the Russian push to build an atomic reactor and then a bomb to rival America’s. In this the Russians were hugely helped by the Allied spies who, ironically, now Soviet brutality was a bit more obvious to the world, began to have second thoughts. In fact Klaus Fuchs, the most important conduit of atomic secrets to the Russians, eventually confessed his role.

Baggott’s account in fact goes up to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 and it is so grippingly, thrillingly written I wished it had gone right up to the fall of the Soviet Union. Maybe he’ll write a sequel which covers the Cold War. Then again, most of the scientific innovation had been achieved and the basic principles established; now it was a question of engineering, of improving designs and outcomes. Of building bigger and better bombs and more and more of them.

The last section contains a running thread about the attempts by some of the scientists and politicians to prevent nuclear proliferation, and explains in detail why they came to nothing. The reason was the unavoidable new superpower rivalry between America and Russia, the geopolitical dynamic of mutually assured destruction which dominated the world for the next 45 years (until the fall of the USSR).

A new era in human history was inaugurated in which ‘traditional’ morality was drained of meaning. Or to put it another way (as I’ve suggested above) in which the traditional morality which just about makes sense in large complex societies, reached its limits, frayed and broke.

The nuclear era exposed the limitations of not only human morality but of human reason itself, showing that incompatible systems of values could apply to the same phenomena, in which nuclear truths could be good and evil, vital and obscene, at the same time. An era in which all attempts at rational thought about weapons of mass destruction seemed to lead only to inescapable paradox and absurdity.

Credit

Atomic: The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb 1939-49 by Jim Baggott was published in 2009 by Icon Books. All quotes and references are to the 2015 Icon Books paperback edition.

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All posts tagged the Berlin Airlift

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