visit booktv.org. >> coming up next on booktv, military historian steven biewd yang sky recounts the use of scientific and mathematical research to aid in the direction of allied forces in world war ii. this is about 40 minutes. [applause] >> well, thank you. it's great to be here at r.j. julia, a wonderful independent bookstore, a dying but essential breed. and i can tell you as both a writer and a reader, stores like this play a role that can't be duplicated anywhere else, so thank you. world war ii was, of course, the first war in which science and scientists played a central and vital role. the manhattan project, the thousands of physicists and other scientists who developed the atomic bomb was the most dramatic illustration of this, i think probably today almost as well known were the thousands of mathematicians and other sign b terrific work withers in england and washington, d.c. who broke the german e anything ma, cipher and other access codes. the very small group of parish parish -- british and american scientists who really turned the tide in the battle against the u-boats are not so nearly well known at all. but their contribution was, i think, every bit as vital not only in winning one of the most crucial battles in the war against nazi germany, but also for its lasting consequences in revolutionizing the very way military commanders think about war. for that matter, revolution eyeing the way quantitative an access could be apply today a host of practical problems in the business world through the new science patrick plaqueet and his -- blacket and his scientists created during the war, operational research. so it's their story i've tried to tell in my book, blacket's war. the war of the u-boats was the one threat churchill worried could bring britain to its knees even after the danger of sea borne invasion faded following the raf's heroic defense in the battle of britain during the summer of 1940. britain crucially depended on imports not only for oil, steel, war material, but just to stay alive. the country was a net importer of food, and by the start of 1941, the u-boats had already sunk enough shipping to reduce imports below the 31 million tons a year it needed to just maintain essential food supplies for the civilian population. the crunch of the whole war, churchill to roosevelt at the end of 1940, rests in the atlantic. the decision for 1941, he wrote, lies upon the seas. and churchill after the war in his memoirs would write: the battle of the atlantic was the dominating factor all through the war. never for one moment could we forget that everything happening elsewhere on land, sea or in the air depending ultimately on its outcome. so in the spring of 1940, excuse me, thank you. so in the spring of 1941 in the face of mounting losses at sea, churchill issued a somewhat grin dill went, i guess you could say, churchillian order to, quote, take to the offensive against the u-boat, and it was then that patrick blacket was given the job of putting together a small group of scientists to see if he could come up with some ways of improving their heretofore dismal performance in locating and attacking the german submarines that were threatening to cut britain's lifeline. blacket was at this time one of the world's most prominent physicists. he'd been a naval cadet, and as an 18-year-old mid shipman aboard a battleship in world war ii. after the war the navy decided that all of these cadets in britain at that time started at age 14, and at age 18 they yachted and went into the -- graduated and went intobe the navy as midshipmen, but the navy had had to rush this last class right into war with the start of world war i, so they thought to make up for the loss and interruption of their education, thegd send them all to university for six months just to round out their education. blackett was sent to cambridge, and he said one day i wandered over to the cavendish laboratory to see what a scientific lahr story was like, and very shortly after that he told the navy i want to become a scientist. he never did receive a ph.d., but he quickly became one of the world's foremost physicists for the work he did in the 1930s discovering the positive terror, the positive electron, the first piece of antimatter whose existence was confirmed. he would win the nobel prize in physics in 1948. he was good looking, had an extraordinary combination of hands-on ability and theoretical imagination. his colleagues remarked they'd never known anyone his equal in his ability to conceive of a problem in physics, write out a few lines of mathematics, design an ap apparatus, build it himse, carry out the experiment, analyze the results. he was also one of a number of scientists in britain and america who had been working hard behind the scenes in the 1930s to prepare for war and to try to make sure that the army and navy made full use of science when it came. he was frustrated no end by what he found to be the typical attitude of military commanders which was not only that a bunch of civilian intellectuals could not tell them how to run a war, but more specifically that the only role of scientists and other technical men was just produce some new gadget or weapon or gizmo, hand it other to the military -- over to the military and then not concern themselves with anything beyond that. but blackett argued that war itself, its tactics and strategy and operations, was a series of actions directed at more or less definite ends. and so to quote him: the use of these weapons and the organization of the men who handle them are at least as much sign terrific problems as -- scientific problems as is their production. what he was arguing for was what would become the genesis of operations research. today it's a fundamental component of military thinking, something every student at west point and the naval academy studies and, indeed, every student in business school. then-revolutionary. military -- then it was revolutionary. military commanders thought tactical and strategic commanding in particular was an art that was learned through experience and judgment, and they bridled at intellectuals butting their nose in. but several astonishing insights that blackett's small team proved early on changed their minds. probably dramatic was a calculation the scientists made showing that the tactics the navy had orders its air crews to follow in attacking u-boats -- even though it seems like a perfectly sensible approach on its face -- was, in fact, unlikely ever successful in sinking a u-boat. the navy commanders had actually done a somingly reasonable calculationing themselves. -- seemingly reasonable calculation themselves. they knew how much time typically elapsed between the moment a patrol plane spotted a u-boat and the u-boat spotted the patrol plane and dove beneath the surface. they knew how fast a u-boat could dive. they knew it was of 45 seconds that a u-boat had been out of sight by the time the patrol plane got into position to develop a depth charge, and they figure a u-boat could have gotten to about 150 feet below the surface at that point. so they said, okay, 150 feet, that's the best average. the trouble was, as blackett's scientists realized once they started sifting through this data, was that a u-boat that had been out of sight for 5 seconds also -- 45 seconds also had time to take evasive action left or right. so even though the depth charges were probably exploding at the right depth, they were almost always in the wrong place and so were missing their targets and, in fact, the results with positively dismal. fewer than 1% of all sighted u-boats were being successfully attacked. the scientists proposed an incredibly simple change that involved no new equipment or new be manpower or anything else. they said change the depth setting on the depth charges from 150 feet to 25 feet, only attack u-boats that had been out of sight for less than 15 seconds. that would insure that when they did carry out an attack, the target would be both at the right depth and the right place because u-boats caught in this small 15-second window wouldn't have had much time to take evasive action and zigzag left to right. the scientists calculated this would increase the successful kill rate from 1% to 10%. now, imagine if you had approached a military commander at this time and said we've got this incredible new wonder weapon, this incredibly more powerful explosive, and it will increase by a factor of ten your success. it would have been astonishing. here there was no new weapon, no new gizmo, it was change the depth setting. and sure enough, when the results were implemented, excuse me, it was almost exactly a factor of telephone improvement -- of ten improvement that ultimately occurred. astonishing. well, it took some convincing, of course, to get this change introduced, as you can imagine, but when it did happen, these results were just undeniable. that change alone transformed the anti-subsubmarine air campan to one of almost complete ineffectiveness in 1941, as i mentioned, to the decisive battle and war-winning operate it would become by 1943. and by that summer of 1943, it effectively knocked the u-boats out of the war. repeatedly blackett's group and a team of scientists that were established by the u.s. navy produced equal results, doubling or tripling even more the effectiveness of existing weapons and forces in hand. again through fairly simple analyses and just by asking the right questions about tactical and strategic decisions that had often been made by tradition, history, circumstance rather than rigorous analysis. their most powerful piece of new technology was the back of the en re-- envelope. one time blackett literally wrote out an equation that led to a dramatic outcome. the british command overseeing all of the convoys that were crossing the atlantic bringing vital spries to britain -- supplies to britain. they had a large map where they were also tracking what they believed were the known positions of u-boats. and backett knew that u-boats mostly traveled on the surface, he knew how many hours the patrol planes were flying, so he was able to figure out how many u-boats should have been spotted by them per hour. of when he compared them to the actual numbers that were being spotted, they were only finding a third of a fourth the number it seemed they ought to be. so apparently, in other words, the u-boats were seeing the approaching patrol planes before the patrol planes saw the u-boats, giving the u-boats time to dye and escape -- dive and escape detection altogether. the answer turned out to be very simple yet overlooked. one day an air force officer asked blackett, well, what color are coastal command aircraft? turned out most of them were painted black because they'd opinion night bombers that had been pressed to serve for anti-submarine duty. black is a very good color at night, it's the worse possible color if you don't want to be seen against a light or cloudy sky in the north atlantic by day. repainting the underside of the wings white of these planes led to a doubling of u-boat sightings from one every 700 hours to one every 350 hours. again, imagine if you were a commander and you went to chief or to the prime minister and said we'd like to have twice as many airplanes as we've been assigned. you know, you wouldn't have gotten it. but here was something which produced the equivalent effect simply by analysis asking the right questions and a relative simple change. now, blackett after the war, in fact, took pains to emphasize it wasn't really the case of a bunch. of brilliant scientists telling, you know, showing how stupid the military commanders were as much as i might have sounded line like that. he said, in fact, most of the time it turned out the military was doing things the best way. but by going back to square one, they again and again turned up small points that had been overlooked. phil morse who was the mit physicist who headed the american anti-submarine research effort after the war wrote a textbook, actually, where he true on a lot of the experiences from the or war to show how these same ideas could be applied to business and many sort of everyday practical problems. and his favorite example, he cited, he said it was a trivial but very good illustrationing of what operations research could do. one of his scientists was out in the field visiting some base, fairly rough conditions, and he noticed after every meals thrfl a huge line, soldiers waiting to watch their mess kits. so being a good operations researcher, he went up and started timing what was going on. apparently, what was going on, they had four washtubs, they had two for washing and two for rinsing. and there would be this huge back up. so he timed how long it took each operation, and he noticed, well, it took three times as long to wash the mess kit as to rinse it, so he finally said, you know, if you had three tubs for washing and one for rinsing, it will, um, speed things up. and not only did the line shrink, he said the line vanished completely. and, actually, that's a common phenomenon with these sorts of operations analyses of not diminishings, -- diminishing returns. if you could find the bottleneck and remove it, often, you know, it's the seemingly miraculous result. now, one rather more important illustration of this was the work carried out by cecil gordon who was a quite brilliant, very eccentric british geneticist. his civilian expertise was fruit fly genetics. but he managed to triple the number of flying hours that the coastal command air quadrants were able to carry out each month, again, not adding a single airplane, not adding a single additional man to the ground crews, but simply by looking at where the boltnecks were many routine maintenance operations, looking at what components broke most often and rearranging procedures and routines. one raf wing commander who was asked about gordon's work and was full of praise though he, i think, also showed exactly what the scientists were sometimes up against when it came to traditional military attitudes. he said, gordon, a marvelously efficient chap. then he added, of course, he was no gentleman. [laughter] but it was an extraordinarily diverse group of men and a few women who made up up the british and american anti-submarine operational research teams. there were physicists, chemists, mathematicians, insurance actuaries, zoologists, astronomers, botanists and one expert on the sex life of the oyster as he was described by a colleague with, i think, no exaggeration. blackett was actually the only one i'm aware of who had any military background at all. but what they shared was a scientific mindset and no preconceived notions. it was also crucial, i think, that they were outsiders. they were not military professionals. they had no career on the line in their work, only the results mattered. blackett advised one of his colleagues who was offered a naval commission to turn it town. he said it was far better to remain a civilian so he could talk back to admirals, he told him. but i think being civilians also meant -- and this was a quite important factor, i think -- that they could more easily talk to and associate with the enlisted men who as everyone in the military knows are the people who really know what's going on. one of the operational researchers recalled how his colleagues got most of their useful information by hanging out in the pubs where the ncos went which led him to conclude 90% of operational research is beer. [laughter] i found the sociological aspects of what blackett and later his american counterparts did actually every bit as fascinating as the technical and scientific details. it took an incredible amount of tact and understanding to bureaucratic politics on the part of blackett and phil morse to obtain permission in the first place to be embedded with operational squadrons, tock allowed -- to be allowed not just to see secondhand data but to see for themselves and to be able to ask questions. blackett, i think, very shrewdly decided his group was not going to stake its reputation by going to the mat to fight for small or incremental improvements. he said if it was going to require some complex scientific statistical analysis to prove that they had actually made things better, they were never going to persuade the admirals and generals that they were worthwhile. he said, rather, they had to concentrate on the things that produced results that were so dramatic that they would speak for themselves, as, in fact, he did with that example of the changing the color of the camouflage, changing the keepth charge setting -- the depth charge setting. these were dramatic examples that really convinced initially disbelieving officers that these civilian intellectuals did have something to offer. likewide, he said, they needed to stifle the natural tendency for offices to sit around intellectualizing about a problem for its own sake. he told his colleagues this was not at all like the situation in their own labs. their job was to improve things if they can and if not, to keep quiet. on the american side, phil morse from the outset, i think, showed an arguably even more skilled understanding of bureaucracies and military bureaucracies to make it an absolute rule, in fact, he required everyone read this every single month, the same standing instructions. he said we have to be able to get permission to go out and talk to the operational squad rants, we have to be able to talk to everyone from high to low to gather the facts. but we can't be seen as some sort of spies who are going to tell on them that they're doing something wrong, and even more important, the credit has to go to the commanding officer. we report to the commanding officer. and he's cautioned all of the scientists. he said don't ever try to claim credit for yourself, even when you deserve it. he said our job is to help win the war, not to run it ourselves. well, i wanted to mention just one other point that fascinated me in the course of my research before i get to your questions. and while i definitely set out to write the story of the nerds who won world war ii, i was not at all expecting that i was going to be also writing the lefties who won world war ii. but it was a very striking fact that emerged that blackett and many on the scientists who pioneered operations researching and who helped to win this very crucial victory against the u-boats were hard left marxists and even in a few cases card-carrying communists. it turned out there were several important reasons for this which i think it's interesting and important to understand. most basic scientists until the 1920s or so were actually, as a matter of principle, not political at all. ernest rutherford who ran the cavendish laboratory in britain actually told his students it would harm your objectivity and your detachment as a scientist if you were involved in politics, and you should not be involved in politics in any way. but two things changed that. one was the great depression. finish blackett was one of many scientists in the 1930s who was furiously frustrated by what he saw as this almost incomprehensible disconnect between the incredible discoveries that were being made in the laboratory -- this was the golden age of physics. incredible break throughs and discoveries and understanding were being made. so there was that on the one hand. and on the other hand, it was the miserable poverty of the working population. i think that was particularly true in britain. you know, britain in a sense the stock market crash of 929 and the great depression here was less -- which did become a worldwide phenomenon -- though was less something new than just a continuation of the same slump that had been afflicting the british economy since the end of th