Free Blackett's War by Stephen Budiansky Page B

accept the stern terms demanded by the Allies and a revolutionary mob in Berlin was proclaiming a socialist republic from the steps of the Reichstag. Ludendorff’s successor at the high command explained to His Majesty that he no longer had an army that would obey his orders.
    It was Haig, almost alone among the Allied military and political leaders, who had expressed grave reservations about the wisdom of extracting humiliating concessions from Germany. “I think this is a mistake,” he wrote his wife, “and may encourage the wish for revenge in the future.” Haig was especially dismissive of the Admiralty’s reasoning that, since the German High Seas Fleet would surely have lost all of its modern warships had it ventured forth to do battle, it should therefore be required to turn over the entire fleet as one of the Armistice conditions. 30 His was a voice in the wilderness.
    Within a year of the war’s end Ludendorff and Hindenburg were insisting without batting an eye that a valiant and undefeated German army had been “stabbed in the back” by a weak and treasonous civilian government, abetted by socialists and Jews. “One had to live in Germany between the wars,” wrote the newspaper correspondent William Shirer, “to realize how widespread was the acceptance of this incredible legend by the German people”—and how much it would drive Germany’s resurgent militarism. 31

Remedial Education
    ON THE EVE OF WAR Britain’s naval experts remained serenely confident that the U-boat menace had been vanquished for good. “The submarine,” a 1937 British naval staff report concluded, “should never again be able to present us with the problem we were faced with in 1917.” 1 Such confidence was the chief reason the Admiralty had been so untroubled at the prospect of Germany’s acquiring the force of fifty to sixty U-boats permitted her under the Anglo-German Naval Treaty.
    There were two main arguments that led to this reassuring conclusion. One was convoys: however reluctant the Admiralty had been in first adopting the practice, their effectiveness in 1917 and 1918 had been so decisive as to remove all doubt. The naval staff had drawn up extensive contingency plans for taking over the control and movement of all merchant shipping should war come again, and by the summer of 1939 a Shipping Defence Advisory Committee had been meeting monthly with shipowners to work out the practical details. 2
    The other source of British confidence was asdic, or sonar as it was now known in America. British, French, and American scientists had all been working on the idea at the time of the Armistice. Hydrophones, underwater microphones that passively detected sounds beneath the surface, had been instrumental in only four kills of German submarines during the war, but asdic promised much better results. Like radar, asdic worked by transmittingpulses of energy—high-pitched sound waves in the case of asdic—and then recording the time it took for an echo to return from a target; the longer the time, the greater its distance.
    Had the war lasted another six months the system would have been ready for operational deployment on Royal Navy warships. The development of asdic had incidentally provided another example for Churchill’s belief that military heads required substantial knocking to get them to accept new ideas. The work had been shepherded by a board of civilian scientists set up by the Admiralty in July 1915—this was the group that Rutherford had been brought in to help with—and was headed by Churchill’s outspoken and like-minded ally Jacky Fisher. It was officially known as the Board of Invention and Research; Fisher’s many enemies among the regular navy’s tradition-minded officers called it the Board of Intrigue and Revenge. It earned little but suspicion and hostility at first. Nonetheless, the researchers made substantial progress in working out both the basic physical facts of undersea acoustics and the