In the early morning of June 22, 1940, a large group of rumpled, bleary-eyed passengers clustered together on a platform at London’s Paddington Station, surrounded by luggage, wooden crates, and twenty-six metal canisters. The crowds hurrying by paid little attention to the bedraggled travelers, who had just arrived from France. Londoners were focused on more important concerns that day, including the imminent capitulation of France to Germany.
Nothing about the group’s members indicated their prominence; they included some of France’s most distinguished scientists and engineers, experts in everything from ballistics and chemical warfare research to explosives manufacturing. Also on the platform were two nuclear physicists from the renowned Collège de France in Paris, a leading center of nuclear fission experiments. Unobserved as their arrival was, the physicists—and the precious substance in the canisters beside them—would end up playing a vital role in one of the most momentous developments of the war.
A tall, unshaven Englishman, wearing flannel trousers and a travel-stained trench coat, was tending to the group. Known as Jack to his family and friends, he was Charles Henry George Howard, the 20th Earl of Suffolk and a scion of one of Britain’s most ancient and powerful families. Lord Suffolk had scooped up the scientists a few days earlier and spirited them out of France aboard a scruffy Scottish coal freighter. An awestruck Harold Macmillan, then a junior minister in Churchill’s government, was introduced to the swashbuckling Suffolk a few hours after the group’s arrival in London; he would later describe the thirty-four-year-old peer as a “mixture between Sir Frances Drake and the Scarlet Pimpernel.”
Yet while Lord Suffolk had shown considerable daring and ingenuity during his adventure in France, its success was not due solely to him. His partner in arranging the rescue was Raoul Dautry, the French minister of armaments. Unlike most of his colleagues in the French government, the fifty-nine-year-old Dautry, a former head of the French railway system and a man of audacity and vision, was determined to do all he could to help Britain and defy the Nazis.
DAUTRY’S INVOLVEMENT IN THIS cloak-and-dagger episode had begun a few months earlier, when Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the son-in-law of Nobel laureates Marie and Pierre Curie, paid him a series of visits shortly after France and Britain declared war on Germany. In 1935, Joliot-Curie and his wife, Irène, had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their seminal work on artificial radioactivity. Under Joliot-Curie’s direction, nuclear physicists at the Collège de France had demonstrated that uranium had the potential to produce an explosive chain reaction and had even designed a workable reactor on paper.
Joliot-Curie told Dautry that his team’s research might well lead to the development of a vastly powerful new bomb. But to harness nuclear energy, he said, it would be necessary to find a material that would slow down the rapid chain reaction caused by the splitting of uranium nuclei, which in turn would allow the reaction to become self-sustaining. One such moderator was an extremely rare substance called heavy water, a liquid that looked like ordinary water but contained deuterium—an isotope, or variation, of hydrogen. Only one company in the world—a Norwegian firm called Norsk Hydro—produced heavy water in quantities greater than a few drops, Joliot-Curie said. It was manufactured at a Norsk Hydro electrochemical plant nestled in a narrow, mountain-rimmed valley about seventy miles west of Oslo.
In late December 1939, soon after his meetings with Joliot-Curie, Dautry received alarming news from officials in France’s military intelligence bureau. Norsk Hydro, which produced heavy water as a sideline and sold small amounts of it to laboratories all over the world for various kinds of scientific experiments, had just informed them that I.G. Farben, the huge German chemical-industry conglomerate, had placed an order for its entire heavy water stock. When the Norwegian company had asked the reason for such a large purchase, Farben had declined to answer.
Dautry’s fear—that Germany was also pursuing the possibility of producing a nuclear bomb—was in fact correct. Indeed, the German government had created a military department devoted exclusively to the wartime development of nuclear energy. “The country which first makes use of [nuclear fission] has an unsurpassable advantage over the others,” observed the German physicist Paul Harteck. Under government sponsorship, Harteck and other physicists had formed what they called “the Uranium Club,” conducting nuclear chain reaction experiments in half a dozen laboratories throughout the Reich. Like Joliot-Curie and his team, the Germans had decided on heavy water as the best instrument for controlling and sustaining a nuclear reaction.
News of the Germans’ interest in heavy water galvanized Dautry into action. Determined to keep nuclear weapons out of Nazi hands, he organized a secret mission to Norway to bring back all the heavy water its operatives could find. To head the operation, Dautry chose Jacques Allier, a dapper, bespectacled young Frenchman who in peacetime was an officer at the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, one of France’s leading banks and a chief shareholder in Norsk Hydro.
On February 28, 1940, Allier, now a reserve officer with the Ministry of Armaments, left Paris for Oslo—and the adventure of his life. Traveling under an assumed name and with a false passport, he carried with him a letter of credit for 1.5 million Norwegian kroner (more than $5 million today).
In the snowbound Norwegian capital, Allier told Axel Aubert, Norsk Hydro’s director, of the race between French and German scientists to build a nuclear bomb and of the vital importance of heavy water in that endeavor. When the Frenchman offered the letter of credit in exchange for all of Norsk Hydro’s stock, Aubert shook his head. His company, he said, did “not wish to receive one centime” for the heavy water; instead Norsk Hydro would lend it to France, as well as any the company manufactured in the future. “I know that if the [German] experiments succeed and if later France has the misfortune of losing the war, I will be shot for what I am doing today,” Aubert said. “But it’s a matter of pride for me to run that risk.”
With the heavy water in hand, Allier and his team of agents faced a new challenge: how to get it out of the country without German interference. Despite the secrecy of the French mission, the Nazis knew all about it: the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency, had cabled its operatives in Oslo to follow and waylay a suspicious Frenchman named Allier, who was traveling under an alias.
Late one evening in early March 1940, workers at the Norsk Hydro plant poured the heavy water into twenty-six metal canisters, then drove over ice-covered roads to deliver them to Oslo. The following morning, Allier and one of his French colleagues arrived at Oslo’s Fornebu Airport. Two passenger planes were revving up on the airfield side by side, one bound for Scotland, the other for Amsterdam. Both were scheduled to depart at about the same time.
In the departure hall, the Frenchmen, under the watchful eye of Abwehr operatives, confirmed their reservations for the Amsterdam plane. As passengers for both flights began boarding, a taxi drove up to the departure gate, was waved through to the tarmac, and stopped between the two aircraft, out of sight of the terminal. The cans of heavy water were hurriedly transferred from the taxi to the Scotland-bound plane as Allier and his colleague headed for the other. Hidden in a swarm of fellow passengers, they abruptly shifted direction, scrambling aboard the airliner flying to Scotland just as its door was closing. Both planes took off and headed out over the North Sea.
A few minutes into the flight, two Luftwaffe fighters intercepted the craft heading for Amsterdam and forced it to land at Hamburg, a port city in northern Germany. As soon as it touched down, Abwehr agents forced its cargo compartment open and unloaded several large wooden crates. Inside, they found loads of Norwegian crushed granite instead of the heavy water they had been ordered to retrieve. By then the canisters were safely in Edinburgh. By March 16, they were in Paris, stored in the cellars of the Collège de France. Three weeks later, Germany invaded Norway.
Raoul Dautry, however, had little time to savor his success. On May 16, he received an urgent call from General Weygand, informing him of the German breakthrough at the Meuse River. Unlike his superiors, Dautry was not focused on the twin specters of defeat and capitulation. He shared Churchill and de Gaulle’s belief that his country must stand its ground and fight; if vanquished on French soil, he argued, its army should retreat to France’s colonies in North Africa to continue the battle alongside Britain.
His prime concern at the moment, though, was to ensure the safety of the Collège de France physicists and the heavy water they were sheltering. At his urging, two leading members of Joliot-Curie’s team—the tall, burly, Russian-born Lew Kowarski and Hans von Halban, a cultivated Austrian who had grown up in Germany—accompanied the precious substance to Clermont-Ferrand, an industrial town some 250 miles south of Paris, where they set up a temporary lab. In early June, as the enemy drew closer to Paris, Joliot-Curie and his wife joined them. By then Dautry had realized the hopelessness of the situation; it was essential to get the scientists and the heavy water out of France before the Germans tracked them down. Just as he was working out plans to do so, Lord Suffolk providentially appeared in his office.
In early 1940, Suffolk, a scientist in his own right, had been sent to Paris as the liaison between Dautry’s Ministry of Armaments and the British Ministry of Supply’s department for scientific and industrial research. After taking a suite at the Ritz, he set about acquainting himself with the latest French developments in science and engineering, including Joliot-Curie’s nuclear fission experiments.
In the first days of June, with France about to fall, Suffolk decided on his own initiative to rescue from the country whatever he could of scientific and industrial value. Dautry wholeheartedly approved and presented Suffolk a letter authorizing him to do so. With that in hand, Suffolk raced around Paris collecting scientists, engineers, state-of-the art machine tools, and millions of dollars worth of industrial diamonds, dispatched from Belgium and Holland in advance of the German blitzkrieg. When some of the bankers in whose vaults the diamonds were stored refused to hand them over, the English lord pulled out two ivory-handled pistols along with Dautry’s letter. The bankers quickly complied.
The Earl of Suffolk
LORD SUFFOLK’S CONFRONTATION WITH the bankers in Paris was not atypical. All his life, Jack Howard, as he preferred to be called, had refused to follow the rules of polite society. His rebellion against conformity and thirst for adventure seemed to have been firmly embedded in his family’s DNA. “For twenty generations,” an observer remarked, “the earls of Suffolk have done just what they pleased—and what they pleased to do was invariably dangerous.” Thomas Howard, the 1st Earl of Suffolk, was given his title by Queen Elizabeth I for the key part he played in defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588. The queen referred to him as “Good Thomas,” to distinguish him from his father, Thomas Howard, the 4th Duke of Norfolk, who was executed in 1572 for plotting to dethrone Elizabeth and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. Some three hundred years later, Queen Victoria tartly referred to the family as “those mad Howards.”
Jack’s mother, Daisy, the Dowager Countess of Suffolk, was as disapproving of her son’s escapades as Queen Victoria had been of the exploits of his ancestors. Yet Daisy was hardly a model of conformity herself. The youngest daughter of Levi Leiter, a multimillionaire businessman from Chicago, she was one of a flock of American heiresses, labeled “the buccaneers” by the novelist Edith Wharton, who had crossed the Atlantic in the Victorian era to marry members of the English nobility. Daisy’s eldest sister, Mary, had scored one of the biggest catches of all—Lord Curzon, the brilliant, temperamental peer who became British viceroy to India and later foreign secretary.
During a visit to her sister in India, Daisy met and fell in love with Henry Paget Howard, the 19th Earl of Suffolk, a dashing sportsman and aide-de-camp to Curzon. The couple was married in 1904. Like her husband, Daisy was addicted to excitement and adventure—fast cars, speeding planes, and hunting to hounds or on safari. The marriage produced three children and lasted almost thirteen years; in 1917, Henry Howard was killed fighting the Turks near Baghdad in World War I.
Eleven years old when he inherited his father’s title, Jack Howard had no interest in pursuing what he viewed as the self-indulgent, pleasure-seeking lifestyle of English aristocrats. He hated hunting and shooting and was bored by the thought of devoting his life to the upkeep of the Suffolks’ ancestral home—a forty-room Elizabethan mansion and 10,000-acre Wiltshire estate known as Charlton Park. “Jack was a rebel against everything in his own past and against everything the society he was born into stood for,” one friend remarked.
When his mother sent Jack to the Royal Naval College at Osborne, the sixteen-year-old lasted barely a year. He loved the idea of going to sea—but on his terms, not the Royal Navy’s. A short time later, after attending Radley College, he signed up as a common deckhand on a clipper ship bound for Australia. “I don’t see how you can fit yourself to any great position in life unless you have spent time roughing it and learning what the other fellow goes through,” he later declared. He spent much of the next six years in Australia in a variety of jobs, from cowboy to sawmill worker. Toward the end of his time there, he became part owner of a large sheep station in Queensland. When he returned to England to take over the management of his estate, he sported a beard, a pet parrot, and tattoos of a snake and skull-and-crossbones on his arms. His mother broke down in tears when she saw him.
Once again, though, his restlessness got the better of him, and he enrolled at the University of Edinburgh to study chemistry. At the age of twenty-eight, the Earl of Suffolk had finally found a field that truly absorbed him. Graduating from the university with a first-class degree, he went to work at the Nuffield Laboratory at Oxford as a research chemist.
When war broke out in 1939, he tried to enlist in the army but was turned down because of a childhood bout with rheumatic fever. In early 1940, his fluent French and scientific expertise won him the job of liaison between Dautry and the British Ministry of Supply. Herbert Gough, who was Suffolk’s boss at the ministry, later recalled that he had been “won over completely” by the earl’s “tremendous enthusiasm, infectious personality, and buccaneering spirit”—traits that, in the chaos of France’s defeat, would yield huge benefits for the British and Allied cause.
IN MID-JUNE 1940, with his cargo of diamonds, machine tools, and scientists secure, Suffolk headed south to Bordeaux, hoping to commandeer a ship that would transport them all to Britain. When he arrived, he discovered a city in chaos. Hordes of fleeing French soldiers and civilian refugees had swollen the population from 300,000 to 900,000 virtually overnight. Food, water, and lodging were extremely scarce, and millionaires from Paris camped in the city’s public square alongside shopkeepers and factory workers. “The single thought in everyone’s mind was escape,” an American journalist observed.
Forced to sleep in his car, Suffolk haunted the Bordeaux docks for three days trying to find a captain willing to make the journey across the Channel. He had no luck until the morning of the fourth day, when, thanks to a tip from the British commercial attaché, he located an old Scottish freighter called the Broompark. Its skipper agreed to take the job, provided they left as soon as possible. German planes, which had been strafing refugees on the roads leading to Bordeaux, had begun bombing ships in the harbor; later that afternoon, in fact, a freighter tied up alongside the Broompark would be hit by a bomb and severely damaged.
Meanwhile, Joliot-Curie and his colleagues, along with the heavy water canisters, had arrived in Bordeaux, under orders from Dautry to leave with Suffolk. Having fought their way through the massive crowds clogging the docks, the Collège de France team stared in wonderment at the fantastic bearded figure, looking like “an unkempt pirate,” who greeted them at the Broompark’s gangplank. Stripped to the waist, his arms covered with tattoos, Suffolk ushered them aboard the ship, swinging a riding crop and shouting to the crew to begin loading the heavy water.
Before dawn on June 19, the Broompark weighed anchor and headed for England. Lew Kowarski and Hans von Halban were among the couple dozen scientists aboard; Frédéric Joliot-Curie was not. Despite intense pressure from Suffolk, he decided at the last minute that he could not leave his homeland. Above all, he could not bear the thought of abandoning his wife, who was ill with tuberculosis, and his two young children, who were living with relatives. Before the ship sailed, however, he instructed Kowarski and Halban to work closely with the British in continuing their nuclear fission experiments.
Throughout the uneventful voyage, Lord Suffolk plied the scientists with champagne to settle their nerves. On June 21, the Broompark tied up at the Cornish port of Falmouth, and Suffolk, with his usual panache, somehow procured a special train and armed guard to transport the scientists, diamonds, machine tools, and heavy water to London.
Early on the morning of June 22, Harold Macmillan, the future prime minister who then was parliamentary secretary to the minister of supply, was awakened at his flat by a phone call and told to report to his office immediately. There he found “a young man of somewhat battered appearance, unshaven…yet distinguished by a certain air of grace and dignity.” It was his first meeting with Lord Suffolk, who briefed him on the valuable cargo he had rescued in France, which included, in Macmillan’s words, “something called heavy water.” As Macmillan recalled years later, “I did not know at the time what heavy water was, and I was too confused to inquire.” What he remembered most about that encounter was Suffolk himself, whom he described as “a truly Elizabethan character.” In his memoirs, Macmillan would write, “I have had the good fortune in my life to meet many gallant officers and brave men, but I have never known such a remarkable combination in a single man of courage, expert knowledge and charm.”
The following day, Suffolk escorted Halban and Kowarski to a meeting with leading British scientists at London’s Great Western Hotel. In the mid- to late 1930s, a number of physicists in Britain, including several refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria, had also been conducting experiments to determine the possibility of nuclear fission. But once the war broke out, more pressing matters occupied their attention, including creating a radar system to detect the approach of enemy aircraft. Nonetheless, in early 1940, half a dozen of the country’s top scientists persuaded the British government that development of a nuclear bomb was a distinct, if distant, possibility. Thus was born the MAUD (Military Applications of Uranium Detonation) Committee, which, like its German government counterpart, began overseeing uranium-related research in laboratories throughout the country. In their discussions with Halban and Kowarski, British scientists realized how much further ahead Joliot-Curie’s team was in such work than they were. They immediately invited the Collège de France nuclear physicists to join their efforts.
Meanwhile, Suffolk and his colleagues at the Ministry of Supply were debating where to store the heavy water, which, according to one ministry official, “may prove to be the most important scientific contribution to our war effort.” After depositing the canisters briefly in cells at Wormwood Scrubs prison in suburban London, ministry officials finally found the perfect spot for them: with the permission of King George VI, they were stashed with the British crown jewels in a heavily guarded hiding place somewhere deep inside Windsor Castle.
Kowarski and Halban were given space at Cambridge University’s renowned Cavendish Laboratory, which had been largely evacuated because of fears that Cambridge would be in the direct path of an expected German invasion. During the remainder of 1940, as the Battle of Britain raged overhead, the two physicists used some of their cache of heavy water to continue their nuclear fission experiments. By early 1941, their research had convinced British leaders that, with enough uranium and heavy water, a nuclear reactor—and a bomb—could be built in time to affect the course of the war. “I remember the spring of 1941 to this day,” recalled James Chadwick, Britain’s foremost physicist, who won the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the neutron. “I realized then that a nuclear bomb was not only possible. It was inevitable.”
But the war-battered British did not have the enormous economic and industrial resources it would require to undertake such a massive project. For that, they had to turn to the neutral United States, where nuclear fission research was also being conducted in a number of laboratories. Only the physicists at the Columbia University lab, Enrico Fermi and Harold Urey among them, could be considered serious rivals to the Collège de France team. Yet although Fermi, Urey, and their colleagues recognized that reactors could be used to produce bombs, they were not yet as advanced in their research as Kowarski and Halban.
In mid-1941, the MAUD Committee sent a report to the U.S. government urging the development of a nuclear bomb. A few months later, Harold Urey visited Britain for discussions with Kowarski, Halban, and British physicists and engineers. That report and those consultations in turn led to the Manhattan Project—and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
“Had the British not taken up fission in earnest in 1940 and 1941…and had they not then pushed the Americans to act, it is likely that no nuclear weapon would have been ready before the end of the war,” the science historian Spencer Weart has noted. He added, “If von Halban and Kowarski had not come to Britain in June 1940, there almost certainly would have been no British reactor program at all.”
SINCE THE RESCUE OF the French scientists and the heavy water was considered top secret at the time, no public recognition was given to Lord Suffolk for his crucial role in bringing it about. In a closed session of Parliament on June 27, 1940, Herbert Morrison, the minister of supply, informed MPs that a mission had been mounted in France to save valuable materials, “some of them of almost incalculable scientific importance.” He added only that a Ministry of Supply official, whom he did not name, had been responsible for the rescue.
Within a few months, Suffolk would take on another vital and even more perilous mission for the government. This time, the British public would be made fully aware of what he had done.