In Deepest Secret
On the morning of 11 December 1941 over the Gulf of Siam, a stretch of sea between Malaya and Vietnam, a single Japanese torpedo-bomber flew out of the cloudless sky. Piloted by Lieutenant Iki, it dipped down towards the waves and dropped not a bomb but a single wreath of leaves and flowers, left floating amid the oil stains and debris. Nothing like this would happen again in the bloody Far East war. The wreath was a rare sign of Japanese respect for nearly a thousand dead British sailors, blown to pieces or drowned when two great warships, the ‘unsinkable’ new Prince of Wales and the rather more elderly Repulse, had gone to the bottom in less than two hours, thanks to brilliantly precise and lethal torpedo attacks by the Japanese. The defeat had shocked Britain and plunged Churchill into despair. These ships were, in the words of one naval historian, ‘symbols of the men and nation that had dominated the sea lanes of the Pacific since the days of Anson and Cook’. The fall of Singapore, the psychological death-blow to the British Empire and the single worst defeat in the war for British forces, followed swiftly. But Lt Iki’s gallant action was not simply a tribute to the sunken ships, the Royal Navy generally, or even to that expiring British Empire the Japanese had long admired. It was also a tribute to an Aberdeenshire aristocrat, William Francis Forbes, the Master of Semphill.
Semphill is one of those Britons forgotten here, remembered over there. He had been a pioneer aviator who served in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War and made a once-famous early solo flight to Australia. When the two warships were sunk he was serving with Britain’s Fleet Air Arm. A child of the British Establishment, the son of an aide to George V, Sempill would live on until 1965, honoured as a veteran of air warfare. So why the Japanese wreath? A quick inspection of the honours Semphill received after the war would have turned up the Order of the Rising Sun. The fact was that Semphill can be blamed or credited for some of Japan’s awesome skill in destroying warships with torpedo-carrying aircraft, not only off Malaya but at Pearl Harbor. He had been sent to Japan on a British mission in the twenties to help build the Japanese naval air force, teaching the latest torpedo bombing techniques and advising on the design of aircraft carriers. Another British engineer had obligingly helped design one of the aircraft, which eventually developed into the feared Mitsubishi Zero. Semphill was impressed by the determination of the Japanese pilots and was thanked by the then Japanese Prime Minister who called his work ‘almost epoch-making’. By 1942 it certainly was. When Semphill had trained his Japanese friends the two countries were linked by a treaty of friendship. More recently it has been revealed that Semphill went on to spy for the Japanese as well. He was not a one-off, nor was the passing over of a vital technology from Britain a rare event. Repeatedly in the past century Britain was involved in the early development of a breakthrough in military or industrial thinking which went straight to enemies or rivals who developed it further and used it better. The sinking of those battleships should have caused even more soul-searching than it did.
In the early years of the twentieth century the Royal Navy had been well ahead of the Germans, Americans and French in developing a modern submarine with guided torpedoes, despite the objection of one admiral who found it ‘underhanded, unfair and damned un-English’. The Second Sea Lord, Jack Fisher, a brilliant, restless, terrifying man, widely rumoured to be half-Asiatic himself, pressed ahead. Yet it was Germany, first under the Kaiser and then under Hitler, which developed the U-boat to its logical and lethal conclusion, coming very close to starving Britain into submission in both world wars. Again, it was a Royal Navy engineer and a British company, Fosters, who produced the first workable tank in 1915 (they were originally called ‘landships’ but to keep their purpose secret, factory workers in Lincoln were told they were mobile water-tanks for the desert and this was shortened to simply, tank). Yet it was the Germans who turned the tank two decades later into an instrument of a new kind of warfare, by which time British tanks were comparatively outdated. As Semphill demonstrated, Britain had also once been ahead with torpedo-attack aircraft. In the mid-forties Britain was far advanced with jet engines, too. But again and again, deploying the new idea, actually getting it to work, was something that foreigners seemed better at.
The greatest example of all is the atomic bomb. We now know that Hitler’s scientists were working hard on this new doomsday weapon, and hoped to test it as early as 1944. Scientists from Italy, France and Hungary were struggling with the physics throughout the thirties. The anguished private warning of Albert Einstein to President Roosevelt in a letter of 1939 about ‘extremely powerful bombs of a new type’ has gone down in history. Less well known is the work of two émigré scientists a year later in a laboratory at Birmingham University. Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls were working on the effects of using the isotope uranium 235 for a nuclear weapon. They made the theoretical breakthrough for building an effective bomb and in 1940 hurriedly typed out a memo for the British government, an obscure paper which has been described as one of the most significant documents of the century. The government, as governments will do, set up a committee of scientists and military advisers and reported back that ‘the scheme for a uranium bomb is practicable and likely to lead to decisive results in the war.’ This was shrewd enough. Thanks to Hitler’s persecution of the Jews Britain had the know-how to get ahead of Germany. But this was the year when the Blitz was at its height and the threat of invasion very real. Britain’s economy was already vastly overstretched. The huge effort needed to create a nuclear industry, to turn the mathematics into metal, was beyond the country’s technical and economic strength. So the news about the bomb was passed to the Americans. Out in the New Mexico desert, they soon leapt ahead. A new world order would swiftly follow.
For a short while after the war it looked as if Britain would stay out of the nuclear race, which seemed to the Attlee government expensive and difficult. Key ministers argued against trying to join it. Had Ernest Bevin, Britain’s post-war Foreign Secretary, not been a prickly patriot, perhaps Britain would have stayed non-nuclear. But after being patronized by his American opposite number, Bevin told his colleagues that he wanted no British Foreign Secretary to be treated that way again. It was a matter of national status, said Ernie. ‘We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.’ This was an agonizing struggle, far harder than was admitted. Churchill had had a private wartime deal with President Roosevelt. Both countries would seek the other’s permission before using nuclear weapons. Information would be shared. Britain would not develop civil nuclear power without Washington’s agreement. This was effectively torn up by the Americans in 1946 with the McMahon Act, which prohibited the sharing of nuclear information or technology. When Attlee tried to revive nuclear cooperation after the war, the White House ignored his letter and the US copy of the secret Churchill-Roosevelt agreement was conveniently lost in the wrong file. A few years after that early breakthrough by the refugees in Birmingham, Britain was far behind the Americans, without access to their work.
The decision to develop the first A-bombs had been a secret even from Churchill in opposition, who later told the Commons: ‘I was not aware until I took office that not only had the Socialist Government made the atomic bomb as a matter of research, but that they had created at the expense of scores of millions of pounds the important plant necessary for its regular production.’ Though private assessments of the threat posed by the Soviet Union were drawn up within months of the end of the war, right from the start in the cabinet committee papers there is the curious and unmistakeable fact that the Soviet menace is rarely at the top of the argument about the British bomb. It is all about the Americans. First, in the Bevin years, it is about status and old-fashioned bulldog pride.
Then it becomes a matter of global strategy, something needed as leverage to influence US policy. Answering the appeal of the defeated Admiralty after the war, the mandarins bluntly admitted: ‘The UK has ceased to be a first-class power in material terms. The United States and Russia already far outstrip us in population and material wealth, and both have vast untapped resources. Canada, India and China, to name only three…in time will certainly outstrip us.’ But, they pointed out, the much more powerful hydrogen bomb was transforming the military situation around the world: ‘If we possess these weapons, the Americans will be prepared to pay attention to our opinions in a way they would otherwise not. The same applies to our standing in the eyes of other countries, such as Germany. And our lesser potential enemies, such as Egypt, will feel that we might, if pushed too far, use nuclear weapons against them.’ ‘These’, concluded the mandarins rather chillingly, ‘are great advantages…’
From early on, Whitehall intelligence reports to ministers identified the peril of war being triggered by a pre-emptive strike from America, hitting the Russians, before they had devised their own nuclear systems at a level which would allow them to properly retaliate. With British troops on the vulnerable front line in Germany, Britain would be thrown into the midst of the new war for which she was not prepared. Persuading the Americans to stay their hand might be easier, the British policy-makers suggested, if Britain was herself an independent nuclear power. In the summer of 1947 work began in deepest secret to build a plutonium-producing plant at Windscale, a little place on the coast of Cumbria, and work started on designing a bomb under the guidance of one of the British scientists who had been at Los Alamos, William Penney. A few years later, the tiny Berkshire village of Aldermaston, with its twelfth-century church, brick labourers’ cottages and ancient Roman defences, which had been looking forward to quieter times with the closure of an airbase, was chosen as the site for Britain’s nuclear weapons programme. More money spent on defence and status was of course less money available for a New Jerusalem.