19 thoughts on “Freeman Dyson”

  1. I regard his most significant essay for a general audience “The Children’s Crusade”, first published in The New Yorker and later in his book Disturbing the Universe.

    I grew up reading about the exploits of both the heroic RAF and USAAC pilots flying raids deep into Germany, applying Air Power to hasten the end of WW-II. Dyson’s, “hey wait a minute, it didn’t quite work out that way” was quite an eye-opener, that the Consensus View on a topic that important to how the world ended up could be just plain wrong.

    The Children’s Crusade is titled to evoke Dyson’s belief, from his position as an RAF statistician tracking British bomber losses, that the British night-time bombing campaign was largely ineffective and a waste of lives of both British air crews and German civilians.

    One matter he wrote and talks about in interviews is the too-narrow hatch on the Lancaster bomber, where only a fifth of airmen were able to escape a stricken plane whereas fully half of American crews, with a bigger hatch and admittedly in daylight, were able to escape their planes before they crashed. One of his colleagues was passionate about this and got nowhere with Bomber Command, perhaps not because of bureaucratic inertia but because of fear on the part of the RAF generals that enlarging the hatch would demoralize crews because it would admit how their lost comrades had perished and remind them that their odds against the German defenses were not much better.

    The cause that Dyson took up, however, was how contrary to the story told to the crews of how their chances increased with experience, the Statistics Section had data showing that the loss rate was flat, showing no reduction with experience. Dyson and his colleagues formulated a theory called “upward firing guns”, that the Germans had a gun that fired straight up instead of to the front, where the German night fighter could sneak up on a British bomber from underneath and shoot it down without the tail gunner shooting back.

    Sure enough, Dyson found out years later, maybe even after writing The Children’s Crusade, that the Germans had such a gun on their night fighter they called Schrage Musik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schräge_Musik — “Slant Music”, which is the German term for musical syncopation such as in American Jazz.

    The existence of that weapon is an amazing inference from the RAF statistics section. Dyson had the idea that since the Lancaster was essentially defenseless against whatever the Germans had, to strip the guns out. A lighter, more streamlined Lancaster might fly just enough faster to throw off the Germans “vectoring” their fighters at the British bombers, or at least for a while, and if that didn’t work, the Lancasters would conduct missions with fewer crew and lose fewer young British men, Children’s Crusade style. Once again the RAF leadership held firm and nothing was changed.

    On the other hand, there is an element to Dyson’s account that is like the proverbial near-sighted persons describing an elephant from different vantage points. The American B-17 and B-24 bombers were at some point equipped with an apparatus called a ball turret, where the shortest guy on the crew was stuffed into this precarious orb of plexiglass and winched down below the belly of the plane to defend against such a blind-spot defense.

    The concept of attacking a bomber (without a ball turret) from below was also known to David Lee Hill of the Flying Tigers. In an interview on PBS he explained that the Japanese bombers appeared upside down in his gun camera films because his unit’s tactic was to dive below the bomber formation, roll inverted, and attack the bombers from underneath. So maybe this tactic was known to more people than a few Luftwaffe pilots?

    Furthermore, the early B-29 attacks against Japan were at high altitude and were wildly inaccurate owing to the jet stream that was not known about until then. Curtis Lemay lightened the bombers by stripping them of defensive guns and conducted low-level raids at night, setting fire to the major Japanese cities. So LeMay showed a flexibility that the RAF Generals never had, although Dyson claims that the Japanese defenses were much weaker than what the Germans fielded.

    1. I wonder if this experience colored Dyson’s heterodox approach to other subjects in the rest of his life. At the least it should give a person a healthy lack of respect for pronouncements of authorities.

  2. Has there ever been any war that was decided by anything other than which side was exhausted first? All of the theories, the grand strategies come down to this in the end. Yet, after all , every war starts with “home for Christmas”.

    The Strategic Bombing Survey conducted after the war confirmed everything Dyson found and more. Aircraft production, especially, increased throughout the war until Dec. 44 despite all of the “Maximum Effort”and the “Black Thursdays”.

    What it did do was tie up a huge amount of material and manpower killing our air crews that wasn’t available on D-Day. As imperfect as the weapons were, they were the only way available to carry the war to the enemy until invasion was possible.

    1. I think the Pacific Theater of WW-II concluded long before the Japanese were exhausted. One might argue that the Emperor was exhausted, and being the spiritual leader and Commander in Chief of the armed forces, he had the ultimate say. But Japan was a lot like like today’s Deep State, and the military just about pulled off a coup when Hirohito decided to surrender. The Japanese people were willing to fight to the very end, as they had demonstrated at Saipan, and had far more industrial capacity left than we knew about. In fact, it wasn’t until recently that large underground factories and stores of munitions were found. But the atomic bomb was such a scary development that I think the will to go on, at the very top levels, wavered. The Japanese were far from done, but the risk of being exterminated quickly and completely, without losses on our side, proved too daunting.

      1. If we had wished to exterminate them, we would only have had to maintain the blockade. By Spring of ’46 the deaths from starvation would have been in the millions. The Japanese had 0 offensive capability and their defensive capability was falling fast.

        They had no Merchant Marine and no Navy. The few aircraft were third line and trainers without enough fuel to train pilots beyond the basics.

        A great many Americans would have still died in an invasion, including, possibly, my father. The Japanese losses would have been an order of magnitude or more greater with many more dying of disease and starvation.

        The real question in my mind is what sort of insanity made an invasion seem necessary when we could just stand back and wait for the survivors to sue for peace.

    2. Not exactly as simple as that; the Luftwaffe was almost completely ineffective for D-day and after, because it had been decimated though heavy personnel losses incurred defending the Reich against Allied air raids. Also, most of those newly produced aircraft never got into action, due to the shortages in oil and transportation facilities from Allied bombing. The ones that did pretty much became cannon fodder in the face of what amounted to Allied air supremacy.

      1. Your statement is very accurate. Both the Japanese and Germans never had a big pipeline to produce pilots. They started the war with large cadres of highly skilled and experienced pilots. However, pilots and aircrew flew combat missions until they were wounded or killed. There was no effective rotation system and they couldn’t produce equally well trained pilots fast enough to make up for the losses.

        Strategic bombing over Europe wasn’t very effective at stopping production, especially after factories were dispersed and buried to make them harder targets. Oil production did take heavy hits and without fuel, all those new planes were essentially useless.

        1. One of the simplest means to under cut the flow of oil to Germany from Romania was not tried till early 1944. This was to mine the Danube river, on which at least 1/3rd of the oil was sent North, though the pipelines and trains were also vulnerable. Later that year, the Russians conquered Romania, finally stopping that oil.

  3. I think the US learned from WW-II, Korea, and Vietnam when it came to strategic bombing (though Vietnam “strategy” was driven solely by politics). When it came to the Gulf War, we started bombing their military positions, and kept it up 24/7 for 42 days. The Coalition conducted 100,000 sorties in that time, and dropped on the order of 88,500 tons of bombs. Military targets were well defined, and critical ones taken out early. Some civilian infrastructure was also targeted (carbon fiber chaff dropped on power substations to short them out), but it was mostly military infrastructure and the Republican Guard itself that we targeted. These attacks softened up the resistance to the point where the ground invasion took just 100 hours to conclude.

      1. I would argue also that over theater tactical air ops co-ordination via J-STARS and AWACS also greatly improved air power, making orbital lingers vastly more effective and allowing the advance of the 2nd strike doctrine we first saw with ground attack fighters and now drones.

      2. True, but in Desert Storm, precision guided munitions only counted for a small (IIRC, < 20%) of all bombs dropped. By 2003, that was reversed.

  4. That was a good interview. It would be even more interestinger to read the stuff left out.

    Is the fact that small populations diverge genetically really such a heresy or is it the view of situations like this overall effect on evolutionary history that is? It seems like that view isn’t all that controversial.

    The answer on ego really confirmed what was long expected, that scientists are actually humans. Confidence vs humility is a good mindset for any endeavor.

    It was funny when he politely said atheists are loud. Obviously there are lots of atheists who are not “loud” but the ones who have a mission of spreading their religion are worse than vegans.

    1. I remember “Neo-Darwinist” Stephen Jay Gould saying as much, that at least new species emerge through “hopeful monster” mutations that propagate through interbreeding in small populations from which these new life forms emerge. He called it Punctuated Equilibrium, and he used it to explain gaps in the fossil record where new species appear to pop out of nowhere without there being a continuum of intermediate forms.

      You need these small isolated populations otherwise the new forms get swamped out.

      The Darwinist explanation of the absence of the intermediate forms is that the fossil record under samples what had taken place.

      1. The usual explanation for punctuated equilibrium is that species are often at a point where they’re at a local optimum. When this is not the case evolution can occur at extreme speed, and there is nothing that contradicts conventional evolutionary theory in that.

  5. Well, the comments have certainly drifted on this one.

    Seems fitting when discussing Freeman Dyson, IMHO.

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