Churchill stored all the thinking that had to do with the quantitative world inside Lindemann’s brain. And when Churchill became prime minister, in 1940, just after the war broke out, he took Lindemann with him. Lindemann served in Churchill’s cabinet as a kind of gatekeeper to Churchill’s mind. He went with Churchill to conferences. He dined with him. Lindemann never drank unless he was eating with Churchill, who was a big drinker. Then he drank. He went to Churchill’s country house on the weekends. People spotted them at 3:00 a.m., sitting by the fire, reading the newspaper together.
As Snow put it, “It was an absolutely true and very deep friendship, and both men paid some price for it. And when Lindemann was very much disliked by other of Churchill’s intimate associates, Winston never budged. They tried to get rid of Lindemann, but Churchill wouldn’t have it.”
One of the subjects on which Lindemann was most persuasive, when it came to Churchill, was bombing. Lindemann was a great believer in the idea that the surest way to break the will of the enemy was by bombing its cities indiscriminately. Now, did Lindemann have any evidence to support his idea? No. In fact, that was the whole point of C. P. Snow’s lecture—to show that this man of science, this brilliant intellectual, manufactured and distorted the facts to support his case:
No one had ever thought how these bomber forces were really to be used. It was just an act of faith; this was a way to fight a war. And I think it’s fair to say that Lindemann was, with his usual extreme intensity, as committed to this faith as any man in England. Early in 1942 he was determined to put it into action.
In America, at the Air Corps Tactical School, the Bomber Mafia dreamed of a world where bombs were used with dazzling precision. Lindemann went out of his way to promote the opposite approach—and the only explanation Snow could come up with is personal. Lindemann was just a sadist. He found it satisfying to reduce the cities of the enemy to rubble: “About him there hung a kind of atmosphere of indefinable malaise. You felt that he didn’t understand his own life well, and he wasn’t very good at coping with the major things. He was venomous; he was harsh-tongued; he had a malicious, sadistic sense of humor, but nevertheless you felt somehow he was lost.”
One of Lindemann’s biographers once wrote of him: “He would not shrink from using an argument which he knew to be wrong if by so doing he could tie up one of his professional opponents.”
And here’s what a friend said of him: “He was indeed lacking in the bond of human sympathy for every chance person who was not brought into a personal relationship with him.” One time Lindemann was asked for his definition of morality, and he answered: “I define a moral action as one that brings advantage to my friends.”
Well, there you are. I define a moral bombing action as one that brings advantage to my friend Winston Churchill. So Lindemann writes Churchill one of his famous memos. As Snow described the document:
It was a paper suggesting that every resource in England should be used to make bombers, to train bombing crews, to use all these bombers and bombing crews on the bombing of German working-class houses. It described in quantitative terms the results of a bombing offensive…The calculation was that if you gave total effort, you could destroy half the working-class houses in all the big towns in Germany. That is 50 percent of the…towns with populations over fifty thousand within the period of eighteen months. Fifty percent of the houses, according to Lindemann, would no longer exist.
So Lindemann convinced Churchill. And Churchill appointed Arthur Harris—the man whose home Ira Eaker stayed at when he first came to England—to run the British bombing command. And Arthur Harris was a psychopath. His own men called him Butcher Harris.
In one of his first major statements upon taking the post, Harris quoted Hosea, one of the bleakest of the Old Testament prophets: “The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else and nobody was going to bomb them…They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”
Shortly after taking over British bombing operations, Harris launched a massive attack on the city of Cologne. A night bombing, because of course they didn’t particularly need to see their targets, did they? Harris sent one thousand bombers into Germany, and they dropped their bombs everywhere. In the end, the RAF campaign leveled 90 percent of central Cologne, six hundred acres in all. More than three thousand homes were destroyed.
Once, during the war—the story goes—Harris was stopped for speeding. The policeman said, “Sir, you are traveling much too fast; you might kill someone.” Harris replied, “Now that you mention it, it’s my business to kill people: Germans.”