Churchill's Gut-feel Decision By Robert S. Babin

CHURCHILL’S GUT-FEEL DECISION Recently I read a Reagan-administration insider’s fascinating description of how President and Mrs. Reagan used astrology to make important decisions in the White House! It reminded me of Winston Churchill’s so-called “gut-feel” decision not to evacuate London during the German blitz in World War Two, a decision that overruled his experts’ steadfast advice to the contrary. Many years ago I read that incredible episode recalled by a scientist who served on Churchill’s staff at the time. Here is the gist of it, plus some added research and observations of my own. In May 1940, Hitler’s astonishing four-week blitzkrieg ripped through France, Belgium, and Holland and quickly brought them all to a humiliating surrender. By July, Hitler was planning to invade England by sea that fall. Goering’s Luftwaffe had installed itself on a great semi-circle of French airfields, all within easy striking distance of London, and German bombing attacks on England were scheduled to begin. To achieve the necessary German air superiority for the invaders’ safe crossing of the Channel, Goering promised Hitler he would totally wipe out England’s Royal Air Force in two weeks. Since the Luftwaffe had indiscriminately bombed and strafed schools, hospitals, and homes along with military targets in Poland the previous September, no one doubted that London would soon face the same kind of ordeal but enormously more intense. Winston Churchill, the new Prime Minister of England, asked for expert advice on how to prepare London to survive the impending terror and destruction from air raids by German bombers. A select team of technical experts—engineers, scientists, mathematicians, and specialists in many technical fields, including aircraft, explosives, gas warfare, fire fighting, health care, and sanitation—intensively studied the matter for weeks and personally presented their conclusions and recommendations to the Prime Minister. The experts told Churchill emphatically that London must be totally evacuated before the German bombing attacks began. Britain’s meager fighter-aircraft squadrons, anti-aircraft guns, and tethered balloons could not hope to deter large-scale, repeated, devastating air raids on London, they said; no person should be required to remain in the city to suffer that terror; those who stayed during the blitz would face horrible death by explosion, fire, poison gas, or infection. The scientists explained that they had evaluated casualty counts from Germany’s World War One dirigible-bombing raids on England, and from its recent bombing attacks in Spain, Poland, and elsewhere. Their best estimate was that every ton of German bombs dropped on London would cause 50 casualties, a third of them fatal. They predicted that the Germans would use 800 bomber aircraft to drop 2000 tons of bombs on London each day for several consecutive days at the outset and then an average of 700 tons daily for an unlimited period. For a fully populated city they forecast 600,000 Londoners killed and 1,200,000 wounded during the first six weeks of bombing and an average of 50,000 casualties per day in the longer term! They calculated the need of upwards of two million hospital beds for the wounded, more than ten times the number then available. Burying more than a fraction of the dead would be impossible, they said, even with mass interment in lime pits envisaged as one practical possibility. Unburied, putrefying corpses would litter the streets. Sewage disposal would be impossible. Typhus, amoebic dysentery, and other deadly infections would run uncontrolled. Within a week after the bombing began, the Thames River, which runs through the center of London, would be polluted and would remain so. The German bombs would likely release deadly poison gas, since both sides in World War One had

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routinely put gas in tens of thousands of artillery shells. Magnesium incendiary bombs would set thousands of high-temperature fires that could burn through metal and would continue to burn even after being doused with water. Panic, civil disorder, and street crime would be widespread. Within days, London, the largest city in the world, would literally become a flaming cesspool, in which few could hope to survive the explosions, fires, and contagion, let alone preserve civil order, and contribute to the war effort! Churchill listened attentively, then abruptly announced that he planned to do no such thing! He said he would remove from London all young children and their mothers and, of course, the elderly, sick, and infirm. But he would not remove London’s officials and administrators, firefighters, police, health specialists, and others required to cope with the air blitz. Nor would he remove a larger number of men and women serving in war-essential commerce, industry, and military assignments. To abandon the great city and let the Germans blast and burn it to rubble, he said, would be unconscionable! His advisors were astounded. They politely suggested that he may have misunderstood their recommendations, which, they reminded him, were based on carefully derived scientific conclusions and estimates, not quick or subjective surmises or conjectures. Churchill assured them that he had misunderstood nothing they had said and that his mind was made up. His decision quickly got parliament’s approval and was implemented essentially as he had stated it. Several million men and women, including those whose work was deemed to be war-essential and many others who voluntarily chose to remain, lived and worked in London during the five remaining years of war, right through the most devastating rain of terror that Hitler could deliver. The London blitz began in late afternoon on September 7, 1940 with a spectacular raid of 300 German bombers. Then 247 more bombers came over that night. Six hundred tons of high explosives and thousands of incendiary bombs landed on the London docks, the largest and busiest port in the world. Hundreds of buildings went up in flames. The smoke could be seen a hundred miles away. The size and pattern of those first two raids were typical of the pairs of raids that were to follow. The fires set by a day raid accurately located the targets for the night bombers, even on the darkest, moonless nights. Many such pairs of day-night raids lasted six to eight hours and did not end until two or three a.m. For weeks on end, Londoners were lucky to get more than an hour or two of uninterrupted sleep. Every night and very nearly every day thereafter the London blitz continued at much the same intensity until 14 November 1940, except for a two-day respite in October. Then for several months the Germans included as their targets other major industrial cities of the United Kingdom, hitting London only about a third of the time. During the pivotal month of September 1940, the defiant image that London presented to Hitler was of enormous importance to the future course of the war—a fact that Churchill well knew and so magnificently articulated in his thrilling speeches in the House of Commons and to the entire world on radio. Across the English Channel Hitler waited, delaying a go-ahead on his well laid plans to invade England. His invasion battalions were poised at several Belgian and French ports, ready to push off. The decision on whether to invade England was his alone. Arrogantly proud of his recent victories in Poland and France, Hitler had reached the point where he consulted no one seriously and tolerated no counter-advice whatever on military strategy. Now it was crucial that he first make certain that he had broken the will of the British to fight. But with London carrying on courageously day after day through the worst bombings, he

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soon realized that the British were not ready to surrender, and that its entire population would fight German invaders to the death. He waited in vain for the British to sue for peace. In contrast to his whirlwind victories in the past, he was forced to conclude that an invasion of England now would be an excessively expensive and bloody business. In late September Hitler ordered his invasion battalions to stand down, and he turned his attention to the east. The next decision he made, the biggest mistake of his life, was to invade Russia the following summer (on 22 June 1941). Never again would the invasion of England be a viable option for him. For the rest of the war he continued to bomb the British Isles, however, for reasons that historians have never been able to establish. Clearly he would have done better to have thrown his full air might at the Russians. In the furious, close-run battles on the Russian front during 1941-43 more German air support might well have turned the tide in his favor. Then after defeating Russia he could have turned all his fury on England, at which time invasion might have been feasible. But for his own twisted reasons he chose to continue a two-front war, which in prior years he had repeatedly and emphatically declared to many he would never do! A dazzling air raid on London on Sunday, 29 December 1940, started 1,500 fires that joined to became two monstrous conflagrations, creating the largest area of war devastation in all Britain. Several factors, including fifty-mile-an-hour winds and low tide, combined to fan the flames and deprive the firemen of water for many hours. The holocaust was an “incendiary classic,” in Churchill’s own words. It burned free most of the night, becoming the second Great Fire of London. Saint Paul Cathedral, on whose roof 28 incendiary bombs landed that night, very nearly succumbed but was saved by the heroic exertions of the fire fighters. If only one incendiary had penetrated its outer, lead dome and reached its inner, dry-timber dome, Sir Christopher Wren’s enormous 18th-century masterpiece, the second largest church in all Christendom, would have burned to the ground. Eight other lovely, old Wren churches were reduced to ashes that night. Beginning on March 8th, 1941, Hitler resumed massive, almost continuous raids on London for two months, during which it suffered the heaviest bombings of all. Now he used larger bombs and more airplanes. Four notable raids were record breakers. On March 19th, 479 planes dropped 467 tons of high-explosive (“HE”) and 3,347 canisters of magnesium incendiaries, called “COI’s.” On April 16th, 685 planes dropped 890 tons of HE and 4,200 COI’s. On April 19th, in the heaviest raid of all, 712 planes dropped 1026 tons of HE and 4,252 COI’s. On May 10th, the last massive raid was 507 planes that dropped 711 tons of HE and 2,393 COI’s. These numbers are taken from official Luftwaffe records. That ended the main, intensive London blitz, but explosives continued to fall on London sporadically right up to the last month of the war. As he diminished his manned-bomber raids, Hitler targeted hundreds of unmanned V1 “buzzbombs” and V2 rockets on London, each carrying a ton or more of high explosives. The hypersonic V2’s gave no audible alarm, bringing instant death with no warning. With no audible clue of its approach, a V2 arriving at a speed of nearly 1000 miles an hour exploded instantly upon impact. For those who survived a V2 blast, the terrifying psychological effect of the monstrous explosion was the worst of all wartime experiences. Overall, the London bombings destroyed tens of thousands of offices, houses, apartments, schools, churches, hospitals, warehouses, and other buildings, but heroic fire fighters quickly snuffed out fires that would have burned for days in an abandoned city. When water mains went dry, the firemen turned to giant pools of water previously pumped into cement foundations of buildings that had been blown away. Rubble that obstructed vital passageways was cleared promptly. Most of the public buildings fared well. A single bomb hit the Parliament building and destroyed several rooms, but did only limited fire damage. One bomb hit Buckingham Palace,

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with similar results and no casualties. Thousands of unexploded bombs were dug up and safely detonated. Civil order was maintained at all times, and the general morale was incredibly high, actually highest during the very worst of the blitz. When the war ended, London was a badly damaged but fully functioning city, not the burned-out mass of rubble it would have been if Churchill had agreed to abandon it at the outset. Continually bombed and burned day and night, London functioned doggedly as the nerve center of the world-wide British Commonwealth and as military headquarters for the entire Allied effort in Europe. Throughout the war it continued as a busy, productive giant, fighting not only for its own survival but as a key bastion in the Allies’ global battle to save the western democracies from subjugation by that utterly ruthless, egomaniacal, power-drunk devil incarnate: Adolf Hitler. _____ After the war it became evident that Churchill’s advisors’ casualty estimates had been erroneously high, grossly so. The total Greater London casualty count from the blitz was 90,000; of that number 20,000 died and 25,000 were seriously injured. The actual number of casualties per ton of bombs was about five—only a tenth of the experts’ prediction of 50! The Germans dropped a total of 18,000 tons of bombs. A much larger fraction of them missed their intended targets than the experts had predicted, due in large part to Royal Air Force heroism and brilliant British countermeasures. Nor did the Germans put as many bombers over London or deliver as many bombs as the British experts had predicted. Most of their other key estimates turned out to have been grossly erroneous on the pessimistic side. The Thames never became polluted, there were no serious problems with communicable diseases, and the dead and injured were handled very efficiently. Of the 120,000 hospital beds available for victims in London, only a small fraction were ever occupied. Actually the general level of health in London during the war was better than before or since (!), a fact attributed to severe shortages of cigarettes, liquor, sugar, and fat! Neither side used poison gas during the war. The British were committed to its avoidance unless Germany used it first, and Hitler, who had been temporarily blinded by gas in World War I, forbade it. Churchill’s courageous decision not to evacuate London was manifestly correct. What explanation is there for his having made such a bold, wise, and proper decision while facing a battery of the nation’s most qualified experts, all of whom had studied the matter in depth and were telling him he was wrong? At the end of that pivotal meeting of Churchill with his experts back in the summer of 1940, they had tactfully inquired as to the basis for his unexpected and upsetting (for them) decision to ignore their recommendations. Churchill grumbled that he based it on his experience, that he had a “gut feeling” that it was the right thing to do. He added that he was always skeptical about statistics-based predictions. What experience was that? What gut feeling? Why the skepticism about statistics? Churchill was 64 at the time (my age now). A graduate of Sandhurst Military Academy, the West Point of England, he had fought as a young lieutenant in bloody sword-and-pistol skirmishes with fanatic natives in India and had seen the Boer War in Africa first hand. He had served as a volunteer infantry colonel in the front-line trenches in France in World War I, where he very narrowly escaped death when during his absence a massive German shell scored a direct hit on his headquarters. After that war he had visited many European cities and towns reduced to rubble by

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massive shelling. He had also served in several cabinet posts, where he had access to authentic, uncensored data on war casualties and destruction. He had little mathematical training. In fact, he was never able to pass his prep-school course in algebra; reportedly his mother got him through by wielding her special influence on the school authorities. This may have accounted for some of his skepticism toward the quantitative estimates and mathematical predictions his experts offered him. But a larger factor may have been his having seen the gross inaccuracies of numerous military and government civilian experts’ estialuations during his many years of government service in numerous high posts. From all the fmates and evighting, dying, and surviving he had seen first-hand in war time and between wars, along with the courage, heroism, and cowardice he had no doubt observed, he must have had a very special, personal perspective that none of his expert advisers shared on that eventful day in 1940. We will never know what magnitude of risk he felt he was taking when he overruled their advice in making his grave and momentous decision on the future of London, or whether in fact he really pondered that risk at all. Churchill’s pivotal decision on London exemplifies those rare situations where visceral judgments—gut-feel decisions—made by a mature, widely experienced person having special insights stand in conflict with and turn out to be superior to the most thoroughly derived conclusions of the best qualified experts on the subject. This sort of thing hard to accept by professionals in the engineering-scientific community. I have been one such for more than 40 years, a period as long as Churchill’s prior career in 1940. Making gut-feel decisions runs counter to our scientific training at the university, training we have striven to follow in making technical decisions all during our careers. Gut-feel decision making smacks of coin flipping and wheel spinning. Is making a gut-feel decision really anything more than simply asking yourself how you happen to feel about the matter at this moment and then opting accordingly? And doesn’t making a so-called “common-sense” conclusion amount to just taking your best, experience-based guess—your best shot at it? How can such personal, subjective guesstimates give superior results to those resulting from rational, objective, scientific data gathering, evaluating, and concluding? How indeed! EPILOGUE The following quotation suggests some answers. Taken from Winston Churchill’s “Memoirs of The Second World War,” here are his personal observations on the 3 September 1939 decision of the British Parliament to declare war on Germany following its brutal, surprise invasion of Poland two days before: “Here was decision at last, taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground, which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people. Here was the righteous cause deliberately and with a refinement of inverted artistry committed to mortal battle after its assets and advantages had been so improvidently squandered. Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and will not be too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.”

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Copyright @ 1989

Robert Sidney Babin

Robert S. Babin

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