LINDEMANN’S PLAN

In March 1942 Churchill’s War Cabinet accepted a plan put before it by Professor Lindemann in which ‘top priority’ as an objective for air attack was in future to be given to obliterating “working-class houses in densely populated residential areas.”

This decision of the War Cabinet was kept a closely guarded secret from the British public for nearly twenty years until it was revealed in 1961 in a book called Science and Government by the physicist and novelist, Sir Charles Snow. Snow described the genesis of this policy:

“Early in 1942 Professor Lindemann, by this time Lord Cherwell and a member of the Cabinet, laid a cabinet paper before the Cabinet on the strategic bombing of Germany. It described in quantitative terms the effect on Germany of a British bombing offensive in the next eighteen months (approximately March 1942 – September 1943). The paper laid down a strategic policy. The bombing must be directed essentially against German working-class houses. Middle-class houses have too much space round them and so are bound to waste bombs; factories and ‘military objectives’ had long since been forgotten, except in official bulletins, since they were much too difficult to find and hit. The paper claimed that – given a total concentration of effort on the production and use of aircraft – it would be possible, in all the larger towns of Germany (that is, those with more than 50,000 inhabitants), to destroy 50 per cent of all houses.” (pp. 47-48.)

Lord Professor Frederick Lindemann (1856-1957) was appointed in 1919 professor of experimental philosophy at Oxford University and director of the Clarendon Laboratory, largely on the recommendation of Sir Henry Tizard who had been a colleague in Berlin. In July 1941 Lindemann was raised to the peerage as Baron Cherwell, of Oxford in the County of Oxford and in 1956 he was made Viscount Cherwell, of Oxford in the County of Oxford. During the Second World War he served as Winston Churchill’s leading scientific adviser.