Allied soldiers who were not killed limped back from defeat. It was now clear that they needed to be able to sneak onto the beach days before the attack to get the latest information. They needed to know where the Nazis dug tunnels, planted explosives or built machine gun nests. None of their ships could get close enough to the coast without being detected, so the Allies needed midget submarines and divers. They need science to do these things.
By this time, Haldane, Spurway and other scientists had suffered eight seizures and broken several vertebrae. This was because, shortly before the Dieppe disaster, the Admiralty asked Haldane and his crew to pivot and focus on a new, more specific objective, but was too late to stop it. To help their countrymen and the Allies defeat Hitler and help end the war, the Allies needed scientists using the same work to prepare beach reconnaissance missions.
Five days after Dieppe, Haldane and Spurway, still unaware of its horrors, were formulating plans for their next amphibious assault. There would be another beach landing, this time in Normandy—and it would not fail.
haldane born In 1892 he entered a Scottish family whose summer house had a tower. Stately portraits of ancestors, with carefully trimmed facial hair and miles of pleated fabric on their skirts, look down from the high walls of their multiple estates. John, known as “Jack” in his youth and later as “JBS,” had no patience for the pomp and circumstance. He insisted on placing an old tub full of tadpoles under the branches of a majestic apple tree. He was determined to breed water spiders.
Jack and his sister Naomi entered science at an early age, just as some people enter royalty.
Their parents, Louisa and John Scott, seemed attracted to each other because they passed on to their children the same fiercely independent, irreverent genius. She was a talented young woman with blond hair, classical beauty, a love of puppies, and an outspoken confidence that, along with her occasional smoking habit, made her a rebel among the staid upper classes of England in the 1800s. .
He was a researcher, physician and reader of physiology at Oxford University, and had a reputation for being eccentric. He converted the basement and attic of the couple’s house into a makeshift laboratory so he could play with fire, air currents and gas mixtures. So can his children.
At the age of three, Jack, a chubby little boy with blond hair, donated blood for his father’s research. At age 4, he rode the London Underground with his father while John Scott hung a canister out of the train window to collect air samples. The pair discovered alarmingly high levels of carbon monoxide, and the city decided to electrify the rail line. Young Haldane is learning how to let people live and breathe in a world they’re not supposed to live in.
By the late 1800s, frequent explosions and gas leaks made mining one of the deadliest jobs in the world, and John Scott Haldane died for his willingness to crawl into narrow, dark, coal-filled passages. Famous among the country’s miners. His mission is to make the air supply safer. When he was 4 years old, Jack was exploring coal mines with his father, learning how people breathed in those tight, dangerous spaces. The common expression “canary in the coal mine” – still used to describe the early detection of any threatening situation – still exists today, as Haldane’s idea was to use the small, brittle bird to detect gas leaks .