Another neglected WW hero re V1's

[Mark Kohut]

Few philosophers have followed Karl Marx’s exhortation to change the world
more directly than J. L. Austin did. A third of M. W. Rowe’s new book on
the Oxford philosopher (the first full-length biography Austin has ever
had) is devoted to his crucial role in the two most important intelligence
issues of the Second World War. Intensive research that Austin conducted,
along with an MI14 colleague, led to the discovery of the locations of V1
factories in simulated “ski sites” in northern France, thus limiting the
flying bombs’ carnage. And according to Rowe it was thanks largely to
Austin’s meticulous planning that on D-Day, “no army ever went off to fight
with more abundant, relevant and accurate intelligence”, so that victory
was ensured and British losses were far lower than anticipated. Austin was
awarded an OBE, a Croix de Guerre and a US Legion of Merit. And when he
returned to Oxford he went on to inspire and dominate the new “ordinary
language” style of philosophy.

Today, unlike his Cambridge counterpart Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austin is
relatively little known outside academia. Certainly, as Rowe writes, none
of Austin’s contemporaries (A. J. Ayer, Stuart Hampshire, Isaiah Berlin)
left adjectives derived from their names, whereas “every philosophy
graduate of good standing knows what ‘Austinian’ means – basically paying
minute attention to distinctions drawn in ordinary language”