Codebreakers Victory (11 page)

Five long years our war was there

subject to local scorn and stare.

 

Meanwhile, Ultra and other sources were reeling in a rich cache of intelligence regarding Operation Sea Lion. German top officers may have been lukewarm about plans for the invasion, but their underlings had no choice but to take the orders seriously and to throw themselves headlong into preparing for it. The Public Record Office file of Red translations includes the calls for embarkation rehearsals and practice landings, orders for transport and loading officers to remain at their ports until further notice, the training of crews for towed gliders, the plans for quick-turnaround airports to be used in shuttling troops and supplies across to England. The decrypts show how unprepared the Germans were to carry out an amphibious invasion. But that was what Hitler had ordered, and his service organizations substituted frenetic action for wiser consideration. Powered barges used on rivers and canals were hastily steered to Channel ports. Demands went out for engines to be mounted on the many other unpowered barges normally pulled in long strings by tugboats. It was a motley assortment, but the best the Germans could manage on such short notice.

On the night of September 7, after a day in which wave after wave of Luftwaffe planes had bombarded London, the code word
Cromwell
was sent to military units throughout Britain. It was the alert that the German invasion was about to begin. Church bells rang—a signal everyone recognized. Families crouched in candlelit shelters. The home defense forces were mobilized for "immediate action." Tomorrow the showdown would come.

But the German air force had not cleared the skies of the RAF. This was demonstrated on September 8 when, of two hundred bombers raiding London, eighty-eight were shot down. Adding strength to the RAF were Polish, Czech and Canadian pilots. The GAF raid was all that happened on that supposedly climactic day. The German invasion fleet never appeared.

The real climax of the Battle of Britain came on September 15. Göring, in desperation, hurled every plane he could muster against London, Southampton, Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool and Manchester. Dowding, in response, departed from his piecemeal tactics and sent the RAF up in full force. When Churchill visited the RAF operations room and asked about reserves, he was given the answer: "There are none." The RAF lost twenty-seven fighters but destroyed fifty-five German aircraft.

Hitler was convinced: Göring had failed. On September 17, Hitler postponed the invasion of Britain, telling a subordinate that while the conquest of France had cost thirty thousand men, "During one night of crossing the Channel we could lose many times that—and success is not certain."

Word of his decision did not show up in Ultra decrypts. It had to be inferred from messages such as the one disclosing that equipment intended for installation on invasion barges "should be returned to store." Also, as October and November wore on, the rapid-fire rate of midsummer intercepts eased. Embarkation practices were postponed or canceled. Warships assembled for the invasion were sent on other missions. The threat evaporated.

Churchill did not wait long to be convinced. He ordered that 150 tanks being held to ward off German invaders should instead be dispatched to his hard-pressed divisions in North Africa.

The depleted Luftwaffe was reduced to making what were mainly nighttime attacks on London—the Blitz, as Londoners called it. Although the bomb runs killed many people and did great damage to the city, they came to be seen more as nuisance raids than elements of a consistent plan. Their effectiveness steadily declined. The Battle of Britain was over and, with the codebreakers' aid, handily won.

Albert Kesselring, who, in the first of his many command postings for Hitler, had led one of Göring's Luftwaffe fleets in the Battle of Britain, presented an interesting view of the effects of Britain's superior radar technology and signals intelligence on the Luftwaffe. Writing his memoirs in 1953, long before the role of Ultra had been revealed, Kesselring recalled that "losses soon increased to an intolerable extent owing to the quick reaction of the British defense—fighters and A.A. [Antiaircraft]—and quick concentration of fighters over the target and on the approaching route. With the alternative before us of letting the enemy's uncanny reading of our intentions bleed the Luftwaffe to death, we had no choice but to switch our targets, times and methods of attack."

"Uncanny reading of our intentions"—this could well be Ultra's epitaph, not just for the Luftwaffe but also for the whole German war effort.

During the depths of the Battle of Britain, Dr. Jones wrote in his memoir, "I used to look at my wall map every morning and wonder how we could possibly survive." By February 1941, he was finding "some hopeful signs," including an early victory in North Africa and "the strong voice of Franklin Roosevelt" in his support of Britain. Jones added, "Above all, there was the great advantage of being able to read much of the Enigma traffic. If only we could hold on, sooner or later this could turn the tide."

 

 

Ultra Guides a Victory in North Africa

 

Entering World War II, British intelligence was better prepared to sense what was happening in Benito Mussolini's Italy than in Hitler's Germany. GC&CS was reading the ciphers used by the Italian army, navy and air force in the Mediterranean, Libya and East Africa. Central Intelligence had also set up an interservice Middle East Intelligence Center in Cairo. The conclusion drawn from the decrypts, however, was that the state of Italy's armed forces left her unprepared for a long war and that Italian leaders would be anxious to preserve her neutrality.

These reasonable conjectures underestimated the ambitions of Mussolini. He felt overshadowed by Hitler's early successes and resolved to seek some conquests of his own. In April 1939, when Hitler took over Czechoslovakia, Mussolini sought to match him by seizing Albania— which gave in without a fight. In May 1940, with Hitler's defeat of France imminent, II Duce declared war on Great Britain and France and even dispatched squadrons of Italian bombers and fighters to make token raids on England. He also tried to invade the southeast corner of France bordering on Italy, but his troops were repulsed by the French, with heavy losses. Undeterred, he planned for actions in North Africa, contenting himself with the thought that the victories he could achieve there fitted more appropriately into his dream of building a new Roman empire.

Mussolini's North African prospects looked highly favorable. The collapse of France freed the more than two hundred thousand troops in Italian-held Libya who were guarding the frontier against the French in Tunisia. They could join the Italian Tenth Army, which was in place to counter the British in Egypt. Conquest of Egypt would crown Mussolini's possessions in Eritrea, Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia, as well as Libya. To oppose the Italian might, the British had fewer than fifty thousand underequipped troops who were also supposed to defend British interests in nine other Middle Eastern countries. On June 28, Mussolini ordered the invasion of Egypt.

The situation was an acute worry for Winston Churchill, especially when he found out that those 150 tanks he had consigned to his Middle Eastern command, that "blood transfusion," as he put it, weren't going to be sped by convoy through the Mediterranean. He was "grieved and vexed" when instead the ships were routed the long, slow way around the Cape of Good Hope.

He needn't have worried. Control of the Italian armies to invade Egypt was placed in the hands of the cautious Marshal Rodolfo Graziani, a much bemedaled veteran of earlier conquests in Africa. A realist, the marshal saw how ill prepared his troops were, with archaic guns and antiquated tanks. He employed delaying tactics, arguing that the attack shouldn't begin until the Germans had invaded Britain. Consequently, all through the on-again, off-again plans for Operation Sea Lion, his vast forces simply camped out in the desert and waited. Fuming, Mussolini on September 7 gave him the choice either to attack or to resign his post. On September 13 Graziani finally did order his troops forward. In four days, to much trumpeting in Rome, he moved sixty miles into Egypt and took the outpost of Sidi Barrani. But for the British it was only a planned withdrawal. When they settled at their base in Matruh, Graziani stopped his advance, still some eighty miles short of the British. All through October and November the Italian armies hunkered down in the desert while Graziani prepared a new base for his offensive. The British tanks and other equipment arrived in October.

Britain's commander in chief in the Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, had placed his Western Desert Force under the command of Richard O'Connor, a resourceful bantam of a general who much favored offense over defense. The day after Italy had declared war, O'Connor directed sorties that captured scores of Italians, including a general. Now he settled into planning his main attack. In this he was greatly aided by the British codebreakers. Their decrypts, relayed to him by the Cairo center, gave him copious and accurate information about the locations and strengths of the various Italian army concentrations. BP's breaking of Luftwaffe Enigma signals assured him that the Germans, as yet, were not planning a transfer to North Africa.

Aerial reconnaissance also came to O'Connor's aid. Photos showed the routes the Italians used to drive through the minefields protecting their main encampments. The paths left a wide gap that he, too, could use to slip between the Italian camps and then wheel his armor around to attack them from the rear.

O'Connor thought of every essential detail. In advance he had patrols store provisions in desert cisterns. Midway to the battle site he had his troops lie dormant for a day and night so they would be fresh for the attack. When, on the night of December 8, the Desert Force began its drive, hurricane lamps blinkered against the Italians' view showed troops and armor where to proceed.

The attack worked as O'Connor had hoped. At dawn the British completely surprised the Italians as they prepared breakfast. The Desert Force destroyed the Italians' armor and killed or captured them by the thousands.

Wavell had authorized O'Connor to launch only a five-day raid against the Italians. O'Connor's fighters were desperately needed elsewhere: to attack the Italian garrison in Eritrea that was threatening the Red Sea route to Egypt, to be ready to aid Greece, and perhaps to withstand German advances in Syria and Lebanon. Wavell did pull out the Fourth Indian Division, about half the Desert Force. All he could offer to replace them were poorly equipped Australians. He allowed O'Connor to continue his drive to the west.

After recapturing Sidi Barrani and thus ending the Italian threat to Egypt, O'Connor's divisions routed the Italians and captured the strongpoints of Bardiyah, Tobruk and Benghazi. When BP decrypts told him the Italians were going to retreat along the coast road toward Tripoli, he made an end run in the desert and blocked the remainder of Mussolini's army. In a two-month campaign, O'Connor's men advanced five hundred miles, destroyed an army of 10 divisions, took 130,000 prisoners and seized some 400 tanks and more than 1,000 guns. Churchill gleefully read a battlefield report claiming the capture of "five acres of officers and two hundred acres of other ranks."

Following the Italian surrender, according to Hinsley's account, the head of British military intelligence in the Middle East observed that he "could not believe that any army commander in the field had [ever] been better served by his intelligence."

O'Connor set his sights on capturing his final prize, Tripoli, but it was not to be. While O'Connor was humiliating the Italian army, Adolf Hitler came to several major decisions. One was to send Erwin Rommel and German troops into North Africa to reinforce what was left of the Italians. The other was to mount a drive through the Balkans into Greece. His objective was to crush the British between these pincers and give Germany control over the eastern Mediterranean, its lands and its oil.

Wavell had to stop O'Connor's westward push and send much of his army to meet Churchill's commitments to the Greeks. O'Connor himself disappeared from the scene when, amid Rommel's first thrusts in North Africa, he was captured and forced to sit out the rest of the war as a prisoner.

Nevertheless, he had shown how Allied generals could, by taking heed of such secret aids as decrypted messages and photoreconnaissance, use intelligence to shape their planning and achieve victory.

 

 

Ultra Adds a Victory at Sea

 

Early in the war the Royal Navy suffered troubling losses, and later would experience other serious defeats. But a couple of Mediterranean triumphs buoyed English spirits. One was against the Italian fleet at anchor in the harbor of Taranto on November 11, 1940. The victory was set up not by signals intelligence but by photoreconnaissance. It will be described later in another context.

The second victory, once more over the Italians, resulted from a Bletchley Park breakthrough against the Italian navy's Enigma-encoded transmissions in March 1941. Dilly Knox, working with his young assistant, Mavis Lever, masterminded the breakthrough. They used a crib together with long strips of cardboard called rods—the cardboard replaced the actual wooden ferules originally employed. On the rods, the crib letters were lined up with letters of the ciphertext to determine the paths of electric current through the code wheels. It was a manual method of eliminating inconsistencies until only linkups between crib and cipher letters remained. By patient manipulation of their rods, Knox and Lever broke messages indicating that a strong force of Italian warships was about to leave port and attack British convoys traveling the sea between Alexandria and Greece. Decodes of air traffic disclosed plans to neutralize British air cover. The decrypts also pinpointed the time of this thrust.

Britain's naval chief in the Mediterranean, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, made his plans on the basis of the intelligence. He knew he had to be cautious not to tip off the Italians that the Royal Navy was aware of their intentions. Cunningham's base in Alexandria was vulnerable to Axis spies, not to mention the Japanese consul general there, who was known to relay information to his Axis partners.