Codebreakers Victory (33 page)

The bombers were supposed to first drop leaflets on the monastery warning the monks and refugees within its walls to get out at once. That done, the bombers' assault would be followed by having a division of Indian lighters swing around to the abbey's rear and drive out the German defenders. Like so many other actions in the Italian campaign, execution of the plan was botched. The bombers made their terrible run not on February 16 as expected but a day earlier. The bishop and some 250 of the refugees remaining in the shrine were killed. The Indians were not ready and their attack failed. The German troops happily moved into the rubble and used the giant blocks of stone to make their fortress still stronger. Here as at Anzio the stalemate held.

What finally did the Germans in was a plan that depended heavily on their intelligence blindness. Now they were lacking not only cryptanalytic clues; their air reconnaissance had largely been swept from the skies. Astutely employing radio-silent maneuvers at night and camouflage by day, Alexander organized a huge attack force. Kesselring thought he was facing six divisions on the main front when in actuality he was up against more than fifteen. Among them were a division of agile, mountain-climbing Moroccans and a Polish division whose troops had once been captives of the Russians.

As a deceptive move, Alexander had amphibious operations staged near Naples, where German intelligence agents were sure to report them. Kesselring responded as expected: he kept his mobile units in the west to guard against being outflanked by another possible landing.

Alexander's planning was guided by a steady flow of signals intelligence that told him Kesselring's complete order of battle, the sections of the front for which his units were responsible and such other details as the number of his tanks and how many of them were serviceable.

A Bletchley decrypt even informed Alexander when to launch this, the fourth Battle of Cassino. It disclosed that Hitler had summoned several officers to discuss plans with him on May 11 to 12. The news assured Alexander that an attack at that time would be a surprise, and it was.

The offensive was helped by one of Kesselring's rare errors. Thinking the rugged terrain of the Aurunci Mountains would forestall any advance there, he left only a thin line to guard the area. The French mountain troops readily managed the ascent and broke through to a point where they were within reach of the Liri Valley and the road to Rome. The German front crumbled. By May 17 the British had outflanked Cassino. The next day the Poles occupied the monastery ruins and raised their flag over the site, whose capture had claimed nearly four thousand of their colleagues' lives. The Germans were at last in retreat along the entire main battlefront, and their exhaustion and desperation were aptly chronicled by Allied decrypts.

As for the troops at Anzio, Alexander wanted them to break out, drive northward toward the town of Valmontone and block the Highway 6 escape route of the German divisions retreating from the south—a move, he thought, that would bag thousands of prisoners.

He figured without Mark Clark. Along with his own ego driving him to become the liberator of Rome were added the pressures from on high, particularly from Churchill and Marshall, to take the Eternal City before the political significance of its capture was overshadowed by the Normandy landings. Moreover, as Clark recorded in his memoir, "I was determined that the Fifth Army was going to capture Rome." His determination was driven by the belief that "practically everybody else was trying to get into the act."

 

 

The Taking of Rome: A Hollow Victory

 

General Truscott fulfilled his part of Alexander's plan. His troops drove through the German defenses at Anzio and headed north toward Valmontone. Eric Sevareid has left a vivid account of what came next. General Clark, who had earlier endorsed the plan to entrap the Germans, called a press conference at which he now claimed it was "nonsense" to think the Germans could be bottled up by seizing Highway 6, since there were many lesser roads by which they could escape. He ordered Truscott to direct only about a third of his troops toward Valmontone; the main body would head straight for Rome.

The correspondents were dumbfounded. Truscott and other commanders were outraged. But Clark was in charge. Paranoid that the British might take Rome while his troops were busy rounding up Germans, he made sure his Fifth Army got there first.

Even though the Germans were in retreat, they could still manage delaying actions. The most serious holdup came at the Alban Hills, the last breastworks defending Rome. Impatient, Clark sent armor across the flat ground between the hills and the sea. According to Sevareid, "Every vehicle was easily spotted in the enemy's gun sights and within ten minutes we had lost twenty-five tanks."

The Alban Hills impasse was solved by General Fred Walker of the Thirty-sixth Division. He drew two regiments from the main line, circled them stealthily around to the right during the night and sent them climbing the two-thousand-foot height
behind
the German line. His maneuver broke the defense. Most of the Germans, declaring Rome an open city, retreated beyond it. But some maintained a rearguard action.

At one point of delay, Brigadier General Robert Frederick, whom Sevareid described as "the young and capable commander of the special 'commando' regiment of Americans and Canadians," was watching the progress of his men when a jeep drew alongside. Major General Geoffrey Keyes, corps commander, descended. "General Frederick," he asked, "what's holding you up here?"

FREDERICK: The Germans, sir.

KEYES: How long will it take you to get across the city limits?

FREDERICK: The rest of the day. There are a couple of SP [self-propelled] guns up there.

KEYES: That will not do. General Clark must be across the city limits by four o'clock.

FREDERICK: Why?

KEYES: Because he has to have a photograph taken.

FREDERICK
[after a long pause]:
Tell the general to give me an hour.

The guns were silenced, the general and his faithful photographer arrived and the pictures were taken, in Sevareid's words, "of the conqueror and his conquered city."

It was June 5. Clark got his headlines and pictures in the world's press. He had beaten the D-Day deadline imposed on him by his superiors by one day. The next morning he called for a meeting of his corps commanders. Arriving, they found they were to supply a proper martial backdrop for more of Clark's posturing before press photographers. Soon Clark signaled that he wanted to make an announcement. The measure of his myopia was made plain by his opening words: "This is a great day for the Fifth Army." The reporters blanched. His generals reddened with embarrassment, some with anger. What about the much-bloodied Eighth Army? The self-sacrificing Poles? The Free French? The whole of what Clark himself had called a "hodgepodge army" that had united to make this day possible?

For these newsbreaks the chance to encircle Kesselring's entire Tenth Army was lost. The German general took full advantage of the opportunity. His delaying actions at Valmontone fought off Truscott's inadequate force while the bulk of his army safely slipped through to the Gothic Line—to fight, and kill, again.

The rest of the Italian campaign was anticlimactic in terms of its news-making value. Churchill envisioned the Allies smashing through the Alps to seize Vienna and possibly even Budapest and Prague before the Russians claimed them, but that remained a dream. The need to transfer combat-hardened divisions to the invasion of southern France drained away strength for tackling the last German redoubts in Italy.

Yet it must be remembered that a main purpose of the war on the peninsula was to tie up and maim German forces that could otherwise have helped throw back the Normandy invasion and/or stop the Soviets in the East. The campaign did that. Hitler's decision to contest every yard of Italian territory played into the Allied hands. For twenty months a score of German divisions were held there and bloodied. As BP veteran Ralph Bennett has written, "Every man, tank and gun [Hitler] sent to Italy meant one less to defend
Festung Europa."

Even with depleted forcesj Alexander and Clark continued the pressure. Their troops broke the Gothic Line and, as the war in Europe was ending, had the last of Germany's shattered Italian divisions fleeing through the Alps.

Their final drive did have the effect of encouraging Italian partisans to spring up and seize northern Italy. In the process they captured Mussolini and his mistress, then killed them and strung up their bodies by the heels like sides of beef for once-worshiping countrymen now to jeer at and spit upon.

 

 

 

13

 

The Coming of the Ultra Americans

 

 

While the British were happy to see the influx of American fighting men, they were not so sure about the advent of U.S. codebreakers. A serious question arose as to whether the Americans and the British could ever reach an agreement to collaborate in signals intelligence. There were convincing reasons why they should unite their cryptanalytic programs, and a good many lives were lost because of their failures to do so. But there were almost equally powerful reasons why they should not. Chief among these were security concerns. No military unit with a hold on some aspect of Sigint trusts any other unit to protect its secrets. So it was then: security gave teeth to interservice rivalries. The U.S. Navy would not entrust the U.S. Army with its methods of cryptanalysis, much less make them available to the British. The British, for their part, saw American intelligence operatives as gabby, loose-lipped security risks who couldn't even keep the U.S. press from blabbing the Midway triumph. Seen from this perspective, both British and American intelligence seemed riddled with small-minded staffers who used the security issue more to guard their own turf than to question the advisability of cooperation.

Slowly both sides realized, however, that they had significant assets that could be shared. The Americans had their Magic; the British had Ultra. Both sides also had intelligence leaders who saw the need for mutual support. As early as August 1940, the head of the U.S. Army planning staff, Brigadier General George V. Strong, led a contingent to England to propose a "periodic exchange of information" between the British and American governments. Hinsley reported that at this meeting, Strong described U.S. progress against Japanese and Italian ciphers—this before the break-in on Purple was completed!

The British reciprocated by sending some of their most respected and talented representatives, including Alan Turing and Alastair Denniston, to discuss cryptologic matters with the likes of William Friedman. But the response was far from complete openness about the doings at Bletchley Park.

In February 1941 the Americans followed with another act of unprecedented generosity. Four junior American officers, including Friedman's disciples Abraham Sinkov and Leo Rosen, arrived in London bearing the gift of a Purple machine or—the records conflict—possibly two, which the British quickly put to work cracking Japanese diplomatic messages in Europe and the Middle East. In reciprocation the Sinkov team received a whirlwind tour of Bletchley Park that included lectures on the general cryptanalytic methods used by the British.

After these promising overtures, however, advances became a matter of two steps forward and one back. The Sinkov mission actually stoked the fires of U.S. opposition. The Americans' exposure to BP had been so superficial—it did not include even a look at a British bombe—that it was seen as a poor trade for the goodwill shown by the U.S. On the British side, surprisingly, Winston Churchill got his back up about yielding any greater depth of Ultra material to the U.S. and declared himself in favor of a "stiffer attitude" toward sharing secret intelligence. The cause was not furthered by that new indication of American security laxness: Colonel Fellers's unwitting revelations to Rommel of British plans in North Africa.

Nor was it helped by the opinion of the U.S. ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, that the British were doomed to defeat and should not be entrusted with U.S. intelligence secrets.

One event that strengthened cooperative attitudes in both camps was the Lend-Lease Act that Franklin Roosevelt negotiated through Congress in March 1941. The British, with their cash reserves depleted, saw this as an imaginative way to "lend" matériel that no one would be expected to return or make postwar payments for, as had been the case in the Great War. Senator Robert Taft compared it to lending chewing gum: you certainly didn't want it back. To avoid having much-needed U.S. lend-lease cargoes loaded onto ships that would then be sunk by U-boats, both navies became more forthcoming in their exchanges of North Atlantic intelligence. The Admiralty, as noted previously, advised the U.S. on setting up a Submarine Tracking Room similar to that of the Royal Navy. Further, an agreement with the Danish ambassador in Washington allowed the U.S. to establish a base in Greenland and later one in Iceland so that the U.S. took responsibility for protecting convoys over an increasingly broad area of the North Atlantic.

Gradually the collaborationists won out over the die-hard resisters, an evolution that accelerated with American entry into the war. In May 1943, this progress culminated in the BRUSA (Britain and USA) Agreement, calling for a comprehensive exchange of intelligence information. One important decision was what Hinsley called "an effective division of labor." The United Kingdom was to concentrate on the ciphers of the European and Mediterranean theaters while the U.S. took the lead responsibility for securing and disseminating intelligence about the forces of Japan.

An interesting outgrowth of BRUSA was an invitation to have American soldiery join in the British codebreaking effort. In fairly short order during 1943 the U.S. Army Signal Corps organized the 2nd Signal "Service Battalion, which was to select and train three outfits to serve in Britain. These were the 6811th, 6812th and 6813th Signal Service Detachments. The original plan called for 485 officers and enlisted men to be assigned, but the number swelled past 500 as more Americans were absorbed into the various detachments. In addition, U.S. Army Intelligence assigned a select group of officers to work at Bletchley Park.