Read The Secrets of Station X Online
Authors: Michael Smith
‘One of the very first things that was noticeable was that there was a radio station very busy indeed in Normandy, near the front,’ said Ralph Bennett, one of the Hut 3 intelligence reporters.
Now Y service could locate this place exactly and could
monitor
the number of signals coming in and out; it was obviously a very important headquarters. But on 10 June, Enigma revealed that it was the headquarters of
Panzergruppe
West
, the
headquarters
of all the tanks in the invasion area. Monty knocked it out for three weeks and lots of the senior staff officers were killed.
There were gaps in the information provided by
Ultra
. The codebreakers were unable to provide a precise location for 32nd
Panzer
Division, which was defending the vital British objective of Caen and held up Montgomery’s advance for more than a month. They had also missed the presence of a German
infantry
division defending Omaha beach. But these were the only blank spaces in an otherwise complete and detailed picture of the German order of battle.
Although the
Red
Enigma remained a constant source of
intelligence until July 1944, when the Germans realised it was compromised, Army Enigma circuits began to be broken and as the Allied invasion wore on Army Enigma networks became more important than their
Luftwaffe
counterparts. There was a major potential problem when von Rundstedt’s
Fish
link to Berlin became temporarily unreadable.
‘Until D-Day, they changed the wheel patterns once a month,’ said Art Levenson.
So once you had them recovered, you were in. But after we invaded, they changed the patterns every day, so the job became much more difficult. We went to the boss Edward Travis and said: ‘We need four more
Colossi
because they’re changing the patterns too often.’ He went to Churchill who said: ‘Anything they want.’ So we got the four new
Colossi
and they were absolutely necessary. We used them to recover the links, which we never would have done without them.
On 20 July, a group of senior Army officers, among them Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, attempted to assassinate Hitler. Stauffenberg took a bomb, hidden in a briefcase, to a staff
conference
at the Rastenberg
Führer HQ
and placed it under the table. As soon as he heard the explosion and unaware that Hitler had escaped serious injury, he left for Berlin to tell the generals
planning
the military takeover that the
Führer
was dead.
Alex Dakin said one of his most vivid memories from Bletchley was being on duty in the Hut 4 ‘Z’ Watch ‘when not much was happening’. The messages coming into the Watch in the wire tray by which messages were passed from Hut 8 ‘were nothing exciting – but then in the next almost empty tray, one of the most exciting messages ever.’
The message read:
OKM AN ALLE EINSATZ WALKUERE NUR DURCH OFFIZIER ZU ENTZIFFERN OFFIZIER DORA DER FUEHRER ADOLF HITLER IST TOT DER NEUE FUEHRER IST FELDMARSCHALL VON WITZLEBEN
…
‘Naval Headquarters to all.
Operation Valkyrie
. Officer only to decypher. Officer setting Dora [D]. The
Führer
Adolf Hitler is dead. The new
Führer
is Field Marshal von Witzleben.’
Sadly, Hitler wasn’t dead. By 11 o’clock that night, the attempted military coup was over and von Stauffenberg and a number of other senior officers had been executed.
As the Allied forces poured into Normandy, they had been held back by heavy German resistance, orchestrated by Field Marshal Günther von Kluge. But at the beginning of August, the American 12th Army Group under General Omar Bradley swept south though Avranches turning west into Brittany and eastwards behind the German tanks.
‘I remember after the invasion there was a long period of time when Montgomery’s forces and the US forces under General Bradley were being built up,’ said Selmer Norland, one of the Americans working in Hut 3.
Units were being ferried across the Channel and, after they captured the initial bridgeheads, they were sort of pinned down for quite a long period of time while this build-up was taking place. And I remember a particular night when I was working on a message and some German unit reported that the American tank spearheads were in the outskirts of Rennes. I told the Army adviser who was on duty at the time and we dashed for a map to find out where Rennes was. We were astonished to find that it was almost all the way across the Brittany peninsula.
Convinced of his own infallibility as a military strategist, Hitler now decided that von Kluge should force his way through to the western Normandy coast at Avranches, cutting the American thrust in half. ‘We must strike like lightning,’ he told his chiefs of staff.
When we reach the sea the American spearheads will be cut off. We might even be able to cut off their entire beachhead.
We must not get bogged down in cutting off the Americans who have broken through. Their turn will come later. We must wheel north like lightning and turn the entire enemy front from the rear.
There was certainly an element of reason in the idea but with more than a million Allied troops now firmly established in Normandy, von Kluge had little hope of carrying it out and, far worse, with Montgomery’s 21st Army Group pressing down on him from the north and the Americans sweeping westwards along his southern flank, he risked becoming trapped in an Allied pincer movement.
The Allies, fully informed by Bletchley Park of the German plans, ensured the initiative failed. As von Kluge’s counterattack faltered with its only route of retreat through a small gap south of the town of Falaise, Hitler insisted that it should be carried through to the bitter end. ‘On its success depends the fate of the Battle of France,’ Hitler said in a message sent in the early hours of 10 August and decyphered in Hut 6 almost immediately. ‘Objective of the attack, the sea at Avranches, to which a bold and unhesitating thrust through is to be made.’
John Prestwich was on duty in Hut 3 when Hitler’s orders came through the hatch from Hut 6.
I remember it. My goodness I remember it. I remember we queried it at the time. We said: ‘It cannot be true.’ It seemed to us inconceivable. But what made sense was that the Americans had broken out of their base in the Cotentin peninsula and the Germans had made what was a perfectly sensible limited spoiling attack on the American lines of communication. Then there came through this detailed order that four or five German armoured divisions were to go hell for leather for Avranches and this opened up the whole possibility of wiping out the cream of the German armed forces. All you had to do was to close the Falaise Gap and there was this great pocket. But it was
an order from Hitler. The German generals might have thought it was lunatic, and Rommel clearly did on at least one occasion, but they obeyed on the spot because they were under oath.
Within a few days, it was clear that von Kluge had no hope of carrying out Hitler’s orders and, fearing that at any moment the Allies would surround his forces, he ordered the withdrawal. Susan Wenham was one of the codebreakers on duty in Hut 6 on duty on 16 August when von Kluge’s orders came through.
It was the most exciting night I had. The Germans were making plans to make their last terrific push to try to get out of the pincer they were in. I was on the night shift and the day shift had had an enormous message. They came in sections; they weren’t allowed to do them more than a certain length. It was a ten-part message and only six of the parts of the message, the
Teile,
came through. They had managed to break those during the day and the message was to say how the Germans were planning to get out of this impasse. Then during the night, a very obvious re-encodement of this came in, all ten of the parts, and we could see by looking at it that it was a word-for-word re-encodement, which was absolutely not allowed. So we let Hut 3 know and we got all the Bombes cleared. We worked like mad on this thing during the night and by morning it was all put through and finished. So that was a very exciting night.
Allied timidity allowed 300,000 German soldiers to escape from the Falaise Pocket, but a further 250,000 were either killed or captured. With the Germans now in full retreat, the Allies poured out of Normandy towards the the Belgian and German borders. Paris was liberated on 25 August as Montgomery’s 21st Army Group raced towards Belgium, heading for the Ruhr and, with the newspaper headlines trumpeting ‘Berlin by Christmas’, an unwarranted level of over-confidence set in.
The intelligence supplied by Bletchley Park had proved invaluable to the Allied generals, giving them a
comprehensive
picture of their opponents’ positions and plans. But now the picture coming out of Hut 3 seemed to contradict that suggested by the speed of the breakout from Normandy and the race across northern France.
Montgomery’s reputation had been built on the back of the codebreakers’ advance knowledge of Rommel’s plans in North Africa. But he ignored their reports that Hitler had ordered his troops to maintain control of the Scheldt estuary. This typically arrogant decision to disregard the
Ultra
intelligence was to lead to a major defeat for the British on the banks of the Rhine. Anxious to beat the Americans to Berlin, Montgomery pushed on into Holland to mount
Operation Market Garden
, a
three-stage
airborne offensive with landings at Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem, the infamous bridge too far.
‘Elements retreating from the pocket in August and September filled the air with reports of their movements and strength,’ said Ralph Bennett.
Among much else these showed that II SS
Panzer
Corps was to refit in the general area of Arnhem where Montgomery was planning to make a bridgehead across the lower Rhine. So firmly entrenched however was the conviction that German resistance was nearing its end that this knowledge was not enough to cast doubt on the wisdom of launching
Operation Market Garden
.
Although the American airborne troops dropped onto Eindhoven and Nijmegen secured their positions and managed to link up with the main advance, the British 1st Airborne Division which was to seize a bridgehead across the Rhine at Arnhem was not so fortunate. It succeeded in capturing the only surviving bridge across the Rhine and held it for several days, expecting
reinforcements
to arrive at any minute. But surrounded by vastly superior
forces from two
SS Panzer
divisions, the British paratroopers were eventually forced to withdraw. Only 2,200 of the
10,000-strong
division managed to get out.
‘It should have been no surprise that 9 and 10 SS
Panzer
Divisions were encountered somewhere between Eindhoven and Arnhem,’ said Bennett.
Ultra
had placed them in this general area with certainty over ten days before
Market Garden
, although it had not located them precisely. The
Ultra
evidence was amply strong enough to shake the confidence of men with minds as open as they had been on D-Day, but the high command had lately become so over-confident that it was allowing itself to spend more time in disputes over future strategy than in studying the ground immediately under its own feet.
Yet even the mistake over Arnhem failed to dissuade the Allied generals from their over-optimistic belief that the Germans were finished and that there was little they could do to slow the advance on Berlin. They continued to ignore the evidence of the
Ultra
decrypts which now pointed to a major
counter-attack
being prepared in the Ardennes.
Jim Rose, one of the Hut 3 air advisers, and Alan
Pryce-Jones
, one of the military advisers, flew to SHAEF headquarters in Paris in November and briefed General Kenneth Strong, Eisenhower’s intelligence officer, on the
Ultra
decrypts.
Strong had a very weak chin. He said: ‘This is the way we read it. Right across the front from the North Sea really to Switzerland the Germans are losing a division a day and this can’t be maintained. They’re bound to crack.’ Alan Pryce-Jones was just a major. He had his own form of battledress, he wore suede shoes. He just sort of sat on the corner of the desk and he said to Strong: ‘My dear sir, if you believe that you’ll believe anything.’ Three weeks later was the Ardennes offensive.
The warning signs that the Germans were planning a major counter-attack were not as obvious from
Ultra
as they had been at times during the war. Nevertheless, there was no failure of intelligence collection, simply a lack of long-term analysis of German intentions born out of the belief that the war was
virtually
over, said Ralph Bennett.
The high-ups on our side became convinced that the Germans were weakened by their failures and they couldn’t do anymore. By that time we’d got too damn cocky. I still don’t understand and I don’t think I shall understand, how it was that sign after sign that they were planning something was ignored. Who knows what it was, we never did know until it happened. They [the Germans] never told us. They were getting very security conscious by then. Time after time, we simply neglected to add two and two together and say well it might make a total of four rather than seventeen and a quarter.
The clearest evidence from the codebreakers came in decrypts of the messages from the Japanese diplomatic representatives in Berlin to their bosses in Tokyo which spoke of ‘the coming offensive’. But there was plenty more besides, said Bennett.
The evidence about what turned out to be the Battle of the Bulge began in September 1944 and went on until 16 December when the attack happened. If anybody had ever thought of putting all the bits of information together they would surely have come to the conclusion that there was going to be an attack.
We had continual signals recording that the rest of the
Panzer
divisions were moving across from the Rhineland into Belgium and no one was saying: ‘Why are they doing all this? That’s very funny: it happens to be just the area where Ike and Bradley have put our defences at their thinnest.’ Because the Ardennes is very difficult countryside, Bradley had weakened
that front, put the least trained divisions there because it was most unlikely they’d be involved in urgent operations. Damn it, Rommel and 7th
Panzer
Division had gone through there in 1940. Easily the most striking evidence was that the Germans had just brought in the ME262s, the first jet aircraft, and these ME262s, the latest, fastest kind of aircraft were making almost daily aerial reconnaissance of the same area, the area in front of the Ardennes, over and over again every day. No one seems to have thought: ‘This is rather a rum thing.’ So consequently we were deceived into thinking there was nothing going to happen, and when I say we, I don’t mean Hut 3, I mean the British. It never occurred to us to think that something might happen down there.