Churchill's Wizards (27 page)

In his BBC broadcast on 3 September, Neville Chamberlain admitted that the failure of his long struggle to bring peace was ‘a bitter blow'. He concluded:

God Save the King
was played, and all around the country many people stood up. Some of them were crying. Others sat in a doggedly British mood of grim apathy. This looked like the Kaiser's War all over again, though it was Poland that had been invaded this time, rather than Belgium. But how much worse would warfare be this time, after twenty-five years of scientific progress?

At that moment the air-raid sirens began their banshee wailing across southern England. Winston and Clementine Churchill watched the balloons go up: dozens of cylindrical barrage balloons or ‘blimps' slowly rising to be tethered above the city skyline like fat silvery fish.

Police constables appeared on bicycles, blowing their whistles and sporting sandwich boards that read ‘Take cover'.

Inside the War Office, overlooking Horse Guards' Arch, Dudley Clarke followed the procedure on his clipboard, storing papers, opening windows, gathering steel helmet, ‘respirator, anti-gas' and emergency rations before descending to join the brass-hats in the newly strengthened basement. The Churchills too (accompanied by Inspector Walter Thompson, recently returned as personal armed bodyguard) made their way to the public shelter just down the street, with refreshments of brandy. ‘Everyone was cheerful and jocular, as is the English manner when about to encounter the unknown,' Churchill wrote in
The Gathering Storm
, the first volume of his history of the WW2. But as he stood in that London street on a bright September morning, Churchill's imagination

Bombing haunted the 1930s. ‘The bomber will always get through,' said Stanley Baldwin gloomily in 1932, and British planning for air-raids included mass evacuation by train, public and private shelter-building, as well as the manufacture of millions of gas masks and sand bags. HMSO published
Air Raid Precautions for Animals
, price 3d; art treasures were quietly removed from London or stored deep underground.

Dudley Clarke's memoir of the first year of the war,
Seven Assignments
, opens like a John Buchan adventure novel. It tells how Clarke, a 40-year-old soldier with a touch of Buchan's hero Richard Hannay, had been working late at the War Office on 31 August 1939 and came home after midnight to his cream and green bachelor flat. There he found, lying on the doormat, the visiting card of an aristocratic German staff officer, Lieutenant Colonel Gerhardt Count von Schwerin.

Clarke had first met von Schwerin at Easter 1939, when staying with his friend Major Kenneth Strong, the assistant military attaché at Berlin, and later that year in England, in July, when von Schwerin had been sent openly by the German General Staff to find out whether
Britain would really honour its obligations to Poland if the country were attacked. Clarke and von Schwerin were not exactly friends but they were of the same age and when they met in London they broached the subject of imminent war between their two countries. ‘Send me a word of warning first,' Dudley had said, jocularly, in a taxi. Now, in a moment of pure Buchan, he found an embossed card, with
Auf wiedersehen
written on the back:

Starting on Friday, 1 September 1939, three million reluctant and name-tagged people, including the very young, the pregnant, the disabled and the blind, were evacuated from cities like London and Glasgow, Birmingham and Liverpool to ‘Safety Zone' towns and villages that did not really want them. The private British railways were placed under state control. Identity cards, based on the census register, were issued. The BBC's nascent television service to 25,000 viewers was cut off. All ham radio transmitting equipment was confiscated. Cinemas, dance halls and theatres were closed. All ARP wardens were mobilised, along with the Army, Navy and Air Force, and the first ‘blackout' was instituted at sunset, 7.47 p.m. This meant that no street lighting was switched on and all householders were forbidden to let a single chink of light escape from their doors or windows. Drivers of motor vehicles could not use their headlights, lest bombers above should spot them. Even electric torches were to be smothered with crepe paper and always held downwards. From ‘Black Friday' onwards, thousands of people would injure themselves stumbling about in dim homes and on dark wintry streets, and there were many more night-time car crashes and road deaths. But the thousands of hospital beds which had been cleared were not waiting for accidents like these, but for casualties imminently expected from enemy aerial bombing. Corporation swimming-baths had been drained and cardboard coffins stacked to await a multitude of corpses.

However, after half an hour of dread on the morning of Sunday the 3rd, with everyone braced for the Nazi bombers' ‘knock-out blow', the sirens sounded the ‘All Clear' and everyone left their air-raid
shelters to find the sunny sandbagged streets as tranquil and undisturbed as before. The false alarm from the Thames estuary, instead of the ruthless thunder and lightning attack that everyone feared the Germans would deliver on the first day, was a fitting opening to that queer period of fighting and not fighting that Churchill called ‘the pretended war' and then ‘the Twilight War', but which impatient American journalists finally dubbed ‘the Phoney War'. This lasted eight months, although the food rationing that was introduced then endured in some form for fourteen years. Evelyn Waugh's
Put
Out More Flags
is the most acute satire on ‘that odd, dead period before the Churchillian renaissance which people called at the time the Great Bore War'.

That same Sunday, Churchill made his way to the House of Commons where, after the debate, Neville Chamberlain offered him a place in the War Cabinet, with the post of First Lord of the Admiralty. (The Board signalled to all Royal Navy ships ‘Winston is back'.) That evening, on the wall behind his familiar old chair in the First Lord's office, Churchill found the wooden mapcase he had had fixed in the panelling twenty-eight years before. When he flung open the door, he saw the chart still marked with the disposition of the German Fleet on 23 May 1915, the day he had left.

Churchill came back to naval problems familiar from 1914–18. On the first day of war, as in WW1, the order was given to sever the two German undersea communication lifelines that connected Emden in Germany on the one hand with the Azores and the Americas, and on the other with Lisbon and Africa. This chopping of the telegraph and telephone cables left Nazi Germany relying on wireless systems or radiotelephony, whose codes and ciphers could be intercepted by the British ‘Y' or listening service, and passed on to the codebreakers at Bletchley Park.

The old enemy was using new mines and better submarines to try and choke off the British Isles. Once again, U-boats were a headache and shipping became a prime German target. In WW1, Britain had lost half its merchant fleet, but in WW2, the Axis would sink 60 per cent or 11.3 million tons of British shipping, and kill over 50,000 British Empire merchant seamen, making theirs a more dangerous occupation than any of the armed forces. German Naval Intelligence cryptanalysts in B Dienst had been breaking British ciphers since the Abyssinian crisis of 1935 and thus knew exactly where many Royal Navy and Merchant Service ships were. War at sea was far from phoney.

In a reminder of Churchill's great fear of a quarter of a century before, on 14 October the German
U-47
crept past nets, booms, blockships, lookouts and patrols right into Scapa Flow, the Orkney-enclosed anchorage of the Royal Navy's Home Fleet. The U-boat torpedoed the huge 1914 battleship HMS
Royal Oak
, which sank in thirteen minutes with the loss of 810 officers and men. While struggling survivors in the water sang
Roll Out the Barrel
to keep their spirits up, the U-boat escaped. Four days later, Kapitänleutnant Günther Prien and his submarine crew surfaced, grinning, at a Nazi press conference, before being paraded through cheering crowds in Berlin. Churchill told the House of Commons that the Royal Navy had sunk 13 German U-boats and damaged some others, which was a better strike rate than in WW1. This was stretching the truth considerably, but Churchill felt he had to cheer the public up.

Prien had visited Scapa Flow before the war, posing as a tourist, and had also used aerial reconnaissance
Aufklärung
photos taken from directly above to find a narrow way in for his boat to sink the
Royal
Oak
. Both high-flying Abwehr aircraft and some Lufthansa civilian flights had been secretly photographing tracts of Britain long before war broke out, and now Hermann Göring's Luftwaffe was filling in the gaps.

As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill went up to Scapa Flow, wept over the wreckage of the
Royal Oak
, and ordered more submarine defences. The death of one of his Dreadnoughts was a blow, making the nation seem vulnerable. Once again, when force had failed, he turned to fraud for protection. Churchill ordered the construction of dummy ships whose camouflage was good enough to deceive spotters in aeroplanes. He came back later to inspect the results. Mock-up warships were dotted about the huge Orkney anchorage. When Churchill pointed to one and said the Germans would never drop a bomb on it, he was told that it had convinced our own aerial reconnaissance. ‘Then they need spectacles,' snapped the First Lord,

The British did manage to trick the German navy during the Battle of the River Plate in Montevideo, Uruguay. The German pocket-battleship
Admiral Graf Spee
was a fast armoured cruiser that could make twenty-six knots and carried six 11-inch guns with a range of seventeen miles. Accompanied by the auxiliary and prison ship
Altmark
, the
Graf Spee
continued the raiding practice of WW1, camouflaging herself as an Allied ship and sending false radio messages while sinking merchantmen in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean. On 13 December 1939, lightly damaged after an engagement with the British cruisers
Exeter, Ajax
and
Achilles
, the marauder made for neutral Montevideo for repairs. British diplomats, naval attachés and secret agents worked together to delay the process; meanwhile they used the BBC news, diplomatic and dockside gossip and talk on telephone lines they knew were tapped to suggest that a large British fleet, including the aircraft carrier
Ark Royal
, was just over the horizon, when in fact it was five days away. The
Graf Spee'
s skipper, Captain Langsdorf, a decent man, was deceived into thinking he had no chance of escaping to the high seas. He released his crew, scuttled the
Graf Spee
, went ashore at Buenos Aires and, wrapped in his navy's ensign, shot himself.

‘It's necessary to understand what real intelligence work is,' John le Carré once told George Plimpton in the
Paris Review
. ‘At its best, it is simply the left arm of healthy government curiosity … It's the collection of information, a journalistic job, if you will, but done in secret.' The Naval Intelligence Division (NID) was not a secret service: it had no agents who did covert espionage. Though secrecy was its character, it was not its essence, for the organisation dealt in legitimate information from many sources. British Naval Intelligence started getting its act together again during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9, when the German and Italian navies were actively assisting General Franco's rebellion against the Spanish Republic, and they had to be watched in the interests of the Royal Navy's blockade and rescue missions. Lessons had been learned from WW1: what was needed was an active, well-wired brain in an acute nervous system. The Admiralty was unlike the War Office or the Air Ministry in that its primary function was not administrative but operational: the Royal Navy's traditions were action and attack. What had gone wrong with the
Admiralty's cryptographic centre, Room 40, in WW1 was that its operational effectiveness was crippled by secrecy. Rigid compartments meant the brain's synapses did not always fire efficiently. Then, when cryptanalysts had information about the German fleet, there was no system to communicate that data swiftly to the British fleet. The brain could not connect with the hand. Hence the failure at the Battle of Jutland, when poor communication of knowledge meant the two fleets effectively missed each other.

When Rear Admiral John Godfrey became director of Naval Intelligence on 3 February 1939, he inherited the basis of an Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC) and was able to consult the most celebrated of his predecessors, Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, and to follow his advice in setting up systems to feed that centre.
Everything
was of potential interest to the director of Naval Intelligence. The net had to be spread wider than the technical world of signals and direction-finding, and the right staff found to process lots of information. Effective intelligence-gathering required curious, sceptical, energetic people. Accordingly, the NID (which expanded in WW2 from employing dozens to thousands) was leavened with civilian scholars, barristers, solicitors, writers and journalists, including the novelists Charles Morgan and William Plomer, Simon Nowell-Smith of the
Times Literary Supplement
and Hilary St George Saunders, the House of Commons librarian. Admiral Godfrey instituted a vitally important grading system for intelligence: the letter stood for the source, the number for the information, so A1 was first rate and D5 most dubious.

Admiral Godfrey made strong links with government, allied diplomats, the armed services and the secret ones, MI6, MI5 and Special Branch. He met Sir Roderick Jones of Reuters, the great press barons and their newspaper editors. Admiral Hall said the director of Naval Intelligence was entitled to enlist the help of anyone in the country from the Archbishop of Canterbury down, and he introduced Godfrey to Sir Montague Norman, governor of the Bank of England, and to various other powerful figures in the City of London. Hall himself had employed a stockbroker called Claude Serocold as his personal assistant in WW1 and advised Godfrey to do the same. The governor of the Bank of England and the chairman of Barings, Sir Edward Peacock, found Godfrey his right-hand man in May 1939. It was the suave chap who had drunk vodka with Sefton Delmer in the
hotel opposite the Kremlin, the stockbroker Ian Lancaster Fleming.

Ian Fleming was an inspired choice to lead the coordinating section of Naval Intelligence, NID 17, where he had to supply ingenious ideas, create structural order, and liaise externally with the wider world. After Eton and Sandhurst, Ian Fleming had learned German and French, and worked for Reuters as a reporter before he became a stockbroker in the City. In Moscow in March 1939 he had told Delmer he was there as a favour to the editor of
The Times
. Years later, with the benefit of hindsight, Delmer claimed that

On the train back to Warsaw, heading for the border of Stalinist Russia, Delmer had memorised his notes, torn them up and thrown them away. ‘Why don't you swallow them?' mocked Ian Fleming, ‘That's what all the best spies do.' But at Negeloroje, the customs officials went through Fleming's luggage with a toothcomb, stripped him and searched him. A carton of Russian contraceptives made of artificial latex which he was taking back to London to have the formula analysed was opened and each condom held up to the light. Fleming was already blushing scarlet when Delmer whispered, ‘You should have swallowed them.'

Five months after this train journey, in the autumn of 1939, Delmer invited Fleming to lunch at his flat in Lincoln's Inn. Fleming turned up looking elegant in the dark blue uniform of the Royal Navy with the waved stripe-and-curl insignia of a lieutenant in the Volunteer Reserve.

‘I thought you'd been to Sandhurst. What are you doing in the navy?'

‘Oh, I've been given a special desk job at the Admiralty.'

Over coffee and brandy, Fleming announced that his boss would like to hear what Delmer had observed of the war in Poland. The reporter said he had seen no ships, only some bombing and air fighting, a lot of retreating and some excited people shooting fifth columnists. Nothing to interest the navy.

‘Never you worry your head about that. Just do as I tell you.'

The next day, Delmer turned up at a door in the Mall behind the
statue of Captain Cook and was escorted along sixty yards of bleak corridor to a transept in front of room 39. When the door opened he saw a crowded office with three tall windows looking out across the parade ground used for Trooping the Colour. A dozen men were working at desks and talking on the telephone, reminding Delmer of the back room of a Beirut bank, except the men were not clerks but section chiefs of British Naval Intelligence. Ian Fleming opened the door to room 38 and ushered Delmer in to meet Admiral Godfrey. There were other naval captains and commanders in the room as well as army and air force officers. They asked him a lot of questions and he told them, as he thought, ‘little of interest'. But to the
Express
man the meeting was supremely interesting. He had discovered how important his friend Ian Fleming had become, ‘nothing less than “17F”, the personal assistant to the intelligence chief of the Senior Service.' Delmer also found himself curiously at home in a place where he would later do some of his greatest work.

Ian Fleming had the social confidence and forcefulness of character required to be an effective factotum to his energetic and horribly hard-driving boss. Fleming was not the wisest, but certainly the most vivid personality in NID 17: ‘a skilled fixer and a vigorous showman', said Donald McLachlan, the historian of room 39. Fleming's Reuters training in good clear English made him first choice to draft his boss's replies to Churchill's imperious requests. Winston was back, and as demanding as ever.

The outbreak of war brought a frenzy of reorganising. The Ministry of Information (MoI) was one of two new British ministries that came into being. The other was the Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW), tasked with disorganising the enemy's economic life so that Germany could not fight. Some thought the Ministry of Information was doing the same job on the communications of the Home Front. The Senate House of London University was taken over by 999 civil servants and new appointees. An officious law lord, Baron Macmillan, now had a brief spell as the first Minister of Information. As Hugh Macmillan, he had been John Buchan's assistant director of Intelligence in the old WW1 Ministry of Information.

Sixty-four-year-old Buchan now bore the title Lord Tweedsmuir and was living in Ottawa. In his role as governor general, it had been his
melancholy duty to sign Canada's declaration of war against Germany. ‘This is the third war I have been in,' he wrote to an old friend, ‘and no-one could hate the horrible thing more than I do.' He gave Macmillan advice from far away: no direct propaganda to America, no jibes at isolationism, ‘no attempt to varnish', ‘never deny a disaster'. He also suggested, ‘Our news should follow the Reuter plan and be as objective as possible,' although this would mean battling the War Office and the Admiralty's ‘passion for babyish secrecy'.