THE LAST GOOD WAR: A Novel (21 page)

“
Blinker
Hall?”

“Admiral Sir Reginald Hall, for the likes of us. 'Blinker' because he had a twitch that made one eye blink like a ship's signal lamp. His huge contributions in the First War are not well recognized. I only hope we can do as much this time.”

“I'm embarrassed. I don't know hardly anything about codebreaking during the First War.”

“It just got the Yanks in on our side, that's all.”

Yvonne wanted details.

“The Zimmerman telegram. In early 1917, Zimmerman—the German foreign minister—sent a telegram to his ambassador in Washington, Count von Bernstorff, asking that it be forwarded to the German ambassador in Mexico. Hall's group decoded it. It urged Mexico to enter the war on Germany's side. Mexico was offered a huge reward. They would get back their lost territories of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. Hall immediately recognized that he had a marvelous windfall—but one that would have to be handled with utmost care. The British couldn't let the secret out, that they had broken the German code. Also, they might have trouble convincing President Wilson it was genuine.”

“Of course.” Yvonne was encouraging Anna to continue.

“As luck would have it, Britain had an agent in the telegraph office in Mexico. He was able to get a copy of the incoming message from Bernstorff. Hall decided to use this one; it would look as if the message had fallen into American hands either in Washington or Mexico City.

“He thereupon sent one of his agents over to the American embassy with a copy of the telegram and a codebook, and decoded the message in front of the American Ambassador. Incidentally, that allowed Wilson to assure Congress that the message had been decoded on American soil—a more-or-less true statement, at least by wartime standards. Anyhow, Wilson was cautious at first, not wanting to be suckered by a fake. His administration leaked the telegram to the
New York Times
.

“But that, of course, was not the end of it. The German ambassador to Mexico flatly denied that he had received the message; so did the Mexican Government. Then came another enormous break. For reasons nobody will ever understand, Zimmerman admitted he had sent the telegram.

“The Americans, of course, were enraged. Together with unrestricted submarine warfare, that brought them into the war.”

“You're not making this up, are you?"

“Oh, no. Never,” replied Anna. “On my honor.”

S
everal weeks later, Yvonne's face was ashen white when they met for lunch. Her hand shook; she dropped her fork. “Not quite the cool Miss Snow,” thought Anna. Some minutes passed before Yvonne regained her composure enough to speak.

“Sorry. But I just got a ride back to BP with Dilly Knox.”

“And?”

“You haven't driven with him?... All I can say is,
don't
. When he gets to an intersection, he speeds up.”

“What?”

“He has this crazy idea, the faster he goes, the less chance someone will hit him from the side.”

“Sounds logical to me,” said Anna with a smirk.... “Provided he's more interested in his car than his life.”

“
My
life, you mean.”

Anna took the opening to mention something that had been bothering her.

"Talking of strange behavior, I didn't meet Alan Turing 'til last week.
Weird.
I spoke, but he wouldn't even look at me; he stared away and edged his way sideways down the hall. When I saw him on the lawn a few days later, he looked away toward the duck pond. Yesterday, I was going down the hall. He came around a corner. The moment he saw me, he abruptly turned and disappeared around the corner again. Guess I'm losing my touch with men."

"No need to be concerned.” Yvonne laughed. “They're looking for brilliant people around here, regardless of how odd.”

The two young women thereupon exchanged stories of the bizarre goings-on at Bletchley Park.

Somebody got the bright idea to set up a local unit of the Home Guard. The so-called parades were a joke—people shuffling around, not even walking in a straight line, much less keeping in step. They didn't understand the first rule of the military: always march smartly, acting as if you know exactly where you're going, even when you don't—
particularly
when you don't. Turing almost brought the farce to an abrupt end when he told the officer that, now he'd learned how to fire a rifle, he was quitting. Learning to shoot was the only reason he joined in the first place.

The officer naturally objected. Turing had signed up and was committed. “Oh, no I'm not,” replied Alan. “I made out the form, but if you check, you'll find I didn't sign it.” Thereupon, the officer put in for a transfer.

Turing also had bizarre, and famous, eccentricities. He kept his coffee mug chained to his radiator. He wore a gas mask when he bicycled to work. He wasn't afraid the Germans would use gas; he did it to filter out the pollen and prevent hay fever.

He also had the idea—perhaps not so strange—that the war would destroy the value of the pound. To protect himself, he buried bars of silver. He had elaborate, encoded instructions, how to find them after the war.

He had briefly been engaged. Then he had a dream. In it, he introduced his fiancée, Joan, to his mother. She didn't like Joan. End of engagement.

And Dilly Knox—reckless driving was not his only oddity. He was notoriously absent-minded; couldn't tell the two doors in his office apart. He often walked into the closet when he meant to enter the hall. Occasionally, he would become so preoccupied during lunch that he would tamp pieces of bread into his pipe.

Then there was the strange case of Alan Ross, taking his young son on the train. He was worried that the boy would cause trouble, so he gave him laudanum—a derivative of opium. When his son passed out, Ross casually stretched him out on the luggage rack.

But, in spite of the stiff competition, Anna and Yvonne agreed: the odd bawd prize went to Josh Cooper.

Cooper's most famous faux pas came when he participated in the interrogation of a captured German pilot. The pilot marched in smartly, clicked his heels, and snapped a sharp Nazi salute, shouting “Heil Hitler.” Apparently Josh had picked up the idea that when someone salutes you, you
must
return the salute. He jumped up as smartly as he could—which wasn't very smartly under the circumstances, as he kicked over his chair. He stuck out his hand in a Nazi salute, and loudly repeated “Heil Hitler.” Of course, he was immediately overcome with embarrassment and abruptly tried to sit down. But his chair wasn't there any more. He fell to the floor and disappeared under the table. The German looked down disdainfully, not even cracking a smile. Maybe he thought this was a normal event—what could be expected from the decadent Western democracies.

T
uring's new machine was a marvel. It not only led to the sporadic breaking of Dolphin, but also to continuous success in reading Luftwaffe traffic. In this, the codebreakers were much assisted by the sloppiness of Luftwaffe operators. Perhaps they were less well trained than their Army and Navy counterparts. Perhaps their minds were less focused. Their lives were not on the line; they were unlikely to find themselves in combat.

The Enigma decryptions were useful in the Battle of Britain, but perhaps less than expected. True, the Enigma did provide some hints regarding targets. But usually the targets were simply numbered, or referred to by code names. Korn, for example, stood for Coventry. But BP didn't figure that out until after that city suffered a devastating bombing.

Rather, it was in the naval war that Enigma decrypts made their most important early contributions.

Anna felt as though she had a ringside seat on the struggle. As a worker in Hut 6, she had practically unlimited access to decryptions. Security had been persuaded to acquiesce. It was good for morale for people to be able to read the decoded messages, and, if any of the senior people at Bletchley Park decided to tip the Germans off, the game was over, anyhow.

Anna had made a standing request for decrypts regarding Poland, but she could scarcely resist the deadly drama unfolding on the high seas.

The opening act came when the new German battleship
Bismarck,
accompanied by the heavy cruiser
Prinz Eugen,
broke through the Iceland Strait into the Atlantic, sinking the showpiece and pride of the British navy,
HMS Hood
. The thought of the two formidable German warships in the midst of a convoy was too terrible to contemplate. The order came directly from the Prime Minister:
Sink the
Bismarck!

The trouble was, just where was
Bismarck?
Harry Hinsley was monitoring German Naval traffic at Bletchley Park. He became convinced that the battleship was heading for the safety of a French port, even though there were no naval decryptions to back him up. His reasoning was straightforward: radio control of the
Bismarck
had been switched from Germany to Paris. He telephoned the Admiralty's Operational Intelligence Centre. OIC was skeptical; they hadn't figured this out on their own and therefore dismissed it—the “not invented here” syndrome.

Hinsley was furious. It was not the first time that OIC had spurned his ideas, including his conclusion, prior to the attack on Norway, that the unusual buildup of undeciphered naval messages foreshadowed German action. His advice ignored, Hinsley visited the Admiralty and the Home Fleet at Scapa Flow—in the Orkney Islands, all the way up at the Northern tip of Scotland—in an effort to mend fences, even acquiring something more presentable than his worn corduroys for the occasion. But his efforts apparently had gone for naught.

“The pigheadedness of OIC,” he fumed. Anna wasn't so sure. The transfer of radio control to Paris didn't necessarily mean the
Bismarck
was headed for France; it might simply be a way of moving communications closer to the ship. And OIC had a great big ocean to worry about.
Bismarck
might materialize out of any fog bank to wreak havoc in shipping channels. But Anna kept her mouth shut. It really was none of her business, and Hinsley was in such a foul mood that she didn't want to raise any questions.

Then, the vulnerability of the Luftwaffe's Enigma saved the day. Two decoded messages came into Hut 6, and Anna huddled around a table with the others to read them. The first was from Luftwaffe Chief of Staff, Jeschonnek, who was worried about a relative serving on the
Bismarck.
The response was reassuring: the battleship was steaming toward the safety of the French port, Brest. It needed refueling. In the rush to leave its Norwegian fjord, it had not taken time to top off its tanks. And, since the encounter with the
Hood
and
Prince of Wales,
it was trailing oil; one of its tanks had been ruptured by an incoming shell.

The word “Brest” was all the Royal Navy needed. A Coastal Command Catalina flying boat—provided by the United States and piloted by an American officer “on loan” to the British—soon located the German battleship. Ancient Swordfish biplanes took off from the
Ark Royal,
their fabric wings fluttering in the breeze and their baling-wire struts straining under the load of single torpedoes. Although obsolete, they had an unforeseen advantage: they flew too slowly for the
Bismarck's
modern, automated fire control system to lock on. One scored a lucky hit, clipping the very end of
Bismarck
, jamming its rudder and sending it in circles. The crew struggled to control the ship, using only one propeller in an attempt to straighten its path. But to no avail. Then night fell—sleepless hours of hopeless terror. Quietly, in small groups, men talked, passing pictures of their families and reminiscing of their time as school boys, then lapsing into pensive silence. Too soon the dawn, and the nervous scanning of the horizon for British battleships.

Anna and Yvonne were off in a corner of the dining room having lunch when a Navy Commander clinked his glass and called for quiet: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I have an announcement. Shortly after daybreak this morning, the Royal Navy engaged the
Bismarck
. As a result of heavy fire from
HMS Rodney
and
King George V
, plus torpedoes from the
Dorsetshire
”... he paused for effect...
“the Bismarck
has been
SUNK!”
A cheer went up.

"I only hope," murmured Anna, "that Jeschonnek never finds out."

14
Fire in the Sky

You might think that it would take a lot of courage to jump out of an airplane with only a parachute.
Actually, if the plane is on fire, it doesn't take any guts at all.

A veteran of the Battle of Britain

F
or Ryk, it was no easy matter to get out of Sweden. Unlike Anna, he didn't have the remotest claim to British citizenship. The Swedish authorities met his story—that he was a simple Polish businessman—with amused and well-justified skepticism, particularly when he was unable to provide the name of even one of his Swedish clients. Somehow, they suspected that he might be a member of the Polish armed forces! As neutrals, they would have an obligation to prevent him from passing through Sweden to a belligerent country. He finally solved the impasse by making the rounds of the waterfront bars in Stockholm, where he arranged passage on a tramp steamer to Ireland. Thence, it was on to England.

As a result of the delays, he didn't arrive in England until June of 1940. But, all in all, his timing could have been worse. France had just fallen, and the British in their lonely solitude now faced the full force of the Nazi war machine. Ryk was accepted with enthusiasm into the Royal Air Force—with qualified enthusiasm, to be sure. He was assigned the rank of sergeant. Naturally, he was disappointed. In the Polish Air Force, he had been the equivalent of a Flying Officer.