The Secrets of Station X (33 page)
Read The Secrets of Station X Online
Authors: Michael Smith
Hitler intended a massive armoured attack to rip through the Allied forces, splitting them in two before recapturing Antwerp and cutting off their lines of supply. It was a massive gamble. Hitler’s attempted reprise of his earlier
Blitzkrieg
assault was checked by the Americans, first at St Vith, and then, fatally for the Germans, by the US 101st Airborne Division at the Battle of Bastogne. His refusal to shift the weight of the attack to that part of ‘the Bulge’ in the German lines that was making most forward progress prevented his tanks from overrunning the Allied fuel depots to replenish their supplies and within four weeks the counter-attack had run out of steam.
The Battle of the Bulge was a massive defeat for the Germans, who lost 120,000 men, killed, wounded or captured, compared to a little over half that figure for the Americans. But it had held up the Allied advance by around six weeks. ‘Hut 3 was asked to do a post-mortem,’ said Jim Rose. ‘It was done by Peter Calvocoressi and F. L. Lucas. It was an extremely good report and showed the failure of intelligence at SHAEF and at the Air Ministry.’
The Germans had dropped the complications to the Lorenz machine by October 1944, easing the problems faced in the
Newmanry and Testery, and in January 1945, as the Allies advanced towards the Rhine, a new intercept station for
Fish
was set up at Genval, near Brussels. Kenworthy recalled:
This was the only station connected with Knockholt which received any damage from enemy action. A V1 dropped very close to the building rendering it unserviceable. Very little damage was done to the gear and it was then installed in the wireless transmitter vans. The Brussels station moved up later in the year with the 21st Army Group advance.
Colossus
was constantly updated as new variants were
introduced
and by the end of the war, there were around ten
Colossi
actually operational, said Donald Michie, another member of the Newmanry.
Each one was like a very big wardrobe in size and the place looked almost like an aircraft hangar. At the end, it was
looking
like a scene that you didn’t see again until about 1960 with huge main-frames all over the place, the whole thing going flat out around the clock, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days round the year, a total staff of 300 Wrens, maybe fifty on duty on any particular shift, and a duty officer taking decisions. Very often when things got really hot, in the sense of being on to something which had been resisting, you would work on. So that there would be people who were officially on shift and people who weren’t but just couldn’t tear themselves away and would catch another transport out of the place and flop in their digs for a few hours and then come back again. They were very exciting times.
By now Bletchley Park had little effect on the Allied advance across Germany although its intelligence on the V-weapon launch sites at Peenemünde and the ISOS traffic carrying the reports of the Double Cross agents was invaluable in
Operation
Crossbow
, the effort to counter the last-ditch German
bombardment
of London.
The double agents were repeatedly being asked for
information
on where the missiles were falling. The mean point of impact of the V-weapons was in south-east London, four miles short of their target. But by carefully manipulating the times and locations of the blasts reported back by the double agents in conjunction with the times of the launches reported by an RAF Y station sent to the continent to monitor them, the Double Cross Committee persuaded the Germans that they were overshooting and the range of the V-weapons was shortened, moving the danger still further out of London.
As the threat from the Germans receded, increasing numbers of people were moved on to Japanese codes and cyphers and new recruits arrived, many of them Wrens like Rosemary Calder, who was put to work in the Japanese Navy traffic analysis section which was run by the Cambridge historian Sir John Plumb.
‘I was interviewed by Jack Plumb who told me, “We analyse traffic”,’ said Calder.
I had no idea what this meant. I had this picture in my mind of people sat on camp stools by the side of the road
counting
lorries and gun carriages. I spent most of my time at BP, attached to the room of which Angus Wilson the famous
novelist
was head. We considered ourselves to be a small exclusive group who were all given scope for initiative and intelligence despite the bulk of the work (as I recall) being of a repetitive clerical nature. Any of us could do any of the jobs in the office. It was a very democratic place. Wrens mixed up with civilians. We might as well as not been in uniform. We were having a marvellous time. It was like being back at college. Angus was a great darling who spoilt us all and we spoilt him in return. He called us all Ducky and he had this special friend called Bentley Bridgewater who took over the traffic analysis section
from Jack Plumb and later went on to become Secretary of the British Museum. Angus was known to be very brilliant but crazy. He had at least one nervous breakdown before I got there and was still going to Oxford to see a psychiatrist, writing all his dreams down. But he was very good-natured most of the time and if he started getting agitated, we would just give him a copy of
Vogue
or
Tatler
and he could go off and sit down by the lake flicking through it and come back as happy as a sandboy.
Anne Petrides, another of the young Wrens in Hut 7, worked on an index of merchant shipping movements.
I joined Naval Section at BP the day after my eighteenth
birthday
‘celebrated’ at the WRNS training centre at Mill Hill on 31 May 1944 and was flung into the work of cataloguing ships, entering brief notes on their cards about the decoded signals as they came to us from the translations. Most of their warships had been sunk by then and we were dealing with
Maru
– merchant ships. The naval officers in my office included Gorley Putt and ‘Shrimp’ Hordern, brother of Michael Hordern, the actor. As a very young girl, I was petrified to be left all alone at lunchtime, in four interconnecting rooms – and in fact justifiably so, as a senior officer from the Admiralty phoned and said ‘Can we go over…’ followed by a burble of words. He came back in clear language and was outraged to find that not only had no one seen fit to tell me which button to press for the scrambler but that no ‘duty officer’ was present. A regular visitor from ‘down the passage’, usually on quieter night watches was Angus Wilson, the novelist. His first book of stories was said to have originated in a series of sessions he had with a psychiatrist. I believe the men cracked more easily under the strain whereas girls found it easier to have a crying breakdown. We Wrens were extremely spoilt in our accommodation, nothing but the best country houses in the area, including Woburn Abbey, while the
ATS lived in barracks at the back of the Park. I started out at Wavendon House. Then I lived at Stockgrove Park. It had been rather knocked about by the 51st Highland Division which had been there before us. I remember dances attended by locally billeted GIs and drinking draught cider, very heady.
Olive Humble, one of the Temporary Women Assistants drafted in to work on Japanese cyphers, was put into another sub-section of Hut 7. She had been called up in early 1943 for the WRNS but there were no places and she found herself sent off instead to the Foreign Office as a civil servant.
So in February 1943 I arrived at BP and was escorted to the Billeting Office by an armed soldier, to my great consternation. I had never left home before, having worked in an insurance office in the City when I left school. I was suitably impressed with my new surroundings, until I saw the Mansion, which no one can say is beautiful to the eye. I was parcelled off to a Commander Thatcher, a fierce naval man who put the fear of God into me. He informed me that I was in the Japanese Naval Section, which confused me even further, that from then on I would not be allowed to leave the Park other than through death or disablement, that if I said one word of what I or anyone else was doing, even to my nearest and dearest, I would get thirty years without the option. He stood over me while I digested the Official Secrets Act, and dutifully signed it.
My billet was in Bedford – the lady of the house was not a willing billetor, and for the few months I was there she made my life miserable, I was turned out in the evenings as I was in the way, and so roamed round Bedford which was manned by the American Army Air Force. I was petrified. Later I made a friend in another part of my Section and we joined forces and went to another billet again in Bedford, to a Mr & Mrs Buick, who had two children. They were completely and absolutely magnificent, never probed, always there for us.
Olive was put to work on the JN40 Merchant Shipping Code which had been broken by British codebreakers working at Kilindini in Kenya.
One half was manned by a host of civilian women, who seemed to be dealing with coloured flimsy sheets of paper. I never did know what they did. The other half of the room was manned by the Navy, and there we went. I was put on to three shifts immediately, the civvies were always on days, and I found myself sitting at a table with six to eight Wrens. In the centre of the room was the boss Major W. E. Martin, he was older than us of course, and looked after his youngsters like a benevolent father. At the other end were three or four Navy boys. All were young and bright, and I was quite happy, as I had really wanted to join the Wrens. We put the
five-figure
blocks, typed on flimsy paper, into clear English letters from pads, and constructed clear messages, such as: ‘Otaru Maru leaving Manila at 0200 hrs for Singapore arrives such and such.’ These messages were then passed to Major Martin, who I suppose with hindsight passed them on. We didn’t know what was happening in any other part of the section, the need to know syndrome was very much to the fore.
The social life at BP was for me rather mixed, as being on shift work did curtail it to a certain extent. When I did get enough time off, in between shifts, I would remain in Bedford, sometimes with a Wren, whose name I have forgotten but who introduced me to Mozart. She would drag me into her
favourite
music shop, and we would land in the booths and listen to records, my recollection of hearing
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
for the first time is still very vivid. I met some odd characters there. One was a very brainy lad, who could only work well while under the influence of whisky, so the caring FO provided him with a bottle a day or equivalent, until he broke and was taken away. I remember passing him in the corridors, always dressed in a pin-stripe suit, papers under his arm, muttering
to himself, and a strong smell of malt wafting by with him. Another bright specimen divested himself of all his clothing and galloped round the lake with the Army in hot pursuit, cheered on by we spectators on the banks, and the Wrens rowing lustily on the lake.
A
s the Allies advanced across western Europe towards Berlin, and German commanders and radio operators came under increasing pressure, the Army Enigma keys finally began to be broken on a more regular basis and, by March 1945, Hut 6 was breaking more Army Enigma than
Luftwaffe
Enigma for the first time in the war. The effect of the battle on Army units forced them to use communications to a far greater extent and limited the number of Enigma keys they could use, leading to productive breaks into
Bantam
, the key used by the German Commander-in-Chief in the West;
Duck
, the German 7th Army’s key; and
Puffin
, the main key in use between Berlin and German forces in Italy, which also produced important
intelligence
on German intentions on the western front. Inevitably, as units came under pressure in battle there were a lot more plain language communications that helped to provide cribs.
Despite new German security measures, improved
Colossus
computers ensured continued coverage of the
Jellyfish
encyphered
teleprinter link between the western front and Berlin and the
Bream
link between Italy and Berlin, which was also producing high-grade intelligence on German intentions in the West. Although individual U-Boats began using unique keys, Hut 8 continued to break the main
Shark
and
Dolphin
keys and as a result increasing numbers of U-Boats were sunk, leading to their withdrawal from the English Channel. Increased captures of cypher material and the sheer pressure of battle ensured that the improved German security measures failed to prevent Bletchley from producing vital intelligence to the very last.
‘The new German security measures of all kinds might, properly handled, have virtually stopped the flow of operational intelligence from Hut 6 to Hut 3,’ said J. M. ‘Max’ Aitken, the official historian of Hut 6.
Very largely through German mistakes, this result was never achieved. This is not to say that our success was unaffected but on the whole the luck of Hut 6 held good and to the end we decoded currently most of the vital operational traffic. On the Army side, in particular, 1944 witnessed an immense advance. Though we should not forget the valuable
intelligence
provided by the African Army keys in 1942–43, still Hut 3 had never previously seen Army traffic of such high quality as on the best keys of 1944 – the
Bantams, Ducks
and
Puffins
. The importance of Army keys relative to Air constantly increased and towards the end when the Air difficulties were most acute the Army decodes sometimes surpassed the Air in number as well as quality. This was of course a reversal of the situation that prevailed for most of the war, but the Army experts who had in general the hardest cryptographic tasks cannot be grudged this final hour of triumph. In 1944–45, first Italy, then the West, finally even the East was held in fee and, on the Army as on the Air, the cryptographic encirclement of Germany was complete.
Asa Briggs, later the distinguished official historian of the BBC but then just another of the students pulled in from Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, to work in Hut 6, was on duty in the early hours of 7 May 1944, his twenty-fourth birthday, when one of the most important messages of the war was received. There was no need to decypher it, it was in plain text.
I was working in the Watch on Monday 7 May, my birthday, when I received and passed on to Hut 3 a message in clear from Grand Admiral Dönitz, Commander-in-Chief of the German
Navy and Hitler’s successor, saying that Germany had
surrendered
unconditionally. This was one of many messages in clear received in Hut Six during the last days of the war. I felt that I was participating in history as I received it and passed it on with a mingled sense of excitement and relief.
Stuart Milner-Barry, the head of Hut 6, recalled that the content of the message
was known all over the Hut on the night shift. It is worth recording, I think, that my appeal to all rooms that it should not be passed on to the day shift was honoured in full, and that the first news they had was in the public announcement, after lunch, on the German wireless. That seems to me of its kind to be one of the most remarkable episodes in our history.
The need for utter secrecy had not disappeared with the fall of Germany. With the war against Japan still continuing and a new Cold War with Russia already anticipated, Travis hammered that message home in a ‘special order’ to the staff congratulating them on their work against Germany.
On this historic occasion I want to express my personal thanks to all of you for your loyal cooperation in our common effort to defeat the enemy. The general standards of keenness, discipline, personal behaviour and security have been
admirable
and have combined to produce a direct and substantial contribution towards winning the war. But our work is by no means ended yet. Three main problems face us now: to finish off the Japanese war; to ease the transition from war to peace conditions as much as possible for everyone; to ensure that nothing we do now shall hinder the efforts of our successors. I cannot stress too strongly the necessity for the maintenance of security. While we were fighting Germany it was vital that the enemy should never know of our activities here. We and
our American allies are still at war with Japan, and we are faced with great responsibilities arising out of the preliminaries to peace in Europe. At some future time, we may be called upon again to use the same methods. It is therefore as vital as ever not to relax from the high standard of security that we have hitherto maintained. The temptation now to ‘own up’ to our friends and families as to what our work has been is a very real and natural one. It must be resisted absolutely.
Seven weeks later, on 28 June, the head of the armed forces Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke visited Bletchley Park to thank the codebreakers for their work. He was accompanied by the First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Cunningham, the victor at Matapan. Malcolm Kennedy recorded the event in his diary.
A great day at Bletchley Park, the Combined Chiefs of Staff paying a visit to express their thanks and appreciation of our work. [Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur] Tedder, unfortunately, was prevented at the last moment from coming, but Sir Alan Brooke and Admiral Cunningham both came, and Brooke made a speech on behalf of all three. It is pleasant to have one’s work recognised in this way by the powers-that-be; and some of the examples he quoted to show how valuable our work had been were of great historical interest although, unfortunately, they are not of a kind that can ever be made public.
The war against Japan continued with Japanese codes and cyphers broken by British codebreakers at Bletchley, in Delhi and in Colombo, until the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Even before the news that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima was officially announced, the Japanese messages arriving in Hut 7 at Bletchley Park provided a frightening vision of what had
happened. ‘I was on a day watch by myself and all this stuff came in and it was total gibberish,’ said Rosemary Calder. ‘I didn’t know the bomb had been dropped but you could tell from the disruption of all the messages that something terrible had happened. You could just feel the people standing there screaming their heads off.’
Later messages were more specific. An Army-Air message sent to the chief of staff of the General Army Air Command in Tokyo and decyphered at Bletchley Park gave one of the first descriptions of the now familiar mushroom cloud associated with the atomic bomb. ‘There was a blinding flash and a violent blast – over the city centre, the flash and burst were almost simultaneous but in the vicinity of the airfield the blast came two or three seconds later – and a mass of white smoke
billowing
up into the air.’
Messages decyphered previously by British and US
codebreakers
had shown that the Japanese would have surrendered before the bombs were dropped if the Allies had been prepared to assure them that the Emperor could remain on the throne. Given that they received this assurance in the subsequent peace deal, it is impossible to comprehend why the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were inflicted on the Japanese.
Churchill called the codebreakers ‘the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled’ and it was not until the mid-1970s that the lifetime ban on them disclosing that they worked there was lifted. Olive Humble was on leave from the Hut 7 Naval Section when Japan surrendered in August 1945.
I came back to Bletchley Park two days later to find all the
civilians
had shipped out. I was sent to the fearsome Commander Thatcher, who lectured me again about keeping my mouth shut for all time, had to re-sign the Official Secrets Act, and
was threatened with the thirty years and or firing squad if I went off the straight and narrow.
But like many of the people who worked at Bletchley Park, Humble had spent the war in what was seen as a ‘cushy billet’ unable to tell even her parents what she was doing.
One thing I regret deeply. I was an only child, on my first day home my father at dinner said: ‘What do you do at the Foreign Office?’ I replied: ‘I cannot tell you sorry, please don’t ask me again’ – and he didn’t, nor did my mother at any time. She died in the early 1960s and he in 1976, before I realised the silence had been lifted.
The contribution made by the codebreakers to the allied victory is truly incalculable. Bletchley Park did not win the war. No single organisation could make that claim. Certainly not of a war that was fought all too often by soldiers killing and dying by the bullet or bayonet. But Bletchley Park’s contribution to the allied victory was enormous. While intelligence was passed intermittently to British officers during the German invasions of Norway and France, and might have helped in small ways, it made no real contribution in either of those campaigns. It was not until late 1940 and the
Blitz
that Bletchley made its first substantial contribution to the British war effort. The breaking by Hut 6 of the
Brown
Enigma cypher allowed Bletchley to predict the targets and routes of the
Luftwaffe
bombers, which ensured that RAF fighter aircraft could ambush them on their way to their targets and that the authorities on the ground could anticipate and prepare for the raids, limiting the numbers of deaths and amount of damage so far as was possible.
The Royal Navy victory over the Italian fleet at Matapan in March 1941 was just one of a number of individual incidents where Bletchley played a direct result in the allied victory. While the extensive knowledge of German intentions in the Balkans
that derived from the
Ultra
intelligence produced by Bletchley did not prevent the German occupation of Greece in mid-1941, it did allow an orderly British withdrawal. Intelligence from Bletchley on German and resistance operations in the Balkans also played a key role in persuading Churchill to back the Yugoslav Partisan leader Tito rather than the Royalist resistance leader Draža Mihailović.
The second half of 1941 saw Hut 8 make the breakthrough on the
Dolphin
Enigma key used by the U-Boats attacking the trans-Atlantic convoys, allowing the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre to re-route the convoys around the U-Boat Wolf Packs. Despite the ten-month ‘blackout’ after the German navy introduced the four-wheel
Shark
Enigma system, the contribution the codebreakers made here was immense. The Battle of the Atlantic is a good example of how Bletchley did not win the war on its own, but it did at numerous points during the war make the difference between success and failure. The U-Boat problems did not stem simply from the fact that the Admiralty knew their locations and intentions. New Allied direction-finding and radar systems became more efficient at tracking them and the US very long-range Liberator aircraft, flown by the RAF in the eastern Atlantic and the Canadians and Americans in the west, ensured that there was no point on the convoy routes where the U-Boats were themselves safe from attack. Nevertheless, as is shown by the horrific losses of merchant shipping when first
Dolphin
and then
Shark
were not broken, compared to the much reduced losses once they were being read,
Ultra
played a critical role in ensuring that Britain continued to receive the vital supplies across the Atlantic.
It was in North Africa where Bletchley Park came into its own, assisted by its outpost in Cairo, the Combined Bureau Middle East. The Enigma decrypts provided vital intelligence in August 1942 ahead of the Battle of Alam Halfa and, from then on, a constant stream of intelligence on Rommel’s vulnerabilities and intentions. British military commanders had until that point
seen far less intelligence of value from Bletchley than their naval and RAF equivalents. Now they, and the codebreakers
themselves
, had tangible evidence of the value it could give in a
long-running
military campaign. This ensured confidence that the codebreakers could play a critical role in winning the land battle that was to come in the invasion of Europe. It also provided, or should have provided, a number of lessons to commanders not just in how to use
Ultra
but also in its limitations.
