IN THE SUMMER OF 1941 ‘Sammy’ Sansom and his team hardly had time to bemoan the loss of Wavell. Freya Stark was with a small group who saw Wavell off at the airport, the atmosphere amongst the small group of well wishers, she felt, was one of ‘loyalty and devotion’.1
On 22 June Germany launched the invasion of Russia, Operation Barbarossa. ‘Suddenly’ wrote Sansom ‘all the communists in the world were transferred to our side.’ But there was no communism in Egypt at that time to muddy the waters.2
That summer of 1941 was pretty trying, with Rommel poised on the frontier and a constant stream of our chaps coming in from the desert for a brief spell of leave … but too many of them got drunk and shouted the odds about how they were going to deal with the Huns when they got back.
Sansom did not mind the ordinary Tommies having a good time, but the officers were more of a worry, as they openly talked about military matters in bars and clubs, despite the many signs bearing the famous line ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’.
I had one of my NCOs stationed almost permanently in the bar at Shepheard’s [Hotel], and his particular unsolved mystery of the war was whether or not the Swiss barman, Joe, was an enemy spy. If he was he was brilliant. I watched him several times myself, and never saw him budge when one of his officer customers dropped his voice to tell his drinking companion a confidence. I thought probably Joe was innocent; I do not suppose he looked any more guileless than Mac [the barman] at the Kit Kat cabaret.3
Meanwhile Eppler had spent a few happy months with Sonia in Copenhagen during the summer. He had completed a refresher course in Brandenburg east of Berlin, home of the Brandenburg Regiment. This unit was developed by Hauptmann Theodor Van Hippel, and was part of the Abwehr 2nd Department. It initially consisted mainly of former German expatriates, like Eppler, fluent in foreign languages.
Returning to Ankara he met ‘Aladin’ in a Turkish bath, for cover, which Eppler found uncomfortable, ‘trying to get the whole business over with oriental equanimity’. Aladin seemed to revel in the ‘torture’.4 He confided to Aladin that he had been in Spain, and he felt that he ‘ran around Iraq for nothing and I wasted my time in Afghanistan and Persia too.’ It had quenched his thirst for adventure but like most of his missions, ‘it seemed a failure.’5 However, he felt he might have stumbled across some useful information some time after the failed revolt in Iraq.
In January 1940 he had taken an apartment in villa No4 Shariah Saloh in Cairo as a bolthole; he had paid the rent for a year, and instructed his bank in Cairo to pay the next year’s rent when it became due. As flamboyant as ever, he began ‘cohabiting with the belly-dancer Carioca, at the time the toast of the Badia Massabni Oriental Theatre. It made a little stir.’ His thinking was such an affair would cover his long absences.
On a return visit he had met his contact in the Canal Zone, Faud Osman. The latter told Eppler about some odd goings on that he had observed in a small courtyard in the city near the Groppi Tearooms. Eppler knew the owner of a house nearby, from where they could observe events unseen. Equipped with a camera they set up an observation post.
The place looked like the backstage of a theatre or a film studio workshop. The innocent observer might have thought they were working on a war film. Four men picked up a mark VI tank and without any trouble carried it across the courtyard, loading it on to a waiting lorry. It was made of rubber. Even from as close as this, from across the street, hardly 50m away, it was indistinguishable from the real thing. They had quite a number of tanks piled up in a corner. They seemed to be mass-producing them right in the middle of a big city! Propped up against the walls of the courtyard were parachutists realistic down to the smallest detail, standing about as though having a five-minute break for a smoke! If it had not been for their height which was barely three feet, one would have taken them for real people.
This ranked amongst some of Eppler’s best information obtained for his Abwehr controllers. He also learnt of deceptions to confuse aircraft.
Camouflage and decoys seemed to be highly thought of by the British. Faud had earlier brought me material from the Canal Zone that bore this out. There they had simply covered over a part of Lake Timsah with sacking over stakes. They had painted the upper side with desert camouflage. It was superb. It was so well done, Faud had said, that it was bound to mislead any pilot and no one would be able to spot it.6
This may well have been the work of Jasper Maskelyne, a stage magician and illusionist, and his dedicated team, who created fake lakes to lure bombers away from Alexandria and to shield the Suez Canal. He also later created a dummy army shortly before the Battle of El Alamein. The British and to a lesser extent the Germans used this type of camouflage deception throughout the war. Perhaps the most famous dummy army deception was that assembled in East Anglia before D-Day.
In October 1940, Colonel Bonner Frank Fellers, a 1918 West Point graduate, who had been a staff officer for General Douglas MacArthur and served in the embassy in Spain, was posted to Cairo as US Military Attaché.
He kept his eyes and ears open, touring the battlefields, observing the problems and tactics of desert war. The British encouraged him, hoping to further foster friendly relations between the two countries. Fellers compiled a great quantity of information and sent it to Washington in encoded reports.7
Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly, working at the offices of SOE in Cairo, met Fellers in February 1941.
Today I met Bonner Fellers, the US Military Attaché here – an original and delightful person who seems to say exactly what he thinks to everyone regardless of nationality or rank.
He has just returned from the Desert and spoke with amusement and admiration of how our attack was kept secret.8
Fellers carefully encoded all his reports into the Black Code and sent them by radio to MILID WASH (Military Intelligence Division Washington), signed ‘Fellers’. The trouble was that Axis radio stations – two at least – were reading every word. Within hours Rommel had these reports, what he called ‘die qute Quelle’ (the Good Source), sometimes referred to as ‘the little fellows’ or ‘the little Fellers’ reports.9
The Germans were able to read Fellers’ messages thanks to the actions of General Cesare Ame, head of Italy’s SIM and friend of Canaris, who had approved a break-in at the US Embassy in Rome that September, the embassy of a still neutral country. Two of his operatives and two Italians employed by the embassy gained access with a set of keys that had been duplicated from the originals. They also had keys to, and the combination of, the safe. The combination had been provided by Loris Gherardi, a messenger in the office of the military attaché, who had worked there since 1920.
The Black Code, so called for the colour of its cover, was removed with the cipher tables, photographed and then replaced. Neither Gherardi’s boss, Colonel Norman E. Fiske, nor the ambassador William Phillips, ever suspected Gherardi and he continued in his job.10
Count Galeazzo Ciano, son-in-law of Mussolini, wrote in his diary on 30 September 1941 that ‘the SIM have secured the American Secret Code. Everything that Phillips cables is read by our decoding offices …’11 Soon after the SIM obtained the Black Code, they gave a copy to the Abwehr. Hans-Otto Behrendt, an intelligence officer in Rommel’s HQ wrote:
Of all the code telegrams, which included some from the US military attaché in Moscow, those sent by Colonel Fellers from Cairo were the most important; because they carried vital information on the Middle East battlefields. In view of the great frankness between the Americans and the English, this information was not only strategically but tactically of the utmost usefulness. In fact it was stupefying in its openness.
He goes on to say that it was ‘playing a role by January/February 1942’ and it was so sensitive it was ‘forbidden to make notes’ thus ‘German documents do not exist.’12
However examples of the information in the Fellers’ signals have been published, taken from the signals received at their intended destination, Washington.
January 23; 270 airplanes and a quantity of antiaircraft artillery being withdrawn from North Africa to reinforce British forces in the Far East.
January 25–26; Allied evaluation of the defects of Axis armour and aircraft.
January 29; Complete rundown of British armour, including numbers in working order, number damaged, number available, and their locations; location and efficiency ratings of armoured and motorized units at the front.
February 1; Forthcoming commando operations; efficiency ratings of various British units; report that American M-3 tanks could not be used before mid-February.
February 6; Location and efficiency of the 4th Indian Division and the 1st Armoured Division; iteration of British plans to dig in along the Acroma-Bir Hacheim line; recognition of the possibility that Axis forces might reach the Egyptian frontier once the armoured divisions had been regrouped.13
Alan Moorehead, the journalist and writer, met Fellers during the Battle of Sidi Rezegh in November 1941.
My party had blundered into the British armoured division headquarters and the first officer I saw was the welcome figure of Colonel Bonner Fellers, the US Military Attache. Bonner Fellers was often in the desert. He liked to gather his facts at first hand and in the Wavell campaign we used to see him buzzing about from place to place in an ordinary civilian car.
And now, here he was again, looking quizzically across to the east where quick heavy gunfire had suddenly broken the quiet of the afternoon. I called across to him, ‘What’s happening?’ and he just had time to reply, ‘Damned if I know,’ when we had to duck for shelter as two Messerschmitts came over, ground strafing.14
Thus the Luftwaffe unwittingly almost finished off one of Rommel’s best sources of intelligence.
All this was in the future; on 5 July General Sir Claude Auchinleck took command, a ‘soldier’s soldier, brave, competent astute but unlucky’. This was particularly true in his choice of field commanders, resulting in him having to take the field command himself.15
Churchill soon began prodding and badgering Auchinleck to take the offensive; but in September the Eighth Army was formed from reinforcements and the Western Desert Force – which became XIII Corps in October – and Auchinleck explained that the army needed training and new equipment had to be properly prepared for the desert. Churchill might have reflected that he had replaced one cautious general with another. His view of warfare was more akin to that of Rommel, whom he admired.
Rommel also waited for Auchinleck, stymied by his precarious supply lines and the nagging problem of Tobruk. Eventually Auchinleck’s offensive Operation Crusader commenced on 18 November. It had two aims: to destroy the enemy in eastern Cyrenaica and drive the enemy from Africa, which in turn would relieve Tobruk.
See here for a list of abbreviations used in the below notes
1 Stark, F., East is West p.130
2 Sansom, p.81
3 ibid, p.88–89
4 Eppler, p.184
5 ibid, p.187
6 ibid, p.189–192
7 Kahn, D., The Codebreakers p.250
8 Ranfurly, Countess, H., To War with Whitaker p.78
9 World War II Magazine June 2006
10 Kahn, p.248–249
11 Ciano, Count, G., Ciano’s Diary 1937–1943 p.450
12 Behrendt, p.146
13 Kahn, p.251
14 Moorehead, A., African Trilogy p.180
15 Neillands, p.77