LATE JUNE, 1942. One of those beginning-of-summer days in Britain when it seems that twilight will last forever. At Chequers, the Prime Minister’s official weekend retreat, the butler informs Winston Churchill that the car with the American general in it has just arrived. Churchill goes to the front door to personally greet his overnight guest. The Prime Minister watches as the general emerges from his car and reaches for his bags.
STUDYING THE OFFICER, Churchill may well have thought of how little he knew about this man to whom he was about to tell so much. Churchill had seen him in action at high-level staff conferences, knew that he was thorough, well-prepared, thoughtful, and respected by his peers. Churchill had also been told that he was immensely popular with his associates, who called him “Ike” as a mark of their affection.
Churchill realized that this Ike had Chief of Staff George C. Marshall’s unlimited confidence, so much so that Marshall had just made General Dwight D. Eisenhower the commander of the American military forces in Great Britain. Marshall had indicated that he felt there was no job too big for Ike. Churchill had also been impressed when told that Eisenhower had spent five years writing speeches for Marshall’s predecessor, General Douglas MacArthur, whose standards for clarity of expression and thought in written English were nearly as high as Churchill’s own.
Most of all, Churchill realized that the Supreme Commander for the Anglo-American counteroffensive against Hitler would have to be an American. That was inevitably one of the prices Britain would have to pay to keep America from turning her back on the European war and concentrating instead on Japan. Knowing that President Franklin Roosevelt stood almost in awe of General Marshall, and would certainly not buck him on a purely military assignment, and knowing Marshall’s attitude toward Eisenhower, Churchill realized that this general walking toward him, suitcase in one hand, briefcase in the other, would be in command of the first Anglo-American amphibious assault since the French and Indian War.
Churchill had called Ike to him because the time had come to introduce the future Supreme Commander to the wizard war, that silent backstage battle between the British intelligentsia and the German intelligentsia that was as critical as it was unknown. This big, hearty, raw-boned, grinning Yank was a professional soldier, fifty-two years old, with nearly thirty years of active duty, but he knew almost nothing about codes or code breaking, about new weapons, or about spies, counterspies, covert actions, or any other aspect of the dark arts. His ignorance came about because the U. S. Army and the nation it defended had virtually no intelligence arm. In 1929, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson had abolished the small code-breaking apparatus of the Army on the grounds that “gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail.” The intelligence branch of the Army was so small, unimportant, in fact despised, that it was widely assumed that no officer of ability ever went into it.
The man approaching the front door at Chequers was truly an innocent abroad. Waiting for him with a cigar in one hand, some documents in the other, and a smile on his face, was Churchill, who delighted in the task of introducing this naïve Yank to the labyrinth of the British Secret Service. Over in the New World they might be saying that Britain was finished, that her day was done, and Churchill knew painfully well that the British could never by themselves produce the guns or divisions in sufficient number to overcome the Germans, but—by God!—in this war of brains, the British were the best in the world, and Churchill was justifiably proud of that fact.
Ike put down his bags and in his warm, friendly, casual American fashion stuck out his hand. Churchill shook hands heartily, meanwhile looking Ike up and down. As Eisenhower removed his hat, two features stood out—his full grin, and his large, prominent forehead. Both the grin and the bald pate seemed as wide, broad, and sunny as the Kansas prairie.
He had no middle-aged sag, either under his eyes or around his belly. Instead, he had the broad shoulders and powerful build of a star athlete (which he had been), and he carried himself lightly, almost catlike. His hands were large, his handshake firm. He looked Churchill right in the eye, not trying to avoid either his gaze or his first questions. Overall, he gave the impression of straightforwardness, strength, boundless energy, and great determination. Churchill liked him at once.
For his part, Ike was meeting Churchill privately for the first time. Churchill had the appearance and manners of a British aristocrat, while Ike was only a year or two away from having been an obscure colonel in a minuscule army. Despite the difference in their backgrounds, prestige, power, and reputation, Ike was not awestruck. He was curious about this great man who had rallied the British people to stand alone for a year against Hitler and his Nazis, and he was anxious to get along with Churchill. Together with Roosevelt, Stalin, and Hitler, the Prime Minister was one of the four best-known and most powerful men in the world. Everyone in America had seen his picture, cigar clamped between his teeth, standing over the ruins of bombed-out London, holding his first two fingers apart, high in the air, in the V-for-Victory signal. Plump, almost cherubic in the face, he could resemble a bulldog when he was determined to have his way (which was nearly all the time). His face would become a violent red when he was angry or crossed. He too had boundless energy and had therefore stuck his finger into every pie in Britain, most of all the war of wits with the Germans, which excited his imagination and limitless curiosity.
Through cocktails, through dinner, through the brandy, coffee, and more brandy, on into the early hours of the morning, Ike listened enthralled as the P.M. briefed him on the secret war. He explained radar, its shortcomings and its promise, how it was being used in the Battle of Britain, what the British hoped it could do in the future. Churchill fairly glowed as he described the Battle of the Beams. German night-bombers were finding their targets over blacked-out London by flying along radio beams sent by transmitters located on the French coast. Crossbeams, sent from another spot on the coast, intersected the beam over the target, letting the German bombers know the precise moment to drop their bombs. A young British scientist, R. V. Jones, had figured out how the system worked, which gave the British an opportunity to jam the signals, or misdirect the Germans, or mislead them into dropping their bombs over open countryside.1
With a chuckle, Churchill described some of the wilder ideas British scientists had produced, such as suspending time bombs by parachute in the path of approaching German bomber formations, or the search for “death rays” for both humans and engines. An idea Churchill liked and intended to follow up was to take masses of seaweed, mix them with huge quantities of dry ice, and thereby create an unsinkable aircraft carrier that could be towed up and down the coast of Europe.
Ike was never tempted to laugh, however absurd some ideas seemed, because he knew that it was this same Churchill who had, in 1914, found private funds to support the research for and development of a new weapon of war that all the generals laughed at. That weapon became the tank, and in 1917 Ike had been one of the first officers of the U. S. Army to recognize its potential. He took command of the “Tank Corps” and trained it at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In late 1918, within a week of his receiving orders to take his unit to France to enter the battle, the armistice came. Ike had therefore never held a combat command, but his appreciation of the tank—and his respect for Churchill for his key role in its creation—remained undiminished.
Churchill told Ike of some of the fears his scientists had with respect to what the Germans were developing in the way of new weapons. The German Navy was making rapid progress with its diesel submarines, while the Luftwaffe was thought to be experimenting with some sort of jet-propelled aircraft. Rocket research was also going forward. It was thought that the Germans might have an operational pilotless aircraft, or even a true rocket, within a year or two. Another innovation was a bomb with eyes—the Germans were experimenting with a ballistic bomb which would be steered from the launching aircraft on the receipt of pictures “televised” back by the bomb.
More cheerful news was that German atomic research seemed to be misdirected. Churchill and Roosevelt, meanwhile, had agreed to pool their resources, and British physicists—along with some of the best European physicists, who had fled Hitler’s Europe to work at their specialties—were now participating fully in the Manhattan Project in America.
As for spies, Churchill was pleased to report that the British had managed to maintain contact with the Polish and French secret services through MI-6 of the British Secret Service, headed by Brigadier Stewart Menzies. The Special Operations Executive (SOE), a branch of Menzies’ Secret Service, was establishing contacts with the French underground forces. Best of all, Menzies believed that the British had managed to identify and then either execute or “turn” every German spy in the United Kingdom, which if true meant that the British Secret Service controlled every piece of information the Germans received from their spies. There was rich potential in such a situation.
(Churchill would not have been quite so pleased with MI-6 if he had known that the Germans had done the same to his MI-6 agents in Holland. The British had parachuted sabotage agents into that country, but the Germans had caught the first one and forced him to send back suitable messages to London. The Germans then knew where subsequent agents were to be dropped, as MI-6 sent radio messages to their agents to be ready for them. The Nazis captured every one of them, at the same time sending messages back to London that led MI-6 to believe that the agents were at large and operating a successful campaign.2)
Finally, triumphantly, Churchill turned to what he called ULTRA. Before explaining the term, however, he rather dramatically made Ike swear that he would never expose himself to capture during the remainder of the war, which meant explicitly that he was never to go into a war zone or fly over one. Everyone who knew about ULTRA had to make that promise, Churchill explained, because this was the most valuable secret of the war, and the Germans had their own ways of making captured men talk.
ULTRA, Churchill then declared, was the term the British used for their systematic breaking of the German code. By itself, difficult though the feat may have been (and was, in fact), breaking an enemy’s code was not a decisive factor, primarily because the enemy changed his code at regular intervals, and when he did, the code breakers had to start all over at point zero. But in this case, a delighted Churchill declared, the Germans believed they had an absolutely safe encoding machine, which was called Enigma. It consisted of two machines somewhat like electric typewriters, which were attached to three rotating drums, which in turn were interconnected by an intricate set of electric wires. An operator would type a plain text on one typewriter; the drums would rotate according to a predetermined setting, and the other typewriter would rap out the encoded message, which was then sent over the airwaves. At the receiving end, all the operator needed to do was put the machine on the proper setting, feed in the encoded message, and take out the plain text.
The Germans believed the system to be foolproof because even if the enemy had an Enigma machine, it would do him no good without the settings. The possible variations were numbered in the tens of thousands and a code breaker would go crazy before cracking even one of them. Enigma could produce an almost infinite number of cipher alphabets merely by changing the keying procedure.
But the British had broken the system, and the Germans did not know it, which gave the British a major asset in the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic. The way in which the British had earned this asset was in itself a fascinating story, involving spies, double-agents, traitors, and the cream of British universities.3
The French and the Poles had both made contributions to ULTRA. A Polish Jew who had worked on an Enigma machine in Berlin managed to contact MI-6; the British arranged to get him from Warsaw to London to direct the building of a duplicate. The French had obtained earlier, commercial models of the Enigma machine, which they made available to MI-6. With these examples before them, the British proceeded to construct a strange contraption, eight feet by eight feet, called “the Bomb,” which was installed at Hut Three, a Nissen hut under the trees at a wretched estate named Bletchley Park. The Bomb, as described by its chief engineer, Harold Keen, was not a computer, and “there was no other machine like it. It was unique, built especially for this purpose. Neither was it a complex tabulating machine, which was sometimes used in cryptanalysis. What it did was to match the electrical circuits of Enigma. Its secret was in the internal wiring of Enigma’s rotors, which ‘the Bomb’ sought to imitate.”4
Bletchley Park, or BP as it inevitably came to be called, soon had an overflow of British intelligentsia. Nissen huts covered the grounds. They were staffed by German-language experts, military technicians, and code breakers, with a heavy emphasis on mathematicians, which meant a high number of eccentrics and “absentminded” professors.
“There was an amazing spirit at the place,” Alfred Friendly, who was there, later wrote. “Morale was high because everyone knew the fantastically successful results of our daily-and-nightly endeavours. It was one place in the military where there was no sense of futility, or useless work or of nonsense. Had he served there, Heller would have had no material for Catch 22.”5 William Filby, a Britisher who served through the war at BP, later scoffed at the idea of a vacation or even a short leave. “You couldn’t wait to get back in the morning to see what had happened overnight,” he said in an interview. “It was like your baby—you never wanted to leave it.”6 At BP, in brief, there was a tremendous feeling of excitement and contribution. Churchill conveyed some of that feeling to Eisenhower in his description of the place and its work.
Breaking the Enigma secrets open had been a brilliant team effort, but there were problems. The codes needed to be broken on a continuous basis, as the Germans were consistently changing the key. The new settings had to be found before each new code could be mastered. As the war went along the thousands of men and women working at BP got better at it, but in the early years they were baffled more often than not. ULTRA was not an important factor in the August-September 1940 Battle of Britain; even by October, BP, after straining every resource of human intelligence and endurance, could break only one message in three in time to act on the information. With the decoded messages, as R. V. Jones pointed out, “I was able to tell the Duty Air Commodore at Fighter Command the exact place of the German bomber attack, the time of the first bomb to within ten minutes or so, the expected ground speed of the bombers, their line of approach to within 100 yards, and their height to within two to three hundred metres. Could any air defence system ask for more?”
And yet, the bombers still got through. Jones complained that “reading the Enigma signals was just like reading tomorrow’s paper today.” As an extreme example, he recorded that the British knew of the German invasion plans for the island of Crete at least three weeks in advance, and still could not stop the enemy. In part this was because of British military weakness, in part because they dared make only the most limited use of their ULTRA-derived information.7
Ronald Lewin, author of Ultra Goes to War, the first detailed examination of the use of ULTRA in the campaigns of World War II, writes, “It was impossible to risk disclosing its intelligence to those in actual contact with the enemy, or liable to capture for other reasons, even though the knowledge might improve their chance of success or survival.”8 So it was at Crete.
An inability to take advantage of the information, or an inability to use it for fear of revealing its source, put definite limits on what ULTRA could contribute. Another limitation was distribution, getting the right information to the right man at the right time, and without tipping their hand. Only the very highest-ranking officers in the British service knew about ULTRA. It was the best-kept secret of the war, a secret that lasted for almost a full generation after the Nazi surrender.
Then, in 1974, Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham revealed The Ultra Secret in a book by that name.* Winterbotham was the officer who brought the ULTRA intercepts directly to Churchill, who delighted in reading Hitler’s messages. Because Winterbotham was so close to the Prime Minister throughout the war, his memoirs were filled with inside stories that made an exciting tale even more appealing.
In the mid-1970s The Ultra Secret came as a surprise to the public, as well as to most World War II scholars. Its immediate reception was one of puzzlement by the public, anger by the scholars (they would have to rewrite their books). Why, the public wondered, if the Allies listened in on everything the Germans said to each other over the radio, did it take so long to win the war? And why was the victory so costly?
Churchill’s initial reactions to ULTRA were similar. In 1941 and throughout 1942, for example, he kept reading Rommel’s messages from Africa, messages in which Rommel complained that his gasoline had not arrived, nor his spare parts, nor his reinforcements, nor his new tanks, nor his communications equipment. Because Churchill knew that Rommel was short on everything, he could not understand why his Middle East commanders hesitated to attack, and one by one he sacked them. Thanks to ULTRA, Churchill knew what the generals knew, and it made the generals furious and apprehensive because it invited criticism by Churchill, who was always at his happiest when he was dressing down a general.
But although Churchill called ULTRA an oracle (which it was when it worked) and the key to victory (which it could be if the right lock were found), it could provide only intelligence, not a strategy or the power to enforce one. General Bernard Law Montgomery pointed out to Churchill time and time again the obvious fact that knowing about Rommel’s supply shortages did not solve the British supply problems.
The Germans never caught on to the ULTRA operation, however. They used Enigma to the last day of the war. So the question persists: Why did the Allies not win sooner, at less cost? An American football analogy may help the perspective here. Suppose you were coaching against a National Football League team, and your intelligence system was so good that you knew not only the height, weight, speed, and characteristics of every opponent (all gathered from open sources, mainly films) but you also knew every one of your opponent’s plays. Even better, suppose you managed to hook up a radio transmitter in the quarterback’s helmet, while each of your players had receivers in their helmets. Your information about the enemy’s strength and intentions would then be perfect, as would your system of getting that information into the right hands in time to act on it.
But if your team consisted of eleven out-of-shape office workers who had never played together and who were all smaller and slower than their opposite numbers, all that perfect information would do you no good. The professional team would still score on every play.
Code breaking could work both ways, of course, since the Allies also used the radio. Patrick Beesly, who worked in the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, points out in his excellent work Very Special Intelligence that “no service in any of the belligerent powers during the Second World War succeeded in keeping every cipher it used secure.” Before Winterbotham broke the ULTRA secret, the ups and downs in the crucial Battle of the Atlantic were inexplicable. German sinkings of Allied merchant vessels would rise dramatically one month, then fall off sharply while Allied sinkings of German submarines went up. The explanation lay with the thousands of men and women, in Germany and England, who toiled night and day to break the other side’s code. Success at this tremendously difficult and demanding task was immediately translated into ships sunk at sea. The ups and downs came as one side or the other changed its code, or broke the code the enemy was using that month.
The British won the Battle of the Atlantic partly because the Royal Navy was good, partly because of American reinforcements, but mainly because Churchill’s code breakers were better than Hitler’s. To a lesser extent this was also true on land, although some of Rommel’s victories in North Africa came about because his people had broken the British code and were reading the radio traffic. Beesly points out, “While each nation accepted the fact that its own cryptanalysts could read at least some of their enemy’s ciphers, they were curiously blind to the fact that they themselves were being subjected to exactly the same form of eavesdropping.”10
Curious, too, was the fact that some Americans had to be sold on the value of ULTRA. Ike fairly beamed as Churchill brought him in on the secret, but others were to be dubious at best, especially Eisenhower’s deputy, General Mark Clark. Shortly after Eisenhower’s visit to Chequers, Winterbotham went to Eisenhower’s headquarters in London to brief Clark. Accompanying him was the legendary Menzies, head of MI-6, “to lend a bit of weight to the proceedings.” Eisenhower introduced Clark and three members of his intelligence staff, then excused himself since he already knew about ULTRA. It is a measure of the tightness of security around ULTRA that this visit by Winterbotham and Menzies did not get entered into Eisenhower’s official office log, which makes it a unique event.
Winterbotham recorded what happened: “Mark Clark was restless from the start. I explained not only what the source was, but in an endeavour to catch Mark Clark’s interest gave some pertinent examples of what it could do. I had intended to follow this with an explanation of how the information would reach him, and the security regulations which accompanied its use. But Mark Clark didn’t appear to believe the first part, and after a quarter of an hour he excused himself and his officers on the grounds that he had something else to do.”11
Patton was equally cavalier. When Winterbotham sought to brief him in Algiers, Patton cut him short, saying, “You know, young man, I think you had better tell all this to my Intelligence staff, I don’t go much on this sort of thing myself. You see I just like fighting.”12
Ike was not so foolish. He saw at once the value of ULTRA, both immediate and potential, just as he responded to everything Churchill had told him. One of the reasons Ike had won Marshall’s confidence was his openness to new ideas, new techniques, new approaches to old problems. Marshall liked to say that Ike was broad-based, not narrow or traditional. Churchill and Eisenhower were neither scientists nor engineers, but they both loved gadgets, inventions, technology, especially when the new devices could help them win a war.
As Ike drove back to London after his evening at Chequers, he reflected on how lucky the United States was to have the British for allies. What an inheritance to fall into! Churchill, for his part, looked forward to working with this American general, who did not seem so stuck in the mud, so resistant to scientific and technological change, as his British generals. Together, they would make a fine team.