CHAPTER FIVE
Ike and ULTRA in Africa, Sicily, and Italy

FEBRUARY, 1942. A fox brought to bay by a pack of hounds is a fearful sight, snarling, snapping, turning left, right, backward, never resting, always alert. The fox is the dreaded Erwin Rommel and his famous Afrika Korps; the hounds are Montgomery’s Eighth Army, pursuing from the east, the American II Corps (General Lloyd Fredendall) closing in from the west, the French from the northwest, and the British First Army (General Kenneth Anderson) covering the northern escape route.

ROMMEL had just retreated across half of North Africa, following his defeat by the British at El Alamein in November 1942. When he reached the Mareth Line, a prepared defensive position, partly underground, along the Tunisian-Libyan border, Rommel turned on the British, who recoiled, then settled down to await reinforcements. The chase across Africa had been exhilarating, but to close in on the “Desert Fox” in his den was another matter altogether. Monty gave Rommel time to catch his breath and plan his next move.

The American II Corps was to Rommel’s west and north, stretched out along the eastern dorsal of the Atlas Mountains. The front line was too long for the Americans to hold in strength, but neither Fredendall nor Eisenhower were overly worried. Intelligence indicated that any German attack would come from north of the II Corps line at Fondouk, which was a British and French responsibility.

According to Ike’s intelligence reports, Rommel was fully occupied by Monty, so General Jürgen von Arnim, who commanded the German forces in Tunis, would lead the offensive. Ike’s G-2 (intelligence) officer at Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ) was British Brigadier Eric E. Mockler-Ferryman. He reported that all available information indicated that von Arnim was going to draw on Rommel’s Africa Korps for reinforcements, then attack through a pass at Fondouk, with the aim of scattering the French, then turning north, driving to the coast, to isolate Anderson’s First Army.1

Eisenhower did not fully accept Mockler-Ferryman’s judgment, but he did not have sufficient self-confidence to overrule his G-2. He was worried enough to go to the front to oversee preparations to meet von Arnim’s attack. On February 13–14 he made an all-night tour of the front. He was disturbed by what he saw. The American troops were complacent, green, and unblooded. They had not received intensive training in the United States, as they were the first divisions to go to England in 1942. In November they had shipped out for North Africa, where operations were just active enough to prevent training but not enough to provide real battlefield experience. Officers and men alike showed the lack of training.2

Ike was also upset at the disposition of the 1st Armored Division, which had been split into two parts, Combat Command A and Combat Command B (CCA and CCB), and was therefore incapable of operating as a unit. General Anderson had insisted upon keeping CCB near Fondouk to help the British meet the expected attack from von Arnim; CCA was to the south, near Faïd Pass.

General Paul Robinett commanded CCB, and on the night of February 13–14 he insistently told Ike that he was sure Mockler-Ferryman’s information was wrong. Robinett said he did not expect an attack at Fondouk because he had sent patrols all the way across the eastern dorsal without encountering any enemy buildup. Further, air reconnaissance had failed to reveal any preparations for an attack. Robinett said he had reported this intelligence to his superiors, Generals Fredendall and Anderson, but they did not believe him. Ike said he did, and promised to change the dispositions the next day.3

After his talk with Robinett, Ike drove south for a couple of hours, then paid a visit to CCA. Everything there seemed to be in order. Just after midnight he went for a walk into the desert. The moon shone. Looking eastward, he could just make out the gap in the black mountain mass that was Faïd Pass. Nothing moved.

Shaking off the mood of the desert, Eisenhower returned to CCA headquarters and then drove toward Tebessa, Fredendall’s headquarters. He arrived three hours later, around 5:30 A.M. The Germans, he learned to his astonishment from a radio message, had attacked CCA, coming through Faïd Pass at 4:00 A.M. Reports indicated, however, that it was only a limited attack, probably designed to draw off strength from the northern end of the line. CCA said it could hold on with no difficulty. Climbing into his Cadillac, Eisenhower drove on toward his advance command post at Constantine. Along the way he stopped to visit the famous Roman ruins at Timgad and did not reach Constantine until the middle of the afternoon, St. Valentine’s Day.4

The news he received when he got to his headquarters was bad. The attack out of Faïd Pass was much bigger and more aggressive than CCA had thought at first. The Germans had destroyed an American tank battalion, overrun a battalion of artillery, isolated two large segments of American troops, and driven CCA out of its position. Nevertheless, General Anderson continued to insist that Mockler-Ferryman’s intelligence was correct and that the main attack would come at Fondouk. He refused to release Robinett’s CCB to join CCA in the defense. Ike tried to speed a flow of reinforcements to CCA, but his main strategic reserve, the U. S. 9th Infantry Division, was unable to move with any dispatch because it had no organic truck transportation. As a result, outnumbered and inexperienced American troops had to take on German veterans led by Erwin Rommel himself. The result was one of the worst American defeats of the war. CCA lost ninety-eight tanks, fifty-seven half-tracks, and twenty-nine artillery pieces. It had practically been destroyed—half an armored division gone!5

Fortunately for Ike, the German command setup was almost as muddled as the Allied one. Rommel and von Arnim operated independently. Von Arnim wanted to confine himself to limited attacks against Fondouk. Rommel was after much bigger results—he wanted to break through the mountains at Kasserine Pass, capture the great Allied supply base at Le Kef, then possibly drive on to Algiers itself. He wanted to turn a tactical advantage into a strategic triumph, destroying the II Corps, isolating the First Army, and thus reversing the entire position in North Africa. If all went well, he could accomplish his objectives before Monty was ready to attack the Mareth Line.6

Von Arnim was a vain, ambitious man who refused to cooperate in Rommel’s bold (but wildly impractical) plan. Higher headquarters (Kesselring) had ordered him to give his best panzer division, the 10th, to Rommel for the original attack, but von Arnim had stalled and it was not committed on February 14. Ironically, this turned out to benefit Rommel, because the location of the 10th Panzer was, according to Mockler-Ferryman, the key piece of information. As long as those tankers were facing CCB at Fondouk, that was where Mockler-Ferryman insisted that the attack would come.

Over the next two days Rommel pressed his initial advantage. On February 20 the 10th Panzer, finally released to his command, moved into Kasserine Pass. It was too late. American reinforcements had arrived. The German offensive stalled.

That same day, February 20, Ike asked the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Alan Brooke, to replace Mockler-Ferryman “with an officer who has a broader insight into German mentality and method.”7 It was the only time in his three-year career as Allied Commander in Chief that Eisenhower asked the British to relieve one of their officers on his staff. In a cable to Marshall the next day, Ike explained that “due to faulty G-2 estimates” Anderson had not become convinced “until too late that the attack through Faïd was really the main effort.”

Then, in guarded language, he added, “I am provoked that there was such reliance placed upon particular types of intelligence that general instructions were considered inapplicable. In this connection and for your eyes only, I have asked for the relief of my G-2. He is British and the head of that section must be a British officer because of the network of special signal establishments he operates, but Brooke has agreed to make available a man in Great Britain who is tops in this regard.”8 The man was General Kenneth Strong. He stayed with Ike through the remainder of the war and the two officers established a close and effective relationship. Mockler-Ferryman returned to London to head the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which controlled sabotage and underground efforts in occupied France.

But what, meanwhile, was the origin of Mockler-Ferryman’s terrible mistake at Kasserine Pass? It was ULTRA. An entry of February 20 in Butcher’s previously unpublished diary provides some of the details: “An explanation of the defeat, as seen by Ike, lies in a misinterpretation of radio messages we regularly intercept from the enemy. This source is known as ‘Ultra.’ It happens that our G.2 Brigadier Mockler-Ferryman, relies heavily upon this source. It has frequently disclosed excellent information as to the intentions of the Axis. However, the interpretation placed by G.2 on the messages dealing with the place of attack—an attack that has been expected for several days—led Mockler-Ferryman to believe that a feint would be made where the attack actually occurred … and that the real and heavy attack would come in the north.”9

What Butcher did not know was that Rommel’s initial attack was as much a surprise to von Arnim and his superiors as it was to Mockler-Ferryman. Rommel, not for the first time, had disobeyed orders.10

On March 14, after Rommel had been driven back both at Kasserine and then at the Mareth Line (and had consequently left Africa), Ike wrote Brooke again about Mockler-Ferryman. He said that his G-2’s performance, up to Kasserine, had been outstanding, pointing out specifically that “his forecast of the extent of French opposition proved in the event to be more accurate than that of any other authority.” Ike wanted Mockler-Ferryman’s relief to be “without prejudice.” Then he added, “In his successor, I now look for a little more inquisitiveness and greater attention to checking and cross-checking reports from various sources.”11

The Battle of Kasserine Pass has often been pointed to as the contest where the American Army of World War II came of age. Green troops became veterans; new commanders gained badly needed combat experience; over-cocky Americans learned what a tough opponent they were up against. The man who learned the most was the commander himself, Dwight Eisenhower, and one of the most important lessons he learned was that no one source of information, no matter how sensational, is ever by itself sufficient. Mockler-Ferryman had been so confident of ULTRA’S insight and trustworthiness that he had neglected other, more traditional sources. As Butcher noted in his diary, “Ike insists we need a G.2 who is never satisfied with his information, who procures it with spies, reconnaissance, and any means available.”12

In the aftermath of Kasserine, Ike also learned from interrogation of German prisoners that the enemy was “easily and constantly” breaking the low-level codes used by the 1st Armored Division. He decided that the Germans were probably as enamored with this information as Mockler-Ferryman, and that he could take advantage of them. He told Patton, “We should obviously but clumsily change the code at frequent intervals, so that the Hun will not suspect a plant, but never enough so that it will be impossible for him to break them quickly. As long as nothing is hurt the orders given in this way should be faithfully executed (unimportant patrols, etc.). But when the time comes for real surprise, use an erroneous order in order to support your other measures of deception. This effort should not be difficult to make—and it might work!”13 The innocent American was learning quickly.

DESPITE ITS RELATIVE FAILURE at Kasserine Pass, ULTRA was Ike’s single most effective spy throughout the war. It proved itself in every campaign from 1943 onward, beginning with Operation HUSKY, the invasion of Sicily, Ike’s second amphibious assault. Well before HUSKY was launched in July 1943, thanks to ULTRA, Eisenhower had a complete picture of the enemy’s order of battle on Sicily and in Italy. Equally valuable, ULTRA allowed him to penetrate the German mind and judge how successful Allied deception measures had been.

The major attempt at deception for HUSKY showed the British Secret Service at the top of its form. In an imaginative subterfuge, the British managed to convince the Germans that Eisenhower’s troops would land either on Sardinia or in Greece, rather than Sicily. This sophisticated deception scheme was potentially decisive, because the Germans had more than enough troops scattered throughout Italy and the Mediterranean to reinforce Sicily sufficiently to produce another Gallipoli.

The story is well known—it was superbly told by Ewen Montagu in his 1954 book, The Man Who Never Was—and needs only a brief summary here. A British Secret Service team searched the London morgues to find a suitable body—they needed a once fairly healthy, fairly young, and completely unknown man. Once found, they used odds and ends to give him an identity, a biography, a history. He became “Captain (acting Major) William Martin, 09560, Royal Marines.” His pockets and his briefcase were stuffed with documents, matches, loose change, love letters, a bill or two, a bank statement, a photo of “mom,” all prepared with exquisite care to prove that Major Martin was authentic.

Major Martin was a courier. His briefcase was attached to his wrist by handcuffs. In it were various travel orders and other documents, some labeled “Most Secret.” The planted material consisted of two private letters, one from the vice chief of staff to General Harold Alexander, the overall ground commander in the Mediterranean, under Ike, and the other from Lord Louis Mountbatten to Admiral Cunningham. Each letter hinted that the next operations would strike at Sardinia and Greece.

At dawn, April 30, 1943, Major Martin was dumped overboard from a British submarine off Huelva on the Spanish coast. (At the last minute in London, there had been an anxious discussion about what would happen if the tide failed to sweep him to shore. Churchill gave his verdict: “You will have to get him back and give him another swim.”) The Spanish picked him up, opened the briefcase, gave the documents to a German intelligence agent (who photographed them and sent the film on to Berlin), replaced the documents in the briefcase, then gave it to the British vice-consul in Huelva. Major Martin was interred and his documents returned to London in the freshly sealed briefcase.

Had the Germans taken the bait? ULTRA showed that they had. From the War Cabinet Office to Churchill, then in Washington, the signal flashed, “Martin swallowed rod, line and sinker by the right people and from best information they look like acting on it.” The phrase “best information” meant ULTRA.14 Between early May and July 10, the date of the invasion, ULTRA provided mounting evidence of the successful deception, primarily through order of battle information, the area in which ULTRA was always at its strongest and most reliable. ULTRA reported that the Germans had moved the 1st Panzer Division from France to Greece, that they had moved units from Russia into Greece, that reinforcements from Germany were sent into Sardinia, and so on. In May, the Luftwaffe had had 415 aircraft in Sicily with 125 in Greece; by July there were 305 in Greece and only 290 in Sicily.15

ULTRA was precise about the opposition Ike’s forces would face on Sicily. Field Marshal Kesselring gave Berlin a complete rundown on his dispositions. He had the Hermann Göring Panzer Division on Sicily, along with the German 15th Panzer Division and some Italian troops (who were without transportation and badly equipped). Part of the 15th Panzer was in Palermo, on the north coast; the remainder, along with the Hermann Göring Panzer Division, was in the center of the island, ready to move in any direction. This was priceless information, as was Ike’s knowledge that via ULTRA he would be able to listen in on the German reaction to the landings.16

The initial assault went according to plan. On the morning of D-Day, from his advance headquarters on Malta, Eisenhower sent a cable to the Combined Chiefs: “Fragmentary information obtained mostly from intercept of messages indicates that leading waves of British 5th, 51st and Canadian Divisions are ashore and advancing.”17 ULTRA, in other words, was giving him not only the German reaction—which was slow and confused—but was also his best source on the immediate tactical dispositions of his own troops. The following day, July 11, was the critical one in the campaign, as German armor from the Hermann Göring Division counterattacked against American forces at Gela. ULTRA had provided an alert, and the Americans were ready with a combination of superb naval gunfire, artillery, infantry action, and tanks. The Germans were repulsed with heavy loss.18

The operation in Sicily did reveal ULTRA’S inescapable limitations. The Allies dared not act on ULTRA information that stood alone—i.e., there had to be some explanation other than a code break as to how they found out this or that, or the Germans would realize what had happened and change their code. Churchill and Menzies insisted that those “in the know” had to promise never to use ULTRA information until it was possible to point to some other source.

For example, parachutists, under the command of General James Gavin, dropped onto Sicily on the eve of the invasion, could not be told that the Hermann Göring Division was in their drop zone for fear of revealing the ULTRA secret. The men were not told they would encounter German tanks. They were also not given antitank weapons. They were told that there were some German “technicians” in the area and “nothing more.” In 1979, General Gavin commented, “From the viewpoint of protecting Ultra, I think that this was the proper course for the high command to take, provided they equipped us with adequate antitank weapons.”19

IF THE SECURITY OF ULTRA was a first objective, the question arises, how was ULTRA information relayed to the field commanders safely and swiftly? The British had worked out a system of Special Liaison Units (SLUS) to speed the intercepted messages from Bletchley Park (BP), where the decoding and translating took place, to Churchill and the generals. In 1943 the United States began to create its own SLUS. The result was a huge success and an extraordinary achievement, showing Americans at their best.

The Army’s selection process was superb. It managed to locate precisely the two dozen or so officers who were perfect for the job. They had to be young and healthy, because the SLUS worked long, taxing hours on intricate problems and because the SLUS had to be junior officers, usually captains or majors, so that they would not attract attention by their rank. They had to be diplomatic enough not to offend the senior generals to whom they reported, but firm enough to make sure the generals heard what they had to say (not always as easy as it might seem, especially when Patton or Clark were the recipients). Men who are absolutely trustworthy, mentally quick, tireless, and self-effacing (they knew there would be no battlefield promotions for them in this war, nor any opportunity to lead men into combat) are few in number—but America had enough of them, and the Army found them. To a man, they did an outstanding job during the war; to a man, they kept their trust, not one of them ever revealing the ULTRA secret or his part in the war.* It may not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the ULTRA system, from BP to the SLUS, was a triumph of the Western democracies nearly on a par with the creation of the atomic bomb.

TELFORD TAYLOR headed the American SLU effort. His later career, as was true of all the SLUS, was marked by success after success. Taylor was the prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials and later a distinguished author and professor of law at Columbia University. His young men, selected for brains and ability rather than rank or background, included William Bundy, who became Assistant Secretary of State; Alfred Friendly, who became managing editor of the Washington Post; John Oakes, who became an editor of the New York Times; Langdon van Norden, a businessman who became chairman of the Metropolitan Opera Association; Curt Zimansky, a noted philologist; Yorke Allen, of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; Stuyvesant Wainwright II, four-term congressman; Lewis Powell, Associate Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court; Josiah Macy, vice president of Pan American Airways; and Adolph Rosengarten, who was a little older than the others but still had a successful postwar career, first as a director of the Fidelity Philadelphia Trust Company, then—in 1975, at age seventy—earning his Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania. Clearly the SLUS were outstanding junior officers.20

The SLUS served in a new Army organization, Special Branch of the Military Intelligence Service. In defining their responsibilities, General Marshall insisted, without any question of misinterpretation, that these officers were in a special category and that the generals in command must allow them (no matter how young or unmilitary) the necessary scope and authority.

Marshall gave his SLUS more latitude, and demanded of them a great deal more, than their British counterparts. In the British system, the SLUS were only glorified messengers who handed on the complete ULTRA intercepts to their superiors. Under the system that Marshall and Taylor created, the American SLUS synthesized, summarized, and interpreted the intercepts. As Marshall put it, “Their primary responsibility will be to evaluate Ultra intelligence, present it in usable form to the Commanding officer, assist in fusing Ultra with intelligence derived from other sources, and give advice in connection with making operational use of Ultra intelligence in such fashion that the security of the source is not endangered.”21 As Lewin notes, “This directive was so comprehensive and permissive that it allowed and indeed encouraged the representative to think of himself as a kind of private intelligence center.”22 As the SLUS were, in fact, for in the field each had his own tent, van, or trailer as an office—under continuous guard—in which his safe contained ULTRA papers plus a great deal more information.

To train these men, Taylor first of all sent them to BP, where they saw 10,000 of the most valuable people in the British Empire at work. They were deeply impressed. The exposure of the SLUS to the inner workings of BP meant that they understood the magnitude and significance of what ULTRA offered in a way that few field commanders could.

In addition, Taylor carefully indoctrinated the SLUS in all aspects of intelligence gathering, which gave them a perspective that was crucial to their effectiveness. The temptation to rely completely on ULTRA was always there, but usually spurned. In 1978, Rosengarten wrote, “I am bold to say that Ultra was primus inter pares, some of the time but not all of the time, among the sources of information which were available to our section. These were principally prisoners, civilians who crossed the line, air photography, and low level deciphering.”23

Rosengarten’s point was made over and over again by the American SLUS. After the war, Taylor had each of his men answer a long questionnaire about their experiences. In his summary of these reports, Taylor noted that “the need for careful study of all sources of intelligence was stressed by most of the representatives.” Everything that the commanding general’s G-2 section knew, the SLU knew, because he made it his business to read all papers passing through the G-2 situation room. This enabled him to fuse ULTRA with other intelligence.

One SLU wrote, “It is most easy for the Ultra representative to allow himself to become isolated from the mainstream of the intelligence section, so that he loses awareness of what other sources are producing. Another facile error, induced by inertia, is to permit Ultra to become a substitute for analysis and evaluation of other intelligence. The two easy errors, isolation from other sources and the conviction that Ultra will provide all needed intelligence, are indeed the Scylla and Charybdis of the representative. Ultra must be looked on as one of a number of sources; it must not be taken as a neatly packaged replacement for tedious work with other evidence.”24

Another point Taylor stressed in his final report was that ULTRA’S “normal function was to enable the SLU and his recipients to select the correct information from the huge mass of P/W, agent, reconnaissance, and photographic reports. Ultra was the guide and the censor to conclusions arrived at by means of other intelligence; at the same time the latter was a secure vehicle by which Ultra could be disseminated under cover.”25

As will be seen, the system Taylor created worked well. Time and again his SLUS were able to get crucial information to their commanders in time for decisive action. Most SLUS had a daily briefing for the general; some held two briefings; all had round-the-clock access to the general if they had an intercept that called for immediate action. It was Anglo-American cooperation at its most highly developed—recall that all decoding and translating was done by British at BP—and as the Germans can testify, it was remarkably effective. As Lewin concludes, “After the Americans first became fully involved in Ultra they entered into an enormous inheritance which they did not squander.”26

IF THE SLUS WERE THE PICK of America’s young men, Donovan’s OSS agents were supposed to be almost as good. But in Sicily, and then during the invasion of Italy in September 1943, the OSS was of no help to Ike, unless it was to provide some comic relief.

Colonel Donovan claimed that the OSS had proved itself in North Africa and that it should therefore be given a free hand in Sicily and Italy. He nearly got it, although Ike was able to stop one or two harebrained schemes before they got started. In late June, for example, Donovan wanted to send an OSS team to Sicily for sabotage operations, but when Eisenhower learned of the plan he vetoed it, on the obvious grounds that sending in agents at so late a date would alert German coastal defenses.

Donovan ran a far more serious risk on D-Day for HUSKY when he went ashore with Patton’s troops to direct the efforts of his ten-man OSS unit for Sicily. How it happened is a mystery, except that Donovan somehow managed to do it without Ike finding out. It was a bit of madness, obviously, for a man who knew all about ULTRA, the atomic bomb, the British Secret Service organization for France, not to mention the OSS secrets, to put himself in a position where he might be captured. Anthony Cave Brown, the British journalist, comments, “This rash behavior on the part of senior OSS officials was one of the root causes of the intense suspicion with which the British secret services were now coming to regard their American comrades-in-arms.”27

It was probably inevitable that the American Government’s secret agencies, initially the OSS and then the CIA, would find occasion to work in close cooperation with another secret organization that also had nearly unlimited funds, the Mafia. It happened first in 1943 during the Sicilian campaign. Assistant New York District Attorney Murray Gurfein, at that time attached to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), later an OSS colonel in Europe, and eventually a federal judge in New York, made a deal with Mafia chief “Lucky” Luciano. Luciano was in prison for crimes concerning prostitution. The deal was that if the Mafia in Sicily cooperated with the OSS there to provide information, the ONI would get him out of prison. Although no concrete evidence has been produced to indicate that the Mafia turned over intelligence of any value, on the day World War II ended in Europe, ONI sent a petition for executive clemency for Luciano to Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York. The petition said Luciano had “cooperated with high military authorities” and had rendered “a definite service to the war effort.” Dewey approved the appeal and Luciano was let out of prison and deported from the United States.28

As the Mafia connection indicated, the Americans had a tremendous potential advantage in carrying out spying in Italy—millions of Americans were from Italy or second-generation immigrants with close personal ties to the old country. Speaking the language perfectly, knowing the country and its ways thoroughly, the Italian-Americans were ideal agents. Donovan had gone deep into the military to find volunteers; the leader of his Sicily unit was Max Corvo, a U. S. Army private of Sicilian descent. Corvo in turn recruited twelve Sicilian-Americans and two young lawyers to become recruiters and organizers. One OSS man who helped train the larger group remembered them as “tough little boys from New York and Chicago, with a few live hoods mixed in.… Their one desire was to get over to the old country and start throwing knives.” One or two had been recruited directly from the ranks of Murder, Inc., and the Philadelphia “Purple Gang.”29 They did not, unfortunately, meet expectations. Although Corvo’s group did recruit on Sicily, they were unable to find a sufficient number of Sicilians who, in the words of one OSS wit, were willing “to take a shot at their relatives.”30

OSS had all the problems of a new organization, compounded by the fact that it had more agents and more money to spend than it could use effectively. The result was its own private war, often either at odds with the aims of the real war or a duplication of effort. During the invasion of Italy, OSS agents dashed off on missions without the knowledge or approval of Eisenhower’s headquarters. It was the only time in the war that Ike allowed this to happen—during the Normandy landings nine months later nothing went on that he had not personally approved—and it appears to have been a result of Donovan’s enthusiasm plus FDR’s strong backing of Donovan.

The absence of communication between OSS and the regular forces was the cause of an absurd mix-up on D-Day at Salerno. A “MacGregor unit” (OSS code name for a sabotage team), consisting of Peter Tompkins, John Shahhen, and Marcello Girosi, commandeered a high-speed British motorboat. They had a wild plot to reach the Italian Naval Command, there to force the Italian admirals to turn their fleet over to the Allies. What they did not know was that the secret surrender negotiations with the Italians, which had been going on for some weeks, had already made arrangements for turning over the fleet, which was indeed sailing at that moment to surrender to the British at Malta.

Elsewhere the ninety-man OSS detachment for Italy, commanded by Colonel Donald Downes, did some good service. Wading ashore on D-Day, the agents managed to exploit the early confusion in order to infiltrate through enemy lines, make contact with resistance groups, and recruit spies. An occasional piece of helpful information came out of this effort.31

Before much could be accomplished, however, Donovan came onto the scene to reorganize the unit. He had Downes join him on a typical Donovan expedition—a jaunt to the Isle of Capri, just across the bay from Naples, which was still held by the Germans. On the way over, Donovan told Downes that Colonel Eddy had taken ill and would be replaced in Algiers by a West Point colonel. Another colonel, Ellery Huntington, Jr., a Wall Street lawyer and former Yale quarterback, would take Downes’ place as head of the OSS detachment in Italy. Downes would stay in the country, but only as chief of counterintelligence. Finally, Donovan said that in the future the OSS would have to follow the President’s political line, which in Italy meant that the OSS could work only with or recruit Italians who pledged their loyalty to the King, Victor Emmanuel.

All this was rather too much for the idealistic Downes, who told Donovan point-blank that he would not serve under Huntington, “a good-natured incompetent” who had been a key fund raiser for Donovan in 1932 when Donovan ran for governor of New York. As to the political directive, he asked Donovan, “How could we betray all the Italian democrats, almost to a man rabidly anti-House of Savoy, by insisting that they swear allegiance to the ridiculous little king who had saddled them with fascism and thumped for Mussolini until military defeat was inevitable?”

They arrived at Capri, where a MacGregor team was plotting a new daredevil operation to rescue an Italian scientist from German-occupied Italy. Capri was peaceful. “Elegant ladies in sun suits and big hats strolled about followed by their little dogs and gigolos. The smart hotels were open and at cafe tables the indolent conversation of the idle rich was to be heard.” To Downes’ amazement, Donovan announced that his first objective was to visit the villa of Mona Williams, wife of a prominent New York utilities magnate who had made the second largest contribution to Donovan’s 1932 campaign. Donovan explained that he had promised to protect her magnificent resort home from being “ruined by a lot of British enlisted personnel.” He told Downes to get on it. Downes replied curtly, “I don’t want to fight a war protecting Mrs. Williams’ pleasure dome.” That night, Donovan ordered Downes to get out of Italy and stay out.32

The contrast between Taylor’s SLUS and Donovan’s OSS could scarcely have been greater. The one was professional, serious, efficient, dedicated, and self-effacing, while the other was amateur, comic, unproductive, and self-serving.

THE ITALIAN CAMPAIGN WAS, for the Allies, the most frustrating of the war. Hopes were high and expenditures of men and equipment were heavy, but results were slim. In August, three weeks before the invasion, ULTRA revealed that Hitler had decided to pull out of southern and central Italy. He wanted Kesselring to bring his divisions north and put them under Rommel, who had taken over command in northern Italy. As this plan seemed to make good strategic sense, and because the Italians were negotiating secretly with Ike’s chief of staff, Bedell Smith, and his G-2, Ken Strong, to pull a double-cross on the Germans, Eisenhower expected a relatively unopposed landing at Salerno. What he got was some of the toughest fighting of the war, and another lesson in the perils of undue reliance on ULTRA.

It is widely believed that Hitler kept a tight control on the various Wehrmacht battlefields, retaining for himself the right to make not only strategic but also tactical decisions. That may have been generally true on the Russian front, but elsewhere the German generals seem to have been able to use their own judgment and even flaunt Hitler’s direct orders. If it worked, they got away with it. For Kesselring, in Italy, it worked.

Kesselring did not like Rommel and liked even less the prospect of turning his troops over to Rommel’s command. Further, Kesselring believed that Rome could be successfully defended. He therefore delayed and obstructed the movement of his troops northward, so that when the attack came on September 9 he still had the bulk of his forces south of Rome. Against Hitler’s better judgment and contrary to his orders, Kesselring decided to launch an all-out counterattack against the Allied beachhead at Salerno. ULTRA revealed only a little of Kesselring’s movements, mainly because the Germans had relatively secure telephone lines in Italy and thus did not need to use the radio.33

ULTRA could provide only an insight into the enemy’s plans, intentions, and capabilities. It could not provide fighting men, tanks, planes, ships, or aggressive generals. At Salerno, Mark Clark had expected a cakewalk. Instead, his troops were under terrific pressure from the Germans in what was one of the most dangerous moments of the entire war for the Allied armies in Europe. An army of two corps, with four divisions, was on the verge of annihilation. Ike received a message from Clark that indicated that Clark was about to put his headquarters on board ship. It made Ike almost frantic. He told Butcher that the headquarters should leave last, that Clark ought to show the spirit of a naval captain and if necessary go down with his ship. Like the Russians at Stalingrad, he should stand and fight.

Fortunately, Clark stayed, rescued by the Allied naval and air forces. Eisenhower put every bomber in the Mediterranean to work pounding the German forces at Salerno, and brought in the British Navy to bombard the German positions with their big naval guns.34 Meanwhile, Monty’s Eighth Army was coming up from the toe of Italy after an unopposed crossing from Sicily to Italy over the Straits of Messina, a crossing supported by an all-out artillery barrage that was comic-opera stuff. The only casualty was an escaped lion from the Reggio zoo.35 Kesselring reluctantly decided that his attempt to throw the Allies back into the sea had failed, and he signaled Hitler—ULTRA picked it up—that he was withdrawing to a line just north of Naples. Hitler approved—he was much impressed by Kesselring’s resistance to date—and Eisenhower breathed a sigh of relief.

In the campaign in Italy that followed, ULTRA continued to provide the Allied commanders with high-grade information. Why, then, did the campaign go so badly? The major reason was the Germans themselves, who fought skillfully and fanatically in mountainous terrain ideally suited to their defensive genius. Another factor of considerable importance was that the Allied divisions were being steadily withdrawn from the Mediterranean to go to England to prepare for the 1944 invasion of France. A third factor was incompetent Allied, especially American, generalship.

Nowhere did this incompetence show more clearly than in the Anzio landings of January 1944. Briefly, the idea was to get an American corps behind Kesselring’s lines in order to cut his communications with Rome and thus force him to retreat to northern Italy. Churchill said he wanted to hurl a wildcat ashore; what he got instead, he later complained, was a stranded whale. The Americans sat at Anzio while the Germans pounded them day after day, week after week. In the end, far from forcing Kesselring to pull back, the troops at Anzio had to be rescued by Allied forces coming up from the south.

Who was to blame? Mark Clark pointed to ULTRA. He said that his forces would have moved inland on the first day, thus effectively cutting Kesselring’s supply line, but ULTRA information indicated that the Germans were moving major units into the region and that therefore his men had to dig in to await the assault. This claim has made various British writers furious, and rightly so. Lewin shows conclusively that the ULTRA information was absolutely sound, that it did indicate a German buildup against the beachhead, but that it also showed that it would take two or three days for the Germans to get to the scene. Meanwhile, Clark’s men sat and the campaign was lost before it got started.36

By then, Ike had left the Mediterranean. Roosevelt had selected him to be the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Forces—one of the most coveted commands in the history of warfare. In England, he would have available to him for the cross-Channel attack the resources of the two great democracies, including thousands of war planes and ships and millions of fighting men.

By no means the least of the resources under his command were the secret ones, which had been built with such skill and patience by the British (and later the Americans) for the moment when the democracies would hurl their armed might across the Channel. These secret resources included guerrilla forces in France, sabotage units, British and American spies, turned German spies in Britain, ULTRA, and countless deception devices. Success in OVERLORD would depend not only on how well Ike used his ships, planes, and fighting men, but also on how well he managed his secret forces.


* In an interview in 1979, former SLU Stuyvesant Wainwright II agreed that it was remarkable that the secret was kept so long. He explained, “Don’t forget we all signed the British Secrecy Act. Have you ever seen one? It practically says your testicles will be cut off and you’ll spend the rest of your life in the local clink if you open your mouth, that you would practically disappear in a Stalinist camp in Northern Siberia if anything came out about ULTRA.… It never occurred to me to discsuss it until thirty years later. I never discussed it with my wife. She always wanted to know what I had done and I never told her.”