Though it was infuriating for MI 9’s staff to discover that so many thousand prisoners had been moved away across the Brenner Pass from Italy into the Reich, there was one crumb of comfort that Crockatt was able to extract from this setback. It much enlarged the number of trained observers that he had in Germany.
Readers will recall how easily and how constantly Beaconsfield was able to communicate with prisoner of war camps when arrangements were being made for escapes. The system of code interchange was repeatedly proved perfectly secure; its only disadvantages were that it was rather slow and that preparing messages in it had to be done in the camps behind some sort of look-out screen. Crockatt was fully aware that his sections had not been placed in the military intelligence directorate by accident; obviously enough, much of his time and all of MI 9’s attention went on extracting intelligence from captured members of the Axis forces. That MI 9 also had a significant role as a source of intelligence has hitherto been overlooked.
Historical angels will fear to tread at all in the pool of British intelligence performance in the last world war before they have read F. H. Hinsley’s still unfinished official history of the subject. No doubt Professor Hinsley, to whose far greater knowledge and capacity we defer, has access to much once highly secret material from which we have quite properly been barred. Yet it may not be altogether foolish to rush into print on this subject. A little can be perceived from the files, and more can safely be conjectured.
It was the task of Rawlinson’s staff at MI 19 to get all that they could out of enemy captives; they certainly got a good deal. 187How and how much are separate questions, awaiting somebody’s book when the papers are available. We need pause no more than a moment to recall that Rait once saw a manuscript minute at the top of a paper of Crockatt’s, produced for one of the early interdepartmental meetings about the impending threat from Hitler’s revenge weapons, the V1 pilotless aircraft and the V2 rocket. The minute was strongly favourable and initialled ‘WSC’. It had in fact been from an MI 19 report, on the indiscretions of two captured German generals, that it had first become known that Peenemünde was the experimental station where the Germans were preparing the V2: hence the RAF’s devastating raid of 17/18 August 1943. That Peenemünde was an experimental rocket station had long been known, from the subsequently famous Oslo report; it was also used for the V1.
The American interrogation staffs that worked in MIS-Y in parallel with MI 19 found out a certain amount from their prisoners about how Allied prisoners behaved under interrogation, a subject of lively and perpetual interest to Crockatt and Catesby Jones alike; one or two fragments may be quotable. On 3 April 1944 for example a captured German interrogator remarked that he had found some German-Americans fairly amenable, especially when he could soften them up by letting them visit relatives. He had found the English ‘better disciplined and more steady, above all better informed. They knew exactly how to behave themselves in German captivity, while the Americans tended to trust to their own judgement.’ According to a captured German IO, over four months later, ‘more than 85 per cent of the American P/Ws would give only their name, rank, and serial number. About 10 per cent were responsive to the extent of giving orally their unit, and about 5 per cent carried documents – mostly letters, notes and diaries – which gave valuable information.’ (American soldiers will keep letters with them in the line, one of them explained, because ‘they cannot get toilet paper and dislike the use of grass’; a straightforward account, if not a polite one. It gets added poignancy 188from a complaint by an American prisoner in Austria: on arrival at his Stalag, ‘Each man was given one roll of toilet paper and this has to last him for a year.’)
On the other hand, ‘One German officer informed our men that any information received from a German prisoner of war could be relied upon, because no German would give false information’, a staggering instance of how far rational self-delusion could progress in the age of Goebbels.
Reports from repatriated Allied prisoners were of enormous value, if the people concerned had been well enough briefed before they left enemy territory and were well enough interrogated when they got back; both for understanding the conditions in which they had been imprisoned, and for whatever of direct military interest might have caught their eyes on the way out, or have been impressed on them by the SAO or SBO before ever they left camp. One day all these reports should surface, and will need to be sifted through, first by military and then by social historians. The last-named group will hardly find an odder tale than that of the two American prisoners of war ‘who struck a deep friendship after discovering from pictures over their respective bunks that they had the same wife.’
Anyone interested in unravelling ‘Amy’, the RAF’s first code, will find among MI 9’s papers the little pocket English-German dictionary on which it was based. Book codes were safe enough to be used by the Russian secret service well on into the war; and it was perhaps part of the cover for ‘Amy’ to use so very common and insignificant-looking a volume – its pages measure less than 2 1/2” x 4”’. Winterbottom pressed on nevertheless with devising more codes. By the late summer of 1942 he had six distributed, one at least of them to MIS-X, and a seventh which Hooker had helped him to prepare which was ready for use; three more were in reserve by the autumn. The Americans after their early fiasco were content to use British codes, and did not devise any of their own. Simonds took the seventh out to the 189Middle East on his way back from America. Traffic was brisk; in April and May 1943 two successive records were set, of 367 and 413 messages successfully received in code at Beaconsfield. Forty-seven of the May ones acknowledged receipt of escape kit parcels.
A condition of the efficient working of the code system in the camps was rigorous security. An elaborate watch system was sometimes needed to protect the coders while they were at work, and they had to take particular trouble about burning all their working papers when they had finished. In Oflags, and officers’ camps in Italy, this was difficult but not impossible. In other ranks’ camps there was much less privacy and therefore much less security; consequently, fewer opportunities for code users to operate. Goodness knows there was little enough privacy in many Oflags, but the law of the jungle did not work so naturally in them; they were comparatively well disciplined, and rank counted for something.
At first the bulk of the messages exchanged with camps dealt with the minutiae of escaping and the passage of escape equipment, and in some camps the coding system was used for little if anything else. The decision about this lay partly in MI 9’s and MIS-X’s hands, partly in those of the SBO or SAO. Given that the senior officer was ready to play, the fact was that the British and later the Americans had several thousand highly accomplished watchers, young, lively-minded, observant and well-informed, scattered all over enemy-occupied territory in Europe and all over the enemy’s homeland as well. Everyone brought up in the traditions of the old officer class knew – whether himself an officer or not – that it was a standing part of his duty to keep his eyes open for anything he could see about the enemy’s behaviour, and to report it to his superior; whether his superior was his section corporal, or the pilot of his crew, or a distant commander-in-chief. The only aspects of this duty that changed when a man became a prisoner were that there might not be much of service interest for him to see, and 190that his reports did not travel as fast. Such a concept of duty spread rapidly from the regulars, in whom it was ingrained, all through the volunteers and conscripts who manned all three fighting services, British and American alike. Prisoners of war were thoroughly imbued with it. They had slow but sure means of communication; the slowness of it was its major disadvantage. A minor difficulty was that the volume of traffic the means could handle was limited; they could only write a few short letters each a month.
The data so far available on the subject of exchanges with camps are limited. In the USA it was the one point on which inquiries were met with a polite but total refusal of information.1 In London, only three files of actual messages exchanged have so far been released, those to Marlag-Milag Nord near Hamburg and those from Oflags VIIC and XIIB. It may be conjectured that there are plenty more to come, unless the weeders have had an unusually large bonfire. There is base enough already on which to build some account of what could be done.
On 4 March 1941 for example Oflag VIIC at Laufen reported ‘doubled gliding seen daily’ – the report was in England by 22 March – and added a week later ‘triple gliding seen. understand all long leave stopping from mid-april’. It is easy in retrospect to associate these messages with General Student’s airborne attack on Crete in May 1941. At the time they were more probably taken to presage some airborne blow at a Red Army target – Hitler was known to be preparing to attack Stalin, as he did on 22 June – and this can serve as yet another example of the difference between knowledge and understanding.
The British parachute party that raided the Tragino viaduct in south-central Italy in February 1941 included an unusually 191large number of code users, and by June 1941 – observe the comparative sloth of the Italian posts – the war diary was able to record that ‘important information’ had been received from them. In the autumn the British chiefs of staff sent friendly secret messages to every camp with which MI 9 was in contact, wishing them luck; so did George VI; so did Churchill; and the Queen of the Netherlands exchanged lengthy messages with her subjects in Colditz.
These were formalities; heartening, not necessarily essential. There was plenty of real work to be done as well. Allied intelligence officers in the large fixed camps in Germany realised quite early on that to secure ‘Escaping information was only a subsidiary duty’, and that their most useful task was to exploit their position as observers on enemy soil. From the middle of 1941, when the Germans’ attack on Russia transformed the face of the war, and the attack’s failure to secure another prompt knock-out blow made an ultimate Nazi victory less likely, SBOs in air force camps at least had got control over all the code users under their command, and directed the traffic in information.
The key personalities here were the camp IOs, who conducted the quasi-formal and very searching interrogations of all new arrivals and of returned unsuccessful escapers. More than one German attempt to plant a stool-pigeon in an Oflag was detected at this initial stage. An Egyptian officer for instance who was smuggled into Colditz was placed under close arrest within a few hours of his arrival, thanks to the IO’s vigilance; the SBO told the commandant that he would answer for the Egyptian’s life by day, but not after dark, and the man was removed. Support for the IOs’ work was provided by what Crockatt once called in a moment of pardonable euphoria ‘the marvellous security prevailing in all P/W camps’. Behind a tough screen of lookouts, or during an innocent and apparently friendly trudge round the compound, they inquired rigidly into how, where, and why each new arrival had been made a prisoner. Vitally important data were provided for the Air Ministry in 192this way, both about defects in Allied aircraft and about enemy fighter and anti-aircraft tactics. Cundall’s reports from Sagan had an appreciable impact on bomber command’s conduct of night raids, for Cundall was able to infer and describe German developments in airborne radar.2 There were no doubt important points about enemy anti-submarine tactics to be discovered also, though the nearest that the accessible papers get to describing this is a telegram of congratulation to Donald Cameron, VC, from the submarine service, sent clandestinely after his gallant attack on Tirpitz had led him into Marlag-Milag Nord. And a whole host of points of interest about land fighting must have been available also.
The principal value of prisoners of war as an intelligence source lay all the same in the brute fact that they were present in the enemy’s heartland and were bound to have some notion of what was going on there. Camp IOs reckoned that returned escapers – people who had got out, and were then caught and brought back – were their best sources of all, provided that they had briefed them before their escape on what to observe. If the escape succeeded, then a cornucopia of information could be poured out into the ears of the first service attaché the escaper met on neutral ground. Cartwright in Berne did much more of this work than his opposite numbers in Madrid and Stockholm; they were more concerned with passing ex-prisoners on promptly home, he as a rule had time on his hands before he could find them a route. And if the escape failed, expert cross-questioning after the would-be escaper had done his turn in solitary could extract the main tidbits, and they would reach Beaconsfield as 193soon as a letter could get there. MI 9 had adequate arrangements with the postal censorship for the prompt interception and copying of prisoners’ mail; Winterbottom found the families concerned were uniformly helpful in bearing with this brief and necessary drill.
If MI 6 had useful agents of its own in Germany during the war, apart from the author of the Oslo report, the secret has been remarkably well kept; this is a point on which Hinsley will be read with particular interest. MI 9 did what it could to fill any gap.
Several camps maintained train-watches – how many trains, loaded with what, in which directions – for years on end. Dobrilugk, Weinsberg, Thorn and Heydekrug, each beside a main railway line, were well placed to do this; Dobrilugk was at the crossing of two. Some maintained airfield watches, though unhappily there is no trace of an organisation fit to mount an airfield watch at Steglitz, the large Stalag in the south-western suburbs of Berlin: a chance to watch the comings and goings at Tempelhof was clearly missed. At Sagan the prisoners watched the local airfield – pine trees hid direct sight of it from the camp, but they were close enough to get a view of most aircraft circling in to land – and from this watch reported German progress with a jet fighter, one of the technical aspects of warfare in which the Germans were well in front of the Allies. A rare fragment of the American correspondence section’s information has surfaced here, and is in point: ‘Hun engineers claim jet propulsion problem licked. Ready for mass production’ on 30 July 1944. Can it be that WO 208/3284, the camp history of the Belaria compound at Sagan which was close to the airfield, has been withheld because it is full of technical information that is still thought to be sensitive?
One important kind of reporting that prisoners could engage in was the identification of German dummies and other camouflage: not only those mile-long strips of netting that were used in vain to baffle radar-equipped bombers about the real shape of German ports, but the presence of simulated aircraft 194on disused airfields of which the nature might have been impossible to unravel by air photography. Extensive and frequent reports were also provided about bomb damage and the lack of it: ‘opel works near mainz station and salzbach oil refinery intact early august’ 1944, for instance, or ‘big oil plant at hochst undisturbed’ two months later.
Davies-Scourfield has an anecdote which illustrates vividly how much this sort of reporting was a matter of routine, and what sudden perils could lurk in it. One day in Colditz he and a friend were sitting preparing a bomb damage report, drawn from the observation of a newly arrived inmate. They had papers spread over the table in front of them, in full confidence that the cry of ‘Goons up!’ from the duty pilot would give them all the time they needed to clear away, before a goon could get up the stairs. For once the duty pilot failed: glancing across the room, Davies-Scourfield saw a German corporal he knew walking up to him. He and his friend both leaned well forward on their elbows, covering up as much of the table surface as they could. ‘Come on’, said the corporal, tugging at a corner of paper that stuck out from beneath Davies-Scourfield’s sleeve, ‘I know that’s a map – give it me.’ ‘It’s not a map.’ ‘You promise me it’s not a map? Nothing to do with escape?’ ‘I promise.’ ‘On your word of honour as an officer!’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Very well, then’ – and the corporal walked out.
Besides indicating bomb damage, prisoners could perform another important agent’s task: they could indicate targets. The Hadamar camp put up several, including ‘big hun hq in white hotel about 9 km n.e. of pistoia on north side rly pistoia to bologna where it emerges from tunnel’, and ‘wetzlar cement works adjoining west side railway station now become steel plant’. This pair of messages must stand in here for a great many more, which must have been valuable to the British and American staffs whose task it was to hunt for bomber targets.
Much more far-ranging information could be got from 195a camp that took its intelligence duties seriously. The air force camps at Heydekrug and Sagan certainly came in this category. At both, trading with the enemy was developed to such a degree that many Germans became more or less willing accomplices of their prisoners and could be persuaded by a sort of benevolent blackmail to part with masses of information. Roger Bushell, who was mentioned as an early escaper from Oberursel, was in charge of trading at Sagan from June 1942, as well as a great many other things; and secured data on a variety of points, which Sagan continued to report home until the camp was moved west on the Russians’ approach early in 1945.
The Sagan camp sought and found reports on troop movements; locations, strengths, sometimes even identifications of units; on locations of airfields, with numbers and types of aircraft on them; on details of ground and anti-aircraft defences; on experiments with new weapons – what, where, and how defended; on local railway traffic in troops and raw materials; on German reactions to various types of warfare; on German morale in general; on bomb damage; and on how things stood economically – prices, surpluses, shortages. As the camp staff came from all over the Reich, Sagan’s range of information though far from all-embracing was extensive. This sort of report cannot be claimed to have been of overwhelming importance, but it was certainly useful, valuable even, to the Intelligence community in London and in Washington. It provided a series of cross-checks on ‘Ultra’ interceptions of the most secret cipher traffic the Germans deluded themselves was indecipherable; and on several other sources of information, such as newspapers. These checks were indispensable in assessing other sources’ reliability and for probing the veracity of those who proffered data: a perpetual intelligence problem.
If ever ‘Ultra’ vanished, as – any day – it might, prisoners of war provided much the strongest alternative as a source for whatever of military interest was going on in Germany. The traditionary caution must again be inserted here, to the effect 196that the British secret intelligence service may have had numerous and highly qualified agents scattered all round the Third Reich. Certainly no trace of them was perceptible to the agents who were parachuted into Germany by the Americans during the last winter of the war.
One neat minor example can be given of how the escape services at one moment knew more about Germany than the Germans themselves. An undated American manual on prisoners’ security and escape mentioned that the branch line bridge over the Rhine a mile south of Remagen, upstream of Bonn, was unlikely to be guarded. This was the bridge the Americans found still intact (though no longer unguarded) when all the others had been blown up, on 7 March 1945.
An odd example of where MI 9 and MIS-X stood among the other bodies dealing with more or less secret subjects, and of how they got on with each other, may be taken from the American files. About 1 August 1943 – uncharacteristically, he left the date off his letter – Crockatt wrote by air mail to Catesby Jones, to pass on a captured German corporal’s indiscretion. Several months earlier this man had been on a fighting patrol in Tunisia that ‘found the Americans asleep in their slit trenches, without sentry or outpost and were able to take about fifty of them prisoners before the rest awoke’. Crockatt added in his own hand: ‘We are not making any distribution of this information other than to you in this letter’. Jones replied with equal tact and courtesy. He thought on 9 August that it might be useful to the British in general and Crockatt in particular to know that the Germans’ operations on the currency market in Lisbon were enabling them to trace the numbers on the notes passed to Allied agents in France.
A great many prisoners worked as hard as they could to lower German morale, and by so doing helped to raise their own. The tone displayed in such books as Sam Kydd’s For You the War is Over, a tone of Cockney assurance and invincible ignorance, 197must have been maddening for Germans and Italians alike, but it was a tone that most British and some American working-class prisoners adopted: the attitude of men who have been personally unlucky, but remain perfectly sure that their own side is the right one and is bound to win. British captives – even Texan, even Australian captives – were not so cocky towards the Japanese, for reasons that a moment’s reflection on the history of the war will make clear there was hardly anything in Asia for the Allies to be cocky about for quite a time.
Nothing is said in this chapter about intelligence provided from camps in Asia, because there the extreme sloth of prisoner of war mail made communications all but impossible. Once – just once – Bevan, the head of the deception service, was able to use a letter sent in to a naval petty officer who was a prisoner in Germany, to mislead the Japanese about the completion date of a new British battlecruiser, but the incident was exceptional.
In one or two camps in Germany the business of lowering enemy morale was taken up in a big way, as soon as the course of the war provided opportunities for German-speaking prisoners. Rhodes’s Highgate course always stressed the importance of making as much of an unmitigated nuisance of oneself as possible, as the keynote of a prisoner’s attitude to the enemy; provided that the nuisance did not obstruct escape. Hence the value of goon-baiting. Roger Bushell in Sagan added to his other responsibilities the task, codenamed ‘Plug’, of adapting the Chinese water-on-a-stone torture technique to the minds of the Germans with whom he was in contact. He was a barrister by profession, and used a lawyer’s subtlety to confuse and dismay them, which over many months’ relentless application achieved some notable results. It is not known whether the Gestapo had taken in his importance in Sagan’s secret anti-Nazi schemes; but it is certain that he was one of those who went through the notorious Sagan tunnel, and never reached home.
Crockatt was particularly delighted by a captured SS secret report on internal security in Germany, dated 12 August 1943. 198Its provenance is unstated in the only accessible copies. Just possibly it was captured in Sicily, in the closing stages of the Axis retreat there; it would be like the SS to send a secret document on to a battlefield everybody else could see was already doomed. In it, the unknown author commented on the self-possessed bearing of British prisoners of war. The hangdog look that had accompanied the victims of the great German drives of 1940 had disappeared.3 These men always looked well dressed and well fed. Their uniforms, seen from close to, were of far better quality than those of the Wehrmacht. They bore themselves in challenging and aggressive, almost arrogant attitudes, full of confidence in victory. The impact of their distribution of chocolate and cigarettes on the morale of chance-met German civilians was deplorable.
This was precisely one of the effects that Crockatt believed his department had been set up to create. In their small way, prisoners who behaved like this were helping to win the war. Those of them who joined in the provision of intelligence were helping in a much more formidable way. Needless to say this intelligence work had to be kept a deadly secret at the time and for long after; though the inquisitive Philby can hardly have failed to know of it, or to report it to his masters in Moscow.
One of the sharper agonies of imprisonment was provided by letters from home announcing to prisoners that their girlfriends, or even their wives, had thrown them over for someone else. Many were fortunate; many others were not. Inconstant women often said that they had taken up with someone who was still active in the war; how could they know that their 199rejected men folk might still be playing an extremely perilous part? How perilous it was, Crockatt well knew, and so did the participants at the sharp end. It might be a nice question for an international lawyer to determine whether a uniformed prisoner of war was legally entitled to amass military information about his enemy, and to try by subterfuge to transmit it back to his own side’s staff. No one at the time had much doubt which way such a question would have been decided by a Nazi court. That it never arose is a tribute to the collective, cohesive security of prisoners of war, as well as a tribute to the care that Crockatt and Johnston took to make sure that prisoners never took unjustifiable risks.
1Neither Pape, Boldness be my friend, nor J. M. Green, From Colditz in code, nor J. Borrie, Despite captivity appeared to have been read in the Pentagon by mid-February 1978. Things may have eased up since.
2 Oddly enough Cundall’s name does not figure on the long list of those: who communicated in code from Sagan (WO 208/3283, 67–70). Jones’] certainly saw his reports (conversation with Jones, 1977); he may have had a code arranged privately with Dansey behind Jones’s back, or he may have been left off the Sagan list by mistake.
3There was an unforgettable shot in the film Sieg im Westen of a disconsolate party of Tommies in battledress, looking thoroughly down in the mouth, accompanied by ‘We’ll hang our washing on the Siegfried Line’ played at half speed on a solo oboe. A Paris audience in October 1940 was less impressed: someone called out contemptuously ‘Was that all they took?’ (Personal knowledge).