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The fires of a distant war

The Second World War began far from Australia, on a moonlit autumn night in Poland. Before dawn on the morning of 1 September 1939, a bomb fell from the sky onto the Polish town of Wieluń, exploding on the All Saints Hospital. More bombs followed, also hitting the hospital, killing 32 people. Air-raid sirens sounded as the bombs fell like rain, destroying almost all of the town’s buildings and killing more than 1000 residents.

The bombs were being dropped by the Luftwaffe, the formidable German air force, under the command of Field Marshal Hermann Goering, as part of a coordinated series of attacks by Germany on Poland. The 32 patients and staff who died in the All Saints Hospital were the first people killed in the Second World War — a war that would ultimately cause the deaths of more than 60 million people and wreak unprecedented devastation.

There were no Polish troops in Wieluń, no heavy industries, no major transportation routes. There was nothing of military value there — only the sleeping residents, woken by the sounds of explosions and air-raid sirens. The first deaths in the bloodiest war in history were utterly pointless, even from a military strategic perspective.

Within minutes of the air raid on Wieluń, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein, anchored in the harbour near the Polish military garrison of Westerplatte on the Baltic Sea, started shelling the Polish outpost. German naval infantry troops landed and attempted to storm the garrison. The fighting at Westerplatte continued into the days ahead until the garrison was seized.

As the sun rose on the first day of September, the German army began a full-scale invasion of Poland with one million troops. Two days after the start of the invasion, Poland activated its alliance with the nations of Britain and France, which both declared war on Germany and initiated a naval blockade of German shipping. Australia, New Zealand, and India declared war on Germany within hours of Britain doing so.

The German army reached the Polish capital, Warsaw, in two weeks. The day after the Germans encircled the city, Russia began its own invasion of Poland from the east. Russia and Germany had previously entered into a secret non-aggression pact, and as part of that pact had made a deal to carve up Poland between them.

Germany was in the grip of a wave of nationalistic fervour and a cult of personality around its charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler. Fascism was a political movement sweeping Europe that emphasised nationalism, military strength, and racism, particularly against Jews. Hitler’s Nazi party took fascism to its limits. Blaming Jews and bankers for many of the problems of ordinary German people, he promised to restore Germany to the glory it had enjoyed before the First World War. The Nazi party had its own army, a paramilitary organisation called the Schutzstaffel, usually known as the SS. Hitler also established a secret police force, the Gestapo, to locate and imprison dissidents. And now, with the invasion of Poland, Hitler had set Germany on the path to greatness once more.

Hitler was friendly with the leaders of other fascist nations in Europe and elsewhere, but there were two nations in particular that he bound tightly with Germany in a series of agreements: Italy and Japan.1 Italy had been ruled by the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini since 1929. Mussolini’s volunteer militia, the ‘Blackshirts’, persecuted political opponents, as did his secret police force. Japan’s prime minister at the outset of Germany’s invasion of Poland was Nobuyuki Abe, who had taken the position the day before. Japan’s government was engaged in a series of crises while the Imperial Japanese Army consolidated its control over the nation under General Hideki Tojo. Under Tojo’s leadership the army was engaged in military expansion of its own in East Asia.

The three nations were the core of Hitler’s network of alliances known as the Axis.

In opposition to the Axis were Britain, France, Australia, Canada, and other nations, known as the Allies. The United States would be forced into the war two years later with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor; but, for now, as bombs fell on Wieluń and German tanks rolled across the Polish border, America did not take sides.

Beneath all the upheaval of the beginnings of war, as troops marched by the millions over borders, as leaders of nations were discarded and new leaders arose, there was another war — a hidden war for inside intelligence and information — that had been underway for years.

A short drive out of London in the English countryside there is a large old manor named Bletchley Park, which at the time was the home of the Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS), a secret organisation dedicated to breaking the codes and ciphers of other nations and reading their most confidential messages. There, a team led by the brilliant Alan Turing were trying to crack high-level German diplomatic and military messages enciphered with a machine known as ‘Enigma’. An ingenious series of cogs and wheels enciphered each message in such a way that it could only be read with the help of another Enigma. The team had intercepted plenty of Enigma messages sent to and from German diplomats and commanders, all of which were unreadable. If Alan Turing’s code-breakers could read them, the British and their Allies would glean important secret information and gain an edge in the war.

The code-breakers at Bletchley Park also toiled to break lower-level codes of the German army, navy, and air force, as well as the codes and ciphers of Russia, Italy, and other nations.

There was a Japanese section, too, devoted to breaking and intercepting Japanese military and diplomatic messages, many of which were collected from radio transmissions in East Asia, which they called the ‘Far East’. The GCCS had a subsidiary organisation in Hong Kong, the Far East Combined Bureau, that had been intercepting Japanese military radio transmissions and breaking Japanese codes for over 10 years, thanks to the work of an Australian naval officer, Eric Nave.

But with war erupting across Europe, work on Japanese codes was naturally a low priority, and the Japanese section at Bletchley Park was small compared to the large teams attacking German, Italian, and Russian codes and ciphers. Decrypting the messages of Japanese generals was less important than trying to read Hitler’s mail.