Codebreakers Victory (16 page)

With the fall of France, Europe became a highly productive rumor mill, grinding out estimates of what Hitler would do next. As early as August 1940 the respected British agent Paul Thummel, code-named A-54, began sending reports directly from within the German military that Hitler was planning an attack on the Soviets. The intelligence branch responsible for the Russian area, Thummel said, had been expanding since June, the counterintelligence had also been urgently increased and the whole intelligence organization was reinforced with specialists on Ukraine, the Crimea and the Caucasus. Other agents reported the eastward deployment of German divisions into Poland and, after a transit agreement agreed to by the Finns, to the eastern borders of Finland. In December a newly organized network of Polish agents sent word of a German push to increase west-east road and rail construction.

None of it was persuasive to British intelligence. Their myopic view was that Hitler could not possibly consider attacking Russia while the second-front war with Britain continued. The buildup of German forces in the east was simply to guard against a drive by the USSR or to blackmail Stalin into further concessions. Until Great Britain was defeated, Germany would not fight Russia "except in dire emergency." Churchill himself believed that the Germans and Russians had more to gain by "overrunning and dividing the British Empire in the East" than by going to war with one another.

Then Bletchley Park decrypts began to change his mind. On March 26, 1941, an Enigma message pinpointed the shift of three armored divisions and two important headquarters locations from the Balkans to Krakow in Poland. On March 30 a BP summary concluded that the evidence it was receiving confirmed a large-scale operation against Russia. Churchill became convinced. He wrote later that the information from his "most trusted source" had "illuminated the whole Eastern scene in a lightning flash." The sudden movement to Krakow of so much armor needed in the Balkan sphere could only mean Hitler's intention to invade Russia in May.

Some were astonished that Churchill, to whom Communism was anathema, should try so hard to awaken the Russian dictator to his peril. His answer: "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons."

All through April and May Bletchley's GC&CS continued to amass evidence of German preparations on the Russian borders. On May 27, as an example, the Luftwaffe's Red code revealed that a German air corps was asking for maps of Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and northeast Russia. Perhaps most persuasive at this point were decrypts of the German Railways Cipher. In an endless stream they shuttled massive shipments of troops and armor supplies to the eastern frontier.

Obstinately, Britain's intelligence leaders held to the view that the Nazis were using these shows of force to achieve better terms in their negotiations with the Soviets. "With her usual thoroughness," one report declared, "Germany is making all preparations for an attack so as to make the threat convincing."

On May 31, GC&CS issued a special paper based on its Enigma decrypts. The report stated, "It becomes harder than ever to doubt that the object of these large movements of the German army and air force is Russia." The paper admitted that Hitler, no doubt, would prefer to blackmail Stalin into a bloodless surrender. "But the quiet move, for instance, of a prisoner-of-war cage to Tarnow looks more like business than bluff." To those still arguing the improbability that Hitler would be so rash as to take on a long struggle on two fronts, the paper answered that it "may well be that the Germans do not expect the struggle with Russia to be long," that Hitler was anticipating "a lightning victory."

The paper was right on target. In making his decision Hitler had been encouraged by the Soviets' earlier bumbling effort to subdue Finland. Announcing his plans to his generals back in July 1940, he had informed them that he expected no more than a five-month blitzkrieg against Russia. He had labeled the invasion Operation Barbarossa, deriving his code name from the medieval emperor who, as legend had it, lay sleeping in a mountain retreat ready to come to Germany's aid in her hour of need.

Seeking to avoid what had befallen Napoléon—"the 1812 factor"—Hitler wanted to make an early start and end the campaign before the Russian winter set in. In his Directive 21, issued on December 18, 1940, he specified that preparations for the attack must be concluded by May 15, 1941.

Churchill's messages to Stalin were only a small part of the flood of warnings pouring in on Moscow. As will be related in more detail subsequently, it was one of those times when superior intelligence did not suffice. Stalin refused to listen. In fact, he had the Soviet press fulminate against British "provocations," deploring them as efforts to drive a wedge between the USSR and Germany.

Whether he wanted help or not, the Russian dictator was about to receive it from an unexpected source.

 

 

Delaying Barbarossa's Start-up

 

As soon as Winston Churchill had accepted his codebreakers' assessment that the Germans planned to invade Russia, he began to think how fortuitous it would be if the date of that invasion could be pushed back, if the time between its launching and the arrival of the Russian winter could be shortened.

One of his principal aids in this endeavor was William Stephenson, Canadian-born industrialist and millionaire. Stephenson's story has become most widely known through a best-selling biography,
A Man Called Intrepid,
written by his near namesake William Stevenson. Unfortunately, the account is seriously flawed. Historian Nigel West has written of the book that it is "almost entirely fictional in content." Even the code name Intrepid, according to West, is false. It was the name given not to Stephenson as an individual but to the New York City operation he headed.

This much seems to be true. Stephenson was chosen to be the chief of British Security Coordination, the cover name for the New York outpost of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. As head of the BSC he established, in his native Canada, a center for clandestine activities such as training spies and fabricating materials for large-scale deceptions of the enemy. He helped negotiate the deal by which fifty mothballed U.S. destroyers went into service for the British. Behind the scenes, he did much to carry out Churchill's scheme to delay Hitler's Russian adventure as long as possible.

The opportunity for delay was presented by fomenting trouble in the Balkans. Hitler believed that this southeastern doorway into Europe must be neutralized before he went ahead with Barbarossa. His planning was complicated by his Axis partner Benito Mussolini, who in October 1940 launched a campaign against Greece while also trying to drive the British out of North Africa. Both ventures foundered. The plucky Greeks had fought the Italians to a standstill at the same time that the campaign to take Egypt had met with embarrassing defeats. An additional problem for Hitler was that the British had occupied the island of Crete and established RAF bases in southern Greece.

He directed his generals to begin planning an early spring campaign against Greece. Otherwise, he sought to gain his objectives in the Balkans by diplomacy backed by threats. Stephenson saw his chance. Fear was supposed to compel the Balkan leaders to give in quickly and sign the Tripartite Pact, which would give the Germans military bases in, and unopposed passage through, their territories. Suppose that somehow those leaders' backbones could be stiffened and their negotiations with the Nazis dragged out for days, perhaps for weeks?

Stephenson found willing collaborators in President Roosevelt and Colonel William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, FDR's envoy-at-large who was eventually to head up the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. When Churchill requested of FDR that Donovan travel to the Balkans on Britain's behalf, Roosevelt readily agreed. Donovan's departure was carefully leaked to the press, leading to headlines such as AMERICA'S SECRET ENVOY FLIES ON MYSTERY MISSION. Stephenson was his unseen companion.

By the time Donovan arrived in the Balkans, Hungary and Romania had already given in to Germany's demands, and Bulgaria was on the verge. He flew to Sofia, Bulgaria, for talks with King Boris. Donovan's message there, and to other Balkan leaders, was that any nation that tamely submitted to the Germans would be regarded less sympathetically when the U.S. came "to settle accounts" than any nation resisting the Nazis. The king couldn't be dissuaded, but he did hesitate. Churchill indicated he would have been content with a delay of twenty-four hours; Donovan put off Bulgaria's surrender by eight days.

The crux of any Balkan campaign was Yugoslavia. It offered more suitable terrain and the best railway system for German intervention in Greece. The British had tried to persuade Prince Paul, regent for young King Peter II, to have Yugoslavia join them in defense of Greece, but Paul refused. He had already been summoned to Berchtesgaden for a browbeating session with Hitler and felt driven to give in to the Germans' demands, even though the agreement was anathema to him: he was an Anglophile graduate of Oxford and had a Greek princess as his wife. Donovan flew to Belgrade and persuaded Paul, too, to drag out his negotiations with the Germans. Secretly Donovan also sent messages to Yugoslav opposition leaders: "If Prince Paul kneels to the Nazis, revolt."

That was what happened. After extending negotiations as long as he thought possible, Paul caved in to the Nazis. Immediately Serb general Dusan Simovic led a palace coup, forced Paul to abdicate and installed Peter II as monarch.

Back in the U.S., Donovan delivered a deliberately provocative report to the nation on the courageous Balkans' defiance of the Nazis.

The plotters hoped that Hitler would fly into a tantrum, as he had before, and do something foolish. Now, as Churchill expressed it, "He had a burst of that convulsive anger which momentarily blotted out thought and sometimes impelled him on his most dire adventures." Hitler called his generals together and told them that since the Yugoslavs had become an uncertain factor in the coming action against Greece and in his plans for Barbarossa, the German army must be diverted to punish them.

His orders were carried out with unmerciful harshness. For three days German bombers attacked Belgrade, flying in virtually unopposed to drop their missiles from rooftop height. Much of the city was destroyed, with heavy losses in civilian lives. The German army crossed the borders and in eleven days crushed the Yugoslav forces.

Yet the Germans also suffered damage—not in terms of military casualties, which were few, but in world opinion. People outside the Axis had been thrilled by the Yugoslav revolt and then horrified by the savagery of the Nazi response.

The sacrifice of the Yugoslavs had another effect, which world opinion at the time could not appreciate. The German command had hoped to begin their campaign in Greece on March 1. The trouble stirred up for them in the Balkans was a factor in delaying their attack to April 6.

Churchill felt obliged to support Greece, his one Balkan ally, in her resistance against the Nazi juggernaut, even though BP decrypts clearly showed that troops sent there would face a grim prospect. In fact, British intelligence warned the chiefs of staff, "We must be prepared to face the loss of all forces sent to Greece." Nevertheless, Churchill directed General Archibald Wavell in North Africa to detach three of his crack divisions and dispatch them to Greece—a transfer that began March 4.

The fight in Greece went pretty much as the pessimists had predicted. The Greek army and the British detachment were outnumbered and, within three weeks, overwhelmed. There was one significant high note. Bletchley Park had been reading the Germans' messages and for the first time arranged to send the substance of its decrypts directly to the commanders in the field. They made good use of the intelligence, managing a series of skillful withdrawals and, in the end, a substantial evacuation of the divisions that had been sent there.

The ships of Admiral Cunningham brought off a smaller Dunkirk, rescuing more than fifty thousand British and Greek soldiers while having to leave only eleven thousand behind. With the Luftwaffe in control of the air, the cost to the Royal Navy was high: twenty-six ships were lost in the operation.

Once again superior intelligence could not right the balance against too-powerful opposition. As Hinsley noted, however, "The high-grade Sigint sent out from the United Kingdom helped to reduce the scale of the calamity."

 

 

Crete, the Germans' Pyrrhic Victory

 

Even with the Balkans subdued, Hitler could not rest easy in his plans for Barbarossa as long as the British threatened from the island of Crete. Besides, he had a group of fighters who were chafing for action. These were the paratrooper corps under the command of Hermann Goring. Still smarting over his defeat in the Battle of Britain, Goring himself was eager for a chance to recoup the Luftwaffe's reputation.

His airborne brigades were made up of the cream of German youth, the most ardent of the young Nazis, and although they had made small-scale drops in Norway and the Netherlands, they were itching to win a major victory for the führer. They saw Crete as their opportunity.

The attack was intended to be a complete surprise to the island's Allied troops, mainly New Zealanders and Australians evacuated from Greece. Suddenly out of the skies on a May morning, following an air and sea softening-up bombardment, thousands of elite parachutists would come floating down and would be followed by a flight of eighty towed gliders hauling additional soldiers and heavy equipment. Still more firepower would come from sea convoys ferrying in troops and armor.

But of course the codebreakers knew all about the attack. "At no moment in the war," Churchill wrote, "was our intelligence so truly and precisely informed." He was pledged not to reveal the source of that intelligence, but we now know that Ultra cryptanalysts began disclosing the German intentions against Crete the day after Hitler issued his directive. Although Bletchley was still struggling with German army and navy codes, those of the Luftwaffe were an open book. Masses of information were accumulated as the Germans prepared their operation. On May 20, when the attack was to begin, Britain's commander, New Zealand general Bernard Freyberg, knew when, where and in what strength the Nazi parachutists and gliders would be attacking.