Codebreakers Victory (23 page)

For the U.S. a tragic omission in Oshima's reports was any word about Pearl Harbor. If the Japanese military had let him in on their plans, he would no doubt have wired back that he had relayed this information to Hitler. But since the generals were cagey about what they told the diplomats, there was nothing explicit for Allied eavesdroppers to overhear.

As the war progressed, the Allies learned more about the fighting on the eastern front from Oshima than from the Russians themselves. In March 1943, for instance, the Soviet gave a large Japanese contingent permission to travel across Russia, east to west and then down through neutral territory and on to Berlin. Everyone in the troupe was a spy, eager to gather information as the tour progressed. From Berlin, using Oshima's Purple machine, they reported back to Tokyo—and to Anglo-American analysts—their copious findings on Soviet rail transport, lend-lease aid, and the rebuilding and relocation of factories, oil storage facilities, food resources and the like. They also confided their observations of the solidarity of the people in support of the war. The tone of their reports reflected their awe at the enormous reserves of Soviet manpower and materiel as well as their feeling that the tide had turned against Germany.

Oshima fought against such pessimism. When he realized how the shortages of rubber and other materials were hampering the German war machine, he led the way in establishing the Mutual Economic Aid Pact for Winning the War. Central to this pact were what were called the Yanagi operations, blockade runners carrying vital Far East materials to Germany in exchange for German machinery and sophisticated armaments. Oshima envisioned a steady traffic back and forth that would ease the most urgent needs of both Axis partners. But since the Allies were decrypting his messages as well as those of the Japanese navy, Allied subs knew exactly where to go to intercept and sink the Yanagi ships. The Germans were soon reduced to converting old U-boats in order to transport minimal supplies through the blockade and then abandoned the operation altogether.

Throughout the war, Oshima kept the Allies informed of shifts in the attitudes of Axis leaders. Early on, the partners were wary toward each other about the possibility of one or another splitting off to sue for peace. On December 14, 1941, the baron reported the signing of a war alliance supplement to the Tripartite Pact: it pledged that none of the three Axis powers would negotiate a separate peace with the U.S. or Britain. As for Oshima's pleas that Tokyo declare war on the USSR, in July 1942 Oshima was told unequivocally that there would be no Japanese attack on the Soviets—information that President Roosevelt immediately relayed to Stalin. In the dark days when German armies were plunging deeper into Russia, Churchill and Roosevelt feared that it was the Soviets who would yield to a separate peace. Oshima's messages confirmed that Stalin was holding staunchly against any such temptation. When the tables were turned and the Russians were overpowering the Germans, the baron reported that now it was Hitler who stood adamant against a peace initiative.

It is one of the war's great ironies that the reports of Japan's German ambassador and his consular colleagues were of far greater value to the Allies than they were to their masters in Tokyo.

It seems almost unfair that after all he'd done for them, the Allies after the war tried Oshima as a war criminal and sentenced him to life imprisonment. However, Hitler's Japanese confidant was paroled in December 1955 and granted clemency in April 1958.

Baron Oshima's story adds an incredible extra dimension to the importance of U.S. cryptology during World War II. From the low point of Pearl Harbor, American cryptanalysis swiftly climbed to a dominance that made the plans of Japanese leaders an open book to Allied commanders, while Japan's widespread use of its Purple machine helped extend that dominance to the European conflict. The combined effect was to make the contribution of U.S. intelligence to Allied victory second to none.

 

 

 

9

 

North Africa: A Pendulum Swung by Codebreakers

 

 

During the war in North Africa, Allied and Axis forces continually pursued each other back and forth over harsh desert sands, losing vast numbers of men in the process. Many factors could be cited for the swings of fortune, but close study shows that none had more impact than signals intelligence. When the Axis was breaking Allied codes, they were the winners. When the Allies sealed their informational leaks and gained cryptologic superiority, they in turn were triumphant.

Rommel's early victories certainly owed much to the unconventional generalship and unexpected moves in the midst of combat that earned him renown as "the Desert Fox." What was not known at the time was that he also gained a powerful advantage through two secret sources. One was a field cryptographic team that expertly listened in on enemy radio exchanges to inform Rommel of British tactical plans. The other was the American military attaché in Cairo, who was kept informed of British strategic decisions and, all unknowingly, passed them on to Rommel.

Captain Alfred Seeböhm led the mobile unit that stayed close to the front lines and tuned in to British wireless traffic. His intercept operators sopped up every bit of undecoded chat and every message transmitted in a field code the Germans were readily breaking. Seeböhm added to his intelligence haul by using call signs to identify British units, and direction finding to ascertain troop concentrations and movements.

One example illustrates the use Rommel made of this information. On the morning of June 16, 1942, when Rommel was driving to isolate Tobruk, Seeböhm's team overheard a radiotelephone conversation between the Twenty-ninth Indian Brigade and the Seventh Armored Division. It disclosed that the garrison at the strongpoint of El Adem intended to launch an attack that night. Rommel responded by ordering his Ninetieth Light Division to strike first. The British, surprised, had to surrender. The larger import was that with the capture of El Adem, Rommel was able to surround and isolate Tobruk, which had been a thorn in his side for months. He soon forced the Tobruk garrison to capitulate, handing over enormous stores badly needed by the Afrika Korps. The surrender also delivered to the world press another disheartening story of British failure.

The U.S. Cairo-based military attaché was Colonel Bonner Frank Fellers. He became Rommel's unwitting dupe because of the code he used. America's Black code, so called because of the color of its binding, had been surreptitiously copied by the Italian secret service and made available to the Germans. As America's chief military observer in Egypt, Fellers was like Japan's Baron Oshima, an energetic gadabout and a tireless reporter. The British were obliging to him because they hoped he would aid them in securing much-needed lend-lease equipment for the desert forces. He himself felt driven to help prepare the American military for desert warfare. He toured the battlefields, talked with commanders, studied their tactics, was often made privy to their plans and then spilled all that he had collected in long, meticulous dispatches that he dutifully enciphered in the Black code and radioed off to Washington—and to Rommel.

Reading Fellers's reports makes one's skin crawl in horror. Through him Rommel turned unexpectant British garrisons into sitting ducks ready to be pounced on by the Desert Fox. Of course, Fellers's giveaways were only a turnabout of what Allied decrypts were routinely doing to unexpectant Axis garrisons. But somehow the sheer nakedness of his disclosures and the awfulness of their consequences are especially penetrating.

For example, he told of forthcoming commando raids by the British, which the Germans met and destroyed. He described defects the Allies had discovered in Axis armor and aircraft, and thereby facilitated corrections that made the equipment more killingly effective. He supplied a complete rundown on where the British armored and motorized units were located at the front, how many tanks were in working order and how many had been damaged. He tipped Rommel off to the withdrawal of 270 airplanes and a quantity of antiaircraft artillery to reinforce British strength in the Far East. He reported the locations of the air squadrons and how many of their planes were operational.

Fellers's revelations played a key role in another of the North African war's reversals. After his earlier successes against Wavell, Rommel had been hurled back by the British under General Claude Auchinleck at the end of 1941. But by receiving what Gordon Welchman called "just about the most perfect intelligence any general could wish for," Rommel knew exactly when and where to strike in his counteroffensive of January 1942. He made the British retreat three hundred miles, and destroyed or captured thousands of men in the course of the campaign.

Rommel might well have gone on to Cairo except for one obstacle: his tanks ran out of gas. The failure underlined the importance of the island of Malta, lying midway between Sicily and the Axis bases in North Africa. The supply shortages that hindered Rommel were a direct result of the depredations on Axis convoys carried out by Malta-based planes, ships and submarines. All-out bombing by German and Italian aircraft could not subdue the island, nor could the German commander in Italy persuade Hitler to commit the land forces to conquer it. Fellers handed the Axis an opportunity, if not to put Malta completely out of business, then at least to greatly hamper its raids on shipping.

The island, too, had its supply problems, and in June 1942 the British planned to have convoys converge simultaneously on Malta, one from the east, the other from the west, as the means of preventing the Axis from directing all its might against either one. To further neutralize Axis attempts to attack the convoys, the British planned to bomb the Italian warships, destroy Axis planes on the ground and air-drop commandos in Italy to sabotage other airfields. All of this Fellers learned about in advance and dutifully reported.

The result was a massacre. The Germans and Italians shot the descending parachutists, stood off the attacks on the airfields and sent ships, submarines and planes against the convoys. Britain's losses included a cruiser, three destroyers and two merchant ships. The convoy from Alexandria was forced to turn back. Of seventeen ships, only two got through to Malta, crippling for a time the island's effectiveness in sinking Rommel's supply ships.

At this low point the cryptologic pendulum again swung to the Allies. British cryptanalysts stopped the exploitation of Fellers by the simple expedient of breaking the Black code, reading his dispatches and putting two and two together. Convinced that the British suspicions were true, the American command recalled Fellers. He resumed his earlier service with MacArthur and became a brigadier general on Mac's staff. The new attaché to Cairo was equipped with a Sigaba code machine. Rommel lost his best informant and his strategic advantage.

Around the same time he was also deprived of his tactical weapon. Amid the desert ebb and flow the British launched an armored thrust that overran the staff headquarters of the Afrika Korps. Seeböhm was killed, his men mostly wiped out or captured and many of the unit's records seized. An added asset from the strike was the surrender of a very cooperative German officer, Seeböhm's second-in-command. This lieutenant's admissions concerning the poor radio practices of British operators guided the tightening of their cryptographic disciplines. Plus, the Germans' new field unit proved very much inferior to Seeböhm and his team.

From then on, Allied cryptology in North Africa never again lost its leading edge. Rommel was shown to be much less prescient in his decision making. Or as Welchman expressed it, "Much of the foxiness of the 'Desert Fox' was due to German radio intelligence."

 

 

First El Alamein: Long-Delayed Turning Point

 

Despite being outclassed, for a time, by the Seeböhm-Fellers decrypts, British cryptologists were steadily strengthening the flow of intelligence they were supplying to North African commanders. Early on, GC&CS decrypts kept General Wavell well informed about Rommel's posting to North Africa and about the forces under his command. Yet these authoritative disclosures could not offset command blunders.

Wavell thought the newly arrived Rommel would behave as he himself would have in the German general's situation. That is, he would delay any serious action until he was firmly in place and all of his equipment had arrived. Wavell was confirmed in these expectations by dispatches from Rommel's superiors in Berlin specifying that in view of the limited supplies of men and materiel they could send him, he should assume only a defensive position in North Africa.

That was not Rommel's way of thinking. He believed in boldness, speed, surprise. Knowing from Fellers's decrypts that Wavell's forces had been depleted by the need to send troops to Greece, Rommel decided that, ready or not, he should strike. He quickly organized what he had in men and machines, built fake tanks mounted on Volkswagens to create the impression he had more armor than he did, and went on the offensive. There were no messages to warn of his attack. Caught off guard, the British reeled back, giving up to the newly energized German-Italian assault troops most of the territories O'Connor had won. As Rommel wrote triumphantly to his wife, "I took the risk against all orders and instructions because the opportunity seemed favorable."

If Rommel, in that early stage of his North African adventures, could have captured Tobruk as an entry port for convoys from Italy, he might well have driven on into Egypt. When the Tobruk garrison held out, the overextension of his supply lines, especially for gasoline, forced him to bring his campaign to a halt.

While Wavell has been judged by analysts to have been an able commander, his attempts to recoup his losses against Rommel were doomed by rigidities in his and his subordinate generals' attitudes toward combat. One such shortcoming was their refusal to accept the tank-killing power of the Germans' 88-millimeter gun. Although this heavy weapon had been developed for antiaircraft use, the Germans had learned in the Spanish civil war that when its barrel was lowered and leveled against tanks, it could blast through the enemy's best armor. British commanders kept sending unescorted tanks against it and seeing them brew up into blazing hulks. The British had an antiaircraft gun whose penetrating power was greater than the 88's, but using it against anything other than aircraft was something one just didn't do.