Codebreakers Victory (44 page)

Most damaging of all, Montgomery persisted in carrying out Market Garden despite copious intelligence warnings of the grave hazards it would encounter. BP decrypts and air reconnaissance showed that the failure to seize control of the Schelde had allowed some seventy thousand German soldiers, with much of their equipment, to be ferried out of Normandy and to begin to regroup in Holland. Admonitions from Ultra were supplemented by those of Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who brought to Montgomery's headquarters a briefcase full of Dutch Resistance reports on the buildup of German forces in the lowlands. Montgomery rejected the prince's advice. He belittled the Ultra decrypts. Not once but twice he brushed aside the cautions of his own intelligence officer. And he waved away the objections to his plan brought to him by Eisenhower's chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith, and the British intelligence chief of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force), Kenneth Strong.

The hazards pointed out to Montgomery included not only the troops of the Fifteenth Army who had escaped across the Schelde estuary, but also two panzer divisions that were in the Arnhem sector to be reequipped with new tanks. Moreover, two companies of parachute troops were there, plus ten battalions armed with heavy antitank guns. To round out this murderers' row, another BP decrypt revealed, Field Marshal Walther Model had established a headquarters just four miles from Arnhem; he would be on the spot to mobilize and direct the annihilation of the invaders.

As Hinsley has noted, Ultra decrypts even revealed that the Germans anticipated an Allied thrust toward Arnhem and believed that it might involve airborne landings.

Montgomery was not to be deterred. His only response was, when the operation was obviously faltering, to send in a reserve brigade of Polish paratroops to be added to the awful stew in what became known as the "caldron."

Even with all these adversities going against it, Market Garden came close to succeeding. Courageous British paratroops did reach Arnhem, seize the bridge and hold out, not for the two days specified in the plan but for three days and three nights. The American paratroops captured their assigned bridges and held open the corridor despite having their ranks thinned by repeated German counterattacks. What caused Market Garden ultimately to fail was that the armored ground forces could not make the connection. The only road for the linkup was one tank wide and six feet higher than the surrounding marshy terrain, making the deployment of tanks impossible, assuring German defenses easy targets. The Rhine crossing at Arnhem became, in the phrase Cornelius Ryan made famous, "a bridge too far."

After nine days of slaughter, the airborne units were ordered to save themselves if they could. Of the original force of ten thousand men, only about two thousand escaped, some by swimming the wide expanse of the Rhine. The rest were killed or taken prisoners.

The setback of Market Garden proved that the German armies, instead of deteriorating after their hard knocks in Normandy and in southern France, were still capable of mounting a surprisingly strong resistance to Allied advances. Still, the Allied generals were obsessed by their desire to bring the war to a quick end, to finish off the Wehrmacht and be in Berlin by Christmas. Their overconfidence that Allied troops could bring this about led to another horrific bloodletting.

This was the Battle of the Hürtgen Forest. A dense tangle of woods, ridges and ravines south of the German city of Aachen, it lay in the way of the plans being developed by Eisenhower, Bradley, Courtney Hodges and their staffs. They had decided that the quickest way for a breakthrough into the Ruhr industrial sector lay in the relatively flat terrain of the Aachen valley, where armor could roll in full force. They saw the forest as a double obstacle. German troops hidden there could spring a flank attack on the Ruhrward push. Also, they could open dam gates on the forest's streams to flood the valley and any Allied armor in it. Hürtgen Forest, the Allied commanders decided, must be taken.

Believing in the power of their troops to overcome weakened Nazi garrisons, the generals were sure the Hürtgen threat could be overcome in a matter of days. The taking required more than a month—a month in which division after division was fed into the German meat chopper. U.S. general James Gavin reported later that American casualties amounted to thirty-three thousand men—twenty-four thousand battle casualties and nine thousand cases of trench foot and respiratory diseases resulting from the miserable weather. Hardly mentioned, barely remembered, the battle nonetheless chewed up more men by far than Market Garden, with little more to show for their sacrifice.

The failure to open the port of Antwerp, the defeat at Arnhem and the grim details of the Hürtgen Forest offense were major contributors to the deceleration of the Allied drive toward Germany. Stung by Arnhem, Monty reverted to his usual caution and stopped to recuperate. The U.S. First Army captured the German city of Aachen but then came up against what Ultra decrypts recognized as two reinforced panzer divisions and settled into a stalemate. In the south, Patton's gasoline-starved armor was frustrated by its inability to subdue the stubborn fortress at Metz. Any hope of ending the war that winter evaporated.

And after being duped time and again by Allied deceptions, Hitler was about to have his turn.

 

 

The Bulge: When Ultra Missed the Main Point

 

On a bitterly cold night in late December 1944, my group of "cryptographers" sat over the dregs of our coffee at Hall Place in Bexley, Kent. We had finished our evening shift and our midnight snack. Our mood was one of despair, for we had just learned the news of what was to become known as the Battle of the Bulge. The German counteroffensive through the Ardennes forest had come as a stunning surprise. The lines of raw, newly arrived, half-trained GIs, and of battle-weary troops sent there for R and R, spread out over too wide a front, were being overrun by giant panzer tanks and waves of German infantry.

Our question was, how could this be happening? How had the Allies been caught so completely off guard? How, if Station X was breaking these endless streams of code we were so diligently processing, could some message have failed to warn of this vicious counterstrike by the Germans? Was our whole war effort an empty charade? Were those masses of message forms we'd intercepted and processed just piling up in some Limey warehouse hopefully awaiting the day when
someone somehow
would find the key to them?

Never had the limitations of the "need to know" been so galling to us, so frustrating. We longed to hear that the work we were doing, this activity in lieu of bleeding and dying, did make some worthwhile contribution, did have some meaning. Reassurance seemed essential if we were to pick ourselves up on the morrow and continue to do our job.

But we were common soldiers, below that broad dividing line of the military caste system separating enlisted men from officers, the system that ruled that we were there merely to do and not to know. There was nothing for it but to overcome our doubts, crawl into our frigid bunks and get the sleep that would let us, out of deference to those poor guys across there on the continent, keep plugging away with the same care as before.

Most of us didn't learn the truth until years later, until the walls of secrecy came tumbling down.

It may have been, we learned, that the Germans had become aware that their Enigma systems had been compromised. As a result, Hitler directed that none of his orders, or those of his generals, relating to his surprise attack were to be sent by wireless. A counterintelligence report prepared by SHAEF in November 1944 stated that a Dutchman, Christiann
Antonius Lindemans, recruited as an agent by the German secret service, had wormed his way into the confidence of Dutch authorities and betrayed both the Allied plans for the Arnhem landings and the secrets of Ultra. Lindemans's disclosures, the report asserted, convinced the Germans to limit their use of the Enigma, even though the task of completely replacing its far-flung dispersion could only partially be met by the end of the war.

Whatever the truth of the Lindemans story, the Germans achieved a definite drop-off in the volume of Enigma traffic. BP decrypted messages ordering units to avoid the use of radio. Selmer Norland has recalled seeing a message that read,
"Fuer Alle SS Einheiten funkstille"
or "For all SS units, radio silence." Winterbotham has told of orders being delivered to the front "by hand by motor-cyclists."

This decline in traffic was in itself viewed by BP analysts as a warning of something big brewing. Norland recognized the importance of the SS message: "It was what we called a five-Zed message, five Zs for 'top priority.' It was a clear indicator of what was going to happen."

Hinsley's history has detailed scores of messages portending a major action by the Germans. As early as August, Baron Oshima was reporting on a "very thorough" mobilization by which Hitler was expecting to form 110 to 125 new divisions and to rebuild the German air force so that it would be able to stand up to the Allies. In September, Oshima used his Magic machine to tell of his latest interview with Hitler, in which the führer confided that a million new troops were ready, together with units withdrawn from other fronts, to undertake a great offensive in the West.

Enigma decrypts showed panzer divisions being withdrawn east of the Rhine for rest and refitting. Their places in the defensive line were taken by new "Volksgrenadier" divisions made up of reassigned air force and navy troops, overage men and Hitler Youth teenagers. Other decrypts revealed the formation of a new Sixth Army and of the reorganization of the Fifth Panzer Army. Decoded railway Enigma messages reported train after train of men and supplies being conveyed to the western front. Luftwaffe decrypts told of Goring energetically gathering together aircraft to replace the close-support operations that had been all but eliminated during the fighting in Normandy, and of preparing the new formations for a "lightning blow."

BP analysts noted the skillful resistance against the Allies being conducted by Rundstedt and wondered, in view of this sensible use of the army, whether Hitler might be "unwell," allowing Rundstedt to function "without higher intuition."

Available at Britain's Public Record Office is Bletchley Park's own twenty-seven-page analysis of what went wrong, written as the crisis was ending. Having by then substantiated "Source" rather than Boniface as the supplier of its information, BP said in its summary, "Source gave clear warning that a counteroffensive was coming. He also gave warning, though at short notice, of
when
it was coming." The trouble was that "he did
not
give by any means unmistakable indications of
where
it was coming, nor . . . of its full scale."

There was the catch. Because of "new and elaborate deceptions staged by German security," the word
Ardennes
never appeared in the decrypts. Although the Ardennes was where Hitler had achieved his great success in 1940, it was now in 1944 regarded as the least likely point of a German attack.

As Hinsley observed, the generals of both the Allied and German armies agreed what the Germans
should
do in the waning months of 1944. They should husband their depleted forces to wage a stubborn withdrawal west of the Rhine and then use that great natural barrier for a last-ditch stand to protect the Reich. They lacked the troops, ammunition and fuel for a counteroffensive other than a minor "spoiling" action to blunt the coming Allied advances.

All of this sensible military prognosis figured without Hitler. Living more and more in his fantasy world, he refused to accept the reports of inadequate resources. As the Allies thinned out their Ardennes defense lines to strengthen their offensives north and south, he saw the opportunity for another grand coup. He would confuse any spies of Allied intelligence by giving his armies new names: the Fifth would become the "Gruppe von Manteuffel," after a young and able general whom Hitler trusted, while the Sixth would be designated, in English translation, the "Rest and Refitting Staff 16." He would further befuddle observers by shifting his troops back and forth across the entry to the Ardennes, moving three divisions one way and two back while holding the extra one for the offensive's buildup. Then, with his Volksgrenadier divisions holding the line, his Fifth and Sixth Panzer Armies would file through to launch the attack.

His delusional idea was that his panzers would smash through the weak American lines, turn north into Belgium, drive to Antwerp, split off the British divisions in the north, force them into another Dunkirk and so dishearten the British people—who were already suffering the demoralizing effects of the V-2 rockets being rained on England—that they would drop out of the war.

Hitler's generals, knowing they were far short of the men and materiel to carry out so grandiose a scheme, tried to persuade him to accept a lesser plan such as a drive toward Liege that stood a chance of encircling large numbers of British troops. He remained adamant. They must carry out the counteroffensive exactly as he had envisioned it.

Despite the partial wireless blackout, the codebreakers at Bletchley Park knew a great deal about these developments. Decrypts told of Luftwaffe pilot aircraft being brought up to guide fighters and fighter-bombers to their targets, as well as the pulling together of a paratroop division. The formation of Volksgrenadier divisions and their dispatch to the front were also amply reported. BP read Hitler's orders for a special operation to be made up of volunteers fluent in English and American idioms and for "captured U.S. clothing, equipment, weapons and vehicles" to be collected for these troops.

All that was missing was where these forces would head once the offensive began.

Partly, Hitler succeeded because he kept his secret even from his own generals for so long. Not until November did Rundstedt and the other top officers learn of the plan. The lower-echelon generals were given only a few days' notice, so short a time that they could not do adequate planning.