Codebreakers Victory (53 page)

In the early stages, remember, Allied codebreaking
kept the war from being lost.
Even though British cryptology was in what one commentator called "its dark ages," Bletchley Park did help get the British army out of France, it did aid in warding off the German air force in the Battle of Britain and it was a main factor in keeping Britain from being strangled by the U-boats.

Similarly, secret intelligence provided the edge that turned back the Germans at Moscow, prevented Rommel from taking Egypt and saved the U.S. Navy from a more definitive Pearl Harbor at Midway Island.

Diana Payne, a bombe operator at Bletchley, expressed it well: "Without the priceless foreknowledge of German plans the war could well have been lost before the Allied forces were sufficiently armed and trained to achieve complete victory."

After staving off defeat, the codebreakers assumed a more critical role:
They took much of the guesswork out of Allied command decisions.

German leaders accepted the belief of military theorist Hans von Seekt that "uncertainty and chance are inescapable characteristics of war." The Nazi commanders had no other choice. After early successes, German codebreakers were progressively shut out and reduced to relying on the lesser non-codebreaking elements of direction-finding and traffic analysis.

Allied leaders, on the other hand, came gradually to the realization that they could, to a large degree, refuse to accept uncertainty and chance as inescapable. Confident that their codebreakers would tell them what their opponents were planning, they could issue their orders on solid information. In war's shifting seas, the codebreakers supplied an anchor of truth.

Further,
codebreaking made victory possible by being "the mother of deceptions."
Recall that in Normandy and elsewhere, the codebreakers gave the Allies the advantage of being able to undertake enormous feats of what Churchill liked to call "legerdemain" and to know whether their duperies were succeeding.

Likewise, deception together with codebreaking set up the Eighth Army victories in North Africa, eased the landings in Sicily, thwarted the Germans at Monte Cassino and, as in the capture of Hollandia, fooled the Japanese repeatedly.

The true value of Allied codebreaking is underscored
by those times when it failed,
when Axis security measures temporarily blacked it out.

Pearl Harbor, it will be recalled, happened because, while U.S. code-breakers were reading Japanese diplomatic messages, they had made only an insufficient dent in Japan's naval codes that would have forewarned them of the Japanese attack.

Other instances include the Battle of the Atlantic, where the U-boats' scores against Allied shipping soared when the Germans were reading British Admiralty codes while Bletchley Park was shut out of decoding German traffic. Blackouts of U.S. codebreakers led to such tragic defeats as that of the navy at Savo Island. Most telling of all was Hitler's surprise 1944 replay of his Ardennes offensive. Thousands of Allied soldiers died unnecessarily because, for once, Ultra was not positive enough in determining where the Nazi buildup was aimed. Nothing says more about the powerful hold that the codebreakers gained on Allied decision making than this: when Allied generals were deprived of warnings relayed to them by their Ultra liaison units, they refused to heed other indicators of looming enemy action. Shorn of Ultra, Allied commanders became suddenly less godlike, more humanly fallible, more bumbling, as they would most likely have been throughout the war without the codebreakers' skills in backing them up.

The codebreakers' vital role is also underscored by the serious Allied setbacks that occurred
when generals ignored their advice,
as Mark Clark did in the disastrous effort to cross Italy's Rapido River, Bernard Montgomery did in the ill-fated airborne landings at Arnhem and Jack Fletcher did in one of the preliminary battles in the Coral Sea.

Conversely, most Allied leaders became adroit
in using the advantage given them by their codebreakers.
Montgomery's victory at El Alamein, Patton's and Bradley's at Mortain and Falaise, Clark's in stopping the counterattacks at Salemo and Anzio, Zhukov's at Stalingrad and Kursk, Spruance's at Midway and MacArthur's at Hollandia and elsewhere were all based on effective use of superior intelligence.

Lastly, Allied cryptanalysis provided the opportunities
to frustrate Axis technological developments,
delay their progress and keep them from becoming the scourges they might well have been. Nuclear bombs, fearsome new U-boats, jet aircraft, V-ls, particularly V-2s, were prevented from realizing their potential before they could hamstring the Allies' march to triumph.

For such reasons as these, it is not excessive to claim that in World War II the main determinant of Allied ascendancy was not warriors and armor, essential as they were, not U.S. industrial might, overpowering as it became, but codebreaking by brilliant Polish codebreakers in Warsaw, geniuses at Bletchley Park, self-sacrificing informants in the Red Orchestra and superlative cryptanalysts among the Americans.

David Kahn cited U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Walter Anderson as saying of wartime codebreaking, "It won the war!" Kahn added, "Hyperbole, to be sure, but indicative nevertheless." He went on to remark that a summation written by George Marshall, "who was certainly in a position to know, tends to support the hyperbole."

Dwight Eisenhower wrote that "Ultra was decisive." Winston Churchill declared, "We owe to the arm of General Menzies that we won the war."

The premise of this book, then, is not without support from the war's leaders. As intelligence documents that have been locked in secrecy since the war years continue to be declassified, they make the case ever stronger. The more we learn about those times, the more evident it becomes: of the many factors that contributed to the winning of the war, none had so powerful an effect as the advantage that came from the breaking of enemy messages and the guidance those decrypts gave Allied commanders. The evidence that has been assembled here points to one conclusion, whose validity the reader is asked to judge: to reassess World War II fairly is to grant that it was a codebreakers' victory.

 

 

 

Acknowledgments

 

 

Work on this book has been a race against time. The idea for it came to me only six years ago—in a reaction, as I've noted, against the previous reading I'd been doing since Fred Winterbotham opened my eyes fully to what, in my wartime duty, I had been a part of, an element in. I could see that the project would be hugely demanding: to assess the effects of secret intelligence in all the major theaters of the war and render defensible judgments in readable prose would be a daunting undertaking for a much younger writer. I was then in my late seventies. In the time I had left, could I possibly conduct the intensive research and manage the vast reading that the writing would entail?

Fortunately, my genes have been kind to me, allowing me these six years, plus the requisite wits and energy, to get the job done. Yes, I would have liked months rather than just days at the Public Record Office, where Britain so efficiently stores its immense detritus of once-secret intelligence from the war. Yes, my stay with John Gallehawk, archivist at Bletchley Park, was all too short. Yes, I would have welcomed more time in the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration files in College Park, Maryland—more time to allow NARA's World War II guru, John Taylor, and his associates to guide me through that labyrinth of information. Yes, I would have appreciated more opportunity to explore what I know are rich resources at the U.S. Army Military History Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the Washington National Records Center and the United States Naval Institute in Maryland, and other such troves as the MacArthur Memorial Bureau of Archives in Norfolk, Virginia. And yes, there are scores of other books, articles and Web sites I would gladly have scanned as well as further interviews with the waning ranks of survivors from the war I could have pursued.

No complaints. I've had the six years to make the most of what I could accomplish. I'm fortunate in having Patricia, my wife of fifty-five years, hang in with me, not as a "golf widow" but certainly as a "writer's widow," and in addition give me great help in getting the manuscript ready for review. I'm grateful that my fellow Ultra Americans and my friends in Britain have rallied round to lend their support. And I'm most fortunate in having Richard Curtis as my ever-encouraging literary agent and Dan Slater as my ever-resourceful editor at Penguin Putnam. I thank all of you for giving me the great adventure of having my first book published as an octogenarian.

Now to notes on sources I
have
been able to call upon.

For general coverage of the war I've relied, of course, on Winston Churchill's magisterial six-volume history I've made a run-through of Samuel Eliot Morison's equally massive
History of United States Naval Operations in World War II.
Primarily, though, I've concentrated on histories written after the walls of secrecy about World War II intelligence came down, histories that could begin to take into account the contributions of the codebreakers. My copy of John Keegan's
The Second World War
has fallen apart from overuse. Martin Gilbert's history with the same name has provided a diurnal record of the conflict—and supplied the most compendious and useful index imaginable. Otherwise, I've drawn snippets about the war from dozens of other writers—Accoce to Ziegler.

To my knowledge, there are no books aside from this one that regard the entire war from the perspective of the codebreakers. The five-volume
British Intelligence in the Second World War,
compiled by Harry Hinsley and three other historians, and nicely condensed by Hinsley into a one-volume abridged edition, focuses almost entirely on the war in Europe. Donald Lewin's
Ultra Goes to War
also deals with Europe, while his
American Magic
tries, less successfully, to cover codebreaking in the Pacific theater. The revised edition of David Kahn's great tome
The Codebreakers
includes an account of Allied successes against the "scrutable orientals" as well as rather cursorily added-on reports on the attacks against Enigma. Otherwise, writers have dealt with specific aspects of the story rather than overall assessments.

 

Introduction

Churchill's quote about the golden eggs: Oliver Hoare's booklet Enigma. Churchill's lines about "the secret war" are from his own
Their Finest Hour.

The first, virtually unnoticed break in the secrecy about conquest of the Enigma came in Wladyslaw Kozaczuk's 1967 book,
Struggle for Secrets,
followed by Gustave Bertrand's equally unnoticed
Enigma
in 1973. It was Winterbotham's
The Ultra Secret,
published in 1974, that first drew world attention to the Ultra program.

 

Chapter 1. Belligerents: Choose Your Code Machines

The brief history of cryptology borrows from David Kahn's
The Code-breakers,
Stephen Budiansky's
Battle of Wits,
James Gannon's
Stealing Secrets, Telling Lies
and Simon Singh's
The Code Book.

The account here of the Battle of Tannenberg is condensed from Barbara Tuchman's
The Guns of August,
while the story of the Zimmermann telegram is from her book of that title.

Painvin's success: Simon Singh,
The Code Book.

Herbert Yardley's Great War experience: his
The American Black. Chamber.

William Friedman's breaking Pletts's machine: Ronald Clark's
The Man Who Broke Purple.

As for Scherbius's Enigma, a number of cryptographic specialists, including Kozaczuk, Kahn and Budiansky, have described its inner workings in enthusiastic detail. The account here is a synthesis, drawing particularly from Bletchley Park veteran Peter Calvocoressi's
Top Secret Ultra.

Several writers, including Robert Leckie in
Delivered from Evil,
have mentioned the connection between Elgar's composition and the naming of Scherbius's machine.

Disclosure by Churchill of Britain's breaking of the German naval code in the Great War: Kahn's
The Codebreakers.

The inventions by Hebern, Damm and Hagelin, as well as developments by the Russians and the Italians, are described by Kahn in his
The Codebreakers.
Clark's book tells of the work of Friedman and Rowlett on an American machine. Ralph Erskine is the source of material on Britain's Typex.

Michael Smith in
The Emperor's Codes
reports Japan's work on code machines.

 

Chapter 2. Breaking the Enigma: Poles Show the Way

Of the many tellings of the Poles' cracking of the Enigma, I've relied primarily on Rejewski's account in the appendixes of Kozaczuk's
Enigma,
on Kozaczuk's own version and on Kahn's explanation, the clearest and most readable, in
Seizing the Enigma.

The incident of the 1929 arrival of an Enigma-holding crate at the Warsaw customs office is from Kozaczuk.

For a fuller review of the stories of Hans-Thilo Schmidt and Bertrand, Kahn is also a good source.

Details of the Poles' course at Poznan and of their initial breaking of the Enigma are in Kozaczuk's
Enigma,
which includes Rejewski's description in the appendixes.

Rejewski's reminiscences of his final victory over the Enigma are from a typewritten copy collected by Jozef Garlinski, author of
The Enigma War.

Bertrand's quote about
"un moment de stupeur"
is from his
Enigma.

Peter Twinn tells of Dilly Knox happily chanting
"Nous avons le QWERTZU"
in his contribution to
Codebreakers,
edited by Harry Hinsley and Alan Stripp.

 

Chapter 3. Britain Takes Over the Cryptologic War

British Intelligence in the Second World War,
by Hinsley et al, is the essential source of information on the Ultra work at Bletchley Park.