The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (24 page)

There had been a clutch of cryptographers based in Singapore in the weeks before the surrender, intercepting and decoding messages; among them was Arthur Cooper, brother of Josh. The decoders and Y Service operatives escaped and were evacuated to Colombo in the nick of time. Once again, we see how fragile the Bletchley secret was; if these men had instead been captured and tortured, could they have withstood and refused to say a word?

In addition to the military setbacks, there was, for Bletchley Park, a disaster that the general public knew nothing of at that time – one that threatened to wipe out a large swathe of the codebreaking operation. For a suspicious Admiral Dönitz, concerned that somehow his codes were being read, decreed that from 1 February 1942, the German U-boat command should bring in an updated version of the naval Enigma machine.

From that point on, an extra, fourth rotor was fitted to U-boat Enigma machines. The immediate result was a total U-boat code blackout at Bletchley. Suddenly, without warning, the messages the
cryptographers received could no longer be decrypted. In turn the Atlantic convoys were rendered horribly vulnerable once more.

After the great satisfaction of Hut 8’s earlier successes, this was a stomach-punch of disappointment. It also caused a great deal of unrest and unease in Whitehall. One historian has noted that the only thing that ever truly frightened Churchill throughout the course of the war was the prospect of the U-boats gaining the advantage and wiping out the best part of the convoys.

There was a further complicating factor. After an accident in September 1941, when HMS
Clyde
was damaged in a collision with U-67, Admiral Dönitz had decided that the submarine codes should be set to a different key from that of the surface naval vessels. As well as decoding ‘Dolphin’, as the naval Enigma key was known, everyone in Hut 8 had now had to turn their attentions to what they termed ‘Shark’, the submarine key. With the upgraded Enigma machines, ‘Shark’ now had sharper teeth. Once more, Admiralty was faced with the nightmare prospect of all those vital supply ships and their crews effectively sailing without protection.

It could not have come at a worse possible time: the U-boats were cruising up and down the Atlantic coast of the United States, lying in wait to encircle, or even sail among the convoys; to wait, generally, until night – and then to start firing their torpedoes, so that when one ship went up in bright flame, the others would have to watch. Crews would perish in the stormy waters; vital supplies would be sent to the ocean bed.

All this coincided almost exactly with the climax of a prolonged power struggle within Bletchley Park itself. For some months, there were voices within the Park, throughout Whitehall and in other corners of the Intelligence community that the Park needed a new directorate; that it was inefficient, not doing its job properly. The Intelligence branches of the Services were becoming increasingly uneasy about the fact that Bletchley Park was producing so much intelligence autonomously (and possibly doubly uneasy about the fact that Bletchley appeared to have the wholehearted support of
Churchill). In other words, it was not only decrypting, but also analysing the information.

According to Harry Hinsley’s account, Whitehall was growing restive about what was perceived as the poor organisation of the institution: ‘GC and CS had increased in size four-fold in the first sixteen months of the war. At the beginning of 1941 it was, by Whitehall’s standards, poorly organised. This was partly because the growth in its size and in the complexity of its activities had outstripped the experience of those who administered it …’ Military chiefs also had very little taste for what they saw as ‘the condition of creative anarchy, within and between the sections, that distinguished GC and CS’s everyday work and brought to the front the best among its unorthodox and ‘undisciplined’ war-time staff …’
²

Churchill himself was made aware of these furious wranglings, which included a suggestion that the director Alistair Denniston got on very badly with the head of MI6, Sir Stewart Menzies. The atmosphere grew fervid. As P.W. Filby recalled it:

It was true that from the beginning of the war, Denniston had found himself swamped in administrative quicksand. The running of the Park, the efforts to ensure that there were enough personnel when demand from other departments and services was so strong, the constant battle for more machines, even enough building contractors to work on the huts … As Bletchley expanded, its practical needs were growing exponentially. All this quashed any hopes that
Denniston once had of contributing further to the Enigma code-breaking himself.

On 1 February 1942, Denniston was removed as Director of Bletchley Park. He was instead bumped sideways to oversee the Diplomatic and Commercial side of the codebreaking operation, in Berkeley Street, back in London. He never received the knighthood that might otherwise have been automatically his due. But this was not a time in which anyone could afford to be remotely sentimental.

In his place came deputy Travis – although according to Mimi Gallilee, who was working in the house at the time, Travis maintained the title ‘Deputy’ for a while after these events. Perhaps out of a residual sense of loyalty and propriety?

A fascinating gloss on this ugly struggle was later offered by one Robert Cecil, who subsequently worked with Denniston in Intelligence in Berkeley Street. Cecil told Denniston’s son Robin that ‘the huts rose up rapidly at Bletchley; but there were less scrupulous and more ambitious men on hand to skim off much of the credit. Denniston left Bletchley and came back to London to escape the backbiting and get on with the job; he disliked the infighting more than he feared the Luftwaffe.’

Cecil added of Denniston and his time in Berkeley Street: ‘He always kept his ship on an even keel and his staff, who included a number of brilliant eccentrics, liked and respected him. One of them, whom I remember, had come down from Oxford with a First in Egyptology and had then become an astrologer; when his eccentricities began to affect his colleagues, Denniston just sent him on sick-leave and welcomed him back when he was restored.’
⁴

We are invited to infer from this that Denniston’s reign at Bletchley Park was composed of similarly enlightened touches. And Robin Denniston adds a salty personal view – which must have been shared by his father – of Sir Stewart Menzies: ‘Menzies was a WWI hero and conducted most of his secret MI6 business at White’s Club in St James’s and BP’s intellectual feats were simply beyond him.

Also, as a manager of difficult and clever men, he [Menzies] was almost useless.’
⁵

This image of the Intelligence man as club-haunting dilettante was very much part of a generalised impression of the secret services, certainly in the years following the First World War. But in the case of Stewart Menzies, the idea of a cocktail-glugging club-dweller was an unfair slur. It seems that he was initially distrusted at Bletchley on being appointed head of MI6 in November 1939; his predecessor, Admiral Sinclair, who had of course bought the house, was much liked. Not least because he was a naval man – the background of Bletchley’s senior personnel echoed back to Room 40, which was a naval concern. Menzies by contrast was an army man. The old service rivalries died hard.

According to Nigel de Grey, commenting more diplomatically later, these and other internal Bletchley Park conflicts were ‘an imbroglio of conflicting jealousies, intrigue and differing opinions’. Yet those furious threats of resignation from Dilly Knox – perhaps exacerbated by ill-health or simple short temper – interestingly also accused Denniston of not being up to the job.

Even the ‘Third Man’, Kim Philby, had a view on these intrigues, as he related in his memoirs: ‘Much of their work was brilliantly successful. I must leave it to learned opinion to decide how much more could have been achieved if the wrangling inside GC and CS had been reduced to manageable proportions.’
⁶

One can easily see how difficult everyone’s position at Bletchley must have been; for the more successful the huts and the code-breakers became at their work, the greater the demands that were as a result placed upon them. And these demands had to be met with finite resources. While a number of bombe machines were now in operation, there was continuing conflict about how much time was dedicated to the decrypts relating to each branch of the Services. Obviously there were only so many hours in every day, so which would receive priority? And who ultimately had the power to parcel out these chunks of time?

Of course the leaders of the different huts were going to fight each other for use of the bombe machines – it was hardly professional rivalry, it was an understanding that the lives of countless others depended upon the work that they were doing. For all the jibes about ‘ambition’ and some being ‘less scrupulous’ than others, the conflicts at Bletchley were rather more than outbreaks of office politics. For all parties concerned, the stakes could not have been higher. Many who worked there had relatives who were out in Europe, in North Africa, in the Far East, fighting. Naturally they would stop at nothing to provide all the assistance and intelligence that they possibly could.

In any case, there were a great many at Bletchley Park who saw the advent of Edward Travis as Director as unquestionably a good thing. He was a man much better able than Denniston to deal with the myriad administrative difficulties – from bombe time to security to the absurdity of tea rations – that the place regularly threw up.

Gordon Welchman clearly had a lot of time for Commander Travis, as he revealed in his memoir:

It might also have been the case that the era of the gifted amateur was over, and that a new, more systematic and disciplined approach to the work was needed. With the sheer volume of traffic that was now being dealt with, day by day, hour by hour, the Park
had to ensure that all this invaluable information was given to the right people. Moreover, with the coming of the machines, and the increase in personnel that this brought, there was a sense in which the functions of Bletchley were becoming industrialised.

A new class of what might be termed ‘technocrats’ were coming forward, of which cocksure young Gordon Welchman seemed the prime exemplar. The old ways of Alistair Denniston, and of Room 40, with its volatile and unpredictable individualists, had been extremely effective in their time. But how could they be expected to cope with these new and extraordinary demands? How could they match the most implacable enemy that Britain had ever seen?

Codebreaker Ralph Bennett – who had been sent to Egypt to coordinate the work of Hut 6 – came back to Bletchley Park in 1942. ‘I had left as one of a group of enthusiastic amateurs,’ he wrote. ‘I returned to a professional organisation with standards and an acknowledged reputation to maintain. Success was no longer an occasional prize, but the natural reward of relentless attention to detail.’
⁸

There were extra recruits coming in; the brilliant young mathematician Shaun Wylie, for instance, arrived in 1941. His recruitment had in part to do with Alan Turing; for the two men had met in the late 1930s at Princeton University. A formidable intellect, Wylie was also an excellent hockey player. He joined Turing’s hut, Hut 8, and the effort to smash naval Enigma. He was to become head of crib subsection, making a special study of phrases and subjects likely to form a part of encrypted texts, such as weather conditions and the locations of Allied attacks.

And the debutantes in their pearls were proving their worth in the cross-referencing card index, which had been steadily growing and growing. Thanks to their painstaking and unimaginably tedious labours, the index was so minutely detailed that the codebreakers could now tell, for example, when Admiral Dönitz was communicating with a captain who was a personal friend, because of the appearance of the name of that captain’s wife.

The card index was equally formidable for Bletchley’s Air Section. ‘My recollection,’ said veteran Hugh Skillen, ‘is of many thousands of cards in shoe-boxes along both sides of a long hut. When a new word came up in the message you were translating – a neologism, new type of jet fuel, or machine part – you looked for it and if it was not there, the indexer put it in with a reference time and a date stamp.’
⁹

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 – the event that finally brought America into the war – Colonel Tiltman was determined that Bletchley’s codebreakers should be trying everything to master the Japanese codes. Immediately, however, he faced twin hurdles: in 1942, there were very few people in Britain familiar with Japanese; and nor is it an easy language to learn.

Tiltman himself was a partial exception. By this stage, he had already taught himself some Japanese to get a feel for it, and to gauge the possibilities of new young recruits being able to master it sufficiently in order to handle encrypted messages. The colonel was an optimist. The call went out to Cambridge and Oxford, for classics scholars who would by now be in some other part of the military structure. Sixth-forms with pupils about to sit for Oxbridge were also contacted.