Read The Secrets of Station X Online
Authors: Michael Smith
Morag Maclennan had followed her brother into the Royal Navy at the age of seventeen and was very disappointed to discover that she was being sent to Bletchley rather than Portsmouth or Plymouth.
We got off at the station and somebody met us and we went up a little gravel path, straight into Hut 11. There were all these machines and you were given a thing called a menu with this strange pattern of letters and figures on it. You had to plait up this machine at the back with these great big leads which had to be plugged into different bits.
Then at the front, you had this rack with rows and rows of drums marked up by colour and you were told what
combination
of colours you were to put on. You would set them all, press a button and the whole row went round once and then moved the next one on. It took about fifteen minutes for the whole run, stopping at different times, and you recorded the stop and phoned it through and, with any luck, sometimes it was the right one and the code was broken.
It was very smelly with the machine oil and really quite noisy. The machine kept clanking around and unless you were very lucky your eight-hour watch would not necessarily
produce a good stop that broke a code. Sometimes you might have a good day and two of the jobs you were working on would break a code and that was a great feeling, particularly if it was a naval code. Obviously, we hoped to do it for everybody. But there was an extra little surge of pride if it was a navy one.
Initially, the Wrens were not trusted with any details of what they were doing and it was a boring, frustrating task, she said.
The job itself was pretty dull. You were just working the machines the entire time. Because if all the bread and butter codes were broken, there were always ones that had got missed from a few days before or trying out more experimental ones. So the Bombes were never idle. But after a bit I think it was thought that it would be useful for our morale to know a little bit more of what the codes were dealing with, what areas they covered and of course the odd successes. Some weren’t all that dramatic. They weren’t necessarily operational, but they were building up the picture of exactly what air force squadrons and tank units were where, or where ships were and what they were doing. But when we were breaking the U-Boat ones in particular, we were told about the U-Boat sinkings and convoy protection, so we felt good about that.
By the end of the war, there were just under 2,000 Bombe operators, of whom 1,676 were Wrens, at six different locations around the country. They had their own unit, HMS
Pembroke
V
, and Wrens had gone on to take up a number of other roles in GC&CS, including codebreaking itself. They were billeted together at a number of beautiful old country homes,
including
Woburn Abbey, which became known as the Wrenneries. But they never allowed themselves to forget that they were part of the Royal Navy, calling their living quarters, fo’c’sles; their dormitories, cabins; and saluting the areas in front of the
country
houses in which they were billeted as the quarterdeck.
Their arrival improved the social life and the Wrenneries became renowned for their dances. Barbara Quirk lived in a Tudor mansion called Crawley Grange, an hour’s drive away from Bletchley.
I remember our watch was having a dance in the most glorious ballroom in Crawley Grange, beautiful oak panelling from floor to ceiling, and we were told by our chief officer, who didn’t work at Bletchley, that we couldn’t have any drink. So we got some of the men who were coming from one of the camps around, they might have been Americans, they might have been British, I can’t remember now, to bring some beer. They brought a mobile bar on a jeep and parked it outside the Wrennery and when the chief officer found out, we were all gated for a month.
Joan Baily was billeted first at Crawley Grange and then at Gayhurst Manor, although she actually worked at Bletchley itself.
I found the atmosphere rather exciting because we had to try to break these codes and if we didn’t get the codes up we knew that somebody had had it. If we were on night shift, we had to sleep during the day of course and I remember they had problems with an RAF aircraft flying low over Gayhurst. We found out afterwards it happened to be because my sister was sunbathing on the roof with nothing on.
T
he early spring of 1941 saw the German and Italian advance into the Balkans, a move that had been predicted by Bletchley on the basis of
Luftwaffe
preparations showing up in the
Red
Enigma and the heavy movement of German troops and armour south by rail which was reflected in messages encyphered on the German Railway Enigma. It was codenamed
Rocket
by Bletchley and broken by John Tiltman, who had a roving brief, breaking any codes and cyphers that were not being attacked, or could not be broken, by other departments.
Tiltman, the head of Hut 5, the GC&CS Military Section, was arguably one of the best codebreakers working during this period. Born in London on 25 May 1894, he was so obviously brilliant as a child that he was offered a place at Oxford at the remarkably young age of thirteen. He served with the King’s Own Scottish Borderers in France during the First World War, winning the Military Cross for bravery, and was seconded to MI1b, the War Office codebreaking unit, shortly before it merged with Room 40 to become GC&CS. A tall, rangy man, who had bad back problems and therefore liked to work standing up at a specially constructed high desk, Tiltman was a leading expert on hand cyphers. He habitually wore his regimental tartan trews, but had an otherwise rather casual approach to military uniform.
William Filby, who worked as a cryptanalyst in Hut 5, recalled their first meeting. ‘My arrival was unforgettable,’ Filby said.
As I saluted, I stamped the wooden floor in my Army boots and came to attention with another shattering noise. Tiltman
turned, looked at my feet, and exclaimed: ‘I say old boy. Must you wear those damned boots?’ I became the only other rank at BP in battledress and white running shoes, much to the disgust of the adjutant.
Hut 6 was by now a much larger operation and it began to expand on the number of different Enigma cyphers it was
working
on. The reliance on the
Red
and the
Brown
Enigmas might well mean they were missing vital life-saving and war-winning intelligence. It also left the codebreakers vulnerable to German security improvements on the
Luftwaffe
keys. ‘All through this year [1941], there persisted, at any rate in my mind, the sensation that it was all much too good to be true,’ said Stuart Milner-Barry,
that any day now the enemy would discover, and that we should wake up one morning to discover, that it was all over. In those days the effects of getting in a jam were much more noticeable because with only two or three keys work simply came to a standstill if nothing broke for a few days and the whole Hut descended rapidly into the darkest abyss of despair.
Welchman, the head of Hut 6, expressed concern that Hut 6’s concentration on the
Red
Enigma was putting too many eggs in one basket. In a ‘screed’ to the members of Hut 6, he said,
Since we have neither enough intercept sets to cover all E [Enigma] traffic nor enough bombes to deal with all menus that could be produced we must be very careful to use our resources to the best advantage. Although we must concentrate the greater part of our resources on those colours which are high in the scale, it is most important that we ourselves should not lose interest in any type of E traffic. We should retain a clear idea of what is worth doing, even if we cannot at present do as much as we would wish, and our aim should always be to break every key and to take all steps that may possibly
assist future breaking. From the crytographic point of view the breaking of any key may be valuable because key repeats or re-encodements may occur.
Hut 6 broke into
Violet
, the
Luftwaffe
administrative cypher, on Christmas Eve 1940 and
Light Blue
, the
Luftwaffe
cypher for north Africa and the Mediterranean, on the last day of February 1941, an event that led to raucous celebrations. ‘This occurred when the first party of American visitors were being shown round Hut 6,’ recalled Stuart Milner-Barry, ‘and must greatly have astonished any of them who had the idea that the British were a phlegmatic race.’
A lack of MI6 coverage of Italy, highlighted in 1935 by the Abyssinia Crisis and caused in part by the refusal of the British ambassador in Switzerland to allow MI6 to use Switzerland as a base for running agents into Italy and in part by lack of funding, led the then Chief of MI6 Admiral Hugh Sinclair to rely heavily on GC&CS to produce intelligence on Italy. As a result, Bletchley Park had good coverage of Italian codes and cyphers and was able to warn of Italy’s entry into the war in June 1940, a month ahead of time. Italian diplomatic and colonial cyphers had been read for several years and the Naval Intelligence Italian section, led by William ‘Nobby’ Clarke, was completely on top of most Italian naval codes and hand cyphers from about 1937 onwards. Similarly, Bletchley was able to read most Italian air force and Army codes and hand cyphers. The Italian Enigma had been initially broken by Dilly Knox during the Spanish Civil War and was covered by his research section. It was unclear whether it was the same machine until, in September 1940, Mavis Lever, one of Knox’s assistants and only nineteen, managed to break the keys proving it was the same machine. She was halfway through a German degree at University College London when the war broke out.
I was concentrating on German romantics and then I realised
the German romantics would soon be overhead and I thought well, I really ought to do something better for the war effort. I said I’d train as a nurse and their response was: ‘Oh no you don’t. You use your German.’ So I thought, great. This is going to be an interesting job, Mata Hari, seducing Prussian officers. But I don’t think either my legs or my German were good enough because they sent me to GC&CS.
She initially worked in a section in London perusing the personal columns of
The Times
for coded spy messages and using captured codebooks to decode them when Bletchley began to call for more staff.
I was taken to Dilly Knox’s section, in the cottage. It was very much a research unit. Hut 6 was up and running and
operational
, but Dilly had been one of the great pioneers of it all. He was working on things that hadn’t been broken. It was a strange little outfit in the cottage because… well, organisation is not a word you would associate with Dilly Knox. When I arrived, he said: ‘Oh, hello, we’re breaking machines, have you got a pencil?’ That was it. I was never really told what to do. ‘Here you are, here’s a whole load of rubbish, get on with it.’ I think looking back on it that was a great precedent in my life, because he taught me to think that you could do things yourself without always checking up to see what the book said. That was the way the cottage worked. We were looking at new traffic all the time or where the wheels or the wiring had been changed, or at other new techniques. So you had to work it all out yourself from scratch.
Knox had a unique knack of using his imagination to open up codes and cyphers. ‘He would stuff his pipe with sandwiches sometimes instead of tobacco he was so woolly-minded,’ Lever said.
But he was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. It just seemed to
come naturally to him. He said the most extraordinary things. He was a great admirer of Lewis Carroll, ‘Which way does the clock go round?’ And if you were stupid enough to say clockwise, he’d just say: ‘Oh, no it doesn’t, not if you’re the clock, it’s the opposite way.’ And that’s sometimes how you had to think about the machines. Not just to look at them how you saw them but what was going on inside. That was the only way in which one was really trained. But trained is a bad word because that was the one thing you mustn’t be. You have got to look at each thing afresh and wonder how you could approach it.
The need to look at codes and cyphers from different
perspectives
was drummed into Knox’s assistants and served both Lever and the Royal Navy well when she spotted one missing element in a long Italian Naval Enigma message.
The one snag with the Enigma of course is the fact that if you press A, you can get every other letter but A. I picked up this message and – one was so used to looking at things and making instant decisions – I thought: ‘Something’s gone. What has this chap done. There is not a single L in this message.’ My chap had been told to send out a dummy message and he had just had a fag and pressed the last key of the middle row of his keyboard, the L. So that was the only letter that didn’t come out. We had got the biggest crib we ever had, the
encypherment
was LLLL right through the message and that gave us the new wiring for the wheel. That’s the sort of thing we were trained to do – instinctively look for something that had gone wrong or someone who had done something silly and torn up the rulebook.
The keys she uncovered as a result of the Italian operators’ mistake were to provide the Royal Navy with its first major victory of the war. Messages decyphered by Lever provided
details of the Italian Navy’s plans to attack British ships off the Greek coast and led to a Royal Navy victory at the Battle of Matapan.
‘We didn’t often know the results of our activities, which messages were important,’ Lever said.
Because you see you might actually break a message which said nothing to report which would give you the settings for the rest of the messages. But the Italian messages were done
individually
. The first Matapan message was very dramatic stuff: ‘Today’s the day minus three’, just that and nothing else. So of course we knew the Italian Navy was going to do something in three days’ time. Why they had to say that I can’t imagine. It seems rather daft but they did. So we worked for three days. It was all the nail-biting stuff of keeping up all night working. One kept thinking: ‘Well, would one be better at it if one had a little sleep or shall we just go on,’ and it did take nearly all of three days.
Then a very, very large message came in which was practically the battle orders for what turned into the Battle of Matapan. How many cruisers there were, and how many submarines were to be there and where they were to be at such and such a time, absolutely incredible that they should spell it all out. It was rushed out to Cunningham and the marvellous thing about him was that he played it extremely cool. He knew that they were going to go out and confront the Italian fleet at Matapan but he did a real Drake on them.
The Italian intention was to intercept British convoys en route from Egypt to Greece. Such was the Royal Navy’s superiority over the Italians that Cunningham initially did not believe the Italians would dare to carry out these plans, but pressure was applied from the Admiralty to ensure that he did believe it. Knowing that the Japanese Consul in Alexandria, who was reporting on the movement of the Mediterranean Fleet, was
a keen golfer, the British admiral ostentatiously visited the club house with his clubs and an overnight bag. ‘He pretended he was just going to have the weekend off and made sure the Japanese spy would pass it all back,’ Lever recalled. ‘Then under cover of the night, they went out and confronted the Italians.’
In a series of running battles over 27 and 28 March 1941, Cunningham’s ships attacked the Italian flotilla sinking an entire Italian cruiser squadron of three Italian heavy cruisers and two Italian destroyers with the loss of 3,000 Italian sailors. Without radar, the Italians were caught completely by surprise, Lever recalled.
It was very exciting stuff. There was a great deal of jubilation in the cottage and then Cunningham himself came to visit us with Admiral Godfrey to congratulate us in person. We rushed down to the Eight Bells at the end of the road to get some bottles of wine and if it was not up to the standard the Commander-
in-Chief
Mediterranean was used to he didn’t show it. The cottage wall had just been whitewashed. Now this just shows how silly and young and giggly we were. We thought it would be jolly funny if we could talk to Admiral Cunningham and get him to lean against the wet whitewash and go away with a white stern. So that’s what we did. It’s rather terrible, isn’t it? On the one hand, everything was so very organised and on the other these silly young things are trying to snare the admiral. We tried not to giggle when he left. He had shaken us all warmly by the hand and we thought that was the end of Matapan. It was in fact practically the last we would hear of the Italian fleet, which only made one more appearance before surrendering to Admiral Cunningham in 1943.
Despite the British victory at Matapan, German troops, supported by the
Luftwaffe
, executed yet another
Blitzkrieg
through Yugoslavia and into Greece. British and Greek troops facing insuperable odds were forced to retreat. But the campaign
was the first in which the intelligence unearthed by the Bletchley Park codebreakers could be passed on to the commanders in the field direct from Bletchley Park itself rather than through MI6, as had occurred in Norway and France.
A direct ‘Special Signals Link’ had been set up between Bletchley Park and Cairo in early 1941 to feed the
Ultra
intelligence
to the British forces in the Middle East and it was extended to the British headquarters in Athens shortly before the German invasion. The
Red Luftwaffe
key provided comprehensive details of the discussions of the German
Fliegerverbindungsoffiziere
or
Flivos
, the air liaison officers who coordinated air and ground operations, and although this had to be passed on in a highly sanitised fashion, it ensured that the British could make an orderly retreat.
It also gave early warning that German airborne forces were moving to the Balkans in preparation for the invasion of Crete. A series of messages beginning in late March provided the British with every detail of the operation, from the preparations to the complete plan of the airborne assault, and the day, 20 May, on which it was to be launched. The problem was to find a plausible way of camouflaging the source of all this intelligence so as to ensure the Germans did not realise that Enigma had been broken.