Read The Secrets of Station X Online
Authors: Michael Smith
Two other new developments at Bletchley Park also helped Montgomery. Hut 3 had just started receiving reports decyphered from the
Chaffinch
cypher, giving a complete breakdown of the fighting strengths of the
Afrika Korps
and comprehensive returns on the availability of tanks. Meanwhile, its joint operation with Hut 4 to detect the Axis supply lines had been improved, partly by the decision to place Royal Navy advisers inside Hut 3 to track the convoys and, more
importantly
, by Hut 8’s breaking of
Porpoise
, the German Navy’s Mediterranean cypher.
Throughout the second half of August, the RAF and the Royal Navy redoubled their attacks on the Axis convoys. Meanwhile, the codebreakers were able to monitor a series of high-level exchanges between the German commanders. Those between Kesselring and Rommel showed the two were barely on speaking terms. They also revealed that the Desert Fox was unwell. Then came the approval, first by Hitler and later by Mussolini, of Rommel’s plans.
More importantly perhaps, given the Desert Fox’s predilection
for ignoring orders, Bletchley and Heliopolis were able to chart the regrouping of the German forces in readiness for the attempt to outflank the Eighth Army as well as the problems and delays to the operation caused by the non-arrival of two of the supply ships. Montgomery had briefed his troops on what Rommel was about to do. Then the supply problems led to a four-day postponement.
‘Believing that the confidence of his men was the
prerequisite
of victory, he told them with remarkable assurance how the enemy was going to be defeated,’ said Williams, the Eighth Army commander’s chief intelligence officer.
The enemy attack was delayed and the usual jokes were made about the ‘crystal-gazers’. A day or two later everything happened according to plan. The morale emerging from the promise so positively fulfilled formed the psychological
background
conditioning the victory which was to follow.
After finding his way through the Alam Halfa ridge blocked, Rommel was forced to retreat for lack of fuel. From then on,
Ultra
played a privileged part in Montgomery’s plans. He allowed Williams access to his command post day or night with any new information the codebreakers produced.
‘Imagine the situation in the desert in the late summer of 1942,’ said Ralph Bennett, who was sent out to the Middle East to report from Cairo on the
Scorpion
traffic.
There is Montgomery. He’s got a little truck park with his own command truck and the Army and the Air commanders forming three sides of a little square. Then the fourth one is the wireless truck to receive the
Ultra
signals so that Williams can make immediate contact with Montgomery and the other commanders to give them the urgent
Ultra
information.
Ultra
played no significant part in the Battle of el Alamein
itself. But Montgomery knew from
Chaffinch
and
Scorpion
the precise numbers of troops and tanks he faced, while the sinking of the supply ships, 50,000 tons in October alone, nearly half of the cargo which left Italy for North Africa, had a crucial
influence
on the
Afrika Korps
’ ability to resist. So tight were its margins of supply that the sinking of an Axis convoy during the battle itself had a direct influence on the fighting.
On the afternoon of 2 November, with Montgomery having punched two holes in the
Panzer
Army’s defences and about to force his way through, Bletchley decyphered a message from Rommel to Hitler asking permission to withdraw. ‘
Panzerarmee
ist
erschopft
’, he said. The Panzer Army was ‘exhausted’ and had precious little fuel left. The response from Berlin was that Rommel should stand his ground at all costs. He was to ‘show no other road to his troops than the road leading to death or victory’.
But in the face of far superior troops, he was forced to retreat along the coast road towards el Agheila. Why he wasn’t pursued at speed and destroyed either by intensive RAF bombing raids or Montgomery himself remains a puzzle.
Chaffinch
revealed on 10 and 11 November that one of his
Panzer
divisions had just eleven tanks while the other had none at all. Five days later, with all attempts to resupply the German troops being frustrated with the aid of
Ultra
, the
Red
Enigma carried a special situation report from Rommel to Hitler in which he described his fuel supplies as ‘catastrophic’.
Bennett was by now in Cairo as the experienced Hut 3 officer who was to oversee the issuing of reports from the
Luftwaffe
Enigma decyphered in Cairo.
My temporary absence meant that among much else I missed the fierce indignation and dismay felt throughout the Hut at Montgomery’s painfully slow advance from Alamein to Tripoli, incomprehensible in the light of the mass of
Ultra
intelligence showing that throughout his retreat Rommel was too weak to withstand serious pressure.
Edward Thomas, who was the Hut 4 liaison officer in Hut 3 during this period, was a first-hand witness to the fury within Hut 3 at Montgomery’s inaction even when told, absolutely correctly, that in the aftermath of Alamein, the Desert Fox had only eleven tanks and virtually no fuel.
After the war, I found my initials at the bottom of the signals giving details of three supremely important tanker movements at the time of el Alamein. Their sinking was largely responsible for Rommel’s long and halting retreat westwards. I well
remember
the frustration that exploded from our Hut 3 colleagues at Montgomery’s failure to overtake and destroy him.
Their anger was clearly shared by Churchill. Following the victory at el Alamein, he had said: ‘This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ Now he bombarded Alexander with pieces of
Ultra
suggesting that the Eighth Army kill the
Afrika Korps
off for good.
‘Presume you have read the
Boniface
numbers QT/7789 and QT/7903 which certainly reveal a condition of weakness and counter-order among the enemy of a very remarkable
character
,’ one signal from the Prime Minister stated with obvious impatience, while another pointed out: ‘
Boniface
shows the enemy in great anxiety and disarray.’
But Montgomery feared that Rommel’s greater mobility might allow him to turn the tables on the British yet again and decided to err on the side of caution, ignoring the repeated suggestions of Churchill, Alexander and Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, the commander of the Middle East Air Force, that the Desert Fox should be pursued and annihilated.
‘Unfortunately after Alam Halfa, Monty was inclined to be a bit boastful about having got it right,’ said Ralph Bennett.
He was inclined to think he was right all the time. At el Agheila,
he insisted on being cautious, which of course was Monty’s great thing most of the time, although he knew perfectly well, because we had told him over and over and over again, that Rommel had inferior defences and very few tanks.
Within days of the victory at el Alamein, Allied forces landed in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia as part of
Operation Torch
, the invasion of North Africa – designed to provide a base from which to attack Italy and southern France. British and American troops under General Eisenhower pushed east with the aim of linking up with Montgomery. Meanwhile the Axis forces began pouring troops into Tunis, a
reinforcement
chronicled in some detail by Hut 3 from the
Luftwaffe
Enigma, the Italian C38m and
Porpoise
, the German Navy’s Mediterranean cypher.
Plans were put in place well in advance to keep the
Torch
commanders supplied with
Ultra
. They were agreed at a
conference
in Broadway attended by Nigel de Grey, representing Travis; Harry Hinsley, on behalf of the Naval Section in Hut 4; and Eric Jones, the head of Hut 3. Four separate Special Liaison Units were set up to pass the material on, one to serve Eisenhower’s headquarters, one with the forward elements of the troops pushing eastwards and two others with the
occupation
forces in Oran and Casablanca.
A number of codebreakers from Bletchley Park, including Noel Currer-Briggs, a member of Tiltman’s Military Section, were sent out to reinforce a mobile Y unit, 1 Special Wireless Section. Their role was to help in breaking the Double Playfair hand cypher that was used by the German Army for its
medium-grade
messages, while Bletchley concentrated on the
Luftwaffe
cyphers and a new Army Enigma introduced for the campaign which Hut 6 designated
Bullfinch
.
The mobile Y unit set up its base in an old Foreign Legion fort at Constantine in eastern Algeria, Currer-Briggs recalled. ‘Fort Sid M’Cid was built in true Beau Geste tradition on top
of a hill above the astonishing gorge which bisects the city of Constantine,’ he said.
It may have looked romantic, but it was the filthiest dump imaginable. One of my most vivid memories of it is cleaning the primitive latrines, a row of stone holes set in the thickness of the wall over a fifty-foot drop which had to be emptied through an iron door set in the base of the ramparts. It would be a good punishment if somebody had done something wrong but nobody had. So the adjutant and I said: ‘Let’s get on and do it’, and we started shovelling shit. I can still smell it. I recall with more pleasure, reading Virgil on the battlements. Hardly typical of military life but in the true tradition of BP.
The Tunisian campaign was to be dominated by Rommel’s last two throws of the dice. In the first,
Ultra
was to
demonstrate
its potential frailties; partial intelligence turned out to be wrong; German orders that seemed to indicate one option had already been superseded by the time they were decyphered. As a result Rommel trounced the Americans in the Kasserine Pass, a vital communications link through the Atlas mountains, before turning round and heading east with the intention of taking on Montgomery, who had advanced to Medenine in eastern Tunisia.
Ultra
gave Montgomery full details of Rommel’s plans to throw the whole of the
Afrika Korps
against the Eighth Army positions. Throughout the last week of February and the first week of March, information from Bletchley and from 1 Special Wireless Section, now moved closer to the British commanders, built up a complete picture of Rommel’s plans.
‘This was a most exciting time for us,’ said Currer-Briggs.
Traffic was coming in thick and fast. We were theoretically working in shifts but there was so much to do that we hardly ever took time off, and frequently worked when we should
have been resting. It was far too exciting to twiddle one’s thumbs in idleness.
For the codebreakers in Hut 6 and their intelligence reporting colleagues in Hut 3, this was seen as final payback for Crete. Whereas in Crete they had every detail of the German plans but no way of preventing it happening, now they had every detail of Rommel’s plan and the forces ready and waiting to counter it.
By the time Rommel’s troops attacked the Eighth Army positions on the morning of 6 March with a total of 160 tanks and 200 guns, they were faced by a solid wall of 470 anti-tank guns, 350 field guns and 400 tanks. Fed by the codebreakers with every detail of his planned assault, the British simply sat and waited for the Desert Fox. By evening, his tanks largely reduced to burning wrecks, Rommel called the battle off. Three days later, he left Africa, never to return.
The fighting in Tunisia continued for two more months but the North African campaign had effectively ended and the British were already making plans for one of the necessary side-effects of victory. The
Ultra
-led attacks on the Axis supply convoys had been carried out with the future need to be able to feed a large number of prisoners in mind, said Edward Thomas. ‘While those with cargoes of tanks, fuel and ammunition had been selected for attack, ships known from the decrypts to be carrying rations had been spared.’
Although Montgomery claimed them as his own, it was his victories in North Africa which finally persuaded the British Army and the RAF that
Ultra
was an extremely powerful weapon and one that could win the war. It was one of the main reasons behind the British defeat of the
Afrika Korps
, said Jim Rose. ‘If you look at the position at the Fall of Tobruk in July 1942, that’s only a few months before el Alamein, Rommel was really in the ascendant. Things looked desperate when Churchill was with Roosevelt and he heard about the fall of Tobruk, but
then six months later they had completely changed. That would not have been possible without
Ultra
.’
For the codebreakers themselves, two and a half years of hard slog had enabled them to create an efficient organisation
capable
of ensuring that, while individual keys might occasionally be lost, the bulk of the German’s top secret communications would be read, and that the information they contained could be passed to the men who were able to make best use of it: the commanders in the field. North Africa was where
Ultra
finally proved itself to be the source of intelligence the military could trust. Until then, the RAF and the Royal Navy had derived real benefits from the Enigma decrypts and understood their importance. The Army had placed a lot of trust in its eventual value, providing the bulk of the intercept operators who
intercepted
Enigma messages and many of those who worked on them at Bletchley, but had been slow to see the tangible value the
Ultra
reports could provide. That changed in North Africa, said Lucas.
From the summer of 1941 until the surrender in Tunisia in May 1943, a very large part of our work was concerned with North Africa, where it may be said without hesitation that ‘Source’ was decisive. This was because, at long last, efficient arrangements had been made for passing our information to those who could best use it, the operational commands.
Partly in consequence of certain differences in the
character
of War Office and Air Ministry, partly because of the scantiness of military, as compared with air, intelligence from Hut 3, relations with these two ministries also differed. While Air Ministry looked to BP for their most important source, the War Office received comparatively little. They therefore treated Hut 3 as a very subsidiary source.
It was not until the African campaign that Hut 3
established
itself in the eyes of the War Office as a purveyor of goods which were priceless, unobtainable elsewhere, and already well
processed when issued. In the African campaign, every
formation
, every unit, had been known and placed, no
reinforcement
could accrue to the enemy across the Mediterranean without due warning.