and the meeting ended in a mood of goodwill and mutual respect. Everybody at Broadway recognised the importance of the Poles’ gesture to their allies as a contribution to the secret struggle against the Nazis. Marian Rejewski, a former mathematics student at Warsaw University who had joined the Kabackie woods team back in 1932, is today acknowledged as a pioneer among those who laid bare the secrets of Enigma, even if it fell to others, in Britain, to advance and exploit Rejewski’s achievement.
Stewart Menzies, then deputy chief of MI6, was so impressed by the outcome of the Polish trip that he turned up in person at Victoria station to greet Gustave Bertrand – and to inspect the mimicked Enigma. Knox sent the Poles a gift of scarves, decorated with images of Derby runners, with the letter thanking his hosts for their ‘co-operation and patience’. At or around this time also, the Poles provided the British with five of the Enigma’s eight alternative rotors. A chasm still yawned, however, between understanding how the machine worked, and achieving the ability to read its traffic. Though a trickle of German messages were broken by human ingenuity during the winter of 1939–40, traffic was breached on an industrial scale only from 1941 onwards, following the creation of revolutionary electro-mechanical technology. Nonetheless, the assistance of the French and Poles dramatically accelerated progress at the GC&CS, now evacuated from London to a safer country home. Physical possession of the enemy’s encryption instrument enabled its cryptanalysts to grasp the mountainous challenge they must overcome.
Until 1939, and in large measure for two years thereafter, British intelligence remained dependent for its view of the world upon humint – reports from informants abroad. How well did MI6 fulfil its responsibility to brief the government about the mounting threat from Nazi Germany – ‘Twelveland’ in Broadway parlance? It produced many reports arguing that Hitler’s long-term ambitions lay in the East, and this was fundamentally correct. Unfortunately for its credibility, however, in 1940 Germany chose first to seek to dispose of the Western democracies. MI6 was in no doubt that Hitler was rearming fast, but insistently emphasised the weakness of the industrial base from which he aspired to make war. Responsibility for gathering economic data rested with the Industrial Intelligence Centre, an offshoot administered since 1934 by the Foreign Office, but run by the veteran secret service officer Major Desmond Morton. During the ‘wilderness years’, Morton passed to Winston Churchill – with the sanction of prime minister Stanley Baldwin – details of German rearmament which empowered the unheeded prophet to cry forth warnings to the world. Ironically, the Major wildly overstated the growth of Hitler’s military machine: Morton never had much grasp of economics in general, nor of the Nazi economy in particular.
But modern historians critical of pre-war British intelligence failures miss some important points. In those days few people of any nationality understood economic analysis. The IIC was correct in judging that Germany was ill-prepared to conduct a long struggle, and was rendered vulnerable by its dependence on imported commodities and especially oil. The German economy, as Adam Tooze has shown, was not strong enough to meet the huge challenge Hitler sought to fulfil, of conquering the most advanced societies on earth. Germany’s GDP was no larger than Britain’s, and her people’s per capita incomes were lower. In 1939, Hitler’s expenditures on armaments had reduced his country’s finances to a parlous condition. But it was asking too much of any intelligence service to gauge the potential of German industry under the stimulus of conflict: to the very end of World War II, the best brains in the Allied nations failed fully to achieve this. MI6 could not be expected to predict Hitler’s conquests, which dramatically enhanced his access to oil, raw materials and slave labour.
On the military side, neither MI6 nor the service departments learned much about the new technology and tactics being developed by Britain’s enemies. Nor about their limitations: they wildly overrated the Luftwaffe’s ability to devastate Britain’s cities. In 1938, Broadway reported that the Germans had 927 first-line bombers capable of mounting 720 sorties a day and dropping 945 tons of ordnance (this was an exaggeration of 50 per cent), and projections of likely casualties were even more inflated. War Office appreciations of the German army were equally mistaken, especially in estimating its potential mobilised strength. These suggested in 1939 that Hitler was already master of the largest war machine his nation’s resources could bear. Rearmament, coupled with vast public expenditure, ‘had taxed the endurance of the German people and the stability of the economic system to a point where any further effort can only be achieved at the risk of a breakdown of the entire structure’.
A February 1939 Strategical Appreciation by the chiefs of staff, drafted by the Joint Planning Committee, asserted that Britain could survive a long war better than Germany. This was true, but the chiefs said nothing about the danger that it could meanwhile lose a short one. Moreover, they never pressed the cabinet to acknowledge the shocking weakness of Britain’s Far East empire. The three services’ intelligence branches had no contact with each other, and there were no joint staffs.
As for politics, an MI6 officer wrote in a November 1938 report for the Foreign Office: ‘Not even Hitler’s intimates, according to one of them, knows if he would really risk world war.’ A few months later, the service’s credibility was severely injured by its issue of warnings that Germany intended imminently to strike at Western Europe, starting with Holland. Embarrassment was increased by the fact that the Foreign Office forwarded this alarm call to the US government. One of the British recipients, senior civil servant Sir George Mounsey, delivered a blast against MI6 which echoed around Whitehall. The Foreign Office’s standing was damaged, he said, by acting on the basis of ‘a highly sensational and highly disturbing kind of information which [MI6] are unable to guarantee’. Mounsey was dismissive of all covert sources, agents whose rumour-mongering had prompted Broadway’s warning: ‘They have a secret mission and they must justify it … If nothing comes to hand for them to report, they must earn their pay by finding something … Are we going to remain so attached to reliance on secret reports, which tie our hands in all directions?’ Mounsey had his own agenda: to sustain the policy of appeasement adopted by Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, whom he admired prodigiously. His views nonetheless reflected a general scepticism in high places about Broadway’s performance.
Gladwyn Jebb of the Foreign Office, often a critic of MI6, on this occasion leapt to its defence. While acknowledging the frustrations of dealing with secret organisations, he said that he could not forget that its officers ‘did warn us of the September [1938 Munich] crisis, and they did not give any colour to the ridiculous optimism that prevailed up to the rape of Czechoslovakia, of which our official [diplomatic] reports did not give us much warning’. In December 1938 Broadway offered a sound character sketch of Germany’s Führer, at a time when many British diplomats and politicians still deluded themselves that he was a man they could do business with. ‘Among his characteristics,’ asserted the MI6 report, ‘are fanaticism, mysticism, ruthlessness, cunning, vanity, moods of exaltation and depression, fits of bitter and self-righteous resentment, and what can only be termed a streak of madness; but with it all there is great tenacity of purpose, which has often been combined with extraordinary clarity of vision. He has gained the reputation of being always able to choose the right moment and right method for “getting away with it”. In the eyes of his disciples, and increasingly in his own, “the Führer is always right”. He has unbounded self-confidence, which has grown in proportion to the strength of the machine he has created; but it is a self-confidence which has latterly been tempered less than hitherto with patience and restraint.’
It is easy to catalogue the shortcomings of MI6. Like most of its sister services on the Continent, in 1939 it commanded little respect in high places, and had small influence on policy-making. It seems necessary to go beyond this, however, and pose the question: what might its spies have usefully discovered, granted more resources and cleverer people? The likely answer is: not much. MI6’s reporting was matched by a daily bombardment of newspaper headlines, both showing beyond peradventure that Germany was rearming. More accurate and detailed information about Hitler’s armed forces would have been useful to the War Office and Downing Street, but the critical issue, the vital uncertainty, was not that of Germany’s capabilities, but rather that of its intentions.
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