How do you make propaganda?
h) How are women and children cared for?
i) Do you take care of elderly parents no longer able to work, whose sons are soldiers? …
k) What is the food situation – especially meat, vegetables, eggs, butter, and bread?
l) What do you think of the black-out?
m) Who is currently the most popular man in England?
n) Who do you consider the most forceful personality in the British cabinet?
o) Do you listen to German radio?
p) Do you like [Lord] Haw-Haw [the Nazi propaganda broadcaster William Joyce]?
q) How are your relations with the French?
r) Do you believe that Germany is bent on world conquest?
s) Would you make peace tomorrow?
The behaviour of most PoWs was strongly influenced by their own nation’s immediate circumstances. At this time, when Allied fortunes were plumbing the depths, a report on the handful of German PoWs in British hands recorded gloomily: ‘The officers (and most of the men) were quite immune to propaganda, think Hitler is a god and refuse to believe a single word of the British news.’ By contrast, a South African RAF pilot named Sgt Edward Wunsch provided his German captors with a highly sympathetic view of the Nazi cause, as recorded by his interrogator: ‘Like all South Africans who have entered Dulag Luft, Wunsch is an unashamed anti-Semite … [He says] There is no hatred towards Germany in South Africa, no enthusiasm for the war at all. Most people believe the nonsense press and propaganda tell them about German atrocities but … W. thinks it possible that one day South Africa could agree to a separate peace, if Germany continues to be militarily successful [author’s italics].’
The Allies lost the 1940 battle for France for many reasons. It has been a source of fierce controversy ever since, whether the French army’s defeat resulted from a failure of judgement by Maurice Gamelin, Allied commander-in-chief, or instead from a national moral collapse. It is unlikely that any amount of intelligence or advance warning could have changed 1940 outcomes. The German army showed itself an incomparably more effective fighting force than the Allies’, and there would be no victories until that changed. If British and French intelligence was poor in 1940, so was everything else.
As the Continent was evacuated, there was a late flurry of buccaneering by secret service officers and freelances: MI6’s Major Monty Chidson, a former head of the Hague station, rescued a priceless haul of industrial diamonds from Amsterdam. Peter Wilkinson got most of the Polish general staff out of France. Tommy Davies, a peacetime director of the Courtaulds textile business, escaped from its Calais plant with a load of platinum hours before the Germans arrived. But these little coups were fleabites in the great scheme of affairs. MI6 had made no contingency plans for stay-behind agents, to report from France in the event of its occupation by the Nazis, and Broadway would probably have been accused of defeatism had it done so. Through many months that followed, Britain’s intelligence services were thus almost blind to events on the Continent, to the frustration of the prime minister. Beleaguered on their island, they became dependent for knowledge of Hitler’s doings on the vagaries of air reconnaissance, and reports from neutral diplomats and correspondents.
The security service explored the limits of the possible and the acceptable in handling a stream of Abwehr agents who descended on Britain, and were promptly captured. MI5 spurned torture as a means of interrogation: in September 1940 at Camp 020, one of its officers intervened to prevent the captured Abwehr agent ‘Tate’ – Harry Williamson – being assaulted and battered by Col. Alexander Scotland of MI9. Guy Liddell deplored this episode, saying that he objected to ‘Gestapo methods’ on both moral and professional grounds. Col. Scotland was likewise prevented from injecting Williamson with drugs. Naval Intelligence Division interrogators tested drugs on each other as a means of extracting information, and concluded that it was a waste of time. Skilled questioning, they decided, was not merely more ethical, but more effective.
As the next act of the great global drama unfolded – Hitler’s air assault on Britain – neither Broadway nor Bletchley Park had much to contribute. The most significant aid to Fighter Command in its epic struggle to repel Göring’s air fleets was wireless traffic analysis of the flood of Morse from the Germans’ new French, Belgian, Dutch and Norwegian bases, together with monitoring of Luftwaffe cockpit chatter by the German linguists of the RAF’s infant Y Service, most of them women.
The prime minister and the chiefs of staff were for many months preoccupied, even obsessed, by two questions: would the Germans invade; and if so, when? In the mad mood prevailing in London in the autumn of 1940, a blend of heroic defiance and absurdity, the War Office’s director of military intelligence suggested exploiting captured Abwehr agents to try to provoke the Germans into hastening an invasion, which he felt sure could be defeated by the Royal Navy and the British Army. This proposal found no favour in Whitehall. Meanwhile the disaster in France had endowed the Wehrmacht with almost magical powers in the minds of the generals, many of whom convinced themselves that Hitler might launch an amphibious assault on Britain with only a few weeks’ preparation, offering no notice to the defenders.
The Royal Navy’s Commander Geoffrey Colpoys was responsible for delivering to Downing Street each day at 1 p.m. a report from the Special Invasion Warning Committee, which for most of the autumn took it for granted that a German assault was imminent, and concerned itself chiefly with the timing. The Joint Intelligence Committee, chaired by the Foreign Office’s Victor ‘Bill’ Cavendish-Bentinck, only once sounded the alarm to suggest that invasion was imminent, on 7 September, when, as Bentinck himself noted sardonically later, he himself was briefly absent and the army’s somewhat unstable director of intelligence – the same man who advocated inciting the Wehrmacht to land – temporarily held the chair. Churchill himself was always sceptical about an invasion, but he deemed it politically imperative to sustain the British people’s belief in the threat not only in 1940, but throughout the following year also, to promote their vigilance and sense of purpose. On 31 July Sir Alexander Cadogan expressed his own conviction that the Germans would not come, but would instead thrust at Gibraltar and Egypt, then added, ‘our “intelligence” gives nothing to corroborate this theory. But then they’re awfully bad.’ Nowhere in the world were British agents providing information of much assistance to the war effort. The British C-in-C in Singapore, Air-Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, wrote in frustration: ‘Little or no reliance is placed upon MI6 information by any authorities here and little valuable information appears to be obtained.’ The same was true nearer home.
For many months after the German occupation of Western Europe, the only nation still able to exploit secret sources on a large scale was the neutral Soviet Union, through its networks in Belgium, Germany and Switzerland. In those days its agents did not even need to trouble with wireless: they simply passed reports to their nearest Soviet diplomatic mission. In May 1940 the GRU’s Leopold Trepper moved from Brussels to Paris, taking with him his mistress, the exotically named Georgie de Winter, a twenty-year-old American, and leaving his deputy Anatoli Gourevitch to arrange the Trepper family’s return to Moscow. Gourevitch’s own personal affairs were scarcely uncomplicated. Under his cover as a ‘Uruguayan businessman’ he had a succession of girlfriends, but felt obliged to break off relations with the prettiest when she revealed that her father knew South America well. ‘In other circumstances,’ he wrote wistfully, ‘I could probably have loved her, but such good fortune is denied to a secret agent.’ Thereafter, however, he formed a friendship with a neighbouring family named Barcza, whose elderly Hungarian husband was married to Margaret, a much younger Belgian blonde with an eight-year-old son. Following her husband’s sudden death, Gourevitch began an intense affair with her. Mikhail Makarov,
