interests of the war effort. The British, and latterly the Americans, did this more effectively than any other participants in World War II. A remarkable proportion of their nations’ brightest and best sooner or later found themselves performing tasks worthy of their talents – in higher army staff posts alongside the likes of Enoch Powell, John Freeman, Toby Aldington; in scientific or technical research; and especially in intelligence, which absorbed thousands of outstanding intellects from many walks of life. The outbreak of war enabled the German section of British military intelligence, for instance, to recruit such writers and academics as Noel Annan, Eric Birley and Alan Pryce-Jones. Annan, a Cambridge don who had only a passable acquaintance with German and French, observed wonderingly: ‘Within a week I was piecing together the reports of agents in the Balkans and the early stutterings of Ultra.’
Donald McLachlan, a journalist who served under Godfrey at the Admiralty, afterwards argued that all wartime intelligence departments should be run by civilians in uniform, because they are unburdened by the lifetime prejudices of career soldiers, sailors and airmen: ‘It is the lawyer, the scholar, the traveller, the banker, even the journalist who shows the ability to resist where the career men tend to bend. Career officers and politicians have a strong interest in cooking raw intelligence to make their masters’ favourite dishes.’ MI6 remained until 1945 under the leadership of its old hands, but most of Britain’s secret war machine passed into the hands of able civilians in uniform who – after an interval of months or in some cases years while they were trained and their skills recognised – progressively improved the quality of intelligence analysis. The Admiralty’s Submarine Tracking Room was directed by Rodger Winn, a barrister and future judge. Gen. Sir Bernard Montgomery’s chief of intelligence from Alamein to Luneburg Heath was the Oxford don Edgar ‘Bill’ Williams, latterly a brigadier. Reg Jones made himself a legend in scientific intelligence.
These men, and a few hundred others throughout the armed forces, spent much of the war exploiting and assessing information derived overwhelmingly from interception and decryption of the enemy’s wireless traffic. Bill Williams, who served in the Mediterranean until 1943 and in Europe thereafter, stated in an important 1945 report: ‘It must be made quite clear that Ultra and Ultra only put intelligence on the map.’ Until decrypts began to become available in bulk in 1942, ‘Intelligence was the Cinderella of the staff … Information about the enemy was frequently treated as interesting rather than valuable [though] of course this attitude varied according to the commander.’
Scepticism was often merited, because much material was downright specious. The 1940 war diary of the army’s Middle East intelligence section in Cairo included comically frivolous snippets: ‘All Hungarian cabaret artistes have been ordered to leave the country by the end of May.’ Data about the Italian army was scanty, so that on 9 August the section recorded: ‘The present location and organisation of Libyan troops in Eastern Cyrenaica is obscure.’ A despondent staff officer added a week later: ‘There has been no further reliable information of fresh [Italian] ground units or formations arriving in Libya from overseas.’ On 27 September, the British high command’s weekly intelligence summary included a paragraph on domestic conditions in Germany: ‘A neutral traveller to the Leipsic fair, whose personal observations are believed reliable, reports that relations between the [Nazi] Party and the Army are not good.’ Three months later, the head of MI6’s Political Section wrung his hands: ‘It is piteous to find ourselves in this state of ignorance’ about both Germany’s internal condition and economy.
Only when Allied warlords were empowered to read the messages being exchanged between enemy generals in the field and their higher headquarters was scepticism about the value of ‘intelligence’ replaced by increasingly fervent belief. Ultra forced commanders-in-chief, not to mention the prime minister, to treat senior intelligence officers with a respect they had seldom received in the pre-Bletchley universe. Brigadier Ian Jacob of the war cabinet secretariat said: ‘My impression is that once the Ultra business got well-established, Churchill didn’t look at anything else.’ Eisenhower’s intelligence chief Kenneth Strong wrote in 1943, in a memorandum on training staff officers: ‘We no longer depend on agents and cloak-and-dagger sources for our information. Modern methods have completely transformed intelligence.’
He meant codebreaking, of course, and in Britain the fountainhead of such activity was the Government Code & Cypher School at Bletchley. In the months following the outbreak of war, GC&CS expanded dramatically with the arrival of a stream of academics, many of them earmarked by its recruiters before the war. Though some were seconded from the armed forces, it was understood that there was no need to train the universities’ contingent to march, blanco webbing, and name the parts of a rifle. They remained their sallow, tweedy, pipe-smoking young selves when housed in lodgings around the dreary suburban town, and enlisted on the government payroll without uniform or ceremony. Twenty-year-old mathematician Keith Batey found his landlady demanding an assurance from his employer that he was not a despised ‘conchy’ – conscientious objector – before he joined the growing body of academics working on a task of supreme importance to their country, fulfilment of which might do something to assuage its shocking vulnerability. What was the task? Bletchley’s little band, 169 strong in 1939 including support staff, understood only that the nation’s enemies communicated in a multitude of codes and ciphers, vulnerable to interception. If even a portion of these combinations of numbers and letters could be rendered intelligible, information might be gained of priceless value to the war effort.
Nobody knew, in the beginning, whether a given message hijacked from the airwaves might be an order from Hitler for his armies to march on Warsaw, or a request from a Luftwaffe airfield in eastern Germany for a delivery of filing cabinets. Ahead of the codebreakers lay a mammoth menu of requirements which could only be addressed as mobilisation sluggishly made available ears, brains and hands to monitor the enemy’s frequencies around the clock, log some of his vast output of messages, fix the locations and possible identities of the senders – diplomatic, police, military, naval or air force. Then came the much greater challenge, of discovering what the messages meant.
All radio communications involved a trade-off between speed and security. At the simplest level, battlefield direction by land, sea and air required some voice linkage. This enabled the instantaneous passage of orders and information, at the cost of being overheard by anybody else who cared to tune to a given frequency. Crude security could be introduced by using coded callsigns in place of names and suchlike – during the Battle of Britain fighter controllers added 5,000 feet to indicated altitudes, to confuse eavesdroppers. But voice messaging was inherently insecure: sensitive information should never be passed verbally, though it often was.
Most military messages were instead wirelessed by Morse key. Low-level material could be rapidly encrypted under battlefield conditions by relatively unsophisticated personnel using so-called hand- or field-ciphers, usually involving groups of two or three letters or numbers – the Kriegsmarine employed twenty-seven variants. More sensitive traffic, issuing from higher echelons, was translated by machine-generated or manual ciphers, usually involving combinations of four or five letters or numbers. The British thought justifiably highly of the security of their Type-X machines, though they never had enough of them.* The Americans rightly trusted their Sigaba, a fifteen-rotor system.
For substantial periods between 1939 and 1943 the Germans broke some Allied codes, including those of the US State Department and military attachés, along with the traffic of several exile governments, notably the Poles and Free French. They sometimes also accessed messages of all three British services, including the RAF’s four-character cipher, and later had successes in attacking products of the US Army’s M-209 field-ciphering machine. It deserves emphasis that Allied code-security weaknesses, and enemy achievements in exploiting them, gave the Germans much more operational assistance than some Western historians acknowledge, especially in the Battle of the Atlantic. However, higher British, American and Russian communications defied enemy scrutiny: Nazi eavesdropping on transatlantic telephone conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt told Berlin little of value. Modern claims that the Germans
