By special request of the Admiralty, a third man joined the party. The third man went by air, which implied some sort of special importance. He was introduced as ‘Sandwich’. The Poles were duly impressed. They thought the mysterious personage going under such an obvious cover-name as ‘Professor Sandwich’ might be ‘C’ (the head of MI6) or, more likely, his deputy, Stuart Menzies, who seemed to be running C’s show in Europe. By contrast, Henri Braquenié, Bertrand’s own deputy, thought it was hilarious. Marian Rejewski recalled, ‘Braquenié nudged me with his elbow and said: “Sandwich – his name is Sandwich!”’16 Braquenié understood Professor Sandwich to be the Earl of Sandwich, descendant of an eighteenth-century First Lord of the Admiralty and inventor of a form of fast food. To send an aristocratic stuffed shirt with a silly name would perfectly fit the way the British did things.
The identity of the third man remained mysterious for many decades, but in truth there was no mystery whatever. Denniston had told his allies exactly who he was. The British had no means of covering the radio traffic of the German Navy on the Polish side of the Kiel canal, leaving a sizeable gap in their strategically vital understanding of German naval operations. So the Admiralty placed great value on those Pimpernels which described the German radio nets along the Baltic. As this information came straight from Poland, they wanted their own radio man, Commander Humphrey Sandwith RN, to be at the party. Although the cryptanalytic liaison was bound to be a washout, information of real value might be obtained about radio, changes to the way the Germans were doing things, intelligence about call signs, naval strengths and deployments, and there was even a possibility that the Poles might provide copies of messages they had intercepted.17
The grumpy Knox and his two companions checked into the best hotel in Warsaw’s old town, The Bristol. At 7 a.m. on Wednesday 26 July 1939, a car came to collect them and whisked them off, past the Belvedere Palace, through the suburbs, out to the woods to the south of the city. They were being taken to Polish intelligence’s most secret installation, the number one radio intelligence site, the Pyry bunker.
Within the bunker, there was to be no stepping around the subject, as had occurred in Paris with the courtly dance of secrecy. Here they got straight down to it, albeit with a certain amount of characteristic Polish military formality which irritated the British delegation (Denniston’s description is of ‘pompous declarations’ at a ‘full dress conference’). Ciężki dropped the bombshell almost at once. The Poles had cracked Enigma. Years ago. They knew the wiring of the rotors. They were able to find the settings used by the Germans to set up the machine so that the cipher changed every day. They had done the reverse-engineering by pure mathematics and they were using machinery to discover the rotors in use and the daily settings. Here were the men who had done it and here were the machines.
Bertrand and Braquenié were open-mouthed with amazement. So, evidently, were the British, described by Braquenié as les anglais idiots. How feeble seemed Knox’s little rods, as described in Paris, against the technological approach being used by the Poles:
I confess [wrote Denniston] I was unable to understand completely the lines of reasoning but when, as seemed part of the conference, we were taken down to an underground room full of electric equipment and introduced to the ‘bombs’ I did then grasp the results of their reasoning and their method of solving the daily key [Enigma settings]. Knox accompanied us throughout but maintained a stony silence and was obviously extremely angry about something.18
Knox had reason to be angry. The Poles’ claim to have used mathematics was ludicrous. Knox knew the mathematician at King’s in Cambridge who had been working on the Enigma problem for a year now and even he hadn’t got anywhere. Knox was suspicious. It had to be a ‘pinch’ – something acquired, through spying, purchase or stealth, or even all three. How else had they found the QWERTZU – that all-important wiring between the plugboard and the rotors? Explain that one? Well, actually, that had just been an inspired guess. They’d tried ABCDEFG … and it had worked. Knox’s discontent grew. It could not have been worse. One of Knox’s own staff had suggested that very idea and he had pooh-poohed it. Knox retreated into one of his black silences.
When they got into the car for the ride back, Knox’s frustration exploded:
He suddenly let himself go and, assuming that no one understood any English, raged and raved that they were lying to us now as in Paris. The whole thing was a fraud that he kept repeating. They never worked it out. They pinched it years ago and have followed developments as anyone could but they must have bought it or pinched it.’
Perhaps Bertrand and Braquenié did not need fluent English to get the gist of Knox’s outburst. Denniston was beside himself with shame. Priceless intelligence was being laid out for them and yet the meeting was going about as badly as could be imagined.
Back at the Bristol, Knox went to his room while Denniston and Sandwith tried, together with Bertrand, to salvage something of the plan for the following day. Upstairs, meanwhile, Knox was still furious. Ordinary folk who have something to say just say it. But Knox did not belong to the category of ordinary folk. He grabbed some notepaper from the desk and spilled out his bile in a letter to Denniston, who was, after all, just the occupant of a nearby room. Denniston, being altogether a calm and mild person, instead of crumpling this piece of ire and consigning it to the waste basket, kept it, and after his return to London, he filed it, where it is still available to see in the National Archives:
My dear Alistair,
Let’s get this straight.
(a) The Poles have got the machine to Sept 15th 38 out by luck. As I have said only Mrs B.B. had seriously contemplated the equation A=1 B=2. Had she worked on the crib we should be teaching them …
(c) Their machine for determining all ciphers … may be good. If we are going to read these we should give it a detailed study: if not, we only want the broadest outline of its electrical principles.
(d) … Even the principle of electrical selection must be viewed with distrust …
I am fairly clear that Schensky [Ciężki] knows very little about the machine + may try to conceal facts from us. The young men seem very capable and honest.
A.D.K.19
Writing the letter seems to have expunged the poison from Knox. On the next day at Pyry, which Denniston and Sandwith must have dreaded, he was much calmer. Ciężki brought back in Rejewski, Różycki and Zygalski and the demeanour of all three was emollient. They continued to impress Knox with their technical ability and especially Zygalski, because he had some English to add to the quatsch of German and French being spoken. The more detail they gave on their machines – the cyclometer and the bomba – the more Knox was ready to listen to a thing not of his invention. Knox would return to London knowing that, possibly for the first time in his life, he had met his intellectual match.
August 1939 became a time for thank-yous and apologies:
My dear Bertrand [wrote Menzies on 1 August 1939] Having just seen [Dunderdale] on his arrival from Paris, he has told me about the huge success of the combined visit to Warsaw, and I wish immediately to take the opportunity of letting you know how appreciative I am of your role in arranging the trip.20
My dear Bertrand [wrote Denniston on 3 August 1939] It’s possible that you understood my great difficulty – Knox. He is a man of extreme intelligence, who does not know the word ‘collaborate’. Outside work, you have no doubt observed that he is a kind boy liked by everyone. In the office, he’s something else. In Warsaw I had some painful scenes with him …21
Serdecznie dziękujęza współpracę i cierpliwość [wrote Knox to the Poles on 1 August 1939: sincere thanks for your cooperation and patience]. Çi inclus (a) des petits batons (b) un souvenir d’Angleterre.22
Knox’s enclosures with his note were, in a sense, a type of code. He sent the Poles some of his rods and a silk scarf, printed with a horse racing scene. Knox’s hidden message was an acknowledgement that the Poles had won the race,
by a mile or more, his little strips of paper outridden by mathematics and machinery.
The Poles had not only explained the wiring of the Engima machine and its rotors but given over the plans to their bomba. The bomba was possibly the most impressive demonstration of Polish talent. While the British had themselves devised a method to find the wiring of rotors, to use it they first needed the unknown QWERTZU. Without a ‘pinch’ of their own, there had been no prospect of finding the QWERTZU before that meeting at Pyry. As things turned out, the first, incomplete, ‘pinch’ of pieces of Enigma hardware during hostilities occurred in early 1940. The Polish revelations had shortened the British attack on Enigma by at least a year.23
Now Knox had some work to do. His first step was to explain what he had learned in Warsaw to Alan Turing. Alan Turing had been recruited as a reserve staffer for the Government Code & Cypher School in the late summer of 1938, when Alastair Denniston had done the rounds of Cambridge colleges on the lookout for ‘men of the Professor type’ to add to an emergency list of standby code-breakers.24 Turing was a mathematician from King’s College who was making a small reputation as a logician with an interest in machinery for solving mathematical problems. They hadn’t thought about machines for breaking ciphers at GC&CS before the Pyry disclosures in that underground chamber, even though Turing had been sent on a course to learn about the Enigma problem in January 1939 and had been mulling over the challenge ever since. In the late summer of 1939, at Knox’s house, the Polish secrets, the theory of cycles and the bomba were revealed to Alan Turing.
• • •
The Golden Arrow boat-train squealed asthmatically into Victoria Station during the evening of 16 August 1939. The presence of a VIP on board required the attendance of a very senior officer of MI6 to meet the train. Thus Stewart Menzies was at the station, dressed for dinner, with (as subtle as it was appropriate for the occasion) the tiny rosette of the Légion d’honneur in his lapel. As the train ground to a halt, Gustave Bertrand stepped from it into the cloud of steam. That their host was wearing a dinner jacket and the rosette was a fine touch, instantly appreciated by Bertrand, head of the escorting party: accueil triomphal, he said.25 The importance of the VIP could not be overstated. The escorting party included Wilfred Dunderdale and his number two, cover-name ‘Uncle Tom’, in fact an oversize MI6 volunteer whose business connections helpfully made border problems disappear. All these preparations were vital, for Bertrand’s VIP was a large wooden box, containing a kind of Wehrmacht Enigma machine: one of two Polish replicas donated to the British at the Pyry conference, which had been sent across to Paris in the diplomatic bag.
In a different train, on the way back from Warsaw the previous month, Denniston could be forgiven if he felt a little triomphal himself. As the train galloped across the plains of Prussia, he felt a little like the surviving rider in Robert Browning’s poem. As in the ride from Ghent to Aix, Dirck and Joris had fallen out of the party. Sandwith had gone back in his plane and Knox had had some trouble with his visa at the border and had been made to return to the consulate at Poznań to sort it out. So Denniston was on his own, thinking over the good news which he was carrying from Warsaw to London. His piece of paper, unlike Chamberlain’s, listed seventeen items of enduring worth which the Poles had given up voluntarily.26 The good news in his briefcase vindicated his decision to recruit mathematicians like Alan Turing. Maybe, just maybe, through the X-Y-Z liaison created by Bertrand, the Poles had given the British an edge, something which Turing and Knox might be able to use to find out what the Nazis were up to.
* See Appendix for a more detailed explanation
6
MONSTROUS PILE
A maudlin and monstrous pile, probably unsurpassed in the architectural gaucherie of the mid-Victorian era.
Landis Gores, quoted in
Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown
The tallest wooden structure in Europe is a radio mast. It is now located in Poland, but in September 1939 this part of Europe was Germany. It was not just the Poles who had radio-related vanity projects. Indeed, the radio centre at Gleiwitz was an obvious target. The Poles would, for sure, be planning to attack it. The attack would be clandestine, done at night, and its careful planning was codenamed Operation HIMMLER. It was scheduled to happen on the night of 31 August–1 September 1939.
The only thing was, the attack was not going to be made by the Poles at all. It was the task of a tiny group of SS men who dressed up in Polish uniforms, murdered a local farmer and a few concentration camp inmates, dressed these corpses to look like saboteurs, ‘seized’ the station from themselves, broadcast a message in Polish, and returned to their proper uniforms to tell the world triumphantly how the Polish attack on Germany’s tallest asset had been thwarted. In a cynical piece of political theatre, the Gleiwitz incident provided an outraged Hitler with the excuse to invade Poland. Later on the same day, 1 September 1939, Poland was invaded from East Prussia in the north, Germany in the west, and German-controlled Slovakia in the south-west. World War Two had begun.
There are many myths about the Battle of Poland in 1939. Cavalrymen charging tanks, clapped-out biplanes fighting Stukas, and such like. Most of these stories are bunk. But there was a failure of planning and strategy. The Poles planned to fight on the border and to defend the industrial and resource-rich region of Silesia. The German Army rapidly squeezed them out of the Polish Corridor, pushing the Poles relentlessly south and east. Edward Rydz-Śmigły, the successor to Piłsudski as Marshal of Poland, was no Piłsudski when it came to the real test. Rydz-Śmigły was fighting a war of movement: movement away from the Germans. Within less than a week of the invasion, Rydz-Śmigły had taken the government out of Warsaw. All the movement left no time for actual government.
Polish strategy relied heavily on the French and the British to honour their promises. If matters worked as they had in 1914, the French and British would immediately attack Germany with all the power at their disposal. And so it was. On 7 September 1939, eleven divisions of the French Army crossed the border into Germany near Saarbrücken and approached the Siegfried Line. German resistance was weak; the bulk of German forces had been committed to the Polish campaign.
The British, meanwhile, sent bombers to Berlin. The planes bombarded innocent German civilians … with leaflets. John Colville, a diarist close to the heart of the British establishment, observed on Wednesday 13 September 1939: ‘Poland has exhausted nearly all her resources of aerial defence … our comparative inactivity on the Western Front is causing general uneasiness. Why not bomb military objectives instead of scattering pamphlets is the question everybody is asking about the R.A.F.’1
The Polish code-breakers found themselves under attack from the Luftwaffe, who most certainly had more than pamphlets to deliver. The way the German planes singled them out seemed almost personal. Jerzy Różicki had a young wife, Barbara, who kept her own diary:
September 2nd. We witness air battles over the Pole Mokotowskie [a park in Warsaw]. They tell us that the second line of Warsaw’s defence now runs along our street (Ursynowska) and that they placed an anti-aircraft gun on our terrace. We’re worried and our concern is growing. ‘Maliznota’ (that’s what we called our son) will soon be only 4 months old. I use a bottle to feed him. Already it’s difficult to get milk and food. Many shops are closed.
September 3rd. The airport and Raszyn are being bombed. Constant air-raid alarms – our life is now a constant journey between the basement and the apartment. Jurek (diminutive of Jerzy) came back from the office late at night. He came with Zyga (a friend called Henryk Zygalski). The events of the day shook them up. They tell us that their bureau is vacating their current place of work (Pyry near Warsaw), they’re already packed, tomorrow they’re taking a special train to Brześć [Brest] by the Bug river …
September 6th. Jurek arrived at 5 a.m. Their train can’t leave just yet. He came just for a moment to see how we were. He’s shocked to see us still here. He couldn’t leave us under
those circumstances. He decided he would take us on to his train – so that we can at least leave Warsaw … We start off on foot, then using different means of transportation, before eventually getting to the station. As soon as we found ourselves in the carriage, the station and the trains standing there were subjected to bombing. We’re all going under the carriages to hide. There’s no way we can depart now. The tracks are destroyed as are some carriages. Some of our carriages need to be replaced. Jurek left to look for milk. His colleague M. Rejewski ran home to see his wife and children. Zyga stayed with us. He was from Poznań and had no family in Warsaw. We were all back together in the evening. The train left …
September 7th. The train isn’t running, it’s going at a snail’s pace. The tracks are broken and need to be fixed. During the day bombs target the train all the time. The train has to stop, we need to leave and hide under the trees in the nearby gardens or in the bushes by the road …
September 8th. Myself, the baby, Jurek and Zyga were in hiding during an air raid and a bomb came down very close to us. A crater opened up in front of us, luckily we were only covered by some sand … Hidden under the trees we saw, on the other side of the tracks, on a field by the forest, some 300 meters away from where we were, a German plane landing …
September 9th. Finally around midday we find ourselves at the station in Brześć by the Bug river. We are met by peace, quiet and beautiful weather. We leave the train. Jurek and I run to find milk and food … Suddenly we hear the sound of motors, then we see a black cloud over our heads – planes just above us. During this, the first air raid on the city, 36 bombers arrived. Again, us first, then them … We need to get back on the train – we left our child there in the care of a 16-year-old girl. However, we find ourselves running with others in the opposite direction – towards the air defence bunkers. We managed to stop when a bomb flew into a bunker in front of us. We come back to the station, to find the building already destroyed by bombs – the station building had a glass roof. We approach the train silently and in the highest state of anxiety. The tracks are damaged, as are the carriages – but our carriage is ok, underneath it we find our baby and his carer. We ask how it is that they’re alive and also how the air raid was. ‘The baby didn’t even cry that much – we hid under the carriage straight away – I had a rosary that the baby was playing with and I was praying out loud …’ Zyga came to tell us that the three of them – M. Rejewski, H. Zygalski and Jurek – had been given a car and that they had been under an order to go to Romania as soon as possible. Everything inside me is rebelling – how come, after yet another rescue, yet another farewell. It’s the third time, since the war began, that we say goodbye …2
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