Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  The temperamental Knox apparently didn’t know—or had forgotten—that Poland had given top priority to intelligence gathering and code breaking since regaining its independence. After World War II, another leading British cryptographer acknowledged that he and some of his fellow code breakers had been “very slow to admit that the Poles might have anything to teach us.”

  Marian Rejewski

  Dilly Knox, however, was not among them. The day after his outburst, he calmed down considerably when he met Marian Rejewski, the thirty-three-year-old mathematician who had been the first to crack Enigma, and the two colleagues who worked with him. The three young Poles explained the intricacies of the machine and their novel technique for breaking ciphers, called mechanical combination theory, to Knox, who, in Rejewski’s words, “grasped everything very quickly, almost as quick as lightning.”

  Denniston had once remarked about Knox, “He can’t stand it when someone else knows more than him.” But the British code breaker made an exception when it came to Rejewski. An assistant to Knox later recalled that “Marian and Dilly struck up a bond right away—a true meeting of the minds.”

  Knox, Denniston reported, soon “became his own bright self and won the hearts and admiration” of the Poles. Even though alcohol was banned at the Polish cipher center, a few bottles of beer were found, and everyone drank to the Polish triumph. When he left the center that day, Knox chanted, “Nous marchons ensemble” (“We are traveling together”). On his return to Britain, he sent Rejewski and his colleagues a thank-you note in Polish: “Serdeznie dzie¸juje¸ za współprace¸ i cierpliw os´c´” (“My sincere thanks for your cooperation and patience”). Accompanying the note were three silk scarves depicting a horse winning The Derby—Knox’s graceful acknowledgment that the Poles had come in first in the Enigma race.

  Yet that exploit did not belong solely to the Poles. If it hadn’t been for the efforts of a short, stout French military intelligence officer named Gustave Bertrand, they might never have solved Enigma’s complexities. In 1933, Bertrand, the head of French radio intelligence, had approached his Polish counterparts with an intriguing story and offer. He told them he had paid a substantial amount of money to an official in the German military cipher department for top secret documents relating to Enigma, including instructions for operating the machine and four diagrams of its construction.

  Bertrand’s superiors in France had had no interest in the documents, declaring that even with them, Enigma could not be broken. He next approached MI6, which also dismissed the idea. When he contacted the Poles, however, they accepted the material, according to Bertrand, as if it had been “manna in the desert.”

  The documents were turned over to three new recruits in the Polish cipher bureau, all in their twenties. The standout of the three was Rejewski, a twenty-eight-year-old mathematical genius who had just returned from a year of graduate study at Germany’s University of Göttingen, an international mecca for mathematicians.

  Armed with the documents, Rejewski and his colleagues built their own Enigma machine, as well as what they called a “bomba,” an electromechanical device that allowed them to scan all the possible permutations of the Enigma code at high speeds. (The “bomba” was named after a popular Polish ice cream dessert that the mathematicians were eating when they came up with the idea.)

  By early 1938, the Poles were able to decrypt about three-quarters of the Enigma intercepts. The Germans, however, began adding even more complexity to their machine, introducing two new rotors and making significant changes in their methods of enciphering. Hampered by a lack of money and other resources and realizing that war was drawing near, the Poles decided to share what they had accomplished with the British and French. Not long after the visit of Dilly Knox and the others to the forest outside Warsaw and only days before Germany invaded Poland, the Poles sent replicas of Enigma to Britain and France, along with detailed information on how to use it.

  Knox and his team went immediately to work on the “Polish treasure trove,” as he called it. In the past, the GC&CS had recruited academics from various disciplines for cryptography work, but, like Poland, it had begun to focus on mathematicians, notably including Gordon Welchman and Alan Turing. After thoroughly examining the design and details of Enigma and the Polish “bomba,” the shy, absent-minded Turing took what he had learned and built a far more powerful and accurate decoding machine, which he called “the bombe.”

  In May 1940, just days after Churchill came to power, Bletchley Park code breakers used the bombe to begin cracking the Luftwaffe’s version of Enigma; months later, they did the same to the Enigma codes of the German navy and army. The information gleaned from these decrypts was “of almost unbelievably high quality,” the British historian M.R.D. Foot wrote. “Operation instructions from Hitler…to his supreme commanders were now and again read by his enemies even before they had been gotten into the hands of their addressees.”

  Since MI6 oversaw Bletchley Park, Stewart Menzies had the daily pleasure of presenting Churchill with an old buff-colored leather box containing the latest priceless information gleaned from Enigma—a box to which Churchill had the only key. For both men, it was a high point of their day. “As ‘C’ quickly saw, he would never have to fear criticism or cuts in his budget as long as he could drop in on the prime minister at breakfast time with some tasty item of Intelligence,” Malcolm Muggeridge noted. About Menzies, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, remarked, “He would not have held the job for more than a year if it had not been for Bletchley.”

  And if it hadn’t been for a quirk of fate, the young Polish cryptographers whose early work had led to Ultra might well have been working at Bletchley Park alongside Knox, Turing, and the others to produce what Churchill called “golden eggs” of intelligence.

  After the fall of Poland, Marian Rejewski had escaped to Romania with his two colleagues, leaving his wife and two young children behind in Warsaw. In the Romanian capital of Bucharest, the three Poles contacted the British embassy, only to be told by a harried diplomat that staffers there were too busy at the moment to deal with them. The mathematicians then went to the French embassy, where they were warmly welcomed and, within a day or two, given travel documents to travel to France.

  When Dilly Knox and Alastair Denniston learned of the Poles’ escape, they asked the French to send them on to Bletchley Park. “The experience of these men may shorten our task by months,” Denniston told the French. His request, however, was rejected by Gustave Bertrand, as was a proposal by the Poles to invite British cryptographers to Paris. Bertrand, who was fiercely anti-German, didn’t much like the British, either. He was particularly irritated that they had, as he put it, “profited gratuitously from a Franco-Polish friendship of eight years’ duration [that was] sustained by mutual trust.” Even though the Poles would have much preferred to work at Bletchley Park, Bertrand was determined to keep them in his own country.

  Until the fall of France, the Polish cryptographers worked with him and his code-breaking team at the French military’s radio intelligence and deciphering center, housed in a handsome château about twenty-five miles northeast of Paris. Despite Bertrand’s frostiness toward the British, his operation cooperated closely with Bletchley Park, daily exchanging decrypts as well as other information and ideas.

  When the Germans marched into Paris, Bertrand evacuated his code breakers—not to a safe location outside France but, in an audacious and breathtakingly risky move, to the south of the country, where they set up shop again at a secluded château in the countryside of Provence. This was now an underground operation: Pétain and the higher-ups in his collaborationist regime knew nothing about it.

  For the next sixteen months, Bertrand’s team was faced with the daily threat of detection; although Provence was in unoccupied France, the Vichy government allowed German agents, in the guise of armistice commissioners, to move about freely in its territory. The code breakers were given a c
ertain amount of protection by anti-German intelligence officials at Vichy, who tipped Bertrand off about German agents or overzealous Vichy police officers who might be roaming around in the area. Nonetheless, the team remained on constant alert, watching for vans or cars with circular aerials on their roofs—a telltale sign of radio-direction-finding equipment inside.

  The cryptographers rarely left the château, whose ground-floor windows were barred and kept shut, making working conditions distinctly unpleasant in the hot, sultry summer of 1940. As a further precaution, three cars were ready, day and night, to whisk the team and their equipment away in case of a sudden German or Vichy police raid. Yet for all their difficulties, the French and Polish code breakers never lost contact with Bletchley Park, providing the British with a constant stream of decrypts about the movements, locations, and equipment of the Reich’s air, ground, and naval forces in France and other occupied countries.

  Throughout the war, the British and their allies were never free from the worry that the Germans would realize that their Enigma ciphers were being read. But despite repeated indications that the British had advance knowledge of many of their military plans, Reich officials refused to acknowledge that their vaunted machine could possibly have yielded its secrets. Ironically, they preferred to believe that agents of the all-powerful MI6 had somehow obtained information about German plans and tactics on their own and passed them on to Churchill and his government.

  While Stewart Menzies and MI6 were basking in the reflected glow of Ultra’s success, their archenemy in Whitehall was still struggling to get off the ground. As it turned out, the grandiose vision painted by SOE’s supporters of its future accomplishments was, to put it mildly, premature.

  “We shall aid and stir the people of every conquered country to resistance and revolution,” Churchill had proclaimed in a meeting with the leaders of the European governments in exile. “Hitler will find no peace, no rest, no halting place, no parley.” Hugh Dalton—who, as head of the Ministry of Economic Warfare, was in overall charge of SOE—had promised that by the end of 1940, “the slave lands which Germany had overrun” would rise up in rebellion, causing Nazi occupation to “dissolve like snow in the spring.”

  But when the spring of 1941 arrived, the Germans were still firmly ensconced in Europe, and only a handful of SOE operatives had actually been dispatched there. From its beginning, the new agency had been faced with an overwhelming array of problems, not least of which was the fact that most of the officials setting it up hadn’t the slightest idea what they were doing.

  With a few prominent exceptions, SOE simply did not have the kind of leadership one would expect for such a daring, innovative, upstart organization. Hugh Dalton, a major figure in the Labour Party, had made no secret of his loathing for Britain’s landed gentry and aristocracy; it seemed to follow, therefore, that he would avoid the well-bred, well-connected types who populated MI6. But such was not the case. Like Menzies, Dalton, whose father had been chaplain to Queen Victoria and a tutor to the future King George V, had been educated at Eton. That old school tie won out in his recruitment of SOE’s central staff, most of whose members came from the informal social networks in London composed of ex-Etonians and the products of other elite public schools.

  Unlike MI6, which drew heavily from the military, SOE recruited largely from legal, banking, and other business circles. But as their schooling indicated, the staffs of the two agencies were similar in the sheltered, privileged lives they led. As a result of their insular backgrounds, they knew almost nothing about the real world in Britain or anywhere else. And as citizens of an island nation that had not been invaded or occupied in more than eight hundred years, they had no idea how ruthless an occupier could be.

  “Only a country which had withstood foreign invasion really knew what war was,” observed the French journalist Eve Curie. Enduring repeated bombing raids, as the British had, was not the same as living with the Germans. As dreadful as those aerial attacks were, the bombers came and went. There was no intimate daily contact with an enemy that, unlike the British, “was not prepared to play the gentleman,” in the words of the military historian John Keegan. The Germans, Keegan added, had no compunction about “breaking all laws and conventions against those who challenged them.”

  “Fear never abated,” recalled one Frenchman of his country’s more than four years of occupation. “Fear for oneself; fear of being denounced; fear of being followed without knowing it; fear that it will be ‘them,’ when at dawn one hears or thinks one hears a door slam shut or someone coming up the stairs. Fears, too, for one’s family. Fear, finally, of being afraid and of not being able to surmount it.”

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  THE MISGUIDED OPTIMISM ABOUT SOE’s potential for immediate success also stemmed from the experience of several SOE officials who had been in Poland during the German invasion as members of a British military mission. The key figure in the group was Brigadier General Colin Gubbins, SOE’s first director of operations and training. An anomaly in the agency because of his military background, Gubbins differed from the majority of his colleagues in other striking ways: he possessed an original and daring mind, was widely read and traveled, and was fluent in two foreign languages—French and German. He had fought against guerrilla fighters in the Irish independence movement and then joined Allied troops battling Bolshevik forces in Soviet Russia in the years immediately following World War I. In both encounters, he had been impressed by his foes’ swift, sudden attacks and quick retreats. Shortly before World War II began, he had written a pamphlet about such guerrilla tactics, urging the British military establishment to study and learn from them—to no avail.

  As a firsthand witness to the 1939 campaign in Poland, Gubbins had admired the courage with which the Polish army had fought against overwhelming odds. But he was even more impressed by the Poles’ later determination to fight back while under German control. Even before the country fell, Polish officials had already laid the groundwork for widespread armed resistance. Some nine hundred Poles trained in guerrilla warfare were left in place, and dynamite, grenades, rifles, and pistols were stored in three hundred underground bunkers throughout the country.

  More than any other country occupied by Germany, Poland rejected collaboration. Its Home Army—the largest, most sophisticated, and best-organized resistance movement in all of Europe—made it clear it expected all Poles to defy the Germans in every possible way, from noncooperation to outright sabotage.

  When their occupiers shut down government institutions such as courts and the national legislature, the Poles re-created them as part of a remarkable underground society. They did the same with schools and cultural institutions, also banned by the Germans. Throughout the country, orchestras and chamber quartets performed behind closed doors, as did troupes of professional and amateur actors. Clandestine classes, meanwhile, were held for more than a million children and young adults. Like other major Polish institutions of higher education, Poland’s most esteemed university—Jagiellonian University in Kraków—offered underground study in all its departments. More than eight hundred students, including Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, attended the Jagiellonian classes.

  Colin Gubbins used Poland as his model for the type and scale of resistance that he wanted to foment throughout Europe. The problem, as he soon discovered, was that Poland was unique in its determination to rebel. Shortly after the war, Gubbins told an audience that whereas the shock of German occupation had stunned the peoples of western Europe, “only the Poles, toughened by centuries of oppression, were spiritually uncrushed.”

  When other European countries had been invaded and occupied, their citizens, in contrast to the Poles, had not known how to react, much less fight back. As one Frenchman noted, “The French have no experience of clandestine life; they do not even know how to be silent or how to hide.” In the occupation’s early days, the Germans also did not treat western Europeans, whom they regarded as having Aryan blood, as sav
agely as they did the Poles and other Slavs. While all Poles lived in constant fear of arrest, torture, and death, enemy forces in the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, France, and Luxembourg were generally well disciplined and more or less polite to those countries’ non-Jewish populations, as long as they did nothing to defy German rule.

  For most captive Europeans, the paramount aim was simple survival. Notwithstanding their surface politeness, the Germans were ruthless in their occupation policies, sending most of Europe’s foodstuffs and energy sources, particularly coal, to the Reich and inflicting great privation on the people under their control. Focused as they were on acquiring the daily necessities of life and anxious to protect their families and themselves from perilous confrontations with the enemy, it’s not surprising that the majority of Europeans did not put resistance high on their personal agendas.

  Years after the war, Stanley Hoffmann, a Harvard professor who lived in occupied France as a child, had some gentle but pointed advice for historians and others who criticized the failure of much of occupied Europe to stand up to the Germans: “For [people] who have never experienced sudden, total defeat and the almost overnight disappearance of their political elites; who have never lived under foreign occupation; who do not know what Nazi pressure meant; who have never had to worry first and last about food and physical survival…the warning must be heeded: do not judge too harshly.”

  It’s important to note, too, that while the vast majority of Europeans were never active resisters during the war, neither were they active collaborators. Most were antagonistic toward their captors, displaying their animosity primarily through silence and social ostracism. In Paris, one observer remarked, “people pass by the Germans without seeing them. They are surrounded by silence…in the trains, in the metro, in the street. Each [Parisian] keeps his thoughts to himself. And yet one senses the hostility.”