Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  ‘Black’ radio worked precisely because it did not sound authorised. A bored German radio operator, more likely to be military than civilian because more soldiers had short-wave receivers, might be scrolling through the dial one night when he chances to pick up a German voice speaking the salty language of the barracks. Delmer had learned from hearing genuine ships’ captains talking to each other, and the ‘black’ radio listening experience was intended to feel, Delmer said, like ‘eavesdropping on the private wireless of a secret organisation …’ If some of what der Chef said rang bells with the listener or if he found the dirty stories funny, he probably kept listening and told his mates about what he heard. In this way, slowly, by word of mouth, the reputation of Gustav Siegfried Eins spread.

  Sefton Delmer concocted der Chef from the angry, barking military types he had known in Berlin before the war, and was able to write his scripts because he was an excellent mimic with a real grip on the language. But to bring the man to life before the microphone he needed the right voice, and found it in Peter Seckelmann, a former Berlin journalist and writer of detective stories who had been living in Britain since 1937, who had volunteered for the British army and ended up a corporal in a Pioneer Corps bomb-disposal unit. After vetting by MI5, Seckelmann came to live with Delmer and his wife at their house, the Rookery, in the village of Aspley Guise near Bletchley. Delmer also found a German journalist, Johannes Reinholz, to play Seckelmann’s arrogant, strutting, heel-clicking adjutant.

  Sex is always a good way to grab attention. The tabloid newspaper trick of deploring vice while describing it in extensive detail also worked to glue listeners to the radio. There was much interesting material to be found in the works of the German sexologist and advocate of gay rights, Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, ‘the Einstein of sex’, but the pornographic descriptions that der Chef gave in his diatribes against the corrupt elite caused Delmer some trouble. Crossman’s ‘revolutionary’ broadcasters, jealous of Delmer’s success, shopped him by making a lurid translation of one of der Chef’s racier talks about a voyeuristic German admiral at an orgy. When the script reached the left-wing puritan lawyer Sir Stafford Cripps, he sent a handwritten letter to the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, on 12 June 1942, objecting ‘most strongly to such filth being allowed to go out of this country’. According to Delmer, Cripps also said to Eden in person, ‘If this is the sort of thing needed to win the war, I’d rather lose it!’

  Robert Bruce Lockhart, the director general of the PWE from March 1942, had to defend Delmer and placate Cripps over lunch by explaining why the depraved German admiral had been targeted: his failures in ensuring supplies to U-boats had already made him unpopular, so whipping up more indignation against the admiral helped to sow dissension among enemy submariners. Delmer wrote, ‘We are of course not trying to win Germans to our side by this method; we are trying to turn Germans against Germans and to weaken the German war-machine.’ He also justified the violent imagery and excessive language of der Chef, deftly finessing the argument into a claim of British moral superiority: ‘There is a sadism in the German nature quite alien to the British nature and German listeners are very far from being revolted by the sadistic nature of some of these broadcasts.’

  Delmer and his small team on GS1 soon discovered that invention could take you only so far. Rumour and falsehood were best grounded in genuine intelligence. Churchill was to say to Stalin, ‘In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies,’ but Sefton Delmer and Dudley Clarke came to realise that deception work turned that maxim inside out. The big lie was so valuable that it needed a bodyguard of truth. When Max Braun, formerly interned as an ‘enemy alien’ on the Isle of Man, joined the team, he began a huge card index to log personal details of all Nazi Party functionaries and prominent Germans, combing through local German newspapers for authentic stories and genuine background detail to underpin British fantasy and misinformation. For example, Delmer turned a newspaper story about the successes of the German blood-transfusion service on its head by suggesting that the donors had not been tested for venereal disease, so wounded German soldiers might contract syphilis from the plasma.

  Delmer gathered intelligence from many sources, including Foreign Office dispatches and SIS reports. The transcripts of ‘bugged’ conversations between German prisoners of war, derived from the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC), yielded new German technical slang, jokes, rumours, dirt, and insights into everyday German worries. Through the offices of Leonard Ingrams, Delmer was able to get hold of personal letters sent by people inside Germany to family and friends in neutral North, Central and South America. The mail was intercepted by postal censorship in Liverpool, steamed open and copied before being sent on. Gossipy details could be used, altered and inflated to flesh out pointed remarks on air about the inequalities of German wartime conditions, so German listeners heard how the privileged were supposedly gorging themselves on ‘Diplomat Rations’ and moving safely away from bombing zones.

  Delmer found it easy to charm things out of people. In a lecture on Psychological Warfare that Sir Hugh Greene gave to the NATO Defence College in Paris just before he became director general of the BBC, he noted the appeal of Delmer’s kind of work:

  ‘Black’ propaganda seems to have an irresistible attraction to those in authority and the mere mention of the magic word ‘black’ will sometimes open up sources of valuable intelligence which might otherwise be withheld. It seems so much more fascinating and romantic than the slowly grinding mills of orthodox propaganda. It appeals to the small boy’s heart which still beats under the black jacket or the beribboned tunic.

  People trusted Delmer with secrets because he never used intelligence ‘raw’, but always cooked it so as not to betray its source. The first people to discover this and feed Delmer information were Britain’s Naval Intelligence Division, followed by Air Ministry Intelligence, with the War Office last. When Ian Fleming introduced Delmer to his boss in Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, Godfrey had straight away grasped what radio could do and set up a new propaganda section called NID 17 Z, under the former Times journalist Donald McLachlan, liaising with Fleming.

  Just before Christmas 1942, over a champagne lunch, McLachlan talked to Delmer about the long-drawn-out Battle of the Atlantic. One reason to celebrate was that – at last – the decrypt drought was over. From February to November 1942, British Naval Intelligence had not been able to read one single message sent to the U-boats from their command and control centre, the Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote (BdU), or any of their replies, because the Germans were using the four-wheel Enigma key, not the three-wheel they had earlier. But on 13 December 1942 the ‘Shark’ key was cracked and from then on all traffic could be read. The astonishing thing is that German naval intelligence had no idea that their communications were so vulnerable. Most U-boats did not leave harbour with their operational orders, but received them, by radio, at sea; and if the British and Americans could read those instructions, so much the better for them. The Admiralty were keen to step up psychological warfare on the people who were manning them. They proposed that Delmer launch a new, live, shortwave station specially beamed at German submarine crews, featuring a demoralising ‘black’ news bulletin. This excited Delmer. His previous attempt to do ‘black’ news with a station called Wehrmacht-sender Nord had failed because the broadcasts always had to be pre-recorded and so lost the cutting edge news needed. Delmer was convinced he had the best way of broadcasting live news every night: he could unleash the most powerful transmitter in the world.

  To gain advantage in the wireless wars, Churchill had approved the purchase in May 1941 of a giant new radio transmitter from the USA. The Nazi conquest of Europe meant that the Germans had many more transmitters than Britain, some of which were being used to jam UK stations. The 500 kilowatt medium-wave transmitter, which Gambier-Parry called a ‘raiding Dreadnought of the Ether’, was monstrously powerful and adapted to broadcast o
n different frequencies, between which it could switch almost instantaneously. (It was nicknamed ‘Aspidistra’ for its size, after the Gracie Fields song, ‘The Biggest Aspidistra in the World’.) Aspidistra was originally destined for the American station WJZ, but the Federal Communications Commission refused it a licence because it massively exceeded the 50 kW limit for commercial radio stations. Section VIII of the British Secret Service managed to get in its bid for the transmitter before the Chinese government did, paying around £165,000 in all.

  Aspidistra was initially supposed to fill an old gravel pit in Bedfordshire, but Section VIII’s Chief Engineer, Harold Robin, insisted it should be positioned nearer Europe. Eventually somewhere was found near Crowborough in Sussex, the highest spot in the 6,400-acre Ashdown Forest, the largest area of open moorland in the south-east of England. A battalion of Canadian engineers with road-building equipment helped excavate a hole 50 feet deep, and 600 men worked by day and by night in the summer of 1942 to erect the reinforced concrete shell. Robin also supervised the installation of a 3,000-horsepower diesel generator, a cooling tower, workshops and offices. Aspidistra made its first broadcast early in November 1942, supporting operation torch, the landings in North Africa. Its output was shared between PWE, the BBC and the RAF.

  Aspidistra’s power and reach were extraordinary. On 17 November 1943, for example, during an RAF bombing raid on Ludwigshafen, an RAF linguist transmitting via Aspidistra counterfeited the voice of the controller of the German nightfighters, warning them all to land because of the dangers of fog. According to Professor R. V. Jones, when the Germans found out, they employed women controllers. So the RAF found German-speaking WAAFs; and when the Germans used a man and a woman for all orders, the British did likewise. Eventually, the Germans had to supplement verbal orders with music: a waltz meant Munich, jazz Berlin.

  Delmer called his new live station Deutsche Kurzwellensender Atlantik (German short-wave Radio Atlantic), and it was later familiarly known as Atlantiksender. His team moved into a fenced and guarded five-acre compound at Milton Bryan in Buckinghamshire, and got ready to start transmissions in March 1943. It was a strange community that Delmer ran, some of whose members were still enemy prisoners of war. His close assistants included Tom Stevens, the classicist who had been in the ‘V’ campaign and who had an ingenious, detective-puzzling mind. As Hugh Greene noted, the best psychological warriors were often journalists or university dons.

  Delmer envisaged Atlantiksender as a really entertaining programme that would lure people into listening with lots of dance music; as chief disc jockey he used Alexander Maass, whom he had known in Berlin and met again in Madrid. They got the latest records of German dance music flown over by fast Mosquito plane from Stockholm, and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the American SOE) helped them obtain new American music. Marlene Dietrich was even persuaded to sing in German for what she was told was a special Voice of America broadcast to Germany. Atlantiksender’s German in-house band, led by Henry Zeisel, had been captured by the British Eighth Army when they were touring to entertain Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Delmer dug other helpers out of PoW camps, finding anti-Nazis or deserters from the German forces, looking particularly for naval men who were up to date on technical terms, correct procedures, and the authentic argot and complaints of the petty officers’ messes and the lower decks. Frank Lyndner, a former bookseller who thought Delmer was ‘a god’, kept the filing system on the German Navy, logging personal details culled from letters to and from captured U-boat crew-members in PoW camps in Britain and Canada, and sifting German local newspapers, just as Max Braun had for Delmer’s earlier station GS1, but this time for dates of births, marriages, deaths, transfers, promotions, awarding of medals, etc., in order to send personalised congratulations over the air.

  Most of the listeners in the German Navy guessed that Atlantiksender was an enemy station, but they carried on listening despite that, because it was so good. When Atlantiksender cheerily reported the results of football matches between U-boat crews in St Nazaire, including the nicknames of goal-scorers with little personal details about them, or broadcast ‘special request’ music to a specific U-boat that thought its position was completely secret, it made the German Navy feel under constant surveillance. ‘The British know everything anyway,’ shrugged captured U-boat men, and no longer bothered to resist interrogation. The more the prisoners talked, the more information came back that the ‘black’ propagandists could use. One of the interrogators on attachment to CSDIC was the veteran BBC broadcaster Charles Wheeler, then a young captain in the Royal Marines who spoke German because he had been born in Bremen. Wheeler was not after technical information. In friendly talks where the prisoners were offered cigarettes, he got stories about the bars and brothels of Brest, Lorient and St Nazaire that helped garnish the chatty broadcasts and to reinforce the German Navy’s gnawing angst about ever-present spies, phone taps and radar.

  The Atlantiksender programme of smoochy music, made more seductive by the breathily erotic voice of ‘Vicky’, the announcer Agnes Bernelle, was interspersed with news bulletins and human interest stories. ‘Gallant doctors battle diphtheria in German children’s camps’ was the kind of apparently upbeat take on a disaster that was actually designed to worry a German parent. Delmer stressed that strict accuracy in professional naval and military matters would make listeners more likely to accept the invented or half-true stories about the economic, political or social situation at home in Germany. The credibility of the news was helped by close attention to BBC Monitoring’s Daily Digest of German broadcasting, and also by Delmer’s acquisition of a Hellschreiber teleprinter left behind by the correspondent of the official German news agency, Deutsche Nachrichtenbüro, DNB, when he fled at the beginning of the war. It was still receiving directly from Goebbels’s centralised news system, so now the ‘black’ team could swiftly broadcast his official Nazi news communiqués and speeches, either as impeccable cover or bent to their own disruptive purposes. (In July 1943, Delmer devised an ingenious plan, called Helga, to reverse the Hellschreiber process. Instead of receiving news from the centre, he wanted to feed false news, indistinguishable from the real thing, back into the German system while it was idling. Delmer’s proposal for what we would now call ‘hacking into’ the German news system and adding counterfeit stories to the brew was discussed at the very top, but never actually tried.)

  When Air Ministry Intelligence became involved, Delmer got detailed reports of the RAF and USAAF bombing raids on Germany, including aerial photographs. Accurate damage reports from specific streets and neighbourhoods were mixed on air with heart-rending descriptions of women and children suffering the incendiaries and high explosive of Allied ‘Terror Raids’, and horror stories about disease, mutilation, rats, necrophilia. Demoralising news from the civilian home front was followed up by seductive fantasies of a better life for German soldiers who surrendered or deserted. Stories from the International Committee of the Red Cross about escapees from Germany earning good money in Sweden, Switzerland or Spain featured regularly, as did rumours that deserters could get grants of land in Canada, the USA and Brazil. Reprisals from the German authorities were unlikely, the radio added, because they had no way of knowing whether missing people had deserted or simply died.

  On 24 October 1943, a new ‘black’ British radio station came through loud and clear on the same medium wavelengths as the authentic German Radio Deutschland, located in Munich. Soldatensender Calais (Soldiers’ Radio Calais, later called Soldiers’ Radio West) followed the same tested formula of music and news. Although it was beamed at German troops occupying France, Belgium and Holland, Soldatensender Calais became a big hit with German civilians who liked its hard-hitting style and believed it was a genuine German station dedicated to the military, on the grounds that ‘our boys at the front’ would have to be told harsher truths than the usual pap civilians were fed. Even Goebbels admitted that Soldatensender did a very clever job of propaganda. Der
Chef was cut down in a fictional hail of bullets three weeks after the new station started broadcasting.

  Soldatensender went out so strongly on medium wave because Delmer had finally managed to get the underused Aspidistra transmitter back from the clutches of the BBC. Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, controller of the BBC European Service, could not stand up to the combined weight of the PWE, the Service Ministries and the chiefs of staff. Their case was unequivocal: ‘black’ radio propaganda was needed to soften up the Atlantic Wall of Fortress Europe for the forthcoming invasion, the great storm of D-Day in June 1944 that would blast the way to Allied victory.

  * British urban legend holds that the digital insult was first made by the longbow archers of Agincourt in 1415, defying the French who had threatened to cut off the bow-string fingers of any shooters they captured. There is no medieval evidence for this practice. Longbows were drawn with three fingers and archers were killed rather than mutilated. This urban myth probably dates from Mrs Thatcher’s premiership in the 1980s.

  21

  ‘A’ Force: North Africa

  ‘The Western Desert is a place fit only for war,’ begins the script by the Sunday Times journalist James Lansdale Hodson for the 1943 propaganda documentary film Desert Victory:

  Thousands of square miles are nothing but sand and stone. A compass is as necessary, once off the road, as it is to a sailor at sea. Water doesn’t exist until you bore deep into the earth. You bath in your shaving-mug. Flies have the tenacity of bulldogs. Bruises turn rapidly to desert sores. Days that are very hot are followed by nights of bitter cold. When the hot khamsin wind brings its sandstorms, life can be intolerable. The Arabs say that after five days of it, murder can be excused.