A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  The pilot shrugged and pushed the nose down. If he must risk low altitude, the quicker the better. Holding the plane at maximum speed, despite a warning sign against exceeding a diving velocity that could tear off the wings, he headed for the sea, turning gently northward at the same time. One eye on the panel, he went to work on the Dalton computer strapped to one thigh. At sea level, flying flat out, he had fuel enough to sweep farther north and approach Scotland along a route beyond the range of German fighters. It would mean a careful juggling of speed at the cost of high fuel consumption, and the risk of a landfall with near-empty tanks.

  Northeast of the bleak Orkney Islands, he switched on the Iffy—Identification/Friend or Foe—device that told Britain’s radar guardians he was harmless. Ten miles from Scapa Flow he broke radio silence to request emergency landing. There was no sign of life from Professor Bohr.

  * A rare glimpse of Churchill’s ruthless approach to secret warfare was given by General Alan Brooke after one of these discussions. A diversionary raid had been proposed. “Churchill shoved his chin out in his aggressive way and said: ! had instructed you to prepare a detailed plan. . . . What have you done? You have submitted instead a masterly treatise on all the difficulties. . . .’ He then cross-examined me for nearly two hours on most of the minor points.” The chief reason for rejecting the proposed operation was lack of air support. Churchill avoided this issue and selected his own arguments: “You state that you will be confronted by thaws and frosts which will render mobility difficult. How can you account for such a statement?” Brooke said this was a trivial matter but in any case the statement came from The Climate Book. The Climate Book, an essential part of intelligence, was duly produced. It exactly supported the objection. Churchill shifted his attack: “You state it will take you some twenty-four hours to cover the ground between A and B. Explain to me exactly how every hour of those twenty-four will be occupied?” It was no easy matter to give a detailed picture of every hour, since the twenty-four-hour period allowed for overcoming enemy resistance, removal of roadblocks, repair of bridges and culverts. Brooke did his best: “This led to a series of more questions, interspersed with sarcasm and criticism. A very unpleasant gruelling to stand up to in a full room, but excellent training. . .”

  46

  Waiting on a desolate Moon squadron base near Edinburgh was the man who could persuade Professor Bohr to join the Allied attempt to build an atomic bomb—Bill Stephenson.

  A small RAF van sped across the field to meet the Mosquito. Ambulance men raced with mechanics to the sealed belly of the gaunt aircraft as the blue flame of the exhausts stabbed the darkness for the last time. Bomb-bay doors hissed open. The limp form of Professor Bohr was lowered to the waiting stretcher.

  The Mosquito pilot slid down the wing. “Not much I could do—”

  His arm was squeezed by the small man in nondescript clothes. “We’ll take care of this.”

  The pilot glanced at the ring of silent civilians. “Well—”

  “It’s okay.” The commanding voice cut through the gloom. “You did your job.”

  The pilot nodded. In this strange work, you said nothing and you asked nothing. He slung his parachute over one shoulder and moved out of the circle of emergency lights. For him, a dangerous and solitary mission would be fixed in memory as a disaster.

  Stephenson turned back to the Baker Street doctor. “Any chance?”

  The younger man fiddled with needles and tubes. “Pulse a bit weak. But we’ll pull him through.”

  Stephenson suppressed an urge to say “You’d better.” He turned and walked over to the flight shack. Across the fields, lanterns glowed in the village of Elmdon, where farm workers prepared for another day. “We’ll need to airlift his son,” Stephenson told the young officer who joined him. “Aage Bohr—he’s familiar with Professor Bohr’s work.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Aage Bohr was brought out of Sweden a few days later. By then, his father had recovered. Professor Bohr’s intercom plug had been jerked out of its jack during the take-off. Unable to see, scarcely able to move, he was unable to trace the problem. His oxygen mask was undipped, and he had heard nothing of the pilot’s instruction to seal it over his mouth and regulate the oxygen flow. He was lucky to be alive.

  Father and son were installed briefly in a drab Westminster hotel and given an office on Old Queen Street, headquarters of the British atomic project, TUBE ALLOYS. “We were baffled by the mob of eccentrics who came to see us,” Aage wrote later. “We were staggered by the information they had. . . . In Copenhagen we had viewed Europe through a tiny slit in the wall.”

  “Professor Bohr was a gentle soul,” said Stephenson. “He genuinely believed in Gandhi’s philosophy of opposing evil with humility, of resisting violence with intellectual weapons. He had to come out of Nazi surroundings to comprehend the scale of wickedness we were dealing with.”

  Five days after the atomic scientist’s strange flight to England, he met Churchill, whose Foreign Office adviser, Alexander Cadogan, wrote in his diary: “Nils [sic] Bohr. What a man! He talked, quite inaudibly, for three-quarters of an hour—about what, I haven’t the faintest idea. . . . It’s a growing, lazy habit to mutter away a jumble of ill-arranged thoughts.” Cadogan knew nothing of how Bohr had arrived. Churchill, better informed, still had little time to waste on formality.

  Bohr was questioned about Hitler’s plan to shower London with 5,000 Vergeltung (Vengeance) V-l rockets a day. How did this dovetail into reports of atomic rockets? Could an atomic warhead be carried by these German rockets already in existence?

  He was shown details of rockets that he never knew existed. He was told that experiments with these long-range Vengeance weapons had been conducted only 120 miles from his labs, at a place called Peenemünde, in such secrecy that for each of 40,000 inhabitants there was one SS guard.

  Finally, he was told that he was needed in the United States “to work on the bomb.”

  Bohr objected. “We cannot fight one barbarism with another barbarism.”

  “We won’t survive to fight for anything if we neglect this new weapon,” argued one of the chief researchers.

  “I cannot subscribe to violence,” said Bohr.

  “If you don’t resist violence, you’ll surrender to a violent ideology all the values of our civilization, built up by generations of struggle.”

  “But civilized behavior calls for non-violence.”

  “The freedom to behave in a civilized way must be defended, and sometimes that means using violence. . . .”

  It was the old dilemma. Bohr, the theoretician, was being talked down from his ivory tower. He agreed to join the team racing against time to produce the bomb. He still insisted, however, on his right to climb back later to a higher view of mankind. As Britain entered her fourth winter of war, Bohr in late 1943 traveled with his son to New York. They were provided with false identity papers in the name of Baker—it was the one name that Bohr seemed able to remember at all times. Baker of Baker Street. In Stockholm and in London, he had been given other false names and always forgot them, often answering the telephone with the familiar “Bohr here. . . ,” Now he was a Baker Street Irregular, and in the guise of “Uncle Nick” Baker and young Jim Baker, father and son were absorbed into the Manhattan Project. They would have sixteen months’ intensive work before “the design of the weapon was finally frozen (March 1945),” according to the BSC Papers, “and even then, feverish activity was necessary at Los Alamos to get the weapon ready.” How close Bohr came to helping the wrong side, at least in Churchill’s view, was betrayed in the memo written to his scientific adviser, Professor Lindemann, by then Lord Cherwell: “It seems to me that Bohr ought to be confined or at any rate made to see that he is very near to mortal crimes.”

  Aage Bohr described his father returning from an encounter with Churchill “downcast. . . . He had been scolded and immediately began to dictate a letter and a description of the atomic energy project and of the argume
nts against the bomb.”

  Roosevelt actually dispatched Bohr back to London, bearing messages reflecting the concern of prominent scientists who feared Russia’s exclusion from atomic secrets. But the President, for once, failed to read the Prime Minister’s mood. Churchill’s doubts and suspicions were based on hard experience. He felt that Nazism and other forms of tyranny were possible because men like Bohr clung blindly to their belief that reason is the strongest force in human beings. Because of this belief, Bohr had been vulnerable to German blandishments. The SS tore away the wraps of self-deception. Yet Bohr continued to preach his faith in men, arguing that atomic secrets must be shared to prevent another fatal arms race.

  Bohr may have been right. But Churchill did not think so. He had only to cast his mind back to Munich in 1938, when he had met with the Focus group at the Savoy to compose a telegram warning Chamberlain not to make more concessions. One by one, the members of the small circle confessed they saw no way to make appeasement-minded men face reality. “Winston sat alone with tears in his eyes,” Stephenson recalled. “The iron entered his soul. His attempt to salvage what was left of honor and good faith had failed. . . .

  “The lesson of Munich was that free men should stand together. Churchill had not hesitated to share secrets with the United States from 1940 onwards because Americans shared the same traditions of freedom. He had no reason to believe the Soviet Union would repay any such gesture. His experience of Russian leaders was that they behaved like other leaders of totalitarian states. They understood only one thing—power. This may have been a glum conclusion compared with Bohr’s idealism. But that was what Churchill had learned from his own position in history.”

  Four years after Britain’s gamble in dispatching scientific secrets to Washington in 1940, Stephenson felt vindicated. His faith in the triumph of the individual over the state was being tested in Europe. In occupied Paris, the German directorate of the flying-bomb organization played a war game. Rockets and flying bombs would be launched during that summer of 1944 in a series of six-hour salvos on London, with between 672 and 840 winged bombs in each salvo. The commander of the flying-bomb regiment, Colonel Ulrich Wachtel, was not to know that the Americans had developed the first effective antiaircraft radar system, repayment for the “boxes of tricks” protected by Stephenson after his original talk with Roosevelt. The British cavity magnetron tube and the proximity fuse, among the gifts delivered by Sir Henry Tizard, led to the American SCR 584, which linked radar with predictor and gun, and came into action in time to help counter the frightening V-1 attacks.

  Less than a hundred miles from London, 5,000 German engineers worked on a vast concrete structure concealing batteries of guns with barrels each 416 feet long to pump shells at the rate of one every ten seconds into Whitehall and Westminster. Launch sites for missiles were scattered just inside Fortress Europe’s wall. The potential scale of the assault was daunting.

  “It failed because of individuals who never met, who played no direct part, and yet were bound in a symbiotic union the implications of which we would do well to heed,” Stephenson wrote in a subsequent assessment. The V-1 and V-2 rockets were defused by American know-how and by Baker Street’s skillful use of the secret armies.

  “The counter-offensive to mass raids by German Vengeance rockets saw the dawn of missile strategies in a world balanced on the edge of nuclear death,” he said later. “German work on ‘atomistics’ and rockets was thwarted by us before it could mature—but it was thwarted through thousands of individuals, scattered from Poland where one secret army reassembled bits of German rockets to ship to London and New York, to Paris where Jewish scientists took terrible risks getting data on electronic brains to steer the new weapons onto London.”

  Each group worked independently and thought itself alone responsible for the defeat of Hitler’s V plan to atomize the little English donkey.

  47

  All through Nazi Europe, the individual was pitted against technology and the totalitarian machine. The resistance armies were highly independent, without uniforms half the time, seldom in awe of rank, and always ready to question orders. Vital undertakings depended on single acts of courage that brought neither praise nor military awards.

  They had turned to London as the source of hope. Now, London was threatened by V bombs. London had become General Eisenhower’s headquarters; and British secret operations came under American command. London had become the forward base of OSS, whose American agents parachuted into enemy territory to make contact with the secret armies. But London, for the irregular forces who recognized no single direction, was still an emotional symbol. In groups of two or three—Norwegian, French, Belgian, Dutch, elderly ladies in Pomerania and teen-age girls in Zagreb—they worked to lift the threat hanging over the city that many had never seen but all knew as a voice out of the darkness: “This is London calling,” followed by those opening bars from Beethoven that spelled out V for Victory.

  Agents in Denmark sent back photographs of rockets and control mechanisms. In Poland a team collected the pieces of a smashed V-1 and managed to ship it over to London. None could be told of the work of others. Each group, with understandable pride, thought it had solved the scientific riddle that loomed before the war when Stephenson received hints of it through the secret Jewish agency FRIENDS, whose members were in the defense-research branch of the French General Staff. One was Dr. Alfred Eskenazy, a specialist in the new science of electronic controls for pilotless aircraft. Another was Professor André Heilbronner, an expert on rocket fuels. Both, being Jews, ran a terrible risk by remaining in Paris after the German occupation. They became part of the MARCO POLO group, whose members took code names from science fiction, VERNE, one of the leaders, reported to London that German experiments with Hitler’s promised “atomic rockets” were centered on Peenemünde, in Pomeranian Bay, a secluded part of the Baltic coast. The rockets, shooting out to sea, appeared to be controlled by radio from an island belonging to Denmark and only twenty-five miles from Sweden. Some test rockets were falling into nearby Poland. Many separate and independent networks became involved when the German experiments spread from one occupied country to another.

  “The first incredible play of chance was Hitler’s decision to launch the rockets against London,” Stephenson recalled. “He named them Vengeance weapons. The concerted attacks took place after the D-day invasion of France. He should have aimed his rockets at the English Channel ports, to stop reinforcements from relieving Allied armies establishing a foothold in Normandy. Instead, he vented his spleen on civilian targets.”

  The German rockets had been strategically delayed by co-ordinated secret Allied operations separately performed. At Bletchley Park, the ULTRA teams sat at the hub of underground radio traffic. The demand for radio units from the United States fell upon the INTREPID organization in New York, which had to convey to American manufacturers the urgency of new and intricate orders without revealing the purpose of their use. The special teams inside Nazi territory often depended on these slender threads—radio contact with Bletchley and thus to BSC in New York. Bill Donovan, who knew the real reasons behind the seemingly excessive demands, was beset by so much interference that the BSC Papers contain a section called “The Menace of U.S. Inter-Departmental Strife.”

  When American air intelligence began to designate Peenemünde for reconnaissance and strikes, an acceptable story had to be issued by the British to explain how the secret weapons had been located. A pretty WAAF officer, Constance Babington-Smith, was said to have been studying aerial photographs in May 1943 when she recognized what appeared to be rocket launch ramps. By that time, MARCO POLO in Paris and other secret networks had provided a great deal of related information. Babington-Smith was young and photogenic, and she had indeed spotted in hundreds of aerial pictures the T-shaped ramps. She was skilled at estimating the dimensions of objects by relating such factors as the length of shadows to the time of day when each picture was taken. More important, the
publicity about her exploits misdirected the Germans about how the Allies were getting information.

  Babington-Smith had to compete with headline events around the world. Gory battles raged from China to Italy. The chief of OSS in Switzerland, Allen Dulles, was negotiating the surrender of German armies in one theater. In the Pacific, OSS was using Australia as the springboard for operations against Japanese garrisons from Singapore to Shanghai. In Washington, careerists peered ahead, sensing the danger OSS presented to the traditional service intelligence establishment. A permanent, central intelligence agency might deprive service chiefs of some instruments of power and rob diplomats of their full authority.

  The English, under the threat of direct annihilation, could think only of today. Death plunged out of the sky, unheralded. London’s vulnerability was an urgent problem for Americans whose headquarters were there. Technical experts in the United States thought they could perfect a counterweapon, given more information. But even the most primitive of the new Nazi weapons—nicknamed the “doodle-bug” by Londoners—had 25,000 parts. And when this particular rocket exploded, away went all the parts. Stephenson, having persuaded Washington that this threat was real and could still influence the outcome of the war, now had to persuade London to secure a complete rocket, undamaged, for Americans to study. A request was radioed to the Polish secret army and instructions were sent by courier for interfering with the radio guidance system of some German rockets. Shortly afterward, a V-1 swerved off course from Peenemünde and fell in the marshes beside the River Bug in Poland. Local farmers hid the stubby wings in mud. German search parties failed to spot the buried weapon.

  The Polish partisans informed London that the rocket was being dismantled. Tantalizing reports followed. One signal read: REGRET WARHEAD GONE. There was a thoughtful silence in London. Had it exploded? Was it mislaid? A later signal was more explicit. The live warhead was in deep water, making it hard to locate. These operations were taking place under the most brutal Nazi occupation forces in Europe. Despite this, the entire V-1, warhead and all, was reassembled, and an aircraft was sent to pick it up. The twin-engined DC-3 Dakota landed safely enough. On the night of July 25, 1944, it waddled across the “reception field” in occupied Poland with the rocket on board. The gamble almost failed when the plane swerved and became stuck in the rain-sodden ground. The small partisan group, anxious to leave the scene, heaved and tugged; the plane’s engines roared until it seemed impossible that German security forces had not heard the racket. But shortly before dawn the Moon plane got away. “Sure that we could now quickly find a countermeasure, Churchill announced next day the extent of V-1 damage,” Stephenson recalled later. “People had to know, but until this moment, we could promise no relief. For every rocket that fell in London or southern England, there was one civilian casualty. Churchill gave the figures—the number launched to July 26 was 2,754 V-1s, and the number of casualties was 2,752. Two hundred V-ls fell on London within a single day. The rockets seemed unaffected by anything—fog, moon, light, or dark—and people felt helpless. The moment we saw the possibility of stopping them, the facts were made public. During the following month of August, only one in six V-1s got through the new defenses. By September 7, London was told the danger had passed. Then the big V-2s began to fall. . . .”