FOR MORE THAN two years, the war had been a constant but distant fear in Cairo.
Men and machines fought out there, in the desert, hundreds of miles from the narrow band of green country along the Nile. The armies pushed back and forth across Cyrenaica, the eastern half of Libya, Italy’s colony. They paused, exhausted, and shoved onward again. At the end of May 1942, the Panzer Army Africa—the German and Italian force under Rommel’s command—attacked once more. The Axis and British armies ground each other down.
Then Tobruk fell.
Tobruk was a small Libyan town with a deep-water harbor, ninety miles from the border with Egypt. In 1941, Rommel’s army besieged it for nine months but failed to conquer it. Without the harbor, the Axis forces couldn’t advance into Egypt. They needed it to get fuel, food, and ammunition by sea, and they couldn’t risk the British breaking out of Tobruk and cutting them off from behind.28
Britain had retreated from France, lost Greece, lost Singapore. But Tobruk stood for British tenacity and victory.
“British” in a very wide sense: the Tobruk garrison was originally Australians; they were relieved by Polish and English brigades. The Eighth Army was an international legion. Besides units actually from Britain, the roster of the Eighth Army also included New Zealanders, Indians and South Africans, Free French and Greeks, and others.29
In 1942, Tobruk fell in twenty-four hours.
At dawn on June 20, the Panzer Army attacked. The next day, at the first sunrise of summer, the garrison surrendered. Thirty-five thousand South African, Indian, and British soldiers went into captivity.30
Moorehead, the war correspondent, had passed through Tobruk shortly before this. He saw thousands of British military vehicles parked in the town, ammunition dumps, fuel that “lay around in flimsy square tins—millions of gallons.” The food dumps held “tinned tomatoes, peas and potatoes, tinned American bacon and Argentine beef… sacks of tea and sugar, big tins of cheese… fresh onions and dates.” Before surrender, the garrison managed to destroy only some of the supplies. Rommel’s army—hungry for food and ammo, thirsty for water and fuel, and very short on trucks to carry what it needed—took the rest of the treasure, even before it could use the port.31
Tobruk the symbol was also in Axis hands. “Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another,” Prime Minister Winston Churchill would say of Tobruk.32 Churchill told Auchinleck to mount “stern resistance” at the Egyptian border. Auchinleck answered, “This position is untenable because of our weakness in armor.” He and Lieutenant General Neil Ritchie, commander of the Eighth Army, decided the only hope was to retreat to the tiny port of Mersa Matruh, 150 miles further back on the desolate Egyptian coast.33 Their army was unravelling. It fled at full speed eastward with Rommel pursuing it.
Auchinleck flew from a Cairo airfield to the new battle headquarters near Mersa Matruh, abruptly dismissed Ritchie, and took command in the field.34 On June 29, after another battle, the Panzer Army overran Mersa Matruh and continued chasing the British forces eastward toward Alexandria.35
Late that night, Lampson dined at the residence of Alexander Kirk, the American ambassador. Kirk “solemnly assured me that tonight was the night and Alexandria was going to be bypassed and Cairo occupied, and that a parachute landing in Cairo” to seize General Headquarters Middle East “would take place before the morning.” So Lampson recorded the dinner conversation in his diary. He had poked holes in Kirk’s rumors. “While we were thus discoursing in the moonlight on his roof, the [air raid] sirens went.” Lampson waited half an hour for the “all clear” siren, heard nothing, and ordered his driver to take him home through the empty streets.36
EVERYONE TALKED ABOUT Rommel. He was always pictured with captured British sand goggles strapped onto his cap, to show he was master of the desert.37
The press, in Arabic and in European languages, said too much about Rommel’s abilities, SIME complained. The reports “have convinced Egyptians that he is the greatest military genius of the war.”38
Yet the papers were telling what the British thought, from Churchill down. “We have a very daring and skillful opponent,” the prime minister had declared in the House of Commons, “a great general.”39 Auchinleck had sent out an order to his officers, warning them not to call the enemy “Rommel.” It made soldiers think he had “supernatural powers,” which hurt morale. “We must refer to ‘the Germans’ or ‘the Axis powers’ or ‘the enemy,’” Auchinleck commanded.40
It was a futile order. The British were awed by Rommel. He was the reason for their collapse—his boldness, and his preternatural ability to predict where the Eighth Army would be, to evade it, to strike where it was weakest.41
But Fellers, the American military attaché, wrote as if he had stood watching the debacle from another angle, from a separate hilltop, through other binoculars, and had spotted a different culprit. “Under their present leadership,” he reported to Washington, the British army could not win, no matter how much equipment the United States sent.
The “Eighth Army failed to maintain morale… Its tactical conceptions were consistently faulty… Its reactions to battlefield changes [were] sluggish,” Fellers said. The infantry, armor, and air force fought separate battles. “The German Air Force has complete control of the Eastern Mediterranean. The Royal Navy is impotent.”
The only hope for holding the Middle East was new British commanders with new methods and American reinforcements, Fellers wrote. He did not use exclamation marks; all of his words were exclamation marks.42
ROMMEL WROTE TO his wife after passing Mersa Matruh: “Dear Lu… There will be a few more battles to fight before we reach our goal, but I think the worst is well behind us. I’m fine.”43
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini flew to eastern Libya. “About a dozen” planes carried his entourage, Italian war correspondent Paolo Monelli wrote. By some accounts, one of them carried the white charger on which he intended to enter Cairo.44 At last he would have the new Roman Empire he sought. Rommel, and Adolf Hitler, were looking much further than the Nile and even the Suez Canal—to the oil fields of Iraq and to Persia, where the Panzer Army Africa would meet victorious German forces coming south from Russia.45
At midday on July 1, 1942, Rommel’s forces reached another set of British defenses, prepared in haste, running south through the sands from a minor railway stop on the coast called Two Flags—in Arabic, El Alamein.
Alexandria was a little more than sixty miles away. In Cairo, soldiers were burning papers, and the train station was mobbed.
THE MANSION STOOD halfway between Oxford and Cambridge, in the damp green English countryside, two thousand miles to the northwest of Egypt. It looked like an architect’s sampler of styles offered to wealthy Englishmen: turrets and classical columns, round bay windows and square ones, plain red-brick and stone masonry. On the lawns an infestation of squat brick and wood huts had sprung up. The place was called Bletchley Park.
Margaret Storey and Russell Dudley-Smith worked in one of those huts. They were studying messages not meant for their eyes—radiograms sent from Berlin to German army and air force headquarters in North Africa, and from headquarters to officers in command of divisions and brigades. Storey and Dudley-Smith wanted to know if someone in Cairo was still sending out the secrets of the General Headquarters Middle East—secrets that had served Rommel so well.
Much depended on this question, much more than Dudley-Smith and Storey could imagine. The fate of the Middle East hung on the next battle. It might determine the outcome of the war.
Act I
ALL QUIET ON THE NILE
1
“REPORT FOR DUTY, IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE INSTRUCTIONS YOU HAVE RECEIVED”
September 1939. Cambridge–Berlin–Warsaw.
NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN’s VOICE came out of every wireless set in Britain at 11:15 on Sunday morning. It was September 3. Two days earlier, Germany had invaded Poland.
At first, the prime minister’s pauses lasted longer than hi
s words. He swam slowly through the quicksand of his exhaustion.1 That morning, he said, Britain’s ambassador had delivered an ultimatum to Germany: Agree by 11:00 to withdraw from Poland, or Britain will go to war. “No such undertaking has been received,” Chamberlain intoned.
“Consequently this country is at war with Germany.”
He spoke for less than five minutes. By the end, as he prayed for God to “defend the right,” he’d found his rhythm. He sounded like a leader calling a nation to victory.
But first he admitted personal defeat. It was “a bitter blow,” Chamberlain said, “that all my long struggle to win the peace has failed.”
The lesson that Britain had learned from the trench warfare and endless slaughter of the Great War was to avoid another Great War. Chamberlain, more than anyone, had believed the way to do that was to keep a smaller war from breaking out anywhere in Europe, lest the conflagration spread.2 It was a sensible lesson for a sensible world, one that did not include Adolf Hitler. In Munich almost a year before, Chamberlain had given away part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. Instead of “peace in our time,” he got some months for Britain to start to create a wartime military, and for him to accept whom he was facing. “There is no chance… that this man will ever give up his practice of using force to gain his will,” Chamberlain said. “He can only be stopped by force.”
The radio speech was anticlimax. The children of London and the rest of Britain’s cities were already lining up, school by school, on the platforms of railway stations and boarding trains for the countryside, where they would live with strangers who were required to take them. Parents had received notice the day before.3 German bombers were expected in the skies immediately, possibly carrying poison gas. The BBC announced that sports events were prohibited, cinemas shut. Too many people would die if a bomb found a crowd.4 Parliament met that day and passed a law requiring all men between eighteen and forty-one to register for conscription.
GORDON WELCHMAN WAS at home in Cambridge when the prime minister spoke. The line in the speech that mattered most immediately to him was the one telling members of the “fighting services” to “report for duty in accordance with the instructions you have received.” Welchman had neither rank nor uniform. But he had instructions.
Welchman was a thirty-three-year-old Cambridge don, which is to say a professor of mathematics. He was writing a textbook on algebraic geometry, an abstract field unsullied by real-world applications. A photo of him from this time shows his wavy hair meticulously combed, his moustache trimmed. He wears a tweed jacket, rests his head against one hand, and smokes a pipe: he looks like a Hollywood heartthrob in a poster for a movie about a Cambridge professor. War had broken into his life once, when he was a boy, when his much older brother was killed at Mons, in Belgium, in the first battle the British fought in the Great War. The closest he’d come to violent death himself was a motorcycle accident, from which the only lasting effect was to end his trombone playing.
That night an air-raid siren went off in Cambridge. Welchman and his wife, Katherine, grabbed their one-and-a-half-year-old son and took shelter under the staircase, considered the safest place in a house. “Cambridge could hardly be considered a prime military target,” he wrote of the incident. “Katherine saw the absurdity of the situation before I did.” The siren was a false alarm.5
A Cambridge fellow who rushed back to the university when war broke out found several of his colleagues “digging a zigzag trench in the playing field of King College School as a makeshift air-raid shelter.” They were “fortified by a large beer barrel set in one of the classrooms.”6 Welchman missed this. On the morning of September 4, he drove to Bletchley Park to report for duty. Another Cambridge mathematician, Alan Turing, arrived the same day.7
Welchman’s real-world life was about to begin.
THE UNSCHEDULED TRAIN, code-named “Amerika,” left Berlin on the evening of September 3. It was the mobile headquarters of Adolf Hitler—a dozen or so railway cars that included his personal quarters, his communications center for keeping in touch with Berlin and his field commanders, and the rolling war room with the maps where orderlies could mark the advance of armored divisions. Hitler was heading eastward, into Poland. He wanted to see the work of his hands.
A special security battalion, with its own antitank and antiaircraft guns, traveled with Hitler and his retinue. The Führer had personally chosen the commander: Erwin Rommel.8
Three times before, Germany’s absolute ruler had pulled Rommel away from other duties for this purpose: after the Anschluss in March 1938, when Hitler made his triumphal entry into Austria; again when Hitler rode into the Sudentenland to survey his newly seized territory; and then in March 1939, when Germany overran the rest of Czechoslovakia and Hitler entered Prague. Hitler was very taken with the forty-seven-year-old officer. For the occasion of invading Poland, he promoted Rommel, retroactively, from colonel to major general.
Rommel gloried in each moment of attention from the supreme leader. He wrote home to his wife proudly that he’d been invited to sit next to the Führer at lunch, and that he “was allowed to chat for almost two hours with him about military problems yesterday. He is extraordinarily friendly towards me.”9
(These letters did not make it into a collection of Rommel’s papers, published years later. Perhaps this was because they did not fit the legend that Germans and, strangely enough, British writers built around Rommel—that he was a worthy opponent on the playing field of a team sport called war, a “brave, able and scrupulous” general who patriotically fought for Germany but was unsullied by Nazism.10)
Rommel’s name was already known in Germany. In 1937, he published a best-selling book, Infantry Tactics. The title suggested a textbook, but mostly it told stories of battles that Rommel fought as a young infantry commander in the Great War.
The lesson that Rommel had learned in that war was that ramming an army against the trenches of the enemy was senseless. The skillful commander would find a weak point, dash through or around enemy lines, and throw his opponent into confusion. Speed, daring, and the power of the will would bring victory.
Rommel wrote about commanding foot soldiers. But tanks—still an experiment in the last war—could move much faster. Rommel, like Hitler, believed that tanks were the weapon of modern war, and his ideas matched the new form of warfare that Germany unleashed in Poland: blitzkrieg, massive armored divisions breaking through enemy defenses and overrunning a country.11
There was a problem: to direct an offensive, headquarters had to keep in touch with the commanders of those tank forces, who needed to keep in contact with the units under them. The key to blitzkrieg was “speed of attack through speed of communications.” The only way to do this was by radio—but to send battle plans by radio was to shout them out loud to the world.
A way had to be found to put the messages into a code that the enemy could not break. It had to be simple and quick. It had to be portable. The solution Germany found was a machine called Enigma.12
A FEW HOURS after the train called “Amerika” pulled out of Berlin, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the American nation by radio. Because night came later to the United States than to Europe, it was still Sunday evening for him and his listeners. His fireside chat consisted of carefully poised contradictions.
“It is easy for you and me to shrug our shoulders and to say that conflicts taking place thousands of miles from the continental United States… do not seriously affect Americans,” he said. And a moment later, “Let no man or woman thoughtlessly or falsely talk of America sending its armies to European fields.”
“This nation will remain a neutral nation,” Roosevelt said. And then, “Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or close his conscience.”
He knew which side he was on, which side the country should be on. He also knew that the lesson that most Americans had learned from the Great War was to stay safely on their own side of the ocean. In line with that sentiment, the United
States had remained resolutely unready for war. The year before, the army chief of staff estimated that America had the eighteenth-largest army in the world. “As long as it remains within my power to prevent, there will be no blackout of peace in the United States,” Roosevelt concluded.13
The president’s practical proposal for taking sides while staying out of war was to sell arms to Britain and France. That required Congress to repeal the 1935 Neutrality Act. The country’s best-known isolationist, aviator Charles Lindbergh, gave his own national radio broadcast to rally opposition. The speech was tinged with Nazi talking points on the injustice of the post–Great War borders. The only kind of war that America should enter, Lindbergh said, would be one to preserve white supremacy.
“These wars in Europe are not wars in which our civilization is defending itself against some Asiatic intruder,” Lindbergh said. “This is not a question of banding together to defend the white race against foreign invasion.”14
ON SEPTEMBER 7, Walther Rauff sat in a meeting at the SS Main Office in Berlin. There are no minutes of his thoughts, no record of whether he engaged in any self-reflection.15
If he did, Rauff could well have been amazed at how his life had turned around. Two years earlier, his father had died—the imperious man, unsparing of the rod, who had come home badly wounded from the Great War. Walther Rauff’s wife and the German navy got fed up with his drinking and his womanizing. She divorced him; the navy dismissed him. At the age of thirty-one, he went from being in command of most of Germany’s minesweepers to being out of work and alone.
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