The Führer himself made repeated trips to Poland in September. In the morning, he’d hold a staff meeting in the conference room of his train. Rommel attended, listened, and was sometimes honored by being asked to speak. (Heydrich’s work may not have been on the agenda, but generals were talking about it. Rommel almost certainly heard something. Only a determined effort to preserve Rommel’s innocence could lead one to conclude otherwise.) After the meetings, Hitler went out in an open Mercedes Benz, wearing a pistol in his belt, with Rommel’s soldiers before and after him. The convoy rode through newly conquered towns, where Polish snipers were still shooting, to posts under artillery fire, to the very line of battle where German units were pushing across rivers.37
“I had a lot of trouble with him. He always wanted to be with the advance units. It seemed to give him pleasure to be under fire,” Rommel wrote, not as a complaint but in admiration. Rommel believed in commanding from the front, from the midst of the battle. Like Hitler, he thrilled to danger. They were gamblers who played another hand, and another, to prove what they already believed—that they would always draw the right cards, that the odds did not apply to special men like them.38
On October 5, Hitler came to Warsaw only for a few hours, not to command but to exult. A reviewing stand had been built on a central street in the diplomatic quarter, where the buildings were relatively whole. Row upon row of troops marched before him, their rifles shouldered, their legs goose-stepping as if they were all driven by gears of the same clockwork. Cavalry troops rode by with arms aloft in the Nazi salute. Hitler’s own arm jerked up, dropped, and stabbed up again, as if propelled by the same invisible springs and gears.
Back at the airport, Hitler shook hands with the foreign newsmen and used the rubblescape of Warsaw as a warning. “I only wish certain statesmen in certain countries who seem to want to turn the whole of Western Europe into such a shambles could have the opportunity of seeing, as you have, the real meaning of war.”
Rommel wrote to his wife, “About every tenth house is burned out and collapsed… There has been no water, no light, no gas and no food for two days now… The Lord Mayor is estimating 40,000 dead and wounded.” As if blind to how all this had happened, he wrote, “The inhabitants draw a breath of relief that we have arrived and rescued them.”39
AS WELCHMAN WOULD remember the blowup over his brainstorm, he didn’t get angry himself, despite Dilly Knox’s fury. He was too exhilarated: he wasn’t alone; other people also believed that Enigma could be cracked.
When he brought his idea to Dilly, it turned out, a team led by Cambridge mathematician John Jeffreys was already busy in the cottage, punching sheets with a machine built for the purpose. The noise was driving Alan Turing nuts. Turing moved to a loft in the cottage where the stable boys once slept. He climbed up by rope ladder and lowered a basket tied to a rope when he wanted coffee sent up.40
A loft and a coffee cup lowered by rope to the world of people: this arrangement fit Alan Turing. He was twenty-seven. He had not fit into his English boarding school as a boy. He did not like to play cricket. He ran long distances, mostly alone. Contrary to myths that grew up about Turing, he did not have a problem understanding people’s feelings. Rather, he could not bear the illogic of society. He was unkempt, probably because he did not see the logical need to tuck his shirt in or shave closely. Since he suffered terribly from hay fever, it was logical to ride his bicycle wearing his war-issue gas mask during pollen season. He was shy, apparently because conventions made no sense to him. They were full of contradictions. The greatest contradiction may have been between the private upper-class acceptance of homosexuality, like his, especially at Cambridge, and the public horror of it.
At twenty-four Turing had written a paper in which he imagined a machine that could be directed by instructions on punched cards to solve any mathematical problem. The machine was not the point of the paper; its imagined existence was part of his proof that no mathematic calculation could solve the paradox of the sentence “I am lying.” The paradox would remain, and Turing’s idea of a machine that followed programmed instructions would transform the world. But this was later.41
The bombe drawings from Poland, it appears, ended up in Turing’s loft. He seized on the idea of a machine that spun the wheels of multiple copies of Enigma. But he took it in a new direction. Rejewski’s bombe had exploited the same flaw as the punched sheets did: the German practice of enciphering the wheel settings twice. Turing’s bombe would instead exploit a piece of text you could expect to find in a message—what was known as a crib.
A German code clerk who received an enciphered message and knew the day’s settings used the machine to produce the original words. Turing’s idea was that you could reverse the process: if you had an enciphered message and a very good idea of a few of the original words, you could use them to find the settings. The machine would spin through one setting after another until it found one that could have turned the guessed words into the gibberish taken down by the intercept operator.
This wasn’t the programmable machine Turing had imagined in his paper. The bombe would be hardwired to do just one thing. Turing’s design called for a machine with thirty copies of Enigma, their ninety wheels all spinning at once, to run through thousands of settings quickly.
There was a catch: to use Turing’s method, you’d need to break Enigma some other way first. Only then would you know which phrases insistently repeated.
Logically, Turing concluded, it could be done. It would be done. On this, Welchman and Knox could agree. A memo they all signed from November 1, 1939, only two months after the war began, says they had two machines now punching the Zygalski sheets and planned to go up to six. Turing’s “30 enigma bomb [sic] machine, adapted to use for cribs, is on order and parts are being made at the British Tabulating Company.”42 A report a week later said that the German military was using Enigma “universally… wherever there is no great danger of capture,” and added, “It is believed that messages can be read in considerable quantity when the machinery is complete.”43
Welchman thought about quantity and had another big idea.
Poland had fallen. Britain and France were not fighting anywhere; neither was Germany. People were already talking about the “phoney war.” They knew better. It was the anxious war. Something would happen, at a place not yet known, on a date not yet set. Yet, even in that time of waiting, the motorcycle dispatch rider from the interception station at Chatham brought hundreds of messages every day.
In the past, Welchman saw, codebreaking had been an artisanal pursuit. A cable or radiogram was intercepted, or a paper stolen from a diplomatic bag. A brilliant person worked on it, single-minded, occasionally inspired, and broke the code or cipher and translated the message. Now the Germans were radioing enciphered text in industrial amounts. The abundance would only grow when the fighting began again.
If GC&CS cracked Enigma, it would also need to create an intelligence assembly line. It would need to break the job into pieces, to grow, to add people, to create separate teams to register the messages, break keys, decode, and translate, working three shifts a day, around the clock. Chatham wouldn’t be enough. They’d need more intercept stations, more operators, more wireless sets, more, much more of everything.
The future, Welchman saw, was turning intelligence into an industry.
Welchman thought of this, and Knox did not, because Knox was an artisan, a master craftsman proud of his trade. He was a lone knight doing battle with the dragon named Enigma. Welchman liked being with people, and was beginning to imagine that fitting them into teams and directing them could be even more fun than solving equations.
In mid-November, Welchman took a plan for massive expansion to Denniston’s deputy, Commander Edward Travis. Welchman sensed, correctly, that Travis would be more interested than Denniston would. Denniston had written to “C” that he would be “greatly relieved” when he could get done with the management tangles of moving to Bletchley Park
, confiding, “I am most anxious to take my share of the work on the… cryptographic problems confronting us.”44 He wanted to break codes, not manage an empire. A draft of Welchman’s plan proposed dividing research and production. Knox would head a small research group, working on the German navy’s more secure Enigma system and other unsolved problems. Travis took the job of going to government offices at Whitehall in London. He would talk, wheedle, beg, and get funds.45
The confidence was radiant. It was glorious. The Enigma section hadn’t yet deciphered a single German message.
POLAND PROVED TO Rommel what he already wanted to believe: Hitler was a brilliant strategist. Hitler, like Rommel himself, was free of the outdated caution of the Prussian aristocrats of the General Staff, which made sense because neither man was Prussian, and neither had General Staff training. The best commander led from the front; the best commander fought by rushing forward—and now the best way to do that was with tanks.46
Rommel asked for his next command to be a panzer division—an armored division. The army’s personnel department wanted to give him a mountain infantry division, because that’s where his past lay. Hitler, it seems, overruled the personnel officers, and Rommel got his wish. He and Hitler agreed: tanks were the future. Tomorrow belonged to machines.47
5
THE FLAW IN THE MACHINE IS THE MAN
Winter 1940. Cairo–Rome–Bletchley Park.
IN CAIRO ON the last day of 1939, “Our big hotels were crowded. At Shepheard’s and at Mena House, New Year’s Eve was celebrated as brilliantly as in other years. The creations (from Paris and London) worn by the ladies, the gargantuan menus washed down with unlimited champagne and whisky and good company, all helped one… ‘drive away dull care,’” wrote Jean Lugol, the Swiss editor of the Cairo daily La bourse egyptienne. “We drank, ate and danced till the small hours.”1
Lugol’s “we” referred to foreigners and wealthy westernized Egyptians. For the poor, which meant most Egyptians, the war felt closer. The price of everything had gone up, especially the kerosene they used to cook their food. “There is already a genuine background of popular discomfort and resentment” that could make people receptive to Axis propaganda, Ambassador Miles Lampson told the Foreign Office in London.2
Lampson’s reports rippled with diplomatically restrained anxiety. When the war began, he said, most Egyptians were “wholeheartedly in favour of the democratic powers.” But Prime Minister Ali Maher had dismissed “numerous… senior government officials, popularly regarded as pro-British.” At the palace, King Farouk created an “increasingly anti-British atmosphere,” ignored warnings to get rid of his Italian hangers-on, and only listened to Maher. Aziz el-Masri, the army chief of staff, was undermining the British military, and he organized sporting clubs that were really “quasi-military formations… to serve political ends in the future.” Lampson demanded that Maher force Masri out. The prime minister leaked the demand and “represented himself as the staunch patriot resisting… this British attack on Egyptian independence.”
Lampson took offense at a cartoon published in a comic paper that showed the rector of Egyptian University “in a suppliant attitude before me” begging not to be given the honor of knight commander of the British Empire that he’d recently been awarded. Government employees who wanted to keep their jobs would do best to maintain distance from the British, the cartoon suggested.
Lampson and Maher met. The prime minister agreed to force Chief of Staff Masri into retirement. But when Lampson demanded that Maher tighten censorship of the weekly comic papers, Maher gave him a typed reply accusing him of “dictatorial methods.” Lampson angrily told him to tear it up. “The common belief,” Lampson wrote, was that the “prime minister is not always entirely balanced or normal.”3 Maher’s view of Lampson is not recorded.
MI5’s man in Cairo, Raymond Maunsell, had one or two explanations of Maher’s actions. In 1939, Maunsell got promoted to lieutenant colonel and became head of Security Intelligence Middle East, SIME, a new office responsible for counterintelligence all the way to Persia. In Cairo, Maunsell “had an agent—a Jewess believe it or not—in the telephone exchange of the Dresdner Bank,” which had close ties to the Nazi regime. She could plug an extra line into conversations; it ran to an “observation flat,” where Maunsell’s agents eavesdropped.
SIME “strongly suspected” that until September 1939 Maher was in contact with the Abwehr, Nazi military intelligence, and probably getting money from it through the Dresdner Bank. Maunsell conceded that Maher’s pro-Axis position might have reflected what “he thought was right for his country”—but even so, Maher didn’t mind getting paid for it.4
On the other hand, Maunsell’s men appear to have missed General Masri’s meeting with Italy’s ambassador in Egypt, Serafino Mazzolini, in October 1939. Masri wanted to cooperate with the Italians and push out the British. He also suggested that Egypt follow the German and Italian example and institute a race policy. In Egypt’s case, that would mean expelling “colored elements” southward to the Sudan. Masri asked for a promise that Italy wasn’t out to take Britain’s place by conquering Egypt. Whatever Mazzolini’s response was, Masri went on seeing his enemy’s enemy as his friend.5
At Mersa Matruh, Major Ralph Bagnold looked out at the Western Desert and cultivated his own crop of fears. The commander of the British Troops in Egypt, the BTE, and his staff officers showed “total ignorance of the desert country” that lay beyond the narrow green band of fields and villages along the Nile River. Bagnold had once gone looking at the Cairo headquarters for a map of Egypt that extended to the Libyan border. The only one he found “faded out to the west with the inscription, ‘Limits of sand dunes unknown,’” as if none of Bagnold’s and Hassanein’s and Almasy’s expeditions had ever happened.
Bagnold thought about a dinner of chicken, spaghetti, and Chianti served deep in the desert seven years earlier, and about his Italian host Major Lorenzini’s careless warning. What if the Italians did, in fact, send a light desert force south of the Sand Sea to Aswan or to Wadi Halfa? They could cut Egypt off from the Sudan, which was now threatened by Italian forces in Ethiopia.
The commander of the armored division at Mersa Matruh, General Michael O’Moore Creagh, asked Bagnold to show him the territory they were supposed to defend. They drove out to the Libyan frontier, getting close enough to see Italian forts. From there they drove south to the edge of the Great Sand Sea, then eastward again to look at the cliffs dropping to the Qattara Depression and its salt marshes. Qattara was shaped like a jagged leaf, the wide part in the southwest near Libya, the tip closest to the coast in the northeast, reaching almost to the Nile Delta. It was two-thirds the size of Belgium and impassable. Together the Sand Sea and Qattara blocked much of the desert to armored forces, leaving a coastal corridor that got narrower on the eastern end. When Bagnold and Creagh got back to base after three days in the desert, Creagh found a note from BTE commander General Henry Maitland Wilson—asking him why he’d left his headquarters.
Bagnold wrote up a short proposal: the British army should buy some American trucks and cars, fit them for the desert as he’d done for exploring, and train a small group of “officers and men in the art of cross-country driving.” Rather than wait for an Italian attack, they’d slip across the dunes into Libya and explore what the Italians were up to. In January 1940, Creagh sent the proposal to General Wilson in Cairo. This was actually the second time Bagnold had suggested the idea. It was rejected, again. An official account explains that the high command “considered that Italy was unlikely to come into the war against us.”6
HUTS SPROUTED ON the groomed grounds of Bletchley Park. The rose garden was uprooted to make room. The green maze was cut down. The lake and tennis courts survived. From the outside, the huts looked like something thrown up in a factory yard to house machines. Inside, thin walls of board or asbestos divided the rooms from a center hallway just wide enough for two people to pass.
At the start of
1940, Huts 6 and 8 were halfway built. Hut 8 was designated for Turing, who’d head the team working on the German navy’s Enigma system. Welchman would move into Hut 6 with the operation that was supposed to break air force and army Enigma.7
Welchman needed more people. GC&CS was still informal, practically a club to which you were invited by a member, or that you might hear very vaguely about if you knew the right kind of people or came from the right university. Welchman recruited a friend from his student days, Stuart Milner-Barry, who’d studied classics at Cambridge. Now he worked unhappily as a stockbroker and more pleasurably played chess for the British national team. Milner-Barry, in turn, brought his friend, Hugh Alexander, who’d been a mathematics student at Cambridge and was now working in London as director of research for a department store chain, a job for which he was “ill-adapted; he was far too untidy even to look like a businessman.” Milner-Barry knew him from chess. Alexander was the British champion.8
Next came Welchman’s students. He signed up Joan Clarke, whom he’d supervised the year before in geometry. He warned her the pay would be low. “Girls”—as women were almost always called at Bletchley Park—were paid less than men, even with the same job title, and started at lower ranks as a matter of course. A male Cambridge student recruited earlier that year got £5 a week as a Foreign Office “temporary junior assistant.” When Clarke started work after her last exams, she was listed as a “linguist” at £3 a week and assigned to Turing’s Hut 8. Almost immediately she moved from the clerks’ room to where Turing, Peter Twinn, and Alex Kendrick worked on Enigma. One of them said, “Welcome to the sahib’s room.” In her task, though not her pay, she was now their equal.9
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