War of Shadows

by Gershom Gorenberg

  As a favor to the RAF, Brower flew back an American P-40 fighter plane. Taking off in Sudan, he made a tight turn at slow speed, went into a spin, and hit the ground. Thrown from the cockpit, he was killed instantly. “You’ll have to stop scolding us Americans for being neutral,” Fellers told Ranfurly, “when my friends are getting killed flying planes up to you British.”

  She liked Fellers. She did not say anything about her friend Toby, or about how many soldiers were dying in Greece and the Western Desert.

  “We reckon this is one of your worst emergencies—the whole Mediterranean is threatened,” Fellers said over their next lunch. “America must declare war soon.” It was as if he’d never thought differently. Afterward he phoned one evening to say he had word from the American legation in Rome: “General O’Connor says Ranfurly captured. Last seen in good health.”

  With her husband in captivity, the Wavells invited her to stay with them. The general exuded serenity. One night after dinner, she played backgammon with him. “I must win one battle today, Hermione,” he said, grinning. “You seem to be the only enemy I can be sure of defeating these days.”44

  Jacqueline Lampson, the young, half-Italian wife of Miles Lampson, invited Ranfurly to a dinner with the newly arrived American ambassador, Alexander Kirk. “You are the very man I want to meet, because your country still has a legation in Rome,” she said when introduced to Kirk, with the kind of teasing that only half hides pain. “If you can get me a job there, I could visit my husband on my day off and talk to him through the bars.”

  “Lady Ranfurly, you must remember there is a war on,” Kirk said.

  “That from an American,” she answered and walked away. She thought to herself that possibly her sense of humor had gone missing, but certainly her husband had gone missing.

  After dinner, out on the lawn, Jacqueline Lampson came up to her. “When I ask you to dinner, I don’t expect you to be rude to my most important guest. Mr. Kirk is very pro-British.”

  “I always say what I think,” Hermione Ranfurly said, “whether it be to neutrals or Italians.”45

  MENZIES HAD TO talk Winston Churchill out of reading every single decrypted Enigma message. The prime minister wouldn’t have time left for anything else, said the man called “C.” He avoided saying that a prime minister reading raw intelligence—an old man with a boy’s enthusiasm for spy stories—might jump to rash conclusions. Instead, “C” selected material and hand-delivered it daily, sometimes several times a day. In the spring of 1941, someone started an office file for those messages, with their dark red “most secret” stamps.

  The first one in the file came from railway Enigma at the end of March. It contained orders for moving armored divisions, troops, and SS divisions in the weeks ahead to the Cracow area.46 Cracow was in Poland, under firm Nazi control. For forces suited for blitzkrieg, it could only be a staging ground for an offensive eastward.

  Churchill wrote a brief, veiled message for his ambassador in Moscow to hand-deliver to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Churchill wrote that a “trusted agent” had given him “sure information” on the troop movements. “Your Excellency will surely appreciate the significance of these facts,” he wrote.47

  The next message in the file contained a precise outline of the German plan for invading Crete. It had come in an air force key of Enigma, because Germany was about to do something unheard of. It would conquer an island from the air. Paratroopers would land and seize airfields. Planes would land with troops who would conquer the harbors. Only then would ships arrive with antiaircraft guns and supplies.48

  GENERAL WAVELL HAD reason to feel that his realm was shrinking. Greece was lost. In Cairo, King Farouk was “believed likely to go to the German camp” if he thought Egypt was likely to fall.49

  In Iraq, four pro-German colonels staged a coup in April 1941 and restored former prime minister Rashid Ali al-Gailani to power. The regent who ruled in place of the country’s six-year-old king, Faisal II, fled to Transjordan, while the child king’s mother smuggled him out of Baghdad.

  The Foreign Office in London had already seen Gailani as Ali Maher’s Iraqi twin—unreliable and most likely an Axis asset. The British embassy in Iraq said the four colonels, known as the Golden Square, were “in close and constant touch” with Hajj Amin el-Husseini, the exiled ex-mufti of Jerusalem. For the moment, Husseini’s magnetism moved people more in Baghdad than in Palestine. The plotters had met in his home to plan the coup. He handled the link between the coup leaders and his German contacts, even as Berlin never quite made the promise he sought: support for full Arab independence in Palestine, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and beyond. Iraq’s government radio station broadcast Nazi propaganda. On Baghdad’s streets, members of the pro-Nazi paramilitary Youth Phalanxes movement arrested random Jews and dragged them to police stations—or occasionally murdered them on the spot.

  At the end of April, Iraqi troops surrounded the big RAF base at Habbaniya west of Baghdad and threatened to down any planes that took off. Practically speaking, Gailani had declared war.50

  Hut 3 at Bletchley Park sent a stream of messages: From Athens and Rhodes, the German air force was to send bombers, fighters, and transport planes eastward, “with Iraq markings or no markings at all.” Air crews would remove the German insignia from their uniforms and carry no identification. Ships arriving at Rhodes were carrying machine-gun rounds, antiaircraft shells, and bombs for Iraq. At Palmyra in Syria, a way station on the route, a German air force headquarters was being set up. On the map of the Middle East, two question marks could be erased. Both Iraq and the Vichy-ruled territories of Syria and Lebanon were fully aligned with the Axis.51

  THE PLANS OF Fliegerkorps XI, the German 11th Air Corps paratroop force, might as well have been sent directly to Bernard Freyberg, the New Zealand general in command of forty thousand soldiers in Crete—though they actually had to be deciphered first from the air force keys of Enigma in Hut 6, passed to Hut 3, and then translated in the nicotine haze of the second hut before Freyberg got them.

  Freyberg knew that zero hour had been postponed from May 17 to May 20. His men, from Britain, New Zealand, Australia, Greece, Cyprus, and Palestine, were tired. Almost all had been evacuated from mainland Greece, leaving much of their weaponry behind. But they were waiting for the parachutes to open that morning. In some places, the air was so thick with men dangling from white clouds of cloth that a single British machine-gun nest could kill them all before they touched the ground. But the paratroops kept coming, and after them airplanes pulling trains of gliders and releasing them so they could land more troops, or often carry them to their deaths when the glider pilots failed to find flat land on an island of sharp mountains, narrow valleys, and olive groves.

  In Hut 3, you watched the battle through German eyes. “Malame aerodrome serviceable,” read a decoded Enigma scrap on the second morning of the invasion. Enough of the German paratroopers and glider pilots had survived to capture the runways, so that transport planes with more men and guns could come down.

  After a week, Freyberg knew Crete was lost. Some of his units were already surrounded. Those that weren’t retreated to the port of Heraklion, or through the mountains to the tiny harbor of Sfakia on the south side of the island. The Royal Navy managed to evacuate less than half of his original troops.52

  Seen from London and Cairo, the aerial invasion was another terrifying Nazi innovation. At Bletchley Park, it was reason for the kind of doubts that you had to erase to keep on working. Never before had a general been granted so much information about the enemy’s plans and condition so quickly. Despite the victory over Enigma on the battlefield of the mind, out in the world the battle had been lost.53

  At a general staff meeting in Berlin, Franz Halder jotted in his notebook a list of German battalions shattered, airplanes lost, officers and men killed. Crete was the kind of victory that a general did not want to repeat. “British were expecting airborne landing… and made effective preparations for defense,” he r
ecorded. “This explains our heavy losses.” Had these words been radioed in the Red key of Enigma, they could have provided some consolation in Bletchley Park.54

  “THESE DAYS NO fear is an exaggeration,” Meir Yaari said. Yaari was a leader of a left-wing kibbutz movement; he was speaking at a meeting of Jewish labor leaders in Palestine. Another speaker described the mood among Palestine’s Jews as “immense panic… fatalism… and total paralysis.” Very suddenly it seemed that the Nazis could come from the west through Egypt, or the north through Syria, or from the air. A thousand Jewish soldiers from Palestine had been taken captive in Greece. By sheer bureaucratic coincidence, the British army picked that moment to send questionnaires to soldiers in Palestine, including local Jews, asking to list family members for possible evacuation. By another coincidence, a “wanted” poster appeared in police stations for Fawzi al-Qawuqji, a leader of the late 1930s Arab revolt, which set fire to rumors that he’d returned from exile to start a new rebellion.

  “A Nazi invasion of the Land of Israel isn’t like the German invasion of Poland, even [as it affected] the Jews of Poland,” said Moshe Shertok, for practical purposes the foreign minister of Palestine’s Jews, at another emergency meeting. “It’s possible there will be atrocities here.”55 The comment showed how little was known about what was happening in Poland. On that, intelligence was entirely lacking.

  A WHITE CROSS made of bed sheets was supposed to be spread out in the desert southwest of Cairo. Captain Laszlo Almasy looked down from the German bomber. There was no cross.

  The Hungarian explorer’s plane and its escort had taken off from Derna, between Benghazi and Tobruk on the Libyan coast. They left late in the day so they would enter darkness and hostile territory at the same time. It was June 7, 1941.

  Major Nikolaus Ritter, the Abwehr officer who had brought Almasy back to Africa, had managed to get the German air force to lend him the planes and their crews only after the fall of Crete. Ritter was certain that the deposed chief of staff of the Egyptian army, Aziz el-Masri, would be waiting that night, and would mark the landing spot. As Ritter would tell things, he had received word, via a contraband wireless set hidden in a church in Cairo, that Masri had confirmed he was coming. Almasy’s plane would land and pick him up. Once in Axis territory, Masri would work to foment a revolution in Egypt.

  The German planes had enough fuel to circle just above the desert for half an hour before turning back. The general never showed up. On the runway in Derna, Captain Almasy had to tell Ritter that he had nothing to show for the long flight over enemy territory.56

  Masri, it would turn out, had tried to leave Cairo—three weeks earlier, on the night of May 16, in an Egyptian air force plane commandeered by two Egyptian airmen. Their destination was Beirut in Vichy-ruled Lebanon. Beforehand, Masri had told an SOE colonel in charge of British propaganda in the Middle East, Cudbert Thornhill, that he wanted to fly to Baghdad to propose a compromise to the Gailani regime to end the crisis. The colonel did not approve the idea, but apparently he did not report the meeting either.

  It’s most likely that the old pro-German general’s real intent was to join the Iraqi rebellion against Britain. But Masri’s poorly trained Egyptian pilot panicked and made an emergency landing ten miles after takeoff. Masri went into hiding in Cairo and may well have confirmed the rendezvous with Almasy in the desert as his plan B—but Egyptian police arrested him the day before his intended escape. Afraid that Masri’s meeting with the Special Operations Executive colonel would come out, Ambassador Lampson urged the Egyptian government to let the case fade away.57

  The irony is that if Masri had made it to Baghdad, he might have ended up in Berlin after all.

  Wavell, pressed by London to stretch his forces to yet another front, had rushed a relief force from Palestine to the RAF base at Habbaniya in Iraq. By the end of May, the Iraqi army crumbled, and the British force was approaching Baghdad. Gailani and Husseini fled to Iran, then traveled to Turkey and onward to Germany. From there they would try to create a German-Arab alliance: just the role that Masri was meant to play.

  THE REGENT OF Iraq returned to Baghdad on June 1. The British troops stayed outside the city, in the hope that his return would not look like their doing.

  It was the first day of the two-day Jewish holiday of Shavuot. Baghdad was one-sixth Jewish, and for Jews the fall of the Nazi-shaded military regime doubled the cause for celebration. A crowd in holiday clothes met the regent on the west bank of the Tigris River. As the Jews returned home, soldiers attacked them with knives and fists. Police watched and did nothing. Outside a hospital where the wounded were taken, a mob of people demanded that the Jewish doctors and nurses be delivered to them so they could be killed. Teens from the Youth Phalanxes joined the rioting. The supporters of Gailani and the Mufti had found someone to blame for their defeat. On the second day, the looting and bloodshed spread until the regent finally ordered the police to use live fire to disperse the mobs.

  “A large number of Jewish shops and homes were looted, and several hundred Jews were brutally murdered,” the British ambassador reported. “There is no doubt that a large number of [Jews] would emigrate… if only they could find a country to take them.” The dead of the Farhood, as Iraq’s Jews called those two days in June, may have been the least known, least acknowledged victims of Nazism. Jews had lived by the rivers of Babylon for twenty-six hundred years. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the community’s greatest religious teacher, Rabbi Yosef Haim, had taught how to calculate the times for Jewish prayer according to the call of the muezzin from Baghdad’s mosques, and based religious practices on the fact that it was safe to walk Baghdad’s streets at night. Months after the Farhood, a “most secret” message from British military headquarters said that poor Iraqi Jews, some of whom had lost their shops in the looting, were paying truck drivers to smuggle them into Palestine.58

  ROOSEVELT WROTE TO Churchill, saying that in both Britain and America, the public understood that Britain would win the war “even if you have to withdraw further in the Eastern Mediterranean.”

  Churchill did not like this. He composed a letter back. Spain, Vichy France, Turkey, and Japan might all decide whether to join the war based on what happened in the Middle East, he wrote. After thought, he added several lines. “The one decisive counterweight I can see to balance the growing pessimism” about Britain’s chances among still-neutral bystanders “would be if the United States were immediately to range herself with us as a belligerent power.” This was more direct than Churchill usually allowed himself. Stop cheering from the sideline, he said.

  Roosevelt did not answer that plea directly. He sent back a long list of what he was shipping to the Middle East, including two hundred tanks fresh from American factories and seven hundred ten-ton trucks to carry supplies in the desert. The message meant: I believe you can hold on there, and this is the most that I can do.59

  Barely, Britain held on. Crete was lost, but Iraq was safe for now. Wavell’s hurried attempt to push Rommel back into Libya in June failed. But the Free French, British, and Australian forces he reluctantly sent out of Palestine against the Vichy army in Syria and Lebanon slowly pushed forward. Turkey stayed neutral. Persia was shaky. The leaders of both countries, Fellers radioed from Cairo, “have a great fear of the U.S.S.R., less of Britain, none of Italy, and a very remote fear and a great respect for Germany.”60 His sources for that anxious reading were almost certainly British.

  RITTER AND ALMASY had failed to get the old Egyptian general out of Cairo. But they had another operation planned: to fly two German agents in. One had lived in Suez before the war, the other in Alexandria. The same two planes would go. One would land sixty miles from Cairo on a stretch of hard, gravel-strewn ground known to Almasy. It would drop off the spies, along with a motorcycle that they would ride into the city. The other plane would be the escort.

  At take-off time, a mechanic told Ritter that the plane meant to carry the spies had a bad tire and c
ouldn’t land on gravel. Ritter decided to go with his two spies in the other, though its pilot was less experienced. “The front lines were waiting for information regarding enemy activities,” Ritter would explain. “I had to take a chance.”

  Almasy, who’d come to the airfield, stayed on the ground. If the risk-enamored Hungarian argued with Ritter on the tarmac and refused to go, as gossip said afterward, Ritter must truly have been desperate for a success.

  Hours later, Ritter’s pilot descended—and suddenly pulled up. In Ritter’s telling, the long shadows of sunset made the pilot think the gravel was a field of boulders, and he refused to touch down. Hours later, back over the Libyan coast, with their fuel running out, the radio man shouted, “No landing in Derna. Enemy air raid!” The pilot put the plane down at sea off the coast. One of the would-be spies was killed. Ritter’s arm was badly broken. After a rescue squadron found the survivors, Ritter was flown out to Athens for treatment. His African adventure was over.

  Almasy, on the other hand, stayed. He had a new plan for smuggling German spies into Cairo.61

  WHEN HE DEFEATED Wavell’s June offensive, Rommel would write, the German high command promised him new armored divisions. He could have done great things with those reinforcements, but they never came, he lamented.62

  Churchill’s attempt to share a secret with Joseph Stalin, one that had been sent in railway Enigma, did not go well. Instead of handing the message to Stalin himself, the British ambassador in Moscow had to give it to one of Stalin’s top officials, Andrey Vyshinsky, formerly a prosecutor in the purge trials of the dictator’s purported enemies.

  The intelligence was accurate. But it had value only if the recipient trusted the messenger. It could make a difference only if he was willing to bend his certainties.