War of Shadows

by Gershom Gorenberg

  The wind dropped, sand fell, chaos remained: the two armies were entangled. Part of Rommel’s army coalesced in an area the British named the Cauldron, on what had been the British side of the minefields and fortifications stretching from Gazala south to Bir Hakeim.

  Colonel Bill Liardet’s half-trained regiment, rushed from Egypt to Libya with their American tanks, was sent to a spot near Knightsbridge and repeatedly ordered to attack German positions in the Cauldron. He lost five tanks and “a number of chaps” in one useless attack, a few more in the next. “I did not like seeing my tanks burning on the skyline” in “this frittering [away] of our armor,” he wrote.17

  The Axis was holding on to the Cauldron, Fellers radioed Washington on June 6. “From the information available to this office,” he said, echoing Liardet’s complaint, the British did not appear to be using their divisions “as tactical units.” Two hours later Fellers sent another message. One of his assistant attachés, the one responsible for keeping a situation map of the battle, had come back from General Headquarters Middle East. He’d learned that the Operations Branch “does not know exact composition or location of its 2 armored divisions.” The “personal belief” of his informant at headquarters was that “the Germans have not abandoned original plans… of taking Tobruk.”18

  To get there, Rommel decided, he first had to take the desert fortress of Bir Hakeim, which sat on his supply route. The Free French brigade at Bir Hakeim included Frenchmen who’d escaped their country, Czechs and Poles, Spanish Republicans, recruits from the French colonies of Senegal and Cameroon, Tahiti and Madagascar, Foreign Legionnaires from dozens more countries, and one Englishwoman—Susan Travers, driver and mistress of General Pierre Koenig, the commander. Koenig himself had been proclaimed a traitor by France’s government in Vichy. “The French fought in a skilfully planned system of field positions and… slit trenches, small pillboxes, machine gun and anti-tank gun nests,” Rommel wrote. They fought as if it were the last redoubt on earth. The Luftwaffe’s Stuka dive-bombers came in swarms, and the RAF hunted the dive bombers. Rommel sent in a German infantry division and an Italian one, outnumbering the Free French defenders by at least five to one. Both Axis divisions were beaten back.

  Ritchie twice managed to get supply trucks through to the fortress; then Rommel surrounded it completely and again sent his divisions against the lone French brigade. Ritchie did not manage, despite Auchinleck’s urging, to launch a major offensive against Rommel’s ring from the outside. Bir Hakeim was alone.19

  “ACCORDING TO A secret service report, there is famine in Malta,” said a radio message from Kesselring to the Luftwaffe commander in North Africa, intercepted by a British wireless operator on June 4. “The morale of the civil population and the military has been weakened by continuous air attacks.” On the smaller island of Gozo next to Malta and the islet of Comino between them, it said, “there is a shortage of drinking water.”20

  For Margaret Storey, “secret service” suggested a human source—one who knew about the local mood and conditions, even on Comino, where only a handful of people lived. It appeared there was a German agent on the island.21

  The more Enigma messages Storey got from Hut 3, the more German spying showed up, tantalizing, dangerous, and anonymous.

  IF THERE WAS a spot in the world lonelier than Bir Hakeim, it was Midway: two patches of land in the mid-Pacific, thirteen hundred miles northwest of Hawaii, twenty-five hundred miles from Tokyo. Together, the islands were barely twice the size of New York’s Central Park.

  On June 4, 1942, Japanese bombers appeared above Midway’s American airfield. Japan’s naval commander, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, had brought a fleet spearheaded by four of Japan’s eight intact aircraft carriers to conquer the US outpost. Yamamoto’s strategy said that taking Midway would protect Japan from US air raids and provide a launching station for invading Hawaii.

  Yamamoto’s planning did not account for the belated, desperate, and successful effort of the US Navy’s OP-20-G to crack the main Japanese naval code after the Pearl Harbor debacle. His plan did not include the contingency that his order to proceed would be overheard in Hawaii or that US admiral Chester Nimitz would trust the intelligence and send his own carriers toward Midway.

  Before the Japanese could launch their second wave of bombers against Midway, American dive-bombers came from the east to hurl their explosives down at Yamamoto’s ships. By the next day, all four Japanese carriers had sunk. The shattered remains of Japan’s fleet retreated.22

  For America, all the pieces necessary for an intelligence victory had come together: the code broken, the unambiguous message deciphered, the commander receptive and daring, the necessary forces available.

  “U.S. Navy Knew in Advance All About Jap Fleet,” read a headline on the front of the Washington Times Herald the day after the battle. The article, by a Chicago Tribune correspondent in the Pacific, cited “reliable sources in the Naval Intelligence” as saying that “advance information enabled the American Navy” to strike the Japanese fleet. Bletchley Park’s liaison to OP-20-G sent a copy of the news story from Washington to Britain’s naval intelligence director, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, and called it “a very unpleasant article.” (Read in the proper accent, this was very close to a burst of obscenities.) He described the compounding acts of carelessness that led to the journalist getting the story. Somehow, the news did not lead the Japanese navy to change its code.

  For Godfrey and his colleagues, Midway was not just evidence of what “special intelligence”—information pulled from the enemy’s highest-grade ciphers and codes—could accomplish. It confirmed their heartfelt fear that in the art of guarding special intelligence, their American allies were amateurs.23

  FROM THE GARDENS of Government House, the British high commissioner’s residence in Jerusalem, Hermione Ranfurly could look beyond the lavender hedges and fig trees to the Old City walls and the Dome of the Rock. As High Commissioner MacMichael’s assistant private secretary, the young countess had a desk at the end of the residence’s billiard room and her own bedroom. From the newspapers, she knew that the war in the desert had flared back into flame. “It is terrifying to think that nearly all our friends are down there fighting,” she wrote in her diary.

  At Government House, “each morning an Arab gardener arranges flowers in the cool arched rooms; the red leather boxes go back and forth to the Secretariat,” she wrote. “Lady MacMichael and I visit hospitals.” Ranfurly got a letter from her husband that took only five weeks to reach her from the POW camp in Italy. “The evening sun turns the hills gilt color,” she wrote. “We change for dinner and afterwards, if there are no visitors, we all read.” The 9 p.m. broadcast from London made little sense of the battles in Libya. “Around ten o’clock we take ourselves and our anxieties to bed.”24 At Government House, the war was both disturbing and far away to the west.

  The SOE camp at Kibbutz Mishmar Ha’emek closed in early June, six weeks after it opened. All 150, or 400, or most likely 1,000 Palmah fighters, depending on which account of events one trusts, had completed their training to resist Nazi occupation of Palestine. “I do not know what the enemy will think of them, but by God they frighten me,” an SOE officer said of them, paraphrasing what either King George II or the Duke of Wellington had supposedly said of his generals. Major General B. T. Wilson, the SOE’s number one in Palestine, “had made a very good impression with the Jews in Palestine and they were collaborating with him successfully,” the SOE’s war diary said.

  Wilson was forthwith dismissed.

  According to the British military commander in Palestine, Wilson “was endangering security in Palestine by giving too much latitude to the ‘Friends,’” meaning Jews. Palestine high commissioner MacMichael concurred. The SOE investigated and concluded that the accusations were “exaggerated and somewhat vitriolic” but that SOE cooperation with the authorities in Palestine depended on Wilson leaving.25

  In February, with troops and tanks at Abd
in Palace, both Lampson and the British generals had made a statement that immediate war needs took precedence over avoiding a revolt in Egypt in some hard-to-imagine time after the war. In Jerusalem, MacMichael and the generals were still more in the habit of worrying about Jewish rebels in the future than about an Axis invasion much sooner.

  The SOE, though, maintained its plan for a network of four hundred Jewish resistance fighters in Palestine. The Cairo office asked London for the funding that Wilson had promised the Jewish Agency for the project. The London office did not want to pay.26

  “THE INFORMATION RECEIVED by the enemy on 16 April” about Royal Air Force technicians failing to maintain American airplanes bore a “striking resemblance” to a signal from Washington to General Russell Maxwell’s US supply mission in Egypt. So wrote Air Marshal Tedder, the RAF chief of staff in the Middle East, who then transmitted the text of the American message.

  Tedder was answering the RAF commander in chief, who needed a reply for Stewart Menzies, who had to tell Churchill whether the Germans’ “particularly reliable source” was right about the “dreadful waste” of US aircraft and spare parts. Tedder had quietly been in touch with Maxwell’s staff, who told him that the information from Washington was utterly false, tantamount to “fifth column propaganda.” The complaints had come from “disgruntled… representatives” of the American manufacturers, who’d been in Egypt and had been sent home.

  “Dope given in German report suggests information was obtained in Washington,” Tedder added, since the message had only been decoded in Cairo on April 17, a day after the Germans got it. In other words, the most likely explanation was a German source in the War Department.27 If one took a globe and stuck red pins where German spies appeared to be successfully at work, one more pin had to be inserted at Washington.

  ON MALTA, BREAD was scarce. For a month, everyone had been living on siege rations. “Troops and civil population accepting reduced rations and discomfort cheerfully,” wrote General Auchinleck in early June.28 Auchinleck’s weekly reports to General Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, spoke in a resolutely positive tone. Still, food was running out on Malta. So was fuel for the planes that fought off German bombers.

  In Alexandria and at Gibraltar, ships gathered. From each end of the Mediterranean, convoys would strive for the Grand Harbor of Valetta in Malta. The one from Egypt was named Operation Vigorous. Auchinleck’s contribution was supposed to have been an offensive at the start of June to take the coast of Cyrenaica, so that the RAF could take off from airfields there to protect Vigorous from Italian ships and German planes. Just as Kesselring’s particularly reliable source had predicted, June was “too late.” Rommel had preempted Auchinleck, and the Luftwaffe would rise from the Cyrenaica aerodromes to attack the convoy.

  General Headquarters in Cairo produced a new plan. The Long Range Desert Group would cross the sands far to the south of Bir Hakeim and the battles on the Gazala line, then head through Axis territory toward Derna in the east and Benghazi further west. It would deliver commandos who would attack six Luftwaffe fields, destroying planes on the ground. Other commandos would reach Crete by submarine to sabotage planes there.

  Most of the commandos for the Libya raids came from the Special Air Service, the SAS. The name was misleading: parachuting proved to be a disastrous way to deliver men behind enemy lines. Instead, the SAS traveled with the experienced navigators of the LRDG. This time, they were joined by the Special Interrogation Group, Captain Buck’s contingent of German-speaking Palestinian Jews in Nazi uniforms. On June 8, Buck and fourteen of his men, including seventeen-year-old Eliahu Gottlieb, left Siwa Oasis at the edge of the Sand Sea and crossed into Libya to try their luck at piracy on the high desert.29

  THE MESSAGE FROM the intelligence officer of the German high command to his opposite number at Rommel’s headquarters explicitly cited an “army source” with information from General Headquarters Middle East in Cairo. Sent in the Chaffinch II key on June 7, translated in Hut 3 two days later, it said that the British Fourth Armored Brigade was at the spot called Eluet et-Tamar, northeast of the Cauldron, and that the “200 Guards Brigade and support group of the First Armored Division [are] established at 386-412,” coordinates on British war maps, placing them due east of the Cauldron. Rommel could not have asked for information more precise.

  Auchinleck’s chief of operations “does not know the exact constitution and location of his two armored divisions,” the message added. “In the view of an agent, the Germans have not given up their original plan of… taking Tobruk.” The paraphrased version of this, sent from Hut 3 to the army command, referred explicitly to a “British agent.”30

  Later that evening, another message to Rommel’s intelligence chief was belatedly deciphered and translated. On June 4, it said, there had been “no news of any important [sic] from Good Source.” Enigma messages did not have upper- and lowercase letters. But the message made clear that “Good Source” was no longer a descriptive phrase, an evaluation applicable to any number of sources. It was a name. And a day when Good Source had no important news was so unusual it needed to be noted.31 In that case, British intercept operators had overheard only a small piece of what had been sent.

  THE KEYS TO the Swiss legation in Rome were most likely provided by the servant called Peppino, later named as working for Manfredi Talamo’s Sezione Prelevamento, or P Squad. It’s possible, though, that Talamo had additional agents on the Swiss staff whose names have been lost to memory. Following his standard method of operation, Talamo presumably entered the building himself, opened the safe, took documents to the Servizio Informazioni Militari photo studio, brought them back, and put them precisely in their original place.

  It was a fruitful operation. Talamo, now also in command of SIM’s counterintelligence section, had suspected that the Swiss were cooperating with Allied intelligence services. To test the thesis, he fed a double agent—a Soviet spy actually working for Italy—a report that an anti-Communist army was being formed in Italy. The fictional army included an imaginary “Divisione Buon Servezi.” In the Swiss safe, Talamo found messages from Berne asking the Swiss military attaché for information about the anti-Bolshevik army and the Buon Servezi division. Ergo, the double agent’s fake intelligence had found its way from Moscow to Berne and back to Rome.

  The stolen papers also revealed that the Swiss military attaché had an agent in the German embassy in Rome.

  “Dr. Sauer, a cultural attache, has already been arrested and has confessed,” Foreign Minister Ciano wrote in his diary on June 9. “He made it clear that he did not act for money but out of hatred for Nazism and Fascism.” German envoy Otto von Bismarck dismissed that explanation, Ciano wrote. “He says that Sauer is a pederast and that he has been induced by his vice to commit this serious offense.”

  Herbert Kappler, officially the police liaison at the German embassy, actually the Gestapo’s man in Rome, was not pleased. Kurt Sauer was Kappler’s friend. Not only that, but an Italian had exposed a German spy that the Gestapo had missed. Kappler looked bad.

  Talamo was promoted from major to lieutenant colonel. But Kappler remembered, and did not forgive.32

  Act IV

  “THE MATTER BECOMES OF EXTREME URGENCY”

  1

  COMPROMISED

  June 10–16, 1942. Bir Hakeim–Bletchley Park–Washington.

  “AT NOON JUNE 10th left Libya,” Colonel Fellers wrote that same evening from Cairo. The battle had turned into a stalemate, he radioed Washington. “The present situation will continue for some time,” he believed. “Rommel has obviously failed in his mission,” largely because the German general had underestimated the American Grant tank. Bir Hakeim was of no real strategic value in itself, Fellers said, but politically the British “cannot allow the destruction of the Free French.”

  He wrote in the quiet of El Nabatat Street in Garden City with his mind still in the rush of the battle, alive to a thousand details, at once detache
d, despondent, and furious. He mixed strategic lessons with positions of British units and “costly mistakes” by the British.

  Fellers had listened to many British commanders. The German air force acted like a flying artillery, striking British ground units. The RAF gave no support. Eighth Army commander Neil Ritchie had sent an Indian brigade to block the gap in the minefields through which Rommel brought supplies. The brigade had “insufficient antitank guns and artillery.” While Rommel’s tanks were firing at the Indians on their west, British armored units on the east had been silent. The Indian brigade was destroyed. “Tank losses on both sides have been heavy,” Fellers said, but the British had lost more.1

  Lance Corporal Ron Hurlock was in a tank that exploded in flames that day. There is no record of why he’d been shifted to a tank from the wireless van on which he’d hoped a German gunner would not waste a shell. His letter worrying about his wife’s coolness was his last.2

  FOR THE EAVESDROPPERS at Hut 3, relations between the Luftwaffe and Rommel’s ground forces did not sound so harmonious.

  “I am grieved,” Field Marshal Kesselring radioed Rommel on that same June evening, that successful dive-bomber strikes on Bir Hakeim weren’t matched by a “commensurate infantry and tank attack.” Kesselring demanded “most urgently to establish temporarily a tank concentration” against the fortress.

  Rommel thought it was “completely out of the question” to use tanks against minefields and dug-in strongpoints. Tanks were for mobile battles and rapid movement. He was relying on infantry to take Bir Hakeim.

  Rommel demanded heavier air strikes. Kesselring’s subordinate, the commander of the Fliegerkorps X—the 10th Air Corps in North Africa—radioed a rejection. To the Luftwaffe liaison officer at Rommel’s headquarters, the 10th Air Corps chief sent word that he would be visiting. He suggested they “take leave together until Hakeim has been cleaned up.” In the Watch Room at Hut 3, the air adviser added a comment to the decoded message that the “suggestion [was] thought to be result of irritation and not intended seriously.”3