War of Shadows

by Gershom Gorenberg

  FELLERS’S MOTIVE FOR sending the cable about the commando raids had been to recommend the tactic. “This method of attack offers tremendous possibility for destruction, risks is [sic] slight compared with possible gains,” he’d written.28 The German’s Good Source message, naturally, did not quote this commentary.

  The Good Source report, sent in the Chaffinch key, was actually the third warning, and not the last, based on Fellers’s message and deciphered at Bletchley Park. One came on June 12 in an Italian naval code and cited a “reliable source.” Another came the same day in the Primrose key of Enigma, used by Luftwaffe supply units. It gave no source at all but told airfields to be on high alert from 5 p.m. till dawn. Ammunition dumps and fuel depots should be searched “with a view to discovering bombs and incendiary matter with time fuses” and then constantly guarded, airbase commanders were ordered. Yet another air force warning, to airfields in the Aegean, was also sent that day but deciphered at Hut 6 only the following week.29

  All around the Mediterranean, Axis radio networks carried the word: expect commandos.

  By the afternoon of June 12, Hut 3 had sent General Headquarters in Cairo a paraphrase of the orders to boost security at German airfields.30 Even if it reached someone who was in on the secret of the commando raids, even if that person had figured out a way to radio a warning to the Long Range Desert Group patrols without committing the cardinal sin of hinting at the Enigma break, it was too late.31

  The night before, the LRDG’s desert buccaneers had dropped off bands of Special Air Service saboteurs, including a team of Free French, near Benghazi. The SAS men would make the final approach to four Axis landing fields on their own. Further east, on the other side of the hump of Cyrenaica, Captain Buck’s team from the Special Interrogation Group parted from its LRDG guides. Buck’s group consisted of fourteen of his German-speaking Palestinian Jews and their two professedly anti-Nazi German instructors, all in German uniform, along with fourteen Free French paratroopers and their commander. They rode in captured German trucks. At checkpoints, the German instructors did the talking and identified the French as prisoners of war. The raiders split into two groups. Their targets were an airfield at Derna and another at nearby Martuba.

  What happened after that will remain indistinct, the subject of two sets of stories, British and Axis, with disputes within each set.

  Major David Stirling, commander of the Special Air Service group, reported that his Free French contingent destroyed or damaged fourteen planes at one of the fields, at Berca. The French commander claimed only eleven. At another landing ground, Stirling wrote, his men destroyed five planes and up to thirty new engines and left hangars burning behind them. At yet another, they got only one plane. At the Barce airfield, the planes were too well guarded to approach.

  Across Cyrenaica, at the Derna landing ground, a truck arrived late at night, driven by one of SIG’s professedly anti-Nazi German trainers. With him were Eliahu Gottlieb and another Palestinian Jew, Czech-born Petr Haas. In the back, in the guise of prisoners or perhaps hidden under a tarp, were the French fighters.

  The French commander later made it back on foot, alone, to the point set for the rendezvous with LRDG. His story, as passed on with multiple variations by those who heard him, was that the German driver went into the guard booth and betrayed the group. German soldiers came out, surrounded the truck, and demanded surrender. A Special Interrogation Group man would recount afterward that Gottlieb and Haas responded with gunfire and grenades. (He could have only known this, or misheard it, from the French officer.) In another telling, one of the two Jews blew up their own supply of explosives, killing some of the Germans in the process. Except for the lone French officer, the French were either killed or captured. The closest thing to a certainty is that Haas and Gottlieb died as they fought Nazi soldiers. Gottlieb was two months short of his eighteenth birthday.32

  The second SIG team headed into the night toward Martuba. What happened next is mostly mystery. A few days after the raids, the LRDG’s intelligence officer, Bill Kennedy-Shaw, wrote from Siwa Oasis to a superior at General Headquarters. Captain Buck, he relayed, believed that the men he’d sent to Martuba airfield had “done their stuff.” Explosions had been seen there. But after the raiders’ cover was blown, Buck had been forced to leave the rendezvous point without waiting for the Martuba team. Buck “thinks they may have got 15–20 aircraft” at Martuba, Kennedy-Shaw said. As for the fate of the Martuba raiders, he could only say that there was “a chance” that some might have escaped capture and were hiding in the Green Mountains.33

  Altogether, in the British reports, the raiders destroyed as many as forty warplanes, along with spare engines, and damaged more.

  Seen from inside the Axis bases, the action looked very different. A German pilot who’d been at the Derna landing ground, and who was shot down and taken prisoner soon after, knew of an attempted raid but had heard nothing of a betrayal by the driver. His account was that the truck pulled up to the sentry’s booth, “a melee ensued… and all the occupants were shot on the spot,” apparently including the driver. As for Martuba, a German pilot from there, also taken prisoner, “stated that he knew nothing about a raiding party” on his field that night.34

  The two captured German pilots agreed on this: there’d been warnings in advance to expect British raiding parties, dressed in German uniforms. According to the Derna pilot, the commanding officer banned any movement of trucks in and around the field after sundown.35

  It’s possible the German driver indeed betrayed the party at Derna. It’s very possible, though, that he had nothing to do with the sentries’ response to the truck they’d been told to expect and suspect.

  A German report from the morning after the raids lists a total of ten planes destroyed and one more lightly damaged, a hangar ignited, and several pilots killed—far less damage than in the British accounts. The German report says nothing of an attack at Martuba. At Derna, “one van with explosive material” was seized and “a saboteur… in German uniform was captured.”36 The information is telegraphic, the drama at Derna absent.

  Airfield commanders may have had reason to understate what happened. But they could count the wreckage when the sun came up. Stirling and Buck could only listen for explosions and look back for flames as they fled.

  Two stories were born that night. In British memory and histories woven from it, the raids were a success of audacious daring, albeit marred by disaster at Derna.37 The most succinct Axis account comes from General Cesare Amè, head of Italy’s Servizio Informazioni Militari, the SIM. The raids, Amè would later write, “failed almost completely” due to the last-minute intelligence from Cairo. The British plan to cripple Axis air strength came to naught, Amè would write.38 The credit, he said, belonged to his SIM.

  TWO HUNDRED MILES north from Derna, off the shore of Crete, a submarine had surfaced with a band of commandos—one English officer, four Frenchmen, and one Greek—from the British unit known as the Special Boat Section. They came ashore on June 11 in rubber boats and hiked into the mountains, burdened with explosives. On the night of June 13, a German patrol discovered them while they cut the fence around the airfield at Heraklion. Fortunately, the English officer would recount, the Germans “were quite unprepared for the presence of British or Allied troops… A happy snore from one of the Free French satisfied them that we were a party of German drunks!” The only thing that interfered with their subsequent work of sticking explosives with time-delay fuses on German planes was an RAF air raid. Failure to coordinate the commando mission and the air attack saved the Germans at least ten planes.39

  Here, unusually, the British and Axis accounts line up almost precisely. Kesselring ordered an investigation of what happened on Crete. The commander at Heraklion had received general warnings of impending commando actions, which came from “overheard radio messages, agent reports and interrogations of prisoners and deserters.”

  The information from Cairo brought those warning
s into sudden, sharp focus, with the nearly precise date of the raid. Yet the Heraklion commander said that the critical orders on June 12 and 13 to boost security at the airfield never reached him. The intruders arrived unnoticed and managed to place “17 to 18 explosive devices on 13 planes.” Some of the aircraft would take days or weeks to rebuild; some were total losses.

  What happened to the base commander is unclear. The day after the attack, the German report states, “fifty hostages from guilty elements of the local population were shot.”40

  “THE ALEXANDRIA-MALTA RUN is perhaps the most dangerous in the world,” wrote a Royal Navy telegraphist of his thoughts on being assigned to Operation Vigorous. The convoy of supply ships and their escort sailed from Egypt on the afternoon of June 13, hours before the commandos approached the Cyrenaica airfields. “Malta convoys were known as suicide runs,” another anxious sailor wrote.41

  Clear weather and the long June days made it easier for German planes to find them. On board the cruiser HMS Newcastle, the navigating officer scribbled changes of course, minute by minute, in a notebook the size of his palm.

  At 4:32 p.m. on the second day, he noted the approach of a Ju-88, a German bomber.

  “Eight more,” he wrote at 4:35.

  “Eighteen Stukas attacked again from astern,” he recorded at 5:44. “One direct hit on [the] Bhutan,” a supply ship that came to a standstill and began to sink. Rescue ships were picking survivors out of the water, his next notation said.42

  Night, when it came at last, was moonless. The convoy commander gave orders not to return fire so that German pilots would not be able to find the ships. “The policy was quite unsuccessful because aircraft were searching for the darkened convoy with flares,” a destroyer’s commander wrote. “Any ship within range was caught in a pool of light against which she became an isolated target for bombers gliding out of the darkness with no other evidence of their passage than the explosion of their bombs.”43

  The telegraphist was in the wireless office of his destroyer, the Airedale, the next afternoon when a wave of Stukas appeared. Three bombs hit the ship. He was unhurt, but “bodies were strewn all over the deck and one had been flung high and became entangled halfway up the funnel.” He jumped overboard. He and another man shared a plank and “drifted through masses of thick, black cloggy oil.” A ship steamed away; they despaired. At last the crew of another spotted them. On board, “I found myself on my head with my legs [held] high in the air by two friendly sailors who were pumping oil and seawater out of my body.”44

  At the outset, the greatest expected danger to the convoy was an Italian fleet that sailed out to meet it. British submarine attacks and bombers from Malta slowed the Italians. Yet the convoy turned back toward Alexandria. In the constant fighting with German planes, the warships had used too much of their antiaircraft ammunition. Not enough was left for a dash to the island.45

  General Amè would argue that the intelligence that defeated the commando attacks also foiled the convoy.46 It’s impossible to test this claim—to know if the ships would have gotten through, or if the men killed on the Airedale would have lived, had Stirling’s and Buck’s men wrecked a hundred planes. But they did not destroy anywhere near that number, even according to their commanders’ own optimistic estimates. The advance warning from Cairo certainly put most of the targeted bases on alert, which in turn saved Axis planes from destruction. The convoy from Alexandria did not reach Malta.

  Operation Vigorous did have this success: it diverted enough Axis attention that the second convoy, from Gibraltar, managed to bring two of its six supply-laden ships to Malta. They carried enough food to allow the island to withstand the siege for a couple more months.47 Whether it could withstand invasion was a separate question.

  “TONIGHT,” FELLERS RADIOED from Cairo, “British will withdraw 1st South African and 50th divisions” from the Gazala line, or the last remnant of it. It was June 14.48 The South Africans had dug in all spring, preparing to stop Rommel’s forces in the worst case, to push forward toward Benghazi in the best. Then Rommel had come behind them. They had to leave before his forces reached the sea and cut them off. They took what they could quickly put on trucks and blew up the rest. Already Axis artillery was bombarding the coastal road. The South African truck drivers found themselves in a traffic jam with shells falling on them. The lucky ones reached Tobruk. The British Fiftieth Division, further inland, already had its obvious escape route blocked. It turned westward, smashed through surprised Italian forces, then took a long loop through the desert around Bir Hakeim and headed across the border into Egyptian territory. Ritchie was pulling most of his army out of Libya.49

  “Presume there is no question of giving up Tobruk,” Churchill cabled Auchinleck. “As long as Tobruk is held no serious advance into Egypt is possible.” The generals disagreed with Churchill’s judgment of Tobruk’s military value. What Churchill left unsaid was that Tobruk had become a symbol of British resilience during the long siege of 1941. Generals lead armies. The prime minister led a nation, whose morale he had to maintain. A symbol was a strategic asset.

  Auchinleck answered that he’d ordered Ritchie to keep Rommel from crossing a line running from the coast west of Tobruk to El Adem south of the town. But Auchinleck was in Cairo. In the desert, Ritchie thought Auchinleck’s plan wouldn’t work. He hoped to hold El Adem. He hoped to hold the coastal road from the Egyptian border to Tobruk. At worst, if he lost the road, the garrison at Tobruk would have to hold out for a month or two till he could counterattack. Tobruk had survived one siege. Ritchie gambled that it would survive another.50

  MARGARET STOREY COULD not list all of the reports that German or Italian intelligence received from Cairo, because not all of them were repeated in Axis radio messages. Of those that were radioed, not all were heard by British intercept operators, and not all those that were intercepted could be decoded.

  The entire Enigma-cracking effort was a peephole in a shut door to a large room. Most of what happened in that room was at the wrong angle to spot through the peephole. The Cairo source had turned into a fountain, a gusher. Some of the information it provided would be found soon after the war in captured enemy documents; some would only be found decades later.

  So no one at Bletchley Park would see the memo to the Luftwaffe’s intelligence staff, passing on a radiogram from General Russell Maxwell’s office on El Nabatat Street to General Henry Arnold, commander of the US Army Air Forces. The RAF, Maxwell said, wanted to know when the United States would take over the Sheikh Othman airfield in Aden, the British colony at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. The base would serve as a stopover on the American air ferry that brought warplanes and other weaponry across Africa, then onward to India and China or to Persia and then to Baku in the Soviet Union. Aden provided an alternative to flying via Egypt and Iraq. Rommel didn’t need to know about this; it was strategic information above his pay grade. For the Luftwaffe high command, it was high-value intelligence: it meant that even if Egypt fell, the American supply route from sub-Saharan Africa to Asia would remain open.51

  The leak was more dangerous than Churchill, Menzies, or anyone at Bletchley Park knew. But what Bletchley Park could see through its peephole was frightening enough. The day after Travis sent Friedman his examples of what the Good Source was revealing, Menzies gave Churchill copies of both deciphered messages—the commando-raid warning and the criticism of “costly mistakes” by the British accompanied by the positions of British units.52 Churchill said to cable Washington that unless Menzies received “a report on the leakage within twenty-four hours,” Churchill would wire Roosevelt personally.53

  At the Signal Intelligence Service in Washington, the suspicion persisted that the British were themselves reading American messages from Cairo. To this another suspicion was added: the story of the leak was a subterfuge for getting Fellers out of Cairo. One US colonel would later go so far as to suggest that MI6 had deliberately fed Fellers the information about the raids
“for the purpose of bringing matters to a head or even for the purpose of stamping Fellers as a dangerous person to have around.”54

  Most plausibly, the dark view of British motives was born when the SIS checked the texts sent by Travis with Fellers’s superiors in military intelligence. They would have known about the Fellers paradox: Auchinleck and other top British commanders resented his independent reports and his blunt judgments—yet Fellers and his assistants had no trouble opening office doors and officers’ mouths in General Headquarters Middle East.

  Nonetheless, the threat of involving Roosevelt finally produced results at the SIS. “Washington informs that it is now clear that the cypher of the American military attaché in Cairo is compromised,” Menzies informed Churchill the next day, June 16. Menzies had told the Americans that the code and cipher had to be replaced immediately with a more secure one. They were not to give Fellers any reason for the change.

  “In my opinion,” Menzies added, “the Germans have succeeded in photographing the American cypher book, but as this is held at a number of stations abroad, it is impossible to determine where the treachery occurred.” (What Menzies called “my opinion” matched Kullback’s hunch, likely passed on by Travis or Tiltman.) The spy could even be in Washington.

  And yet, Menzies indicated, neither he nor his contacts in Washington were really so certain. Switching the cipher was a test. If the leak continued, Menzies wrote, “we shall then know for certain that there is a traitor in Cairo.”55

  2

  INSIDE INFORMATION

  Late June, 1942. Tobruk–Washington–Cairo.

  A SENIOR BRITISH officer, privy to the talk in generals’ offices, “most reliable,” spoke to a friendly man, one who was always willing to listen—the American colonel, Bonner Fellers.