War of Shadows

by Gershom Gorenberg

  Rommel learned from Fellers that his enemy’s best remaining division was New Zealanders under General Bernard Freyberg. A crucial piece of information repeated: the Eighth Army would mount its defense of Egypt at Mersa Matruh.

  Some of this was overheard by British wireless operators and decoded at Hut 6. Much more was not.21

  THE ROAD EAST, from Sollum at the border to Mersa Matruh and beyond, was a slow river of trucks, bumper to bumper. They carried men; they carried supplies that had taken months to move forward, whatever could be loaded up and saved, rations and artillery shells, the machinery of tank repair workshops, bullets, blankets, aircraft fuel, and clothing, with ambulances carrying the wounded stuck between the trucks. The military units were mixed up, like houses lifted by a flood and broken apart and dragged onward. Their great good fortune was that Rommel had moved too quickly for Kesselring’s air force, which was short on planes and fuel and was busy attacking Malta so that British ships and planes there could not attack Italian supply ships crossing to Libya. The chaos that was called the Eighth Army moved eastward under mostly clear skies.22

  At General Headquarters in Cairo, an officer from the Operations Section came to talk to Colonel Ralph Bagnold about the Qattara Depression. More than two years had passed since Bagnold had given a tour of the desert to the general who was then his division commander, and shown him the cliffs overlooking the vast Qattara lowlands and salt marshes. The general had been reprimanded for leaving his headquarters. Now the strategists were interested in topography. Bagnold said that the cliffs were impassable for vehicles except in two spots, that only one track through the lowlands might be useable by light tanks, that in some areas vehicles would likely get bogged down in sand and elsewhere in standing water. Telling what would be passable from the air was impossible.23

  Bagnold had driven through territory that no one else had dared cross. Politely, he was saying that it would be easier to drive tanks across a sea than across the Qattara Depression.

  On June 25, four days after Tobruk fell, two days after Rommel invaded Egypt, a two-engine RAF bomber landed at the spot in the desert east of Mersa Matruh where General Ritchie had set up his headquarters. On board were Auchinleck and his old comrade in arms Major General Eric Dorman-Smith. From the plane, the two drove to Ritchie’s tent.

  Auchinleck stepped inside and told Ritchie that he was no longer in command of the Eighth Army. Auchinleck was taking over in the field himself. He’d left a deputy in Cairo to manage the entire Middle East Command.

  The flight from Cairo could not have lasted more than an hour. Auchinleck and Dorman-Smith had sat on the floor of the bomber and tried to figure out how to stop Rommel’s army before it reached Alexandria and Cairo. Since the beginning of the war, plans had designated Mersa Matruh as the final point of defense. The public knew this.

  Auchinleck chose a new plan. He would leave General Freyberg’s New Zealand division and other forces at Mersa Matruh. If the small town and port fell, people would believe Egypt was lost.

  Nonetheless, most of the Eighth Army would retreat over a hundred miles more, to a line starting at the rail station known as El Alamein. By pulling further back, Auchinleck would be leaving only sixty miles between his chosen battlefield and Alexandria. But he would stretch the Axis supply line even further and shorten his own.

  Most important, El Alamein marked where the coastline and the Qattara Depression came closest, leaving a corridor of passable desert only forty miles wide. Rommel might fight his way through Auchinleck’s line. But he could not go around it.24

  DESPITE WARTIME CENSORSHIP, newspapers were constantly referring to the “ability and personality of Rommel,” Security Intelligence Middle East complained in a roundup on the public mood. “An Axis-inspired whispering campaign” had exploited this and “exalted him to an almost legendary figure of invincibility,” SIME said. The British agency’s informants reported a tidal wave of rumors: that “pro-British Egyptian politicians had received anonymous warnings that they would be publicly hanged by Rommel’s orders on 3 July,” that Britain was “trying to force the Egyptian army into the war,” that “the Egyptian army was preparing to join the Germans,” and that Churchill visited Washington in an “act of despair” in order to discuss what peace terms to offer Germany.

  There were also optimistic rumors, SIME said, but they were harmful, too, because they’d lead to disappointment: that American troops had landed in Tunisia, that sixty-five thousand Americans had arrived in Egypt, that eighty thousand were on their way from South Africa, and that General Wavell had returned to Egypt. In the Cairo streets, Wavell had graduated to the rank of savior, and was about to have a second coming.25

  At Panzer Army headquarters, Konstantin von Neurath received a cable from Berlin with a calmer evaluation of the mood in Egypt. Neurath was the German Foreign Office’s liaison to Rommel, and was in charge of propaganda warfare. “King Farouk is extremely well disposed towards Germany,” said the cable. “We are at the moment anxious to get a message to the king that he should conceal himself from the British at the proper moment, as his person is of great importance to us.” Untangled, that meant: We’re afraid the British will take Farouk when they retreat, and we’d like him as a puppet. “The German watchword” must be that the Axis has come “not to conquer Egypt, but to free her from British imperialism,” the cable said.

  As for the Egyptian army, Neurath was told, it would neither help nor hinder the invasion. The junior officers had “great sympathy” for Germany, but the British had taken all of the army’s effective weaponry, leaving it powerless.26

  Mussolini was happy about the victories but upset that Rommel was getting all the credit, stealing Italy’s glory. So Ciano wrote in his diary. Italian officials were busy preparing “a declaration of independence for Egypt, changes in government, etc.,” Ciano said. Lest there be a question of what “independence” meant, he noted that Mussolini hoped Italy could establish its “commissariat,” its governing office, in Alexandria within half a month.27

  “The rumor was that Egypt would be given to Italy,” Anwar al-Sadat would recall. He got together with his friends among the junior officers and came up with a plan: they would send someone to the German side of the lines and offer to “recruit an entire army” to fight on the Axis side; they would provide aerial photos of British positions, in return for full independence. Sadat’s memory often glorified his actions. In this case, though, the plan was real—and shows that it was only at this moment that the officers fully realized that an Axis victory might mean trading British domination for Italian or German rule.28

  At the Reich Security Main Office, the RSHA, in Berlin, preparations accelerated to send Walther Rauff’s Einsatzkommando to Africa. Rauff’s assignment would be to carry out “executive measures”—the SS bureaucracy’s term for mass murder—against the seventy-five thousand Jews in Egypt. Once Rommel advanced further, so would Rauff and his men. Its future targets would include Palestine, where at least half a million Jews lived; the twenty-five thousand Jews of Syria and Lebanon; and if Rommel realized his “Oriental strategy” of conquering the entire Middle East, close to one hundred thousand Jews in Iraq.29

  THE MESSAGE WAS from the Good Source. It described the tactics of German tanks attacking British positions. Translated into German, it was sent to Rommel’s intelligence officer on June 23. It took another three days for Hut 6 to find the settings for the Chaffinch key of Enigma. On June 26, Menzies gave the decoded message to Churchill.

  “Is this still happening?” Churchill scrawled, outraged, in his red ink.

  Menzies checked, and answered. The Americans had, at last, changed their cipher on the 25th, he said. He did not explain what had taken so long, because he had no idea. “If leakage continues, then there must be a traitor with access to American telegrams in Cairo, transmitting by secret wireless from Egypt, but available evidence does not support this likelihood.”30

  Since several days could pass between wh
en the Good Source in Cairo sent a message and when it showed up at Bletchley Park in decoded Enigma texts, it was too early to know if the Americans had finally plugged the leak. In the meantime, Rommel was spurring his sleepless, victorious troops toward the Nile.

  CECIL BEATON, CELEBRITY fashion photographer turned war photographer, was in the Syrian desert snapping an armor and artillery exercise when he heard about Tobruk. In Tehran he’d done a portrait of Fawzia, queen of Persia, King Farouk’s sister, her hair covered, her arms bare, her face incandescent, her eyes looking for something lost and distant beyond the palace walls; in Baghdad, he photographed King Faisal II, age seven, wearing shorts and looking lost on an immense throne. Beaton had left much of his luggage in Cairo. The night after he heard about the defeat, he dreamed that the “Germans had arrived in Cairo, and had discovered my excessively indiscreet diaries left at Shepheard’s Hotel, which were now getting a very mixed reception among my friends, relayed over the air to England by Lord Haw-Haw,” the Englishman turned Nazi radio propagandist. War creates many fears. Like Almasy, it seems, Beaton feared shame most of all.31

  ROMMEL’S TANKS CROSSED the minefield south of Mersa Matruh. Inexplicably, the mines did not explode. On British wireless networks, reports turned the last thirty tanks of the Panzer Army into a force of a hundred. General Freyberg was wounded. His New Zealanders were surrounded. They broke through the German forces and escaped. An Indian division and a British one were mauled as they retreated.32

  “Now the battle of Mersa Matruh has also been won and our leading units are only 125 miles from Alexandria,” Rommel wrote to his wife on June 29. He’d already advanced three hundred miles from Tobruk in a week. The British had left the roads and railway in “first-class order” for him to use, he exulted. “There’ll be a few more battles to fight before we reach our goal,” Rommel wrote, “but I think the worst is well behind us.” He was winning his wager.33

  Act V

  LINE IN THE SAND

  1

  EL ALAMEIN

  July 1942. El Alamein–Cairo–Bletchley Park–Washington.

  SMOKE ROSE FROM the grand British embassy facing the Nile. Smoke rose a few hundred yards down the river, too, from the mansions of Garden City that war had transformed into British General Headquarters. General Tom Corbett, left in charge in Cairo by Auchinleck, was on his own, out of touch with the front. He ordered officers to wear their pistols at all times, imposed a curfew, and ordered the burning of all secret documents.1

  In British offices, secretaries told war photographer Cecil Beaton that everything was “a flap,” a very polite way not to say “panic.” Beaton had just flown back to Cairo. A RAF squadron leader showed him a map with a pencil line marking the El Alamein positions. They looked “perilously near to Alexandria,” Beaton thought. Outside, on the crowded streets, “black charred pieces of papers drifted down from the chimneys—a storm of black cinders, a hail of funereal confetti.” It was July 1, 1942. The German radio station promised that Rommel’s forces “would be in Alexandria on the 6th and in Cairo on the 9th.” People expected them sooner. At Groppi’s garden cafe, cipher officer June Watkins looked out the window of the ladies’ room and saw waiters painting welcome signs in German for Rommel’s officers.2

  Alexander Kirk, the US ambassador, came to see Miles Lampson. Kirk had instructions to stay in Cairo if Lampson did. Lampson said he intended to keep his entire staff in Cairo. The British embassy had a “special position” in Egypt, Lampson said. He did not need to spell out that the ambassador embodied the empire. Leaving would have a “lamentable effect” on morale, Lampson said.

  Kirk “argued vehemently against this position.” A diplomatic mission caught in a conquered city, he said, was “an embarrassment to its government… besides being treated by the enemies as objects of contempt and ridicule.”

  Lampson had his own fears. He did not admit them to an American.3

  AUCHINLECK KNEW THE positions of the German units as they pushed forward from Mersa Matruh, and that German antiaircraft batteries urgently needed both diesel fuel and shells. He knew that Rommel had intended to attack the British line at El Alamein on June 30 but his “troops did not reach the areas ordered” on time, so the attack would come early the next day. Auchinleck knew that Rommel’s plan was to launch a feint toward the south. So the Eighth Army could ignore the German division traveling loudly and visibly southward on June 30; Auchinleck knew it would turn back to the north and join the real attacks. He knew within one kilometer the points on the map where the attacks were aimed.

  The close coordination between Rommel’s ground forces and the Luftwaffe, one of the Germans’ strengths in battle, had become their hidden weakness. Luftwaffe liaison officers at Rommel’s headquarters used the Enigma key that Hut 6 had named Scorpion. The German code clerks had no idea that when they set up their machines at midnight, the wheel order, ring settings, and plugboard pairs that they’d been assigned were all copied from a previous month’s setting for a different key. Hut 6 was now breaking Scorpion so quickly that a liaison message about German army plans for the next day reached Auchinleck in as little as seven and a half hours.4

  The German army’s Chaffinch key was still a harder problem. Sometimes it took several days to break; sometimes a day’s messages were never decoded. On July 1, Margaret Storey had not seen a report from the Good Source for six days. This was promising. She couldn’t yet be certain.

  BUT ROMMEL WAS sure. The Good Source was silent, at least for now. “Unfortunately, we can no longer count on the reliable messages for the foreseeable future, which we have used till this point and which gave us immediate insight into enemy operations,” said an intelligence evaluation from army headquarters in Germany. It was dated June 29.5

  Rommel had seen this happen before. All through the winter before, he had depended on those “reliable messages” from Cairo. Before Christmas, in the worst moments of his retreat, he’d received a gift, upsetting but valuable: word that the British were intercepting all his communications and knew what orders he was giving.6 In January, after he’d lost half of Libya, the intercepted letters from Fellers told him that the RAF was sending 250 warplanes to the Far East, “undermining the position of British aviation in the Middle East,” and that five thousand British soldiers had embarked from Suez for the Pacific, half of them from field artillery.

  He had not needed to read the minds of British commanders. He had not needed supernatural intuition. He was a gambler, but one who could read the other player’s cards.

  As he went on the offensive, he knew the British thought he had “insufficient air and armored forces for a major counter-attack.” In the days that followed, the intercepted mail from Cairo had told him how many tanks the British had, and that British workshops would take months to restore damaged tanks to combat condition. It had told him that an Indian division was short of motor transport, that a South African division was “badly depleted,” that the British expected to be pushed back almost to Tobruk. He had proved them right.7

  In early February, out of fuel and ammunition, harassed by commanders in Rome and Berlin who thought he was irresponsible and dangerous, he had stopped.8 A few days later, the mail from Cairo also ceased.

  In April the Good Source had miraculously reappeared, overflowing with information. So on June 29, his experience said that conceivably, in two months or three, it could start again. But right now he was driving forward, and the source failed him.

  Recognition that the silence wasn’t momentary, that it would last, had come slowly. The last message to or from Cairo that he received was sent on June 25 at the latest.9 Before that, Washington had informed either Colonel Fellers or General Maxwell that an American armored division would be shipped to Egypt. Cavallero, head of the Italian Supreme Command, received word. Rommel almost certainly did. They did not see Marshall’s order, late on June 25 Washington time, cancelling the plan.10

  Much more important for his hour-to-hour decisions, Ro
mmel saw Fellers’s cables saying that Mersa Matruh was where the Eighth Army would turn, fight, and try to save Egypt. No cable from Fellers told him of Auchinleck’s decision late on the 25th to make his stand at El Alamein.11

  After Rommel took Mersa Matruh, the Luftwaffe’s aerial reconnaissance and Captain Alfred Seebohm’s battlefield listening group, Strategical Intercept Company 621, could tell him that the British were building positions at El Alamein. But Rommel’s intelligence officers knew that there was “no comparison” between the quality of the “good source” and what Seebohm could supply.12 He had every reason to believe that he had already won the crucial battle and that El Alamein would be a mere epilogue.13

  WILLIAM FRIEDMAN HAD been mistaken in his second cable to John Tiltman about the leak: the cipher tables of the Military Intelligence Code had not been replaced on May 1. The code room on El Nabatat Street in Cairo had not stopped using the code on June 3. Friedman knew what instructions had been sent. Someone had not gotten around to carrying them out. The proof was that the leak did not stop on either of those dates.

  The mystery was why it took another two weeks before the code was replaced. At least a week passed between Churchill’s threat to call Roosevelt and the leak stopping. What were the Americans up to?

  One possibility was that Friedman and his colleagues discovered that the new cipher machine for the Cairo office was still in Washington, and had it sent by air—on the ferry route south to Brazil, across the Atlantic to Takoradi, thence to Khartoum and Egypt. If that was the case, neither the Signal Intelligence Service nor the Military Intelligence Division ordered Fellers to stop using the old code while the new machine was on the way.