And birds and beasts alike were sleeping
Still we sat and laboured on
Tired and weary every one.
You hear a double defensiveness here; for these men and women knew at the time that their contribution to the war effort would go coldly unacknowledged, simply as a result of secrecy and security. They knew when the troops finally returned home and were enjoying their victory parades, that the Experimental Wireless Assistants would be left instead with silence. So it is unsurprising that those working through the night, taking down those signals, might find their thoughts heading in the direction of melancholy.
It needs to be reiterated that wherever they were being worked – from Devon to Cairo – night shifts could be almost hallucinatory in their tedium. For the first few minutes, one could perhaps listen to the stream of Morse and conjure vivid images of the skirmishes, the battles, the raids. But after an hour, two hours, three, of simply sitting there, concentrating furiously, the brain in the middle of the night would shift into a new and wholly unfamiliar gear. ‘Not all the time was melancholy,’ noted ‘Nosweh’ in his verse:
At times, nay frequently, ’twas jolly
We had our football, cricket, dancing
Beery hope and much romancing . . .
But those night shifts were surely an exception.
For the listeners there was also an element of brooding on the ‘what ifs’; especially for the men, following the exploits of General Montgomery, there must surely have been a stab of curious envy. The Eighth Army were rightly lauded; would the men and women who manned the headphones themselves receive any sort of appreciation, even tacit? In the end, it was all a question of duty, rather than glory; but in Ollie Pearce’s tribute to the Eighth Army, it is nevertheless possible to hear that twinge.
12 Rommel and the Art of Dirty Tricks
In the Middle East, the harrying of Rommel’s forces continued into 1943, as the Allies pushed into Libya and Tunisia. Owing apparently to tight security, there was some difficulty in getting a full quota of Enigma messages into and out of Tunisia. Meanwhile, the Y Service in the field lost none of its vigilance; but when Rommel attempted a counter-attack at the Kassarine Pass in Algeria, the American forces were taken by surprise, and in the most demoralising way; under attack from artillery, troops scattered. ‘The British Y station attached to the US 11th Corps [was] able to provide some warning that Rommel was continuing his attack,’ states the official Bletchley Park history. But there had been earlier confusion concerning interpretation, with some senior commanders convinced that Rommel simply intended to try a feint while General Von Arnim’s forces struck from the north. In the wake of this, General Eisenhower dismissed one of his commanders for favouring only one sort of intelligence – that is, the results of Enigma decrypts – while ignoring the even more valuable intelligence being produced by the local Y stations.
As it happened, the Y section in question was headed by Captain Hugh Skillen. And as he recalled, a recurring problem faced by operators was the tangle of bureaucracy, and the way that top secret information was quietly parcelled out. ‘Although the Y officers in the field did not know that Enigma was being systematically broken and distributed to commands in the field,’ he wrote, ‘in fact . . . Bletchley Park was receiving thousands of Enigma messages through . . . Cheadle . . . Chicksands . . . and Beaumanor.’ On top of this, there was also of course the ‘mini Bletchley Park’ established in Heliopolis. But the eternal problem was: how could the secret intelligence be distributed in such a way as not to alert the enemy as to its source?
‘To receive the high-grade intelligence Ultra,’ wrote Skillen, ‘it was necessary to provide ultra-safe Special Liaison Units (SLUs) which decoded the Ultra sent out by BP . . . The Army provided a number of Special Wireless Sections for this purpose.’ But, he added, ‘at no time was the American 11 US Army corps a recipient.’1 So really the Kasserine debacle had a very simple cause: Rommel and Von Arnim had been planning an attack elsewhere, all of which had been correctly monitored and logged by Bletchley Park’s cryptographers. And it was this that the military had planned for. The difficulty was that the Germans had changed their plans, and had done so in such a secure way that no indications came through. Save, that is, for the fragments picked up by Captain Skillen’s Y unit.
Rommel’s offensive at the Kasserine Pass eventually lost momentum. Instead his forces focused on building the strength of the Mareth Line in Tunisia, and on launching a surprise attack on the Eighth Army, which was struggling to keep a supply line going along the single coastal road back to Tripoli, 200 miles away.
As the Bletchley official history points out, though, in many defensive skirmishes, such intelligence could only be of limited use. The need to protect the Enigma secret meant that any counter-strategies would have to have a further layer of misdirection thrown in, so that Rommel would not suspect that Montgomery had such an advantage.
Another example of this disguising of the Enigma secret came shortly afterwards. Having been promoted, Rommel now succumbed to illness and was forced to leave Tunisia. Every step of his departure was noted in Enigma decrypts. Yet Montgomery and the British had to behave – and communicate – as though they had no idea that this was the case.
The Bletchley official history also notes the occasion when General Patton made a terrible slip-up with Enigma; one that he apparently learned from very quickly. Advancing on the Mareth Line, the general was informed that the 10th Panzer Division was about to attack. The official history notes that Patton was not on the distribution list for Enigma intelligence, and it is not clear whether the information came from Bletchley or from the British Y Service in the field – nevertheless, he declared on the radio to his commanders in II Corps: ‘Sure source informs me . . .’ This, in turn, was picked up by the German Y service and as a result, there was an instantaneous tightening of security around Army Enigma signals. But this was in fact to prove a relatively minor setback: at the time, the airwaves were filled with noise, and there was never any shortage of material for the British Y Service to intercept. It also left General Patton with an enhanced sense of respect for such intelligence-gathering skills.
For WAAF officer Aileen Clayton, who had, after some official resistance, received her posting closer to the heart of the action, the prospect of the desert was daunting but thrilling; the journey from Cairo to Benghazi, however, shook her high spirits a little:
I flew up in one of their Wellingtons to their new base at Benina, outside Benghazi . . . we had no navigator on board so we flew low over the desert, keeping beneath the haze, and I spent my time lying in the bomb aimer’s position in the nose of the aircraft trying to pick up points of reference en route. After a while, my sense of balance began to object to the midday upcurrents, and I was not sorry when we finally touched down . . . The crew of the aircraft decently refrained from mentioning my lapse.
Yet there was a further outbreak of unpleasantness to come: and that was over what some in authority regarded as her incongruous figure. Upon arrival, she recalled, ‘[the naval Y officer] could not get over a woman being in the desert and he was still flabbergasted by the evening.’2
This, perhaps, is not an entirely unreasonable reaction, nor indeed an especially chauvinist one. It’s tempting to judge the past by the mores of today; but the fact was that in 1943, the idea even of women in factories – let alone working among battle-hardened troops in the desert – was distinctly novel. Clayton seems amusingly breezy about it; the fact that she assumed a man’s ‘flabbergasted’ reaction to be worthy of particular note tells us much about how formidable she was. And as we have seen in her recollections of Malta, she obviously commanded a great deal of respect wherever she was posted.
In a wider sense, though, she is also an illustration of how the Second World War pushed and stretched boundaries in terms of social and sexual assumptions. Just as the largely middle-class undergraduates recruited to Bletchley Park were later to become the dominant voic
es of the age in politics, science and the civil service, so women such as Aileen Clayton were forerunners of feminism; they demonstrated, quite unselfconsciously, that women were quite capable of undertaking work previously thought to be the sole domain of men. And incidentally, of the women back in Britain who took up all the factory positions once held by their husbands, many – even those in smelting works – felt the loss keenly when the war was over, the men returned, and they were compelled to return to the ordinary lives of housewives.
A little later on, Clayton flew on to Algiers, to continue with her interception and cipher work. Again, in the midst of the carnage of recent battle, she seemed more surprised by the implacability of the response to her presence:
It was a strange feeling finally to land at Castel Benito, on an airfield which had been in enemy hands for so long. The whole place was devastated. It was a mortuary of gutted hangars and derelict aircraft keeling over in grotesque angles . . . I had difficulty finding somewhere to sleep. The transit facilities were understandably still primitive but I was rather hurt when the officer-in-charge told me peremptorily that there was no accommodation for women. This was one of the very few occasions when I met with downright hostility towards a woman being in a forward area.
Again, though, one thinks of the officer-in-charge, and one can quite easily imagine that the idea of a young woman of twenty-four in a camp filled with Tommies would have been awkward.
Clayton’s righteous indignation was extended to her female colleagues, who as 1943 unfolded began arriving in north Africa in greater numbers:
One of the first WAAF to arrive in North Africa had been Section Officer MK ‘Rusty’ Goff. But to her chagrin, when the unit [later] moved over to Sicily . . . she was not allowed to go with them. However, when the Italian naval vessels surrendered after the armistice, the energetic and irrepressible ‘Rusty’ flew over, first to Taranto, and then to Gibraltar, with our scientific officer . . . to act as his interpreter when he examined the radar equipment on board the Italian warships.
In the meantime, Clayton was getting on with the task in hand – which sometimes involved playing dirty tricks on the enemy:
There was a period . . . when the British Y-Service did its best, with malice aforethought, to help their German opposite numbers. When an RAF reconnaissance aircraft sent a signal back to its base in Malta giving details of an Axis convoy that it had spotted, this was usually intercepted by German Y. The message, re-enciphered, was then transmitted verbatim to the enemy convoy. Malta Y, of course, intercepted the German signal, and since they knew exactly the contents of the original reconnaissance message, they were then able to break the code for the day. As even the best of Y operators were not infallible, the German Horchdienst would occasionally miss a message, so ‘pour encourager’, Malta would re-transmit the original RAF message at high power, ostensibly to the Navy in Alexandria, thereby presenting the enemy with another opportunity to give us a lead into the current code.
Then there was the ongoing business of cracking the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of German codes. Also sent out to Algiers in 1943 was Patrick Wilkinson from Bletchley Park, who took with him several others including Sheridan Russell, described by Wilkinson as ‘a first rate cellist (he had been spare man of the Lener String Quartet), no great cryptographer but a delightful, unusual personality of gypsy-like appearance – a genuine Bletchley Park eccentric’.
But before too long Wilkinson found himself tangled up in an imbroglio of embarrassment about codebreaking and the chain of command. Low-grade codes were one thing, but he and his team were soon required to work on higher-security messages:
I knew there was a long-standing tug-of-war between Bletchley Park and the Commands abroad, the former being worried lest the secret that we were reading the machine traffic should be compromised by multiplication and exposure of the stations where this was done, the latter anxious to avoid the delays inevitable in transmission via Bletchley. I was a civilian employed by Bletchley Park, and we [he and his team] were now being told to go beyond our brief.3
The situation was finessed to Wilkinson’s satisfaction; unlike Captain Hugh Trevor-Roper, who had been roundly reprimanded for having quietly broken into the Abwehr code on his own account, Wilkinson and his civilian team – working under the auspices of the military – were given a free hand. He and the team were ‘delighted that they were to be given this far more exciting and responsible work’.
Not everyone in Egypt was in a position to drink in the extraordinary atmosphere. Robert Hughes from Islington had been shipped out with other fellow Special Operators and pitched up in Alexandria; unfortunately, as he recalls, they were in a vast camp of about five or six thousand men with pretty ramshackle working, and indeed living, facilities. ‘We had nowhere to go, as Y Service Special Operators, as a unit. We were just chucked into this melee of matelots,’ says Mr Hughes. ‘We were no different to anyone being dumped off a ship and waiting for the next job. We were all lumped in together. And every morning, we Special Operators used to be marched out of the camp to the wireless area.
‘Now it was some time after that they had these areas purpose-built with facilities – in the meantime, the wireless areas were just simple slabs of concrete and four walls. Since we took two months to sail out there, you’d have thought there had been some pre-planning about this. They could have put three of these buildings up in a week.
‘But instead,’ Mr Hughes adds with a laugh, ‘we were stuck in this camp. We did three eight-hour watches. Some of us went for the Italian signals, some of us went for German.’
So, a teeming mass of thousands of soldiers were thrown together in somewhat extemporised circumstances. And unlike Barbara Skelton and Cherrie Ballantine, the greenhorn Islingtonian Mr Hughes had no access to the extraordinary distractions that Egypt could offer. ‘Time off?’ he snorts. ‘There wasn’t a lot to do in Alex.’ Even the films that were shipped out for troop entertainment, and passed up and down the lines of the Eighth Army, were notoriously terrible.
‘People would ask “What’s on?” and we would jokingly reply with the oldest film we could think of: the 1920s silent version of Ben Hur,’ says Mr Hughes. ‘But one night, that film was bloody on. They took these films to different units and – as a joke – they would cut frames out of them before passing them on, so when they were next shown, you’d watch a scene with a man singing, then suddenly he would be flat on his back, knocked out.’
Even the beach held out little promise, especially to a London-born non-swimmer: ‘I nearly got killed swimming. We went in the water, and I thought I’d keep in my depth. But the water began to rise and rise . . . God it frightened me, that was a frightening experience.’
There was one sporting consolation. ‘We did have a very good football team there. The Special Operators. I played for them. They were a particularly good side.’ Indeed, a little later in the war, Mr Hughes’s football skills were to land him in one of the most extraordinary and potentially lethal matches he was ever to play.
For other personnel, hazards could be found in the most unexpected places. In May 1943, for instance, the RAF listening station at Kafr-El-Farouk had been hit with a mysterious bout of typhoid fever. The authorities, naturally, were keen to find its source. A ban was placed on drinking tap water; boiled water was taken instead. However, there were several further outbreaks. Was this sabotage of some kind? In the event, the explanation was both sinister and everyday. A common factor was that the men and women afflicted had been served lemonade. After stringent tests, it was found that the lemonade itself was not the source of the outbreak; so what could it have been? It was eventually realised that the drinks had been served with ice, and that the probable source of the bug was the cooler in the WAAF mess. The story illustrates how, in such places, personnel could be struck down from the most unexpected angles; constant effort was required to resolve such intractable problems.
The arts of bamboozlement – the low tricks, tactics and cove
rt operations employed in the Y Service – were very much in use in neutral countries too, which for some of the younger recruits could prove hugely exciting. Eighteen-year-old Dafydd Williams, having been trained in the arts of wireless work at Whaddon Hall, received his first foreign posting in February 1943. ‘I was told that I was being sent to Madrid in Spain,’ Mr Williams recalled. ‘I remember I was given leave and a whole pile of clothing coupons to buy clothes. Yes, they told me to buy a couple of suits to fit in with the life there.’
The business of getting there, like the journeys undertaken by other recruits, throws interesting light on wartime travel. ‘I flew from Bristol, Bristol to Lisbon and then by train from Lisbon to Madrid,’ Mr Williams said. ‘There was a section of the Dutch Airlines, KLM, that operated flights between Bristol and Lisbon throughout the war as both Spain and Portugal were neutral countries.’
For a teenager, such work – and his official attachment to the Intelligence Service – was obviously a formative experience, and later on in life, a source of some pride:
First of all because we were members of the Intelligence Service we were kept . . . separate from the main Embassy – and we operated from an out building in the Embassy compound. Of course I was a very junior person being the age of 18 – but the only people we came in contact with were people doing similar work. There was the Escape Organisation, MI9. This was for helping escaped Prisoners of War. Occasionally one was involved in passing messages for them. And one was aware also of the SOE people in the Embassy although we didn’t have that much contact with them. Everything was done on a need to know basis.
Mr Williams was part of a small, almost hermetically sealed community, one in which the culture of secrecy was pervasive. ‘I lived in a pension a couple of hundred yards from the Embassy . . . there were four of us – Intelligence people – living in the same pension. It was the Coding Section that I was with.’ Even the technical aspects of Mr Williams’s work slowly came to acquire a cloak-and-dagger glamour:
The Secret Listeners Page 22
