With Allied success in north Africa had come a reduction in the amount of wireless traffic emanating from Axis forces. As the assault on Sicily was undertaken and plans for Italy laid, there was anxiety in the service that back in Europe, much Axis traffic would be carried on telephone landlines instead of radios, and would thus be impossible to intercept. But as the German units arrived intent on defending Sicily, they persisted in communicating over the radio. The Y Service thus continued to pass invaluable information back to Bletchley Park; new codes, which were unlocked swiftly.
As well as instantly revealing German strategy with regard to Sicily – including details of the units drafted in from Russia – Abwehr messages revealed the full extent of the uncertainty in German High Command about the Mediterranean; Hitler and his generals had very little idea how or when the Allies would strike next. As Captain Trevor-Roper – who had been reading Abwehr messages throughout (and providing unsolicited interpretations for his various superiors thereof) – wrote a little later in an exultant memo marked ‘top secret’:
The landings in SICILY were thus achieved without any apparent warning by the Abwehr; even after they had occurred, it was twice suggested that they were a feint for an operation elsewhere . . . a hitherto unregarded sub-agent in MELILLA had reported the departure from ALGIERS and TUNIS of an invasion fleet destined for the south-east corner of SICILY. The surprise which so accurate a forecast (though too late to be of any use) occasioned in the Abwehr is evidenced by the fact that Admiral Canaris himself sent a message enquiring what the sub-agent in MELILLA thought the Allies’ next move would be. Evidently he thought him worth the whole of the rest of the Abwehr.
Perhaps the sub-agent was worth more. For, according to Trevor-Roper:
[in] strategic matters, the Abwehr’s record is one of failure. It failed to forecast the attack on MADAGASCAR; it failed over ‘TORCH’; it failed over the Casablanca conference. Since then it has sought eagerly for intelligence of Allied plans for the Second Front, but it seems to have had difficulty distinguishing, among the spate of reports that it has received, between the good and the bad, the genuine and the tendentious . . . there has been in general a divergence between the copious and alarmist reports of Abwehr agents and the more critical attitude of the German Service Attaches, who work for the Abwehr.8
In terms of the Sicily operation, there were also indications beforehand from Italian naval messages that they had at least a shrewd idea of what was coming next; incidentally, these Italian Enigma codes, faithfully relayed back to Bletchley Park, had some time ago been cracked by cryptographers Dilly Knox and Mavis Lever.
As the invasion of Sicily was launched, an Army Y unit joined the Eighth Army for the landings; unfortunately, according to the official history, it was of little help in the field as the security of the German communications systems had been improved since the rout of Tunisia – the operators were more disciplined, less given to the lapses into laxity that would make their encryptions easier to break. Thankfully, Y units elsewhere were not short of material; messages flooding in from the Luftwaffe and the German navy were gathered in at lightning speed and relayed to Bletchley, which unscrambled the codes with equal speed, providing almost a form of commentary on the unfolding events.
And once again, women were finding ways to participate directly, as opposed to being distant witnesses. Aileen Clayton noted:
I met General Eisenhower for the first time soon after I started to work at Supreme Headquarters in Algiers. His suite of offices was on the same corridor as those of our own branch. ‘Ike’, as he was affectionately known to everybody, fascinated me by his almost computer-like memory. He seemed never to forget a fact or a face. I would take him a report on some subject, which he would read with incredible rapidity, and then he might say, ‘I read something recently which ties up with that. Let me see, it is in a file on . . . about page 57, second paragraph from the bottom.’ I would go back to my office, call for the file, and sure enough, he would be right.9
General Eisenhower was not the only notable American face. Serving time in the US ranks also happened to be one of the greatest playwrights and screen-writers of his age:
Thornton Wilder was with us at that time in the American Air Force, and he brought a breath of sanity into our otherwise somewhat unnatural military existence. It is interesting that he was so intrigued by the timelessness of the name of one of our prisoner-of-war interrogators – Antrobus – that he used it for the central character of the play ‘The Skin of our Teeth’ that he wrote after the war.
14 Life-Long Friendships Were Forged
Even before the declaration of war, a few girls knew exactly what role they wanted to play in the coming conflict. Intense patriotism was part of it, but there were other reasons too. It does these women no discredit to say that some sections of military life were deemed more glamorous than others, and that the Wrens were felt by many to have a special appeal. One such enthusiast was Pat Sinclair; born a cockney, within the sound of the old Bow Bells, she was living with her family in the semi-rural north London suburb of Southgate in 1939. When Mr Chamberlain’s mournful broadcast was made on the Sunday morning of 3 September, Pat was too young to join up, even though she had put in an early request. Instead, in the interim, she went to work for her local electricity board, the North Metropolitan Power Company.
‘I was a bit later going in to the Wrens than I would have liked,’ she explains, adding: ‘Why the Wrens? My brother was in the TAs as a young boy. The war started, he went to camp and didn’t come back – he was already in the war, already a soldier. He said to me: “I don’t want any sister of mine being in the ATS” – I think because they were mainly in the catering side of it. He said, “No – it’s no life.” He saw the rough end of the soldiers and the rough end of the girls.
‘Actually, that didn’t influence me. The Wrens was the smallest service and it was a senior service and they picked their recruits, so I aimed high and I went through all the categories. I could have been in the cookhouse, I could have been in an office, I could have been a lady’s maid to one of the officers – stewards they were called.’
Obviously, none of those options would have been satisfactory. ‘I thought, wireless telegraphy: wow. That was one of the highest categories.’ Happily, Mrs Sinclair was able to do some preparation before she was called up. ‘I got together with a girl at work and her father had a little [Morse] sending machine and I used to go round to her house to learn the alphabet. And she went in the Wrens ultimately. When I applied, I wrote these letters – to the Navy – and said I wanted to join the Wrens. And I told them I could do five words a minute.
‘It was all a bit of a bluff. But anyway, they accepted me and the next thing, I was called up to Mill Hill.’ Another suburb on the outskirts of north London, Mill Hill was where the initial stages of recruitment were carried out. ‘We were there for two weeks. This is where they allocated what they were going to accept you for. That’s how I found I was going to go on the wireless telegraphy course. And I got on it, because I had lied and said that I could do five words a minute intercepting – so I was put in the top class.’
This cheeky deception did not end in disaster, though, for it transpired that Mrs Sinclair had a genuine aptitude, as well as enthusiasm, for the work.
‘Perhaps because I was so keen . . . it’s like learning shorthand, you either take to it or you can’t do it,’ she says. ‘And I took to it like a duck takes to water, I just loved it. It was the most glamorous group to go in and the job was quite high up. That’s what spurred me on.’
Similarly spurred was Betty White, who found herself drafted into the Wrens and, like her friend-to-be Pat Sinclair, sent off to HMS Flowerdown in Hampshire. ‘I was a bit late joining,’ says Mrs White, although this was through no fault of her own; she had been working for the Public Trustee Office, a branch of the civil service that was reluctant to see her go. And even though the results of her IQ test, together with the fact that her
older brother had already taught her Morse, ushered her quickly towards wireless telegraphy, she still had to face the initial shock of the Mill Hill training camp: ‘Three weeks of scrubbing floors and cleaning windows,’ she recalls ruefully. Then came further, and rather more technical training, at Soberton Towers, a requisitioned boys’ boarding school in Hampshire.
Another friend Pat Sinclair was later to meet at HMS Flowerdown recalls a yen for the Wrens. Like Pat, Majorie Gerken had decided very quickly what sort of role she wanted to play. ‘I had always been interested in the Navy,’ she says. ‘My uncle served in the Navy, and as a girl, I was in the Guides, and they had the Sea Rangers. This put me in a good position for later joining up.
‘I got to the age of nineteen, going on twenty, and it was September 1942 when I was allowed to join. When applying to the Wrens, I had to write to an address at Queen Anne’s Mansions. It was there that you went for your interview, and a medical, and they told you when you were required. I had a head start: we had been taught Morse in the Guides. Not to any kind of speed at all – but we had been taught it none the less, and so we knew what all the dots and dashes were.’
She continues, ‘Even with this, though, there was a lot of training involved to become a wireless telegraphist. We did notice that in the first three months, we were taught nothing but receiving – there was nothing at all about transmitting. We did ask ourselves why. Were they going to concentrate purely on this? But at the end of three months, we were told about special duties.’
The first of Mrs Gerken’s special duties took her down to Plymouth and in its own way had a frisson of genuine excitement. ‘It was mine-watching at the Plymouth lighthouse. The Germans were dropping mines, and these were landing in the Sound. Our job was to plot their positions, and then teams could go out there and explode them safely.’
After this thrilling induction came the next step towards the Y Service. ‘As to special duties, and the interception work: you had to sign the Official Secrets Act. There was super-secrecy,’ says Mrs Gerken. ‘So much so that we genuinely thought that if we breathed a word to anyone, we would be beheaded. It was very effective brainwashing. We really didn’t say a word. The Y training was first at New College in London, then down in Doxford, near Petersfield. Throughout all of it, we never talked about it.
‘My parents certainly never knew anything about it. But there was a certain amount that we knew. We intercepted shore stations in France, we’d know if they were seeking frequencies. There were tutors at Flowerdown who had been among the first intake of wireless telegraphists when the war broke out and in 1940, at around the time that the first codes were being broken. These older people might have told us what we were there to do. In terms of listening and Morse, we got up to very high speeds.’
And so it was, not too long after her introduction, that Majorie Gerken found herself being posted to Hampshire. Initially, she was rather peevish about this; she had instead wanted to go up to the station at Scarborough, chiefly because the idea of being beside the sea appealed. But once she had made friends – especially with Pat Sinclair – this new, rigorous, highly disciplined wartime life became, in many ways, very enjoyable. Certainly, her memories of the establishment are now extremely sunny (as indeed, curiously, are many of the photographs taken of the place, as though England in the early 1940s was basking in a perpetual summer).
‘Really, though, we were lucky,’ says Mrs Gerken. ‘Flowerdown had been a civilian station between the wars. And it had facilities, especially for games. There was football, hockey, tennis, squash. It had a special dance floor, and there was also a specially built lounge area. These were just brick-built buildings and Nissen huts. In some places, there were brick buildings like houses: we never went to these but I think that is where they housed families. Then there was a long brick building which had individual rooms, for single boys I think. We Wrens went into the Nissen huts. It was a very nice crowd of people. I made lifelong friends there.
‘Our watch room was a long, low building, single storey. When you were on watch, you could never leave your radio set – in case. If you wanted to visit the loo, you had to put your hand up first and wait for someone to come and relieve you. But equally, there were times, if it was less busy, when you were allowed, after putting your hand up, to go and make a drink of some sort. This could be the case if you were listening in to stations on the French coast which would always be strict about the times that they transmitted.’
These little breaks highlighted one of the more free and easy aspects of the establishment: the casual commingling of servicemen and women. Somehow, if an institution is largely civilian (as in the case of Bletchley Park), then such an arrangement does not seem especially noteworthy; when the men and women are in uniform, however, it seems curiously modern. ‘When it came to making those beverages,’ continues Mrs Gerken, ‘they would always pick a Wren and a sailor to go and do it together. Not two Wrens or two sailors but always a Wren and a sailor.’ There were inevitable romantic consequences; lust simmering away over the beef tea. ‘A great friend of mine there ended up marrying the sailor that she had made tea with,’ says Mrs Gerken. ‘I met my own husband at Flowerdown: it got a lot of sailors who were coming in, say, from the convoys, and who were there for what was termed rest and resuscitation.’
This was one of the elements that made the place so conducive to a certain light-heartedness. ‘The lounge area – it was a beautiful building for us,’ says Mrs Gerken. ‘There was a canteen, which had a big piano. You could get a drink in there, nothing excessive, but I’m sure it was possible to get beer. We would sit in there to chat. And if anyone was a pianist . . . Of course with the 24-hour watch there were very strict rotas. But when you got your time off . . .’
Love wasn’t only brewing up in the tea-making areas. There was plenty of romance in all areas at Flowerdown. Having swiftly become firm friends, Pat and Marjorie were there to see each other through various scrapes and imbroglios. Pat, on one occasion, was in the awkward position of having met a soldier on a train down from London and agreeing to meet up with him for a date, without paying attention to his name. ‘I said, “Would you like to come to one of our camp dances? On the Saturday? If I’m off duty?” ’ The man had eagerly assented. But as the Saturday in question drew closer, all Pat could recall was his first name. She told Marjorie all about it.
‘I said, “Marjorie, I’ve done it again”,’ says Mrs Sinclair, laughing. Her companion, ever protective, asked, ‘What have you been up to?’
‘And I said, “Well, I’ve made a date with this soldier and I don’t even know his name – only Peter. I can’t remember what he looks like, even.” ’
Marjorie told her, ‘Well, you’ll have to go and meet him at the station.’
‘I said, “Oh, he won’t turn up”, and she read me the Riot Act, she said at the very least I must go because it would be very unfair if I didn’t.
‘So, very reluctantly, I went on this hot Saturday afternoon – and Winchester then, the forces were there, lots of soldiers. The station was just outside the town, and there were not many cars, of course. I walked up the drive to the station and the train had gone, people had departed, and there were two soldiers. One was by the window, one was by the door, and I thought, I don’t know which one it is. Fortunately, Peter came towards me, so that was that.’
Their first date was a dance: as it was ‘on board’ HMS Flowerdown, Pat had to make the official arrangements for her soldier suitor. ‘You could only get on to the base with a pass. And you couldn’t go just anywhere.
‘But when I first put in a request to let this staff sergeant come on, I said to Marjorie, “I don’t know what his name is, I’m going to have to put Sgt Peter Smith.” And that was that.
‘And I had to see him off the premises. So at the end of the dance, we got to the gate – Peter went to kiss me. I drew myself up to my five foot nine height and said: “But I hardly know you!” Can you imagine that today? I was such a prude
!
‘We laugh about that now. Then he just pursued me.’
With some success, as it happened. For Peter Sinclair and Pat are still married to this day, some seventy years after first meeting on that hot Saturday afternoon at Winchester station. Peter Sinclair’s own story is remarkable; he was in fact German-born, and had come over with the Kindertransport in the 1930s.
But before Peter – and Marjorie’s husband-to-be, Norman – materialised on the scene, Pat and Marjorie were throwing themselves with gusto into another celebrated aspect of wartime social life: fraternisation with the Americans. Though it should be swiftly pointed out that for them, these relationships were – by modern standards – extremely innocent. ‘Pat and I had American boyfriends – who were friends – and we had a good time,’ says Mrs Gerken. ‘They would come on leave with us back to London. And indeed after the war, one of the Americans wrote to my mother every Christmas. They were nice boys, and after north Africa, where they had been through a lot, they were much more subdued.’ This was in contrast to the often bombastic figures who had first arrived on British soil.
The Secret Listeners Page 25
