The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  The irony was that the initial landings had taken place virtually unopposed; this was partly thanks to Admiral Canaris of the Abwehr, who informed General Kesselring with some confidence that the Allies could not possibly mount such an expedition because so many other British and American troops – who had pushing on through Italy from Naples and up the Adriatic coast – were now hopelessly tied up around Monte Cassino, engaged there in a fierce fight with German troops. But owing to American reluctance to push on until supplies had been reinforced, the Anzio beach-head landing parties – amounting even at first to 70,000 troops, and then, as the days and weeks passed, to an extraordinary 150,000 – started to look more painfully vulnerable as time went by. For General Kesselring wasted no time in summoning as many reinforcements as he could from divisions in the Balkans. The casualties that Aileen Clayton had feared began to pile up. What began as a brave invasion ended up as a near-siege that went on for several months. Allied troops were trapped within the perimeter of Anzio as the Germans fought back with startling vehemence and indeed viciousness. Some of the most savage fighting of the war took place here; on one occasion, American prisoners, held at bayonet point, were stabbed every time a German soldier was shot. The Allies appeared mired and the Germans implacable and immovable.

  The Bletchley Park official history states that America’s General Clark set little store by the valuable information streaming from Bletchley Park; yet he was to change his mind when the Y Service and Bletchley provided him with what the history describes as ‘one of the most valuable decrypts of the whole war’. These were signals indicating General Kesselring’s detailed plans for a savage attack on the Anzio beach-head.

  Through wireless interception and the work of Bletchley, these plans were fed back to the Allies almost as quickly as they were being absorbed by high-ranking Germans. The Y Service expertly intercepted German High Command orders not merely to the Luftwaffe, but also relating to more diverse threats such as motor-torpedo boat attacks which aimed to cripple Allied shipping. Thanks to the instant nature of the intercepts and decrypts, the Allies were able – just – to parry an assault that might well have proved terminally damaging to their chances. Soon, with the capture of Monte Cassino, the Allies would be able to break out of the Anzio perimeter and start their move northwards through Italy, harrying the retreating German forces as they went.

  Heartening progress was being made on the other side of the world. There was a busy and effective network of Y stations in New Zealand. By 1943, their numbers had been swelled with Wren volunteers, with some highly honed skills. One such was the art of ‘Radio Finger-Printing’, which enabled operators to identify sets and users, and was now proving extremely effective against Japanese submarines.

  ‘Radio finger-printing . . . proved significant as it was capable of identifying not only the transmitter type but often the individual transmitter,’ recalled Major T. Gray of the Royal Signals. ‘It would have been even more useful had today’s computer scanning of records been available for identification purposes replacing the very tedious manual search then necessary.’ Manual searches would have involved identifying each craft by means of card-file indexes, which would have cross-referenced transmitters to vessels – excruciatingly dull to compile, wearying to plough through for information.

  Having effectively ‘tracked’ the submarines by means of their radio transmissions, the Wren operators – heroically immune to tedium – alerted the Royal New Zealand Navy of positions and bearings. In the case of one particular submarine, they chose the target well: after being located and depth-bombed, the wrecked vessel was found to be carrying not merely sixty troops, but also extremely valuable coding material which, amid all the chaos and panic, the crew had been unable to destroy.

  Survivors of the depth-charging made it to the shore; many escaped, at least for a time. But the code material was of greater concern to the Japanese authorities, who swiftly sent in another submarine in an attempt to completely annihilate the first vessel; not only this, but they sent in bombers too. A little too late; the Navy had managed to bring to the surface a great many codebooks.

  Naturally, the advantage was only temporary. By the time the intelligence had been avidly shared out between the Americans and the British, the Japanese had taken the obvious precaution of bringing in huge changes to their coding systems. Nonetheless, the codebooks provided a logical glimmer; and hugely complex though the new system was, the Allied codebreakers knew that they would be able to burrow into it after about four weeks.

  Meanwhile, in Kilindini, Mombasa, the wireless operation was seamlessly exchanging an unending source of intelligence both with Bletchley and with Melbourne and Washington DC. According to one historian, the real presiding genius of the station was Lieutenant-Commander George Curnock. ‘He was a gin-before-breakfast man,’ wrote Peter Elphick. This was not Curnock’s only qualification. He had spent ‘three years as a language officer in pre-war Tokyo, and served with the Far East Combined Bureau in Colombo’ before the Kilindini posting. Despite – or even, perhaps, because of – his aptitude for grog, ‘his knowledge of the Japanese language enabled him quickly to scan the most fragmentary of texts and assign meanings to corrupt or unsolved code-groups; he seemed able to feel his way into the Japanese mind,’ wrote Elphick.5

  And for the Wrens posted there, life offered more diversion than the daily transcription and cracking of Japanese codes. ‘We started watch keeping again at Alidina,’ recalled Joan Dinwoodie, who was posted there after her stint in Colombo with HMS Anderson.

  Once again we made the best of our free time, swimming at Nyali Beach, we were shown around HMS Revenge and had tea with Vice Admiral Willis, visited HMS Albatross and HMS Indomitable. We also received a visit and inspection by Admiral Somerville.

  I had leave in September and travelled by train to Nairobi with a friend, Hetty. We flew from Nairobi to Nakuru in a Fulmar Fighter, over Lake Naivasha. I was very sick. We stayed a day in Nakuru and left by train, climbing 10,000 feet and arrived at Kisumu in the early evening . . . Whilst there, we visited Kakamega, centre of the gold mining district.

  In other words, the sorts of experiences that were not normally offered up to young women from Norwich.

  In the autumn of 1943, the staff of the Kilindini base were being transferred to HMS Anderson. One immediate setback of the workplace, recalls Anderson veteran Jean Valentine, was the local wildlife. ‘The station was just outside Colombo. And you would get insect life. Great big flying cockroaches and things. They would hit the light – because they go for the light – and land on your paperwork.’

  But there were immediate upsides too. Near the cabins where the codebreakers lived was the ocean, where, as Hugh Denham recalled wistfully, ‘you could dive into the phosphorescent water when you came off watch at midnight.’ The cabins themselves, he remembered, had unusual features, thanks to the pervasive, rippling heat of the island. They were partly constructed with woven palm leaves and there were ‘no windows, of course, just apertures, so that during gales, the rain came in not only through the roof but horizontally through the window’.

  There were disadvantages to this picturesque arrangement, and to the climate generally. As Victor Newman recalls, wearing headphones in certain conditions could be hazardous: ‘Night shifts were hot and humid and you would sometimes get huge terrific electrical storms. Now when you are wearing earphones, and you get that enormous great thunderclap, it’s a bit more than a crackle. It slightly deafened me and I am still like that now.’ That was not all. ‘It was tricky taking down signals during the monsoon rains, which would smash against the roof of the hut which was made of plaited palm leaves. It could be really difficult during the rains.’

  Elsewhere, the Wireless Experimental Centre in New Delhi was also receiving a fresh influx of young recruits, gathered together at Bletchley Park. Based at a former university campus high up on what was referred to locally as ‘the Hill of Happiness’, this was a bustling establishment wit
h a thousand staff, ‘made up of Army, RAF, Indian and West African service personnel’, wrote Peter Elphick. Codebreaker Alan Stripp was sent out there after a fruitful period working with Japanese codes at Bletchley Park:

  After six months I found myself commissioned and posted to Delhi. The Mess and the long bungalows where most of us had single rooms (Majors and above had two) were at the foot of the hill . . . the Wireless Experimental Centre felt very different from Bletchley Park . . . it had little of the ‘friendly informality verging on apparent anarchy’ in Lord Dacre’s happy phrase. There were no civilians. I do not recall any women. Although orthodox military routine did not obstruct our work, there was a sense of rigidity and hierarchy which did not help it; too often administration relied on authority rather than professionalism.6

  He might have been referring to the commanding style of Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Marr-Johnson; in his years of working with and presiding over the Far East Combined Bureau, Marr-Johnson – fluent in Japanese – became noted for a certain aloofness that was taken for snobbery, and a predilection for secretiveness which a number of colleagues found alienating. One might argue that the very nature of the work would have justified such a bearing. But there were also occasional instances when compartmentalisation between different departments in New Delhi led to mistakes.

  ‘I was in C section, which . . . dealt with the breaking and translating of Japanese signals; next door to us was B section which collated and evaluated signals intelligence and compiled the enemy order of battle,’ wrote Stripp. ‘I discovered only 45 years later that they had a map room that could have solved any number of problems for us.’ One such problem: ‘When the place name KA-BI-EN . . . meant nothing to us since it was not on our small maps, their large resources could have identified it as Kavieng in New Guinea near Guadalcanal, the scene of such bitter fighting. They in turn had no idea that we were stuck.’

  Such disagreements aside, Colonel Marr-Johnson’s Wireless Experimental Centre was not merely successful, but also demonstrably instrumental in helping the British and Indian armies led by General Slim who were holding off the Japanese 15th Army and its invasion of India. The attacks were relentless, and the Allies at Impahl and Kohima were under heavy pressure beneath the weight of such sustained ferocity. Fortunately for the Allies, the Japanese forces began to run dry of supplies; doubly fortunately, the Y Service at Delhi was burrowing deep into the Japanese air codes and were thus able to anticipate the more lethal assaults from the sky; British air superiority was, according to the official history, ‘almost total’.

  With the Japanese army forced to withdraw, the Allies set off to pursue them. In a book written a few years after the war, General Slim complained bitterly that in a wider sense, he had been consistently let down by signals intelligence. He was directly contradicted by Captain F.W. Winterbotham in his pioneering book on Ultra: Winterbotham wrote that not only was the general well satisfied with the quality of the information he was receiving, but Slim’s certain knowledge of the growing crisis of rations in the Japanese ranks was, like so much vital information throughout the conflict, thanks to the painstaking work of the codebreakers.

  17 Witnesses to Different Worlds

  Although, by the first months of 1944, it was possible for the Allies to believe that the conflict was going their way, many were now more grimly determined than ever to get it finished with: from the highest military commanders down to members of the public, war-weary, and wanting simply to see the job done.

  Even before the first Nazi V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets soared over the skies of Kent, that powerful sense of duty – the sense that everyone had to subsume their own wishes to ensure that the national interest was served – was totally ingrained. So much so, for instance, that when eighteen-year-old Wren Jean Valentine received official word that she was to be sent on a perilous voyage to Ceylon to help break the Japanese codes, her father – from whom permission had to be sought – granted that permission immediately.

  Jean Valentine was an only child who had never left her native Scotland before the outbreak of war; after volunteering for the Wrens, and handsomely passing an intelligence and aptitude test, she was whisked down to Buckinghamshire to operate codebreaking bombe machines at Bletchley and Adstock, a Bletchley out-station. This in itself was quite a culture shock. What was to follow, however, was to shape the rest of her life in every conceivable way.

  Jean was born in Perth, a pleasant and staid town with streets of grey stone and people of strict middle-class respectability. In those days, there was no such designation as ‘young people’; from a child you became an adult, and if you were a woman, you were expected to marry and make a home. Outside the big cities, notions as eccentric as careers for women were rare. Had war not broken out, this is conceivably the future that Jean, an extremely bright girl, would have faced. It is more than possible that she would never have left the sobre streets of Perth.

  As it was, when she was old enough, she volunteered to do her bit. And when, finally, she arrived on the other side of the globe in the tropics of Ceylon, it quickly became apparent that she would not easily be able to return to small-town Scotland. She swiftly acquired a taste for the colour and the splendour and quite understandably found that she could not give it up.

  ‘I did a course at Adstock to prepare me for going overseas,’ says Jean. ‘A sign went up on the wall saying “the following are required to go overseas. Those with an asterisk. Get your parents’ permission”.

  ‘If my father had refused, then they would not have been able to send me. And I secretly rather hoped that he would refuse, because there were a lot of U-boats and things out there. It wasn’t the best time to go sailing the seven seas.’

  Her father, a successful Perth businessman, was, it seems, remarkably unyielding over the issue. ‘When I went home to him,’ says Jean, ‘and told him that I had been required to go overseas – I wasn’t allowed to tell him where, even though I needed his permission – he said: “You joined up to do your bit wherever they need you to go. You go. Permission granted.”

  ‘He knew that the posting would clearly be some distance away. Europe, obviously, was overrun. But in general, there was a different ethos then. The country was in a bad state and I think that anything anybody could do was considered acceptable.

  ‘For the first time in my life,’ Jean adds, ‘my father didn’t ask my mother. Usually, he always asked my mother permission over anything. But on this occasion, I can’t imagine him saying “well, we’ll have to see what Mum says about that”. His reasoning was: if I could do anything to help, then I had to go and do it.’

  Jean’s parents would have to spend the next few weeks speculating where exactly in the world their only child was being sent. Jean was forbidden to tell them until she had reached her destination. She wasn’t even allowed to let them know where she and her fellow Wrens stopped off along the way. Like so many before her, Jean Valentine found that the voyage into this new world was itself fraught, full of adventure and hazard; also like so many before her, she coped with it with a sort of amused insouciance.

  As soon as she arrived at HMS Anderson, the Bletchley out-station in Ceylon, Jean was put to work on a branch of cryptology; she and her colleagues were there to drill their way into the Japanese meteorological codes. There was scarcely even time to absorb the strangeness of her new palm-leaved surrounds, the noise of the Colombo streets, the unfamiliar food, the flickering pervasive heat which – as a native Scots girl – she had never experienced before. She was hurled straight into her new job.

  ‘Before we went, there was a short course, only about two or three weeks, to familiarise ourselves with the structure of the Japanese language,’ she says. ‘And we had to learn Japanese Morse, which is like international Morse, but different – each letter is much longer. The reason for that was, if you were trying to break something and it didn’t make sense, then you could say perhaps it wasn’t that letter at all, it could have been something else t
hat hadn’t been heard properly.’ There was also ‘a little bit of Japanese history and geography, just to get us in the right mind, I suppose’.

  Life in and around the out-station was touched with the kind of romance that she would have been hard pushed to find in her native Scotland. ‘My job was very different to the bombe operating I had been doing back at Adstock.’ There, her role had involved engaging with vast, complex machinery, masses of drums and wires, ensuring that the code-crunching functions of the bombes kept running smoothly. Her new work presented a more tranquil prospect. ‘I quite simply had a paper and pencil. Wireless operators would bring in the signals to us – sailors would come round every so often with a batch of papers – and you would log them, and then examine them, because there was the chance you could break into the first two or three groups. We had a lot of captured documents. Code books.’

  On top of this, the nature of the messages themselves gave key clues to unravelling the codes. ‘A lot of the coded communications started with the time of the message, so the wireless operator would have written on it the time that it was received, and the time it was received was the time it was sent – obviously. This would then be followed by the written call sign for that particular wavelength. So you’d get information like this and then you would apply it to the encrypted messages and see what matched.’ In other words, the established routine of messages enabled the codebreakers to crowbar a way in. ‘We would then carefully take down the relevant books and quietly go through them,’ says Jean. ‘Once you’d found two or three code groups together, you could read the rest off. So really, as long as you had got the first few groups sorted out, it was just patience. Equally, though, it was satisfying when you had done it.’

  When her part was done, Jean would hand over her workings to another Wren. Then they would be sent off via teleprinter to places such as Melbourne.