The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  ‘As a result of this, we were allowed to draw whatever we liked. And you know, when that sort of thing starts, you soon get enmeshed. We were soon overdrawn, months and months in advance! We lived the life of Riley. We had tailor-made suits from our own tailors, ate out in restaurants . . .’

  As if this was not quite enough during wartime, there were technical perks too. ‘One of the HROs broke down and the authorities must have thought we were reasonably important because they flew a civilian technician up from Colombo. He brought a new HRO with him. He managed to repair the other one and he said to me, “Have you got a radio in your room?”

  ‘I said no, so he said “You have this HRO, we’ll put the new one in.”

  ‘So, a while later, when the war finished, we closed down and I had this HRO. So I went down to the pay clerk, who I was very friendly with and gave me advances whenever I wanted them, and said: “I’ve got this and I want to get it back to the UK.”

  ‘“Oh, no problem, sab, no problem.” They were going to send it back via a system called officers’ personal belongings. Next morning, a half-ton truck turned up with six Indian ratings. They put the HRO in, screwed it down, addressed it to Mr Budd and off it went. I thought, well, I shall never see that again . . .’

  In the meantime, back in England in the late spring of 1944, there were those like wireless interceptor Betty White, based near the south coast, who could see the massive build-up of troop numbers, and who knew, despite all the secrecy, what was coming. In the days and weeks prior to June 1944, in fact, there were a remarkable number of people who simply put two and two together. For Betty, located at that time in a small village in Hampshire, it was reasonably obvious because ‘you couldn’t walk down the road without having to jump on to the pavement to let a tank pass.’ Not far away was a stretch of railway; the local girls heard the rumours that Winston Churchill had used a train on the Meon Valley line to meet up with Eisenhower and de Gaulle to discuss the forthcoming landing operation, and that on this very train, Churchill had requested that the British join in with the proposed landings.

  Betty also knew – although they were strictly not supposed to talk about it – that her soldier brother was in the area, and every day she would run to the top of a local hill in the distant hope of catching a glimpse of him before he left. Both she and he knew that D-Day was looming.

  18 D-Day and After

  Among the tense preparations for the D-Day landings, those in the mobile Y Service found themselves receiving some very specific training. In the course of an intensive three-day exercise spent in full battle dress, the wireless operators not only had to deal with such hindrances as gas masks, but the even more significant hindrance of ‘constant interruptions from very senior officers’, as Major Hugh Skillen recalled.

  The idea of the exercise was to replicate as closely as possible the demands that would be placed upon the operators’ focus and concentration as the invasion of the Normandy beaches unfolded. As part of the exercise, the operators were given a slew of messages; according to Skillen these were old communications to do with north Africa, for of course, the very idea of Operation Overlord had to remain completely secret.

  Nonetheless, Wren Margery Medlock – based in Scarborough – vividly recalls how in the weeks beforehand, the volume of signals reached a frenzied level. ‘For some months prior to D-Day, all leave was cancelled,’ she recalls, ‘and the piles of wireless transmission red forms reached astronomic proportions.’ These were the transcribed messages, to be sent on for decoding. ‘We did our very best to reduce these before the next watch took over. At the end of a watch we were exhausted, especially after the starboard watch, from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.’

  In April 1944, further arrangements were made for Scarborough: twenty new receivers, stated a secret memo at the time, ‘whenever required for new tasks resulting from OVERLORD. These receivers would be made available by discontinuing watch on unprofitable groups, either Med. or perhaps one or two Home Waters exercise groups.’

  Other contemporary memos now in the National Archives illustrate vividly how meticulous the Y Service preparations were. At Bletchley Park, the logistics within Hut 18, which covered Intelligence, were calculated to the last aerial. There is a pleasing politeness and calmness about the memos, such as this note to senior Bletchley codebreaker Harry Hinsley: ‘Mr Treadgold arrived yesterday a.m. and tested receiving conditions . . . [he] found that reception was very good . . . By the time the emergency period comes along, we should be in an excellent position to make the greatest possible use of this small “Y” unit, which we are all convinced is going to be most beneficial.’

  Careful contingency plans were made. Should there have been an air attack on the Scarborough listening station, for instance, HMS Flowerdown would deal with ‘traffic priorities’ in sending material back to Bletchley. And at the Park itself, details as fine as the rationing system for extra Wrens and WAAFs during the ‘emergency period’ were taken into account; just days before the landings began, officers were ensuring that there were sufficient supplies of chocolate, soap and cigarettes (‘Following rates are for your guidance: Woodbines: 20 for 1/1. Kensitas: 24 for 1/6’). Even on 5 June, the needs of the female telegraphists drafted into Bletchley Park were – rather touchingly – being ministered to. One memo sent to Lieutenant-Commander Bloodworth from Lieutenant Dugmore states: ‘You were good enough to promise to try to get anything they [the telegraphists] wanted in the way of stores and I wondered whether it would be possible for you to supply them with an electric iron. At the moment, they have no facilities in this respect and consequently collars and flannels are rather rumpled.’1

  But if such concerns seem frivolous, it ought to be borne in mind that all these women and men were continuing to work extraordinarily hard, through all hours and with a heightened degree of dedication and focus; amid the buzz and the excitement, efforts were being redoubled. Indeed, a note sent a few days later from Bletchley’s Head of Naval Section, Frank Birch, to Lieutenant Dugmore and the Wrens on X Watch illustrates what a crucial role they played at this time:

  I have been much impressed by the zeal shown by the Wren Assistants carrying intercepts from Hut 18. They are astonishingly quick off the mark and you know this has made a great difference to the time at which Admiralty and Allied Naval Command Expeditionary Force receive information from us, which in its turn must have considerable effect on operations. Would you please congratulate them and thank them from me.2

  And, just two days before D-Day – a brilliant operation to deceive Field Marshal Kesselring having paid off – came the propaganda coup of the Allies’ entry into Rome. The German army’s subsequent retreat was harried and hindered by Army Y Service units picking up and translating their communications. Indeed, the Y Service, according to the Bletchley official history, was ‘performing as well as it had ever done in Africa, with two of the German divisions transmitting the highest volume of traffic ever intercepted’. The men sitting in those cramped trucks, hunched over their small desks and clutter of radio equipment, were doing an invaluable job.

  Then came 6 June. And as the Normandy landings were launched, Rommel (who had been in France for some months beforehand in preparation for such an incursion) was, thanks to more deception from British intelligence, anticipating that the bulk of the Allied forces would materialise in the Pas de Calais. Amid the courage and the carnage – the grim sea crossing for the troops, the lethal German fire that turned the beaches into bloody death-traps for so many men – the small Y Service units were there, and a little later, were able to provide forewarning of imminent attacks from Panzer divisions. This ability to raise the alarm repeatedly proved acute over the coming weeks, as the Y units dug themselves into Normandy, intercepting and decoding German strategies for counter-attacks. Although in a wider sense, progress at first seemed dispiritingly slow, with tension between the American and British hierarchies rising, by August the Allied forces were firmly on the move throughout France.<
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  Then of course there were the straightforward espionage operations behind enemy lines. SOE operative David Pearson recalled the days of peril immediately after the D-Day landings. For this mission, he was given both a fake identity and a Y Service operative:

  Eventually at the end of July 1944, I was dropped with a radio operator into . . . Eastern France. Having made contact with reliable resistance elements . . . I moved around the Lorraine countryside contacting the various resistance groups, most of which were quite well organised but desperately short of arms, ammunition, explosives, money, food and clothing . . . with the help of my radio operator, London was made aware of this situation and began some big parachute operations.

  Capture would have meant torture, even death. And the hazardous nature of the mission increased in intensity the longer the two men spent among the resistance groups. Other tiny cells were dropped in across the country – specially trained agents, together with professional wireless operators. But the enemy had an idea of what was going on. ‘The operations of the wireless operators became very risky,’ remembered Pearson, ‘as the messages became longer and more frequent and the Gestapo stepped up its radio detection operations with mobile RDF (Radio direction-finding) vans.’ But the missions were fruitful:

  As well as our close work with a number of maquis in the region, ‘Bruno’ – the code-name of my operator – and I (the two of us constituted Mission Pedagogue) – had excellent contacts with various networks of information gatherers . . . when Patton’s troops began moving forward again, our people had been feeding the Americans information as to German troop withdrawals.3

  And back in England, it was thanks to the work of Hugh Trevor-Roper – now promoted to major – and his department in analysing the communications of the Abwehr, that such special commando units (always effective in sabotage operations) were able to target transmitters and teleprinters with ever more lethal accuracy, forcing the Germans to fall back on more cumbersome means of sending messages.

  Meanwhile, Y operatives in the field – who had been specially trained to decode the German army’s sub-Enigma code, Double Playfair – found that the Germans were now using an even more complex system. By the time it took to un-knot the code, therefore, any immediate front-line information to be gleaned would be outdated. There was, however, an unlikely plus side: the code was fearsomely difficult to use in the field. It involved 5 x 5 letter grids and a daily change of stencils (used for a further layer of letter transposition), and mistakes were regularly made in messages as a result of this complexity. While the mistakes alone were of no use to the cryptanalysts, they could make good use of the fact that messages then had to be repeated in order to compensate for the errors.

  Even in those nerve-strung days, when a combination of high morale and hope were balanced against the often fanatical fightbacks of the German army, moments of levity were provided by Y Service operatives. One particular message, intercepted from deep in Ukraine, gave a pleasing insight into the thoughts of German operators. Bletchley’s deputy director, Nigel de Grey, gave it wider circulation among his colleagues: ‘On the 28th August, one of the operators from the German Army Group, South Ukraine, while working Supreme Army Command broke into violent remarks about Hitler, using the peculiarly foul language in which the Germans delight. The operator at Supreme Army Command tried to shut him up in equally filthy language.’

  For many at Bletchley and out in the Y Service stations at around this time, priorities were being recalibrated, and increasing numbers of women and men were trained in the Japanese codes. For Wrens Pat Sinclair and Marjorie Gerken, this meant being temporarily removed from their happy base at HMS Flowerdown. They were also to be instructed in the fine arts of direction finding. The experience – especially at that point in the war – was one that they found unnecessarily irksome.

  They were first sent to Bedfordshire for a short, sharp course in Japanese. ‘Marjorie and I were singled out,’ says Mrs Sinclair. ‘I took to that Japanese stuff, I loved it.’ But then came the DF training with a formidably eccentric tutor out in a village in the countryside. ‘Marjorie and I were on night duty. We were in this little hut in a field. And the man teaching us was a civilian – to us he would seem middle-aged, because we were young, but he wasn’t actually that old. He would probably have been in his fifties, and probably would have been in the Navy between the wars. Marjorie told me that this man had a caravan, and his poor wife was stuck there.

  ‘Anyway, when we first met, he came to pick us up at the station on a motorbike and sidecar. I was in the sidecar with our luggage, and Marjorie had to sit on the pillion. We didn’t have helmets in those days. And he was driving like a madman.’ Furthermore, says Mrs Sinclair, ‘he tried to flirt with us but we weren’t having any, we didn’t like him on sight. Apparently he had had a go at the previous Wrens, with his poor wife stuck there in that caravan. He didn’t cut any ice with us at all.’

  Soundly rebuffed, the tutor’s campaign took a sinister if comical turn while Marjorie and Pat were on night duty, direction finding in the little hut. Without them knowing, ‘he came along and chucked this huge piece of concrete on the corrugated roof in the middle of the night. We nearly jumped out of our skins. His explanation was: “I was just testing how you would react if I was a German parachutist landing on the roof.”’

  Though often meeting with ferocious and sometimes almost irrational German resistance, the Allies pushed steadily through Europe. Hugh Skillen quoted Harold Everett’s recollections of the day that Brussels was liberated. Entering the city unannounced, the Allied armoured divisions were apparently met first with sullen indifference by a populace that thought that they were simply more German soldiers, rolling through the streets in German tanks. Eventually a few citizens realised; and then word spread with lightning speed. The result, for Everett and his comrades, was a never-to-be-forgotten exhilaration:

  At 11 a.m., one of our operators picked up a news flash on the BBC: ‘British troops are entering Brussels’ and suddenly all the population of Brussels was round us! There were literally thousands and thousands of people milling around, cheering, shouting, waving Union Jacks and Belgian flags and throwing flowers into our van. Some stood silently weeping but the deliriously happy majority struggled and jostled each other in rapturous good humour, just to get near us and to touch us.

  The van containing Everett and his fellow radio operators was invaded by men and women, crowding forward to hug and kiss them. One young woman got into the van and sat with ‘her skirt hitched high’ and ‘kicking her legs in the air’ until another woman of a certain age warned her that this might be giving quite the wrong impression. Perhaps it was giving exactly the right impression. Nonetheless, said Everett, the noise and the ecstasy and the knowledge that the British were ‘the cause of this great outburst of joy’ gave him an intense pride and pleasure and left him feeling ‘emotionally super-charged’.

  Despite the clear turning of the tide, the German war machine, far from slowing down, escalated new tactics, such as the launching of the lethal V1 missiles across the channel. Voluntary Interceptor Ray Fautley recalled their arrival: ‘Then there were the buzz bombs – the number of times I dropped flat on my face in the middle of the road. And you saw businessmen, all smartly dressed up, doing the same, when we heard the engine cut out. That’s when it was going to come down and wherever you were, you went flat down.

  ‘The nearest one went off to me was about 100 yards away. They were big bombs. And you could feel them. If you were standing, they would knock you flying. That’s why you had to get down. Everyone went down. There were old ladies pushing little kids down.’

  Wireless Group Intelligence officers stationed outside Brussels picked up distinctive signals – long dashes – just at the point when these rockets were taking off overhead. But the signals, puzzlingly, could not be unlocked; they seem to lack significance. It subsequently turned out that they were dummy signals sent out to confuse potential codebreaker
s and misdirect attention.

  The bravely fought disaster of September 1944 that was Operation Market Garden – in which General Montgomery and the Americans sought to seize the bridges at Eindhoven, Zon, Vegehl and Arnhem (the last being the responsibility of the British) – was not a failure of intelligence, or down to a lack of data provided by the Y Service. Days before the attack, intelligence had been supplied concerning the possible presence – ‘elements’ of four Panzer divisions that were in the region for ‘rest’ and ‘re-fit’. Montgomery chose to interpret this as meaning that they were effectively out of action, or at least not in a position to be brought into action. And so the bridges were captured – but the bridge at Arnhem was famously one bridge too far. And those German tanks were now roused into deadly action in the town, against British paratroops with negligible anti-tank weaponry. The houses they fought in were pulverised, and troops were forced back not merely by artillery but by phosphorous smoke from the shells. Nearly 1500 men from the parachute division were killed; about 6500 were taken prisoner. Even now, Y Service veteran Betty White recalls with horror how her brother was caught up in the carnage and, even though he escaped, was badly hurt, losing ‘half a hand’ and sustaining a serious abdominal wound. In another sense, though, he was fortunate; they managed to get him back to England where he ended up spending six months in hospital. He went on to live until the age of eighty-six.

  But in broader terms, despite this grim episode – and despite the surprise Ardennes offensive a few weeks later, when Allied forces in that deeply forested region of Belgium were thrown into disarray by a vast and vicious German attack, after which Bletchley Park found itself blamed for not giving enough forewarning – it was widely known that the question now was when, not if. No matter what the Germans threw back at the Allies, their power was being whittled away.