The Dangerous Book of Heroes

by Conn Iggulden

  Some codes were unbreakable. Pike German naval code was never broken, and Staff only once. Of Hitler’s three Fish codes, Thrasher was never broken, Sturgeon was solved but was mostly duplicated by other signals, while Tunny was solved and exploited without German knowledge. Tunny was used mostly for top-secret messages between Hitler and German High Command.

  The absolute brilliance of the women and men at Bletchley Park is demonstrated there, because a Tunny machine was never captured, never photographed, never even seen. Nevertheless, purely from intercepted signals, the brains in Hut 11 worked out that it was a teleprinter, that it used strings of characters from different combinations of five positive and negative dots and crosses, that the machine used twelve wheels to create the code, and so on.

  John Tiltman and Bill Tutte first worked on Tunny in 1941, beginning a two-year-long analysis of the code. Alan Turing joined Hut 11 in the summer of 1942, specifically to help with the complex maths needed to break the Tunny wheel patterns. He invented a solely mathematical solution called the Turingery. The breaking of Tunny remains still the greatest cryptanalysis ever achieved by any intelligence service, but to take advantage of the break-in, a computer was needed to decode the signals quickly enough for the intelligence to be used.

  Another amazing Cambridge mathematician, Max Newman, joined Hut 11 in November 1942. Initially he devised a photoelectric machine using mechanical relays and valve counters. It compared fast-moving teleprinter tapes of Tunny signals against a decoding tape. It was built in Hut 11 by Post Office engineers. It looked physically impossible, like an iron bedstead on end, an inventor’s dream, and so was named the Heath Robinson, after the British artist known for his drawings of ingeniously complicated contraptions. Most important, Newman’s machine brought Newman and Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers together. The result was the world’s first electronic computer.

  A computer is simply a piece of equipment—mainframe, Palm Pilot, desktop, laptop, pocket calculator, or calculating machine—capable of following the instructions and completing the calculations that a human being can do, only quicker. The first modern computers or calculating machines were built by the Third Earl of Stanhope in about 1777, but development was slow.

  In 1935, Alan Turing devised the vital breakthrough of controlling a machine with a program stored in the machine’s own memory. He was just twenty-three years old. He turned the concept into a practical design he called the Universal Turing Machine. At that time calculating machines were electromechanical—they used electrically operated on-off switches called relays. Turing himself built a small electromechanical binary multiplier. Several such computers were built, but they were slow and they were not electronic. The development of electronic valves for radio and radar—in turn replaced by diode and transistor technology—opened the door to electronic computers.

  Tommy Flowers realized that electronic valves were reliable enough to be used as on-off electronic switches and would be hundreds of times faster than mechanical relays. Using those concepts, he invented the world’s first electronic telephone exchange, operating in Britain in 1939.

  Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

  Max Newman had his Heath Robinson photoelectric machine up and running in June 1943. It operated at 1,000 to 2,000 characters per second. Flowers was unimpressed. He said electronic-valve equipment would be four times as fast. Perhaps understandably, the powers at Bletchley thought it would take too long to make and would be less reliable. Flowers went ahead regardless and built his concept at Dollis Hill in London. Working flat out, Flowers’s team had it completed and operating by December 1943. It was called Colossus, the first electronic digital computer in the world. It went online at Bletchley Park in February 1944 to decode Tunny signals.

  Colossus used 1,600 electronic valves, operated at 5,000 characters per second, weighed a ton, and was the size of a small cupboard. It was a semi-programmable as opposed to a stored-program computer. A basic Pentium 2 laptop today has the same power as that first computer. Flowers’s much-improved Colossus II was brought online in May 1944, shortly before D-day. It used 2,400 valves and operated at 25,000 characters per second.

  German High Command Tunny signals were decoded regularly and speedily by Colossus. Almost the entire German battle order in France was revealed at Bletchley before the D-day invasion. As a result, Bletchley Park was involved in the deception called Operation Fortitude, where the Nazis were deceived into believing the invasion would be at Calais, not Normandy. In addition, a thirty-two-page report sent by the Japanese military attaché in Berlin was decoded by the Japanese section at Bletchley, filling important gaps in the German battle plan. A late change of German positions in Normandy was also decoded by Colossus, which stopped U.S. paratroopers from landing in the middle of a German division.

  Two vital items of military intelligence were not decoded because they were, unfortunately, never sent. The first was the position of the Twenty-first Panzer (tank) Division. That division attacked the left wing of the British landings at Sword Beach and prevented them from taking Caen that June 6, 1944. As a result, the British and Canadian armies were forced into a slow and brutal battle for Caen lasting almost two months. It was the bloodiest fighting in western Europe, with 66,000 German and 80,000 British and Canadian casualties.

  The second item never sent was the position of the German 352 Division. They were near Omaha Beach and hammered the U.S. Army in its landings on June 6. From those two gaps in intelligence it can be seen that, without the code breakers of Bletchley Park, the invasion might well have failed.

  Message decoding at Bletchley reached a peak of eighteen thousand a day shortly after D-day, then gradually decreased. After D-day, German High Command changed its Tunny codes every day, so that by the end of the war nine Colossus computers were online in Hut 11.

  After the war, Max Newman and Alan Turing left the GC&CS and began their own separate projects to design and construct the first stored-program computer. Their designs were both based upon Turing’s groundbreaking 1937 paper “On Computable Numbers.”

  Turing designed his stored-program computer in 1945, using his earlier universal Turing machine. He completed the technical report—“Proposed Electronic Calculator”—by the end of the year, the first complete specification for an electronic stored-program digital computer. Its high-speed memory was equal to the chip memory of the early Macintosh computers of the 1980s. However, Turing had problems with production and soon was eighteen months behind schedule. Newman, meanwhile, wrote his own logico-mathematical design for a stored-program computer. He invited the brilliant electrical engineers Frederick Williams and Thomas Kilburn to join him.

  Newman’s team produced the world’s first stored-program electronic computer in 1948. It was called the Manchester Baby and incorporated the first high-speed random access memory (RAM), called the Williams Tube. The Manchester Baby ran its first program on June 21. So far ahead in production was Newman’s team that Turing joined them that year.

  With Turing on board, a redesigned input and programming system was built for the Manchester Baby, including a programming manual. That improved computer was called the Manchester Mark I. The Mark I became the first computer mass-produced for public sale.

  Very soon Turing was using the Mark I to model biological growth—what we now call artificial life. By 1950, Turing was already devising how to program a computer to think. A fragile genius of the first order, he had always been a shy and retiring man. He committed suicide in 1954 by eating an apple laced with cyanide. He was just forty-one years old.

  All the messages decoded at Bletchley came under the general heading of signals intelligence, or “SIGINT.” However, there were other people working at Bletchley Park. Sigint people referred to them as “the other side.”

  The other side specialized in human intelligence—“HUMINT.” None of the Sigint people knew what Human Intelligence was, nor what the “other side” did. Even today they don’t know, for Humint h
as not been declassified. There are secrets still to come from Bletchley Park.

  Recommended

  British Intelligence in the Second World War by F. H. Hinsley, vols. 1 and 2

  Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, edited by F. H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp

  The Emperor’s Codes: Bletchley Park and the Breaking of Japan’s Secret Ciphers by Michael Smith

  Action This Day, edited by Michael Smith and Ralph Erskine Bletchley Park Trust, Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, U.K.

  William Bligh’s Boat Voyage

  In 1789, the twenty-ninth year of the reign of His Most Gracious Majesty, King George III, occurred the most famous naval mutiny of all time: the mutiny on the Bounty.

  At dawn on April 28, Lieutenant William Bligh and eighteen crew were cast adrift in the Bounty’s twenty-three-foot open launch. Bligh had been obliged to order some of them out for safety, and four loyal seamen remained behind with the mutineers. Even then, the launch rode only seven inches above the surface of the sea.

  In 1787 the Admiralty had appointed Lieutenant Bligh commander of the Bounty, to be addressed as Captain on board. His orders were to sail to Otaheite (Tahiti), there to collect breadfruit plants as a crop to feed plantation slaves. Bligh’s experiences with Captain Cook and his previous visit to Otaheite made him the obvious choice.

  Bligh was allowed to choose the master’s mate from the many who applied. He chose his friend Fletcher Christian, who had sailed with him twice before. The Admiralty saddled Bligh with a drunken surgeon, Thomas Huggan, though fortunately Sir Joseph Banks found Bligh an assistant surgeon, Thomas Ledward. The Admiralty would not promote Bligh to captain, would not appoint any commissioned officers, and would not give him marines. Cook had considered commissioned officers and marines essential for discipline in his three voyages to the Pacific, and Bligh agreed. There the Admiralty made a bad decision; Bligh knew the South Seas, the Admiralty did not.

  Knowing that the Bounty’s voyage would take two years, Bligh divided her crew into three watches instead of two. With two watches, watch keepers work four hours on, four hours off. It’s a tiring system. With three watches they work four on and eight off. The advantage of the latter is the opportunity for decent sleep. In a long voyage this is invaluable. Bligh promoted Fryer, Peckover, and twenty-three-year-old Manxman Fletcher Christian as watch leaders. There was also another Manxman on the Bounty, the fourteen-year-old unqualified midshipman Peter Heywood, distantly related to Christian. Through Bligh’s Manx wife, the Heywood family had requested a berth for Peter.

  One of the first signs of a troubled voyage came from carpenter Purcell, who was insubordinate at Cape Town. He refused to obey an order from Bligh and an order from the master, and when they reached Otaheite, he refused another order from his captain. Bligh was enraged by this disobedience. Under the Twenty-second Article of War, Bligh could have hanged or flogged Purcell for the offenses. He did neither. In fact, he ordered only seven floggings in sixteen months, fewer than the great and beloved Nelson, fewer even than the humane Cook. Seven floggings a month was not unusual in those times.

  Bligh knew the temptations of Otaheite from his voyage with Cook. The women were bare-breasted, their skins a smooth brown. They were attractive and sensual, and they bathed every day. They had no inhibiting morals. The climate was languid, the lush greens of the hills contrasting pleasantly with the blue tropical sea. The food was plentiful and the Tahitians friendly. They did practice human sacrifice, they did use infanticide to control their island population, and some of their rituals involved sexual intercourse. It was a heady, seductive mix, very different from the grim streets of Georgian Britain. Cook had experienced desertion there on every voyage, with the deserters recaptured and flogged.

  With no officers and no marines, Bligh knew it would be impossible to stop his men from going ashore. With the permission of King Tynah, he worked a rotating system where some crew maintained the Bounty while others lived ashore to tend the breadfruit nursery.

  In five months on the island, only three men deserted, and they were recaptured. They’d stolen a ship’s boat, arms, and ammunition while the mate of the watch, Thomas Hayward, was asleep on duty. Bligh disrated Hayward, placed him in irons for four weeks, and flogged the deserters. Desertion on a foreign station was a hanging offense.

  At the time, an exasperated Bligh wrote: “Such neglectful and worthiless petty Officers I believe never was in a ship as are in this—No orders for a few hours together are Obeyed by them, and their conduct in general is so bad, that no confidence or trust can be reposed in them—in short, they have drove me to everything but Corporal punishment, and that must follow if they do not improve.” Yet only one more man was flogged, for “neglect of duty.” This, perhaps, was Bligh’s problem: he was too humane for his time.

  As well as the Bounty’s log and Bligh’s journal, there is another day-to-day account: the journal of boatswain’s mate Morrison, a mutineer. It was recovered in Otaheite. It agrees with Bligh’s journal in every detail and includes the list of possible deserters. There is no recording of cruelty, excessive flogging, gagging, inhumanity, excessive duties, or extra punishments by Bligh. In the journal of mutineer Peter Heywood there is also no mention of cruelty, excessive floggings, or punishment by his captain. In the notes written by John Adams in Fletcher Christian’s Bible after the mutiny, there is no mention of cruelty by Bligh.

  After five months at Otaheite, the Bounty prepared for sea with breadfruit plants in pots around the quarterdeck. There had been minor incidents with the islanders, mostly the breaking of “tabu,” but the most unsavory involved the master. Fryer had sex with a woman but did not give her the agreed piece of cloth. Bligh apologized to the woman and ordered Fryer to give her the cloth. Like Fryer, Bligh was a married man, but like Cook, he remained celibate.

  Surgeon Huggan drank himself to death on Otaheite from his own private supplies. He kept notes of the patients he’d treated, including those for venereal disease. Among them were Christian and Heywood.

  The Bounty departed Otaheite on April 4, bound for the West Indies. Bligh stopped at Anamooka island on the twenty-fifth for fruit and water. There he became angry with the crew for letting islanders steal their tools and brandished a pistol at McCoy for not paying attention. Bligh’s temper was well known. Cook had a temper, too, but the anger of a captain is not cause to mutiny.

  At sea, someone on Christian’s watch stole coconuts from the supply stowed on deck. Stealing coconuts may appear petty, but one of the codes of behavior on board ship is to not steal anything. A ship is a small community and possessions cannot be locked away. In the navy it’s a criminal offense.

  After the theft, Bligh called Christian “a damned hound” and the men of Christian’s watch “scoundrels.” He might have flogged them. Many captains in 1789 would have flogged a thief without a second thought.

  That evening Bligh invited Christian to dinner in the cabin. The incident had obviously not been important to Bligh, but Christian refused, saying he was unwell. Purcell, Morrison, and Lebogue all reported that Christian drank heavily that night.

  After dinner in the Bounty, Bligh slept, leaving his door open as usual. Shortly before dawn, he was shaken awake by Christian, with a cutlass in his hand. Behind him, carrying loaded muskets and bayonets, were Churchill, Mills, and Burkitt. They tied the captain’s hands behind him and pushed him out on deck in his nightshirt.

  Christian ordered boatswain Cole to lower the launch. Heywood assisted, and those of the crew who refused to join the mutiny were called on deck and told off into the boat. The sea was very calm. As daylight came, Christian ordered a dram of rum for each mutineer to steady them through the confusion. Bligh’s clerk, Samuel, managed to take a quadrant, compass, and the journal into the launch but was warned by Christian “on pain of death” to leave charts, surveys, sextant, chronometer, and navigation tables.

  When Bligh had to order some men back to the Bounty from the overladen
launch, Fryer was told he’d be shot if he returned. Bligh asked Christian if this treatment was the “proper return for his friendship,” and Christian answered: “That, Captain Bligh, that is the thing; I am in hell—I am in hell!” In the last moments, with Heywood standing by Christian, Bligh called again for Christian to come to his senses, begging him to reconsider. According to Bligh, Christian replied: “I am in hell,” while Morrison recorded: “I have been in hell this fortnight passed and am determined to bear it no longer.” It was three weeks since they’d left Otaheite.

  Bligh and the launch crew were all aware that midshipmen Peter Heywood, Stewart, and Young were among the mutineers. Morrison recorded that it was Stewart who first suggested that Christian take the ship. Christian said: “Come, Captain Bligh, your officers and men are now in the boat, and you must go with them; if you attempt to make the least resistance you will be instantly put to death.”

  As the launch veered astern of the ship, the mutineers jeered and threw breadfruit plants from the quarterdeck. The Bounty sailed slowly to the west-northwest, although Bligh assumed correctly that it was a false course and the mutineers would eventually return to Otaheite.

  At the time of the mutiny the Bounty’s crew numbered forty-three. Twenty-two remained loyal to their captain. As the launch and the Bounty parted company, those forced to remain called down to Bligh for him to remember that they were loyal.

  “Never fear, my lads,” he said. “I’ll do you justice if ever I reach England!”

  In fact, Bligh had greater worries on his mind. He was in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean in an overloaded boat, with no charts, no surveys, no sextant, no guns, no stores, and small odds of surviving. So began the greatest open-boat voyage in history.