Our Land at War

by Duff Hart-Davis

  This was one of the unit’s most crucial achievements – an extraordinary feat of interpretation, based on intensive study, in which the PIs went back over earlier photographs again and again, re-examining images to see what tiny details they could pick out. In her memoirs, Evidence in Camera, Babington Smith recalled how she detected structures that looked like launching ramps in woodland clearings at Peenemünde, and how, one morning in December 1943, scanning a newly taken photo, she made the crucial breakthrough:

  Even with the naked eye I could see that on the ramp was something that had not been there before. A tiny cruciform shape, set exactly on the lower end of the inclined rails – a midget aircraft actually in position for launching.

  The Medmenham interpreters rapidly identified ninety-six installations in north-western France that looked like launch sites, some complete, others under construction. In all of them angled ramps were accompanied by long, narrow buildings the shape of giant skis laid on their sides. But until Babington Smith’s discovery, the purpose of these ‘ski sites’ had remained obscure. Now suddenly it was obvious that the Germans were planning a mass attack on London with flying bombs. ‘It seemed that the V-1 attacks, when they came, might be of an appalling magnitude,’ she wrote.

  The ski buildings provided storage space for twenty flying bombs at each site, and as there were nearly 100 sites it seemed possible that the target for launchings was something like 2,000 flying bombs in each twenty-four hours.

  The threat was acute. If London were deluged with a devastating hail of V-weapons, the ensuing chaos – apart from killing thousands of people – would inevitably disrupt the planning of Operation Overlord and delay the liberation of Europe. The Allied response – Operation Crossbow – was swift and effective. The answer to the ski sites was bombs. By the end of December 1943 British and American bombers had destroyed all but four of the known ski sites, and, as Babington Smith wrote, ‘The first round of the battle against the flying bomb was an overwhelming victory for the Allies.’ The first V-1 did not reach England until 13 June 1944.

  Hitler’s other revenge weapon, the V-2 rocket, proved more elusive. On 5 May a Mosquito crew photographed a rocket with four fins at its base standing upright on the Nazi test site at Blizna, in south-east Poland. Similar rockets had been spotted at Peenemünde, and the PIs at Medmenham searched frantically for launch sites in Holland and France; but because the rockets were moved around on huge road trailers, which could be hidden under trees, and fired vertically from small asphalt pads, they were almost impossible to detect. As Babington Smith put it, ‘General Dornberger’s almost ridiculously simple conception of how the V-2s should be launched defeated Allied photographic reconnaissance.’

  Another of the WAAF girls at Medmenham, working in the high tower, was Winston Churchill’s rebellious daughter Sarah, who before the war had taken to the stage and (to her father’s distress) married the Austrian comedian Vic Oliver. Babs described her as ‘a quick and versatile interpreter’, but she was luckier than most in that she was able to take two long, stimulating breaks accompanying her father to the Teheran Conference with Roosevelt in 1943 and the Yalta Conference with Roosevelt and Stalin in 1945.

  At Medmenham, as at Bletchley Park, secrecy was all. Outside the station, nobody talked about their work. The amount of material handled grew to phenomenal proportions: in 1945 the daily intake averaged 25,000 negatives and 60,000 prints, and by the end of the war the ACIU had accumulated millions of aerial reconnaissance images, which had yielded intelligence vital to the planning of almost every major Allied operation. For the D-Day landings the staff at Medmenham produced more than 300 synthetic rubber models of the Normandy beaches, based on photographic data of gradients, and giving details of tides and currents.

  Purely in terms of physical size, Bletchley Park was insignificant. Some fifty miles north-west of London, the house was of no great architectural merit, and certainly not famous before the war; but it had the advantage of being bang in the middle of England, with good road connections, close to teleprinter links, and within 300 yards of a main-line railway station.

  The present building was bought in 1887 by Herbert Leon, a London financier who several times extended and embellished it in flamboyant Victorian style. Its south front became a blaze of orange-red brick and white stone or painted wood, with windows of different sizes and assorted shapes. A bell-shaped, copper-clad cupola lopsidedly crowned one wing. Inside were garishly coloured skylights, ceilings decorated with heavy plaster mouldings, dark panelling, a spacious ballroom and twenty-seven principal bedrooms (though only four bathrooms).

  One wartime recruit, the American architect Landis Gores, called it ‘a maudlin, monstrous pile probably unsurpassed, though not for lack of competition, in the architectural gaucherie of the mid-Victorian era … inchoate, unfocused and incomprehensible’. To someone else it was the embodiment of ‘lavatory Gothic’. But the fact that the house struck many of its inhabitants as a monstrosity did not spoil the attraction of its surroundings: it sat in a park on a low hill, looking out over an ornamental lake, and all around were pleasure gardens, a ha-ha, a yew maze, grottoes, many fine trees and open farmland.

  In 1938 the house was acquired by the much-loved Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair – the ‘C’ of the day – who decided to move the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) out of London to somewhere safer, and chose Bletchley as its new home, attracted by the proximity of the teleprinter repeater station at Fenny Stratford, immediately to the north, and by the house’s position beside the railway, with the North Western line cutting through the estate, and branch lines leading off conveniently to east and west towards Cambridge and Oxford.

  In May 1938 Sinclair bought the house and surrounding land for £6000, apparently on his own initiative and with his own money. Until his death from cancer in November 1939 the place nominally belonged to him; but in 1940 his sister Evelyn, to whom he had left it, transferred it to the SIS for the princely sum of 10s, and in due course it passed on to the Ministry of Works for the same amount – which suggests that the money for the original purchase had come out of SIS funds.

  Sinclair sent the Code and Cypher School to Bletchley during the Munich crisis of August 1938; but when the alarm died down the code-breakers went back to London. Then in 1939, after telephone and teleprinter lines had been installed, they returned to Buckinghamshire, and the Park was given the code name ‘Station X’, it being the tenth site acquired by MI6 for its War Stations. The advance guard arrived under the guise of a shooting party led by Captain Ridley (a naval officer in MI6) and the other pioneers at the Park were Section IX, a new organization recently established by Sinclair to develop sabotage material, including incendiary devices and plastic explosive. They evidently had fertile imaginations, for one of their ideas was to place mustard gas in the seats of the Berlin opera house before a major Nazi rally took place there.

  From that modest beginning Bletchley grew into what its own publicity leaflet later described as ‘the centre of a great communications web, receiving intercepts from all directions and disseminating information [known as Ultra] to those who could put it to strategic use in the major theatres of the war, throughout the world’. The station’s achievements included a decisive contribution towards the defeat of the U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic (because the code-breakers, intercepting the captains’ messages, could tell where the submarines were, and warn Allied ships to keep clear), and above all to the success of Operation Overlord, the invasion of Europe in June 1944. In the opinion of Sir Harry Hinsley, the official historian of British Intelligence during the war, Ultra shortened the conflict by between two and four years – and without it the outcome might have been quite different. One leading German historian speculated that the first atom bomb might have been dropped on Berlin rather than Hiroshima.

  This priceless harvest resulted from the breaking of Enigma, the code used in communications between the Nazi armed
forces and the German High Command. Because the portable Enigma encoding machines, like typewriters equipped with lights, generated hundreds of millions of different letter combinations, and the settings were changed every night, the Germans were confident that it was impossible for an enemy to penetrate the system’s secrets.

  They reckoned without the phenomenal intellectual power concentrated at Bletchley. Mathematicians, philosophers, classical scholars, chess players, writers, musicians – all contributed to the code-breaking. The irascible senior cryptographer, Dillwyn Knox – always known as ‘Dilly’, and described by one colleague as ‘the mastermind behind the Enigma affair’ – was a gangling figure in his fifties ‘with a prominent forehead, unruly black hair, and his eyes, behind glasses, some miles away in thought’. His colleague Frank Birch, a theatre actor and director, had been a memorable Widow Twankey in a West End production of Aladdin. But if these two – and many others – were highly intelligent, one man stood out from the rest as a genius: a twenty-seven-year-old mathematician from King’s College, Cambridge – Alan Turing, known as ‘the Prof’. With his stammer, his high-pitched voice and irritating laugh, reinforced by his habit of wearing a gas mask while bicycling in summer, he soon established a reputation as an eccentric; but his manner concealed robust physical qualities, and he was a good enough runner to compete in marathons. Besides, he wore the mask for practical reasons, as he suffered from hay fever.

  The first chink of light into Enigma was opened up by Polish experts in the summer of 1939; but by December that year, Turing, working on his own, had managed to break into some old Enigma material. He was also developing the first of the enormous proto-computers known as ‘bombes’ – electro-mechanical monsters six feet high, seven wide and two deep – which became instrumental in cracking the code. Mathematicians and engineers worked together to construct the war-winning machines.

  Trade and personnel at Bletchley built up fast. At the beginning, the cryptographers could fit into the main house and the buildings in the stable yard – the tack room, feed room and so on; but new accommodation was soon needed. Elmers School – a nearby boys’ school – was taken over, and the maze at Bletchley was cleared away to make room for the first long huts, made of timber and plasterboard insulated with asbestos. By early 1941 there were eleven huts, known by their numbers, which also referred to their inhabitants and the tasks done in them.

  Working conditions were incredibly uncomfortable: the huts were divided into small rooms, and since almost everybody smoked continually, the air was permanently dense with tobacco fumes. In winter smoke from the coke-burning stoves was positively toxic, and in some of the huts the noise was barely tolerable. Facilities were basic, to say the least. Huts 3 and 6 were connected by a tunnel through which documents could be propelled on a tea tray pushed by a broom handle. Later many more substantial buildings of steel and concrete were added: teleprinter building, cafeteria, garages, dormitory blocks and lecture hall. An eight-foot, chain-link perimeter fence topped by barbed wire encircled the park, reminding some inmates of Whipsnade Zoo; during the invasion scare Lewis machine guns adapted for use on the ground were installed at the gates, and a dedicated unit of the Home Guard was on standby.

  Staff were recruited largely by personal contact, and included many civilians, not least dons from Oxford and Cambridge. They worked in three shifts – from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., 4 p.m. to midnight, midnight to 8 a.m. Such was the strain of concentrating for eight hours, with only one thirty-minute meal break in the middle of the shift, that many girls collapsed. Of the 12,000 people who worked at GC&CS at some point during the war, over 80 per cent were women. This was a classless society, quite different from the old-fashioned order still prevailing in the world outside. Here, class and gender were of no consequence: intelligence, hard work, enthusiasm and integrity were what counted, and men treated women as equals.

  At first the staff lodged in hotels and pubs. Later they were found accommodation in surrounding towns and villages – in some discomfort, for the Buckinghamshire countryside was still rustic, and most of the local families who provided billets had no electricity or inside lavatory. From early 1942 the Admiralty began requisitioning big country houses to serve as quarters for the Wrens who managed the bombes. Some were lodged in style at Woburn Abbey, others at the Elizabethan Gayhurst Manor, where they slept in bunks in the ballroom and worked in one of the five local bombe outstations – a job that demanded intense concentration and often led to temporary breakdown. Girls who became ill irritated doctors by refusing (quite correctly) to divulge what work they did, and so contributing to their own problems. A further hazard of OSG – Outstation Gayhurst – was that the Wrens slept in the house but had to walk to work in a prefabricated building in the woods – a journey which spooked them at night, as there was talk of a resident ghost, and the path ran by the cemetery in which past manor pets were buried.

  The transportation of such a large workforce, in and out of Bletchley Park, day and night, became a major undertaking. By 1942 111 shift buses were in use, and it was reckoned that the transport service made 28,351 journeys per year. Had a German spy been at large anywhere in the neighbourhood, he could hardly have failed to notice the extraordinary amount of traffic that the place generated: it was like a beehive, with the denizens constantly whizzing along the country lanes, in and out. Many of the Wrens bought bicycles or had their own sent from home; those billeted not too far away came and went by bike, and on days off the girls based at Gayhurst would ride out for a scrumptious tea in the WVS canteen at Olney, a village five miles to the north.

  Feeding the staff at Bletchley was another enormous task: a new canteen was built in the summer of 1941, and by February 1943 almost 3000 meals were being provided every day. In the run-up to D-Day new restrictions were imposed: workers were forbidden to go more than twenty-five miles from base – but when a notice appeared on the girls’ board saying ‘All Wrens’ clothing will be held up until the Navy’s needs are satisfied’, an officer, hearing raucous laughter, shot out of her room and tore it down.

  Secrecy was paramount. All ranks were sworn to silence about their work, and a personal security form issued in May 1942 told people not to talk at meals, in the transport, while travelling, in billets, or even ‘by your own fireside’. The form ended, ‘Be careful even in your hut’. The buses which brought the workers in decanted them at the door of their hut, and they were forbidden to talk shop with other huts. No doubt the embargo was observed on the premises; but it is hard to believe that men and girls off duty, riding round the lanes or walking the footpaths through the fields, did not exchange some confidences. And what did they say about their work to their families when they went home on leave? To disguise the workers’ whereabouts, all post destined for them had to be sent via a PO box in London.

  It seems extraordinary that the whole installation survived with practically no damage from bombs. The network of railway lines converging on Bletchley from all points of the compass must have been a tempting target for any Luftwaffe crew wanting to shed the remains of their load before they headed home, even if they had no idea what lay beside the tracks, which shone in moonlight. The huts were as fragile as eggshells, and they housed human beings and machines of incalculable value to the war effort, besides irreplaceable stores of knowledge. Yet Dorothy Gait, who went to Bletchley as a clerk in June 1940, and worked in one of the upstairs bedrooms, remembered that when air-raid sirens wailed her instructions were to gather up as many heavy ledgers as she could carry and dash to what was optimistically known as the ‘shelter’, a slit trench halfway across an adjacent field.

  On 21 November 1940 a single bomb did fall between the house and Hut 11, and it blew the hut four inches sideways – but the building was so insubstantial that it could simply be pushed back into position. On the same night another bomb landed in the stable yard, but failed to go off. One deliberate, well-aimed attack, one stick of high explosives or incendiaries into the centre of the complex,
and the heart of the installation might have been destroyed, the course of the war irrevocably altered.

  As it was, the stringent security rules observed by all who worked at Bletchley Park preserved its secrets throughout the war. The Germans may, towards the end, have begun to suspect that the British were breaking their Enigma transmissions; but they never got the slightest idea of where the detective work was taking place, and the most potent weapon of the war came through unscathed.

  Thirteen

  Rescue Operations

  An Englishman’s home is his castle

  Traditional proverb

  If a country house was not appropriated by the Government, its owners were left to fend for themselves; and as James Lees-Milne wrote about the owners of Lyme Park – the ‘splendid Elizabethan and Georgian palace’ approached by a mile-long drive through parkland on the outskirts of the industrial town of Stockport – ‘their predicament was the sad but not singular one of deciding what to do with a vast ancestral white elephant’.

  When Lees-Milne arrived there in November 1943, the place was in a poor state. Forty evacuated children had just left the building, and the park had been ‘cut to pieces by thousands of RAF lorries’; but his task, as Country House Secretary of the National Trust, was to negotiate with the owners, Lord and Lady Newton, and arrange the handover of the property. It says much for his diplomacy that, after protracted disagreements, he eventually achieved the transfer in 1946.