by Mark Simmons
Admiral Cunningham was short of destroyers, a disadvantage he was to suffer through much of the early war in the Mediterranean. If he took his whole battle fleet to sea it severely restricted other activities. However he was still able to dominate the eastern basin, as long as there was a French fleet in the western basin.6
The morale of the Mediterranean Fleet was second to none and they were not disturbed by the coming of war. Indeed like the rest of the fleet, Warspite went to war while lying at anchor in Alexandria harbour, her crew enjoying rest and recreation.
Lying in harbour was pretty boring for all the younger ratings, nothing to do … Entertainment on board, except for the occasional film, consisted of the tannoy system. The favourite was, guess who, Vera Lynn. I will never forget Chamberlain’s announcement of being at war with Germany. A lot of us congregated in the recreation space, some played games. Others got their heads down. When somebody switched on the tannoy speaker, a momentous time in history was nigh. But Jack was not impressed. By general consent the cry went up ‘Shut that bloody thing off’.7
Admiral Cunningham received the news of the outbreak of war while watching the squadron regattas in Alexandria harbour from a 15-inch gun turret on Malaya. He was not surprised.
There was little to be done. So far as possible all our preparations had been made. As I wrote to my aunt, I never expected when war was declared to have nothing to do but go ashore and have tea with my wife.
We received the signal ‘Winston is back’, i.e. at the Admiralty, on the evening of September 3rd with considerable satisfaction.8
Notes
1 Cunningham, A.B. A Sailor’s Odyssey p.241
2 Playfair, Major-General I.S.O. The Mediterranean and Middle East Volume 1 p.30
3 Elliott, Peter, The Cross and the Ensign. A naval history of Malta p.69–70
4 Playfair, p.75–77
5 Plevy, Harry, Battleship Sailors p.100
6 Playfair, p.91–92
7 Stoker F.W. Earridge account, Imperial War Museum
8 Cunningham, p.217
4
Ultra Secret
Winston Churchill took office at the head of a coalition government on 10 May 1940, the day that the Phoney War ended and Germany began her western offensive Operation Yellow. He promised nothing but ‘blood, toil, tears, and sweat.’ His analysis was correct as Britain was brought to the brink of military disaster. Yet in one direction he was to have a significant advantage over the discredited Neville Chamberlain with the revival of fortunes in British intelligence. For, as fate would have it, the most valuable intelligence source in British history began to come online less than a fortnight after he became Prime Minister.
On 22 May the code breakers, recently relocated to Bletchley Park, broke the Luftwaffe version of the Enigma machine cipher, the Enigma being an electro-mechanical rotary machine that generated codes to encrypt messages. From that date onwards they were able to read German traffic almost without a break for the remainder of the war. ‘Ultra’ was the name used by the British for intelligence resulting from this decryption. Churchill called his Cryptanalysts ‘the geese who laid the golden eggs and never cackled.’1
Ultra de-codes was an Allied rather than a purely British triumph, the culmination of years of intelligence work involving the Poles and the French as well as the British. The first breakthrough was made by Martin Rejewski, a brilliant mathematician from Posnan University who joined the cryptographic service of the Polish General Staff in 1932. By studying a commercial version of the Enigma machine and thousands of unsolved German intercepts, Rejewski succeeded in laying the theoretical foundations for the solution of Enigma.
All the Polish information and reconstructions of the Enigma machine and methods of decrypting ciphers were given by Polish Military Intelligence to the British and French on 26 July 1939, weeks before the German invasion of Poland. Bletchley Park cryptologist Gordon Welchman wrote ‘Ultra would never have gotten off the ground if we had not learned from the Poles, in the nick of time, the details both of the German Military Enigma machine, and of the operating procedures that were in use.’2 A year later in the early months of 1941 Bletchley Park had mastered the Naval Enigma.
Initially Army and RAF related material was compiled at Bletchley Park. The summaries were then distributed under the codeword ‘Boniface’. The Admiralty produced its own intelligence summaries at the RN Operational Centre which were distributed under the codeword ‘Hydro’.
From June 1941 the term ‘Ultra Secret’ was used; the codename ‘Ultra’ is said to have been the idea of Commander Geoffrey Colpays.3 It was taken from the fact that the code-breaking success was considered more important than the highest security classification at the time (Most Secret) and so was regarded as being Ultra Secret.
It was under the irascible Admiral John Godfrey at Naval Intelligence in the legendary Room 39, that Ultra intercepts were interrupted. It was already a relic of an older statelier Admiralty. A large uncomfortable nineteenth-century office with high elaborate ceilings, iron radiators, cream coloured walls and a heavy black marble fireplace. The First Sea Lord had his office directly overhead; the private entrance to No 10 Downing Street was just visible on the opposite side of the square, and beyond that stretched the Foreign Office, the Treasury and the rest of Whitehall. Ian Fleming, celebrated author and creator of James Bond, was Godfrey’s personal assistant. Throughout the war Room 39 was the nerve centre of the Naval Intelligence Division, originating, sifting and co-ordinating the day-to-day work.4
It was Godfrey, known as ‘Uncle John’ who saw Ewen Montague as having a natural ability for the work involving Ultra. He was soon running his own subsection along the corridor from Room 39, the top secret Section 17M, (M for Montague). This was in Room 13 where his small staff dealt with the Ultra intercepts. In the early years they came as a trickle, albeit a steady trickle, but grew to some 200 messages a day later in the war.
From Room 13 and Montague’s team, information would find its way via the RN Operational Intelligence Centre – Section 8 as it was known – to ships at sea transmitted over normal naval radio circuits and protected by one time pad encryption.5 Montague would later become famous for his part in Operation Mincemeat retold in his 1953 book The Man who Never Was.
The Allies became highly protective of the fact they had broken into the Enigma traffic.
We got a huge series of messages with convoys carrying urgently needed petrol, ammunition, etc, across the Mediterranean to Rommel. These were included in the Orange Summaries because of their background value on whether Rommel could or could not carry out his plans, but they were dealt with operationally simultaneously by the O.I.C. These enabled us to sink a large proportion of these supplies than we could otherwise have done, and thus cripple Rommel’s Army.
Incidentally much praise is due to those who so managed our operations that they drained Rommel of supplies without compromising our sources of information; no naval sweep, no submarine patrol and no bombing flight was ordered to be at the right spot at the right time to intercept. Either one or several air reconnaissances sent to different areas – including, of course, the right one – sighted the German-Italian convoy first or seaborne sweeps were ordered which would ‘just happen’ to reach the right spot at the right time, on a neat piece of navigational planning.6
Orange Summaries were the summary of non-operational deciphered signals with comments provided to the First Sea Lord and the heads of naval operational staff twice a day by Section 17M. None of the operational ships, submarines or aircraft on reconnaissance knew they were working with the benefit on Ultra intercepts.7
On one occasion a convoy of five Italian ships sailed from Naples with vital supplies for the Afrika Korps. In this case there was no time for reconnaissance. The decision to attack solely on Ultra went directly to Churchill. The ships were all sunk by a precise attack arousing Axis suspicions. To cover this, a radio message was sent to a fictitious spy in Naples, congratulating him
for his success, which it was known the Germans would be able to decode.
Ultra was to have a direct effect on the Battle of Matapan and several operations by the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. During 1942, through Ultra intercepts, the British were able to foil German plans to sink British ships at Gibraltar using divers and limpet mines. Montague observed; ‘The Italians on the other hand, had four successes in Gibraltar. But then we were not reading their messages!’8 (Here Montague refers to radio traffic, not Enigma which was generally used by shore based command establishments.)
Notes
1 Andrew, Christopher, Secret Service p.449
2 Wetchman.G. p.289
3 West, Nigel, GCHQ. The Secret Wireless War 1900–1986
4 Pearson, John, The Life of Ian Fleming p.98–99
5 Beesly, Patrick, Very Special Intelligence p.142
6 Montague, Ewen, Beyond Top Secret Ultra p.100
7 Ibid p.181
8 Ibid p90
5
Early Clashes
The entry of Italy into the war and the collapse of France came roughly at the same time, presenting the British with several problems. The most pressing was to deal with the French Fleet while it was still crucial to retain Cunningham’s fleet in the Eastern Mediterranean, which had the aim to seek out and destroy Italian naval forces. Cunningham found the news disturbing;
Graver and graver became the news from France until, on June 24th, we heard she had capitulated to Germany and Italy. The next morning, when we were feeling rather depressed I was walking up and down the quarterdeck of the Warspite. I saw an Admiral’s barge approaching, and went to the gangway to receive the Vice Admiral (D), John Tovey. A smiling figure ran up the gangway and greeted me with. ‘Now I know we shall win the war, sir. We have no more allies!’ Such depression as I had, vanished. It was impossible to feel downcast in the face of such optimism.1
Dealing with the fate of the French Fleet, their recent allies, was for the men involved a sad duty. Attempts to persuade the French to disperse their fleet to British, French overseas or American neutral ports met with limited success. Two old battleships, four destroyers, seven submarines and some smaller vessels reached British ports. Cunningham and his staff persuaded Rear-Admiral Godfrey at Alexandria, after much diplomacy, some arm twisting and veiled threats, to decommission his ships.
However the core of the French Fleet were dispersed by Admiral Jean Darlan, the French naval C-in-C; all he would say to his old allies were that the Germans and the Italians ‘would not be allowed’ to have the fleet.2 However Churchill and the war cabinet felt unable to accept the risk of these ships falling into enemy hands. There was a large force in the Algerian Ports of Mers-el-Kebir and Oran. Force H at Gibraltar, under Vice Admiral Somerville was given the task of dealing with these vessels.
Force H had been formed partly to compensate for the loss of the French Mediterranean Fleet. It was able to lend support to the Atlantic or the western Mediterranean as required. At this point Somerville had the battlecruiser Hood and the battleships Resolution and Valiant, the carrier Ark Royal, two cruisers and eleven destroyers.
On the morning of 3 July Somerville’s fleet arrived off the Algerian coast ready to put into action Operation Catapult. The former naval attaché at Paris, Captain C.S. Holland RN was sent ashore to see Admiral Gensoul, the French commander, with a six-hour ultimatum: to join the British, go into internment, sail to the French West Indies and disarm, scuttle their ships or be destroyed. Gensoul thought the British were bluffing and played for time so that his ships could raise steam.
Force H opened fire at 17:30. The battlecruiser Strasbourg, although sustaining some damage, and five destroyers, broke out and managed to reach Toulon. All other ships in the two ports were sunk or crippled within minutes. Stoker Vernon Coles, on board the destroyer HMS Faulknor witnessed the action.
What a bombardment I had never seen anything like it. One of our destroyers out on the starboard wing had got too close inshore that she was coming under the range of their 9-inch gun.
So the Hood just trained her guns to fire on the hill, just below a big fort which was where the firing was coming from. The fort came tumbling down because the blast had undermined its foundations. The French battleship Dunkerque was right under a dockyard crane and the Hood had to destroy it before she could get at Dunkerque. Her first broadside hit the crane; it was just like a matelot dropping. The second salvo hit the Dunkerque. We were firing from a distance of seven or eight miles, which for a 15-inch gun is point-blank range.3
The battleship Bretagne exploded and sank; 37 officers and 940 ratings were killed. Total casualties were 1,297 men killed.4
The next day at dawn, torpedo-carrying Swordfish aircraft from Ark Royal attacked the Dunkerque when doubts were raised over the extent of her damage. A torpedo hit on a tug alongside caused considerable hull damage to the battleship which put her out of action for a year.
In July, two convoys were waiting at Malta carrying men and stores required at Alexandria. The Italians were expected to try to intercept these ships, so the convoys would sail under the cover of a fleet operation. As a diversion Force H would cruise into the western Mediterranean and launch an air attack on Cagliari.
The fleet sailed from Alexandria on the evening of 7 July in three sections. Vice-Admiral Tovey led with the 7th Cruiser Squadron his flagship Orion, with Neptune, Sydney, Gloucester and Liverpool. Next came the fleet flagship Warspite with five destroyers. Behind that some miles astern were the slower battleships Malaya and Royal Sovereign, and the carrier Eagle (19 aircraft embarked) escorted by ten destroyers.
Several submarines were also patrolling the central basin. Early the next day the submarine Phoenix reported two Italian battleships and four destroyers in position between Benghazi and the toe of Italy cruising south. Phoenix never returned from this patrol. Eagle’s air patrols sighted enemy submarines and bombed them.
The British fleet was soon subjected to several high-level air attacks over the next five days. During the course of one forenoon, observers on Warspite counted no fewer than 300 bombs dropped round her in 22 attacks, the closest when 24 bombs fell close along the port side while at the same time twelve close across the starboard bow, and all within 200 yards of the ship.5 Admiral Cunningham was complimentary of the Regia Aeronautica:
To us at the time it appeared that they had some squadrons specially trained for anti-ship work. Their reconnaissance was highly efficient, and seldom failed to find and report our ships at sea. The bombers invariably arrived within an hour or two. They carried out high-level attacks from about 12,000 feet, pressed home in formation in the face of the heavy anti-aircraft fire of the fleet, and for this type of attack their accuracy was very good. We were fortunate to escape being hit.6
On the evening of the 8th one of Tovey’s ships, the Gloucester, was hit, the bomb falling on the bridge, killing the captain and seventeen other men.
Reports from a flying boat late in the afternoon indicated to Cunningham that the Italian force now consisted of 2 battleships, 6 cruisers and 7 destroyers, and was about 60 miles north of Benghazi steering northwest.
Commander Bragadin reveals that the Italian fleet was constantly shadowed by British reconnaissance aircraft. Yet, ‘Italian reconnaissance did not succeed even in locating the enemy formation. This failure left both Supermarina and Admiral Campioni with many grave doubts, extending even to the point of wondering whether the British ships might have withdrawn toward Alexandria.’7
This is an odd statement since the British fleet had been under heavy air attack from aircraft all day. It points to a severe lack of communication between the Regia Marina and Regia Aeronautica, if one had no idea of the location of the enemy the other was attacking.
However in contrast Cunningham’s reconnaissance was working well; another report indicated the Italian fleet hand changed course to the east. This convinced him the enemy were covering convoys to Libya; this, combined with the heavy air a
ttacks on the fleet, caused him to postpone the sailing of the eastbound Malta convoys. His fleet worked up to their best speed to get between the enemy and his base at Taranto and bring them to battle.
At 06:00 on 9 July Warspite was some 60 miles west of Navarino. Leading were Tovey’s cruisers, eight miles astern Warspite, and a similar distance further back the slower battleships and the carrier Eagle.
Two hours later the enemy fleet was reported about 145 miles ahead by flying boats from No 228 Squadron RAF, consisting of two battleships, 16–18 cruisers, and 25–30 destroyers, an accurate report as it turned out. At 13:30 nine Swordfish torpedo bombers of No 824 Squadron from Eagle made their first strike but were unable to find the battleships and attacked a cruiser instead with no success.8 Campioni quickly grasped the fact the aircraft must have come from a carrier. Reconnaissance aircraft were launched from his fleet which soon found the British 80 miles away. The Italian fleet set course toward them.
At about 14:15 Cunningham’s fleet had reached a favourable position between the enemy and the Italian base of Taranto, so he altered course due west. Contact was imminent; it would be the first clash between the British and Italian fleets.
It was not quite the moment I would have chosen to give battle. They had a large number of cruisers, and we, because of the damaged Gloucester which was not fit to fight in serious fighting, had no more than four, which had little more than 50% of their ammunition remaining. Moreover, the speed of approach was limited by the maximum speed of the Royal Sovereign.9
Cunningham ordered Gloucester back to support Eagle, while Warspite strained to catch up with the cruisers.
