by Kahn, David
A dim sun shone; the air was calm except for an occasional puff; the sea was smooth. The sub-lieutenant, Ludovic Kennedy, was struck by the incredible clarity of the light and by the metallic look of the water in the Arctic world, different, he felt, from anywhere else. The sky had an icy cast. Patches of fog blew in from the west, hampering visibility, and large bergs and growlers hindered the search.
At 4:11 P.M., the Bedouin obtained a radio direction-finding bearing of north by east on a transmission made by the unsuspecting trawler. The flotilla kept steaming north. The lookouts swung their heavy binoculars back and forth across their quadrants, arms growing weary, eyes growing tired as they scanned the horizon in hopes of seeing the top of the trawler’s mast. At 5:08 the Admiralty reported that one of its direction-finding stations—at Cupar, in Scotland, some 10 miles west of St. Andrews and almost directly on the meridian of 3° west longitude—had heard the trawler’s transmission on a bearing of due north, which would have put the Lauenburg not at 4° west, as previously reported, but at 3°. But at the Lauenburg’s latitude, 73° north, the distance between 3° and 4° west is only 17.6 nautical miles, and this difference, at Cupar’s distance of 760 miles, was well within the margin of error of radio direction-finding. So Burrough did not alter course.
Two hours later, at 6:50, with the sun a little south of west and low on the horizon, the Nigeria suddenly swung to starboard, due east, perhaps because of fog blowing in from the west. Soon the Tartar recognized this change of course and turned as well. At this moment, “Shorty” Allgood, the leading seaman, whose job was to train the director tower on the enemy, sang out. “There’s something behind that iceberg, sir!” he cried. The lookouts peered ahead. A dark blob with a mast emerged from behind one of the bergs. It was 6:59. The blob was bearing just to the left of dead ahead, at a range of 10 miles.
It soon proved to be the trawler. The Lauenburg was then 2 miles north of her announced position of 73° north and a little more than 13 miles east of her announced position of 4° west; the Tartar, being on the east of the patrol line, was the first to spot her.
On orders, the Tartar crew jumped from defense stations to action stations. Skipwith ordered full speed ahead. In the wheelhouse, the quartermasters at the port and starboard telegraphs rang the engine room. The ship vibrated more strongly to the increased power. White water thrashed at her stern. The Tartar spurted ahead. Seven minutes later she signaled, “Possible two trawlers bearing 358° ahead.” The Bedouin, too, increased to full speed. Two minutes after the Tartar’s message, she had spotted the trawler. She and the Tartar raced for the prize.
The Lauenburg’s crew had been fearing some unpleasantness ever since the radio operator had reported transmissions so strong that they could have come only from nearby vessels. He also may have determined their bearing using the ship’s direction-finder. Braun and Klarman were on deck when one of the lookouts raised an alarm: he had seen the mast of a warship behind an iceberg to the south. At once Captain Gewald turned the Lauenburg to the north and pushed her to her top speed of about 12 knots. The British ships chased her at far greater speed.
On the Tartar, Chief Gunner’s Mate Kelly prepared to follow Skipwith’s admonition to fire at the ship but not hit her. He gave high-altitude practice shells, with a dollop of black powder to make a puff, to the two forward twin 4.7-inch guns of his A and B turrets. He worked out the range and the time for these to explode 75 feet above the ship. He set the shells’ 206 fuse—the latest model, with a dial like a clock on which the time from firing to detonation could be set.
The destroyers soon determined the direction of the Lauenburg’s flight, and at 7:01 the Bedouin signaled, “Enemy’s course 360°,” or due north. Two minutes later she opened fire, and a minute after that the Tartar did.
At the same time, the Tartar’s radioman, listening on the Lauenburg’s usual frequency of 12,040 kilocycles, heard the trawler broadcast the international radio call CT, meaning “You should not come alongside.” The call stopped almost immediately—not that the British would have heeded it anyway. The Nigeria began firing her 6-inch guns. The shells from all these ships exploded above or splashed ahead and to both sides of the Lauenburg 50 to 100 yards from her, as she steamed frantically away from the on-rushing British. The Tartar closed in.
Aboard the Lauenburg, the sight of three gray warships racing toward her, foam peeling from their bows, flames bursting from their guns, struck fear into the crew. Some members recognized that the shells being fired were not real—they took them for warning shots—and thus not intended to sink their ship. Thinking at first that they might make a stand, they broke out small arms, mostly automatic pistols, from their grease-paper wrappings. But then the ludicrousness of this attempt overcame them, and they dropped the puny weapons on the mess table. Nor did they attempt to man the feeble deck weapons with which their vessel had been equipped: discretion was the better part of valor.
Gewald and all but two members of the crew climbed into the two lifeboats and quickly rowed as far away from the ship as they could. The two men left on board, including the mate, threw overboard the most precious item on the ship, the Enigma, and then stuffed documents into the coal-burning furnace of a boiler.
The Tartar ceased fire at 7:12 and sped toward the Lauenburg, coming alongside at almost 32 knots. The two men left aboard offered no resistance and willingly took the destroyer’s lines. By then the order had been given, “Boarding party muster on forecastle.”
The head of the boarding party was the ship’s navigating officer, Lieutenant T. Hugh P. Wilson, nicknamed “Spider,” a brown-eyed, bushy-browed, popular career officer. He was glad to be in the Royal Navy. Like the others in the Senior Service, he felt equal to anyone in the realm; their place in the hierarchy of the establishment assured them of this status, and as officers they were gentlemen. He had joined the Tartar at her builders’ and on September 1, 1939, had been promoted to lieutenant, the basic naval rank, which meant that he could serve as officer of the watch on any ship. He had spent much of the war up to the Lofotens raid in tedious patrol duty on the destroyer. For work in the chart room, which was warm but drafty, and for the long hours on the open bridge, he had sewn a duffel skirt onto his duffel jacket and was thereafter called, whenever he wore it, “the Widow Twankey.” Skipwith and the first lieutenant (the second in command) chose him to command the boarding party probably because they wanted a qualified officer and because he was the next in seniority.
As the Tartar and the Lauenburg rocked side by side in the slight swell, with the low sunlight diffusing through the haze, the great white wall of the ice gleaming in the distance, and the sounds of the gunfire still echoing in the Britishers’ brains, Wilson looked down from the forecastle and saw that some of his boarding party, under Kelly, its second in command, were clambering over the guard rail onto the trawler. “Come along, Wilson,” he said to himself. “You’re supposed to be in charge of this lot.” And he jumped down onto the trawler.
Unfortunately, the rising and falling of the ships in the swell caused him to misjudge the distance. His left foot struck the fish hold and was bent back against his shin, splitting his boot and pushing the toes back. In pain, he dragged himself up into the chart house and commanded the boarding party from there.
Some of its members checked the sea cocks and found them closed; no other men but the two first seen on deck were aboard. Kelly examined the ship and found her immaculate. The diesels were ticking smoothly: one of the ratings told Kelly they could have run forever. Her generators were running and her lights were on. The boarders found the handguns, still on their grease paper, abandoned on the mess table. There were some ashes in the boiler furnace, but all over the floor of the wheelhouse and chart house was paper. The boarders were wading in it.
Soon after the Tartar’s men boarded the Lauenburg, the other three warships arrived at the scene, and the Jupiter sent over a boat with G.C.&C.S.’s Allon Bacon. He appeared on board the trawler, saw the m
asses of paper lying about, and said to Wilson, “For God’s sake, man, look at all this material. Pack it up!”
“What?” replied Wilson. “All this rubbish?”
But Bacon wanted it all, so Wilson told his men to get on with it, ordering Kelly to collect every piece of paper with writing on it. The sailors kept asking Wilson, “What do you want all this rubbish for?” As he perched on a stool in the chart house, they reported to him on the food they found in the refrigerator and the sealskins that were curing in barrels. Kelly told them not to turn on any other lights for fear of a booby trap. After about an hour on board, they had collected thirteen mail sacks full of documents, together with photographs of Hitler and Raeder. Kelly liberated the lamp from Captain Gewald’s cabin. The three small deck guns were removed with their ammunition, as well as the small arms and radio equipment. Everything went back to the Tartar.
Admiral Burrough had decided not to bring the captured trawler back to Britain with him. He did not wish to immobilize a destroyer to escort her, and he feared that if a German aircraft sighted her with a destroyer or on a strange course, much of the value of the intelligence gained might be lost. The Lauenburg’s crew, the rest of whom had been picked up by the Bedouin, had been taken below at once so that they could not see what was happening to their ship. When Bacon said he was satisfied that the trawler had been thoroughly searched, Burrough ordered her sunk. The Tartar sent torpedomen aboard with scuttling charges. But they failed to explode, and the torpedomen’s rivals, the gun crews, shouted their derision. Then it was their turn, and at a range of 500 yards Kelly’s men slammed four semi-armor-piercing shells from B turret into the Lauenburg at the waterline. At 9 P.M., in thick fog, the ill-fated ship descended to a grave a thousand fathoms deep. Gewald was brought to the Tartar and put in a cabin over the propellers. Kelly gave him a light, and he lit up a cigar, greatly enjoying the first drag.
Bacon had the mail sacks brought to Captain Skipwith’s main cabin, a room larger than his sea cabin and one that sometimes served as a surgeon’s operating room. There Bacon sorted the captured documents and pieces of paper. Among the vast volume of charts and orders and gun manuals, he found what he was looking for: a table for the July home waters Enigma key, plus two sheets for the plugboard, one for July 1 to 15, one for July 16 to 31, and a sheet of internal settings.
The Tartar and the other ships arrived back at Scapa two days later. Bacon was taken to the Dunluce Castle, a forty-year-old passenger ship converted into a depot ship that was a regular stop for the ferry that made the hour-long trip across Pentland Firth to the railhead at Thurso on the Scottish mainland. From there, carrying his precious documents in a big canvas bag, he rode to Rosyth, the major naval base near Edinburgh, where a scrambler telephone enabled him to call Bletchley and tell the cryptanalysts what he had and when he would be arriving. He took the night train.
Hinsley and the naval cryptanalysts assembled, and early on Wednesday, July 2, Bacon came in with his canvas bag, flung it on the table, and opened it. “Here it is,” he said. They all had a look, and within five minutes the cryptanalysts had taken the documents to Hut 8 next door. These papers would enable them to read July messages and so were immediately useful. At once the solution times fell. From about forty hours on July 1, to which they had risen when the München’s June keys had expired, they fell on the afternoon of July 2 to under three hours. Hinsley felt pleased that it had all worked out so well. But he couldn’t allow himself to wallow in self-congratulation. He had work to do.
15
THE GREAT MAN HIMSELF
THE CAPTURED DOCUMENTS FROM THE U-110 AND THE TWO weather ships and the subsequent acceleration of solutions had no immediate direct effect on the Battle of the Atlantic. In June 1941, when solution times declined to three or four hours, roughly the same number of tons succumbed to U-boats as in May, when solution times ran three or four days. The same situation obtained in July and August, with their respectively fast and slow solution times. In fact, in the fast-solution months of June and July, U-boats sank almost exactly the same tonnage in the North Atlantic as in the slow-solution months of May and August. As these comparisons demonstrate, intelligence did not always rule in the war against the U-boats. Other factors outweighed it. The July–August loss of tonnage fell to under a third of the May–June figure for reasons unrelated to B.P. More escorts were available and were accompanying convoys uninterruptedly across the Atlantic. The escorts’ experience made them more efficient. The minimum speed of ships sailing independently was raised from 13 to 15 knots. Air cover was increased. Also fewer U-boats were in the North Atlantic because some had been withdrawn to fight shipping to the Soviet Union, the new U-boat crews were less experienced, and Hitler was anxious to avoid clashes with American warships.
But in spite of the failure of codebreaking intelligence to contribute much to the Atlantic battle at that time, its potential to do so still seemed great. It might yet permit diverting convoys away from the U-boat wolfpacks that became ever more likely as the Germans built more and more submarines. So Hinsley, and Hut 8, continued their efforts.
And bit by bit they were rewarded. The insight gained into German naval communications procedures and the capture of the Short Signal Book from the U-110 enabled the Hut 8 cryptanalysts to concoct and test cribs more efficiently. They were aided by the growing number of kisses, especially in the Dockyard Cipher and in weather systems.
Conditions were further improved by an influx of men and machines. The number of bombes rose to eight by the end of June. All of this meant that after the first week in August, when cryptanalysis resumed, Hut 8 had mastered the Home Waters key. Its messages were at first not read currently, but after mid-August they were solved every day, most of them within thirty-six hours.
This success was made the sweeter by appreciatory visits to Bletchley Park. The first sea lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, passed through on August 9, and a month later the great man himself, Prime Minister Churchill, appeared.
He had long been intensely interested in the results of code-breaking. It was into his hands that the Russian naval attaché had placed the Magdeburg codebook in October 1914, and he had witnessed the first successes it brought the Royal Navy. In November 1924, when he had just become chancellor of the exchequer following a Conservative landslide, he pleaded with the foreign secretary to be allowed to see the intercepts. “I have studied this information over a long period and more attentively than probably any other Minister has done,” he wrote. “… I attach more importance to them as a means of forming a true judgement of public policy in these spheres than to any other source of knowledge at the disposal of the State.” In September 1940, four months after he became prime minister, Churchill ordered that he be given “daily all Enigma messages.” This proved impracticable, but by the summer of 1941 he was getting each day a selection of several dozen, together with reports on the progress of cryptanalyses, brought to him in a special dispatch box, buff-colored to distinguish it from the black boxes for other official papers. The box was to be unlocked only by Churchill, who carried the key on his key ring. Extremely watchful about access to these papers, he minuted once: “I am astounded at the vast congregation who are invited to study these matters,” and he urged restrictions. This source of information was disguised at first under the codename BONIFACE, but later ULTRA came to be used as the collective cover name for the solutions of the Enigma intercepts. With those in the know, he used the solutions vigorously. He discussed them at his daily meetings with his chiefs of staff, fired off messages based on them to his field commanders, and in general used them to the maximum in running the war.
So on Saturday, September 6, 1941, as Churchill was driving to a friend’s country estate for the weekend, he stopped off at Bletchley Park. Some thirty to forty of the higher-level workers gathered around him on the grass as he stood on the trunk of a felled tree near Hut 6 and said, in his incomparable tones, and with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, “You all look
very innocent.” The grateful and security-conscious prime minister praised them as the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled. He related a few stories of how their work had helped him and emphasized the great value of their accomplishments. Then he visited a few of the huts. In Naval Section, where a nervous Alan Turing was introduced to him, he was shown as a prize exhibit the Dockyard-Enigma kisses.
Gordon Welchman had, upon instructions, prepared a five-minute talk. He began, “I would like to make three points.” He had completed only two when G.C.&C.S.’s second in command, Commander Edward Travis, interrupted: “That’s enough, Welchman.” Churchill winked at the speaker and said, “I think there was a third point, Welchman.” Welchman presented John Herivel to Churchill as one of the solvers of Enigma. Herivel was thrilled.
Word of the visit raced through the Park. Those not present at the prime minister’s speech heard that he had said “something great.” The episode boosted morale. It was just as well that the Bletchleyites did not hear his remark to Sir Stewart Menzies, who as head of the Secret Intelligence Service was formally the director of G.C.&C.S., after viewing the unkempt crew of workers: “I know I told you to leave no stone unturned to find the necessary staff, but I didn’t mean you to take me so literally!”
In addition to lifting spirits, the visit had a more significant effect. Back in April, the Kriegsmarine had slightly modified the Home Waters key for U-boats, probably to keep other German units from eavesdropping on submarine messages. This gave Hut 8 no trouble. In October, however, the navy set up a separate U-boat message cipher net called TRITON, which delayed the British solutions a little. The extra work entailed in solving the new settings perhaps contributed to the overworking of the punched-card section of Hut 8, compelling it to cut out night shifts. This delayed the recovery of any naval keys by at least twelve hours every day. To this serious problem were added others: failure to supply enough women to work on the bombes and insufficient personnel to decipher a Luftwaffe key for North Africa, which was providing data about General Erwin Rommel’s air unit’s order of battle, supplies, and tactical policy—all of great value as Britain was preparing an offensive. Yet no one seemed to be doing anything about these problems.
