One Day in August

by David O'Keefe

  With Operation Archery, the age of combined operations truly began. All three services—the British Army, the Royal Navy and the RAF—worked together to plan and execute it. Right from the beginning, each service provided a force commander and staff to integrate its particular contribution into the overall or combined plan to achieve the common goal—a process that is normal now in planning military operations but was startlingly new at the time. Moreover, Archery laid the groundwork for the coming raids at Bruneval and St-Nazaire—and, in August 1942, for Operation Jubilee at Dieppe.

  Publicly, the aim of Operation Archery was the destruction of the fisheries on South Vaagso and the tiny island of Maaloy, which guarded the waterway known as the Ulvesund—the sound that separates these beautiful but isolated islands from the Norwegian coast.19 These fisheries provided minerals that were used to manufacture two essential products for the German navy: vitamin supplements for U-boat crews long deprived of sunlight, and glycerine for the explosive charges in submarine torpedoes. Unlike Operation Anklet farther north in Lofoten, where little resistance was expected, the Germans had garrisoned the village of Vaagso in respectable numbers, so Mountbatten prepared for a fight—an engagement welcomed by the men of Lieutenant Colonel John Durnford-Slater’s veteran No. 3 Commando unit who had participated in the first Lofoten raid and would later be called upon again for Dieppe. According to the plan, the commandos would launch an amphibious raid on four areas to knock out the German gun positions and defences as well as the built-up area in South Vaagso. To support the attack, the Royal Navy sent a cruiser squadron with destroyers, troopships and a submarine. The RAF supplied several squadrons of Blenheim and Beaufighter aircraft, marking the first time it contributed significantly to a Combined Operations plan.

  However, the imperative of the operation was the pinch—either during the capture or sinking of German patrol boats, trawlers and merchant vessels or on land, with the commandos targeting a wireless station and the local Kriegsmarine headquarters, each housed in a hotel, in an attempt to scrounge the critical code books and other materials Bletchley Park urgently needed. The operational instructions prepared for Operation Archery included this carefully crafted advisory:

  It is very important that ships, particularly escort ships, armed trawlers, etc., be prevented from destroying or throwing overboard any papers, etc. On boarding, a thorough search is to be made for papers especially those found in the charthouse, wheel-house or captain’s cabin. All papers are to be brought off and great care is to be taken to avoid damaging such documents or moving the keys of typewriters or simply machines as the value of their capture may be reduced thereby. The discovery of any of the above must be reported at once to the rear admiral commanding 10th Cruiser Squadron. It is of the greatest importance that this signal should NOT be made in plain language.20

  With the pinch net spread, John Godfrey attached a liaison officer from the Naval Section to the raid in an effort to home in on potential targets. On December 18, just days before the twin raids, Lieutenant Commander Allon Bacon, the veteran of the Lauenburg pinch and the officer sent by Godfrey to retrieve the material from U-110, evaluated the potential pinch targets offered by both operations.21 The resourceful Bacon based his assessment on the intelligence provided by a Norwegian fisherman whose brother worked for the Special Operations Executive. He concluded that both operations offered good pinch opportunities.22 “In view of this report which provides 4 possible Z targets and greater speed than the Northern Anklet party,” he decided that “this party i.e. Archery offers best chances.”23 Most significant, Operation Archery appears to be the first time that military forces took an active part in a pinch alongside their naval counterparts.

  Another conspicuous “first” was Mountbatten’s decision to attach one of his own staff officers, Royal Navy Lieutenant Commander Ackroyd Norman Palliser de Costobadie, to the raid. Better known as “Dick” to his colleagues, De Costobadie had earned the Distinguished Service Cross for “good judgement and initiative” while he commanded the flat-bottomed Royal Navy river gunboat HMS Locust during the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940.24 After his investiture by the King at Buckingham Palace at the height of the Battle of Britain, he joined Combined Operations, where he worked on the staff of the naval adviser responsible for the selection of targets and the creation of outline plans for all Mountbatten’s operations.25 His attachment to Operation Archery did not seem curious at the time because the staff at Combined Operations were still learning their trade, and observers were commonplace.

  When the day for the mission arrived, Mountbatten tasked De Costobadie with commanding the boarding party slated to protect Bacon while he sought out and pinched the vital material. This move clearly reflected Mountbatten’s personal interest in the raid and its crucial importance to Combined Operations—spurred by the potential “political” gain for his organization should the pinched materials provide another triumph.

  It was not until he was on board HMS Onslow that De Costobadie found that the ad hoc collection of officers and ratings provided from the destroyer’s crew seemed to have no training at all as a boarding party.26 “I was more than worried, I was in fact horrified. They consisted to the best of my recollection of one Sub-Lieutenant, one Midshipman, one Petty Officer, one Leading Seaman, three seamen and two stokers. None of these men appeared trained. They turned up when paraded in any sort of rig, so I roared them up and sent them off to get into proper rig.”27 He was in an invidious situation: he was a guest on the ship, with no knowledge of the men now under his command. He would have much preferred to go into battle with a specially organized and trained pinch unit, but at this eleventh hour he had no choice but to make the best of the situation.28

  The raid kicked off after a short delay caused by foul winter weather over Scapa Flow and following a brief address from Mountbatten, who reputedly told the troops in his closing remarks: “One last thing. When my ship, the destroyer Kelly, went down off Crete earlier this year, the Germans machine-gunned the survivors in the water. There’s absolutely no need to treat them gently on my account. Good luck to you all!”29

  The Onslow headed into Vaagso Fjord. It did not have to wait long for a victim. Directly in front of the oncoming destroyer was the German trawler Fohn, which on first sighting turned and fled, accompanied by two other vessels, steaming up the inlet and firing at the British aircraft overhead while its crew desperately threw documents over the sides. When the collection of ships reached a bend in the waterway, they turned hard to port and beached themselves, with Onslow closing fast. Within minutes, the order “Away All Boarding Parties” bellowed, and both De Costobadie and Bacon stood amidships on the destroyer’s motor launch, steaming for shore. 30 They quickly crossed the three hundred yards to the Fohn with rifles, pistols and bayonets at the ready. By the time they reached the stranded trawler, most of the crew had leapt ashore, positioning themselves across a road from where they sniped at the boarding party. Without a properly trained commando unit, taking over the Fohn proved difficult at first. Eventually the boarding party forced the remaining Germans to flee, and De Costobadie and his band moved on to the next ship while Bacon was left to search the Fohn and execute the pinch.

  Commandos in action during the pinch raid on Vaagso, Operation Archery, which brought back a “precious haul.” Dramatically posed action photos like this were used to promote the commandos and Combined Operations, and build up morale at home, while at the same time helping to deflect attention from the pinch imperative of the raid. (photo credits 5.2)

  Stepping over the body of the captain, Bacon entered Fohn‘s wireless room, which yielded nothing. He proceeded to the captain’s cabin, where “the application of a jemmy to the Master’s desk produced the highly-prized list of Enigma daily settings.”31A more detailed search of his wardrobe revealed “the current bigram tables encased in a celluloid container and stowed away amongst his well laundered shirts.”32 Bacon immediately placed the documents, printed in soluble ink, inside
a double-skinned, watertight rubber bag specially made for this purpose and moved on to the other ships.33

  Not as lucky on these vessels, the commando party quickly made their way back to Onslow in time to witness the destroyer’s four-inch guns obliterate all the German craft—part of the pre-arranged plan to cover their tracks. On shore, explosions and fires raged in the wake of the simultaneous successful operations by Durnford-Slater’s No. 3 Commandos. The scale of the destruction they inflicted shocked the German commander days later when he toured the smouldering ruins in South Vaagso. Everywhere he looked, German barracks, telephone exchanges, gun positions, the wireless station, fish canneries and oil storage tanks all lay in smashed and burnt-out ruins, as did the Hotel Ulvesand, which had housed the German headquarters. But the level of the devastation hid the truly vital thing that had taken place; it gave no indication that a pinch had occurred—or that a “precious haul” had returned to England.

  The prized materials—some of them seized from another patrol boat, the Donner, and by another boarding party from HMS Offa, coupled with material from the patrol vessel Geier—made these two operations the most successful pinch raid of the war thus far.34 At least two complete three-rotor Enigma machines, parts of a third, extra rotors, and a variety of tables, key sheets, RHV emergency and WW weather code books, short signals, and the long-sought-after bigram tables ended up in Alan Turing’s hands by New Year’s Day 1942.35 This material paid huge dividends, enabling the cryptographers at Bletchley Park to break the Kriegsmarine Home Waters, Mediterranean, Norwegian and Baltic keys, and the cryptanalysts to gain invaluable insights into German encryption methods and technology. The only black spot was the failure to uncover anything substantial connected to the four-rotor Enigma machine. With fingers still firmly crossed, the British moved on into a new year and a new war.

  On December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched their surprise attack on the American Pacific fleet based at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and ushered in a new era that took the European conflict worldwide. In the House of Commons that night, Winston Churchill seemed relieved, proclaiming with almost boyish glee what he saw as the course of the eventual Allied victory. “In the past we have had a light which flickered” in the atmosphere, he said; “in the present we have a light which flames, and in the future there will be a light which shines over all the land and sea.” 36

  Indeed, the prime minister had reason to be ecstatic. For close to two years he had desperately courted the United States, using every means at his disposal to bring the sleeping giant into a formal, overt alliance. Churchill’s campaign of covert subversion, propaganda and diplomatic cajoling had already brought the two nations closer, with President Franklin Roosevelt extending what help he could during the isolationist period by trading much-needed “Destroyers for Bases” and entering into the all-encompassing Lend-Lease agreement. Meanwhile, Godfrey and the Admiralty cozied up to the “neutral” U.S. fleet on convoy and intelligence matters. The sum total of this relationship saw the Americans adopt an increasingly belligerent stance towards Germany and Japan as 1941 wore on. With luck, one of those enemy countries would react with an incident that would sway the isolationist American public opinion to favour a declaration of war. The devastating bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan was perhaps more than Britain and Roosevelt had bargained for, but it had a galvanizing effect on the Americans. They were now set on war—an attitude reinforced two days later when Hitler joined Japan and declared war on the United States.

  But the British still had a long year ahead, during which they would be more or less on their own. The massive U.S. industrial potential was not yet organized for the war effort and could have no immediate impact on the war situation. The British would have to survive on their own all through 1942, until the retooling of the American economy shifted into high gear and the much-anticipated American troops, aircraft and naval vessels reached the United Kingdom. Once there, they would help build up the forces for the eventual liberation of Europe.

  For the Admiralty, the widening war immediately brought with it increased responsibilities, which in some cases were impossible to meet. Life was dire in the weeks and months following Pearl Harbor: the garrison of Hong Kong quickly fell to the surging Japanese army, as did the Dutch East Indies with their vital oil and rubber resources. At sea, the pride of the Royal Navy, the battleships HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, Godfrey’s former flagship, succumbed to Japanese air attacks off Malaysia, leaving little doubt of the vulnerability of surface ships to Japan’s air power. Meanwhile, the Japanese fleet launched carrier raids from Hawaii to Australia and into the Indian Ocean at Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). In February, the British bastion at Singapore fell to the Japanese in the most humiliating capitulation in British history.

  As a result of all this sudden activity on the other side of the world, the Royal Navy found itself in an exceedingly precarious situation, overstretched in all aspects and with ever-increasing demands worldwide. First and foremost, it had to maintain the vital North Atlantic convoy routes, deliver convoys through the treacherous Arctic Ocean to Russia, and keep lines of communication open and supplies flowing to its armies in the field in Gibraltar, Persia, Iraq and India, and in West Africa, East Africa and North Africa. With the fall of the Dutch East Indies to the Japanese, the vital Middle East and Persian Gulf oil reserves became more vulnerable to submarine attacks. An already overburdened anti-submarine force now had to reinforce the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf area, where any blows against tankers and the loss of their precious supplies were likely to produce a paralyzing effect on the Allies. The answer in part was to increase the number of escort vessels and long-range aircraft covering the convoys’ routes and to keep up pressure on the U-boats.

  Unlike modern submarines that operate fully submerged, the Second World War version was in fact a submersible vessel. When not involved in direct combat, it had to sail on the surface in order to operate its diesel engines, maintain a decent speed, and provide fresh air for the crew and its batteries. Although aircraft anti-submarine armaments were not yet as lethal as they would become later in the war, the simple appearance of a warplane overhead was enough to force a submarine to dive. Once underwater, a U-boat’s speed declined by half or two-thirds, meaning that the ships in the convoy the U-boat was stalking could escape, even as the U-boat used up its precious fresh-air supply and battery power. Eventually it would have to surface, where it would be at the mercy of any aircraft or surface ships in the area.

  The convoys’ escort vessels, including destroyers and corvettes, were the most effective protection against U-boats, particularly given the constantly improving British anti-submarine weapons: depth charges, short-range shipboard radar and direction-finding “Huff Duff” instruments. But supplies of these escort ships were limited, leaving convoys hopelessly exposed to organized groups of U-boat wolf packs unless air power could pick up the slack. Unfortunately, there was not enough of anything to go around, and the growing demand for aircraft brought the Admiralty into direct conflict with the RAF, which required the same type of long-range, heavy-payload planes for the nascent bombing campaign over Germany.

  Part of Churchill’s relief over the recent pinches stemmed from the fact that, thanks to the resumed flow of Ultra, he no longer had to divert his attention and scarce resources away from his most recent panacea—the strategic bombing of Germany. Ultra offered him a tool he could wield to manage his strategic assets more effectively and to engage in operations and policies based on calculated rather than blind risks.

  The tremendous intelligence and pinch successes of 1941, capped off by the Lofoten and Vaagso raids, ushered in a new era the following year for both the Naval Intelligence Division and Bletchley Park. Not only had the Bletchley boffins broken into Germany’s Enigma via the crib-fed Bombes, but lesser codes, the ones originally used to get in the back door, began to contribute intelligence dividends themselves. This payoff forced Godfrey to revamp his pinch priorities. Over the year, hi
s NID, working in conjunction with Frank Birch at the Naval Section, had created a simple rubric to denote their vital needs. Using a letter-and-number method, the letters A to G represented the level of importance of the particular code and cipher, while the number marked the veracity of the actual information obtained. In this scheme, A represented the most secret codes and ciphers; B, small-ship ciphers; C, naval air codes; D, merchant navy codes; E, meteorological codes; F, miscellaneous; and G, Armistice Commission codes.37 Intelligence derived from naval Enigma remained, as it had been since the beginning of the war, as A1, but now, with the ascendancy of the “lower-level” codes in the cryptographic realm, RHV—the emergency hand cipher used when Enigma broke down, and which changed very rarely—appeared as A2; short-signal codes (E-bars, B-bars and the WW weather codes) as A3; Kriegsmarine general cipher as A4; and the Werftschlussel dockyard cipher as B1.38 Each one of these codes and ciphers could now be tapped to provide cribs for the Bombes or for their own intrinsic value.

  The cumulative results of all this pinching and decoding during the previous twelve months proved staggering: by year’s end in 1941, almost every area of the Kriegsmarine’s operations was under British surveillance to one degree or another. Godfrey refused to push his luck any further. On January 20, 1942, he convened a meeting with his senior staff and with Frank Birch, where he laid out a pivotal change in pinch policy.39 It was an extremely difficult time, despite the recent success at Lofoten and Vaagso, because ominous warnings about the imminent introduction of the four-rotor Enigma machine continued to surface. A new series of “four-rotor duds”—setting mistakes by German operators using the new machine as though it were a three-rotor—confirmed the suspicion that some U-boats stationed in the Atlantic already carried the machine.40 Then, just a week before the meeting, an intercepted message indicated that some surface vessels too were using the machine.41