One Day in August

by David O'Keefe

  If pinch raids offered the only viable short-term option to feed Bletchley Park’s voracious appetite for German code and cipher materials during the four-rotor blackout, Mountbatten’s Combined Operations provided the ideal vehicle to carry out the raids. Dickie Mountbatten, who had built his reputation in part on his work in signals intelligence, understood what was at stake when at the end of 1941 he hired Jock Hughes-Hallett specifically to create a raiding programme on several targets along the coast of France.

  By the new year, outline plans were shaping up for raids on Bruneval, St-Nazaire, Bayonne and Dieppe, among other targets. And here John Godfrey came in too. Early in the war, he had recognized that, in a raid, detailed knowledge of the terrain ashore was crucial to the success of any amphibious operation, so in the summer of 1940 he had established the innocuously named Inter-Services Topographical Department (ISTD)1 to create intelligence work-ups on selected areas. Each of these reports was first class for its time, containing impressively thick planning dossiers and maps, photos and diagrams, local postcards, and even family holiday snapshots submitted by the general public of both the natural and urban environments. In any military operation, a fundamental understanding of the terrain is essential to success, and the creation of the ISTD showed Godfrey at his professional best. The Topographical Department rapidly became his pet project—and ultimately his crowning glory during the war.

  Almost every Wednesday morning, John Godfrey climbed into his chauffeured staff car with briefcase in hand and headed north to Bletchley. The trip that began in the rubble-strewn and, at times, smoke-filled streets of London ended roughly ninety minutes later in the splendour of the Oxfordshire countryside. The journey provided the Director of Naval Intelligence with a rare opportunity to engage in uninterrupted study and peaceful reflection as well as a short visit with his wife, Margaret, and their eldest daughter, Katherine.

  In the best nepotistic traditions of the intelligence world, Godfrey had placed first his wife and then his daughter in support positions at Bletchley Park, as had his RAF counterpart on the Joint Intelligence Committee, Air Marshal Charles Medhurst, whose daughter Rozanne worked alongside Kate and the “boffins” in the huts. In his other roles as a member of the Joint Intelligence Committee and of they Committee, which set policy for signals intelligence, Godfrey found that these regular visits to Bletchley allowed him to keep abreast of the latest developments in both the Naval Section and Hut 8, where he liaised with Frank Birch, Alan Turing and others involved in cryptanalysis. Just days before he announced his January 1942 change in pinch policy, Godfrey could rightly boast to Bletchley’s overlord, Stewart Menzies, “I have seen more of the workings of B.P. than any other Director of Intelligence and probably more than any outside authority.”2

  The secret home of British cryptography was just the first stop on his Wednesday route. Later in the day, Godfrey would drive the forty miles into Oxford to visit the Inter-Services Topographical Department, where he kept an office with a direct link to Room 39 in the Old Admiralty Building in London. Godfrey transferred Margaret, after her brief tenure at Bletchley Park, to the ISTD, and there she very ably played much the same role for her husband as Ian Fleming did in the Naval Intelligence Division.3

  The role of the Topographical Department was to act as a central collecting, collating and compilation department for all the topographical knowledge bearing on a proposed site for amphibious assault.4 The concept stemmed from yet another of Blinker Hall’s First World War ideas, where he recruited civilians from the universities to create a series of geographical handbooks. Godfrey’s Second World War version occupied several buildings in the Schools of Geography in Manchester and Mansfield colleges and in the Bodleian Library. For Godfrey, the location was key: first, he needed to tap into the brightest minds that Oxford and Cambridge had to offer, much in the same way that the Government Code and Cypher School had stocked Bletchley Park’s cryptographic endeavours; and second, it gave him full access to the machinery of Oxford University Press, which printed, among other highly sensitive documents, the Most Secret Royal Navy signals code books. By 1942, the ISTD accounted for more than two-thirds of all the material published by the university press, including a series of pamphlets known as the Inter-Services Information Series (ISIS) and special topographical intelligence work-ups on potential landing areas, which were used in the planning for amphibious operations.5

  Ironically, it was Winston Churchill’s return to the Admiralty as First Lord on the opening day of the war that had set the wheels in motion for the creation of Godfrey’s Topographical Department. The signal sent by the Admiralty board announcing emphatically and defiantly that “Winston is back!” came as both a blessing and a curse. Not all members of the Royal Navy interpreted the magisterial pronouncement as a “second coming.” Churchill’s return put the Royal Navy on its toes and drove some members, such as Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord, and John Godfrey, to look for ways to harness or at least channel Churchill’s notorious proclivity for incessant meddling and “wildcat operations.”6 They could only double their efforts when, in May of the following year, he was also appointed prime minister.

  Godfrey had initially created the Inter-Services Topographical Department—with ample backing from the chiefs of staff—in the wake of the British debacle during the German invasion of Norway. The specific goal was to prevent another Gallipoli, the 1915 tragedy in which Allied troops were massacred partly because of their profound ignorance of the Turkish terrain, defences and enemy forces.7 As he would later write:

  Every year between 1919 and 1939 the staff college spent a month or six weeks examining every aspect of combined operations and opposed landings. We knew in 1939 how to conduct an amphibious operation, what preparations were needed, and what to avoid, but at Gallipoli we were ignorant of [the] nature of the country over which we were to fight, of the condition of the defences we were called upon to assault, and of the morale, equipment and order of battle of the Turkish Army.8

  He records in his unpublished memoir that the chiefs of staff, the Joint Planning Staff, the Joint Intelligence Committee and the Joint Intelligence Staff all “carefully curbed … Churchill’s appetite for diversionary operations … but not until the ISTD … had put in a great deal of hard preparatory work.”9 Ironically—and happily for Godfrey—it was precisely Churchill’s interest in these “diversionary operations and landings on hostile shores” that accelerated the growth of his new organization.10

  Godfrey’s vision for the ISTD was for it to act as a combined intelligence body, or as a clearing house that would cut across the partisan rivalries that had plagued operational planning and execution during the First World War, and provide the essential intelligence needed to carry out successful amphibious combined operations.11 He hoped that, when the chiefs of staff and the joint planners could not effectively dissuade or contain Churchill in one of his ill-conceived schemes, they could at least satisfy his orders and filter the idea through a proper planning process—one founded on solid intelligence provided by all three services and coordinated under one roof. “Total War deserved Total Intelligence,” Godfrey believed, and the Topographical Department gave him the machine for serving up information on unusual topics at very short notice—a valuable commodity with Churchill at the helm.12 At the same time, Godfrey knew he was crossing a Rubicon of sorts by delving into this domain: the work, while decidedly military in character, came under naval direction and could easily “ricochet on the DNI and Admiralty if anything [went] wrong.”13

  From its inception, the beaches, the landing areas and, above all, the ports along the Channel coast were the “cardinal interest” for the Topographical Department.14 Yet when Dudley Pound requested a full work-up on the French coastline to prepare for the Dunkirk evacuation in late May 1940, Godfrey discovered that his Naval Intelligence Division had no information to share; nothing in advance of this historic moment had required intelligence on an area they expected would remain in Allied han
ds. Immediately, he called on several captains from a British shipping firm that regularly plied the Channel for their expertise and dispatched two reconnaissance teams to scour the coastline for the much-needed intelligence.15 With the German armies advancing towards them, one team covered the area from Le Havre to Dieppe while the other raced from Dieppe to Cherbourg.16 Given the circumstances, both reports were crude, hasty endeavours, with photographs of the terrain pasted onto folio-sized brown paper and linked by a simple text. “It was I think inadequate and shabbily dressed compared with the elaborate productions used later,” Godfrey recalled, “but at least it was a start.”

  Meanwhile, Godfrey sent Ian Fleming to France as well, though not to do scouting along the coast. Even as the German invaders advanced towards Paris, Fleming was in the capital trying to maintain links with the French navy and to ascertain Admiral François Darlan’s intentions with regard to the disposition of his fleet in the event that France fell to the enemy. Arriving to find that Darlan had moved his headquarters to Tours, on the west coast of France, Fleming removed the Royal Navy’s Top Secret teleprinter from the British embassy and the cash contents from the Secret Intelligence Service safe in the city and beat a hasty retreat towards Bordeaux, keeping Godfrey informed on the rapidly unfolding events via wireless. The man who travelled with him and helped him signal Godfrey was Patrick Beesly, Godfrey’s future biographer.17

  Initially, the Inter-Services Topographical Department had been greeted with apathy in wartime Britain. But with Churchill’s increasing demands for operations of all sorts and the creation of Combined Operations to carry them out, the unit swelled from its first seventeen members after it was set up on June 12, 1940, to seventy-two by the end of 1941 and eventually to 541 by 1944. It became, as Godfrey remembered, “an inter-service monster” that, as his biographer notes, signalled a bid for “empire building on a grand scale.” 18 From June 1940 onwards, “no single Commando, hardly an agent of SOE and certainly no major Allied force set foot on German or Italian held territory without the benefit of detailed information about the terrain and its natural and man-made features and characteristics supplied by ISTD.” 19 By the time 1942 rolled around, the monster had taken on several heads and was “continually bombarded with requests for topographical data about possible landings and enterprises, many of them emanating from the Prime Minister’s fertile mind.”20 Churchill was not the only suitor: all three services, along with the SIS, the Special Operations Executive and the Joint Planning Staff, made regular use of the information it provided, as did its greatest client, Mountbatten’s Combined Operations Headquarters.

  The association with Combined Operations predated Mountbatten’s tenure; it had started immediately after the organization was established. At first, Combined Operations had been inclined to produce its own topographical data, but Godfrey soon persuaded Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, the first director, to attach one of his staff to work in Oxford—a move that paid immediate dividends.21 Very quickly, close co-operation developed between the two organizations as they worked in conjunction to gather intelligence for a large number of raids and an even larger number of plans—some of which never went into effect.22 Originally, the requests were small, supporting pinprick raids along the French coast in 1940. Within a year, however, the ISTD had produced the report that would be the basis for the very successful raids on the Lofoten Islands and Vaagso.23 By May 1942, Mountbatten had come to rely so heavily on the work of the Topographical Department that Godfrey felt compelled to issue a memo, circulated inside the Combined Operations intelligence section, to stop sending requests for a short period “as the ISTD staff are working 24 hours a day and it is feared some may collapse.”24

  Godfrey’s caution was not without foundation: during a ninety-day period between October 1941 and January 1942, the ISTD created more than thirty “special reports” in response to urgent requests from both Mountbatten’s staff and the Joint Planning Staff. Among the requests that topped the lists were work-ups on the areas of St-Nazaire, Bayonne and Dieppe.

  The raid on St-Nazaire has been dubbed the “Greatest Raid of All,” with scores of articles, books, a feature film and a recent BBC documentary canonizing the bravado, courage and sheer audacity that brought about spectacular results.25 It was not by any means as large an operation as Dieppe—but it was successful. And it still remains a showcase for what Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Combined Operations could accomplish. The daring idea of attacking Hitler’s heavily defended Festung (Fortress) St-Nazaire at the mouth of the Loire River on the Biscay coast first arose in the weeks following the successful hunt for the Bismarck in 1941. In the summer, the Admiralty had learned through Ultra that her sister ship, the Tirpitz, an equally daunting and powerful adversary, had just finished sea trials in the Baltic before heading into position to blockade the Soviet fleet near Leningrad. So far, there were no indications that she would venture out to wreak havoc on the Atlantic trade, but preparations had to be made for that eventuality.

  Within the NID, the French part of Section 1 was responsible for intelligence concerning the Channel coastline and the rest of France. It was headed by retired Royal Navy commander George Edmund Gonin, a British businessman who lived in Antwerp and had a special interest in ports. With Godfrey’s blessing, Gonin, who represented NID at the first meeting following the formation of Combined Operations in 1940, approached Keyes’s staff in the hope of gaining their support for a cunning plan. The approach did not come out of left field given the close association that had already developed between the NID and Combined Operations Headquarters, with the former providing intelligence and advice in the selection of raiding targets.

  The idea Gonin proposed was straightforward: because Ultra had clearly revealed that the Bismarck, when she was attacked and sunk, was making for the Normandie dry dock in St-Nazaire—the only facility in western France with a dry dock capable of housing the 42,000-ton vessel for repairs—why not launch a commando raid on that port itself, which also housed one of the largest U-boat bases?26 With one bold move, the British could achieve two major goals. Destroying the lock gates or disabling the pumping mechanisms used to control the flow of water into and out of the dry dock would render the port “tidal,” flooding the dry dock and denying the Tirpitz a repair facility. That act alone would dramatically reduce, if not eliminate, the chances of the giant battleship venturing into the Atlantic. At the same time, the attack offered a chance to destroy or disable a few of Dönitz’s deadly submarines while at anchor and, although not stated, pinch vital material in the process.

  Unsure of whether their current operational capabilities would permit such a daring raid, Keyes initially balked at the idea, leaving it in limbo for months, until the Admiralty’s Plans Division, thoroughly prompted and backed by Godfrey, decided to push ahead with the scheme, generating a planning docket that included intelligence gathered by both his ISTD and the wily Gonin.27

  Having discovered through his myriad contacts that the engineering firm which helped construct the locks was based in London, Gonin had obtained a model of the lock gates along with detailed reports and air photographs, and then consulted the Special Operations Executive on where best to place the explosive charges. The resulting plan was desperate, bold—and close to suicidal. It involved taking a group of highly trained commandos and placing them on board a collection of motor torpedo boats (MTBs) and an obsolete and therefore expendable destroyer, HMS Campbeltown, which would be disguised as a German vessel. With the destroyer’s bow lower decks primed with a timed explosive charge, the entire force would then sail into St-Nazaire harbour at night, the Campbeltown would ram headlong into the lock gates, and the commandos would storm ashore to knock out the pumping stations and other targets while waiting for the destroyer to explode. Once the mission was accomplished, the commandos would essentially be on their own. The lucky ones would make it back to the MTBs for departure or, more probably, would try to find their own way through southwestern France and across the
Pyrenees into neutral Spain before setting out to return to England.28

  On September 14, Gonin met with the Plans Division, which had originally hoped to deliver the attack on Trafalgar Day, October 21, as a public relations nod to the great victory of the British fleet over Napoleon’s navy in 1805. Unfortunately, environmental conditions reduced the likelihood of surprise, and the plan was shelved for the time being.

  And so it remained until January 1942, when Ultra from Bletchley revealed that the Tirpitz was on the move: she had left the Leningrad blockade and sailed first to the port of Wilhelmshaven in northern Germany and then on to Norway, suggesting she might break out into the Atlantic and follow in the Bismarck‘s path. The Operational Intelligence Centre, tracking her every move through the German Home Waters key and then the Norwegian key, was relieved at first to report to Churchill and the Admiralty that her immediate objective was the fjords rather than the Atlantic sea lanes. But once she had made the move to Norway, the battleship was clearly positioned within easy striking distance of both the North Atlantic and the vital convoys bound for Russia. Churchill feared it was only a matter of time before she made her move for open water. As he related melodramatically in his memoir Hinge of Fate, he informed Major General Hastings “Pug” Ismay, his shrewd and loyal personal liaison with the chiefs of staff, just days before the four-rotor Enigma machine went into action on February 1 on Dönitz’s U-boats in the Atlantic, that “the destruction or even the crippling” of the Tirpitz was, in his estimation, “the greatest event at sea at the present time. No other target is comparable to it.”29

  Previously, in November, when Mountbatten had first taken over the reins of Combined Operations, his headquarters had begun, as Godfrey relates, “a keen search for targets” that revived Gonin’s “hope for his neglected child.”30 After Churchill sounded the alarm in late January, Gonin’s daring but relatively low-cost strategy to cripple the Tirpitz before she could position herself in the Atlantic became an imperative. Suddenly, the raid was back on the table. When Gonin approached Combined Operations with the idea, the result, according to Godfrey, “was magical.” Instantly, Dickie Mountbatten latched on to the idea, and he put his naval advisory team onto detailed planning for the mission. In late February, Operation Chariot was born—a commando raid that would prove to be one of the greatest acts of heroism and self-sacrifice of the entire Second World War.