Churchill's Secret War

by Denniston, Robin

  On the same day (2 October) De Peppo, the Italian ambassador at Ankara, reported his conversation with Clodius:

  My own impression is that he took some political soundings too, and that he is convinced that Turkey [garbled] to maintain her neutrality against everyone. In the matter of foreign trade, too, Turkey is trying to keep out of either camp, with leanings towards Britain who controls and regulates Turkish trade with herself and the US [Churchill to Eden: ‘This is noteworthy’].44

  The next day GCCS circulated an intercept from the German chargé in Stockholm noting that:

  . . . the whole world had its eyes on Turkey . . . Everyone wishes to win her to his own side. England naturally wishes to see the German and Turkish armies weaken themselves in fighting one another, but Turco-German friendship stands solid. Sweden has understood from this how great a danger Russia, with her desire for a corridor to the open sea, constitutes both for herself and for Europe.45

  On the same day the Japanese ambassador in Ankara spelt out a twelve-point scenario for Turkey:

  1) Germany will drive to the Caucasus.

  2) Turkey will keep in step with Germany.

  3) If Turkey’s attitude is ambiguous Germany will exert pressure ‘or even try conclusions with them once for all’.

  4) Germany will [garbled] Turkey in the end so the outlook is not hopeful.

  5) Britain attaches great importance to Turkey as ‘centre of Near Eastern defence’.

  6) Anglo-Soviet activity in Persia was a sideshow.

  7) Popular sentiment in Turkey is expecting a breakaway from Britain.

  8) Britain may demand passage of Soviet aid through Turkey.

  9) British ships would go through the Straits.

  10) There could be a joint (Allied) defence in the Caucasus, consisting of Russia, Britain and Turkey.

  11) Turkey will lean neither way.

  12) The British are becoming desperate.46

  George Clutton in the Southern Department of the FO minuted forcefully during October: ‘We can only reflect on our folly in refusing the Turkish proposals of 1939–40 that we should take the total chrome output for a period of twenty years.’47

  On 10 October, the Japanese ambassador reported from Ankara to Tokyo that Gerede, the Turkish ambassador to Germany admired by Hitler, advised I·nönü ‘to disregard Anglo-Turkish relations and cooperate with Germany. The President is understood to have accepted his advice on the whole and to have decided to follow an opportunistic policy’. He also reported that two high-ranking Turkish generals had been invited by the Germans to inspect the fighting on the Eastern Front:

  . . . taken in conjunction with the recent German-Turkish joint declaration and trade agreement, this is seen to indicate a tightening of relations between Germany and Turkey. Generally speaking Turkey sees that the outcome of the fighting on the Eastern front is already decided and the collapse of the Soviet is near at hand. Little by little, therefore, she appears to be trying to bring about a rapprochement with the Axis and I have the impression that the feeling is that this attitude has been decided upon earlier than expected.48

  This message was repeated to Berlin and Rome. Berlin may have obtained it through the Forschungsamt, who may well have used similar arrangements to the British for reading Ankara-based diplomatic traffic.

  On 14 October ‘C’ told Churchill that the Turks expected to be invaded by the Germans in the spring and on the 19th an intercept contained speculation about a German attack on Suez through Turkey.49 The next day Churchill was writing to Roosevelt about Turkey:

  She may be consolidated in her resistance to Hitler. We do not require Turkey to enter the war aggressively at the present moment, but only to maintain a stolid, unyielding front to German threats and blandishments.50

  His language about Turkey strikingly mirrors that of the German diplomat in Sweden.51 Churchill was well aware, through his intercept reading, of the true state of German global intentions in late 1941, as Oshima reported from Berlin to Tokyo the next day: ‘German plans for an invasion of England were still in an active phase. The next step is the overthrow of Britain.’52 He reported Hitler and Ribbentrop saying to him that ‘Germany is firmly resolved to carry out an invasion of Britain’.

  Both Hitler and Ribbentrop admired Oshima because he spoke as much for the Japanese Army as the Foreign Ministry. They were almost equally impressed by Gerede, the Turkish ambassador in Berlin, summoned to Ankara at the time, so they believed, in order to be appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs there. Hitler approved his pro-German stance but noted that Oshima had the more ‘militant’ mindset. In fact that key job went to Numan Menemencioğlu.53 The report was sent to Ankara as well as Tokyo. On 18 October Hugessen asked the FO ‘whether German boasts of victory in the East are bluff or not.’ An anodyne reply was drafted which the FO sent to its main ambassadorial clients: Cadogan railed against Turkey’s ‘timorousness’.54

  Hitler was still carrying all before him. On 11 November Oshima reported on German plans to shift their eastern offensive south, to pincer the British in the Mediterranean and enable Spain to take Gibraltar, while on the same day the new Japanese ambassador in Ankara, Kurihara, reported that Germany would continue south to the Caucasus and ‘may send 15–20 divisions from the Balkans to proceed through Turkey and make Turkey the nucleus of their Near Eastern plans of operation’.55

  The Mediterranean was, in fact, a sideshow for the Germans but mainstream for the Allies. The UK claimed to have fifteen divisions in the area but no one believed this, and the Turks, Iraqis, Persians and Syrians were all turning against Britain, looking for their independence with the whole of the Arab world, under German protection. ‘So German troops in the Near East might mean a Moslem uprising and a mortal blow to the British Empire, India and the South Pacific.’ The next day Kurihara was less specific about his Turkey-based information on German intentions in the area. If Germans crossed Turkey ‘the consequences would be profound’.56

  Diplomatic intercepts were providing not only valuable, if sometimes exaggerated, reports of German aggressive plans but equally important reports on the war plans of Britain’s inscrutable new ally, Russia. Changes in the Soviet high command, reported by the Turkish ambassador in Kuibyshev, the temporary Soviet capital from 16 October, would not in any other way have been known to Churchill and the COS, since the latter acknowledged that diplomatic intercepts were not just their main but their only source of information on the Russian order of battle. And of more immediate urgency than the possibility of an invasion of Turkey was the apparently irresistible surge of Panzer troops through the Ukraine: it was here that the final outcome of hostilities would be determined, as Churchill knew well. On 30 November, his birthday, Churchill annotated a blue jacket: ‘Fear. It does not prevent, it may provoke action. But it is a fact all the same.’57 Who can blame Churchill for thinking of fear on his 67th birthday, with the invasion of Britain still on Hitler’s agenda?

  A fortnight later those fears were finally put to rest by Hitler, who declared war on the USA following the Japanese bombing of the American navy at Pearl Harbor on 7 December. The ring was closed. It was not enough for Japan to be fighting America in the Pacific, particularly as Russia saw no need to join in. It was not enough for Germany and Russia to be at each other’s throats in the Ukraine, with the outcome in doubt and the possibility of a separate peace between them an ever-present nightmare. It was enough when Hitler finally overreached himself, and having forced war on both the superpowers, finally ensured that Churchill need no longer brood over his personal fears.

  With Turkey now more likely to become a belligerent, the rest of the year saw little change in her position. On 5 December Churchill wrote to Eden:

  The attitude of Turkey becomes increasingly important, both to Russia and Great Britain. The Turkish army of 50 divisions requires air support. We have promised a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 12 fighter squadrons to Turkey in the event of Turkey being attacked.58

  Kuriha
ra, and hence Churchill, also knew of a German study of future operations including ‘Plan Orient’ – ‘From Bulgaria, if Turkey were acquiescent, a force of 10 divisions . . . would traverse Anatolia into Syria’ and ‘Turkey will support the Axis in the Spring’.59

  Kurihara was wrong. Before spring came many thousands of German and Russian troops had died of cold, as well as of combat. Singapore fell to the Japanese in February and Turkish neutrality was off the agenda. Warfare, even global warfare, is seasonal. If snow and ice make invasion impossible in deep winter, mud makes the passage of non-tracked vehicles impossible throughout most of the spring. The Caucasus and south Russia are among the muddiest places on earth and the spring mud thaw in Russia was in April. Hitler’s ambitions were restrained by the weather. He realised the hard way a truth he passed on to Goebbels, that Russian soldiers fought best in winter and Germans in summer.

  This section has traced Turkey’s understanding of neutrality through the autumn of 1941, and has drawn on the early files of DIR/C (HW1) for the differences they indicate in Churchillian historiography between periods when a study of DIR/C can throw light on what he wrote, thought and did, and other periods (e.g. January to February 1942) when the DIR/C files are unavailable. What follows pursues this theme in the early months of 1942.

  Turkish Neutrality and British Disasters: Spring 1942

  Churchill’s daily reading of diplomatic files and Enigma continued, and from the comparative safety and warmth of Whitehall, the FO developed its own plans for Turkey. Dixon of the Southern Department listened to the Bulgarian diplomat Gavrilovitch, full of the advantages of a Balkan federation; full, too, ‘of tiresome ideas about the future of Europe’.60 George Rendel, formerly of the same department but by now minister plenipotentiary in Bucharest, commented with some foresight: ‘we must prevent Russian encroachment into the Balkans postwar and at once consider what steps are necessary to forestall her.’61 Dixon noted Turkish suspicions of Soviet intentions: ‘We should pretend to dispel this. We want Turkey to stay wary of Russia.’ Over both these diplomats loomed the presence of Permanent Under-Secretary Sir Orme Sargent, whose views of where Britain should be in world affairs came straight from the FO policy of about 1910. Looking for the re-establishment of British influence in the postwar Balkans at a time when peace was four years off, and Allied victory by no means certain, suggests a lurking folie de grandeur in the FO which contrasted with Churchill’s instinctive grasping of the moment.62

  Reality was different. The British were retreating before the numerically inferior Japanese down the Malay peninsula. Eden failed to charm the Turkish ambassador in London. Churchill ironically marked an intercept which told him that he was about to resign and the British cabinet would be reconstructed without him.63 On 21 January Hugessen cabled the FO reporting his talk with President I·nönü who was expecting a German attack through Thrace and had authorised many divisions of Turkish soldiers to bivouac there.64 Churchill queried the COS: ‘I thought Turkish forces were mainly in Anatolia, not Thrace?’ But 40 per cent were manning the borders with Greece and Bulgaria.65 On 9 February Numan Menemencioğlu was reckoned by the Southern Department to be the ‘best bargainer the Turks ever had’ and ‘was reluctant to let slip any chance of extra arms’.66 All this showed Churchill that the Turkish leadership was in an aggressive mode, with so many of their forces on the frontier with Greece and Bulgaria, prepared not only to defend Thrace, but if called upon, to invade Bulgaria – an action the officer class thought both desirable and inevitable.

  HW1 is silent from 382 of 23 January to 385 of 23 February.67 This particular lacuna may have been due to the reorganisation of GCCS which brought all work on diplomatic and commercial messages from Bletchley Park to Berkeley Street, and later Aldford House, serviced by the FO intercept station at Wavendon near Bletchley at the end of February 1942.68 Cadogan, to whom the diplomatic traffic came directly rather than monitored through BP’s ‘Director’, Menzies, wrote that 12 February was ‘the blackest day of the war’. Allied and neutral shipping losses achieved staggering proportions, the British were on the run in Libya and Singapore was about to fall to the Japanese.69 So we do not know from the DIR files of the period what the diplomatic community worldwide made of British disasters. It is noteworthy that Pacific affairs always commanded less attention than European affairs in the reports of the diplomats. An event like the dismissal of Mussolini echoed round European chancelleries for months; but a major victory or defeat in the Pacific theatre rarely commanded similar attention, though Allied defeat and eventual success in nearby North Africa did.

  In Ankara an attempt was made on von Papen’s life while he and his wife were walking to work. Three Russians and a Turk were arrested on suspicion, and a Soviet plot was assumed, though indignantly denied. Lengthy legal proceedings failed to prove conclusive guilt of the Russians and Turk arrested. The Turkish prime minister died and Sukru Saraçoğlu, former foreign minister, and a man of calculated indiscretion on occasion, took office, retaining his existing role until the cleverest of all Turkish statesmen, Numan Menemencioğlu, was appointed foreign minister. Some suspected him of pro-German leanings, but he served the Turkish cause assiduously and his dismissal by the president in early 1944 was rightly resented by his family.

  On 26 March Hugessen wrote again to the MP Emrys Evans: ‘Things here are very calm . . . the Germans have more important things to think about than attack Turkey . . . We are not likely to become more than a factor in some general scheme.’70 But the next day the Japanese ambassador in Sofia reported to Tokyo that ‘Turkey was in a state of extreme anxiety. If Russia is defeated in the west, it can still have Siberia as a stronghold for communist doctrine.’71 The Japanese should take over India while ‘others are otherwise occupied’ to prevent it falling, via international communism, to Russia. A day later ‘C’ sent a significant intercept to Churchill. The Chinese ambassador in Ankara, having reported the assassination attempt on von Papen added: ‘Turkish territory will not be subdued by the Germans, but the Germans think that if all goes well Turkey will be surrounded, and will become a second Sweden.’ He went on to say that Turkey was hemmed in by the Soviets, and might have to escape by the Dardanelles if Germany occupied the Crimea. Bulgaria would then join in. If British and Soviet troops invaded Turkey, Bulgaria and Germany would enter Turkey. ‘German troops are already in Thrace and the Aegean islands. Bulgaria hopes in this way to stop Turkey yielding to the Allies.’72 In fact Bulgarian troops were never sent beyond the borders of their own country, Hitler respecting the traditional historical and religious Slavic entente between Bulgaria and Russia.73 An intercepted message from the Turkish ambassador in Kuibyshev (read by British and Germans as well as Turks) reported hostile Bulgarian reactions to German demands for Bulgarian troops to replace some of their own casualties on the Eastern Front: ‘these troops would be needed to defend Bulgaria against the Turks’.74 So fear of the Turk pinned valuable divisions, already equipped by the Germans, in Bulgaria when they might have fought the Russians at Stalingrad; and Churchill’s instinct about Turkey’s key role in Balkan affairs was justified. These contrasting accounts of the state of Turkish morale suggest Hugessen was too bland, and other ambassadors, Chinese, Japanese and Turkish, got closer to the truth.

  At the end of March, Hitler told his dinner guests:

  I prefer the Turks [to the Romanians] . . . I would conclude a trade treaty with her, supply her with arms and ammunitions, and guarantee the inviolability of the Straits and the integrity of her frontiers, if the Turks had any wish for an alliance with us.75

  In early April Rommel began his offensive against the British in North Africa. And on 9 April Churchill read that Germany would attack Turkey as part of the spring offensive, either from the Caucasus or Serbia.76 Five days later Alanbrooke was reflecting on the consequences of a successful Japanese incursion into the Indian Ocean: ‘Germany would get all the oil she required, the Southern route to Russia would be cut, Turkey would be isolated a
nd defenceless.’77

  This chapter has been mainly concerned with the world’s reactions to Turkish neutrality in 1941, the period before BJs came on stream. In the welter of conflicting information available to Churchill, the Foreign Office and the COS as to Turkish intentions and potential, insufficient attention was given to the country’s geographical and socio-economic conditions, or to the effect there of British disasters in the spring of 1942. The next chapter shows Churchill’s personal handling of Anglo-Turkish affairs in a new light through BJs.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Churchill’s Turkey Hand 1942

  Ambassador Hiroshi confided to [Gœbbels] that Japan would capture Singapore shortly. ‘He is already forging plans for a joint [Japanese-German] assault on India. But we’re some way short of that.’

  David Irving, Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich, p. 646

  Fear! It may not prevent, it may even provoke action. But it is there all the same.

  WSC HW/1 261

  Churchill’s depression at the course of events culminating in the surrender at Singapore on 12 February 1942 is palpable all through this period. The Japanese rout of British arms signalled the end of Empire, and Churchill was an imperialist. A perceptive American historian of Churchillian war strategy noticed Churchill’s frequent inexplicable bouts of pessimism at this time.1 This pessimism could well have been brought on by his compulsive reading of BJs. Writing in 1959, nearly twenty years before the breaking of the Ultra secret, Higgins’s analysis of Allied strategy in 1942 remarkably anticipates the release of the most secret source and shows that history and historical perceptions are not greatly changed by the discovery of new sources, however clandestine and exciting. The same can be said for the official historians’ account of Churchillian strategic planning and activity in the eastern Mediterranean from 1941 to 1943. Both draw substantially on Churchill’s own history.2 Churchill’s disingenuous claims for his history are prominently displayed in Volume 5 (Closing the Ring):