APPENDIX FIVE
HW3
Papers on GCCS in 1939 – comments by Prof Hinsley on memoranda supplied by J.E. Cooper and Nigel de Grey to Frank Birch in HW3/83 at the PRO.
By 1945, with the result of the war no longer in doubt, GCCS at BP turned its attention to writing its own history, or rather the history of the war through the interpretation of its work. The historians assigned this task included W.F. Clarke, in charge of the German section in 1939, and Frank Birch, his successor. The recently released files of HW3 in the PRO contain memoranda written at his request. Many of these concentrate on the immediate prewar period. These seem to be in response to a conviction that prewar GCCS failed to adapt itself to the ends of a world war and of machine encipherment and that the resulting pessimism about the possibility of everyone reading Enigma messages delayed the success of Turing and Welchman in 1940. Two classical cryptographers, J.E.C. Cooper and Nigel de Grey, were asked for their comments on this piece of received wisdom and to assess the accuracy of Alastair Denniston’s memory when he wrote the interwar history of GCCS, to be found in HW3/32. Cooper’s comments were reviewed by Prof Sir Harry Hinsley, who wrote the following comment on 1 May 1996:
I believe Josh Cooper is right when he says in his para 8 that AGD understood the wider problem of Sigint better than he was given credit for. It is certainly true that he had to be careful about crossing the boundary between cryptography and intelligence because the Service departments were extremely jealous in insisting that intelligence was their business. It is also true that most of the prewar cryptographers Josh refers to had no interest in intelligence. Neither of these situations was to change until after the outbreak of war – in new circumstances and with no people. Even so, it is to be noted that despite Josh’s criticisms of the prewar staff in his para 6 (FO/371/2182), and of the office’s amateur structure, the place did remarkably well on the cryptographic side before the war. In addition to its good results on the diplomatic, it made good progress against Italian and Japanese service cyphers. Only against Germany and the Soviets, both diplomatic and service cyphers, did it have no success. But this was due to circumstances that would not change till after the outbreak of war – very little traffic intercepted because of the use of landlines; very difficult cyphers. German diplomatic was not broken until 1943 and German Enigma only broken by the Poles with the aid of stolen documents before mid-1940 (for air force) mid-1941 (for navy) and autumn 1941 (for army).
Josh in para 9 (FO371/2182) is also right to stress that it was AGD who recruited the wartime staff from the universities with visits there in 1937 and 1938 (also 1939, when he recruited me and 20 other undergraduates within two months of the outbreak of war). I believe this was a major contribution to the wartime successes – going to the right places and choosing the right people showed great foresight.
Josh’s comment in para 10 (FO/371/21842) that AGD was ‘diffident and nervous, a small fish in a big pool that contained many predators’ may seem unduly harsh, therefore, but I think it is harsher than Josh intended. There were many predators (the Services seriously thought of winding GCCS down when war came) and Josh would agree, I’m sure, that it was necessary to be diffident and understandable to be nervous. He quite rightly adds at the end of para 20 (FO371/21482) that AGD remembered WW1 very well but ‘was tied by the narrow terms of reference imposed on him from above’. This is an accurate conclusion.
The only other paper that calls for comment is the three-page memo, by de Grey. He says that more was achieved cryptographically before the war than is generally recognised, but that the overall effort was limited by lack of funds, lack of imagination and forgetfulness of the lessons about Signals intelligence learnt in war. But he adds that the fault was not all or mainly the fault of GCCS. ‘National policy was directed by axemen – very difficult to fight at the time.’ I think he exaggerates the lack of imagination and the forgetfulness of the lessons of the previous war. AGD was severely restricted by the axemen – and by the difficulty of doing signals intelligence, as distinct from cryptography, in the interwar years.
Hinsley added his own comment on the spirit of pessimism which allegedly hung over BP in 1940. ‘The GAF [Luftwaffe] Enigma was broken early because of Norway but was of limited use operationally, so the breakthrough did not signal great new importance to Bletchley in Whitehall.’ Alan Turing told Harry Hinsley he could not break Enigma without the weatherships. These, BP knew, carried German naval Enigma machines and codebooks, for the current months by the coding clerk, for the subsequent month, locked in a safe. Twice Hinsley pinpointed German weatherships for the Royal Navy to board in order to seize not the current month’s book – which would have been destroyed by the coding clerk, but the safe which contained the next month’s books. Both raids were successful and the books they produced enabled Turing to complete his work on the machine successfully. See Appendix 12 (pp. 565–569) in Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations (London, HMSO, 1979) vol. 1.
APPENDIX SIX
A Note on Breach of Security
Breach of Security was edited by David Irving and subtitled ‘The German Secret Intelligence File on Events leading to the Second World War’ (London, William Kimber, 1968). Pages 121–166 cover intercepted foreign diplomatic cables shown to the Führer; pp. 175–184 decoded material shown to Dr Joseph Goebbels.
The use by Hitler, Ribbentrop, Goebbels and Kaltenbrunner of intercepted diplomatic communications from the neutrals is disclosed in Breach of Security. It summarises some of the diplomatic intercepts supplied by the Forschungsamt, and the German Foreign Office’s Deciphering Bureau – Chiffierstelle. The dates on which these were supplied to Hitler are given. They begin on 14 February 1940 and end on 13 November 1943. They emanate from the same capitals as DIR/C – namely Ankara, Washington, Vichy, Cairo, Berne, Rome, Buenos Aires, Santiago da Chile, London, Sofia, Bucharest, Belgrade, Lisbon, Madrid and Tokyo. Their content, as summarised, show they cover the same topics as the BJs, and it must be theoretically possible to marry up the two archives. Some 472 intercepted foreign diplomatic cables were shown to Hitler, according to this compilation, and of these 180 emanated from Turkey.
APPENDIX SEVEN
Who Was Who
British
(1) = served in the First World War
(1a) = served between 1919 and 1939
(2) = served in the Second World War
Adcock, F.E. (1) and (2).
Anstey, W.H. (1).
Birch, Frank (1) and (2). Attached to a department of the FO from 1939. CMG 1945.
Boase, Tom (2). Later Prof, in GCCS’s Italian section.
Clark, E. Russell (1) (1a).
Cooper, Josh (2). Head of the Air Force Section in GCCS.
Denniston, A.G. (1) (1a) (2). Head of a department in the FO. CMG 1943.
Ewing, J.A. (1). Director of Naval Education in 1914 and first head of Room 40.
Fetterlein, Ernst (1a) (2). Died 1944.
Forbes, Courtenay (1a)(2).
Foss, Hugh (1a) (2).
Godfrey, Margaret (1a) (2). Wife of Adm Godfrey, DNI.
de Grey, Nigel (1) (2). CMG 1945.
Hall, Adm Reginald. DNI in the First World War.
Hobart-Hampden, Ernest (2).
Hooper, Joe (1a) (2). Later Director of GCHQ.
Hope, G.L.N. (1) (1a) (2).
Hope, H.W.W. Herbert (later Adm) (1). Operational head of Room 40.
Hippisley, Baytum(1).
Hinsley, Harry (2). Later Prof Sir, Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University.
Jones, Gp Capt Eric (2). Later head of GCHQ.
Kendrick, A.D. (1a) (2).
Kenworthy, H.C. (1a) (2).
Knox, A.D. (2). Head of ISK at Bletchley Park.
Lambert, Leslie (1) (1a) (2). Also broadcaster and conjuror.
Last, Hugh (2). Professor of Roman History.
Maine, Henry (1a) (2).
Montgomery, Revd William (1).
&nb
sp; Parlett, Sir Harold (1a). Previously Japanese counsellor at the Tokyo embassy.
Rotter, E. (1). Paymaster Captain.
Sinclair, Evelyn. Sister of Adm Sinclair, head of SIS 1922–39.
Sinclair, Adm Hugh, head of SIS.
Strachey, Oliver (1a) (2). Formerly of MI1B, later head of ISOS at Bletchley.
Tiltman, John (1a) (2). Head of the military section in GCCS.
Travis, Edward (1a) (2). Head of Bletchley Park 1942–52.
Welchman, Gordon (2). Also author of The Hut Six Story.
Welsford, Rhoda (1a) (2). Worked with Anthony Blunt at the Courtauld Institute.
Turks
Saraçoğlu, Sukru
Menemencioğlu, Numan
I·nönü, Ismet
Acekalin
Rauf, Orbay
Ambassadors
Oshima, Hiroshi
Kurihara, Sho
de Peppo
Quaroni
FO Officials
Butler, R.A.
Cadogan, Sir Alexander
Clutton, George (GL)
Dixon, Pierson
Helm, Knox
Jebb, Gladwyn
Falla, Paul
Knatchbull-Hugessen, Sir Hughe
Lawford, J.
Reilly, Patrick
Rendel, George
Sargent, Sir Orme ‘Moley’
Notes
Introduction
1 DIR/C is the name given to Churchill’s files of secret intelligence.
2 The following official histories cover Turkish neutrality from a British point of view: G.E. Kirk’s The War and the Neutrals; Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1954; W.N. Medlicott, The Economic Blockade; London, HMSO, 1952; vol. 1, chapters 8 and 18; Sir Llewelyn Woodward’s 5-volume British Foreign Policy in the Second World War; London, HMSO, 1963; vol. 3.
3 While this has been massively documented, Robin Maugham’s memory of Churchill’s electoral defeat in 1945 is worth recording. Churchill told him at a party: ‘What I shall miss most of all are the . . . cables being brought in at the start of every day’ (quoted in Michael Woodbine Parish, Aegean Adventures 1940–3; Lewes, the Book Guild, 1993).
4 Handwritten undated notes on the origin and wartime work of Room 40, by A.G. Denniston, lodged in the Churchill Archives in Churchill College, Cambridge. See also Patrick Beesly, Room 40: British Naval Intelligence 1914–18; London, Hamish Hamilton, 1982, pp. 16 and 20. See also Appendix 4.
5 A quote from Richard Ullman, Anglo-Soviet Relations: vol. 3 The Anglo-Soviet Accord; Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1972; chapter 7.
6 See especially Ronald Lewin, Ultra Goes to War: The Secret War; London, Hutchinson, 1979.
7 See Keith Jeffrey (ed) ‘The Government Code and Cipher School: A Memorandum by Lord Curzon’, in Intelligence and National Security, vol. 1, no. 3, 1986.
8 See HW1/12, ‘Government Code and Cipher School’, which only covers the diplomatic section for the period 1919–26.
9 D.C. Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War; London, Heinemann, 1989.
10 See Peter Smith and E. Walker, War In the Aegean; London, Kimber, 1974; and Jeffrey Holland, The Aegean Mission: Allied Operations in the Dodecanese, 1943; Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1988.
11 F.H. Hinsley et al, British Intelligence in the Second World War: Its Influence on Strategy and Operations (abridgement); London, HMSO, 1993. See also Hinsley (co-ed) Code-breakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park; Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993.
12 See Louis and Blake (eds) Churchill; Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 4.
Chapter 1
1 See Trumbull Higgins, Winston Churchill and the Dardanelles: A Dialogue in Ends and Means; New York, Macmillan, 1963, p. 105; and Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill; London, Heinemann, 1971, vol. 3, with accompanying companion volumes for the period November 1914–April 1916.
2 See Chapter 3.
3 Reported in PRO ADM223/147 in an appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of the Turkish soldiery.
4 D.C. Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938–9; London, Heinemann, 1988, p. 284.
5 Much to the annoyance of the British service attachés in Ankara, ‘The Turks like him [Kelly] enormously’:Lady Kanfurly, To War with Whitaker: The Wartime Diaries of the Countess of Kanfurly 1939–45; London, Heinemann, 1994, p. 180.
6 Harold Macmillan, War Diaries:Politics and War in the Mediterranean, January 1943–May 1945; London, Macmillan, 1973.
7 See Larry Weisband, Anticipating the Cold War: Turkish Foreign Policy 1943–5; Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1973, p. 52.
8 See Ronald Lewin, Ultra Goes to War; London, Hutchinson, 1978, p. 188.
9 Patrick Beesly, Room 40: Naval Intelligence 1914–18; London, Hamish Hamilton, 1978, pp. 16–18. Beesly quotes extensively from an undated handwritten memorandum by A.G. Denniston lodged in the Churchill College archives and reproduced here at Appendix 6. See Christopher Andrew, Secret Service: The Masking of the British Intelligence Community; London, Heinemann, 1985, p. 307; and Martin Gilbert, op. cit., p. 359. For Churchill’s Room 40 charter see HW3/4 at the PRO.
10 Ewing and Hall: see Beesly, op. cit., pp. 125–27.
11 See Barbara W. Tuchman, The Zimmermann Telegram; London, Constable, 1959, p. 3; for the names of those who broke it: William Montgomery and Nigel de Grey. See also Sir William James, The Sky Was Always Blue; London, Methuen, 1951.
12 The main source is A.G. Denniston, ‘The Government Code and Cipher School between the Wars’ (ed Dr Christopher Andrew) in Intelligence and National Security, vol. 1, no. 1, 1936, pp. 48ff.
13 Denniston, op. cit., p. 55.
14 For more on OTP, see Chapter 2.
15 On Ambassador Oshima see Carl Boyd, Hitler’s Japanese Confidant: Oshima Hiroshi; Kansas City, University of Kansas Press, 1989.
16 This information comes from Dr John Ferris, and from the National Archives of Canada. (See Appendix 2.)
17 See Appendix 8, and Prof Bradley Smith, The Ultra Magic Deals: The Most Secret Special Relationship 1940–6; Los Angeles, Presidio, 1993.
18 BJs or ‘blue jackets’, so called from the blue folders in which they were circulated. DIR or DIR/C Archive in Hinsley stands for Director and refers to the Chief of the British Secret Service, Gen Sir Stewart Menzies, and identifies the files Menzies (‘C’) brought constantly to Churchill.
19 Diplomatic deciphering from 1939 to 1942 took place in the main building at Bletchley Park, while ‘High-grade’ sigint (Enigma, later also ‘Fish’) was carried out in Huts 3, 4, 6 and 8, in the grounds of the Park (information from Prof Hinsley). Turkish material was accesible partly because of Cable & Wireless and partly because the traffic was in French both ways, and did not require translation. For this reason GCCS did not need a Turkish specialist.
20 See John Charnley, Churchill: The End of Glory; London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1991.
21 The C-in-C Middle East, Gen Sir Henry Maitland Wilson, was related to Field Marshal Maitland Wilson who was in charge of military affairs in the Mediterranean at the time of the Dardanelles assault.
22 See J. Ferris, ‘Indulged in all too little: Vansittart, Intelligence and Appeasement’ in Diplomacy and Statecraft, vol. 6, no. 1, 1995, pp. 122–51.
23 J.M. Gwyer and J.R.M. Butler, Grand Strategy; vol. 3, London, HMSO, 1976, pp. 343–4; also quoted in Michael Howard, The Mediterranean Strategy in the Second World War; London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968.
24 Howard, op. cit., p. 34.
25 Howard, op. cit., p. 37.
26 See David Kahn, Seizing the Enigma: the Race to Break the German U-boat Codes, 1943–5; Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
27 David Dilks (ed), The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan OM 1938–45; London, Cassell, 1971, p. 433.
28 Quoted from a BJ in DIR/C (HW1/892).
Chapter 2
1 See especially John Ferris, ‘Whitehall’s Black Chamber: British Cr
yptology and the Government Code and Cipher School 1919–29’ in Intelligence and National Security, vol. 2, no. 1, 1987, pp. 54–91.
2 See DENN 1/3 (handwritten on Admiralty letter heading) and DENN 1/4 in Churchill College, Cambridge.
3 See DENN 3/1 (handwritten on Admiralty letter heading) and DENN 4/1 in Churchill College, Cambridge.
4 See Appendix 8 for list of names of British cryptographers.
5 See John Ferris in his review of F.H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp (eds) Code-Breakers; (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993) in Intelligence and National Security, vol. 9, no. 3, 1994, pp. 560–1.
6 Ibid.
7 See Appendix 8.
8 See Patrick Beesly, Room 40: British Naval Intelligence 1914–18; London, Hamish Hamilton, 1982.
9 Rotter or Hope. See Appendix 8 and see Beesly, op. cit., p. 15.
10 A.G. Denniston, in his draft manuscript history of Room 40, 2 December 1944, DENN 1/4, asserts that both were vital to the early success of the enterprise. Hope later became Room 40’s operational head.
11 Beesly, op. cit., p. 18. See Appendix 4 for the document in extenso. This is also used by Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill; London, Heinemann, 1971, vol. 3, and Christopher Andrew, Secret Service: The Making of the British Espionage Establishment; London, Heinemann, 1985, p. 307.
12 Beesly, op. cit., p. 80 and Appendix 4.
13 Admiral Usedüm, the German Inspector-General of Coast Defences and Mines at the Dardanelles.
14 Minute of 22 March 1915 in Martin Gilbert (ed), Winston S. Churchill; vol. 3, p. 359.
15 Beesly comments, op. cit., p. 82: ‘This may seem a somewhat unbelievable story, but then so are most of the stories about Hall, and most of them are true!’ Hall’s papers are in Churchill College, Cambridge. See also Gilbert and Andrew, op. cit.
16 See India Office Records L/MIL/7/2541.
17 See Christopher Andrew, ‘The British Secret Service and Anglo-Soviet Relations in the 1920s’ and ‘British Intelligence and the Breach with Russia in 1927’, both Historical Journal, vol. 20, no. 3 (1977), pp. 653–70 and vol. 25, no. 4 (1982), pp. 957–64 respectively.
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