In the cold dawn of 31 March, a British escort was waiting for the Empress of Scotland in the Western Approaches. The danger was passed, no U-boat having sighted the ship, and the odd civilian returned safely to his country. For three years now he had helped to stem the tide by thinking, and they had built a colossal machine around his brain. But they could not fight the war by knowing about it. Intelligence was not enough; it had to be embodied in a savage world. Nor would its engineer escape that general rule.
* * *
* Curiously, they had not found this by any means an obvious idea, although it was just like the base-10 modular addition used in one-time pad ciphers. They had invented it afresh.
† They had also independently invented a form of pulse-coded modulation.
* The British did not get their way regarding the location of the London terminal. In April the X-system was installed in the American headquarters and only later was a line run to Churchill’s war room.
* At least one of Scholz’s students was working directly against him.
* German security policy was more advanced than the British. In a letter12 of 9 October 1942, Himmler replied to a memorandum from the Consultant Physician to the Reichsicherheitshauptamt (Supreme State Security Office) on the subject of die Homosexualität in der Spionage und Sabotage. ‘I grant you … that the British have found some rather promising (passender) material for their purposes here,’ he wrote, but decreed that there was no question of a remission in the vigorous prosecution of homosexuality for the sake of gaining recruits, in view of the risk of homosexual vice rampaging unpunished amongst the Volk, and whole sections of the youth being seduced. Anyway, he said, if one of these degenerates and crooks (Pathologen und Gauner) were set on betraying his country, he would do so whether punished according to Paragraph 175 or not. Prosecution, in 1942, meant consignment as a ‘pink triangle’ prisoner to a concentration camp. The doctors were sharply rebuked by Himmler on 23 June 1943 for their suggestion of retraining (Erziehungsversuche an anormalen Menschen) as a waste of effort at a time when Germany struggled for its existence, and because the outcome of such efforts was so dubious (höchst zweifelhaft).
PART TWO
THE PHYSICAL
5 Running Up
One’s-self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.
Of physiology from top to toe I sing,
Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse,
I say the Form complete is worthier far,
The Female equally with the Male I sing.
Of Life immense in passion, pulse and power,
Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.
The surrender at Stalingrad had marked the beginning of the end for Germany. The war had turned. Yet in the south and west there was little evidence of progress for the Allies. The African war dragged on, the Luftwaffe still mounted raids on Britain. And the ports were sheltering the survivors of what had been the most damaging convoy battle of the war, fought in mid-Atlantic while Alan had waited in New York.
When Churchill and Roosevelt had conferred at Casablanca, they had good reason to suppose that, with Atlantic U-boat Enigma restored, the sinkings could be kept down to the level of late 1941. In January they were. But in February they had doubled, nearly back to 1942 levels. And then in March they were the worst of the war: ninety-five ships, amounting to three-quarters of a million tons. Massed U-boats had been able to sink twenty-two out of the 125 ships that had set out in convoy on the eastbound Atlantic passage that month. There was a reason for the deteriorating Allied control of events, one scarcely credible. It was not just that the convoys had sailed during the nine days’ blackout caused by the change to the U-boat weather report system. It was that all the time, and to an ever-increasing degree, the convoy routeing cipher, among others, was being broken by the B. Dienst.
Convoy SC.122 had started out on 5 March, HX.229 on 8 March, and the smaller and more fortunate HX.229A the next day. On 12 March, SC.122 was re-routed to the north to avoid what was thought to be the position of a U-boat line, the Raubgraf. This signal was intercepted and deciphered. On 13 March the Raubgraf attacked a westward-bound convoy, thus openly betraying its position; SC.122 and HX.229 were both diverted again. Both diversion signals were intercepted and deciphered within four hours. The Raubgraf group could not catch up with SC.122 but 300 miles to the east, the forty-strong Stürmer and Dränger lines were sent to intercept them. There was ill luck on the German side – they were confused as to which convoy was which – but good luck too, for one of the Raubgraf happened to sight HX.229 by chance, and beckoned the others on. In London they could see the two convoys moving into the midst of the U-boat lines – but it was too late to do anything but to have them fight it out. On 17 March, they were surrounded by U-boats, and over the three days that followed twenty-two vessels were sunk, for the loss of one U-boat. Chance had played its part in this particular action, but underlying these and other current engagements lay the systematic failure of Allied communications.
In London and Washington, the first suspicion that this was so had been aroused in February 1943, when it was noticed that three U-boat line diversions were ordered within thirty minutes to operate successfully against a convoy on the 18th. Clear proof came only in mid-May when three doubly-enciphered Enigma messages showed evidence of the decipherment of particular Allied transmissions. Identifiable Enigma information had gone since 1941 into one-time-pad messages, and so had not been directly compromised. But it was implicit in the daily U-boat Situation Report, which by February 1943 was being decrypted. Yet again, the German authorities imputed Allied knowledge to a combination of airborne radar and the treachery of their officers. In a futile gesture, they reduced the number of people allowed to know about U-boat traffic. Again and again, only an a prioni faith in the machine prevented them from seeing the truth. The Allies had very nearly given their own game away.
It was a dismal story, not perhaps one of individuals, but of the system. Neither in London nor in Washington was there a section in a position to do the very difficult detailed work of sorting out what the German command must have known, from what it could have known. The cryptanalysts were not given access to Allied dispatches – of which, in any case, there was no complete record. At the OIC they were still understaffed, underequipped, and under great strain with the convoy battles.
The cryptographic and operational authorities were working to standards which to Hut 8 eyes would seem criminally negligent. For one thing, the convoy routeing cipher, introduced as a joint Anglo-American system, was in fact an old British book cipher which the B. Dienst were able to recognise. Although in December 1942 a ‘recipherment of indicators’ had caused a setback for the B. Dienst, every kind of mistake was still being made. According to the American post-mortem:1
USN-British Naval Communications were so complex, and often repetitious, that no-one seemed to know how many times a thing might not be sent and by whom – and in what systems. It is possible that the question of cipher compromise might have been settled earlier than May had the Combined Communications system been less obscure and had there been closer cooperation between the British and the US in such matters
while according to Travis’s German counterpart,2
The Admiral at Halifax, Nova Scotia, was a big help to us. He sent out a Daily Situation Report which reached us every evening and it always began ‘Addressees, Situation, Date’, and this repetition of opening style helped us to select very quickly the correct code in use at that time….
All the time, while minds and technology were being pushed to the limit at Bletchley in the attack on German signals, the most elementary blunders were being made in the defence of their own. The result was that since late 1941, the German successes had been owed not only to the growing numerical strength of the U-boat fleet, but to their knowledge of Allied convoy rout
es; and during 1942 the effect of the Enigma blackout was only half the story.
Unlike the German authorities, the British were capable of recognising a mistake. The error was not that of the Admiralty alone, for GC and CS had exercised that part of its remit which called it to advise upon cipher security. But it was a part of GC and CS which had been left untouched by the revolutions elsewhere, and whose timescale still ran in terms of years. In 1941 it had devised a new system, which in 1942 the Admiralty had agreed to introduce in June 1943. Even allowing for the fact that it took six months simply to equip the Navy with new tables, this was a story of delays normal in peacetime, but bearing no connection with the new standards applied to anything considered essential for the war. If it were the decipherment of exciting messages, or airborne radar to make German cities visible for night raids, or the atomic bomb, then new industries could be conjured up in months. The less glamorous work of convoy protection called forth no such effort. Although the principle of integration had been applied so powerfully at Bletchley, it had not been extended to match up the two sides of its work.
They had learnt, but it was a painful way to learn, and those who had suffered most were unable to benefit from the lesson. They were at the bottom of the sea. Fifty thousand Allied seamen died in the course of the war, trying to mind their own business in the most gruelling conditions of the western war; 360 in the March 1943 convoy battle alone. Nor were their trials then over; the Merchant Navy cipher system continued to be breakable for the rest of 1943, long after the Navy was protected by the introduction of its new system on 10 June. Peculiarly vulnerable, and given the lowest priority, the merchant shipping ran a danger of which few knew, and whose enormity even fewer could appreciate.
In retrospect the failure of Allied naval communications vindicated the policy urged before the war by Mountbatten, and rejected by the Admiralty, that cipher machines should be employed. After 1943 the Navy joined the other services in an increasing use both of the Typex and of the equivalent American machine. Against these the B. Dienst made no headway. And yet the modernists such as Mountbatten might have been right for the wrong reason. Machine ciphers were not inherently secure, as the Enigma proved. The Foreign Office continued to use a hand system based on books; it remained unbroken. Bletchley deciphered the Italians’ naval machine system; but was increasingly powerless against their book ciphers. What was enciphered on a machine might all the easier be deciphered on a machine. It was not the machine, but the whole human system in which it was embodied, that mattered. Behind the mis-match of Allied cryptanalytic and cryptographic standards there lay another question: were the Typex transmissions really more secure than those of the Enigma? Perhaps the most salient fact was the negative one: that the B. Dienst made no serious effort against them, just as in 1938 no serious effort had been made against the Enigma. If an attack upon the Typex had been made with the resources mobilised at Bletchley, the story might have been very different.3 But perhaps they had no Alan Turing – nor a system in which an Alan Turing could be used.
Such was the background against which Alan returned to base himself in Hut 8. The game had gone sour. The cryptanalysts tended to assume that their productions were being fed into a system that knew what it was doing, and it was a shock when they were told of the convoy cipher fiasco. Hut 8 itself had been taken over by Hugh Alexander during Alan’s absence. There was a story that a form had come round, asking for the name of the head of the section. Alexander had said, ‘Well, I suppose I am,’ and thereafter he remained in smooth control of the naval Enigma. There were no further crises, despite the later proliferation of German naval key-systems. The introduction of an alternative fourth wheel in July 1943 for the U-boat system caused them no problem; they were able to deduce its wiring without a capture. None of this needed Alan any more; indeed several of the high-level analysts were moved to more innovative work on Fish. Nor, indeed, did the U-boat Enigma need the British effort now. Although the British* produced the first working high-speed four-wheel Bombe in June 1943, the Americans produced more and better Bombes after August. By the end of 1943 they had taken over the U-boat work entirely, and had spare capacity for other Enigma problems.
If they did not need Alan Turing on what had become a routine task, his help might well have been of use in the cryptographic context, where 1943 saw a slightly greater degree of cooperation and coordination prevail. He had already been introduced to the job of inspecting speech cipher systems, and to the delicate work of Anglo-American liaison. The Allies now had the problem of recovering from the delays and narrow vision of 1942, at a time when communications were expanding enormously and growing towards their great climax. The times had been out of joint, something they could not afford to allow in the intricate plans for 1944. For Alan Turing this would be dull and dispiriting work compared with the excitement of the relay race; but it was the job crying out for expert attention.4
After June 1943 the Atlantic war turned dramatically in favour of the Allies, with ship sinkings reduced to tolerable levels. In retrospect, March 1943 had seen ‘the crisis’ of the battle of the Atlantic, and thereafter it could be claimed that ‘the U-boat was defeated’. But more truly, 1943 saw a continuing state of crisis, one in which it was not the boat but the system that was beaten from day to day by a superior system. At last they introduced long-range air patrols to cover the mid-Atlantic gap. And the logical advantage held by the U-boats in 1940 had been reversed. They were now visible from afar through the Enigma (by the end of 1943 the British had a clearer idea of where they were than did their own command), and at close range through the airborne radar work of TRE. Meanwhile the convoy communications became secure. The combination was a winning one, and the Atlantic poker game appeared as a quiet front, only noticed when occasionally the cheating failed to work. But from the German point of view it was not a quiet front at all. For them, 1943 saw a tremendous stepping up of the attack. At the end of the year they would have over 400 U-boats to deploy, equipped with elaborate measures to counter the radar detection they believed responsible for all their failure to find convoys. The fleet was still alive and aggressive, even if individual U-boats were increasingly short-lived. It was a game of perfect information – or Sigint, as it became in the new language of 1943 – for one player. But the other did not admit defeat. The Second World War was not a game.
The introduction of the fourth rotor in February 1942 thus had effects unknown in Germany. That it was employed half-heartedly and foolishly, allowing it to be mastered after December 1942, meant the loss of the battle of the Atlantic. But that it had been employed at all meant that it had introduced electronic engineers to Bletchley and hence to the Fish problem. And while 1943 saw a general resolution of Anglo-American friction over Intelligence, by means of an agreement to divide the world between them – Britain taking Europe and America taking Asia – the US Navy retained its more aggressive stance. Their rapid development of Bombes reflected the fact that the Atlantic was now an American sea. Alan Turing’s work had denied the ocean lanes to Germany, and secured them for the United States.
Alan had written to Joan while away in America, asking her what she would like as a present, but in her reply she had not been able to answer this question because of the censorship. In the event he brought back a good-quality fountain pen for her – and others too had presents. There were Hershey bars among the sweets he left for general consumption in Hut 8, and he also brought an electric shaver for Bob, making a transformer to convert it from the American to the British voltage. He told Joan how seeing Mary Crawford in January, just after Jack had died, had affected him with a sense of how much they had meant to each other. He hinted that they should ‘try again’, but Joan did not take up the hint; she knew that it was over.
He showed her a book on Go, and lay on the floor in his room at the Crown Inn demonstrating some of the situations in the game. And he also lent her a remarkable new novel. It was by his friend Fred Clayton, though under a pseudonym,
5 and had been published in January 1943. The Cloven Pine, as it was called, in a cryptic reference to Ariel’s imprisonment by Sycorax in The Tempest, vented groans about politics and sex which were closer to Fred’s experiences and problems than to Alan’s, Fred having set his plot in the Germany of 1937 and 1938, and drawing upon his complex and conflicting reactions to the Vienna and Dresden of a little earlier.
He had tried to understand the collapse of the ideals of 1933. On one level, he showed German individuals, no less and no more lovable than English individuals. On another, he showed the system, the Nazi system. And while he portrayed himself as the Englishman, asking how Germans could believe such things, he tried to see himself and English attitudes through German eyes. In an internationalist gesture, The Cloven Pine was dedicated jointly to George, his younger brother, and to Wolf, one of the boys in Dresden that he had known. ‘Freedom and consistency of mind’, he had the German boy of his story think to himself, analysing English liberalism. ‘They were illusions! What freedom or consistency was there in this Self, a thing of moods that did not understand one another….’ It was the conclusion of a King’s liberal, trying hard to comprehend the absolute denial of Self.
There was a second thread to his story, that of the English schoolmaster’s friendship with the German boy which remained ‘suspended in an atmosphere of semi-Platonic sentimentality’. This for Joan represented a quality of self-restraint that deserved admiration, but Alan, who had often teased Fred in terms rather like these, would probably have taken a different view. The book was saved from the obvious danger, one that Evelyn Waugh had mocked in Put Out More Flags, by the stringency and sophistication with which it examined the contradictions. The personal realities were ever questioning, and questioned by, a political background which included the late-1930s Nazi propaganda about boy-corrupting Jews and Catholic clergy. On this level it served Alan as a way of saying that his ‘tendencies’ could not be separated from his place in society, nor regarded as peripheral to his own freedom and consistency of mind.
Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game Page 42
