Most Secret War

by R. V. Jones

When we arrived we found that Hugo was not quite right, in that tennis had already started and two formidable girls were thumping the ball about the court more in the spirit of a County match. Moreover they were attired in very brief shorts. When their game was over, the Viscount suggested that a four should be made up, and Lady Dorothy said that Vera would like to play. Vera was very apologetic, saying that she had not come dressed for tennis because she thought that shorts might be out of place. ‘You are quite right, my dear,’ said the very positively voiced daughter of the house. ‘We never wear shorts here!’ Perhaps the general embarrassment caused by this remark, for it was surely within earshot of the two Amazons, may have contributed to the subsequent course of affairs.

  I watched Vera miserably go on to the tennis court to partner the Viscount against the two girls who had obviously assessed the amount of tennis that she had played by her blue dress. She seemed to be about half their size. I have rarely enjoyed myself so much. I knew how annoyed Vera was having to play in this habit, and I also suspected that the Amazons were in for a surprise. Moreover, there was enough already right about Hugo’s predictions to make me hope that the rest might well come true. The Viscount’s racquet was, for example, triangular and it did have a ball-end to its handle. There was a piece of string connecting the too-short net rope to one of the posts. While there was not exactly a manhole in the middle of the court, there was for some curious reason a drainage hole like a miniature hydrant.

  As play got under way, I watched the growing bewilderment of the Amazons as the little thing in the party dress began to hit the ball even harder than they could. The Quixotic figure of the Viscount grew as appreciative of his partner as the Don would have been if his ‘Dulcinea del Toboso’ had suddenly appeared on the court. His enthusiasm waxed full: ‘Well done, partner! Splendid shot, partner!’ And then in ecstasy at one of Vera’s further efforts, ‘Oh, I have got a good partner!’ Emulating the Don in the Sierra Morena, he cut a series of wild capers one of which caused him to trip over the manhole, crash into the net, get himself tangled up with it, and break the string. Laughter overwhelmed me and I fell off my chair. The odd-job men were duly summoned to repair the net with a new piece of string, and Vera carried the Viscount to a triumphant victory.

  After tea his father, the Earl, suggested that I might walk round the garden with him. It was a magnificent garden, landscaped by Capability Brown. As we walked, we chatted about the international situation and of the prospect of war. The Earl summed up, ‘I don’t believe in it—I tell you, my boy, Hitler’s bluffing. Yes, the man’s bluffing. There will be no war!’ Twelve hours later the Germans were marching into Poland.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Secret Weapon

  AS THE German tanks and dive bombers attacked Poland, Britain became tensely calm. Trains full of evacuated children left our large cities, and those of us at Hoar Cross spent Saturday 2nd September collecting evacuees from the local railway station and taking them to their pre-arranged billets. The pathos of these bewildered children, torn from their parents by unpredictable danger, indelibly impressed me with sympathy for the innocents in war.

  The British Ultimatum to Germany expired on 3rd September 1939. It was a Sunday, and Vera had accompanied the Meynells to morning service at church. Jean, Hugo Meynell’s wife, and Rachel Meynell had stayed in the house, and the three of us listened to Neville Chamberlain’s speech at a quarter past eleven. The Prime Minister sounded like a decent, if ineffectual, man who had been badly let down; and as he said ‘It is evil things that we shall be fighting against’, we at least felt that Britain had done everything possible, in fact too much, to accommodate German demands.

  So we were, for the second time in our lives, at war. My immediate reaction was one of discomfiture, in that the most likely target in the event of a blitzkrieg would be London, and that I ought not to be comfortably away in Staffordshire. At the same time there was a sneaking relief at being out of London entirely legitimately, and therefore being able to weigh up the odds. The next few days were typical of those in a family decently prepared to do what it could. Hugo moved to join his Territorial Regiment, the Staffordshire Yeomanry—he was to be badly wounded at El Alamein. Rachel put on her Red Cross uniform—her mother had long been President of the Red Cross for Staffordshire—and Vera and I returned to London.

  There had been no air attack, although there had been a false alarm immediately after Chamberlain’s speech. I reported for duty to the Directorate of Scientific Research, which I found packing up its files in Berkeley Square House, in preparation for evacuating to Harrogate. I read what I could of the files that yet had to be packed and which might be useful as briefing regarding the development of new military weapons and techniques in this country.

  Woodward-Nutt introduced me to Wing Commander F. W. Winterbotham, the Head of the Air Intelligence branch designated as A.I.1(c) which was, although I did not know it, the Air component of M.I.6, the Secret Intelligence Service. It was agreed that I should be attached to Winterbotham’s Section after I had read the rest of the files in Harrogate. A few days later I drove north, the only incident of interest being a Montagu’s Harrier flying across the Great North Road, the only time in my life that I have seen one.

  I thought about the job that I now had to do. In some ways it suited me perfectly. I could see it as one of the very outposts of our national defences—it could not win the war but a failure to detect the development of a new German weapon could easily lead to disaster. This was what I had meant in my immediate comment on being offered the job by Woodward-Nutt. So, as with my father in 1914, I would hope to be among the first or the last. And had I been old enough to think about it—which I was not—I might have consciously wondered at the experience that, with two weeks still to go to my twenty-eighth birthday, I had already accumulated which was all going to be useful in the new job. My main weakness was in not being able to speak German—a legacy of the bias in school in favour of French—but against that I had gained much from school, and from home and Oxford. I had five years’ postdoctoral experience, especially in problems of observation, detection and navigation. I had worked in the Admiralty Research Laboratory and had been at sea with the Navy; I had the background of the Grenadiers coupled with seven years in the O.T.C. and more recently with the Air Defence Experimental Establishment at Biggin Hill and the Chemical Defence Establishment at Porton; I had been on the staff at Farnborough and had flown with the Royal Air Force. I knew both Lindemann and Tizard—and I also knew how different operational conditions in battle, or at least in trials, were from the calm of the laboratory. I had worked in Air Ministry Headquarters. Finally I had hoaxed the German Intelligence Service.

  The first trial was soon to come, for I had hardly been in Harrogate a week when Hitler made a speech at Danzig on 19th September 1939, in which, according to the Foreign Office translation, he said that he had a secret weapon against which no defence would avail. This caused Mr. Chamberlain as Prime Minister to ask the Intelligence Services if they knew what the secret weapon was. They were only too glad to be able to reply that they had just appointed a man for the very purpose, and would ask him to report. So I received an urgent call from Winter-botham to return to London, so that I could look through the files of the Secret Intelligence Service, and decide what the weapon must be.

  As it turned out, this was a great stroke of luck. Instead of having to spend some months on the periphery of Intelligence, while those in charge summed me up and decided whether I would be sufficiently reliable, there was such an alarm that I was taken to the very heart of Intelligence, and all its secrets were laid bare to me. After a day or two at the Headquarters of M.I.6 at No. 54, Broadway, I was told to go to Bletchley Park, or ‘Station X’ as it was known, which was to be the evacuation headquarters of M.I.6, and where all its pre-war files now rested.

  At Bletchley I shared a room with a most gentlemanly Squadron Leader, Courtleigh Nasmith Shaw, who had the traditional Air Force moustac
he and equally traditional drawl, and who had once been a cavalry officer. The relative informality of even military flying in those days enabled him to claim the endurance record for a Wapiti aircraft. What happened was that he had taken it from his own station to another for a lunch which was preceded, and doubtless followed, by a surfeit of what he termed ‘lightning snifters’. Flying back across Salisbury Plain he realized that his personal endurance was about to be reached, and that he would have to land in order to relieve himself. Spotting a large field he put down the aircraft without any trouble, and taxied to a convenient corner. After he had done what he had to do, it struck him that it was a beautiful summer afternoon and that a nap in the shade would be much in order. He therefore went to sleep, to be awakened some time later by the noise of an aircraft engine. It turned out to be his own, which he had not switched off. Jumping into the aircraft in some alarm he promptly took off, only to curse himself for being so foolish because it was clear that an hour or two had gone by and that his fuel might be near exhaustion. However, the fuel situation was not too bad, since the engine had not used much while ticking over, and he got home safely, some two hours beyond the official endurance of a Wapiti, to find that a search alarm had been instituted for him.

  The Wapiti was not the only episode in Courtleigh Shaw’s varied life in which micturition played a part. Courtleigh, or ‘Jane’ as he was universally nicknamed in honour of a well-known rugger song, had actually been a spy. During a tour of Germany by car to locate new airfields, he was accompanied by a suitable girlfriend, and the two of them were caught well within a forbidden area. They were taken by German Air Force guards to the airfield headquarters and interrogated. By making appropriate signs, Jane convinced the interrogator that nature was making undue demands on him, which he was too shy to mention in front of the girl, and was finally told the way to the lavatory while his girlfriend remained behind. In the best manner of the silly-ass Englishman he blundered into one door after another in an apparent search for the lavatory, excusing himself every time but in fact taking a look at what was going on in every room. He and the girl were finally released because the Germans could find nothing incriminating; but Jane told me that he was glad that he had made no marks on his maps. The worst thing that you can do, he said, was to use a pin instead of a pencil—although a pinprick cannot easily be seen from the right side of the map it is immediately obvious to any Intelligence Officer who knows the job and therefore holds the map up to the light.

  Jane looked after me for the first few days at Bletchley, and introduced me to some outstandingly interesting colleagues. At our first lunch he whispered to me, ‘See that chap opposite you—he’s A. J. Alan.’ This was the marvellous raconteur who used to fascinate B.B.C. listeners with his broadcast stories, and I found that most of the clues that I had spotted about him from his talks were correct. He was officially a civil servant, and had been at Oxford and, I think, Rugby. He was a cryptographer, which accounted for the reticence which surrounded him whenever anyone tried to discover his identity: his real name was Lambert. The most surprising thing about him was that, in contrast to the outrageously unconventional stories that he told, he himself was a model of regularity. At 11.30 precisely he would leave for a drink, usually with Oliver Strachey, another cryptographer, and return to work with the same punctuality. All his days were run on a monotonously regular timetable.

  The following day I found myself sitting opposite a distinctly excitable professor of German, who turned out to be Frederick Norman of King’s College London. He seemed to have no technical knowledge whatsoever, and he was waxing furious about the recent loss of the aircraft carrier H.M.S. Courageous. ‘Shocking show, shocking show!’ he kept on saying, shaking his head from side to side at the same time. I asked him why he was so moved, and he told me that it was bad enough to lose an aircraft carrier but to lose all the aircraft as well was beyond the limit. He said that she had taken some time to sink and so why couldn’t they have flown off all the aircraft in the meantime? I pointed out to him that it is difficult enough to take off from an aircraft carrier in the ordinary way, but to try to do so from a deck that was listing would be almost impossible. ‘I hadn’t thought of that!’ he said, and his technological ineptitude gave no clue to the enormous help he was to provide for me right through the war. A pleasant surprise at lunch was to encounter Joan Stenning, the daughter of the Warden of Wadham when I was an undergraduate. Again, we had no idea how the events of war were to throw us together.

  One of the most remarkable men at Bletchley was universally known as ‘Josh’. An outstanding cryptographer, he had built up a reputation for absentmindedness that even by the standard of his academic colleagues was unique. While I was at Bletchley he took part in the first interrogation of a prisoner of war from the German Air Force. This was a Lieutenant who had been shot down during the attack on our warships in the Firth of Forth on 16th October 1939. The party that was assembled to conduct the interrogation numbered four. The chief interrogator was S. D. Felkin, then a Squadron Leader who had served in World War I, and who had come back to the Air Force after being manager of Ideal Boilers in Paris. He was a good German speaker and, as it turned out, a brilliant interrogator. This first time, however, his technique had not yet developed, and it was agreed that he should be backed up by three experts. One was from the German Section of Air Intelligence; another was Flight Lieutenant Maggs, from the Y Service, or Signals Intelligence, who had a magnificent knowledge of the radio call signs used by German aircraft. I found that at any stage throughout the war I could telephone him asking him where an aircraft with a particular call sign had been heard before, and he could immediately give me its history. The third expert was Josh.

  They had a preliminary meeting together, and decided that the first thing that they had to do was to establish a moral superiority over the prisoner. They were to sit on one side of a long table, and the prisoner was to be marched in and stood to attention between two guards as members of the interrogation panel fired questions at him. When they had settled themselves down, the door was thrown open and the prisoner marched in. He was a typical product of Nazi success. His uniform was smart, his jackboots were gleaming, and his movements executed with German precision. As he came to the centre of the room he was halted and turned to face the panel. No sooner had he executed his turn than he clicked his heels together and gave a very smart Nazi salute. For this the panel were unprepared, and none more so than Josh, who stood up as smartly, gave the Nazi salute and repeated the prisoner’s ‘Heil Hitler!’ Then, realizing that he had done the wrong thing, he looked in embarrassment at his colleagues and sat down with such speed that he missed his chair and, to the prisoner’s astonishment, disappeared completely under the table.

  My final stroke of luck at Bletchley was that I was billeted with Sir Kenneth and Lady Macdonald at Winslow, along with Commander Edward Travis, who happened to be Deputy Head of the Government Code and Cipher School, the cryptographic headquarters that was officially part of M.I.6. The Head of the School was Commander Alexander Denniston, whom Travis was to succeed in 1942, but who had laid the foundations of our brilliant cryptographic successes. In our long evenings together Travis discussed with me his problems in cryptography, and in particular the problem of trying to ‘break’ the German Enigma machine. This was a very ingenious arrangement of three wheels, each one of which had a sequence of studs on each side, with each stud on one side being connected by a wire to a pin on the other side—the exact arrangement of the connections being one of the secrets of the machine—and the pin making contact with one of the studs on the next wheel. The machine had a typewriter keyboard, and it was worked rather like a cyclometer: every time the machine was operated to encode a letter, one wheel would be turned by one space; after this wheel had moved by enough spaces to turn it through one revolution, it would click its neighbouring wheel by one space. The wheels were thus never in the same position twice. The basic encoding was effected by the passage of
an electric current through the studs so that when a letter was to be encoded, the appropriate key would be pressed on the keyboard, and the resultant coded letter would be determined by the appropriate conducting path through the studs, the studs on one wheel making suitable contact with the pins on the neighbouring wheel. A further touch of ingenuity was to add a reversing arrangement at the edge of the third wheel, again with studs cross-connected so as to send the current backwards through the wheels by yet another path. The returning current lit a small electric bulb which illuminated a particular letter on a second keyboard, and thus indicated the enciphered equivalent of the letter whose key had originally been pressed.

  Travis told me that although the World War I generation of cryptographers, which included Oliver Strachey and Nigel de Grey (who had helped break the famous Zimmermann telegram) believed that machine codes would be unbreakable, some of his new generation of young cryptographers believed that Enigma could be broken, and that they had already got as far as working out what some of the cross wiring inside the wheels must be. A great step forward had recently been achieved through the Poles, who had stolen the wheels of an actual machine, and it was now therefore a question of building yet another machine which could rapidly try out all the possible combinations to see which one produced a plain text in German language. Even when you had the wheels, you needed to know the relative order in which they were placed, and the positions in which they were set at the beginning of a message, if you were to use the Enigma machine, and this was, of course, the knowledge that was still denied us and which had somehow to be recovered every time.

  Travis introduced me to Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician who later contributed so much to the development of computers and machine intelligence, and together we worked out ways in which the process might be done mechanically, with a machine that would recognize when genuine German was coming out by the frequencies with which various letters and diphthongs appeared. Actually, the way in which the problem was finally and brilliantly solved was not quite along that line of attack, but it had introduced me to the cryptographers and given me an understanding of their problems. And it had alerted them to mine.