Most Secret War

by R. V. Jones

  As it was, we could not keep up the scale of attack that had caused such havoc at Hamburg, despite the fears of Speer and Milch; and instead of the Germans collapsing, they recovered magnificently. Their war production increased, and their night defences were reorganized to the extent that within three months they were—thanks to our mistakes—again a limiting factor of what we could achieve by bombing.

  In the meantime, though, we were elated by our success, and on 3rd August I wrote a report summarizing our experiences of the first few nights, and pointing out that the Germans were already extemporizing by using day fighters over the burning targets. We should also need to improve our jamming against the Freyas, and to develop means of homing on the nightfighters, even though their Lichtenstein sets had been upset by Window. Finally, we must improve our concentration on the return journey if we were to keep up a sufficient density of Window to provide a smokescreen. As for the amount of Window we had dropped, and the original estimates that had been made by Bomber Command, Fighter Command and my own Unit, the amounts used in these early raids had been nearer to my own figure than to those of either Command, and they had worked as I expected; but as the Germans grew more expert we should certainly need more Window unless we took great pains to maintain concentration on the return journey.

  It would obviously be an encouragement to the bomber crews if we could let them know something of the German reactions. One that we had not expected was an accusation of chemical warfare. A cow somewhere near Hamburg ate some of the Window strips and died; this caused the Germans to examine the strips in detail, and they found that the black paint with which we had coated them, so as not to show up in searchlights, did contain traces of arsenic, as we ourselves then confirmed. But this was entirely accidental, and too small an amount to be serious, and so the accusation was dropped.

  Other German reactions, such as those that we were gaining from Enigma, could not be broadcast to our crews; but fortunately a heavily-laden and very gallant pigeon arrived at its home base, having been dropped by Bomber Command somewhere in North France with my usual questionnaire. It had been picked up by a Frenchman who had been present in one of the German nightfighter control stations, perhaps as a cleaner, and when he saw that there was a question about radar he had clearly delighted in describing the events one night in the station at le Croix Caluyau as he had witnessed them. I have never seen a pigeon carrying such a profuse message. It ended with the exclamation by the German Station Commander, who had spent the night trying to intercept seven hundred separate bombers without being able to locate one: ‘He would rather be attacked by a hundred bombers than submit to that torrent of paper again!’ Since no source could be compromised by this message, we were able to circulate it to Bomber Command, where the Commander’s comment was widely appreciated.

  As for the Luftwaffe, its report written soon after Hamburg and entitled ‘A study of the Present Window Situation’ said:

  ‘Since July 25, the enemy, first at night—in isolated cases in daylight too—combined with the raids into Reich territory, the dropping of “Hamburg bodies”. The technical success of this action must be designated as complete.… By this means the enemy has delivered the long awaited blow against our decimetre radar sets both on land and in the air.’

  While the Germans wrestled with the problem of dealing with Window, Bomber Command should gain some respite after its heavy losses earlier in the year, and I could now give rather more attention to other aspects of the war that threatened to overwhelm us.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Heavy Water

  LEIF TRONSTAND’S ‘Thicker than heavy water’ telegram (p. 206) and his subsequent journey from Norway to Britain in early autumn 1941 had amply confirmed our suspicions that the Germans would be interested in heavy water as a ‘moderator’ if they intended to make an atomic pile; and it had thus indicated that they were taking atomic developments seriously. It turned out that Karl Wirtz, a pre-war friend of Charles Frank at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut, had inspected the Norwegian plant at Vermork, the main European source of heavy water, to ascertain how far its output could be increased. A contract had been awarded to the plant to produce 1,500 kilograms of heavy water starting in the autumn of 1941, and it seemed that the Germans were on the way to making an atomic pile in which plutonium might be produced.

  Later in the war, when Charles and I surveyed the evidence, we began to wonder whether someone in Germany had consciously steered his countrymen away from the plutonium route towards the construction of an atomic bomb, because—despite the demand for heavy water—it seemed that the Germans were not thinking along this line. It turned out that at least one German scientist, Fritz Houtermans, had indeed foreseen the possibility of making plutonium in an atomic pile and so making a bomb from the plutonium produced, and that he had written a memorandum about it. He submitted the paper to the German Post Office because, or so he told us, he thought it would be buried there and that no one would take any notice of it. At the same time, if there were ever a postmortem he could not be accused of not having told the German government about the possibility. Whether this was true or not, I had sympathy for Houtermans, when I heard about him after the war. He had had the almost unique experience of having been imprisoned both by the Gestapo and the Ogpu, both the Germans and the Russians having at different times suspected him of working for their enemies. In solitary confinement he had kept himself sane by trying to develop The Theory of Numbers, working out the various theorems by scratching on the whitewashed walls of his cell. I was reminded of Lord Cherwell who, in very different circumstances, adopted much the same policy; for during his wartime duties in Whitehall, he kept an interest in mathematics by working out a new proof of what is known as the prime number theorem, which concerns the probability that any given number may be a prime. When I met Houtermans after the war and told him how I had felt for him he replied, ‘Well, it is the only experimental science that you can do without a laboratory.’

  In March 1942 one of S.O.E.’s exploits was to capture a Norwegian coastal steamer and sail it to Aberdeen. Among the Norwegian volunteers in the exploit was Einar Skinnarland, who came from Rjukan, the site of the heavy water plant. When he landed at Aberdeen he was briefed by Tronstad, and parachuted back into Norway within such a short time that his absence went unnoticed. He made contact with the chief engineer of the plant, Jomar Brun, who provided full details of the plant, and in November 1942 Brun himself came to London, where Welsh, Frank and I talked with him and Tronstad.

  In the meantime, the information about heavy water production at Rjukan was so positive that I was asked whether we ought to try to knock it out. When I agreed, the recommendation went up to the War Cabinet, which requested Combined Operations to prepare an attack. Direct bombing had been opposed by Tronstad, on the grounds that many civilian casualties would be caused if the liquid-ammonia storage tanks were to be hit, so the plan was formed to fly in two gliders carrying a force of 34 men of the First Airborne Division, who would attack the plant and attempt to escape into Sweden. The attempt was made on 19th November 1942, but met with utter disaster. One of the towing aircraft flew into a mountainside and all six of its crew were killed. Three of the men in the glider were killed and several others badly injured. They were caught by the Germans, and although they were wearing British Army uniform they were considered to come under Hitler’s edict that all commandos should be killed. They were all shot or, possibly in the case of the three badly wounded, poisoned by a German doctor. The other glider, which the towing aircraft had thought to have come down in the sea, did in fact come down on land and again those who were not killed in the crash were executed by the Germans.

  All we knew at the time was that every man had been lost. Eric Welsh broke the news to me, and told me that the decision whether or not the attack should be repeated would rest with me. I told him that since one day either way was not likely to matter, I would sleep on the decision and give it to him the following day.
I spent much of the night arguing both sides of the case with myself, but finally decided that the argument for the destruction of the heavy water plant was just as strong now as it had been when we made the original decision; I therefore told him that I thought another attempt should be made.

  I am unable to say whether my decision was the vital one that led to the next raid because I suspect in retrospect that Welsh was beginning to use me, as he ultimately used others in more eminent positions, as a puppet. Had his own opinion differed much from my own, I do not know what would have transpired. But he went to S.O.E., who agreed to mount a different type of operation involving a much smaller force—just six Norwegians under Lieutenant Joachim Rönneberg. They parachuted into Norway on 16th February 1943, and made their way to Rjukan which they attacked with brilliant success on the night of 27/28th February. It was an epic of daring, endurance, and sabotage. The German Commander in Norway, General von Falkenhorst, described it as ‘the best coup I have ever seen’. The plant was put out of action for some months, and a stock of about 350 kilograms of heavy water was lost. At the same time, there had been no damage to the basic hydroelectric works, and no casualties on either side, for all six Norwegian saboteurs escaped. Lieutenants Rönneberg and Poulsson were awarded D.S.O.’s, and the others either M.C.’s or M.M.’s.

  Matters were clearly warming up in the nuclear field. On 3rd December 1942 the world’s first atomic pile had gone critical in Chicago, under the direction of Enrico Fermi, and the American effort was rapidly gaining momentum. Eric Welsh now began to grow in stature, and his next proposal seemed distinctly imaginative. It was that we should attempt to get Niels Bohr, the father of theoretical nuclear physics, to come to Britain from Denmark. For this he conceived the idea of using our own distinguished physicist, James Chadwick. He called on Chadwick in his Liverpool laboratory, stressing that he was in the Secret Service, and that it was Chadwick’s duty to his country to try to persuade Bohr to come. Chadwick hesitated, thinking of the risk to Bohr, but Welsh then ‘came the heavy father’ and called on Chadwick in the name of England, as he told me, and Chadwick agreed to write a letter which was microfilmed and smuggled to Bohr in an ordinary household key. Bohr duly received the message but decided that his duty lay in staying at his post in Copenhagen—he used to quote Hans Andersen’s poem: ‘In Denmark I was born, and there my home is!’

  For us, there was clearly enough in the Intelligence picture, coupled with what we knew of developments on our own side and in America, to justify the closest watch on German nuclear developments, long-term though these might be. I myself was very heavily committed to the work in support of Bomber Command and with anticipating the threat of the German V weapons, and since both these activities were more urgent, I thought the nuclear problem could be covered by getting Charles Frank and Eric Welsh together for meetings with Wallace Akers and Michael Perrin, both former I.C.I. employees, but now prominently in the British ‘Tube Alloys’ project, as our own nuclear bomb effort was called. I thought that Welsh, as the one Secret Service man with a science degree, and who had shown such an interest in nuclear matters after he had recovered from his first gaffe about heavy water, would work all the better for this direct liaison with those who were responsible for the British bomb developments, on the general principle that the more a man is involved, the better he works. In addition, Frank and Perrin were both Oxford chemists who could talk easily to one another.

  After a month or two of their triumvirate meetings Welsh came to me with a confidential message from Perrin, asking if I would withdraw Frank from the meetings, and allow him, Welsh, to represent me alone, because Frank tended to rub people up the wrong way. Remembering the early brush with Stewart Menzies, I accepted that there could be just enough truth in this, but it was not a matter which I could very well discuss with Frank without hurting his feelings. I therefore suggested to him that we both had enough to do with the immediate issues of the war, and that we could safely leave the liaison with Akers and Perrin to Welsh. It was to have grave effects.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Revelations From The Secret Service

  ONE FASCINATION of the war was the way in which it drew men and women of very different backgrounds together. This was especially true of the Intelligence Services, and I for one enjoyed the expanding range of human contacts. Beside the galaxy of talent at Bletchley, where I met mathematicians and Arts men in far warmer circumstances than in a university, there were men whose adventurous lives alternated between a desk and the ‘sharp end’ in the field, such as naval officers who spent weeks with us in the office, and then disappeared for spells when they took a four-master sailing ship from the Helford River right into the Breton coast under the noses of the Kriegsmarine.

  One reason for such sorties was to bring back British personnel such as air crew who had evaded capture after being shot down in Europe. The principal figure in the escaping organization was a Coldstream officer, James Langley. He had joined the Coldstream Guards in 1936, his father having selected the regiment for him after recalling a 1915 discussion among the Greenjackets regarding the regiment out of the whole army that they would most prefer to have on their flanks in attack or retreat. The Coldstream won by one vote from the Grenadiers; but a regular Guards commission in peace-time was too much for the family pocket, and so Jimmy went on the reserve and into the City. Like most scientists, I had come to regard ‘men in the City’ as parasites who lived on the brains and labours of others; but meeting men like Jimmy changed my views. He was recalled in May 1939 and one year later found himself in the rearguard at Dunkirk.

  Just as most of the Army had been evacuated, Jimmy was badly wounded while his Company was still holding its position. When their time came his Guardsmen carried him to the beach but the Navy would not take him because as a stretcher case he would occupy as much space on board ship as four men standing up. His wounds were so serious that in prisoner-of-war camp his left arm had to be amputated by a British surgeon; and injuries to his leg limited him to crawling. By October 1940 he had recovered sufficiently to escape from hospital in Lille, and he set out across France for the Spanish frontier. The long journey home took him until March 1941, when he landed in Liverpool: then, by the propriety that occurs more often in war than in peace, he was at once put in charge of the Section of M.I.9 that was attached to M.I.6 to organize the escape of British service personnel, especially air crew, from the Continent back to Britain.

  From time to time he came to my office to seek advice about where a boat had best chances to reach the French coast undetected by German radar. In 1942 he was joined by Airey Neave, who had made a remarkable escape from Colditz, and they have described their experiences in Langley’s Fight Another Day and Neave’s Saturday At M.I.9. Although Langley’s own modest comment was ‘too little and too late’ the achievements of his organization were remarkable: several hundred soldiers and some three thousand airmen were brought back, with invaluable effect on R.A.F. morale. The cost, though, was heavy: at least five hundred of those in Occupied Territories who aided the escapers are known to have been killed by the Germans, and the true total may be much higher. As Jimmy has said, quite possibly for every British serviceman brought back, a Dutch, Belgian or French patriot died.

  I used to hear some of the stories from him as they were occurring, and there is one told by him and by Neave in their books to which I can add a detail that has escaped their memories. It concerns Harold Cole, or Paul Cole as he later called himself. The first I heard of him was when Jimmy told me how puzzled he was by the activities of an Englishman who was at large in France and who was running great risks to help our airmen escape. On one occasion he had shepherded a party of, I think, six R.A.F. evaders from the Occupied Zone across the demarcation line into Vichy France, and the senior officer had asked him for his name so that his gallantry could be recognized at some suitable time. ‘Just tell them I’m Inspector Thompson of Scotland Yard,’ was the Pimpernel’s reply. But when Jimmy w
ent to Scotland Yard, they had no trace of Inspector Thompson or, indeed, of any Inspector missing in France. Ultimately the ‘Inspector’ helped an Englishwoman who had been a governess to a French family in the south of France to escape. She was so certain of her story that Jimmy took her to Scotland Yard, where she was shown photographs of all their Inspectors who could possibly fit the bill, but she could recognize none of them. Finally one of the Yard men said; ‘Wait a minute!’ and went out of the room: he returned with a new album of photographs and before very long the governess picked ‘Inspector Thompson’ out.

  The only difficulty was that this was no portrait of a Scotland Yard Inspector but one from the Rogue’s Gallery of a confidence trickster who was wanted by the police on a charge of manslaughter or murder. He had disappeared before the war, and had turned up in 1940, posing as a sergeant in the British Army, in France where he was presumably continuing his career of crime. The German triumph seemed to have brought out all his patriotic instincts and, as for handling escapes, who better than a confidence trickster who was prepared not to stop at murder?