Although PC Cadix was working flat out, Bertrand’s demands were unpredictable and always super-urgent. Tasks had to be dropped half-way through to give priority to Bertrand, despite the resulting negative impact on efficiency.9 After the German attack on the USSR, the volume of material being intercepted had gone up, creating ‘a gigantic amount of work,’ said Gwido Langer.10 The code-breakers were at their duties round the clock. To be sure, there was less potato-peeling, but other chores such as wood-chopping and electrical work still had to be shared out among the team as no outside help could prudently be engaged.
And that was not all of it. With the establishment of the new Polish intelligence organisation headed by Mieczysław Słowikowski, cover-name Rygor, in North Africa, the volume and importance of the messages being transmitted via Ciężki in Algiers and the radio-relay team at PC Cadix had also grown. These covered coastal and air defences across French North Africa, ship movements and the dependency of the colonies on American supplies of fuel. The Vichy régime was getting ever closer to alliance with the Germans. Permission was given for Luftwaffe aircraft to land at Oran, in French territory. Moreover, despite the appointment of a special oversight commission, American fuel was being sent on to the Axis forces in Libya. Nobody else was supplying the Allies with this quality of intelligence so vital to Allied interests in the North African desert.
• • •
The volatile Vichy régime was trying to adapt to the new world order, as German successes to the East and South added to their dominance. Yet Vichy had no solid support among the French population and lacked self-confidence. Symptomatic of its rotten structure was its persistent creation of new organs to spy on itself. When Admiral François Darlan took over the helm of the Vichy government he had instigated a confidential surveillance mission, which reported that the French Army and Air Force intelligence services were still working against Germany and Italy and passing details to the British. Darlan reacted by setting up a new coordination body, the Centre d’Information Gouvernemental, whose job was to keep people like Louis Rivet and his subordinates in check.
Thus, Bertrand reported to the British in October 1941 that he had been told by Vichy to cease relations with the British, and there was a report that December on the activities of the British MI6 in France and its colonies, noting that the British were using stay-behind Polish agents.11 Rivet fended off these intrusions with some suitably dressed-up half-information from Bertrand about machine encryption and super-encipherment, accompanied with examples to show that British material was at least being tracked.12 It was indeed being tracked, by another organ of the Vichy establishment, the Groupement des Contrôles Radioéléctriques, which had been set up to snuff out illicit Resistance radio broadcasts but was in fact working under Bertrand’s direction.13 Not everyone in Vichy France was doing as they were told.
Vichy rule was also changing l’Afrique Française du Nord. French North Africa was no longer the devil-may-care place of beaches and parties. Coal was in short supply. As the French government grew closer to the Nazis, travail, famille, patrie slogans appeared everywhere. Listening to the BBC was forbidden. Anti-semitic rants in the press increased in volume and darkened in tone. Pro-Gaullist movements were hounded by the official authorities. The train timetable had to be changed because of the coal shortage and spot checks on travellers were stepped up. The attempt to close down Gaullist sentiment had the opposite effect, but still, many colonists supported the proud authoritarianism of Pétain, without necessarily agreeing to support the Germans. Even the anti-Vichy resisters were divided between royalists and republicans. The only thing that everyone agreed on was the villainy of the British, but beyond that nobody knew what anyone really thought.
While the need for secrecy in this troubled territory intensified, the volume, importance and visibility of what the Poles were doing there was rising. Maksymilian Ciężki reported to Słowikowski that his French liaison officer, whom Ciężki thought of as his minder, was (prompted by Bertrand) asking questions about the reasons behind the growth in volume of radio traffic.14 Ciężki had responded with a feeble excuse about an internal reorganisation, but this would not hold up for much longer. Ciężki said his room had been searched. He’d been keeping Słowikowski’s materials in his own safe, in a building controlled by the French. It was messy, and increasingly dangerous.15 Something needed to change.
• • •
On 7 December 1941, everything did change. Everything. The attack on Pearl Harbor (and on some British shipping near Indonesia) took everyone by surprise. Suddenly, Japan was at war with America and Britain. Germany declared war on America. If the war between Germany and the USSR had unsettled the relations of the Allies, the entry of America into the war was going to be an earthquake by comparison. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it a day of infamy. Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill said, ‘to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy … we had won after all!’16 In this new construct, Poland, Britain’s first ally – for a year, Britain’s only ally – was receding from sight.
For Słowikowski it was fitting to reach out, Z to A, to contact the Americans in Algiers. He did not go in through the front door; it was better to lay some bait. So his first step was to use a contact to leak that the Polish forces might have some sort of secret intelligence operation. And then he watched for the reaction. The Americans were intrigued, and once the depth and quality of what the Poles knew – and the depth of their own innocent ignorance – became apparent, a permanent relationship was proposed. During the coming months, that relationship would grow into the most important intelligence liaison for the North African theatre.
Meanwhile, though, Słowikowski had to solve the radio traffic problem and the Americans could help. They agreed that their diplomatic bag could be used to send Słowikowski’s non-urgent despatches. There was still a need for a direct radio link to London, cutting the outpost of Ekspozytura 300 out of the loop so as to dampen the French suspicions. Stanisław Gano, head of intelligence in London, could not send anyone to North Africa;17 the problem was worsened because one of the Poles, Ryszard Krajewski, had suffered a breakdown and was in hospital in Algiers. Ciężki would have to manage regardless. But Krajewski’s illness gave Langer a good reason to pull the wool further over the eyes of Bertrand, keeping the radio-relay operation in place for a while longer.18 As things turned out, Ciężki’s tour of duty in Algiers was going to be extended until the summer and only then would Ekspozytura 300 cease to have responsibility for keeping Słowikowski in touch with London.19
Meanwhile the group who had been supporting Ciężki in Africa were being sent back to France. Krajewski was still in hospital. So, on 6 January 1942, along with the suspicious Capitaine Lane (who may have been the person who searched Ciężki’s room), four Poles once more boarded the Marseilles steamer Lamoricière at Algiers. The Polish code-breakers embarking on the voyage were: Paszkowski, known as Casanova; Różycki of the original Enigma team from Poznań; Smoleński, whose photography at the Château des Fouzes had drawn upon him the wrath of Bertrand, and Graliński, who at 47 was one of the oldest of the Ekspozytura 300 staff and the only expert on Russian ciphers in Africa.
• • •
The Lamoricière was a passenger ship of 1,450 tons, originally built in the Swan Hunter yard in Newcastle in 1921. On the day of departure her coal was bad and the weather was very bad. She struggled to make headway. The Captain announced that their arrival in Marseilles would be delayed. He changed course in response a distress call from the cargo ship Jumièges, but in the heavy seas he could not find her and discovered his own ship was taking on water. The pumps could not cope and the rising water level threatened to swamp the engines.20 The captain called for volunteers to form a chain of buckets and Paszkowski and Smoleński stood for six hours in the freezing water handing up dripping containers. By 8 a.m. on 9 January 1942 the captain knew the game was up. The ship had a heavy, uncontrollable list. Passengers and crew wer
e ordered to grab lifebelts and go to their abandon-ship stations. Another ship, the Gueydon, was standing off, but the seas were too high for a coordinated rescue and the Lamoricière was about to go. The boats on one side could not be launched; boats on the other were quickly swamped.
Without discussing it, each one of us started to plan their own jumps into the sea. Ralewski [Graliński] left us just before 12 and went to the front of the ship. Around 12.10, after a short conversation with me, Rouget [Różycki] followed him. Smolny [Smoleński] and I were left in the bar. Around 12.20 the waves consumed the bridge just outside the bar and water started pouring into the bar. We left it then in an attempt to reach the rear of the ship. When we got there, Ralewski and Rouget were nowhere to be seen. Next thing I see is Smolny taking off his camera and coat … At 12.27 (the time shown by the watch on my arm) I jumped into the sea …21
Henryk Paszkowski, the author of this account, was the only code-breaker to survive the shipwreck. He managed to survive half an hour in the water and swim to the waiting Gueydon. His bride Janina was lucky to have been left behind in Algeria. She would see her husband again, but Barbara Różycka’s 2½-year-old son would never know his father. Capitaine Milliasseau honourably went down with his ship, but over half his crew managed to save themselves while leaving more than four out of five of the passengers to drown.
Słowikowski had been worried about Maksymilian Ciężki. He thought Ciężki was getting paranoid and it didn’t help that the major had been left to run the Ekspozytura AFR radio operation almost solo.22 Then came the news. There were scenes, almost a riot, outside the shipping office on the Boulevard Carnot. Only 50 out of the 272 passengers on board had been saved and the others had become victims of the coal crisis in Algeria. Ciężki was crushed.
The shocked group at the Château des Fouzes were plunged into despondency when – the day after the disaster – the news reached them. Bertrand appeared to offer his personal condolences and Paszkowksi himself arrived after a few more days. It was going to be difficult to adjust to the loss and the workload had not let up at all. Janina Paszkowska was an obvious choice to help with the staff numbers, and with effect from 23 February 1942 she was hired as a cipher clerk with the splendid cover-name ‘la comtesse Makarewicz’. Another Polish alumnus of the Biuro Szyfrów called Tadeusz Suszczewski had turned up, attending a hydraulic engineering course in Grenoble. Henryk Zygalski made a couple of trips there and by the end of May Suszczewski had also been recruited (with the much more dreary cover-name ‘Dubois’), to replace Graliński on decoding the Russian intercepts.23
The arrival of Suszczewski brought a new pastime, namely frog-hunting:
After arriving by car or bicycle at an area of ponds and meadows, we would select a suitable muddy pool where we heard the loudest croaking, and spread a large red cloth on the grass. Evidently this colour is very alluring to frogs, because after a few minutes several of them would appear on the cloth, and then more and more would hop aboard.
The frogs soon found their way to the pot, a welcome supplement to the wartime diet.24
In Algiers, where the diet was porridge, Słowikowski’s radio problem was taking its time to find a solution. A two-way wireless was smuggled from London via the American consulate, but the real issue was finding someone to operate it. There was no progress until March, when one of Słowikowski’s French national agents, who was a radio technician by profession, agreed to take on the job. Słowikowski set up his cover using the best deception technique in the book: to hide the wireless in plain sight. A radio repair shop was established in suitable premises in the Arab quarter and amongst the second-hand junk ostensibly for sale was a disembowelled radiogram containing the fully operational device. The aerial would be rigged only when needed for transmissions. Nothing could look more innocent. Establishing reliable communications was harder and it was only on 18 July 1942 (and after a visit from Bertrand) that Ciężki could finally go back to join his remaining pre-war colleagues in France.25
Meanwhile the intelligence continued to flow to London and, via headquarters and Biffy Dunderdale, to MI6. The unpleasant details of what the German ‘police’ were doing included particulars of ‘evacuation’ trains (971 Jews left Bremen for Poland in January 1942) and a demand for figures (such as the number of furs seized from Jews in Poland). Between May 1941 and June 1942, Dunderdale’s people signed for over 1,400 despatches and other materials handed over by the Polish General Staff, ranging through messages intercepted by Ekspozytura 300, aid for Słowikowski’s operation, supplies delivered to the Germans in French North Africa, French collaboration with the Germans, Russian messages, cash transfers for the French and African outposts and messages from Bertrand himself.26
• • •
Bletchley Park was busy. By 1942, Alan Turing’s work on Enigma was largely complete, with Bombes being built by the score and – unknown to Bertrand – the settings on a dozen or more networks being churned out daily in factory-style production. The staff who had had to endure freezing wooden huts were being transferred to new, brick-built edifices of stupendous ugliness which were now lining one side of the once glamorous Victorian lake. Americans had arrived to strengthen the forces working against Naval Enigma. Now Turing was being given a new role, helping the Americans in the war against the U-boats.
The problem of Naval Enigma was central to the Battle of the Atlantic. The race was to find the U-boats and re-route the convoys before the U-boats found the merchant ships. It was a game of cat and mouse and the German Navy was very good at it. Not only were they able to read the coded messages of the British Merchant Navy and, for most of 1942 and the early part of 1943, the Royal Navy as well, the U-boats had developed tactics for punishing convoys and evading their escorts. On 1 February 1942, they had also introduced a new Enigma machine, the M4, with four rather than three rotors. The U-boats had eight, rather than five, possible rotors to choose from, and their ‘indicator’ procedure did not depend on the vulnerable choose-it-yourself approach of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe. Altogether, the U-boat system was more solid, more reliable, less breakable than Army and Air Force Enigma and without breaks, Bletchley Park couldn’t get cribs and without cribs, they couldn’t use the Bombes. Worse still, once the four-rotor machine came into operation, a three-rotor Bombe was of very limited use unless you were able to set aside twenty-six Bombes to run a single problem.
All this made the task of Naval Enigma very tough. At the same time it was Churchill’s number one priority. The country would starve, let alone be able to continue to fight, if the lifeline across the Atlantic were severed. Huge efforts were piled into the challenge. Alan Turing solved the indicator system early in the war, but it required ‘pinches’ (captures of the ‘confidential books’, the all-important ciphering instructions containing the daily Enigma settings) before Bletchley Park could break in, solve messages and create cribs to keep their methods alive.
On 30 October 1942, the U-boat U-559 was patrolling in the eastern Mediterranean when she was spotted by an aircraft. In company with several other ships, HMS Petard intercepted the boat and subjected her to a merciless depth-charge onslaught lasting ten hours. After all her desperate evasive efforts, the air in the U-boat was foul and the charge on her batteries was low. To escape, to refresh and to recharge all pointed to a run on the surface under cover of darkness. U-559 surfaced gingerly and tried to sneak away. Unfortunately for her, she was picked up instantly on radar and the battle recommenced. There was nothing for it but to scuttle and the crew abandoned ship. But something went wrong; in fact two things went wrong. The scuttling charges didn’t send U-559 instantly to the bottom of the sea and the orders to destroy the ‘confidential books’ had not been carried out.
Lieutenant-Commander Mark Thornton, the captain of Petard, ordered a boarding party across and they raided the captain’s tiny cabin. There they found a strange machine which looked a bit like a typewriter, a collection of cog-wheels with the letters of the alphabet around th
em and the much-prized confidential books. These were handed out to the Royal Navy crew manning the whale boat above and then the boarding party went back for another look. Suddenly the U-boat took a gulp and began to founder. The scuttling charges had made enough of a hole after all. She went suddenly, too fast for Lieutenant Anthony Fasson and Able Seaman Colin Grazier to escape. But a piece of pink blotting paper printed with water-soluble ink was already in the whaler. Still dry, the pink paper reached Bletchley Park on 24 November 1942 and it was the way in, via the short-signal weather code, to unravel the four-rotor Enigma. Fasson and Grazier were posthumously awarded the George Cross.
The four-rotor machine would also need a new engineering solution, and while the British worked on one possibility, Alan Turing was sent to America to advise their engineers on another. The American naval Bombe was an astonishing advance in technology. While it used the logical design of the Turing–Welchman Bombe, its hardware solution was revolutionary. If a three-rotor Bombe of the 1940 model took ten minutes to complete its run, a four-rotor Bombe built on the same principles would take twenty-six times as long: four and a half hours. The fast rotor needed to go much faster for the machine to do its job. This was within the tolerance of electromechanical parts, but problems happened when the machine reached a possible solution and its moving parts were supposed to stop. Whizzing around at over 1,000 rpm, the fast rotor had so much momentum that it was never going to stop in the time available. So the Americans – to be specific, Joe Desch, an engineer working at the National Cash Register corporation – were going to use electronics to ‘memorise’ the overshot stop position. Alan Turing went to visit Joe Desch and discuss his prototype. It was the first use of electronic technology in a code-breaking machine and may have been the first step on the road to post-war electronic computing machines. Y and A were taking intelligence co-operation into a completely new dimension.
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