The task fell to another beneficiary of Ensign Smith’s brief signal. The cruiser Dorsetshire had been escorting a convoy from West Africa when she picked up the Catalina’s sighting report. She had turned at once toward the position, 600 miles to the northward, for it was the unwritten privilege of a warship’s captain to “steer for the sound of the guns.”
At 8:40 on the morning of Tuesday, May 27, Bismarck slowly capsized from Dorsetshire’s coup de grâce. There were 107 survivors out of the great battleship’s company of 2,000; and a total of 4,100 sailors had drowned during the eight days’ hunt from the Baltic to the Arctic and down to Biscay.
Churchill meanwhile prepared Parliament for news that land and sea battles were going badly everywhere. He had entered the House knowing only that Bismarck might be trapped. “It is . . . thought that there cannot be any lengthy delay in disposing of this vessel,” he was saying when someone waved a piece of paper. The Prime Minister stopped and sank heavily to his seat. There was a sense of doom around him. The paper was thrust into his hand. He rose again. “I crave your indulgence, Mr. Speaker. I have just received news that the Bismarck is sunk.” A sigh like a fresh wind swept through the Commons.
Roosevelt signaled his congratulations from “one former naval person to another former naval person” through BSC, adding a somber note of regret that such a notable victory was won while America remained officially frozen in peaceful and uncomprehending immobility.
The battle was described by Admiral Raeder as having “a decisive effect on the war at sea.” Not only that—the battle had a decisive effect on President Roosevelt, psychologically. He made a speech that seemed to guarantee American action in the North Atlantic against German attempts to break the supply line, and proclaimed an “Unlimited National Emergency.” When public reaction persuaded Roosevelt that he ran the risk again of getting too far ahead of opinion, he shifted to clandestine support through BSC channels. An invasion of Americans into Britain began: the build-up of “advisers,” who were the nucleus of expeditionary forces yet to come.
The secrets of Ensign Smith’s assignment and quick action were sealed in the Public Record Office, which has housed, since the eleventh century, “all documents relating to the actions of the central government and the courts of law of England and Wales,” and were not made public for thirty-two years. Only then did scholars find the clue to Smith’s role in a characteristically mild note. It mentions the vital moment when the Bismarck was found again, and the courage of the American PBY’s crew. The public historian knew nothing about the secret arrangement whereby members of the U.S. armed forces participated in British operations, traveling abroad at U.S. government expense to join British organizations. He wrote the dry comment: “I am not quite clear why these American officers were in the aircraft. However, I suggest it would be a good thing if the Admiralty were to recognize their services.”
But no recognition was given to Ensign Smith, and other Americans assigned to the British services, for the reason that, technically speaking, they had broken the law, aided and abetted by their president. The strain on U.S. Navy personnel engaged in “short of war” operations was noted by the American naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison: “They were forbidden to tell of their experiences. . . . The fact that morale remained high throughout this period of bitter warfare that was not yet war attests the intelligence, the discipline, and the fortitude of the United States Navy.”
Stephenson recalled that shortly before FDR made his decision to give the British as much naval support as he could get away with, he sent for the musty documents concerning the torpedoing of the passenger liner Lusitania, in May 1915. That event played a major role in bringing the United States into World War I. There had long been a question about whether Churchill, then also First Lord of the Admiralty, maneuvered the situation so that the Germans would seem coldbloodedly to have preyed upon a neutral passenger ship. The suspicion was that the Lusitania’s cargo included arms and ammunition.
The original cargo manifest went down with the ship. But carbon copies had been obtained by Woodrow Wilson, who sealed the documents and marked them TO BE OPENED ONLY BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. They revealed an additional cargo of 200 tons of munitions, enough to make her the legitimate target of an enemy U-boat attack. This controversial manifest was put away with Roosevelt’s personal papers. If it was a true copy of the original cargo list, then the official version of the sinking of the Lusitania had been negligent in failing to mention her service as a munitions ship. Furthermore, the Admiralty on Churchill’s behalf had advised British ships to paint out their port of registry. The owners of the Lusitania had gone so far as to sail her under an American flag, posing therefore as neutral. The suppression of her true manifest would appear to have been an attempt to diminish the opposition of those Americans who did not wish the sinking to be made an excuse for war.
Whatever the truth about the Lusitania, there was never much doubt about Churchill’s approach to the U-boat menace. In his book The World Crisis, he had written that in the 1914–18 submarine war there was always the possibility Germany would become embroiled with other Great Powers because the U-boat relied increasingly on underwater attack, which risked sinking neutral ships and drowning neutral crews. Clearly, he thought Germany deserved whatever she got by taking this risk.
What did President Roosevelt think of all this when he reviewed the case on the twenty-sixth anniversary of the Lusitania’s sinking? What did he have in mind? “We shall never know,” Stephenson said. “The Bismarck drove all else from our minds, and the Lusitania papers were put away again. But for a moment one president glimpsed something which had guided the hand of another president, and those old documents bridged the truce between the wars.”
Bismarck’s end marked the beginning of closer U.S. radio-intelligence aid in British war operations. Pedestrians on New York’s Fifth Avenue who had read in their morning newspapers of the great naval battle were actually closer than they knew to a most vital part of the conflict. A Traffic Exchange Section of BSC gathered threads from U.S. Coast Guard and Navy stations through the FBI’s channels and sent them to the Radio Security Service in England. A rough-and-ready form of co-operation was clearly not good enough. The tracking and sinking of the German battleship had been marred by failures and misjudgments, but it had also shown the possibilities in the systematic analysis of radio traffic collected by U.S. and British listening posts around the globe. “Traffic analysis” became an important job of coordination for BSC, whose historians recorded that “deciphering signals is not the only way to discover what the enemy has in mind. . . . Intelligence can be extracted from external features of a message by means of ‘traffic analysis.’ ”
The hunt for the Bismarck made the U.S. Navy chiefs aware that the British still possessed ingenuity even if they lacked time and equipment. The war at sea was especially influenced, they could see, by the skill of the traffic analysts, though they needed masses of material on which to work. The U.S. Navy, watching the looming threat from Japan, felt that whatever could be collected by British listening posts scattered around the Pacific was well worth getting. Since monitors in Canada gathered large quantities of coded Japanese transmissions, it made good sense to Washington to have the Navy help the Canadians build up their own naval forces in exchange for information.
German U-boat commanders were puzzled by a sudden expansion in antisubmarine patrols by the Canadian Navy around the strategic Gulf of St. Lawrence. The truth was that it was a makeshift fleet consisting of large U.S. seagoing craft purchased by Canadian civilians. Their own yachts had been requisitioned. In this way, U.S. legislation against the sale of arms to belligerents had been circumvented in early stages of the war; and it continued to be a useful way to transfer equipment from the U.S. to Canadian and British forces. The Germans were never sure how strong the North American coastal defenses might prove to be. Even when a U-boat torpedoed the Canadian naval vessel Raccoon, one of the guard
ians of the gulf, the Germans did not discover that it actually was a converted American luxury yacht.
Sometimes the new Canadian “owners” were themselves puzzled. They were allowed to operate the U.S. vessels for a while, “for the sake of artistic verisimilitude,” before they were stripped and armed. The story was told of one red-faced Canadian on a shakedown cruise who complained, “M’damn captain kicked m’off m’own bridge!” Thirteen of these American vessels were purchased before U.S. bureaucracy intervened.
The fourteenth yacht was bought through President Roosevelt after a personal appeal from Hugh Keenlyside, a Canadian representative on the Canada–U.S. Permanent Joint Board on Defense.
The INTREPID organization had discovered German plans for using two French islands off the coast of Canada and seizing bases in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The Royal Canadian Navy was officially equipped with only ten effective vessels. It more than doubled its strength overnight. The new ships’ luxury fittings were replaced by detection gear and communications equipment for calling “real” warships whenever they located U-boats. Some of these American yachts, in their original form, seemed singularly unfitted for war. One had an eight-foot circular bed, the removal of which left sufficient space for radio direction-finding gear. The large seagoing yachts were inspected by Canadians dressed in civilian clothes who visited American marinas in the guise of wealthy businessmen—“cloak-and-dagger stuff” that aroused much huffing and puffing among bluff Canadian Navy types. They got their reward: before the war’s end, the Canadian Navy had become the third largest in the world. Such a fleet, in the hands of a friendly neighbor, was in the United States’s interest. The quid pro quo basis of these arrangements was well understood.
The most delicate field of co-operation was communications intelligence, because it necessitated a disclosure of each country’s apparatus for eavesdropping upon the coded radio traffic of other nations, an activity to which nobody wished to confess. When the Canadians were building their makeshift navy, they offered through BSC communications intelligence their own intercepts of Japanese radio traffic. From as far away as Australia, New Guinea, and Singapore, units that specialized in plucking messages out of the ether directed their material to London with copies for Washington.
Stephenson had asked early in the game if American high-frequency direction-finding stations along the eastern seaboard would work with his people in locating enemy submarines. The Battle of the Atlantic has been described by naval historians as essentially a duel between Allied and Axis “wireless intelligence.” It was an endless battle never decisively won or lost, reaching peaks of crisis at regular intervals, conducted in eerie circumstances.
The skippers of German U-boats, under the direct tactical control of Admiral Karl Doenitz, were encouraged to pour information by radio into his headquarters. Their talkative transmissions were easy prey for radio direction-finders, which worked on a simple principle. A sensitive directional antenna, swinging until it brought in the signal at the highest volume, was the accusing finger. Two widely spaced direction-finders, each pointing at the same transmitter, provided the bearings; where the lines crossed lay the transmitter. It was not difficult to keep track of garrulous U-boats, but catching them was another matter. The “fixes” had to be conveyed to the U-boat killers with great speed, and the more the better.
When the U-boat war reached one of its successful peaks in the fall of 1940, the United States possessed an arc of land-based stations equipped to locate the German submarines. This net, known as Huffduff (H/F D/F, from high-frequency direction-finding), reported to a central control in Maryland, which passed the information along to the U.S. Navy communications-intelligence headquarters in Washington. Its occupants, housed at 3801 Nebraska Avenue, Northwest, knew from the flood of radio traffic the extent of the catastrophes suffered by each British convoy, but they also realized that the British were introducing something new—shipborne Huffduff, so that escorts could pinpoint U-boats locally. A British scientific mission that had visited Washington earlier had provided information on the cavity magnetron, which would make shipborne radar more flexible. Now the Americans were anxious to see what was being done to develop a better system of Huffduff and to equip escorts with better communications, which were needed for the teamwork that alone would defeat the U-boat wolf packs.
And so, in another sphere the United States got into the war unnoticed. Communications intelligence did more than anything to break the U-boats’ stranglehold. British Huffduff stations worked closely with American ships, aircraft, and shore-based Atlantic seaboard stations, as well as with their own British naval vessels. When, for instance, U-158 chatted with its German control center, having “nothing better to report,” Huffduff stations in the British-held islands of the Caribbean and American locators at Georgetown fixed her position and got the information to an antisubmarine U.S. naval aircraft VP-74, already flying in the vicinity. Within minutes of U-158’s imprudent gossip, she was caught on the surface and sunk west of Bermuda.
Americans who made the big decisions on defense were, by mid-1941, filling the Washington air with muted cries of concern that the British were taking unjustified risks by fighting the enemy wherever they could make contact with him. Harry Hopkins told Churchill: “[We] believe the British Empire is making too many sacrifices in trying to maintain an indefensible position in the Middle East. At any moment the Germans might take Gibraltar and seal up the Western Mediterranean. They might block the Suez Canal. They might overwhelm the British Armies in the Middle East. Our Chiefs of Staff believe that the Battle of the Atlantic is the final, decisive battle. . . .”
Churchill’s reaction was recorded in the BSC Papers. “The Prime Minister felt there was insufficient understanding of the spirit that moved the British who had to fight in the Middle East and had to go to the aid of Greece in response to their obligations to friends and dependencies. The diversion of substantial numbers of men and arms to the Middle East when all might be needed for the desperate defense of the United Kingdom was a decision dictated by an age-old tradition. During the past eight months nearly half Britain’s war production has been sent to the Middle East as a matter of calculated policy. It would be unfortunate if the British people were made to feel that the United States was more concerned with securing their islands as a launching-platform against Germany in the event of war than with helping those nations already at war to destroy Nazi tyranny.” Finally, Churchill suggested that if the United States should be drawn into the war, “North and West Africa might well prove the areas most favourable for the operation of American forces.” The Prime Minister’s remark foreshadowed TORCH, the first combined Anglo-American intelligence and military operation, which was to be, as the BSC Papers later noted, the first light at the end of the tunnel, “when we could go over from the defensive to the offensive, that is to say to secure full American participation in secret activities directed against the enemy.”
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Before the hunt for the Bismarck, Stephenson had cabled Churchill:
I HAVE BEEN ATTEMPTING TO MANEUVER DONOVAN INTO JOB OF COORDINATING ALL UNITED STATES INTELLIGENCE.
A few days after the Bismarck was sunk, he signaled:
DONOVAN SAW PRESIDENT TODAY AND AFTER LONG DISCUSSION WHEREIN ALL POINTS AGREED CMA HE ACCEPTED APPOINTMENT COORDINATION ALL FORMS INTELLIGENCE INCLUDING OFFENSIVE OPERATIONS. . . . HE WILL HOLD RANK OF MAJOR GENERAL AND WILL BE RESPONSIBLE ONLY REPEAT ONLY TO PRESIDENT. . . . DONOVAN ACCUSES ME OF HAVING INTRIGUED AND DRIVEN HIM INTO APPOINTMENT. . . . YOU CAN IMAGINE HOW RELIEVED I AM AFTER MONTHS OF BATTLE AND JOCKEYING IN WASHINGTON THAT OUR MAN IS IN POSITION.
Hitler’s postponed invasion of Russia was now at hand—and so was the next phase of Donovan’s unofficial partnership with INTREPID. The plan was to exploit their foreknowledge of Germany’s intentions. This conflicted with Hoover’s pursuit of publicity.
The British had learned that it paid to keep an intelligence coup to themselves—even to
the extent of not making immediate use of the information. One master of dirty tricks had just moved into INTREPID’s New York headquarters: Lieutenant-Commander Ewen Montagu,* a brilliant young barrister who knew how to deceive the enemy by making use of German intelligence networks rather than breaking them up. Hoover tended to break them up and tell the world. “He wanted to publicize everything to enhance the FBI’s reputation,” Montagu said later. “We dared not confide to him certain plans for fear of leaks. Our methods depended on concealment. This made Hoover more distrustful. A ghastly period began. . . .”
Montagu could not know that the real culprits were agents seeking to poison Anglo-American intelligence relations on behalf of the Soviet Union. Yet it was Stalin, fearful of this alliance, who was about to become the chief beneficiary.
On Sunday, June 1, 1941, Stephenson walked into his office in Room 3553 at 630 Fifth Avenue. His organization was now spread through two floors of Rockefeller Center. His staff was accustomed to his seeming omnipresence. On this occasion he walked straight through his office and out by way of a rear exit concealed by bookcases. Back on the street, he was picked up by Donovan. They drove north, crossing unseen into Canada, and that night were cocooned in the gun turrets of a bomber being ferried to Scotland. The last part of the journey was made by night express from Glasgow to London. Air-raid alarms forced the train to stop frequently. They reached the blacked-out capital with their lightweight suits impregnated by the smell of locomotive smoke. They were greeted with news of a tremendous German success in using airborne invasion forces. They had captured the Mediterranean island of Crete, after the British again suffered high casualties. Hitler declared that the battle proved “no island is impregnable,” a statement interpreted by the Joint Intelligence Committee to mean that their own islands must prepare for this new kind of assault from the skies.
A Man Called Intrepid Page 31