“You are fighting the ghosts of the Somme,” Stephenson told General George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, when Marshall wondered out loud why the British hesitated to launch the mass invasion of Europe. The Somme was synonymous with the slaughter of World War I, and Churchill never rid himself of the fear that it might be repeated.
“Churchill approached with dread the final reckoning,” said Stephenson. “He loved action, mobility, swift moves and counter-moves. A premature invasion would end in another slogging match and open-ended massacre.”
There was always this hope that the tyrants could be destroyed without wholesale slaughter; that small intelligence operations, selective assassination, and sabotage would corrode the foundations of Fortress Europe.
“Even if we had foreseen where this all might lead, there was no possible alternative response,” said Stephenson. “Dirty tricks were like dirty atom bombs . . . you could not undo them. Passive resistance might work for Gandhi against the British. It could never work for French peasants against the Gestapo. The story of secret warfare was that of proceeding from one extreme to another—a steady escalation.”
The most ambitious secret-intelligence operation, JUBILEE, dramatized his point. It was forced on the British by the need to convince allies as well as the enemy that a Second Front could not be opened across the English Channel yet. JUBILEE was a deliberate sacrifice, designed to save many more lives when the dreaded D day finally arrived. Making the best of things, the intelligence chiefs utilized it as cover for sixteen special operations. Americans, preparing at Camp X to take part for the first time in “offensive intelligence,” rubbed shoulders with a Jewish refugee returning voluntarily to the nightmare. He was earmarked for a mission camouflaged by this strangest of invasions—one that was never intended to succeed.
41
OPERATION JUBILEE deceived the enemy into thinking the slaves of Nazidom were about to be freed. When it seemed to fail, JUBILEE deceived the enemy about how the Second Front would be created. Canadian troops, who suffered the bulk of the casualties, thought it was a horrible mistake. Sergeant Peretz Rose saw it as a classic guerrilla operation that served political and military ends.
One of the many mysteries that JUBILEE was intended to solve was: How good is German radar?
Part of the answer was provided by Rose, an expert on communications for the Jewish Agency and its own secret army. Of German origin, he had debriefed a captured German radio-detection specialist and concluded from this and other evidence that the latest enemy radar units were scattered along the western wall of Fortress Europe. The most up-to-date was at the French port of Dieppe, seventy miles across the English Channel from Newhaven. The Newhaven-Dieppe cross-Channel ferry had been a prewar tourist route into Europe; now it might be possible to persuade the Germans that it was the future route of Allied invasion.
Two British radar experts were brought for special training to Camp X. They were introduced to the FBI man who would go with them to examine the enemy radar at Dieppe. The FBI man’s job would be to shoot either or both of them dead if there was any danger of their being captured. Sergeant Rose would go along to demolish the enemy radar after the two British scientists had removed key pieces from the unit. The men would have an air umbrella and a rag-taggle fleet of more than 230 ships, with 16,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen. Many would be slaughtered in what seemed a reckless and mismanaged attempt to invade Europe. Long afterward, although the real purpose of the raid remained obscure, Churchill wrote: “Dieppe occupies a place of its own in the story of the war, and the grim casualty figures must not class it as a failure.” Lord Louis Mountbatten, who had then been the Chief of Combined Operations, disclosed thirty-two years later that “Dieppe was one of the most vital operations of the whole Second World War. . . . It was The Great Deception.”
All that Sergeant Rose ever said, when he retired to an Israeli settlement near Haifa, was: “Nobody was told the real reason for it, but the code name JUBILEE came out of a discussion with Stephenson, Chaim Weizmann, and other Jewish leaders.
“Weizmann, as a scientist, was in touch with Germans on matters like the atomic bomb and so on. I regarded him as the man working for a Jewish national home. Somehow we got talking about Jewish biblical traditions. If ever Hitler were destroyed and Europe liberated, it would be like that biblical period when slaves are freed and the land restored to its rightful owners—the period that Jews traditionally call Jubilee.”
The FBI had been sending agents to Camp X in anticipation of setting up similar facilities in the United States for training men and women in foreign-intelligence operations. OSS, Bill Donovan’s new organization, took over the responsibility in 1942.
Former FBI man James Callaghan, now working for Donovan, regarded himself as practically a Canadian. His parents had been born just across the Michigan border in Windsor, Ontario. He had worked closely with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in helping cut the bureaucratic red tape when Stephenson needed to move bodies and equipment between Canada and New York. He was a first-class gunman, thirty years old in 1942, mature, stable, and accustomed to thinking for himself. He began working with the Toronto police in April, helping to test Camp X trainees. Some of them were assigned to “raid” targets in the city, eluding police “guards” who were playing the role of German sentries and counterespionage squads. None knew they were rehearsing the theft of Nazi military secrets.
Twelve French Resistance leaders were taken to the Gestapo headquarters at Dieppe that same April.
In BSC’s Research and Analysis Division in New York, one of the German political refugees discussed with Allen Dulles the possibility of a military revolt against Hitler. The prospects were not good, he said. Not unless direct contact could be made with certain German officers. It would be dangerous for a German-born agent to try to return to the Fatherland through normal ports of entry. Trains, roads, and commercial airlines into German territory were too carefully scrutinized. To go in by parachute was risky, and capture would jeopardize others in the German forces who were interested in killing Hitler. One means of entry might be to land on the coast somewhere, under cover of a raid.
Baker Street was collecting information on German defenses and the number and quality of troops in the Dieppe area. Young women in civilian clothes traveled around Britain with prewar lists of visitors to France. They knocked on doors and asked surprised householders if they had taken photographs in tourist resorts. A snap of Ma or Pa playing on a beach with the kids would help to build up an estimate of the beach gradient; the density of pebbles would give a clue to capacity to take the weight of a tank. At Danesfield Hall in Buckinghamshire, not far from Bletchley Park, a young RAF Wing Commander, Douglas Kendall, supervised the analysis of aerial pictures taken by Spitfires emptied of guns and stuffed with cameras. A book was being compiled by Combined Operations Intelligence to guide a new kind of armed tourist.
The idea of a raid in force had been raised early in 1942 with a few limited intelligence objectives in view. Then in April of that year the U.S. Navy bounced back from disaster at Pearl Harbor with remarkable resilience. For the first time in history, heavy bombers designed for land-based operations were launched from a pitching carrier; they struck Tokyo, a display of American fighting spirit that made the British feel suddenly spiritless and slow. Churchill ordered a series of lightning raids against the enemy coast, but nothing faintly approaching the massive assault that many Americans seemed to regard as possible and necessary to relieve German pressure on Russia. The first six months of 1942 had been the most disastrous for Britain. The Royal Navy failed to communicate its faith in its highly developed convoy system, so that the U.S. Navy did not take advantage of freely offered experience. “We were woefully unprepared,” commented the American naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison, “both materially and mentally.” He was writing about the Atlantic. In the Pacific, the Americans were building up a powerful head of steam. They might still switch to a Japan Fir
st policy if the British seemed to hang back.
Dieppe began to evolve into the Great Deception.
France and all her overseas territories had been blacked out, so far as British diplomacy was concerned. American diplomats had become London’s eyes and ears in France since the fall of Paris, piping intelligence to Washington, which passed it along to Stephenson for London.
For six months before Pearl Harbor, and right up until the late spring of 1942, American intelligence specialists under Donovan had been preparing for the invasion by Anglo-American forces into French North Africa: TORCH. But now the U.S. service chiefs wanted a direct assault into France, immediately.
A top-level strategy meeting between the President’s military advisers and the British Chief of Combined Operations, Mountbatten, took place in Washington in June 1942 and brought the conflict into focus. “I faced my most important task of the whole war,” Mountbatten said later. “I had to persuade Roosevelt’s Service chiefs that our entire strategy needed rethinking.” He carried the unwelcome news that the British were not confident about a frontal assault into France that year or even possibly the next. Every effort should be concentrated upon TORCH.
The prelude to TORCH would be the Dieppe raid—OPERATION JUBILEE. The British had not even told their own First Lord of the Admiralty about the Dieppe plan—nor would they, until it was all over, for security reasons. With each passing day, Dieppe’s importance seemed to grow. President Roosevelt understood this, but he felt in no position to disclose to his own service chiefs a British-run operation so secret that even their own top men were not being informed unless they were directly involved.
“Mountbatten put one over the President” was the verdict of Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, when it became known that the big invasion had been put off. The U.S. Joint Chiefs shared his anger. Roosevelt was backing TORCH again, apparently for no reason other than the slippery-tongued persuasiveness of a forty-one-year-old cousin to King George VI.
Lord Mountbatten was a great deal more than the King’s cousin, of course. He had been fighting at sea for two years, rising up through the demanding ranks of the Royal Navy, which gave no quarter to a man because of his landlubber relatives. The degree of ignorance in Washington about the British, however, was startling. Part of it was Britain’s own fault—caused by trying to do too much in too many places, and neglecting the need to explain herself to anybody.
Stephenson flew to London to discuss the dangers with Churchill, perching himself on the edge of the Prime Minister’s bed the next morning. There he heard of more trouble with the Russians. Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov had produced the text of an unpublished communiqué drafted by the British Prime Minister that said “full understanding has been reached with regard to the urgent task of creating a Second Front in Europe in 1942.” Churchill was nailed by his own vague promise. The Russians were publicizing it in a way he had not authorized. Now he must agree or else comfort the enemy with a conflicting announcement. He gave Molotov an aide-mémoire stating that although preparations were being made for cross-Channel landings in August or September, the size would be limited by landing-craft shortages. “. . . it would not further either the Russian cause or that of the Allies as a whole,” Churchill stated flatly, “if, for the sake of action at any price, we embarked on some operation which ended in disaster. . . .”
What prompted this statement? JUBILEE seemed to be planned to fail, as if to prove the truth of Churchill’s warnings. Indeed, JUBILEE’S critics later used the statement as proof of a British intention to discourage further Russian demands for a Second Front that year.
There was a compelling reason for Churchill’s concern to convince the Soviet Union that a cross-Channel invasion in 1942 would be suicidal. He wished to prevent Russia from deserting her allies. ULTRA and other Bletchley code-breaking teams were watching Russia flirt with the possibility of a negotiated peace. Germany dangled tempting bait. If the Soviet Union agreed to an armistice, Germany would be content with the land already captured. The Russians might take the bait if they believed Anglo-American strategy was to let Hitler and Stalin destroy one another, delaying a Second Front for this reason only. Churchill’s fears were well founded, as ULTRA subsequently proved when it retrieved messages concerning the unprecedented journey that Molotov made, 200 miles into German-occupied territory, to discuss a separate peace with the Nazis in June 1943, an astonishing episode never officially made public.*
In the atmosphere of distrust already evident in mid-1942, Stephenson suggested it might be time for Churchill to talk directly with the President. The Prime Minister, in one of his glummer moods, was cheered by the prospect of action and agreed to go to Washington. The War Cabinet had gone through a depressing session on June 15, after the Germans had launched renewed offensives in Russia that synchronized with General Erwin Rommel’s mysterious string of victories in North Africa. In Europe, retaliation for the assassination of Heydrich had gathered momentum, and Churchill listened to reports of children sent to camps for experimental purposes.
On June 17, Churchill penned a note to his King: “Sir, In case of my death on this journey I am about to undertake, I avail myself of Your Majesty’s gracious permission to advise that you should entrust the formation of a new Government to Mr. Anthony Eden. . . .”
He traveled in the co-pilot’s seat of a flying boat, wearing his siren suit, a black Homburg tilted on the back of his head, his hands resting on his gold-topped malacca cane. Stephenson had flown ahead with duplicates of secret documents dealing with the development of nuclear weapons and the Dieppe raid.
Churchill still seemed laden with doom when he sat with Roosevelt in the days that followed, either talking in a tiny sweltering room at Hyde Park or in their quarters at the White House. “He looked rather crumpled in his rompers, with a face of gloomy thunder,” reported one of his air marshals. “Mr. Roosevelt also looked rather dishevelled.” Neither seemed much interested in crucial matters of logistics. And little wonder. The President on June 21 handed the Prime Minister a pink slip, which stated simply: “Tobruk has fallen.”
The fall of Tobruk was a disaster of the first magnitude. The seaport had symbolic importance in the great desert battles swirling west of Cairo. The Germans had launched an advance through the Crimea that would link them with their Afrika Korps under Rommel in the Middle East. From England, reinforcements were rushed by the long route around the far southern tip of South Africa.
The unadvertised tragedy in the loss of Tobruk was the innocent help given Rommel by the U.S. Military Attaché in Cairo, Colonel Bonner Fellers. Every detail of British operations had been radioed by Fellers to the Military Intelligence in Washington—and, because they had broken the State Department’s Black code, which he was using, to the Germans as well. Every morning at breakfast, General Rommel had been presented with a concise appreciation of his opponent’s plans, location of units, strength, and morale. Since January 1942, Rommel had been receiving the very information needed to reverse his fortunes. The Afrika Korps had been driven back during the previous year, but on January 21, 1942, Rommel rebounded with such elasticity that he had the British on the run for seventeen consecutive days. Churchill was thunderstruck. The Desert Fox seemed to anticipate each change in British tactics. By May 1942, he was driving to isolate Tobruk with a confidence that seemed born of foreknowledge. Tobruk, which had previously withstood a siege of 230 days, and appeared to be a tough nut to crack, was actually in bad shape, for reasons Rommel ought not to have known. British traffic analysis of enemy transmissions concluded that Rommel was getting advance information from inside the British camp at Cairo.
Meanwhile, Rommel’s thrusts could be throttled down by squeezing his fuel lines, which had to cross the Mediterranean in convoys vulnerable to attack from the island bastion of Malta. Malta alone had the capacity to slow Rommel; so Axis bombers and submarines struck the island time and time again, trying to prevent British ships from supplying the island. To hob
ble Axis attackers, a large-scale British operation was to go into effect on June 12 and 13. Paratroopers and strike forces would knock out nine Axis bases from which the raids on Malta were being launched. On June 11, Colonel Fellers obtained the details and in good faith filed them in the Black code to Washington through the Egyptian Telegraph Company in Cairo. A few hours later, the details were in enemy hands. The British sabotage units and supporting strike forces ran into the waiting arms of the Germans. Next day, the Axis bombers that should have been destroyed were launched instead against a British supply convoy. The convoy suffered such damage that it was forced to turn back. It would be months before another convoy broke through.
At the moment of disaster, the British were tracing the leaks back to the U.S. Military Attaché in Cairo, who was relying on the supposed impenetrability of the Black code.
Churchill wept over American criticism of Britain after she had fought steadily for nearly three years around the globe. Before the discovery of the Cairo leak, the Prime Minister burst out when told of yet another defeat in the desert: “Defeat is one thing. Disgrace is another.” Now some of the disgrace was found to be shared with Americans, and Churchill seized his advantage. He asked for tanks and self-propelled guns for British forces in North Africa. He pressed Roosevelt to agree once more to the TORCH invasion of French North Africa. And he unfolded the substitute plan that would postpone the full-scale crossing of the English Channel. The pendulum had swung back in favor of irregular operations.
JUBILEE had secret objectives. Its stated objectives sounded tiny and timid to the regular warfare chiefs. When Chief of U.S. Naval Operations Ernest King heard of it, he said: “I don’t give a damn what the British do, so long as I get my battleships back into the Pacific.”
A Man Called Intrepid Page 46