Archibald Wavell was gone. The loss of Cyrenaica and his failed counterattack had cost him Churchill’s confidence. (A photo of Wavell’s farewell party in Cairo shows the one-eyed general in conversation, smiling, with Bonner Fellers, the omnipresent genial American.) The prime minister replaced Wavell with Claude Auchinleck, the general who’d been in command in India, and sent Wavell to Delhi.
Auchinleck was a tall man with blue eyes, a long, narrow face, and a cleft chin. He had thick red hair; he did not look fifty-eight years old. He left his much younger wife in Delhi because officers of lower rank than his couldn’t bring their wives to Cairo. He did not like to make speeches. He did not like large groups. He did not enjoy team sports, which made him nearly un-British. He worked. He was thorough.23
From the day he took over, he and Churchill argued by radiogram. Churchill wanted him to retake Cyrenaica, quickly. In April, Wavell had said he had six trained armored regiments waiting for tanks, Churchill wrote. The tanks were coming, from Britain and America; by the end of July, Auchinleck would have five hundred. “Our intelligence shows considerable Italian reinforcements of Libya, but little or no German. However, a Russian collapse might soon alter this to your detriment,” Churchill said.
Auchinleck wrote back: His forces needed to retrain to work better together as teams. Those American tanks had new features and armament. His regiments needed to learn how to use them.
“If we do not use the lull accorded us by the German entanglement in Russia… the opportunity may never recur,” Churchill said, in a message that showed his voice could rise even in a telegram. “It would seem justifiable to fight a hard and decisive battle in the Western Desert… and to run those major risks without which victory has rarely been gained.”
“To launch an offensive with the inadequate means at present at our disposal is not, in my opinion, a justifiable act of war… To gain results risks must be taken,” Auchinleck answered, “and I am ready to run them if they are reasonably justifiable.”
Auchinleck was not willing to lose an army on a Churchillian whim. Churchill was disappointed with generals, all of them, who preferred “certainty to hazard.” He wanted a general who could seize the moment. Churchill longed for a general like Rommel.24
“THERE ARE ENDLESS swarms of flies,” Rommel wrote to his wife in one letter, and in the next, “The heat’s frightful, nighttime as well as daytime.” At first he blamed the Italian navy for not bringing him more supplies. Then he lamented to his wife that “with things as they are in the Mediterranean it’s not easy to get anything across,” and “for the moment we’re only stepchildren” while the fighting lasted in Russia.25
Rommel’s supply problems were not just due to Barbarossa. He could not know that the summer before at Bletchley Park, behind the old stable yard, in the cottage where Dilly Knox ran his research group, Mavis Lever had solved a message sent by the Italian navy’s version of Enigma. The Italian machine did not have a plugboard, which cut the number of possible settings down to a mere couple of billion. Lever, just nineteen years old, had cut that down to one with a series of intuitive flashes about what might be in the message. (Knox’s staff consisted entirely of “girls,” who became known as “Dilly’s Fillies.” There is no evidence that he sexually exploited them. It does appear, though, that the codebreaker with the unkempt black hair and volcanic temper found women less of a threat to his ego.) Lever’s break unlocked Italian naval traffic. From the Mediterranean, it neatly complemented German air force messages.26
“Fuel crisis of German Africa Corps likely to be extremely grave should British attacks continue successful,” said a message on August 1, 1941. The “German Africa Corps” meant Rommel’s forces. A tanker called the Bellona would therefore be leaving Naples for Bardia in Libya. The message gave the ship’s precise route, along with instructions for German air force units to provide cover. From Bletchley Park, this information went to RAF headquarters in Cairo, followed by confirmation that the ship had sailed. Somewhere along its route, the crewmen would have seen an RAF reconnaissance plane overhead. The Italians would not have known that the British pilot had been told where to look for the tanker, or that he’d been sent from Alexandria to cover up the true source of information. “On seventh August at 0630 hours steamship Bellona… ordered to turn for Suda Bay because… British destroyers had been sighted,” the naval section in Hut 4 at Bletchley Park reported. Suda Bay was the main naval base in Crete. The fuel had not reached Africa.27
Moorehead, likewise, did not know a key reason that more convoys from America bearing Lend-Lease supplies were making it to Egypt. Between March and June, the Royal Navy had succeeded in capturing three German ships and a U-boat and seizing Enigma settings, manuals, and codebooks from them. Those were the pinches that Alan Turing and Peter Twinn had so desperately wanted. Hut 8 was now reading naval Enigma, and convoys were routed to avoid U-boats.28
In the summer and again in the fall, German naval intelligence did conduct investigations into whether Britain might have found a way to crack Enigma. Both times the investigators posited other reasons for British naval successes. The British had found U-boats by locating the source of their radio signals, the German investigators suggested, and the Atlantic ports of Europe were full of British spies. It was statistically impossible to break Enigma.29
AS HEINRICH SANDSTEDE saw things, his choice at age twenty-seven came down to volunteering to be a spy for German military intelligence, the Abwehr, in Africa or being assigned to active army duty, learning to march in formation and goose-step, and getting sent to fight in Russia. Marching in formation didn’t suit Sandstede. Sandy, as friends called him, had dropped out of school in Germany when he was sixteen, worked on farms in South Africa and Mozambique, prospected for gold in Tanganyika, picked up Swahili, and learned to speak English well enough to pass as an Englishman.
Only the war had forced him to leave the British colonies in East Africa. Back home he’d been drafted. His years of wandering got him a job in the military high command’s topographical department, marking maps with the roads, tracks, and bridges that he remembered from East Africa. He made friends there with Johann Eppler, another fellow who didn’t march in step. Eppler had been born in Alexandria to a German woman and an unknown father. Afterward, he got a new name, Hussein Gaafar, when his mother married an Egyptian man. In 1937, Eppler, or Gaafar, married a Danish woman and moved back to Europe. At the topographical department, he’d corrected maps of Egypt.
Their luck held. The Abwehr took them. There was a plan to put them in a German desert patrol that might work out of Kufra oasis; there was a plan to parachute them into Egypt as spies, which the two men considered much too dangerous. They learned how to use wireless sets. While they waited, they stayed in Berlin, with fine salaries and as many ration tickets for food as they liked. “We live like kings. Most of the money is wasted by the end of the month and then we have to live on collected dry peas and beans etc.,” Sandstede wrote. “The bars in Berlin are expensive and the girls are even more expensive.”
Sometime that summer, Eppler was sent to Vienna to meet Captain Laszlo Almasy.30
6
THE ORACLES SPEAK GIBBERISH
Autumn 1941–Spring 1942. Bletchley Park–Washington–Benghazi–Cairo–Gilf Kebir.
AT HUT 4 of Bletchley Park, in a large logbook, a clerk hand-copied the most secret telegrams between GCHQ and the code-breaking agencies of the United States. An outgoing entry from December 3, 1941, at 1404 hours, 2:04 p.m., reads:
“On 1st December Tokyo ordered Japanese Embassy in London to destroy their machine. On 2nd December Embassy reported they had done so.”
The instructions to smash the Purple machine had come enciphered in Purple itself. With the machine taken apart and hammered into scrap, the embassy sent a single word in Japanese, “dispatched,” without use of a cipher, as the sign that it had followed orders.
Before the diplomats smashed their machine, they’d received a second,
more detailed message. It said that similar instructions had been sent to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Manila. The Japanese mission in Batavia—capital of the Dutch East Indies, under the rule of the Dutch government-in-exile—had already sent its cipher machine home. The Japanese embassies in Canada and Panama and the consulate in Honolulu—apparently lacking Purple machines—were told to burn their codebooks.
The same messages, picked up by American antennae, were being decoded and translated in Washington. The improvised Purple machine that the American officers had brought to Bletchley Park made it possible for Stewart Menzies to hand those messages, decoded and translated, to Winston Churchill. If Churchill had any doubt about why an embassy needed to destroy its codes, they were dispelled by the telegrams from the Japanese ambassador in Berlin to Tokyo and the response. Menzies delivered these, too, to the prime minister.
In a message sent from Berlin on November 29 but decoded at Bletchley Park only on December 4, Ambassador Hiroshi Oshima said he’d been called to a late night meeting with Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who wanted to know the state of the negotiations between Japan and the United States. Washington was demanding that Japan end its invasion of China. Tokyo insisted on a free hand in China and an end to a US embargo that was starving it of oil. The Japanese government had set the 29th as its deadline for reaching an agreement. Oshima told Ribbentrop he hadn’t yet heard the outcome.
“Ribbentrop said Japan must not lose this opportunity of achieving the establishment of a New Order in East Asia,” Oshima wired home. “As the Fuehrer had said that day,” Ribbentrop had added, “the existence of Japan and Germany on one hand and of America on the other was fundamentally incompatible.” If Japan went to war, Ribbentrop promised, “Germany would, of course, join in immediately.”
The next day, Oshima got an answer from his government: tell the Germans the negotiations have failed, the cable said, and that it was likely “we shall find ourselves in a state of war with Britain and America.
“You should add that this may happen sooner than expected.”1
Yet the signs were at once urgent and vague, like the echo of a stranger’s footsteps somewhere in a dark building. In another intercepted Purple message, the Japanese embassy in Washington was ordered to destroy one of its two machines, to douse the pieces in acid—and to keep the other. In the Bletchley Park logbook, a message from the US Navy’s OP-20-G agency on December 5 states, “Purple system still in use here.”2
Purple was for diplomats; it did not reveal military plans. Neither the British codebreakers nor the Americans had made much progress against the Japanese naval code. Perhaps the Japanese would first attack Hong Kong or the British protectorate of Malaya in Southeast Asia, or try to seize the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies, and wait to see if America stayed out once more.
Nonetheless, the top US Navy and Army commanders in the Pacific received warnings of a possible Japanese attack. On the West Coast, in Panama, and in the Philippines, they put their forces on war footing. At Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short did not. They did not believe the Japanese could possibly strike America’s strongest naval base. The Philippines were the most likely target.
The final fateful Purple messages to the Japanese embassy in Washington were intercepted by the US Army’s listening station near Seattle overnight between December 6 and 7. One was a text in English to be delivered to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. “Obviously it is the intention of the American government to conspire with Great Britain… to obstruct Japan’s efforts toward… the creation of a New Order in East Asia,” it said, and concluded that “it is impossible to reach an agreement through further negotiations.” The second specified that the message should be delivered to Hull precisely at 1 p.m. Washington time. The third ordered the destruction of the last Purple machine in the embassy.
Together they announced the precise time of the coming Japanese attack—but not the place. OP-20-G and its army counterpart, the SIS, deciphered them more quickly than the Japanese embassy’s own code clerks. On the morning of December 7, Roosevelt got copies and knew war was about to break out. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall ordered that a warning be sent to Pacific commanders, with priority on getting it to Manila in the Philippines. By a tragedy of errors, the coded message went to Admiral Kimmel and General Short in Hawaii as a commercial radiogram. It reached RCA’s Honolulu office just after 7:30 a.m. local time, 1 p.m. in Washington. A motorcycle messenger set out to deliver it as Japanese planes began their bombing runs at Pearl Harbor.3
MANY YEARS LATER, Bonner Fellers would write a letter to Husband Kimmel, the admiral who was dismissed from his command after the Pearl Harbor attack. On the morning of December 6, 1941, Fellers would say, he visited RAF headquarters in Cairo and met the commanding officer, Air Marshal Arthur Longmore. “Bonner, you will be at war in 24 hours… We have a secret signal Japan will strike the U.S. in 24 hours,” Fellers would quote Longmore as saying.
“I decided that if the British knew of the attack, we also knew of it,” Fellers would write, so there had been no reason to send a cable about the conversation. Nonetheless, he would castigate himself for not having “alerted Washington, Panama, Pearl Harbor and the Philippine[s].” Even more, he would castigate the president: “How treasonous of FDR—my God.” His implication is that Roosevelt knew and kept his commanders in the dark to ensure that America would enter the war.4
The letter is testimony to how treacherous the memory of human beings can be. A detail: Arthur Longmore had left Cairo six months before Pearl Harbor and been replaced by Air Marshal Arthur Tedder.
More essential: At the bottom of GCHQ’s translations of Japanese orders to destroy Purple machines, a notation says the information was not sent to Cairo. Secrets are best shared only with those who need to know them, and the commanders in Egypt did not have a need to know. As for the final messages that heralded war within hours, it appears that only the Americans intercepted them.
Memory can shuffle dates, or squeeze several tumultuous days into a single hour. Memory makes us see a moment years ago through all the events that happened since, as if looking through a thousand distorting lenses. It tricks us into thinking that we knew then what we would know later. The meaning of an omen is obvious only in memory. In the lived moment, the oracles speak gibberish. People of the past had no more idea of the next paragraph of their stories than we have now.
It’s possible that Fellers indeed met Tedder, not Longmore, on the morning of December 8 in Cairo, barely twelve hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, before Roosevelt spoke to Congress. In that moment, Tedder might have said something close to “You will be at war in 24 hours.” By then, Tedder would have also known about the Japanese landings in British Malaya, which began an hour and a half before the air attack on Hawaii.
It’s also possible, though much less likely, that word of impending war somehow did reach Tedder by December 6 and that he shared the secret with the genial American. Everyone, after all, liked to talk to Bonner. Even then, Tedder would not have known that Pearl Harbor was a target. No one in Britain or America, including Roosevelt, knew of the Japanese aircraft carriers speeding toward Hawaii in radio silence.
Kimmel did, however, get broad warnings of approaching war. The intelligence did not help him. Kimmel was betrayed not by his president, but by his preconceptions.5
Fellers did send radiograms on those days in December 1941. None referred to Japan. He had just returned from his second trip in three weeks to Libya, driving to the battlefields in a camouflaged van with a bed in the back. He called it his hearse. The war had woken up again. Fellers wanted to see everything, learn everything.6
THE FIRST SHOTS were planned for a minute before midnight at a house in Libya’s Green Mountains, far to the west of Tobruk. Two nights earlier, a submarine had surfaced off the coast in stormy weather. On the shore, dressed as a Beduin, was Captain John Haselden, a British intelligence officer brought
through enemy territory by the Long Range Desert Group.
Guided by Haselden’s flashlight, a small group of commandos landed. From the local Senussi, Haselden had learned which house Rommel was using. The commandos moved at night, hid in the day. At the designated moment, while a dozen men took positions around the house, their commander and two others shot the sentry at the door and burst inside. The commander opened the door to a room; a shot from inside mortally wounded him. The other two commandos sprayed the room with gunfire and tossed in a grenade. In their retreat, several of the British soldiers were taken captive.
Rommel was not there. He’d stopped using the house. Other officers had moved in and were killed.7
Laszlo Almasy, who had returned to Africa, penned an account—poetic, embellished, and enraged—of the attack. “Commandos!” he wrote. “Rush into a house behind front lines and shoot indiscriminately into the room. Like the gangsters did in America during the Prohibition.” Rommel, he claimed, arrived shortly afterward and gave orders: “The commandos were in uniform, therefore they are to be treated as prisoners of war.” The British had behaved criminally, Almasy was certain, and Rommel held the moral high ground.8
The raid had an operational lesson: the submarine was superfluous; the Long Range Desert Group could have delivered the commandos.9 Ralph Bagnold, forty-five years old, had finally surrendered to two decades of accumulated heat fatigue and left his beloved desert to become the LRDG’s staff officer in Cairo. His younger comrade in desert expeditions, Guy Prendergast, now commanded the “mosquito army” in the field. Prendergast and his men slipped in and out of Libya, noticed by the Germans and Italians only when they bit and drew blood.10
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