Another lively – if remote – area to which to be posted was the far north coast of Scotland. ‘My posting after training,’ recalled one Y Service operative, ‘was to Caithness . . . where the station spread out from a tiny village like an octopus – the control hut and five huts where enemy signals were intercepted 24 hours a day.’ The freezing waters around Orkney and Shetland were seething with enemy vessels, and their transmissions were frequent; a vast amount of material to intercept, collate, and send on to Bletchley Park. Some of the wireless operators who found themselves dispatched to RAF Wick were taken aback both by the cold and by the astounding length of time it took to travel there, even from Inverness. But it was not all icy austerity; indeed, for a few, romance found a way, even in those slicing winds. ‘I was a Wireless Operator, and worked in the Signals Section,’ recalled Vi Mitchell, originally from Dundee, and so no stranger to such weather conditions:
This was quite a large building, housing the Wireless Section, the Teleprinter Section and Operations Room where they plotted the Aircraft, PBX (telephone exchange) and Met Office, so a large number of personnel worked there, right round the clock as it was manned 24 hours a day.
I met my husband at Wick. He came from Dundee like myself . . . he was a Teleprinter Operator.
The atmosphere did not seem immediately conducive to romance, though:
The WAAFs were in houses, which were called married quarters. There were three girls in the downstairs room, three upstairs and a Corporal or Sergeant in the small room. She was in charge of the girls, and had to report any misbehaviour. We shared a kitchen and bathroom, and had strict rotas. We got a ration of coal to put on a fire to heat water, so between seven girls it had to be rationed.
Social lives were further curtailed by other onerous demands placed upon these young women:
The billets had to be kept clean and we had a domestic night once a week, when all WAAFs were confined to camp to clean and polish. We had to polish our brass buttons and cap badge, and woe betide any WAAF who had dingy buttons, if an Officer spotted her. We had to salute all officers both WAAF and RAF either on the Station or outside in the town itself.
Despite that, she added,
I only remember the good times at Wick, I’ve forgotten all the cold dreary days when I wondered if I’d ever get home again. I remember the Pavilion Picture House, the Rifle Hall where we danced, the County Cafe and Mrs Lyall’s Chip Shop where we enjoyed fish and chips, and the odd egg she put on our plate, when she had them.3
Equally warm memories were held by wireless operator Wilma Hall, who at least got to see a bit of action around the place. ‘When I was there in 1943, there was a complete Operations Block among the main station buildings, and the school was then used for offices such as the Sports Office,’ she recalled. ‘The Operations Block, which is where I worked, contained the Operations Room, the Wireless Cabin . . . Meteorological Office, Intelligence Office, Signals Officer’s Office, Teleprinter Room and Telephone Exchange.’
The work was relentless – partly owing to a relative scarcity of fully trained staff; the skills that Hall had acquired meant she was greatly in demand: ‘Wireless operators were in very short supply at that time so we were kept very busy and worked hard seven days a week on a three-watch shift system. We never had a day off, but I loved my work and didn’t mind the long and often unsociable hours.’ But occasional distractions helped to give a little colour to the otherwise grinding routine:
During my time two squadrons of Beaufighters, numbers 144 and 404 (Canadian) were stationed on the airfield. When they flew on operations they used to take with them carrier pigeons and when the crews came to the Operations Block to get debriefed for their mission they would leave the pigeons in their little carrying boxes on our wireless tables while they received their orders. The birds would pop their heads out and coo to us! They usually had a name on their box – Margy or Betty or Mary or whatever – named after wives and girlfriends back home.
One can imagine that the wives and girlfriends would have been thrilled to hear this. ‘There was even an airman on the camp who had the special job of Pigeon Keeper.’4
This being the far north of Scotland, entertainment could be hard to find, although that corner of the country has always produced enthusiastic dancers. But for a young woman on a military base in a small, chilly town, where in winter the sun would barely rise before it had started to set again, a certain kind of fibre was required. Presumably this was why so many recruits sent there originally hailed from the north of the country: they would know what to expect, and not go into shock at the prospect. Even so, the veterans’ fond memories for even the most basic creature comforts have an element of bathos.
‘Food in camp was not very palatable, so we spent most of our pay (three shillings and four pence a day) on eating out in the town, where food was fairly plentiful,’ recalled Wilma Hall. ‘There was a cafe in the Square where one could get tea and a big plate of scones with lashings of butter for nine pence [about 3½ new pence]. Other cafes were the Victory and the Bon Accord.’ In such times, scones and butter and cheerful cosy cafés would have provided more solace than we can imagine.
After doing a short course in direction finding, Marjorie Gerken, who had been based at HMS Flowerdown amid the golden fields of Hampshire, was suddenly told that she was to be transferred somewhere ‘between Wick and Thurso’. The journey by train from Winchester was something of an epic: ‘First, all day up to Perth. Then all night up to Thurso. There, we had quarters in a big old house. There were dormitories. When I arrived, I slept solidly for about sixteen hours, and someone had to come and wake me.’ And the immediate prospect when this girl – who originally hailed from south-west London – awoke in the far north was not immediately comforting: ‘The base was little huts in the middle of a field.’
But the compensations of her new life became swiftly apparent. ‘It was very bleak, the landscape – but on the other hand, the locals didn’t really have much of an idea about rationing. You would get tea in these very welcoming farmhouses.
‘And there was a bit of a social life – I went to a dance with Air Sea Rescue at Wick. Then there was a weekend in the Orkneys to go to a dance there – we were allowed to stay overnight.’ This interlude came to an end quite abruptly when Mrs Gerken’s sister down south was diagnosed with TB; in order to be close by, Marjorie was allowed to transfer back to HMS Flowerdown – her great friend, Wren Pat Sinclair, found a replacement girl who was willing to go north in Marjorie’s place.
In more general terms, at a time when opportunities for overseas travel were very rare other than for the rich, and even travel up and down the country was not all that common, this exchange of English and Scottish girls was a source of great interest among them all. For as Marjorie Gerken and others were transferred north, there were women making the journey to the altogether softer landscape around Winchester. ‘We had a first consignment of Scottish girls come down to HMS Flowerdown,’ says Pat Sinclair. ‘On the same job. And of course, I’d never been to Scotland, never met a Scottish person in my life. I was a real Londoner, and they were the most lovely girls. I remember them with great affection – we just gelled. They could have been from outer space for all we knew about them, with their accents. But we made good friends.’
Meanwhile, in the pulsing heat of the Mediterranean, the oldest game – that of spy versus spy – continued with no let-up in intensity. Thanks in part to the various young men dispatched to places such as Madrid and Lisbon, there to observe on neutral territory the movements of the enemy, MI8 had built up a solid picture of the key players in the secret services, and their foibles and dispositions. Captain Hugh Trevor-Roper was instrumental in collating this information for circulation in London and Bletchley Park.
‘The following is a note on recent developments in German Secret Service W/T communications in Spain and Portugal,’ stated one memo sent in May 1943, by which time the Axis forces were starting to look less invincible.
The Nazis, it seems, were taking greater advantage of the authorities in these apparently neutral countries:
Aided by Spanish and Portuguese co-operation, and diplomatic cover, [these stations] have hitherto controlled almost all other W/T stations in the peninsula . . . By this system, all communications from stations in Spain and Portugal have been routed through Madrid and Lisbon, which alone have contact with Abwehr headquarters in Berlin . . . But this system depends for its safe and efficient working first on the benevolent attitude of the Spanish and Portuguese.
There had been one particularly fat black fly in the ointment for the Germans; Allied success in the region had enabled the Y Service to start exerting covert pressure on their Nazi counterparts: ‘Diplomatic pressure from the Allies, combined with an appreciation of their military successes and the implications of these for the future, has led both the Spanish and Portuguese governments to move closer towards a policy of pure neutrality in their relations with the Abwehr.’5 But MI8 was also keen to underline that the German Y service – far from withering – was bolstering itself against these and further setbacks using technology and a cunning new approach to recruitment. The memo added:
They have taken the obvious precaution of adding to their supplies of technical equipment, and it may be some indication of the priority accorded to their plans by Abwehr headquarters that, in spite of the shortage of wireless transmission sets resulting from the bombing of the Stahnsdorf station near Berlin in January, they have been allotted a very large proportion of the sets for which they asked.
On top of this, the Abwehr was taking on Spanish and Portuguese personnel to ‘replace the German operators’. The new influx, as well as being natives, were also former employees of specialised concerns like Marconi. Their work, obviously, was highly secret; yet one or two were arrested and unmasked. A great many others weren’t. The balance of neutrality was continuing to tip away from the Allies, for all their recent triumphs in the region.
MI8 had also become extremely interested in Abwehr head Admiral Canaris, and the ferocious internal politicking that was taking place among the Nazis. Canaris was considered to be doing his best to maintain the independence of the Abwehr; trying indeed – it has been suggested – to ensure that it maintained a measure of distance from some of the atrocities being carried out. It was reasoned that the key way to do this would be to maintain its dominance of wireless intelligence; this made the already murky atmosphere of the Mediterranean even murkier. Another MI8 report, this time in June 1943, proclaimed:
The keystone of the Abwehr reporting-system is the observation of ships and aircraft in the Straits of Gibraltar. If this were disrupted, the Abwehr presentation of the enemy order of battle would be hopelessly incomplete and inaccurate; this explains the extraordinary importance which Canaris attaches to his relations with highly-placed Spaniards and in particular with Vigon, Spanish Air Minister, and Martinez Campos, vice-chief of the Spanish General Staff. His Spanish connexions are indispensable to him, not only as a source of intelligence, but also because of their political support; the exceptional facilities which the Abwehr enjoys in Spain . . . must be protected against diplomatic pressure . . .
Its intelligence-gathering capabilities were one thing; but according to the wireless spies, the Abwehr was largely useless in other directions. ‘The sabotage and insurrection department of the Abwehr has been remarkably unsuccessful, and we have abundant evidence of its incompetence in western Europe,’ the report stated. However, other Nazi agencies were rising to fill this destructive vacuum and the report identified key figures – ‘Dr Graeffe, for instance, directs subversive activity in Russia . . . In Morocco, Major Schultze foments sabotage and insurrection’. This was to say nothing of ‘Franz Mayer’s very ambitious insurrectionary organisation in Persia’.
Fascinatingly, Captain Trevor-Roper’s unit was also monitoring Nazi wireless intelligence yet further east: beyond Turkey, and into Afghanistan. Given present-day geopolitical tensions, it is extraordinary to see how this country was the focus of quite another conflict in 1943. ‘The [Abwehr] in Afghanistan operates against both Russia and Great Britain,’ stated an intelligence report in May 1943. ‘Against the former, it conspires with the “Union of Young Turkestan” emigres from Russian Turkestan; against the latter, with the Faqir of Ipi and with Subhas Bose’s Forward Block.’ It had ‘a double courier system through Persia to Istanbul . . . we should be able to watch this,’ stated the report. It also had ‘W/T communication with Berlin. For this purpose the Abwehr, as elsewhere, borrows the wireless transmission and cypher facilities of the German legation.’
More sinisterly from the British point of view, there was direct communication ‘from Berlin to the dissident elements in India with whom the [Abwehr] in Kabul deals . . . made by means of code messages in the “Azad Hind” programmes from Zeesen. It is understood this material is taken and handled in India, and here its chief value will be in relation to the study of Axis broadcasts to other and uncontrolled places.’6
What surprises the reader now is the extent and the depth of Y Service intelligence, even down to the number of illicit wireless sets allocated to keep in secret contact with ‘Delhi, Bajaur and the Faqir of Ipi’. Any suggestion of clandestine transmissions, and Radio Security Service India would be listening in and – as with all other communications – cracking the codes that the enemy considered unbreakable. Meanwhile, the ability to pinpoint individuals made the eavesdropping extremely effective. ‘At Abwehr HQ [in Kabul], Dr Richter is in charge of anti-Russian activity and has appeared in Most Secret sources as controlling Abwehr parties destined for subversive activity in the South Caucasus’, while ‘Wendell . . . is directing anti-British activity in Persia.’ Moreover, all these complexities had to be followed and filed and logged in such a way that even the most subtle and unexpected of connections could be made.
To this end, the work of Captain Trevor-Roper and his colleagues was strategically vital. This was not just about listening in to the enemy; it was also about the opportunity to disrupt the enemy’s vital communications. For the Radio Analysis Bureau to have pinpointed with such accuracy the nerve centres of communications would mean that when the time was right, the SAS would be able to go in and carry out acts of sabotage: for instance, parachuting in near a wireless/teleprinter station, entering it and destroying the equipment. The destruction of teleprinters and local telephone lines would mean that the enemy would have to make all communications by radio – which in turn would be picked up by the Y Services, bringing in a crop of fresh intelligence.
Trevor-Roper’s own war had been possibly more reflective and calm than most; when not working out of Arkley View in Barnet, with his witty colleagues, he was either pursuing his great love of hunting, or on leave back home in Northumberland, which always seemed to inspire him to heights of flowery prose. The two poles of his life were entangled in a dream which he committed to his diary. He wrote that he was in Bletchley Park, walking around the huts with ‘hundreds of other human termites’, when suddenly the entire place was invaded by a pack of hounds and a huntsmaster – the part of the dream that gave Trevor-Roper real pleasure.
The Park preyed upon him in other ways; for instance, he brooded about his perpetually fraught relationships with the Directorate. So much so that he was once moved to compose a poem about Bletchley’s new director, Commander Edward Travis, and how he would eventually be compelled to leave the place like his predecessor, ‘[when] Denniston packed up and fled’.
At one point in 1943, he was on a yearned-for break in Northumberland when a letter arrived from his colleague Logan Pearsall Smith, acutely putting it to Trevor-Roper that he was considering his future and his fate, ‘to decide what you want to make of your life . . .’ This set Trevor-Roper brooding that perhaps he needed some ‘sharp external blow to direct the aimless thoughts’. He considered asking to be sent to Yugoslavia, ‘to live with the rebels there, in their woods and caves’.7 He would join the SIS – and pe
rhaps court death, or become a Byronic figure. Such musings were apparently extinguished when he got a phone call from Barnet asking him to go back to work. And it is just as well in some ways, for Trevor-Roper’s later war was to take an extraordinary twist that would have repercussions throughout his life.
Back in Bletchley Park, the card-file index system – patiently built up over months and years by infinitely careful debutantes – gave an unparalleled advantage to codebreakers who could identify, for instance, the name of the son of Admiral Dönitz, which showed up in German naval reports and thus gave vital clues to the positions of certain destroyers. The various indexes had a global reach, with connections spanning continents.
Indeed, this steady accretion of information, allied with increasingly skilled methods of radio monitoring, contributed to the formation of what in the late 1940s would become GCHQ – an organisation in which Arthur Bonsall, the young civilian sent to RAF Cheadle, would eventually rise to become director.
The reading of Abwehr codes reached a euphoric peak in May 1943; for naval intelligence had pulled off the deception – now justly famous – called ‘Operation Mincemeat’. This had involved the planting of the body of ‘Major Martin’, an important courier carrying vital intelligence, apparently downed in an air crash off Spain. The body was found by a Spanish fisherman and handed over to the authorities. The authorities in turn alerted German agents, and the Abwehr eagerly passed the results of the find on to German High Command. Documentation found with the dead man included a letter addressed to General Alexander intimating that the Allies were about to launch an assault on Greece and Crete. ‘Major Martin’ was in fact a near anonymous body procured from a morgue; the stage dressings were the responsibility of Naval Intelligence; and, after Rommel had been sent by Hitler to take charge of the defence of Greece, thus confirming the staggering success of the bluff, the Allies were able to launch their long-planned assault upon Sicily. Even after the deception, the Y Service picked up Abwehr messages attempting to explain this disaster to High Command. They of course knew nothing of the highly classified deception, and indeed perhaps few of us might have done until recently were it not for Churchill repeating the story to his friend Duff Cooper; Cooper then used it in a post-war novel called Operation Heartbreak, which led in the 1950s to the non-fiction book and film The Man Who Never Was.
The Secret Listeners Page 24