by Max Hastings
Two Spitfire pilots were first to sight the German squadron, at 10.42 a.m., just west of Le Touquet. They observed standard operating procedure, however, which meant wireless silence, and reported the sensational news only after landing at 11.09 a.m. Sixteen minutes later their tidings were broadcast to all British commands, precipitating a succession of futile assaults. Lt. Cmdr Edward Esmond received a posthumous VC for leading a low-level attack by six pitifully old, slow Swordfish torpedo biplanes from Manston in Kent, all of which plunged into the Channel amid a hail of anti-aircraft fire. The Germans were already through the Narrows when the ‘Stringbags’ made their runs at 12.42 p.m., and all of 825 Squadron’s torpedoes missed. Five MTBs dashed out from Dover harbour, of which one quickly broke down. The leader of the other four, on sighting the German ships, decided that it was impossible for his boats to penetrate the escorting screen. They thus launched their torpedoes at extreme range, without effect. Another three boats, bounding forth from Ramsgate in worsening weather, failed to find the Scharnhorst and its consorts.
In the course of the afternoon of the 12th, a succession of naval twin-engined Beauforts and Hudsons staged piecemeal torpedo and bomb attacks on the receding Germans, without effect and with the loss of several aircraft. At 3.43 p.m. five destroyers from Harwich, under fierce German gunfire, launched a torpedo attack at a range of 3,000 yards, again without effect. Meanwhile 242 British bombers were launched against Ciliax’s squadron, of which just thirty-nine dropped their loads in the vicinity without scoring a hit, and fifteen were shot down. The RAF also lost seventeen of 398 fighters committed.
The German dash up-Channel had proved a triumph for the Kriegsmarine’s planning, skill, daring and luck. Or had it? Scharnhorst struck one British air-dropped mine at 2.31 p.m., without much effect, as did Gneisenau at 7.55 p.m. At 9.34 p.m., however, off Terschelling close to home, Scharnhorst hit a second mine, which inflicted grave damage. The ship eventually crept into Wilhelmshaven early on 13 February with its port engines unserviceable, its consorts following at 7 o’clock the same morning. The British people knew nothing, however, of the late disaster which befell the Germans, causing Hitler’s naval staff to characterise the episode as ‘a tactical victory, but a strategic defeat’. Churchill’s countrymen saw only that an enemy squadron had defied the might of the Royal Navy in broad daylight, within sight of the white cliffs. The Times thundered that Admiral Ciliax had succeeded where the Spanish Armada had failed. A judicial inquiry was held, of which the findings reflected poorly on all the British force commanders involved.
In truth, though the Channel Dash caused the British government deep embarrassment at a bad time, it was unimportant. Ultra informed the Admiralty of the damage to Scharnhorst, which was restored to operational fitness only in January 1943, when it joined Tirpitz in the Norwegian fjords. Meanwhile, on 26 February 1942, RAF bombers hit Gneisenau in dock at Kiel, crippling the cruiser so severely that it never sailed again. It was deemed impossible, however, to broadcast any of this good news to the British people without compromising Bletchley’s security. The German ships were thus generally supposed to have escaped scot-free. Public bitterness lingered for years about yet another presumed defeat.
Blame for failure to destroy the ships in the Channel Narrows certainly did not lie with intelligence, which provided commanders with the best information they could conceivably have expected about the enemy’s intentions, up to the moment of sailing. Commanders drew appropriate deductions, and were alert to Ciliax’s likely course, save that they expected him to close the English coast by night rather than by day. The problem, as so often, lay with lack of appropriate forces to challenge the German squadron. Anti-shipping capability was a chronic weakness of both the Fleet Air Arm and the RAF. It is often suggested that, if the British had known earlier that Ciliax had put to sea, the outcome could have been different. This seems unlikely. In the course of the conflict, many British air attacks against enemy surface ships failed. As ever, knowledge was not enough, unless matched by power.
2 THE BRAIN
The war yielded plenty of failures and disappointments to match that of February 1942 in the Channel Narrows, but they do not diminish the achievement of Britain’s ‘brain’, the command structure and bureaucracy wherein the collection, analysis and distribution of intelligence were integrated. Bletchley Park’s codebreakers would have achieved much less, but for the existence of a threshing machine for their golden harvest. This could have been created only under the hand of a wise prime minister, who thoroughly understood the making of war.
Churchill dominated his nation’s decision-making much more than did Roosevelt that of the United States. Although he often baulked at assessments which did not conform to his own views, unlike the dictators he never questioned the right and duty of the chiefs of staff and their intelligence officers to speak their minds. He was a critical force in making Britain’s secret services the least ineffective in the world. Because he himself respected intelligence, he ensured that its agencies, and especially Bletchley Park, were adequately resourced.
The prime minister used decrypts as often as weapons in argument with his own chiefs of staff, as against the enemy. ‘Churchill had a tendency to create his own intelligence,’ said the Joint Intelligence Committee’s chairman Victor ‘Bill’ Cavendish-Bentinck, somewhat delphically. But the chiefs seldom deviated from the principle of attempting to analyse evidence objectively. ‘The best arrangement,’ wrote a later chairman of the JIC, Percy Cradock, ‘is intelligence and policy in separate but adjoining rooms, with communicating doors and thin partition walls, as in cheap hotels.’ This is what happened in Whitehall. At least in the second half of the struggle, as Britain’s war effort became more coherent, an impressively robust yet sensitive system collated and examined information, then transferred it from the secret departments to operational commanders.
Bill Bentinck thought the RAF’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal the cleverest of Britain’s three service chiefs, while being irked by CIGS Gen. Sir Alan Brooke’s surges of stubbornness in pursuit of his own hobby-horses. In late 1941, for example, against the firm opinion of the JIC and all the evidence from Bletchley, Brooke persuaded himself that the Germans retained a ‘mass of manoeuvre’, uncommitted to the Eastern Front, which might still invade Britain. It was widely thought that successive War Office directors of intelligence were too eager to tell the highly opinionated army chief what he wanted to hear. The JIC, by contrast, did nothing of the sort: its reporting was almost unfailingly honest, even when it was wrong.
The Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee of the chiefs of staff – to give the JIC its full title – assumed unprecedented importance after the 1940 ascent of Churchill and the fall of France. It met in a house owned by Bill Bentinck’s uncle in Richmond Terrace, a brisk walk from the war cabinet offices. The chairman enjoyed impeccably aristocratic origins, and himself ended life as the last Duke of Portland, but he had an unusual and unenviable personal history. Born in 1897, he was educated at Wellington College, where he was unhappy. In 1918 he served briefly in the army without reaching the front, then joined the diplomatic service, where good looks, easy manners and an air of benign wisdom might have sped him to the top had he not made a disastrous 1924 marriage to an American named Clothilde Quigley, with whom he had two children. As a younger son Bentinck was relatively poor – more so, after some rash stock exchange speculations. His wife nonetheless spent lavishly and quarrelled spectacularly with other diplomatic wives wherever her husband was posted. Bentinck was transferred from the prestigious Paris embassy first to Athens, then to Santiago, leaving everywhere a trail of acrimony laid by Clothilde. Back in London in 1939, he was appointed chairman of the JIC while it was still in its embryo phase, because nobody could think what else to do with him, as long as he remained encumbered by his termagant of a spouse.
Soon after war began, he received at his office an almost incomprehensible telephone call from the family’s Hungarian maid, w
ho eventually made him understand that Mrs Bentinck had packed her bags and departed with the children, apparently for Glasgow to catch a boat to America. ‘It was like a French farce,’ said the JIC chairman dryly long afterwards. Bentinck adopted a mask of patrician stoicism to conceal the trauma this event must have caused him. Thereafter, though his wife made trouble until they were messily divorced in 1948, he devoted himself single-mindedly to his job, and most observers thought him well suited to it. Noel Annan found Bentinck ‘very impressive … He had a temperament of extreme scepticism, yet total belief that the Allies were going to win.’ For a time when Menzies’ throne tottered, Bentinck was touted as his possible successor at MI6.
The chairman was no brainbox, but he had a native shrewdness, impeccable manners and a relaxed charm which enabled him for six years to manage the passions that often swirled at JIC meetings. The Committee’s cleverest and most assertive service representative was John Godfrey, director of naval intelligence, but the admiral’s arrogance exasperated those who had to work with him. Meanwhile Godfrey’s army and air force counterparts were unimpressive officers, and the Ministry of Economic Warfare’s representative only began to exert real influence later in the war, when Sir Geoffrey Vickers was appointed to the role. Though a lawyer, he was a World War I VC who had once commanded an infantry battalion: the service representatives would have found it hard to snub Vickers.
The range of issues addressed by the JIC was extraordinary. In addition to the big strategic questions, in July and August 1941 its staff produced reports on such matters as ‘Military Preparations by Vichy France against Chad’, ‘Rumours Designed to Mislead the Enemy’ – a running theme, ‘Madagascar’, ‘Press, Cinema and Broadcasting Correspondents in Iceland’, ‘An advance by the Axis into Sudan and Arabia’. Every Tuesday morning at 10.30, the Committee’s members reported to the chiefs of staff in the Cabinet War Rooms beneath Great George Street – what Bentinck referred to wryly as ‘leading my choir’. Their assessments might, or might not, influence the chiefs’ decisions, which were passed to the Joint Planning Staff for translation into operational proposals and orders. The JPS’s officers, famously clever, often worked all night to prepare appreciations for the chiefs’ next 8 a.m. meeting. Churchill grumbled to Alan Brooke, ‘These damned planners of yours plan nothing but difficulties.’ Utterly unlike Hitler, however, the prime minister acknowledged that this was their job – even if it afterwards became their duty to identify solutions.
The most important element of the JIC was its supporting body, the Joint Intelligence Staff, which was created in 1941 and thereafter provided the Committee with in-house analysis of material from all sources before members debated it. The new age of technology provided an almost infinitely wide field for exploration, as well as means of addressing this: the trick was to focus attention where it mattered. Group-Captain Peter Stewart, who ran the RAF’s photo-reconnaissance operations, was exasperated by a senior officer who asked for ‘all available cover’ of one European country. Stewart responded that he could only provide helpful information if he knew roughly what intelligence the suppliant wanted – ‘naval, military, air or ecclesiastical’. R.V. Jones made the point that, especially when technology was involved, it was essential to make a clear decision about what commanders needed to know, then to exploit an appropriate mix of aerial reconnaissance, PoW interrogation and signal decrypts, ‘rather as an army commander might use his various arms in a balanced attack with artillery, tanks and infantry. The specific objective to be attacked might be suggested by what we knew was being developed by our own side, and which therefore might also be under development by the enemy, radar and atomic bombs being two such examples.’
The JIS recruited some outstandingly able civilians in uniform. Once a week Bentinck assembled its thirty-odd officers for a ‘brains trust’, an open discussion about the enemy’s dispositions and activities. Junior members were encouraged to speak their minds – which they did, about for instance the man-for-man superiority of the Wehrmacht to their own troops. Noel Annan put it bluntly: ‘The British armies and the new American armies were not the match of the German armies in professionalism and perhaps bravery.’ The JIC’s judgement was far from perfect, but more often right than wrong. It opposed the ill-fated September 1940 descent on Dakar, arguing that the Free French were far too optimistic about their likely reception from Vichy forces. It deserves credit for acknowledging in its reports throughout 1940–41 that much of the world expected Churchill’s people to lose the war, though it was sufficiently nationalistic never to waver from the assumption that Britain was Germany’s principal enemy. Thus in mid-June 1941 the Committee viewed the looming Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union as a mere gambit in Hitler’s campaign against Britain. The JIS argued that one of his key objectives would be ‘to use the Soviet [front] to embarrass and extend us in every way, thereby helping to achieve his supreme objective, the defeat of the British Empire’.
Throughout the summer and winter of 1941, the British assumed Soviet defeat to be inevitable. A 28 July report by the JIS mitigated its own gloom only by expressing gratitude for the breathing space granted to Britain by ‘Barbarossa’: ‘Assuming that the campaign against Russia results in a military success for Germany, there must be some pause for regrouping and refitting before the German Army can embark on major operations elsewhere.’ The JIC displayed better judgement in monitoring increasing Japanese aggression in Asia. On 25 June 1941 it weighed the prospects of Japan seizing the opportunity to strike at Russia, then concluded: ‘We think her inclination will be to abstain from intervention against Soviet Union at present stage and to continue policy of Southward expansion in which case next move will probably be intensified pressure on Indo-China for bases and facilities … It is agreed that German attack on the Soviet Union does not in any way lessen the need to press on with our own preparations for resisting Japan or aiding China.’ Thereafter, the JIC assessed with notable shrewdness likely Japanese behaviour up to their December attack on the European empires.
In July 1941 the JIC discussed an approach through a ‘most secret source’ by Dr Carl Gördeler, ex-mayor of Leipzig, ‘a German in touch with army elements in Germany who was in favour of a compromise with this country before the outbreak of war’. The JIS commented disdainfully: ‘He is not, however, regarded as reliable, and it may be that he is being used consciously or unconsciously by the German government.’ Gördeler had told his contact, accurately enough, that Gen. Franz Halder and other senior members of the general staff had opposed the launching of ‘Barbarossa’. But the JIS commented primly that such a claim did not accord with ‘other reliable information’ reaching London.
Moreover, Gördeler and his friends proposed conditions for discussions which were bound to be unacceptable to the British government: ‘as a preliminary … they required a guarantee that Great Britain would agree to an armistice and that she would, with the United States, force the Russians to come to reasonable terms with Germany over the demarcation of the Polish frontier’. This approach was rebuffed as coolly as were others later in the war by prominent members of the anti-Hitler opposition, for instance the letter sent to London via Stockholm in March 1943 by Helmuth von Moltke of the Abwehr. The consequence of this fastidious policy was that the Russians, and later the Americans through Allen Dulles in Bern, enjoyed a near-monopoly of wartime ‘humint’ from inside Germany, though this did little to influence their policies.
The intelligence machine sometimes reached conclusions which were then rejected by the prime minister or one of the chiefs of staff. In the spring of 1942 a succession of reports highlighted the failure of Axis air forces’ attempts to destroy the British submarine flotilla based at Malta, and emphasised the difficulties of penetrating the vast concrete U-boat pens at Brest and Lorient. The Royal Navy nonetheless insisted that the RAF should persist with its costly and futile attacks on the bases. As First Sea Lord in July 1942, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound overruled his own intelligence sta
ff to make a disastrous personal judgement that Arctic convoy PQ17 was threatened by German capital ships, and must scatter, a blunder which precipitated its piecemeal destruction, and for which he should have been sacked. Intelligence could achieve nothing if it was thus ignored. Yet, while such follies have incurred just censure from historians, it is important to emphasise that unlike their enemy counterparts, Britain’s leaders relatively seldom defied the counsel of their intelligence and operational staffs.
This did not prevent argument about the significance of contradictory evidence. In 1944, for example, the Ministry of Economic Warfare argued that Germany’s manpower situation was deteriorating, while the War Office saw an alarming growth in the Wehrmacht’s strength, as recorded in the JIC’s twice-yearly Enemy Strengths & Dispositions report. Only belatedly was it discovered that Hitler was manipulating his armies’ divisional numbers to inflate their apparent might. In the same way, in the summer of 1944 the JIC allowed itself to be persuaded by Geoffrey Vickers of MEW that lack of oil would precipitate an early German collapse. The Committee was correct in acknowledging the importance of oil, and Hitler’s dire shortage of it, but was over-optimistic about the speed at which his armies’ resistance would become unsustainable. There was another notorious JIC misjudgement on 5 September 1944, in the wake of the liberation of France, when the Committee allowed itself to succumb to euphoria: ‘Whereas the Germans have at the moment an organised front between the Russians and the German frontier, in the West they have nothing but disorganised remnants incapable of holding the Allied advance in strength into Germany itself.’ The prime minister flatly disagreed with this view, arguing that Hitler’s people were still far from beaten. His own instinct proved sounder than the JIS analysis.