The Dangerous Book of Heroes

by Conn Iggulden

  On May 27 Bishop shot down a two-seater over Passchendaele and on the twenty-eighth two Albatross fighters over Ypres. His phenomenal—and deadly—marksmanship continued until June 17, when his squadron was operating from Saint-Omer. He was advised that he’d been posted to Britain to help create a Canadian flying corps, and he had to leave his squadron by noon of the nineteenth. “I’ve never been so furious in my life,” he wrote to his wife. “It makes me livid with rage to be pulled away just as things are getting started.”

  However, the Canadian government was worried about him. With the best airplanes and better tactics, the RAF commanded the air over the battlefronts, yet it was feared that, like his mentor Albert Ball, Bishop would be killed. He was more important to the war effort alive than with a few more victories and dead.

  On the morning of the nineteenth Billy Bishop flew his last patrol. “One last look at the war,” he described it. He intercepted a flight of German Pfalz fighters and in a ferocious fifteen minutes of flying was credited with three more victories, although he claimed five.

  In August he was awarded the RAF’s new Distinguished Flying Cross in recognition of his recent twenty-five victories in just twelve days of combat. Two days later he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and appointed “Officer Commanding-designate of the Canadian Air Force.” In all, he was credited with seventy-two airplane victories and two observation balloons, making him the greatest ace of the RAF and one of the few great aces to survive the war.

  Billy and Margaret Bishop’s postwar years were up and down. They moved to England in 1921, had three children, and ran a successful business until bankrupted by the stock-market crash of 1929. Returning to Canada, Bishop was appointed honorary group captain in the Royal Canadian Air Force and, eventually, honorary air marshal.

  During World War II, Air Marshal Bishop helped expand the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was also instrumental in creating the Commonwealth Air Training Plan, in which thousands of flyers from the commonwealth and empire were trained in the peaceful airspaces of Canada. He had the pleasure of presenting his own son, Arthur, with his pilot’s wings. Arthur Bishop flew Spitfires during the battle of Britain to become one of “the Few,” and one of the few of “the Few” to survive that war.

  In 1942, after the United States entered the war, Billy Bishop appeared in a Hollywood propaganda film, Captains of the Clouds, and so became one of the rare actors actually to play himself. More important, King George VI made Bishop a Companion of the Order of the Bath in the Birthday Honours List of 1944, while at home he was awarded the Canadian Efficiency Decoration. After the war, he wrote another book, Winged Peace. That book and Bishop himself helped the formation of the International Civil Aviation Organization. Bishop retired in 1952 at the age of fifty-eight, to die in his sleep in September 1956.

  Billy Bishop’s honor seemed safe. He’d played his part in two world wars, defeating, respectively, militarism and fascism. Many books were written about him, including one by his son, and there is even a play, Billy Bishop Goes to War. Yet it seems nothing is sacred. In 1982 a “documentary” film was released by the National Film Board of Canada called The Kid Who Couldn’t Miss. It caused controversy throughout Canada and led to a senate inquiry.

  Through the use of fictional “interviews” with people long dead, played by actors giving fictional replies, Bishop’s whole World War I record was questioned—in particular, the dawn attack of June 2, 1917. The film alleges that Bishop lied about this attack. As his Victoria Cross is, so far, the only VC awarded for a specific action not officially witnessed, Bishop was an easy target for defamation. The accusations of lying were built around the argument that (1) there are no German records of an attack on Estourmel; (2) a Nieuport 17 could not have flown that distance and remained in the air for that time; (3) the damage to the Nieuport was self-inflicted by Bishop; (4) Bishop landed in Allied territory and used the plane’s machine gun to make that damage; and (5) Bishop then hid the machine gun.

  It’s the classic defamation of a hero. He’s dead, the witnesses are dead, most of the records are destroyed or lost, and the event took place in another era with different standards of honesty. Yet with Billy Bishop, fortunately there is evidence to refute the defamation.

  According to Bishop’s own combat report, written that 1917 morning, his attack was against an airfield at “either Esnes or Awoingt”—not Estourmel, as the film claims. Bishop wasn’t sure which, for both were temporary airfields, both were four miles from Estourmel, and Bishop was fighting a war, not making a documentary. That first and second of June there were six Albatrosses on a temporary airfield at Esnes, during a German squadron transfer to the British front. It’s not surprising that no German report survives, because squadron transfer reports were not required. The squadron diary where it might have been mentioned was destroyed by British bombing during World War II. The confusion with Estourmel actually comes from a mistake in Bishop’s son’s book of 1965.

  The flight described in Bishop’s combat report that lasted one hour and forty-three minutes was within the capabilities and range of a Nieuport 17. The damage report by mechanic Sergeant Nicod recorded “both machine-gun and heavier anti-aircraft damage.” How can a pilot fake antiaircraft damage to the underside of his wings? Further, the Nieuport 17s were renowned for structural weaknesses in their wing struts; Bishop’s squadron had already lost five from this dangerous fault. It defies argument that an ace with twenty-one victories would land his aircraft, remove his machine gun from the top wing, and shoot his already weak wing structures.

  In addition, it was impossible for the pilot to leave the cockpit of a Nieuport 17 with the engine turning. With no hand or wheel brake and a high-revving rotary engine, the plane would motor away from him. A pilot had to switch off the engine—but the plane had no self-starter. A second person had to swing the propeller, with the pilot in the cockpit, to restart the engine. As to the alleged hidden machine gun, why would Bishop hide it, whatever the circumstances? His combat report does not mention a lost Lewis gun, and the weekly squadron reports record no lost or jettisoned Lewis at all for June. Again, the origin is in Bishop’s son’s book, written from memory nine years after his father died.

  Finally, Bishop’s attack was corroborated by British balloon observer Louis Weirter, twelve miles away at the British front line. Visibility was good that midsummer dawn, and from four thousand feet, equipped with military field glasses, Weirter would have clearly seen a single-fighter attack at Esnes—as he reported. From that height he would have seen clearly thirty miles away.

  For confirmation of Bishop’s other victories, because he fought deep behind enemy lines, it’s no surprise that witnesses to some were hard to find. Yet in fact Bishop had a very high confirmation rate by witnesses, second only to James McCudden of those pilots given commissions to hunt alone.

  In Berlin in 1928, Billy Bishop became the only Allied fighter pilot to be inducted into the German Aces Association of the First World War. They had no doubt about the Blue-Nosed Devil from Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada.

  Let’s leave Bishop’s honor to the 1956 obituary by the Montreal Gazette:

  Death came to Air Marshal Billy Bishop in the early morning. He died at the chill hour before the coming of the dawn—an hour when he must often have been making ready for his solitary flights. Perhaps, if he had had his choice, this would be the hour he would have preferred. For he had that courage which Napoléon Bonaparte once said was the rarest—the courage of the early morning.

  Recommended

  Over the Front by Philip Markham, vol. 10, no. 3 The Courage of the Early Morning by Arthur Bishop The Billy Bishop Museum, Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada The Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon, Middlesex, U.K.

  Bletchley Park and the First Computers

  [Cryptanalysts were] the geese who laid the golden eggs and never cackled.

  —Winston Churchill

  In the north Buckinghamshire countryside lies a sprawling country house bui
lt in Elizabethan, Jacobean, Georgian, and Victorian styles, two stories high with a small central tower and battlement. It’s set in a Domesday estate of 480 acres and is listed by English Heritage. It’s called Bletchley Park.

  In early 1939 the Secret Intelligence Service took over Bletchley Park for its Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS). After the success of Room 40, the Admiralty’s intelligence arm during World War I, the government appreciated the vital role intelligence could play. Nowadays the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), as GC&CS was renamed following World War II, is located in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. It is without doubt the most successful secret service in the world, if only for what its men and women achieved in Bletchley Park from 1939 to 1945.

  Bletchley Park is where the codes of the German Enigma machines were broken, as well as Japanese military and diplomatic codes, and where the world’s first electronic computer was invented to break Hitler’s top-secret codes. The computer age began at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire.

  The “golden eggs” to which Churchill referred were the intelligence intercepts Bletchley produced, and the 7,500 women and 2,500 men who worked there were the “geese.” Not one word was spoken about their role until the information was declassified in the mid-1970s—the geese never cackled. That thirty years of silence is significant in another way. The vast majority of men and women at Bletchley were not silver-haired professors; most of the code breakers were under thirty. Many were under twenty and a few were straight from school. It was young brains that did the job, assisted by daring raids in the field by other young brains.

  By 1939 there was already a history of GC&CS success. Intercepts and code breaks of Russian signals between the wars had uncovered attempts to sow a Communist revolution in Britain—funding left-wing newspapers, the British Communist Party, union unrest, and strikes.

  From the efforts particularly of John Tiltman, Hugh Foss, and Australian Eric Nave, GC&CS also broke Japanese codes regularly, beginning in the 1920s. American intelligence didn’t make its first Japanese code break until 1940. However, the surprise 1941 attack on Malaya and Pearl Harbor was not uncovered. The 1941 German attack on Russia was uncovered by Bletchley; Churchill warned Russia but was not believed.

  By 1940, GC&CS was breaking twenty-six diplomatic codes of both enemy and neutral countries. The Americans were then working only four countries. Later GC&CS gave almost all its keys, ciphers, code breaks, and equipment to American intelligence for it to catch up.

  The greatest challenge that would face the Bletchley Park code breakers was the German Enigma machine. Resembling a typewriter, it had the advantage of being able to encode messages at typing speed. These machines were a vital part of Germany’s war effort and were used by all its armed forces and diplomatic networks. Britain’s Polish allies copied the first Enigma machine in 1939 and passed it to GC&CS. When Poland fell in 1939, Polish cryptanalysts fled to France, and when France fell they fled to Britain. Polish intelligence made the first Enigma code break in January 1940, while GC&CS made the second, in February.

  Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

  There are three parts to a coded message: the plain language, the key to the code used, and the resulting encoded message. Any two parts are required to uncover the third. To operate an Enigma machine, the code designated that day was entered in the code board to prime the machine. For example, the letter A became P, B became Q, C became R, and so on. The plain-language message was then typed, and the machine automatically substituted letter for letter. The coded message was then passed by the machine through three separate rotors, each set to one of twenty-six alphabetical positions according to that day’s code. That encoded the message three more times. A reflector rotor then “reflected” the message back in the opposite direction, so that the message was encoded another three times. That produced an almost random encoded message with nearly three million combinations. The coded message was then transmitted.

  At the receiving end, the coded message was typed into an identical Enigma machine set to that day’s code and the plain-language message was revealed, letter by letter. The one weakness of the Enigma machine, not realized by German cryptanalysts, was that it was not 100 percent random. Crucially, A could not be encoded as A, B could not be B. This gave the brains at Bletchley Park the tiny window they needed in order to, slowly, break each day’s code.

  To speed decoding, the brilliant Cambridge mathematician Alan Turing invented an electromechanical machine utilizing banks and banks of rotors and code boards into which an intercepted coded message was entered. It was called a Bombe, after an earlier but different Polish machine.

  The Bombe was not a computer; that came later. Turing’s Bombe worked by eliminating every wrong decode for a message to leave only the few possible correct codes. Those were then entered by hand and tested, and the correct code for the day was uncovered. A Bombe was then programmed with that code and every message in that particular Enigma network could be decoded.

  There were different Enigma networks for Germany and for Italy, for the army, navy, U-boats, and air force, for High Command, for field units, for the Gestapo, embassies overseas, German spies in Britain, and so on. There was network after network, each using different types of Enigmas—100,000 of them—and different codes.

  Thousands of radio operators throughout Britain, the empire, and the commonwealth monitored enemy radio frequencies to intercept the messages. Those intercepts were passed to huts built on the grounds of Bletchley Park. There, teams of women and men decoded their particular network. Cross-feeding of information among sections was carried out by the head of each team. In the early part of the war there were not enough Bombes to handle the number of intercepts. When America entered the war in December 1941, Bletchley Park sent a Bombe to American intelligence for it to copy.

  Inevitably, the Germans increased the complexity of their codes and improved the Enigma machines. Very early, a plug board like an old-fashioned telephone exchange was added, increasing possible codes to 159 trillion—159,000,000,000,000. Improved rotors were introduced, rotor wiring was changed, and when a fourth rotor was added to naval Enigmas (increasing decoding possibilities to 26 × 159 trillion), it almost won the war for the Nazis. Until a break-in could be found, Bletchley was working blind. It was then that the men in the field played their part.

  Captures of code books and pieces of equipment took place throughout the war, unknown to Germany. Rotors 6 and 7 were captured from the submarine U-33, and code books were recovered from patrol boat Schiff 26 in 1940. In 1941, Enigma parts and a key list were taken from the trawler Krebs during the brilliant Lofoten Islands commando raid, and the surrender of the U-570 yielded the lid from the new four-rotor naval Enigma. Australian soldiers captured Japanese code books in New Guinea in 1943.

  The most vital and famous capture was of the weather and convoy code books for the naval four-rotor Engima from the U-559 in the Mediterranean. Lieutenant Fasson and Able Seaman Grazier of HMS Petard descended into the sinking U-boat on October 30, 1942, to recover the books. With sixteen-year-old Tommy Brown, they passed out code papers as the water poured into the sinking submarine. Brown escaped, but both Fasson and Grazier drowned as they tried to salvage the new Enigma machine itself. They did not give their lives in vain. That code-book capture gave Bletchley Park the break-in to the four-rotor naval code known as Shark.

  Before that capture, GC&CS had broken Shark only three times. It caused the crisis in the battle of the Atlantic, when merchant-ship sinkings by U-boats reached their peak and it was thought the United Kingdom might be blockaded into defeat. In the first half of 1942, U-boats sank more than three million tons of shipping, carrying vital men, food, fuel, and military supplies. With the breaking of Shark that December, intelligence flowed again to the Admiralty, ship sinkings decreased, and U-boat sinkings increased.

  Of the 1.5 million naval Enigma signals intercepted, 1.1 million were successfully decoded at Bletchley Park. How th
at intelligence was used required very careful decisions. Often, intelligence was not acted upon, for to have done so would have alerted the enemy that its codes were being broken.

  One success in March 1941 was by Dillwyn Knox’s women, decoding a message from Italian naval Enigma. The intelligence forewarned the Royal Navy, so that Admiral Cunningham’s ships sailed from Egypt to surprise and defeat an Italian fleet at the battle of Matapan. Italian ships never put to sea again during the whole war. Believing its Enigma codes unbreakable, Germany accused Italy of harboring a traitor, but it was Dilly Knox’s crew at Bletchley.

  Intelligence is a game of bluff, counter-bluff, and apparently unrelated events. For example, RAF Bomber Command dropped mines into various continental sea lanes, apparently to disrupt enemy shipping. In fact, it was not primarily to sink enemy vessels but to generate enemy signals. The coded signals announcing that the sea lanes had been cleared were intercepted and passed to Bletchley. Knowing roughly what those signals concerned allowed code breakers to decode them, then use the decodes as “cribs” to break more important messages and ciphers.

  Similarly, Nazi spies in Britain and Ireland were captured or “turned” without the Germans realizing. Carefully compiled accurate but not vital information was sent to German intelligence as if from these agents. The coded responses were intercepted and passed to Bletchley, where another crib was obtained.