The Secrets of Station X

by Michael Smith

  The intelligence supplied by Bletchley Park had proved invaluable to the Allied generals, giving them a comprehensive picture of their opponents’ positions and plans. But now the picture coming out of Hut 3 seemed to contradict that suggested by the speed of the breakout from Normandy and the race across northern France.

  Montgomery’s reputation had been built on the back of the codebreakers’ advance knowledge of Rommel’s plans in North Africa. But he ignored their reports that Hitler had ordered his troops to maintain control of the Scheldt estuary. This typically arrogant decision to disregard the Ultra intelligence was to lead to a major defeat for the British on the banks of the Rhine. Anxious to beat the Americans to Berlin, Montgomery pushed on into Holland to mount Operation Market Garden, a three-stage airborne offensive with landings at Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Arnhem, the infamous bridge too far.

  ‘Elements retreating from the pocket in August and September filled the air with reports of their movements and strength,’ said Ralph Bennett.

  Among much else these showed that II SS Panzer Corps was to refit in the general area of Arnhem where Montgomery was planning to make a bridgehead across the lower Rhine. So firmly entrenched however was the conviction that German resistance was nearing its end that this knowledge was not enough to cast doubt on the wisdom of launching Operation Market Garden.

  Although the American airborne troops dropped onto Eindhoven and Nijmegen secured their positions and managed to link up with the main advance, the British 1st Airborne Division which was to seize a bridgehead across the Rhine at Arnhem was not so fortunate. It succeeded in capturing the only surviving bridge across the Rhine and held it for several days, expecting reinforcements to arrive at any minute. But surrounded by vastly superior forces from two SS Panzer divisions, the British paratroopers were eventually forced to withdraw. Only 2,200 of the 10,000-strong division managed to get out.

  ‘It should have been no surprise that 9 and 10 SS Panzer Divisions were encountered somewhere between Eindhoven and Arnhem,’ said Bennett.

  Ultra had placed them in this general area with certainty over ten days before Market Garden, although it had not located them precisely. The Ultra evidence was amply strong enough to shake the confidence of men with minds as open as they had been on D-Day, but the high command had lately become so over-confident that it was allowing itself to spend more time in disputes over future strategy than in studying the ground immediately under its own feet.

  Yet even the mistake over Arnhem failed to dissuade the Allied generals from their over-optimistic belief that the Germans were finished and that there was little they could do to slow the advance on Berlin. They continued to ignore the evidence of the Ultra decrypts which now pointed to a major counter-attack being prepared in the Ardennes.

  Jim Rose, one of the Hut 3 air advisers, and Alan Pryce-Jones, one of the military advisers, flew to SHAEF headquarters in Paris in November and briefed General Kenneth Strong, Eisenhower’s intelligence officer, on the Ultra decrypts.

  Strong had a very weak chin. He said: ‘This is the way we read it. Right across the front from the North Sea really to Switzerland the Germans are losing a division a day and this can’t be maintained. They’re bound to crack.’ Alan Pryce-Jones was just a major. He had his own form of battledress, he wore suede shoes. He just sort of sat on the corner of the desk and he said to Strong: ‘My dear sir, if you believe that you’ll believe anything.’ Three weeks later was the Ardennes offensive.

  The warning signs that the Germans were planning a major counter-attack were not as obvious from Ultra as they had been at times during the war. Nevertheless, there was no failure of intelligence collection, simply a lack of long-term analysis of German intentions born out of the belief that the war was virtually over, said Ralph Bennett.

  The high-ups on our side became convinced that the Germans were weakened by their failures and they couldn’t do anymore. By that time we’d got too damn cocky. I still don’t understand and I don’t think I shall understand, how it was that sign after sign that they were planning something was ignored. Who knows what it was, we never did know until it happened. They [the Germans] never told us. They were getting very security conscious by then. Time after time, we simply neglected to add two and two together and say well it might make a total of four rather than seventeen and a quarter.

  The clearest evidence from the codebreakers came in decrypts of the messages from the Japanese diplomatic representatives in Berlin to their bosses in Tokyo which spoke of ‘the coming offensive’. But there was plenty more besides, said Bennett.

  The evidence about what turned out to be the Battle of the Bulge began in September 1944 and went on until 16 December when the attack happened. If anybody had ever thought of putting all the bits of information together they would surely have come to the conclusion that there was going to be an attack.

  We had continual signals recording that the rest of the Panzer divisions were moving across from the Rhineland into Belgium and no one was saying: ‘Why are they doing all this? That’s very funny: it happens to be just the area where Ike and Bradley have put our defences at their thinnest.’ Because the Ardennes is very difficult countryside, Bradley had weakened that front, put the least trained divisions there because it was most unlikely they’d be involved in urgent operations. Damn it, Rommel and 7th Panzer Division had gone through there in 1940. Easily the most striking evidence was that the Germans had just brought in the ME262s, the first jet aircraft, and these ME262s, the latest, fastest kind of aircraft were making almost daily aerial reconnaissance of the same area, the area in front of the Ardennes, over and over again every day. No one seems to have thought: ‘This is rather a rum thing.’ So consequently we were deceived into thinking there was nothing going to happen, and when I say we, I don’t mean Hut 3, I mean the British. It never occurred to us to think that something might happen down there.

  Hitler intended a massive armoured attack to rip through the Allied forces, splitting them in two before recapturing Antwerp and cutting off their lines of supply. It was a massive gamble. Hitler’s attempted reprise of his earlier Blitzkrieg assault was checked by the Americans, first at St Vith, and then, fatally for the Germans, by the US 101st Airborne Division at the Battle of Bastogne. His refusal to shift the weight of the attack to that part of ‘the Bulge’ in the German lines that was making most forward progress prevented his tanks from overrunning the Allied fuel depots to replenish their supplies and within four weeks the counter-attack had run out of steam.

  The Battle of the Bulge was a massive defeat for the Germans, who lost 120,000 men, killed, wounded or captured, compared to a little over half that figure for the Americans. But it had held up the Allied advance by around six weeks. ‘Hut 3 was asked to do a post-mortem,’ said Jim Rose. ‘It was done by Peter Calvocoressi and F. L. Lucas. It was an extremely good report and showed the failure of intelligence at SHAEF and at the Air Ministry.’

  The Germans had dropped the complications to the Lorenz machine by October 1944, easing the problems faced in the Newmanry and Testery, and in January 1945, as the Allies advanced towards the Rhine, a new intercept station for Fish was set up at Genval, near Brussels. Kenworthy recalled:

  This was the only station connected with Knockholt which received any damage from enemy action. A V1 dropped very close to the building rendering it unserviceable. Very little damage was done to the gear and it was then installed in the wireless transmitter vans. The Brussels station moved up later in the year with the 21st Army Group advance.

  Colossus was constantly updated as new variants were introduced and by the end of the war, there were around ten Colossi actually operational, said Donald Michie, another member of the Newmanry.

  Each one was like a very big wardrobe in size and the place looked almost like an aircraft hangar. At the end, it was looking like a scene that you didn’t see again until about 1960 with huge main-frames all over the place, the whole thing going flat out around the clock,
twenty-four hours a day, 365 days round the year, a total staff of 300 Wrens, maybe fifty on duty on any particular shift, and a duty officer taking decisions. Very often when things got really hot, in the sense of being on to something which had been resisting, you would work on. So that there would be people who were officially on shift and people who weren’t but just couldn’t tear themselves away and would catch another transport out of the place and flop in their digs for a few hours and then come back again. They were very exciting times.

  By now Bletchley Park had little effect on the Allied advance across Germany although its intelligence on the V-weapon launch sites at Peenemünde and the ISOS traffic carrying the reports of the Double Cross agents was invaluable in Operation Crossbow, the effort to counter the last-ditch German bombardment of London.

  The double agents were repeatedly being asked for information on where the missiles were falling. The mean point of impact of the V-weapons was in south-east London, four miles short of their target. But by carefully manipulating the times and locations of the blasts reported back by the double agents in conjunction with the times of the launches reported by an RAF Y station sent to the continent to monitor them, the Double Cross Committee persuaded the Germans that they were overshooting and the range of the V-weapons was shortened, moving the danger still further out of London.

  As the threat from the Germans receded, increasing numbers of people were moved on to Japanese codes and cyphers and new recruits arrived, many of them Wrens like Rosemary Calder, who was put to work in the Japanese Navy traffic analysis section which was run by the Cambridge historian Sir John Plumb.

  ‘I was interviewed by Jack Plumb who told me, “We analyse traffic”,’ said Calder.

  I had no idea what this meant. I had this picture in my mind of people sat on camp stools by the side of the road counting lorries and gun carriages. I spent most of my time at BP, attached to the room of which Angus Wilson the famous novelist was head. We considered ourselves to be a small exclusive group who were all given scope for initiative and intelligence despite the bulk of the work (as I recall) being of a repetitive clerical nature. Any of us could do any of the jobs in the office. It was a very democratic place. Wrens mixed up with civilians. We might as well as not been in uniform. We were having a marvellous time. It was like being back at college. Angus was a great darling who spoilt us all and we spoilt him in return. He called us all Ducky and he had this special friend called Bentley Bridgewater who took over the traffic analysis section from Jack Plumb and later went on to become Secretary of the British Museum. Angus was known to be very brilliant but crazy. He had at least one nervous breakdown before I got there and was still going to Oxford to see a psychiatrist, writing all his dreams down. But he was very good-natured most of the time and if he started getting agitated, we would just give him a copy of Vogue or Tatler and he could go off and sit down by the lake flicking through it and come back as happy as a sandboy.

  Anne Petrides, another of the young Wrens in Hut 7, worked on an index of merchant shipping movements.

  I joined Naval Section at BP the day after my eighteenth birthday ‘celebrated’ at the WRNS training centre at Mill Hill on 31 May 1944 and was flung into the work of cataloguing ships, entering brief notes on their cards about the decoded signals as they came to us from the translations. Most of their warships had been sunk by then and we were dealing with Maru – merchant ships. The naval officers in my office included Gorley Putt and ‘Shrimp’ Hordern, brother of Michael Hordern, the actor. As a very young girl, I was petrified to be left all alone at lunchtime, in four interconnecting rooms – and in fact justifiably so, as a senior officer from the Admiralty phoned and said ‘Can we go over…’ followed by a burble of words. He came back in clear language and was outraged to find that not only had no one seen fit to tell me which button to press for the scrambler but that no ‘duty officer’ was present. A regular visitor from ‘down the passage’, usually on quieter night watches was Angus Wilson, the novelist. His first book of stories was said to have originated in a series of sessions he had with a psychiatrist. I believe the men cracked more easily under the strain whereas girls found it easier to have a crying breakdown. We Wrens were extremely spoilt in our accommodation, nothing but the best country houses in the area, including Woburn Abbey, while the ATS lived in barracks at the back of the Park. I started out at Wavendon House. Then I lived at Stockgrove Park. It had been rather knocked about by the 51st Highland Division which had been there before us. I remember dances attended by locally billeted GIs and drinking draught cider, very heady.

  Olive Humble, one of the Temporary Women Assistants drafted in to work on Japanese cyphers, was put into another sub-section of Hut 7. She had been called up in early 1943 for the WRNS but there were no places and she found herself sent off instead to the Foreign Office as a civil servant.

  So in February 1943 I arrived at BP and was escorted to the Billeting Office by an armed soldier, to my great consternation. I had never left home before, having worked in an insurance office in the City when I left school. I was suitably impressed with my new surroundings, until I saw the Mansion, which no one can say is beautiful to the eye. I was parcelled off to a Commander Thatcher, a fierce naval man who put the fear of God into me. He informed me that I was in the Japanese Naval Section, which confused me even further, that from then on I would not be allowed to leave the Park other than through death or disablement, that if I said one word of what I or anyone else was doing, even to my nearest and dearest, I would get thirty years without the option. He stood over me while I digested the Official Secrets Act, and dutifully signed it.

  My billet was in Bedford – the lady of the house was not a willing billetor, and for the few months I was there she made my life miserable, I was turned out in the evenings as I was in the way, and so roamed round Bedford which was manned by the American Army Air Force. I was petrified. Later I made a friend in another part of my Section and we joined forces and went to another billet again in Bedford, to a Mr & Mrs Buick, who had two children. They were completely and absolutely magnificent, never probed, always there for us.

  Olive was put to work on the JN40 Merchant Shipping Code which had been broken by British codebreakers working at Kilindini in Kenya.

  One half was manned by a host of civilian women, who seemed to be dealing with coloured flimsy sheets of paper. I never did know what they did. The other half of the room was manned by the Navy, and there we went. I was put on to three shifts immediately, the civvies were always on days, and I found myself sitting at a table with six to eight Wrens. In the centre of the room was the boss Major W. E. Martin, he was older than us of course, and looked after his youngsters like a benevolent father. At the other end were three or four Navy boys. All were young and bright, and I was quite happy, as I had really wanted to join the Wrens. We put the five-figure blocks, typed on flimsy paper, into clear English letters from pads, and constructed clear messages, such as: ‘Otaru Maru leaving Manila at 0200 hrs for Singapore arrives such and such.’ These messages were then passed to Major Martin, who I suppose with hindsight passed them on. We didn’t know what was happening in any other part of the section, the need to know syndrome was very much to the fore.

  The social life at BP was for me rather mixed, as being on shift work did curtail it to a certain extent. When I did get enough time off, in between shifts, I would remain in Bedford, sometimes with a Wren, whose name I have forgotten but who introduced me to Mozart. She would drag me into her favourite music shop, and we would land in the booths and listen to records, my recollection of hearing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik for the first time is still very vivid. I met some odd characters there. One was a very brainy lad, who could only work well while under the influence of whisky, so the caring FO provided him with a bottle a day or equivalent, until he broke and was taken away. I remember passing him in the corridors, always dressed in a pin-stripe suit, papers under his arm, muttering to himself, and a strong smell of malt wafting by
with him. Another bright specimen divested himself of all his clothing and galloped round the lake with the Army in hot pursuit, cheered on by we spectators on the banks, and the Wrens rowing lustily on the lake.

  CHAPTER 12

  AN EXTRAORDINARY GROUP OF PEOPLE

  As the Allies advanced across western Europe towards Berlin, and German commanders and radio operators came under increasing pressure, the Army Enigma keys finally began to be broken on a more regular basis and, by March 1945, Hut 6 was breaking more Army Enigma than Luftwaffe Enigma for the first time in the war. The effect of the battle on Army units forced them to use communications to a far greater extent and limited the number of Enigma keys they could use, leading to productive breaks into Bantam, the key used by the German Commander-in-Chief in the West; Duck, the German 7th Army’s key; and Puffin, the main key in use between Berlin and German forces in Italy, which also produced important intelligence on German intentions on the western front. Inevitably, as units came under pressure in battle there were a lot more plain language communications that helped to provide cribs.

  Despite new German security measures, improved Colossus computers ensured continued coverage of the Jellyfish encyphered teleprinter link between the western front and Berlin and the Bream link between Italy and Berlin, which was also producing high-grade intelligence on German intentions in the West. Although individual U-Boats began using unique keys, Hut 8 continued to break the main Shark and Dolphin keys and as a result increasing numbers of U-Boats were sunk, leading to their withdrawal from the English Channel. Increased captures of cypher material and the sheer pressure of battle ensured that the improved German security measures failed to prevent Bletchley from producing vital intelligence to the very last.