Testament

by David Gibbins

  Fan knew that Bermonsey was in an extraordinary position. As a mere commander, an acting rank at that, he should not have had the authority to issue orders to the highest echelons of the Admiralty. Officially, therefore, his messages to the OIC following these meetings were couched as advice, to be acted on further up the chain if the rear admiral commanding OIC saw fit. Unofficially, his messages were translated into operational orders without exception. Churchill had taken Alan Turing and his team under his wing when he saw that their efforts might be thwarted by those who disliked “boffins,” and had issued a personal directive that the outcome of all that effort was not to be hindered by military red tape. Anyone higher up in the Admiralty who kicked up a fuss was removed, instantly. Fan knew that the judgments made in this room were tantamount to orders from the commander-in-chief himself.

  She followed Bermonsey to the chart table. She could see that he was on edge, that his hand was shaking slightly as he opened a file. He was probably running on empty again, fueled by tea and cigarettes. Beside him stood Captain Pullen, a retired officer who had done Bermonsey’s job during the latter stages of the Great War and had been re-employed to be in charge of the day-to-day running of the hut, but without authority over the Ultra output to the Admiralty. Around the table were a dozen others: girls like Fan, several naval officers, and two of Turing’s team who had been shuffled here to make use of them after the main decryption breakthrough, both of them disheveled young men who looked as if they had walked straight out of a Cambridge common room.

  The two Americans came and stood in the wings, watching while one of the junior Royal Navy officers arranged some gaming pieces and pencils on the pinned-up chart of the Atlantic in the center of the table. Fan glanced at the shuttered window beside them, seeing that the sun was breaking through. It had been another long, hard winter, the fourth of the war. For the first time she had sensed a cautious optimism while she had been in London over the last few days. The tide had finally turned in the campaign against Rommel in North Africa, and on the Russian front; in Britain, the huge build-up of troops and equipment could only signal imminent invasion plans. And yet for the men actually on the battle lines, that optimism would probably have seemed far-fetched. For those at sea, winter might be over, but the Atlantic was still swept by gales and cold enough to kill a man in minutes. For those men, her men, men who so rarely saw the enemy but who lived in his shadow day and night, the war went on, relentless and unchanging, the dark angel of death ever-present just beneath the waves and over the horizon.

  Bermonsey glanced at the wall clock, and then at his watch. “Right. 0630 hours. My phone call to the Admiralty is scheduled for 0715. You have fifteen minutes for your assessment. Lieutenant Hardy?”

  The naval officer opposite Fan who had laid the counters on the chart sat down and arranged his papers. He was about her age, a recent arrival from the Operational Intelligence Center, one of two officers at the table whose job was to provide a naval briefing to complement her own more mathematical analysis. He had only been here a few weeks, but had already acquired the distinctive flushed, pallid look of long-term Bletchley inmates, a consequence of too little sunlight and too much time in smoky, overheated rooms. He picked up a ruler and leaned over the table, pointing at the map as he spoke.

  “The Ultra intercepts from last night reveal three U-boat patrol lines in the North Atlantic, here, here and here,” he said, tapping the map in three places. “To the south, a line the Germans have code-named Amsel, meaning blackbird, comprising eleven U-boats. To the east, off Greenland, Meise, blue tit, thirty boats, covering the northern route. And finally on the western side of the mid-Atlantic air gap, Specht, woodpecker, seventeen boats, arranged in a line running south of Greenland.”

  “No wolf packs?” Bermonsey asked.

  Hardy shook his head. “No wolf packs. These are not roving attack formations. They are strung-out, static lines, like fishing gillnets.”

  Bermonsey pursed his lips. “And the convoys?”

  Hardy moved the pointer from the pencils indicating the U-boat patrol lines to the backgammon pieces he had arranged across the map. “As of 0500 hours, there were some three hundred and fifty merchant ships in the North Atlantic. Most are within the Western Approaches or off the North American seaboard, well within air cover. The two mid-Atlantic convoys that should concern us most are SC-127 and ONS-5. Patrol line Meise was deployed to catch SC-127, but three days ago the convoy slipped through a gap in the line, completely undetected. SC-127 is by far the biggest prize in the North Atlantic at the moment, an eastward-bound convoy carrying US troops and military supplies for the invasion build-up. But we think it’s safe.”

  “And the other convoy?”

  “ONS-5 is westbound, so the ships are mainly in ballast. German naval intelligence knew it was en route, not from decrypting our messages but from long-range Luftwaffe Condor patrols out of Norway that were shadowing it. Having let SC-127 slip through the net, patrol line Meise was ordered two days ago to reconfigure to catch ONS-5. Yesterday we intercepted a message sent by a U-boat at 1650 hours showing that they had sighted the convoy. We assume that since then the patrol line will have been constricting, tightening the net and making it less likely that this second convoy will slip through. The Germans won’t want to make the same mistake twice.”

  Fan peered at the young officer. Another secret, another fold in the veils that fortified Bletchley, something that even those around this table were forbidden to voice, was that Turing’s team had known for some time that their German equivalent, B-Dienst, had broken the British naval cypher used for Allied North Atlantic convoy messages. As a result, not only was Bletchley playing a game of cat-and-mouse with the Enigma decrypts, pushing and prodding to see how much they could get away with, but they were also playing a similar game in the other direction, keeping the compromised British naval cypher open and using it to feed disinformation to the Germans. They had pushed their luck to the point where B-Dienst would be bound to rumble them soon, so a new naval cypher was ready to be activated. But meanwhile the game with B-Dienst went on, seeing how far they could go in acting on their knowledge without exciting the suspicion of their counterparts in German naval intelligence somewhere deep in their own secret operational headquarters outside Berlin.

  Bermonsey stood forward, leaning on the table. “What’s the strength of the escorts?”

  “Mid-ocean escort force group B-7,” Hardy replied. “A strong group, British, Canadian, American, some of the best corvette captains we have. They’ve been buoyed by their success in depth-charging U-boats over the last few months, and frankly, they’re spoiling for a big fight. This could be their chance to score a decisive blow, with twelve or more U-boats in that patrol line converging on the convoy and those other patrol lines also within striking range. If the escorts can sink or disable half of those U-boats, then the pendulum really begins to swing in our favor. The Germans simply can’t build enough U-boats to make up for losses like that, or replace the experienced crews.”

  Bermonsey tapped the table with a pencil. “So if we did interfere with ONS-5 and send a warning, we could be preventing a convoy battle that might change the course of the war.”

  “And even if we did warn them, there’s the problem with strung-out patrol lines that they may be too long for a convoy to sail around, and in so doing the convoy might be exposing itself to other U-boats in the area. As you know, it’s different with a mobile wolf-pack flotilla or a lone U-boat, where we can attempt to calculate their course from the intercepts and reroute a convoy out of danger’s way. If you try that with a patrol line, you’re just as likely to reroute the convoy into another submarine further down the line.”

  Bermonsey nodded. “And as a westbound convoy, with the ships in ballast, ONS-5 is a lower-order priority than an eastbound, laden convoy. As bait for a potentially decisive U-boat battle, the ships in that convoy can therefore be considered expendable.”

  He paused, looking round
for any retort. Fan thought about what he had just said. A lower-order priority. She knew the fate merchant seamen most feared, being torpedoed in a heavily laden ship, knowing they could go down in seconds. But they could be just as vulnerable to torpedoing in an unladen ship, when they were less likely to have a guardian angel watching over them. And in the scenario they had just been contemplating, one that would depend on ships being hit in order for the escorts to know where to take action, the merchant seamen would be mere pawns in the battle.

  “That’s the North Atlantic done, then,” Bermonsey said. “It leaves ONS-5 as our one open file, but with the tactical assessment pointing to inaction. Agreed?” There was a general murmur of consent, and he looked at the other seated naval officer. “And now for the South Atlantic.” He glanced at the wall clock. “Make it snappy, if you please.”

  The other man, a lieutenant commander in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve who looked as if he might have been an academic in civilian life, pushed up his spectacles and peered at the lower half of the map. “It’s more straightforward, thankfully. The other actionable Ultra intercept of the past twenty-four hours concerns U-515, which is heading south off the coast of West Africa on a collision course with convoy TS-37, heading north from Takoradi in the Gold Coast to Freetown in Sierra Leone. A couple of ruled lines on compass bearings give the point of contact at about 35 degrees 15 minutes north, 45 degrees 12 minutes east, about fifty miles off the coast of Sierra Leone.”

  Fan spoke for the first time. “Do we know whether U-515 has intelligence on TS-37?”

  The officer looked up. “It seems so judging by the intercept course, though we don’t know how. TS-37 is one of the convoys we’ve chosen not to contact using the compromised Naval Cypher No. 3, but we suspect the existence of a Nazi spy operation in Durban who may be able to pass on information about convoy departures. Four of the ships in the convoy are carrying large consignments of manganese ore, currently in very short supply for steel and aluminum production and desperately needed to keep production of bomber aircraft up to counter the losses we’ve been enduring. The current directive from the Ministry of War Transport is that those cargos are to be considered of higher value even than munitions. Manganese is so valuable that you’ll see it disguised as pig iron in the cargo manifests of some of those ships in order not to attract the attention of spies whose information might feed back to U-boat headquarters. Corabella is carrying eight thousand and sixty tons of manganese ore; Bandar Shahpour three thousand tons. Clan Macpherson has over eight thousand tons of it, all described as pig iron. In the past, TS convoys have only rarely been hit, with Admiral Dönitz’s attention mainly having been in the North Atlantic, but with the U-boat losses there already high this year, and with more effective Allied air and sea cover, he may now look to the South Atlantic for easier pickings. My assessment is that we should do what we can to save this convoy.”

  “What do we know about U-515?” Fan said.

  The officer pushed up his glasses again and peered at his notes. “Kapitänleutnant Werner Henke. An exceptionally capable solo commander who sank nine ships during his first patrol last year. He has already sunk two ships in his present patrol, the British California Star off the Azores and the French Bamako off northern Senegal. If you were to choose a commander to seek out and hit a convoy on his own, he’d be your man.”

  “What are our assets in the area?”

  “TS-37 has a weak escort, only one corvette and three armed trawlers. That’s pretty standard for West Africa convoys at present, with the best ships and captains needed in the North Atlantic. There are two long-range Hudsons of RAF Coastal Command based at Freetown, and the convoy commodore could also call on the US escort carrier USS Guadalcanal with its Wildcats and Avengers. But Guadalcanal is currently in the mid-Atlantic, too far off to provide any kind of air cover, and barely within range for a reactive strike. By the time the aircraft arrived, the U-boat would be long gone. And none of those aircraft are specialized sub hunters.”

  Bermonsey glanced at the clock again, and then at Fan. She noticed how pale and tired he looked. “Turley? Your assessment?”

  “Sir.” Fan took the two convoy files from the officers opposite, one for ONS-5 in the North Atlantic and one for TS-37 off Sierra Leone, and marshalled her thoughts. She opened the files and put the diagrams showing the two convoy orders of sailing in front of her, rows and columns of ships, more than sixty of them in all. That meant perhaps eight thousand crew altogether, many of them with wives and children waking up this morning wondering where they were, with no idea of the machinations being played out that might see them through this day or condemn them to a terrible death. She quickly rehearsed in her mind what she intended to say, and then cleared her throat.

  “One possibility is inaction on both convoys,” she said. “We know that assault convoys are currently in preparation in the Clyde for imminent seaborne landings in the Mediterranean, at a destination that’s still top secret. Any Ultra intercepts related to U-boats potentially targeting those convoys will absolutely have to be acted upon, all of them. Given that, it would be disastrous if by acting on an Ultra intercept now we finally take that one step too far, pushing someone in B-Dienst to realize that we’ve cracked the Enigma code and to change it just before the assault convoys sail. The destruction of one of those convoys could set back the war incalculably.”

  One of the two code breakers in the room, an Oxford mathematician named Johnson, pushed his chair back and put his feet up on the table, taking a pipe out of his pocket. “Yes, that’s possible, but by deliberately not acting you also create a pattern, don’t you? If I were a clever analyst in B-Dienst I might notice a welcome but strange increase in the success rate of U-boat contacts with convoys, and I might then be persuaded to look back over the preceding months and begin to suspect that something was not quite right. Do you see what I mean? Inaction means not only do we do nothing to save those convoys, but we might also compromise Ultra completely. That might be their key to realizing that we’d broken the code. If I were that analyst, having decided that Enigma had been broken, I might wonder why the intercepts were no longer being acted on. I might then begin to suspect that we were protecting our intelligence coup because something big was in the offing, something like a seaborne invasion.”

  He glanced at the other code breaker, who nodded in agreement, then put his pipe in his mouth, folding his arms and giving Fan a stolid look. She turned from him and addressed Bermonsey. “I agree. That was going to be my next point. That’s why I recommend that we do take action, and redirect TS-37.”

  She sat back, feeling slightly sick as she always did having chosen one convoy over another, trying not to look at the sailing order for the doomed ONS-5. Bermonsey leaned over and pushed the TS-37 file toward the two code breakers in case either of them wanted to view it. “Does everyone agree? Good.” Fan picked up the ONS-5 file, and Bermonsey addressed the table. “Let me tell you where we are today. In March we lost a hundred and twenty merchant ships, for twelve U-boats sunk. In April so far it’s been sixty-four ships for fifteen U-boats. Are we turning the tide? The Admiralty thinks so. They think this coming month will be the crunch. But we have to keep our nerve, now more than ever. Any chink in our armor, anything that lets the Germans suspect that we’re on to them, and we’re all sunk. Right, everyone. Back to the next set of decrypts. Johnson, that second file, if you please.”

  Johnson tapped his pipe on the table, catching everyone’s attention. “Come on, Bermonsey. What’s it like?”

  Bermonsey stared at him. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re the only one here who’s actually done it. Stood behind a periscope. Had a ship in your sights. Given the order. Watched men you’ve condemned die in the sea.”

  Bermonsey gave him a cold look. “It’s called war. You kill the enemy.”

  Johnson waved his pipe at the file Fan was holding. “What about when it’s not the enemy? What about when a submarine captain has to
look through a periscope and murder his own side? How would that feel?”

  Bermonsey glared at him. “Keep your mouth shut, Johnson,” he snapped. “Now pass me that file.”

  Johnson leaned sideways, his feet still on the desk, sifted the papers, and picked up the file. “I’m not one of your sailors, Bermonsey. You can’t order me around.”

  There was a sudden tension in the room. Fan saw Bermonsey look at Captain Pullen, who had heard the exchange. “Johnson, a word,” Pullen said. Johnson sighed theatrically, tossed the file in front of Fan, pocketed his pipe, swung his legs off the desk, and walked out of the room behind the officer.

  They all knew what “a word” meant. Ever since Turing had broken Enigma, there had been the problem of what to do with his team of code breakers. Some had remained poised for the next decryption, ready in case the Germans altered the machines as they had done with the naval Enigma in early 1942, leaving Bletchley in the dark for almost a year. Others had been reassigned to work on the Colossus computer and Lorenz, the German High Command code. A few of the less socially awkward ones had been flown off to America to teach at the US code-breaker school. Others had been moved to the special operations hut and naval intelligence to help with the cat-and-mouse game they were now playing, using the decrypted intercepts to swing the Battle of the Atlantic in the Allies’ favor. Some, like Turing himself, had taken to it well; a few had decided that their talents were being wasted. They were all under pressure and occasionally the pot bubbled over. One thing was for certain: they would not see Johnson in this hut again.

  Bermonsey reached over, picked up the file and nodded at Fan. As she followed him to the office at the end of the room, her mind was racing. She thought about what Johnson had just said: when it’s not the enemy. What could he possibly have meant?