Godfrey refused to be discouraged. Both he and Birch knew they faced a sticky dilemma. Currently, penetration of German message traffic enciphered on the three-rotor naval Enigma was both fruitful and free-flowing, and the last thing either of them wanted was to tip off the Germans to their success by continuing to pinch material from individual vessels at sea. They quite rightly feared that further pinches would eventually alert the Germans and accelerate the introduction of the four-rotor machine.
Part of this decision sprang from the discovery five months earlier of the four-rotor lid from U-570, mentioned at the end of chapter 4.
Cross-checking the serial number with existing three-rotor machines, Naval Section had calculated that too few four-rotor machines existed to outfit the entire Kriegsmarine immediately and thus they still had some breathing room before a wide-scale replacement would be introduced.42 They rationalized that as long as the Germans continued to cling to their delusion that the three-rotor was impenetrable, the Kriegsmarine had no immediate reason to incur the huge cost and effort of introducing the new machines en masse. With all that in mind, Godfrey decided to suspend pinch raids for the time being but to set out clear provisions for renewing them when Donitz changed the bigram tables as he did periodically. Birch added, “If the U-Boats were put on basically different keys to surface craft or began to use a fourth wheel, a pinch would be the only hope.”43
In his new policy, Godfrey tried to balance current and potential needs with security. The recent operations in Norway had demonstrated the potential for cloaking the pinch within the framework of a larger raid on a port or other shore-based facility.44 Given that surprise and speed were paramount in any effort to obtain the desired material before the Germans could destroy it, it seemed more promising to attack ships in a confined area in order to overwhelm them quickly and prevent a chase or even their escape. Inland waterways or ports offered enticing possibilities, particularly with the ships berthed in tight groups along the docks and quays, either lightly guarded by skeleton crews or even unguarded in some cases, rendering them relatively easy targets for pillage.
In addition, ports offered other tantalizing features—signals facilities, such as wireless stations, and storage depots—which, along with the local naval headquarters, made up a target-rich environment for pinches.45 At Vaagso the Germans had proved adept at moving their signals stations on short notice, but a naval headquarters, fixed in a particular location, would remain in operation almost to the bitter end of the fight, giving the raiders a better chance of capturing vital material.46 There, stockpiles of signals-related material for the current period and, even more important, for months into the future would be found tucked into files and desks or in the safe, most likely in the commandant’s office or quarters. It was the job of the German harbour headquarters to maintain wireless contact with all types of vessels at sea, as well as with other headquarters in the wireless chain. Regardless of size or location, these headquarters would have to possess various forms of the Enigma machine, along with the associated code books, tables and setting sheets, not to mention copies of RHV, short-signal code books, weather codes and dockyard ciphers—all of critical importance to Bletchley Park.47 As an added bonus, other materials—such as plans, charts, technical documents, lists of commanders and the order of battle, and the key for nomenclature of German naval operations and procedures—were generally held in the naval headquarters. It was one thing to read the enemy’s mail, but quite another to understand the technical terminology that resisted normal linguistic translation.48
From the perspective of security, pinch raids on headquarters under the cloak of larger operations were also ideal for several salient reasons. First, because most of the desired target locations were housed close to the shoreline, they could be overrun quickly and effectively during amphibious operations. Second, the ransacked facility could then be destroyed, leaving the Germans unaware of what, if any, material had been pilfered.49 And third, as earlier operations had established, a veil of secrecy could easily be drawn by cloaking the pinch mission under the cover of a larger raid offering up other legitimate, but nonetheless secondary, objectives, thereby deflecting any suspicion from the prime target. In short, from the pinch perspective, taking these raids to shore offered the British a form of “one-stop shopping.”
With the new shore-based policy accepted, Frank Birch created a card index of probable targets, with a description of all the German communications and headquarters establishments likely to contain the desired material. The index was based on information from all possible sources—Ultra, captured documents, photographic reconnaissance, agent reports and prisoner-of-war interrogations.50 Eventually, he built up a network of all enemy communications facilities, the type of traffic they handled and the codes that might be pinched from them.51 This information was posted on a large wall chart in the Naval Section at Bletchley, with pins of various colours and shapes indicating the different codes and ciphers held at each location. One glance at the chart indicated what a raiding force could expect to capture at any given shore establishment.52
But the discussions between Godfrey and Birch over this issue also marked the beginning of a dramatic change in their relationship. In the weeks and months following the January 1942 meeting, Frank Birch’s Naval Section would play an ever-decreasing role in the planning and execution of pinch raids. As before, it could offer up potential targets, relay needs and even suggest methods to obtain the material, but it no longer had any representative attached to the Section who actively participated in the raids. Instead, by the spring of 1942, Godfrey preferred to keep this role “in-house,” joining forces with the delivery vehicle provided by Mountbatten’s Combined Operations Headquarters—a budding collaboration cemented during the wildly successful raids at Vaagso, and later at Bruneval and St-Nazaire. “You will be interested to know,” Godfrey told Mountbatten, “that you are the first person, occupying any position of importance, who has given the NID such unstinted and unsolicited praise.”53 Ever quick to seize a chance to charm, Mountbatten replied, “I am amazed at your statement … because I thought it was commonly accepted that NID was far and away the best Intelligence department and running better now than at any time since the famous Blinker Hall’s days.”54
The intense courtship between the two organizations grew, leaving the Naval Section to play the role of jilted lover. Birch complained loudly about their exclusion from the pinch-raid process, claiming that, if they had possessed advance knowledge of a raid or its specific objectives, he and his staff could have enhanced the overall success.55 But no argument from Bletchley Park penetrated the thick walls of Godfrey’s and Fleming’s Room 39 in the Old Admiralty Building. Birch was fobbed off with practical reasons for his exclusion: first, to meet security concerns, the number of those in the know about upcoming raids had to be limited; second, because most raids never moved past the planning stage, it would be a waste of time and effort to generate unnecessary interest; third, there was little that Frank Birch and his Naval Section could bring to the table that Godfrey’s NID did not already know about naval cryptography.56 The cryptographic knowledge that Ian Fleming and others possessed, the expertise with pinch raids gained by Allon Bacon and by Jasper Haines as the liaison officer between the NID and Bletchley Park, and the close association that the NID was developing with Combined Operations had all made Godfrey more comfortable in proceeding without the need for consultations with Birch and Bletchley.
It is not surprising, then, that the first serious indication of a projected raid on the port of Dieppe appeared just twenty-four hours after the Godfrey-inspired change in pinch policy.57
On January 21, 1942, Combined Operations’ target search committee, led by Captain John “Jock” Hughes-Hallett (who would eventually become the naval force commander for the Dieppe Raid), began to make plans to fulfill Churchill’s wish for a raiding programme along the German-held coast of France. Mountbatten’s selection of Hughes-Hallett to pilot t
his committee, to recommend potential targets, and to oversee the creation of outline plans for upcoming operations was indicative of a new direction for his Combined Operations organization. A career Royal Navy officer who had gained brief combat experience at the end of the First World War, Hughes-Hallett had been educated at Dartmouth Naval College and at Cambridge before serving as a torpedo officer in 1918. In the interwar period, he became a torpedo specialist on the aircraft carrier HMS Courageous and gained praise for his ingenuity with torpedoes, mines and shipboard electronics before rising to executive office. During the Norwegian campaign in 1940, he was mentioned in dispatches for his role in whisking the Norwegian royal family to safety in the midst of the full-blown Nazi invasion of the country.
Following his short stint at sea, which never included a command appointment, Jock Hughes-Hallett had spent the next year and a half as the navy’s lead planner for various schemes to defend British ports and beaches against German invasion. He had developed an intimate knowledge of and expertise in this field. His course and career progression reports were outstanding, marking him as “an officer with a brilliant and original mind.” He had “intellectual capacity of a very high order and is full of ideas. He has great energy and drive and pushes through schemes to their conclusions, undeterred and unperturbed by practical difficulties. A strong personality with great confidence in himself, he expresses himself clearly and decisively both in speech and in writing.”58
Although he had talent and demonstrated a “clear brain,” Hughes-Hallett was not “the money of some naval officers.”59 An overtly “ambitious type,” he offended many who found him “insufferable.”60 “He is considered, and I think with reason, as too loud-voiced, overbearing, and too cocksure of himself without adequate reason,” recalled Rear Admiral H.T. Baillie-Grohman, the man who preceded him as naval commander for the Dieppe Raid.61 Mountbatten concurred with this assessment but cited professional jealousy as the reason. “It is just because he is right 99% of the time that he does annoy so many people,” he replied, praising Hughes-Hallett as “one of the most brilliant and outstanding officers in the service” who had “more than fulfilled expectations.” Later in his personnel file he noted that Hughes-Hallett “is perhaps a little fond of laying down the law (his friends call him Hughes-Hitler).”62
Captain John “Jock” Hughes-Hallett, who was the architect, lead planner and naval force commander for the Dieppe Raid. With his intimate knowledge of port defences, his specific responsibility was to search for raiding targets and to draw up the plans for all of Mountbatten’s Combined Operations. (photo credits 5.3)
In December 1941, after Jock Hughes-Hallett had caught Winston Churchill’s eye for his work preparing to repel the expected German invasion of England, Mountbatten recruited him to Combined Operations to act as his naval adviser. Given Churchill’s increasing desire to take the fight to the enemy, coupled with the new policy of launching pinch raids at enemy ports and naval facilities, who better to call upon than the man responsible for defending British ports from attacks by the Germans? Hughes-Hallett’s intimate knowledge of port defences and the tactics used to breach or subvert them was likely to be priceless. Having joined Mountbatten’s headquarters just before the last round of Norwegian pinches, where his subordinate Dick de Costobadie would play a key role, Hughes-Hallett set about creating a raiding programme for the following six months.63 “Our urgent task,” he recalled on his arrival at Combined Operations Headquarters on Richmond Terrace in Whitehall, “was to select targets for raids on France and Norway,” something “everyone agreed … must fall to the Navy … [because] it was no use suggesting places which could not be reached by appropriate landing craft or other vessels.”64
Despite the “combined” nature of Mountbatten’s headquarters, the Royal Navy’s interests were often front and centre. The air adviser was little more than a liaison officer who sought co-operation from the RAF squadrons in covering and supporting a raid, while the military adviser provided the land-force elements, such as the army commandos, and helped to create the detailed military portion of the combined plan. This division of responsibilities left the genesis of any raid—the creation of the vital outline plan, including the original objectives and intent—firmly in the hands of the naval adviser. He in turn kept both the Admiralty and the Joint Planning Committee informed of what was going on at Combined Operations Headquarter.65
The sudden appearance of Dieppe as a proposed target could not be coincidence, particularly given the men who assisted Jock Hughes-Hallett in making the decision and the timing, just one day after the change in pinch policy. Along with Lieutenant Commander Dick de Costobadie came Commander David Luce, fresh from a year as the head of the Admiralty’s Plans Division and now recruited by Mountbatten to be Hughes-Hallett’s main adviser on raid planning.66 Hughes-Hallett would recall in his memoirs, “David Luce, Costabadie [sic] and I sat down to make tentative proposals for one raid every month up to and including August,” but “were not so much concerned at this stage with the intrinsic value of objectives on a particular raid, but rather with the feasibility of reaching the place undetected.” 67
With his hands often tied by logistical concerns—such as a limited amount of specialized landing craft at his disposal—Hughes-Hallett planned to start small, with an attack on the coastal radar station at Bruneval in late February, followed by another on a Luftwaffe hospital in the Ostend area in early March.68 As the logistical capabilities increased, he envisioned proportionately larger and bolder raids, including a daring and almost suicidal attack on the large dry dock situated at the German U-boat base at St-Nazaire for March, followed days later by another Vaagso-style attack on the port of Bayonne in southwestern France.69 For May he suggested the seizure of Alderney, to cut the supply route for U-boats, and in June and July back-to-back raids on the same target—the port of Dieppe. He offered no particular purpose for these two raids in his carefully measured memoirs, written long before the official release of any information about Ultra.70
In the background, larger schemes such as the opening of a limited second front on the Cherbourg peninsula (Operation Sledgehammer), the invasion of Madagascar (Operation Ironclad) or the potential seizure of the Canary Islands (Operation Puma) were all in the works. But they were quite different operations, with strategic implications involving other elements outside the direct command of Mountbatten’s COHQ.
The interesting point about each one of Hughes-Hallett’s proposed operations is that it met two objectives: it had an overt strategic purpose, as the earlier raids in Norway had demonstrated, but it also contained provisions for a “pinch”—either by opportunity or by design. Because these requirements were not mutually exclusive, this symbiotic relationship offered the perfect natural cover: on the one hand, the operation could legitimately satisfy strategic demands, while on the other, it could capture vital material to inject into the intelligence infrastructure in a way that no other arm of service could deliver at that time. On paper, these proposals seemed the perfect plan to serve as the blueprint for a unique “brand” of warfare that both Godfrey and Mountbatten were anxious to parlay into political currency. Churchill was Ultra’s greatest devotee, and the ambitious Mountbatten in particular wanted to position his organization to deliver the precious goods and justify its existence to both the all-powerful prime minister and the skeptical chiefs of staff.71
On January 23, just days after Godfrey announced the change in pinch policy, Mountbatten gave permission for Hughes-Hallett to draw up a rough plan for what they coined Operation Rutter—the first incarnation of the raid on Dieppe.72
SIX
FADE TO BLACK
The first of all our dangers is the U-Boat peril. That is a very great danger. Our food, our means of making war, our life, all depend upon the passage of ships across the sea. The whole power of the United States to manifest itself in this war depends upon the power to move ships across the sea … what a terrible waste it is to think of all t
hese great ships that are sunk.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL, OCTOBER 31, 1942
0330 hours, February 1, 1942, 250 miles off the New Jersey shoreline
From the bridge of the surfaced U-109, Captain-Lieutenant Heinrich Bleichrodt peered through the targeting binoculars at the silhouette of an 8,000-ton British merchant steamer cutting across his bow less than two thousand yards in the distance. The thirty-two-year-old Bleichrodt, nicknamed “Ajax” after the Greek hero from the Trojan War, was one of Germany’s leading U-boat aces, sinking twenty-five ships and 150,000 tons of shipping in just eight war patrols—a feat that warranted the highest award for valour in Nazi Germany, the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves. Following a curt series of commands, three torpedoes in quick succession lurched out from the submarine’s bow tubes and streamed towards the unsuspecting Tacoma Star, which was zigzagging unescorted through the darkness.
On the same day that Combined Operations had raided Lofoten and Vaagso, U-109 slipped out of her berth in the giant concrete U-boat pen at Lorient, France, for the month-long journey to reach the Eastern Seaboard of North America and participate in Admiral Karl Dönitz’s new submarine offensive, Operation Paukenschlag (Operation Drumbeat). Suspecting that North American waters might provide a healthy killing ground, Dönitz had shifted his U-boats from the mid-Atlantic and unleashed them on merchant vessels carrying troops, passengers, and essential food and war supplies. The submarines had a wide swath of ocean to cover, as the ships travelled from the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico to critical points along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and Canada, penetrating at times the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
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