By the end of February 1942, the direct effects of the blackout on shipping were already setting off alarm bells within the Admiralty. The worry snowballed rapidly and became a full-blown crisis by the summer and fall. In January an “acceptable” 440,000 tons of merchant shipping had been lost in the opening of the new U-boat offensive off the American coast—a regrettable number, but not too serious as long as the rate of sinkings did not rise and continue unabated.25 In February, sinkings dramatically increased, claiming 615,000 tons and leaving the Admiralty worried about future possibilities. Its concerns were recorded in a policy draft prepared for Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord and, in 1917, the officer who had been appointed to lead the first Plans Division in the Admiralty after it was established: “So far our naval operations … have been successful in maintaining our essential imports and war supplies, and bringing safely to this country large Dominion military forces. But the losses have been severe, and during January and February … have again risen to dangerous figures.”26
If the first two months of the year could be classified as “dangerous” and “severe,” the peak months of March and April, respectively with 723,000 and 760,000 tons lost, brought near panic. So did the enormous monthly average of 685,000 tons lost in the remainder of the year.27 This figure was almost twice the crisis level from 1941, forcing Pound’s staff to warn by the fall:
We are now approaching a crisis in the war and we must face the facts. We have lost control of the sea communications over a very wide area, and wherever we have lost this control we have also lost all that depends upon it. Every day the enemy is extending his challenge to new areas and is increasing in strength … our merchant losses are immense; the tanker situation is grave, and the supplies reaching this country are less than we require.28
At least half the losses were British or Dominion vessels. Although help from the American merchant fleet was able to offset this hemorrhage to some degree, the losses placed an enormous strain on all aspects of an already overtaxed British war economy. Told to expect replacements for the lost vessels in 1943 through either the British or the American shipbuilding programmes now gearing up, the Admiralty’s trade division, headed by the son of the renowned Blinker Hall, viewed the overall “acceptable” loss rate for the entire year at 4.5 million tons of shipping.29 By July, losses had eclipsed that level, and by year’s end they were almost double.30
Even more alarming were the types of ships suffering at the hands of the U-boats. In the first two months of Operation Drumbeat, the Admiralty calculated that it could absorb a 20 percent loss rate for merchant vessels and a 13 percent loss rate for the tankers that brought oil—the very lifeblood of the modern war machine—across the seas to British ports.31 By March the rate of merchant ship sinkings held, but the tanker toll skyrocketed to a staggering 24 percent—meaning that one-quarter of the vital oil heading to Great Britain was lost and, even more important, so were these specialized vessels and their crews.32 In one short period in May, six U-boats alone took down more than thirty tankers in the Gulf of Mexico. That led to extraordinary temporary measures such as the suspension of oil shipments and the wide-scale rerouting of convoys.33 By the end of the year, tanker losses would amount to over 1.5 million tons, with only a little over 200,000 tons set to be replaced by the current shipbuilding programme—indicators that pointed to a near-crippling chokepoint for the Allied war machine if the situation was not dealt with quickly and effectively.
The United States Navy training manual attempted to put all these losses into perspective:
If a submarine sinks two 6,000 ton ships and one 3,000 ton tanker, here is a typical account of what we totally lost: 42 tanks, 8 six-inch Howitzers, 88 twenty-five pound guns, 40 two pound guns, 24 armored cars, 50 Bren Gun Carriers, 5,210 tons of ammunition, 600 rifles, 428 tons of tank supplies, 2,000 tons of stores and 1,000 tanks of gasoline … In order to knock out the same amount of equipment by bombing … the enemy would have to make three thousand successful bombing sorties.34
As if all these losses weren’t discouraging enough, the problem was exacerbated by the blind and evasive rerouting of convoys away from suspected rather than known U-boat positions and hunting grounds. Such defensive manoeuvres began to extend trips by thousands of miles. They also elongated the convoy cycle—the time at sea—meaning that without the Germans even firing a shot, the mere threat of running into a wolf pack without warning during this period contributed to a dangerous drop in Britain’s oil quotas, which averaged 30,000 tons a month. By June, only 75 percent of required petroleum products were reaching the United Kingdom because of actual and threatened U-boat attacks, compared with more than 85 percent the year before.35 The United States may have been able to out-produce the world’s oil supply twenty times over, but that potential was useless if the oil could not leave home shores or wound up floating in one of the many slicks that now dotted the oceans. It became clear, on a global scale, that without oil, entire war economies faltered—factories ceased production, trucks and ships did not move, tanks could not fight, and aircraft could not fly—and that meant severe restrictions on the power Great Britain could wield on the world stage. Power, position and prestige were at stake.
A showdown with the Kriegsmarine was building on the high seas. When the war began, the situation for the British was relatively simple in naval terms: the German navy was small in comparison with the Royal Navy and, though it possessed a handful of U-boats and a small surface fleet, it was bottled up in home waters that were vulnerable to blockade. Two and a half years later, close to three hundred U-boats streamed unharmed out of bases on the western coast of France, in Germany and in Norway to raid shipping at will in the Atlantic, the Arctic and, as of the new year, the Mediterranean as well. Most of the key German surface vessels, including their battleships and cruisers, now called the Norwegian fjords home, standing ready to pounce on the vital Arctic convoys to Russia at any moment. The Italian fleet, despite its mauling at Cape Matapan a year earlier, remained a potential regional threat in the Mediterranean, while the French fleet, under the control of the collaborationist Vichy regime, formed a wild card that needed constant monitoring. In the Pacific, the Japanese navy proved more than a match for the American fleet in the opening rounds of their fight. That left the United States no longer capable, at least in the short term, of honouring in full its pre-war naval commitments for the Atlantic theatre; for the time being, the British had to shoulder the major responsibility there as well.
The great worry permeating the Admiralty, given the mounting success of the U-boats against Allied shipping, along with the active German naval building programme, was that Germany was slowly winning the war at sea through attrition, reducing British naval and merchant capacity while their own side remained untouched or, at least, did not suffer proportional losses.36 As early as February, based on the estimates supplied by Godfrey’s NID, the Admiralty’s incisive Plans Division sounded the alarm bell:
All this points to the expectation[,] and intelligence tends to confirm this, that in the Atlantic the German navy will during the spring and summer of this year [1942] make an all-out effort to break down our sea power, and bring the war to an end. For us it is vital to win this battle by providing the adequate counter to the anticipated German naval and air measures.37
The proposed remedy was “early intelligence” coupled with “persistent attack on enemy submarines” and “adequate air cover.”38
And what of the future? It looked grim. The estimates Ian Fleming brought to Godfrey’s attention at their weekly meetings in Room 39 concluded that Dönitz’s fleet now had ninety of its nearly three hundred submarines working in the Atlantic, with that overall number, based on current projections of German construction, set to increase by 60 percent the following year.39 In June, Sir Dudley Pound reflected the growing alarm. He warned his political master, A.V. Alexander, the First Lord of the Admiralty: “If we do not do something to stop the sinkings we should, as an alt
ernative, immediately introduce most drastic steps in civilian consumption and the use of raw materials.”40 Attempts to placate Pound with assurances that the new shipbuilding programme would make good the losses did nothing to convince the wily old sailor, a lifelong and ever-loyal naval officer. There were just too many “ifs” in the equation—if the shipbuilding programmes lived up to expectations and if the sinkings did not increase. “We cannot be certain of either of these things,” Pound told Alexander. “For instance, we do not know what toll will be taken on our shipping when the German U-Boats number 500 as they will in July 1943.”41
The rate of U-boat construction far outpaced the Allies’ ability to destroy the submarines—a feat exponentially harder now that the British had lost their ability to hunt them down effectively. In fact, in early 1942 only 20 percent of the fleet had been sunk, leaving 160 of them in operation, with 115 training for battle in the Baltic. Every month, an additional twenty-two submarines were delivered fresh from German factories, far outpacing the measly five to seven U-boats sunk or lost to other causes each month.42
All indicators pointed to a mounting crisis. Pound sensed an oncoming confrontation with both the enemy on the high seas and the Air Ministry at home. In part to make up for the void left by the loss of Special Intelligence in the Atlantic, the Admiralty was demanding a portion of the heavy bombers that the RAF was presently using to bomb German cities—the only practical support, apart from the Arctic convoys, being tendered to the hard-pressed Soviets on the eastern front. The Admiralty wanted a chunk of this precious air commodity to maintain a constant vigil over stretches of the Atlantic and the Bay of Biscay, where the bombers would attack U-boats departing for or arriving from their bases in western France. In addition, it argued that Bomber Command should target assembly plants—or U-boat “hatching” areas, as Churchill called them—or even take a shot at U-boats inside their impregnable pens. On this last point, the Admiralty now had strong support from the United States president Franklin Roosevelt.43
There is no doubt that Churchill was fully alive to the situation. In the annex close to his flat, he kept his own map room—as he had during his time as First Lord. The room was run by a tall Irishman, Captain Richard Pim—a civilian, like Ian Fleming, commissioned into the RNVR—who marked the maps with pins showing the positions of British (now Allied) forces and, where known, of enemy forces. There he also recorded naval engagements, air attacks, ships, convoys, shipping losses and, now infrequently, U-boat locations. The pins’ positions were constantly updated, so the prime minister was never out of touch. As Elizabeth Nel, Churchill’s personal secretary, recalled:
Each morning while we were in London a Map Room officer would present himself soon after Mr. Churchill waked, to give the latest news; and at all hours of the day or night somebody was on duty to report anything new or to investigate any inquiry we might wish to make. From the time of Casablanca onwards Mr. Churchill never travelled without a detachment from his Map Room, which always included Captain Pim, complete with maps, dividers and other trappings, so that wherever the Prime Minister was, even aboard ship, a Map Room could immediately be set up.44
Knowing Churchill’s keen interest in the navy and that his steady diet of U-boat Special Intelligence had ceased, Dudley Pound suggested a course of action that shrewdly took account of the strategic situation, of the Admirality’s needs and of the prime minister’s very demanding idiosyncrasies. With Churchill doubling as minister of defence, his influence within the War Cabinet was decisive when it came to the allocation of resources. Pound therefore made sure, in his bid to gain the aircraft he needed to solve the pressing crisis at sea, to include a prioritized list of the glaring issues that he felt coincided with Churchill’s personal interests—intelligence, the Tirpitz (the Bismarck’s sister ship) and the defeat of the U-boats topped the list. 45 This list was the opening shot in what Pound later dubbed the Battle of the Air—the fight over allocation of air resources for the Admiralty and the Air Ministry and, ultimately, over the direction of British grand strategy. 46
But Pound’s tactic with Churchill backfired: he had miscalculated the prime minister’s approach to the issue. Although Churchill in no way dismissed the urgent and pressing needs faced by the Royal Navy and the British merchant fleet, he viewed the war at sea and the Battle of the Atlantic as purely defensive in nature. Strategic bombing, in contrast, gave him an immediate force de frappe—the only offensive weapon capable of bringing the war directly to the German people while hammering away at their morale and their crucial industrial infrastructure. With mounting air raids, sometimes in excess of a thousand bombers over a given city on one night, strategic bombing was for Churchill “better than doing nothing and a formidable method of injuring the enemy.”47 Also important, it provided substantial propaganda value and aid in lieu of a second front for Stalin’s Soviet Union. Unfortunately for John Godfrey and Dudley Pound, the bombing denied what the Royal Navy desperately needed to offset the results of the intelligence blackout.
So far as the Admiralty was concerned, this refusal of its request appeared to show that Churchill, in his quest to bring maximum pressure to bear on Germany, was willing to trade heavy shipping losses at sea for his own priority—strategic bombing. Indeed, in July 1942 Churchill wrote a memo that included these telling words: “It might be true to say that the issue of the war depends on whether Hitler’s U-boat attack on Allied tonnage, or the increase and application of Allied Air power, reach their full fruition first.”48
Although Pound brokered a limited agreement for the transfer of four squadrons of long-range aircraft in mid-April, they were still not enough to fill the void left by the loss of Special Intelligence. By June the frustration within the Admiralty had reached crisis point. Admiral John Tovey, the commander-in-chief of Home Fleet and the officer who not only had led the final charge against the Bismarck but was responsible for protecting the Arctic convoys to Russia, told Pound:
It was difficult to believe that the population of Cologne [Germany] would notice much difference between a raid of 1,000 bombers and one by 750.
I informed Their Lordships that in my opinion the situation at sea was now so grave that the time had come for a stand to be made, even if this led to Their Lordships taking the extreme step of resignation. I was supported in my contentions by Admiral of the Fleet Sir Charles Forbes and Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham.49
To these men, it clearly appeared that Churchill had abandoned the Royal Navy at its darkest moment. However, the likely scenario is that, wisely or unwisely, he maintained faith in the eventual resumption of the flow of Special Intelligence. Certainly John Godfrey did, and why not? After all, the bold and increasingly systematic approach to pinch raids the previous year had paid handsomely when the problem with the three-rotor Enigma was equally dark and daunting. With Mountbatten’s Combined Operations in place—an exciting and virile delivery vehicle—optimism made sense. Already it was basking in the results of its Norwegian escapades and a set of spectacular raids on the French coast in February and March 1942 (exploits we will explore in more detail in chapter 7).
Mountbatten’s nascent brand of Combined Operations offered a relatively cost-effective approach to accomplish several essential goals simultaneously: in the wake of recent defeats in Asia and North Africa, to demonstrate Britain’s continued will to fight and raise morale; to assist the hard-pressed Soviet Union; to develop the amphibious capabilities for an eventual second front; and to work in covert fashion to maintain, or in this case re-establish, the cryptographic success and break the blackout with a major pinch.
Britain had yet another reason to fear the four-rotor Enigma and Shark, the key used by Dönitz’s U-boats in the Atlantic. Ultra, or Special Intelligence, was not only a remarkable British breakthrough but, arguably, one of the last natural resources that Great Britain possessed. The technology and processes developed in Bletchley Park’s code-breaking huts to exploit both the Enigma machine and, a year later, to bui
ld Colossus, the world’s first programmable computer, in order to break Tunny, were undeclared national treasures that remained wrapped in a cloak of secrecy for decades following the war. The fruits of the collective intellectual labour at Bletchley Park were expected, first, to help defeat the Allies’ enemies on the field of battle and, later, to give Great Britain a rare commodity for the future.
With the sun setting on the Empire, monopolization of cryptographic technology gave the British the ability to stand toe to toe with the rising Americans, who would soon eclipse them as a superpower on the world stage. Right from the beginning of the war, the British jealously guarded their cryptographic abilities. They went to great lengths to control and protect this source, not only from their enemies but in certain respects from their allies as well—unless circumstances dictated otherwise.
In the summer of 1940, while Ian Fleming was devising Operation Ruthless, Churchill, spurred on by his country’s dire predicament and the need to protect vital interests in the Atlantic, had approached President Roosevelt with an offer to establish a limited signals intelligence partnership built around the basic premise of “spheres of influence.” By this time the Americans were already engaged in their own cryptographic pursuits, largely centred on message traffic from Asia and the Pacific. Churchill’s proposal called for a division of labour in which the Americans maintained their Far Eastern focus while Great Britain dominated the production of signals intelligence in Europe.50 Part of this approach stemmed from the sober realization that the aggressive rise of Japan in Asia and Nazi Germany in Europe would likely draw the United States into the war sooner rather than later. However, as Churchill knew full well, the entry of the Americans was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, this new ally brought unprecedented economic and industrial might that would likely guarantee ultimate victory. On the other hand, if left unchecked, this power threatened to bleed proportionately into the realm of cryptography, leaving Britain as a bystander rather than the lead actor in both a new world order and the dawning of the information age.
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