The changing nature of GCCS’s product mix affected relations between GCCS and its client ministries. These varied. Through its own Room 40 operation, the Admiralty had a long-term interest since 1914, and continued to control its own assessment and distribution. The army had its excellent decryption department, MI 1B in the First World War, and the arrival of Brig John Tiltman to liaise with the army at GCCS strengthened links with the War Office, because he was not only a first-class cryptographer but an effective diplomat who became a founding father of Anglo-American signals co-operation.17 The RAF with its shorter history had, in consequence, a less possessive attitude to the handling of signals intelligence derived from sources other than its own. It provided GCCS with technical facilities. Outside the peacetime service ministries, the chief client was the FO, but a separate ‘commercial’ section of GCCS emerged in 1937 and later became crucial to the Ministry of Economic Warfare. This section monitored German imports of vital minerals especially from Spain and Portugal. Maj Desmond Morton, Churchill’s confidant, was on the circulating list of BJs in the period covered by DIR/C18 and therefore, as head of the department which evolved into the Ministry of Economic Warfare, would have seen prewar BJs from the Commercial Section of GCCS.
It was, of course, diplomatic traffic which predominated throughout the interwar period, and the importance of Turkey to the FO in the 1930s suggests that Turkish traffic, in any case easily available, would have formed a significant fraction of the intercepts, continuing through 1939 and the ‘guarantee’ period till 1941 when DIR/C, now available, shows Turkey still in a leading position as suppliers of BJs.19
The BJs (in French) were sent to and read by the Turkish president and foreign minister, and formed the basis of their subtly changing attitudes to both Axis and Allies. Perhaps it was because both Britain and Germany were reading their messages that Turkey was never pressurised by either belligerent. Both knew the high cost of equipping a major new ally’s large army. German as well as British commanders knew that a Turkish alliance might be more a liability than an asset – as one Field Marshal Lord Wavell summed up Turkish involvement – and courtship rituals seemed preferable to rape. Churchill used his daily access to DIR/C to advise, threaten and cajole his colleagues in the War Cabinet and the Chiefs of Staff to accept his view of how the Allies could beat the Axis. His conviction that a second front in the west would be unsustainable until the Russians had seriously reduced the fighting strength of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front led him to promote several alternative second fronts, of which an Aegean initiative in conjunction with Turkey – entering the war on the Allied side – would be the most likely to head off the insistence of Stalin and Roosevelt on an early launch of a second front in the west. Few people, then or now, agreed with his Turkey policy and by 1944 it was off the agenda.
Why was Turkey so important to him? Several clues have already been noted. He was believed by the Germans to be obsessed with his personal responsibility for the British failure at the Dardanelles in 1915. In 1941 he saw a pro-Allied Turkey as guardian of the imperial route to India, the Far East and Persian oil. He dreamed of a million hardy Turkish soldiers joining the exiguous divisions of Britain and the inexperienced Americans. He was starved of allies after France fell in 1940, and in his determination to keep the fighting away from the shores of Britain, he lighted on Turkey, and worked unceasingly, against opposition and indifference from his new allies after 1941, and against his own government colleagues, to bring her in.
While this can be substantiated from the existing Churchillian historiography, there is another aspect of his playing the Turkey hand. Churchill’s insistence on seeing intercepts ‘raw’ on a daily basis gave him a unique insight into Hitler’s war planning in the Caucasus and on the Eastern Front, as well as in North Africa. The Turkish diplomatic intercepts significantly augmented his picture of how the war was seen by others. He made no secret of his personal commitment to Turkey, and this can be seen in the manner in which he later wrote his history of the war. ‘This is not history,’ Churchill told one of his assistants working on his multi-volume history of the Second World War, ‘it is my case.’20 He selected and reproduced, often in extenso, his own directives for the conduct of the war and the policy that he believed HM government should adopt towards Turkey. His use of his own documents, especially those relating to Turkey, makes his history arid reading but his selection of documents becomes of new interest when correlated with DIR/C and his attitude towards Turkey. This can now be seen not with his own hindsight when he was writing after the war but as the war developed. This is particularly true of the autumn of 1943, when he personally drove the British Dodecanese assault using intercepts and rhetoric for lack of a proper plan of campaign, and the senior officers able to carry it out successfully.21 It is difficult to learn much about the 1940–41 period before DIR/C came on stream in the autumn, by which time the war had been nearly lost. But from September 1941 until mid-1945 DIR/C provided Churchill with diplomatic decrypts which formed the basis of the British government’s foreign policy towards neutrals – that is to say its attitude to those who were neither former friends (France, the Low Countries, Yugoslavia, Greece) nor enemies (Germany, Japan and Italy). Turkey provided the most.
If this is but a provisional answer to the question ‘why Turkey?’ a clearer picture may be gained by identifying the common ground offered by DIR/C, Churchill, the FO and Turkey’s understandable wish to stay non-belligerent. Churchill himself bulked large in this scenario. Most of the other characters are half a dozen Turkish ambassadors, and an equal number of ambassadors of other countries posted to Ankara. Why did they report what they did – was it because they wanted to impress, to alert, to alarm, to press their own cause, to win favour at home, to advance their careers by saying what they thought their masters wished to hear? Or were they routine communications by a run-of-the-mill diplomat? Only a full reading of items over a sustained period could give Churchill then or historians now the flavour, the nuances, the context to make meaningful judgments on which politicians could make decisions. In fact cumulatively they read less like formal diplomatic exchanges and more like a novel – by Benjamin Disraeli, perhaps, or even Leo Tolstoy – or sometimes Jeffrey Archer. The question is answered by incorporating the new source, DIR/C, into the history of the war and by analysing the prime minister’s position on and use of this daily file, and testing the hypothesis that the new source provided crucial information to him and many departments in Whitehall. The emergence of Turkish foreign policy as a major factor in British strategic planning from 1941–45 confirms the view that Turkish neutrality deserves further study. Since the Turkish leadership based policy decisions largely on the reports received from their diplomats in foreign capitals, and since intercepts of many of these appear in DIR/C, it is theoretically possible to construct a hidden dialogue between Churchill and the three Turks who together conducted Turkish foreign policy – I·nönü, Saraçoğlu and Menemencioğlu.
In order even to guess at how GCCS’s main client, the FO, used its most secret source in relation to Turkey, Chapter 2 traces the development of the techniques of British interception, decryption, translation, assessment and distribution of the secret diplomatic communications of foreign governments in the prewar period. Since Turkish material is prominent in both, the case for a special study of Turkey emerges naturally. Other FO files reveal that intercepts illuminated many patterns of decision making in Ankara, the nature of Turkish strategy and its diplomatic relations with other countries, especially the USSR and Britain.22
While Turkish wartime foreign policy was in the hands of no more than three men, British policy by 1940 was conducted by Churchill, despite Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Anthony Eden and the staff of the Southern Department of the FO. What diplomats in both capitals were relying on as well as reports by Turkish ambassadors, chargés and attachés from most of the capitals of Europe and some of America and Asia, were directives and circulars from the T
urkish foreign ministry on foreign policy and neutrality, and reports sent from Ankara by representatives of European countries covering the war situation in the eastern Mediterranean and on the Eastern and North African fronts in general, and official high level Turkish reactions thereto. Far from being restricted to the news and views of non-Turkish neutrals, the wartime BJs revealed (for instance) the Iberian terror of the impending ‘Bolshevisation of Europe’, the effect of Mussolini’s resignation on the Axis conduct of the war and the neutral overreaction to it, on the conflicting agenda of the Big Three after Casablanca at Moscow, Tehran, Cairo and Yalta, on the reasons for the defection of Hungary and Bulgaria from the Axis, and on the reasons why Russia did not declare war on Japan till 1945, on the reasons for the defection of Hungary and Bulgaria from the Axis, and on many other diplomatic concerns.
DIR/C differs from other intelligence sources, and the BJs required a different form of appreciation from all other sources of information, as Churchill knew.
Churchill and Turkey
In trying to answer the question, ‘What light does DIR/C throw on the FO, Churchill, Turkey and the relation between all three from 1941–45?’, it is not clear whether the new material adds to or alters what is already on the record. Churchill understood the changing diplomatic situation at the time because he was reading it almost every day. I·nönü knew because he was reading some of the same material. Hitler, Goebbels, Kaltenbrunner and Ribbentrop knew about it too. By concentrating on the British archive and correlating DIR with the files relevant to Turkey during the war, it has proved possible to make new connections between the Southern Department of the FO, the policies which officials advocated towards Turkey, and the key part played by Churchill in using the Turkish gambit to hasten Allied victory.
Why the Turkish gambit should have loomed so large in British war strategy in 1942 is a question answered in Chapter 3. The Joint Planning Staff, after consultation with Churchill, expressed the hope as early as December 1941:
that the offensive against Germany will take the form of large-scale land operations on the Russian front, large-scale bombing operations supplemented by amphibious raids of increasing weight from the United Kingdom and a gradual tightening of the ring round Axis-controlled Europe by the occupation of strategic points in the Atlantic Islands, North and West Africa, Tripoli and Turkey. Every opportunity will be taken to try and knock out Italy as an active partner in the war. These operations will be followed in the final phase by simultaneous land operations against Germany herself, from the West by the British, from the South by the United States and from the East by the Russians.23
A minor amendment was made later but essentially this remained Britain’s grand strategy. It was not until 8 October 1942 that Churchill told Eden: ‘I am after the Turk’. However, grand strategy, British historians now agree, is something of a misnomer for what was actually going on in the minds of the Chiefs of Staff and the prime minister. For Churchill, instinct or rhetoric would be a more accurate word. What is noteworthy is the important role that Turkey was playing in Allied war planning at this early stage, and without any evidence that she would be a willing partner. That it was Churchill who introduced the Turkey factor can be asserted with confidence, since Turkey was neutral and thus belonged, in Whitehall terms, to the FO and subject to the wiles of British foreign policy, rather than belonging – as an ally – with the war planners. While Churchill was only an important voice in the latter debate, he did not have to argue his case in foreign policy matters.24
By 24 July 1942, Churchill predicted that ‘our second front will in fact comprise both the Atlantic and the Mediterranean coasts of Europe, and we can push either right-handed, left-handed or both-handed as our resources and circumstances permit’.25 Churchill’s approach to war planning was characteristically, and realistically, opportunistic. How could it be otherwise in 1940 when Britain was at the mercy of the German Blitzkrieg in southern and eastern as well as western Europe, Germany was well on the way to becoming master of Europe, defeated but for a moment in the Battle of Britain, and so full of enterprising and aggressive new schemes that hastily reactive and provisional half-measures were all that were practically available to the Chiefs of Staff.
In July 1940 Churchill told the Russian ambassador, Ivan Maisky, that his strategy was to get through the next three months. He wanted Turkey in the war because only thus could German troops in large numbers be diverted from the Russian front, to assuage the Russian need for a second front immediately, while the RAF could bomb the oilfields and refineries of Romania, Austria and Hungary which he and others believed to be vital to Germany’s war effort. Turkey had a large army, a million men. Churchill’s instinct at that time drove him to make common cause with the Turks, suspecting that it would always be difficult to beat the Germans in close combat. The Turkish soldiery – cheap, plentiful and expendable – were already under canvas and might account for 500,000 invading German troops as well as providing a fierce and reassuring comradeship in arms.
German aggression in Poland in September 1939 soon gave Russia the large portions of eastern Europe she acquired by signing the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The Baltic states, valuable mining areas of eastern Poland and Bessarabia, Moldova and Buckhovina fell to Stalin. The Soviet Union in one bound had closed on Turkey’s borders. Russia joined Italy in joint first place on the list of Turkey’s bogeymen. Meanwhile British catastrophes in Norway in the spring of 1940, the overrunning by Germany of the Low Countries, and particularly the fall of France, resounded menacingly in Ankara. Hitler had triumphed, almost without opposition, over what was believed to be the world’s greatest army – the French – in a matter of weeks and his Greater Germany policy brought the victorious Wehrmacht to the borders of Turkey, while his need for oil, wheat and minerals was now satisfied by the adherence of Romania to the Axis and the opening of new oil wells in Austria. Thousands of tons of war equipment were left behind by the Allies at Dunkirk. In June Italy declared war on the Allies and France sued for an armistice with the Axis. What Germany had achieved by Blitzkrieg in the west she could as easily achieve in the Near East, and if that meant invading Anatolia en route to the oilfields of Persia, the Suez Canal and the borders of India, even that might seem possible after the rout of France.
France’s fall created strong anti-French feeling in Ankara. One signatory of the Turco-Franco-British Pact having already defaulted, Turkey signed a commercial agreement with Germany in July 1940. Japan joined the other Axis partners to sign the Tripartite Pact on 27 September. Japan was a long way from Turkey but fear of the ‘yellow peril’ was only dormant in diplomatic circles, as the BJs constantly attest. On 7 October Germany entered Romania and on 28 October Italy attacked Greece. German aircraft and Italian troops were stationed close to the Thracian border by the end of the year. Though Turkey stayed friendly with Britain, Ankara little doubted that Germany would shortly be master of Europe.
For Britain the worst was not over. Germany occupied Bulgaria in March 1941 and Yugoslavia in April. German armies invaded Greece and defeated Greek and Commonwealth troops there. The brief Allied occupation of Crete was brought to a bloody end when the remaining troops were evacuated. While British successes against the Luftwaffe (German air force) in the Battle of Britain and against the Italians by land and sea, as well as her still powerful influence in Persia and Egypt, bolstered her prestige among unaligned nations, German military supremacy was by now the dominating concern of Turkish diplomats. Where would Germany turn next? She had proved unbeatable everywhere, though containable momentarily when Hitler called off the invasion of Britain. The RAF’s success against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain seemed only a temporary setback to Germany’s unstoppable ambition for world domination. Turkey had to align herself with the future victor.
On 22 June 1941, however, Germany invaded Russia, and Turkish diplomats speculated to each other whether Hitler had finally overreached himself. Turkey was relieved because pressure from both Germany
and Russia would be eased so long as they were locked in mortal combat with each other. Germany had opted not to threaten or cajole Turkey to join the fray by allowing German troops and matériel through Anatolia towards Egypt and Persia. But the breathing space was short-lived. For the rest of 1941 the fragile alliance between Britain and Russia, celebrated by their joint occupation of Persia in August of that year, and promoted almost single-handedly by Churchill, did little to mitigate the results of the military disasters suffered by Britain in North Africa, or the crippling of her Atlantic supply lines by German U-boats.
For Turkey these setbacks meant that British offers of friendship in arms were irrelevant to her real needs. Diplomatic efforts by the British ambassador in Ankara, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden were politely shrugged off. A British offer to mediate between Turkey and Russia was ignored. On 10 October 1941 Jodl noted: ‘We have won this war’. It was a war which Turkish diplomacy, given sufficient skill and nerve – and I·nönü had plenty despite his frail appearance, deafness and lack of popular appeal – would keep her doing nicely out of it rather than in it, rather like Sweden and Switzerland. As indeed it proved.
Churchill's Secret War Page 4