by Gareth Rubin
After the resulting publicity, even Wilson could no longer keep the US neutral. He told a joint session of Congress to ‘declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and the people of the United States’ and to state America ‘formally accept the status of belligerent’, i.e. war. The telegram, he announced, showed that Germany ‘means to stir up enemies against us at our very doors, the intercepted note to the German Minister in Mexico is eloquent evidence’.
Four days later, America did indeed declare war. Mexico stayed out of it.
THAT SINKING FEELING – THE K-CLASS SUBMARINES, 1917
The K-Class subs were Britain’s answer to intelligence that Germany was building a fleet of huge submarines capable of 22 knots. There were two problems with this: first, the reports were false and, second, the K-Class subs were more lethal to British sailors than the German Navy. Of the 18 built, six sank in accidents and only one ever engaged a German vessel, firing a torpedo that failed to detonate. They became known as ‘Kalamity Class’.
The steam-powered boats were three times the size of previous submarines, but their sheer size meant they were about as manoeuvrable as a mountain and took five minutes to dive, leaving them vulnerable to attack.
At the beginning of 1917 the first boats were ready for testing. When they did so, K2 caught fire and K13 sank. K3 mysteriously dived down to the sea bed with the future George VI aboard, before luckily managing to resurface; K4 ran aground; K5 sank; K6 got stuck on the sea bed; K7 rammed K17 by accident and was destroyed. So much for the first test dives. On the next dives, K13 – renumbered as K22 to hide its shame – got stuck on one bearing and caused a collision involving K6, K4, K17 and a cruiser.
Finally on active service, K1 collided with K4 off the Danish coast and was scuttled to avoid capture by the Germans.
IGNORING THE TOPOGRAPHY – THE BOMBARDMENT OF FLANDERS
In the summer of 1917 Field Marshal Haig decided to launch an offensive in Flanders. In itself that was not a bad plan, but choosing to begin it with the heaviest bombardment of ordinance of the First World War on the Ypres battleground was an error of the first order.
The problem was that the land around Ypres in northern Belgium was reclaimed marshland, and the drainage system that prevented it from turning into a swamp was delicate and had been carefully developed over centuries.
On 22 July 1917 Haig ignored the warnings from the Belgian government and proceeded to pummel the German lines with more than 3,000 artillery guns. By the end of the bombardment the land looked like a volcano had erupted; then heavy rain turned it, as predicted, into a swamp. Dismissing the concerns of his officers, Haig ordered the British troops to wade through the mud and attack. They were cut down by the German machine guns.
It was a deadly failure that lasted far longer than that terrible day. More than 90 British men drowned each month.
LET’S STICK WITH WHAT WE KNOW – CAVALRY, NOT TANKS, 1922
The post-conflict defence cuts of 1922 showed the true colours of Britain’s idiotic commanders. Field Marshal Haig, an old man who had grown up seeing impressive cavalry officers, didn’t believe in tanks: they weren’t dashing, unlike those chaps with sabres. So he ensured that when the cuts were being made, cavalry regiments would be protected at the cost of tank units. The changes left 126 infantry battalions, 20 cavalry regiments and a mere 6 tank battalions.
In 1929 the British military spent £72,000 on petrol and £607,000 on horse feed – the tanks would have been handy in the upcoming Second World War.
NOT VETTING YOUR CLEANERS – HIRING MELITA NORWOOD, 1935
Melita Norwood was as openly communist as you could get, publicly supporting the Soviet Union. The perfect applicant for a job at a British top-secret nuclear research institute, it seems.
Norwood’s red credentials went back to before she was born. Her father had been a member of the Marxist British Socialist Party and had personally translated Lenin’s The Collapse of the Second International. When she was 20, Melita had joined the Independent Labour Party, while she was living with her husband, Hilary, and his Russian parents. She and her mother-in-law sold copies of the Daily Worker and were members of the Friends of the Soviet Union. If there was any doubt whatsoever, Norwood went on to join the Communist Party in 1935.
Astonishingly, the previous year she had been recruited as a spy for Soviet intelligence, who were either none too picky about their agents maintaining a low profile, or bluffing it by making her such an obvious spy that MI5 would laugh and overlook her. By then she had started work as a secretary at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, which everyone knew was a secret weapons research institute. She was transferred to Tube Alloys – i.e. nuclear weapons – in 1939.
When the war ended she began supplying Moscow with secrets regarding uranium research, and the Soviets later said that it was her information that allowed them to produce a nuclear weapon years before the Western powers had thought they would be able to – even before Britain was able to build one.
Still no one suspected her – perhaps because she was only a secretary and therefore had no security clearance. She got around this by opening her boss’s safe each night and photographing his documents, which she then passed on to her handlers. She even recruited another agent, who spent 14 years passing Moscow details of British arms sales.
Norwood retired in 1973 and hung up her spy’s camera. She went into local politics and refused a Soviet pension, insisting she did what she did for purely ideological reasons and had never accepted a rouble in pay.
In 1992, a Soviet defector unmasked her but the British government saw no point in a prosecution. She publicly declared: ‘I did what I did not to make money, but to prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service.’
In fact, she only regretted one thing: ‘I thought I’d got away with it.’
SWITCHING TARGETS – THE GERMANS FAIL TO DESTROY THE RAF, 1940
Had Hermann Goering pressed home his advantage over Britain’s air force in 1940, Hitler’s plans to invade could well have come to fruition. Luckily, Goering did everything but actually spy for Churchill.
After the disaster of Dunkirk, Hitler planned a full-scale invasion of the United Kingdom for September 1940. In preparation, the Luftwaffe went after air bases through southern Britain, bombing them time after time for seven weeks during the summer. The RAF was losing, and they knew it – they couldn’t hold out much longer. Adding to the fears, information from the codebreakers at Bletchley Park said that the Nazi invasion fleet was gathering. The British commanders knew that after a few more days of German raids on the RAF bases the Air Force would be unable to mount any defence against a naval assault.
Goering’s plan was that the Luftwaffe would ‘continue the fight against the enemy air force until further notice, with the aim of weakening the British fighter forces. The Enemy is to be forced to use his fighters by means of ceaseless attacks. In addition the aircraft industry and the organisation of the air force are to be attacked by individual aircraft by night and day.’ Had he stuck to this strategy, Hitler’s invasion might have succeeded. Instead, Goering and a lost German bomber pilot inadvertently came to Britain’s rescue.
On 24 August the pilot of the lead aircraft in a small flight of Heinkel bombers was on a night raid over Britain when he realised he had no idea where he was. Completely lost and a bit worried because he had no fighter escort, he decided to return to base in France. Before doing so, he dropped his bombs on whatever was underneath him. The other planes in his group followed suit and they all headed for France. The bombs fell onto the streets and houses of London. Without knowing it, the Germans had just bombed the capital. Up until then, raids on civilian populations had normally been off the table.
Although the bombs did little damage, there was fury in Britain like nothing before
and the RAF decided that the only response was to bomb Berlin. Of 95 RAF bombers, 81 reached Berlin and released their loads. Their main target was an airfield at the centre of the city, but the bombs rained down all over the German capital.
After frequently boasting about Germany’s air superiority, Goering now looked foolish in front of his colleagues. He had gone so far as to make a promise on the radio to the people of Berlin that they would never even see an RAF aeroplane. As a result, he ordered the Luftwaffe’s strategy to change – the Nazis would put the RAF to one side and have revenge on the British civilians. In so doing, he scuppered his master’s invasion plans.
On the night of 6 September Goering sent over 68 bombers. The next night, it was a mass raid, with more than 500 dropping bombs on the capital. It was the beginning of two months of attacks.* But the break allowed the RAF to rebuild its bases, meaning they could get planes in the air and fight off the Germans. The renewed strength of the Air Force meant Hitler had to put off his invasion at the last minute. Then, within a month, he cancelled it entirely.
Lost German bomber crews were something of a gift to Britain. In 1944, the Nazis were doing suspiciously well in defending their towns until a stroke of British luck reversed the trend. Then, on 13 July, at the Woodbridge airbase in Suffolk, a British officer, W.D. Raymond, saw a British Mosquito aircraft overhead circling the base, possibly in distress. He used signal flares to guide it down. When it touched down, he drove his jeep over to it but noticed it had a crew of three rather than the usual two, and as he got closer he noticed that it was, in fact, a German Ju88 G1 night fighter. A brand-new model, what made it a fantastic prize was the electronic equipment aboard – including radar-related technology that Britain had been unable to get her hands on.
The crew surrendered when Raymond drew his pistol but what he really wanted to know was what on earth they were doing there. Sheepishly they explained that they had only just completed their flight training, the pilot had misread his compass and had flown in precisely the opposite direction to the one he had wanted to go in. They had thought they were over Holland, rather than Suffolk.
The gadgetry on board was a godsend to RAF intelligence. It included a new technology that used RAF bombers’ own radar signals to locate them – this was the secret that had enabled the Germans to fight off the British bombers. When Bomber Command discovered this, the bombers’ radar equipment was removed, immediately reducing the German fighters’ kill rate and virtually finishing their defence against Allied bombing raids.
AN OPEN SECRET – THE ENIGMA CODE, 1940
Cracking the Enigma Code was one of the greatest British achievements of the Second World War. A rag-tag assortment of crossword fanatics and algebra geniuses came together in an orgy of maths to unravel the secret of the Enigma encoding machines that the Nazis were using to send messages, and in 1940 they managed to break the cipher and eavesdrop on German messages.
It was a brilliant achievement but a wholly unnecessary one because the Enigma machine had been around since the 1920s and the German company that had produced it filed a patent in Britain in 1924, providing full diagrams of how it worked, including the ‘default’ wiring settings. The British codebreakers at Bletchley Park presumed that the German military would have wired their machines differently to the default – rather like changing the password on a computer from ‘password’ – but it wasn’t until Britain got hold of a military Enigma machine in 1939 that they discovered the Germans hadn’t thought of that. Had Bletchley Park simply constructed an Enigma with the default settings, they would have been able to read German messages, which could even have averted the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
Peter Twinn, the first man to break the code, said in 2001: ‘I know in retrospect it sounds daft. It was such an obvious thing to do, rather a silly thing, that nobody ever thought it worthwhile trying.’
Luckily, the Germans were even more foolish with the code. By 1943, the Allies were using the decoded messages to launch stunning attacks on the German sea fleet and the chief of the U-Boat fleet suspected the code had been cracked. His suspicions were confirmed by information from the Swiss intelligence service, which had a spy in the US Navy. But the German ministry of war insisted it was impossible that anyone could outthink Germany and continued to use Enigma.
THE WRONG LAUNDRY – THE GERMANS SPILL THE BEANS, 1941
The Nazis were sticklers for a sharp crease in their jackboots and this proved a great aid to British Army intelligence. Agents in occupied France came up with an offbeat but highly successful method of tracking German troop movements – they set up a chain of laundry firms offering first-class service at low cost. The Germans were hooked and their officers used them all the time. This meant that the French agents could keep track of which regiments were where, and where they were going – because the Germans would always leave forwarding addresses for any items not yet ready. One account from the time said the Hun ‘might be going to Valhalla, but they were not prepared to go without their linen’.
This system gained the vital intelligence in advance of D-Day that the SS Panzer divisions in France weren’t on the move, indicating they were unaware of where the invasion was going to be, and were still expecting it near Calais.
AN UNWELCOME SIGN – HMS TRINIDAD IS DISABLED, 1941
In 1941 the cruiser Trinidad was sailing in the Arctic when it engaged three German destroyers. Immediately, the Trinidad shot a torpedo, but the icy waters froze the weapon’s steering mechanism and the crew had to watch, slightly uncertain, as the torpedo sailed through an arc and sped back towards the British boat. It exploded and caused such damage that the Trinidad was out of action for the rest of the war.
LOOKING THE WRONG WAY – LOSING SINGAPORE, 1942
Singapore was supposed to be impregnable but, as a certain young mother from Bethlehem could tell you, impregnation can sometimes come from the most unexpected direction.
In the case of Singapore, the island city state at the southern tip of modern Malaysia, it came on bike on 8 February 1942. After sweeping through mainland Malaysia, a British possession, the Japanese were so low on motor transport that they cycled down to Singapore. This sneaky Jap trick surprised the British, who had expected a seaborne invasion.
Most of all, the defeat of Singapore was down to complacency. When the Japanese first attacked, one British officer commented that he couldn’t ‘understand why the Governor had got the wind up and mobilised the local volunteer force’. And right up until that moment the British government was resisting recommendations from the Singaporean authorities that Japanese workers in sensitive locations be reduced, because London didn’t want to offend Japan in case it provoked them to attack. This was despite the fact that Tokyo’s agents were everywhere – even the official photographer to the Singapore naval base was believed to be a colonel in Japanese intelligence and no one stopped to question if all those photographs he was taking of the boats and sailors might just be of some use to the Japanese Navy.
Even after the Japanese defeated the British forces on the mainland, Singapore was most definitely not expecting an attack from that direction. For one thing, all the British guns were pointing out to sea – they could be turned to face the mainland, but the ammunition was designed to attack shipping, not land forces. For another, last-minute defences against boats carrying hostile troops from the mainland had not been completed because of a wages dispute with the labourers – not an isolated problem, since many of the Australian troops stationed there had ‘withdrawn their labour’ over pay and many others were drunk for a substantial proportion of the time.
In addition, British intelligence had dismissed any threat from the Japanese Air Force because they had reports saying Japanese men’s bodies were too small and frail to withstand the G-force of aerial manoeuvres. Even when Japanese bombers started to hover ominously over the city, the lights stayed on because no one could find the master key to turn them all off. The Post Office, on the other hand, messed up in
the opposite manner – by cutting off all phone calls to the front line after the wartime regulation three minutes.
In the end, 130,000 British, Indian and Australian troops surrendered to just 35,000 Japanese. It is generally considered the worst disaster in British military history.
The military authorities might also have been criticised for ignoring a specific warning of the attack on the Malay mainland – along with details of the simultaneous attack on Pearl Harbor as an added bonus.
Stationed at an RAF base in northern Malaya, as it was then, was the 18-year-old Air Technician Peter Shepherd, who had signed up to the Air Force at the tender age of 15 when war was declared. On 4 December 1941 he was told that he would be taking a trip in a Dutch East Indies civilian plane as the Dutch engineer was ill. He described what happened in his book, Three Days to Pearl: Incredible Encounter on the Eve of War:
To my surprise we landed in Cambodia on a private landing airfield in the south at a place near Kampot. As French Indo-China was virtually in Japanese hands at the time, this made Cambodia a pretty dangerous place for a Dutch plane to land. The French authorities were of course liberally sprinkled with pro-Vichy elements and so no friends of the British in 1941.
My own position as an RAF serviceman in civilian clothing was therefore highly dangerous. To make things worse, on the way north, the Dutch pilot divulged that the real purpose of the trip was to collect a single British passenger under cover of what sounded to me like a clandestine commercial flight smuggling contraband. To me this looked like a combination of agent-running and smuggling. I had been told none of this before we took off. I thought we were going to Thailand, which was neutral, not to Cambodia, so I was extremely unhappy as you can imagine. I decided to stay out of the way on the ground.