Most Secret War

by R. V. Jones

  During the following week, I wrote an account of the whole episode under the title ‘The Crooked Leg’, for this or ‘Dog Leg’ is one of the meanings of ‘Knickebein’; more recently I have found that it is also the name of a cocktail. My report concluded:

  It is a fitting stage at which to close the account as far as Secret Intelligence is concerned. In the course of ten days the matter has developed from a conjecture to a certainty, with a healthy organization for its investigation. Several technical points remain to be cleared up, but their elucidation is only a matter of time.

  There are many lessons in this story, most of which are too obvious to point out. It shows the German technique is well developed—almost beyond what we thought possible; if they can place an aircraft to within 400 yards over this country, they may well have an extremely accurate system of R.D.F., and one might guess that they are concentrating on the C.H.L. principle.

  The possibility that Knickebein is an elaborate hoax may be discounted. At least sixteen independent sources have been obtained, and while some of them could conceivably have been inspired, the physical evidence of the sharpness of the beam, which would never have been gratuitously revealed, and of the increased sensitivity of the Lorenz receiver, are too subtle even for German thoroughness to have executed.

  The writer trusts that an expression of his appreciation of having worked with the group of officers mentioned in this report, as well as with others whose contributions are nameless but necessary, will be accepted. If our good fortunes hold, we may yet pull the Crooked Leg.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Reflections

  1940 WAS dominated by Churchill. Throughout the preceding decade his career had been commonly judged a brilliant failure, his eloquence denigrated as extravagance, his robust living rated for showmanship, and his changes of party branded as disloyal careerism. Even though he had consistently shown his great qualities, many of his countrymen preferred to see him as the perpetrator of folly in the Dardanelles, as the diehard breaker of strikes, and now as the exploiting war-monger between Britain and the Axis powers. Had there been no Nazi movement, his posthumous reputation might have been at best a matter of dispute. But, now that the hour had come he was uniquely matched to its demands. Tory Democrat, Liberal, Anti-Socialist, Constitutionalist and Conservative, he had been in politics for forty years. He had been head of each of the three Service Ministries, of the Home Office, the Colonial Office and the Board of Trade, and he had been Chancellor of the Exchequer. Yet he had been out of office for ten years; and even this was a qualification for leadership, for it provided the period of isolation which he deemed ingredient. He had served in eight regiments. Pre-eminent in courage—the quality that, he wrote, guarantees all the others—he had learnt from Antwerp in 1914 (or so it seemed) that when directing supreme affairs one must not ‘descend into the valleys of direct physical and personal action’. He understood the essence of supreme decisions: yea or nay, right or left, advance or retreat. He knew the strengths and weaknesses of experts. He knew how easy it is for the man at the summit to receive too rosy a picture from his Intelligence advisers. His humour and fairness had made friends of those enemies who had proved true fighters. Alone among politicians he valued science and technology at something approaching their true worth, at least in military application, and he had for seven years been warning his countrymen of the very disaster that had now befallen them. He had even, forty years before, pictured London in the position that it might shortly face, and had confided that there would at least be some who rather than surrender would die like the Dervishes at Omdurman.

  If he had at times overstrained the eloquence of his language and had seemed to live ‘larger than life’, 1940 was a time which eloquence could not exaggerate, and which demanded a man of more than life size. Throughout his life he had had a sense of history and a feeling of destiny. Now they were fulfilled together. ‘I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial’: this was the truth, simple and deep.

  He never overclaimed his part in 1940. Disaster had united rather than disrupted us, as he knew it would. Although as a nation we were alone, as individuals we were all in it together. He felt our temper exactly: ‘There is no doubt that had I at this juncture faltered at all in the leading of the nation, I should have been hurled out of office.… It fell to me in these coming days and months to express their sentiments on suitable occasions. This I was able to do, because they were mine also.’ All this was true, but there was much more. Churchill could turn even a minor occasion into a memorable one by a happy phrase or a humorous comment. Here he had one of the big occasions of history, and it called for the summit of language, for ‘There was a white glow, overpowering, sublime, which ran through our island from end to end’. In speech after speech he helped the people of Britain to see where they stood in history, he convinced them that the direction at the centre was now both firm and good, and he called from them their supreme effort.

  But it was not to his eloquence, or even to his humour, alone that they responded; disaster had struck the scales from their eyes, and suddenly they saw the towering courage that had been Churchill’s all his life. Everyone knew, in that mysterious way that tells true from false, that here was a man who would stand to the last; and in this confidence they could stand with him.

  From our encounter, I of course felt the elation of a young man at being noticed by any Prime Minister, but somehow it was much more. It was the same whenever we met in the war—I had the feeling of being recharged by contact with a source of living power. Here was strength, resolution, humour, readiness to listen, to ask the searching question and, when convinced, to act. He was rarely complimentary at the time, handsome though his compliments could be afterwards, for he had been brought up in sterner days. In 1940 it was compliment enough to be called in by him at the crisis; but to stand up to his questioning attack and then to convince him was the greatest exhilaration of all.

  As I was speaking at the Knickebein meeting, I could sense the impression that I was making on him. One day after the war, when I was sitting at his bedside, he told me about it: having surveyed our position in the early weeks of June 1940, he thought that we ought just to be able to hold the Luftwaffe by day. And then, when this young man came in and told him that they could still bomb as accurately by night, when our nightfighters would still be almost powerless, it was for him one of the blackest moments of the war. But as the young man went on the load was once again lifted because he said that there could be ways of countering the beams and so preventing our most important targets being destroyed.

  I did not in fact see Churchill again for some two years after the Knickebein meeting, although many of my reports went to him, and the impression throughout the senior staffs in the Service Ministries was that I had his ear the whole time. That was certainly very useful, in that men frequently did what I recommended, not so much because they believed in it, but because they were afraid of the Prime Ministerial wrath if they did something else.

  The ten days, 11th to 21st June, had brought me from obscurity to the highest level of the war. But, if 21st June was a turning point in my own fortunes with Churchill, it was a disastrous—and quite unfair—episode for Tizard. During the previous few days I had been worried about his attitude, although I had seen none of his deprecating minutes; and in the Cabinet Room I sensed that he had put himself in a dangerous position, but I had no idea of the extent to which he had actually done so, because I thought he would be much too sensible. After all, when I had been entirely in Lindemann’s laboratory, he had been almost incredibly fair in applauding my efforts although they had seemingly been done under the aegis of his rival. So when, a few days after the 21st June meeting, I wrote up the whole episode to Churchill and the Air Staff, I therefore did my best to repair any damage that he might have inflicted on himself by saying that at the beginning of the war I ‘had been appointed to be responsi
ble for Scientific Intelligence, and if, incidentally, this present account be considered to justify that appointment, it should be remembered that it was fostered by Sir Henry Tizard, Mr. Pye, Wing Commander Winterbotham and Mr. Woodward Nutt (and opposed by the Treasury!).’

  Tizard himself felt so miserable about the affair that even before it was clear that I was right, he went across to the Athenaeum that afternoon and wrote out his resignation. Had I known I would have been desperately sorry. It was bitter irony, because but for Tizard I would probably not have been in Intelligence and therefore the whole episode would not have taken place; and that was far more important than whether or not on this occasion he himself allowed his judgement to be upset. And had he, instead of Lindemann, sent for me on 11th June, as could easily have happened, their roles would very probably have been reversed.

  It was long before I began fully to realize the damage which had been done to Tizard. As Ronald Clark—his biographer—pointed out to me, I had missed more than twenty minutes of the vital meeting, and so could not know the extent to which his scepticism may have gone. It was only two years later that I began to get some idea, when Lindemann said to me, ‘The Prime Minister was speaking very warmly about you the other night!’ When I asked Lindemann why, he told me that Tizard had once again threatened to resign, this time from the Ministry of Aircraft Production (in 1940 it had been from the Air Staff). The new threat of resignation had been discussed at either the Cabinet or the Defence Committee, and someone had said what a tragedy it would be if Tizard were to go. Churchill had disagreed, and had said, ‘If we had listened to Sir Henry Tizard in 1940, we should not have known about the beams. As it was, it was left to that young Dr. Jones, who spoke so well at our meeting!’ And a good deal later, I was to receive the same picture from Lord Portal. Tizard himself was magnanimous enough never to hold any resentment against me. In fact, he continued to help me throughout the war, and afterwards right up to the time of his death.

  Besides the sense of personal fulfilment that the episode gave me, for of all the tasks I could possibly have done this one, of standing in some ways alone in a vital gap in our national defences, was the one I would have chosen above all others—there was also the fact that I had put Scientific Intelligence ‘on the map’. Moreover, it was a prime example demonstrating the fallacy in Buckingham’s argument regarding the merit of information from the Intelligence Services being interpreted by our own experts. If we had been running on this system, the last word would have rested with Eckersley and we would therefore have taken no action until markedly later, and probably not in time for the Blitz. Thenceforward Scientific Intelligence was to become an essential component in defence, and not in our own country only.

  Of the many laudatory verdicts that have been passed in the books, I think that the one that I value most—apart from Winston’s own1—was that by Telford Taylor, Professor of Law in Columbia University, New York and incidentally the Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, in his book The Breaking Wave: ‘The early detection and partial frustration of Knickebein—a feat then known only to a few—was an early and major British victory in the Battle of Britain.’ If that was right, I was in the best of company, few though it may have been.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Fortunes of Major Wintle

  THE GRIM situation in 1940 was tempered by lighter episodes; and although to record them may appear to hold up the narrative, it may serve to correct the impression of a perpetually breathtaking pace that would be suggested by a compact account merely of the high peaks of my activity. Fortunately we could usually afford the time to laugh, and could then tackle our problems all the better. For me, one of the brightest of such episodes started on 17th June in the middle of the Knickebein flurry, and it was brought about by the impending collapse of France—now only five days away. I was walking back across Horseguards Parade to my office after lunch, perhaps one of the rare lunches that I had as Lindemann’s guest in The Athenaeum, when there were military footsteps behind me, and I received a hearty slap on the back from the brisk figure of Freddie Wintle.

  ‘Hello, old boy, how’s your war going?’ he asked. I told him that for me it had taken an interesting turn, and in reply he told me why he thought we were generally in such a mess. ‘The trouble with this war,’ he said, ‘is that you can’t criticize anybody. It’s “Well done, Neville”, or “Good old Tom” or something like that. Why man, you’re not in a decent Cavalry Mess five minutes before you have been called a bloody fool—and you’re the better for it!’ With that we parted, he towards the Air Ministry in Charles Street, and I to Broadway.

  Evidently Wintle proceeded to put his doctrine into immediate practice, but I did not at first correlate it with what I read a day or so later on a placard: ‘ARMY OFFICER IN THE TOWER’. When I bought a paper I found that it referred to Freddie Wintle. The basic reason for his annoyance on Horseguards, which he had not told me, was that he had been ordered back to his Regiment when he believed that if only he could go to France he could so stiffen the morale of the French that they would not give in. He claimed to know the French better than most because he had been an instructor at the Ecole de Guerre, the French Staff College at St. Cyr. After leaving me, he had gone straight to the Director of Air Intelligence to protest at his posting whereupon, it seems, that he thought that the Director had accused him of cowardice in not wishing to rejoin his Regiment. This of course was fatal, for no one could question Wintle’s gallantry. He thereupon drew his revolver in indignation and said, ‘You and your kind ought to be shot,’ or words to that effect. He was arrested and sent to the Tower.

  Looking forward to his Court Martial was one of our light reliefs during the Battle of Britain. It duly came off, and he appeared in immaculate uniform, leather and brass shining brightly; drawing a silk handkerchief from his pocket he flicked some imaginary dust from his beautifully pipeclayed breeches, returned the handkerchief to the pocket, crossed his legs, screwed in his monocle, folded his arms and glared at the Court. He had to answer three main charges. The first was that he had faked defective vision in his right eye, the implication being that he thereby wished to avoid Active Service. This he was easily able to refute, because not only did he have one eye useless as a result of being wounded in World War I, but he had also bluffed the examining specialist into thinking that he had two good eyes, and he called the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Edmund Ironside, as a witness. This charge was therefore dropped.

  The more serious charge was that he had produced a pistol in the presence of the Air Commodore whom he had threatened to shoot, along with himself, and had ‘said words to the effect that certain of His Majesty’s Ministers or Officers of the Royal Air Force above the rank of Group Captain and most senior Army Officers ought to be shot’. Instead of denying this as regards the Ministers, he proposed to substantiate it as a patriotic action and read out a list of the Ministers who he suggested should be shot. When he got to Kingsley Wood, at No. 7, the Prosecuting Advocate interrupted to say that he did not propose to proceed with this charge, which was accordingly dropped.

  Finally Wintle was asked, ‘When you produced the pistol in the presence of the Air Commodore, was it your intention to intimidate him?’ With his monocle held more firmly than ever, he replied, ‘Intimidate the Air Commodore? Oh dear me, no! Why, I have worked with the Air Commodore for over a year, and I well know that he is the type of Officer that if you rushed into his room and shouted at the top of your voice “The Air Ministry’s on fire!” all he would do would be to take up his pen and write a minute to someone about it!’ He was on a pretty good wicket, in that he was being tried by an Army Court Martial for being rude to an Air Force Officer, and he escaped with a severe reprimand.

  I lost sight of him after that for some time; being the reverse of a coward, and finding service with his Regiment too inactive, he had volunteered to go into France as an agent with the Special Operations Executive, where he was captured by the Vichy French
and we heard of him languishing in Toulon jail. He escaped into Spain at the second attempt, and I again lost trace of him.

  At the end of the war he was to make a dramatic reappearance, this time in the house in which I had been born. The lady of the house was much alarmed to hear a great crash in her sitting-room and found that a motor car had come through its front window. The house was on a bend, which the driver had obviously taken too fast. When he stepped out, it was Freddie Wintle, who at the time was standing as Liberal candidate for Norwood against Duncan Sandys. ‘My dear lady,’ he said, ‘I am most frightfully sorry. I must have upset your nerves. What you need is some sherry which I will now go and get.’ And just as on the occasion of my first meeting him, he went to the local pub and returned with the sherry. I am sorry that he did not become our Member of Parliament.

  Again I lost sight of him, until I read of a retired Army officer who had lured a solicitor to a secluded flat and removed his trousers because the officer—who once again turned out to be Wintle—thought that the solicitor was tricking one of his female relatives into making over her money. The solicitor summoned him for assault, and Wintle was sent to prison for six months. Nevertheless, when he came out he managed to prove his case against the solicitor and he fought the legal battle right up to the House of Lords, without any professional aid. He won, The Times’ headline being ‘CAVALRY OFFICER JUMPS LAST FENCE TO WIN’.

  Wintle died in 1966. Fittingly, his friend ex-Trooper Cedric Mays of the Royals on the occasion of his funeral drank a bottle of Glenfiddich and then, through a mist of whisky and tears, sang the Cavalry Last Post and Cavalry Reveille to the astonished worshippers in Canterbury Cathedral, the Chapel of the Cavalrymen of Britain.