Seizing the Enigma (23 page)

D.N.I.

I suggest we obtain the loot by the following means:

1. Obtain from Air Ministry an air-worthy German bomber.

2. Pick a tough crew of five, including a pilot, W/T [wireless telegraph] operator and word-perfect German speaker. Dress them in German Air Force uniform, add blood and bandages to suit.

3. Crash plane in the Channel after making S.O.S. to rescue service in P/L [plain language].

4. Once aboard rescue boat, shoot German crew, dump overboard, bring rescue boat back to English port.

In order to increase the chances of capturing an R. or M. [
Räumboot
, a small minesweeper;
Minensuchboot
, a large minesweeper] with its richer booty, the crash might be staged in mid-Channel. The Germans would presumably employ one of this type for the longer and more hazardous journey.

Clayton supported the idea, and Fleming produced a more detailed plan. The bomber would take off shortly before dawn as one of the big London raids was ending. It would try to spot an isolated small minesweeper, cut an engine, emit smoke, drop fast, and pancake into the water. Fleming drew up a list of the personnel and material required, including a pilot who was “tough, bachelor, able to swim.”
In case word got out that a German boat had been brought into an English port, Fleming proposed to put out a cover story that the capture was done “for a lark by a group of young hotheads who thought the war was too tame and wanted to have a go at the Germans. They had stolen plane and equipment and had expected to get into trouble when they got back.”

Frank Birch, the head of Naval Section, liked the plan, which he called “very ingenious,” in part because it would not give away British cryptanalytic efforts if it failed. He provided a three-page memorandum of “Activities of German Naval Units in the Channel.”

The plan was approved and given the codename Operation
RUTHLESS
. Fleming assembled the needed men. The director of naval intelligence, Rear Admiral John H. Godfrey, scrounged a bomber from the Air Ministry. A twin-engine Heinkel III, shot down during a raid on the Firth of Forth, had crash-landed on the moors not far from Edinburgh without great damage. The British restored it to flyability. Group Captain H. J. Wilson, in charge of evaluating captured German aircraft, flew it to the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, southwest of London.

A few months later, Wilson was visited by some naval intelligence officers. They explained the plot, referring to the capture not of cipher documents but of secret radio equipment. The plan—which, they assured him, had the blessing of Churchill himself and would guarantee a decoration for the pilot—had elaborated: Spitfires would mock-attack the bomber. Wilson pointed out that the crash landing in the rough autumn seas would unquestionably collapse the Heinkel’s all-acrylic Perspex nose, would probably sink the plane almost at once, and would almost certainly seriously injure the crew. He asked how these shaken-up, soaked, cold crewmen could leap from their dinghy to intimidate the crew of the rescue vessel and capture it. He himself declined the navy’s offer to participate, saying he preferred to work on successful operations than to win a posthumous Victoria Cross.

The intelligence officers were disappointed at his reaction but did not give up. When they advertised for men for a suicide mission, a love-sick pilot volunteered. Wilson reinforced the Heinkel’s nose and found a way to inject oil into the exhaust to simulate an engine fire. All that the airmen could do had been done. In October, Fleming went to Dover to await his chance. None came. Air reconnaissance found no suitable German ships operating at night, and radio reconnaissance likewise found nothing. On the sixteenth, the Dover command postponed
RUTHLESS
but suggested trying it at Portsmouth. Four days later Birch wrote:

Turing and Twinn came to me like undertakers cheated of a nice corpse two days ago, all in a stew about the cancellation of Operation Ruthless. The burden of their song was the importance of a pinch. Did the authorities realise that … there was very little hope, if any, of their deciphering current, or even approximately current, Enigma … at all.

Fleming replied that the value of a pinch was fully recognized and that
RUTHLESS
was still fully laid on. The navy awaited favorable circumstances. But they never materialized, and the plan faded away.

Thus the crisis with the naval Enigma continued. Pressure on the cryptanalysts increased. Churchill told the Commons on November 4, 1940, that “the recent recrudescence of U-boat sinkings in the Atlantic approaches to our islands” was “more serious than the air raids” of the Blitz. That same month, banana imports were stopped; the next month, the meat ration was ordered reduced. No cryptanalyst could envision a way of cracking the naval Enigma and reading the U-boat messages so as to steer the convoys bringing supplies to Britain out of harm’s way.

Still, though Hut 8 had had little success throughout 1940, and despite the increasing strain, the atmosphere in the group was not disheartened but industrious. Then, early in 1941, another clue to the naval Enigma arrived, as tantalizing as it was helpful.

T
HE CENTRAL ACTOR WAS A BLUE-EYED BARONET
, L
IEUTENANT
Sir Marshall George Clitheroe Warmington, signals officer aboard the destroyer
Somali.
The son and grandson of London barristers, Warmington had been brought up in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, and educated at Charterhouse, one of England’s better public schools. He wanted to join the cavalry, but his father vetoed that, and in 1928 he found himself in the Navy on the H.M.S.
Erebus
, a training ship. Warmington felt that this converted World War I monitor exceeded its name by being not just an anteroom to hell but hell itself. The future officers ate and slept and worked in a gunroom in which they couldn’t stand upright. When the showers were working, they either scalded or froze those standing under them. Though the
Erebus
was docked at Devonport, the men were allowed ashore only twice a week, and then they had to be back by 7:30
P.M.
The experience was rather squalid, but it was apt: the whole Navy, Warmington thought later, was rather squalid at the time.

This inauguration was followed by tours in the Mediterranean and in the Home Fleet, by study at Greenwich and Portsmouth, and then by long months of patrol under the broiling Red Sea sun. His ships, the
Penzance
and the
Hastings
, were supposed to be stopping the Arab slave trade, but they never did: the slave traders simply avoided them. Their real purpose was to show the flag. So the ships sailed from Aden near the mouth of the Red Sea to Malta in the middle of the
Mediterranean, calling at Jedda and Port Sudan, nosing into the Gulf of Aqaba, passing British and French Somaliland. The tedium of idleness and of four-hour watches on the bridge was broken only by a bit of gunnery practice and some fishing from the motorboat. In August 1935, upon his father’s death, Warmington succeeded him as third baronet, becoming a member of the lowest hereditary order, whose members, not peers, are addressed in society as “Sir.” In the navy, however, all of the officers addressed one another by last name alone.

In December 1935, Warmington returned to Portsmouth for a year-long course in communications, or signals, as the Royal Navy called it. He liked the field, but the course was “jolly hard work”: Morse code training twice each day to reach at least twenty-five words per minute, visual flag signals, wireless technique and technology, the communications aspects of maneuvering the fleet, codes and ciphers. Warmington then served for a couple of years as a signals officer for a submarine flotilla. After the war began, he was transferred to the staff of the forces that helped evacuate the tattered British forces from Dunkirk after Hitler’s blitzkrieg smashed France. Then, to his pleasure, he was assigned to the
Somali.

She was a member of the newest, largest class of destroyers in the Royal Navy. Earlier classes had been small, handy vessels with good torpedo armament, but the building by Italy and Japan of large fast destroyers with heavy gun armament, and indications that Germany might do the same, led the Admiralty to design a counterforce. The new ships, almost half again as big as the older ones, would double the number of the older classes’ guns but halve their torpedo armament—a revolutionary design that some criticized as being more like that of a small cruiser than of a big destroyer. When a drawing was submitted to the Board of Admiralty for approval, one of the sea lords criticized the straight stem and penciled in a slight curve. This “proud nostril curve” in the profile of the bow distinguished the new class, which was called Tribal because its members bore the names of native tribes, many of the British Empire:
Zulu, Ashanti, Sikh, Cossack, Tartar, Maori.

The keels of six Tribals were laid down in 1936. They displaced 1,959 tons and carried eight 4.7-inch guns, each of which hurled a 50-pound shell 10 miles, and four torpedoes in tubes. The vessels were not armored. Their speed was excellent, a little above 35 knots. The normal wartime complement was around 220, but some Tribals were fitted out as flotilla leaders with accommodations for the additional men and officers needed to command the eight vessels.

One such leader was the
Somali
, named for the Hamitic herders and fisher folk of the Horn of Africa. Launched in August 1938, the
Somali
was the first Home Fleet Tribal to be completed. After the others were commissioned, the
Somali
’s captain became the leader of the Home Fleet’s Sixth Destroyer Flotilla; in Royal Navy parlance he was the “Captain (D).” The
Somali
became the first Royal Navy vessel to capture a prize at sea in World War II when, two hours after war was declared, she seized the
Hannah B?
of Hamburg, which was carrying wood pulp from Canada. Later she engaged in operations in Norwegian waters, including the bombardment of Narvik. Soon thereafter Warmington joined the crew.

During the winter of 1940–41 some days were spent in practice with the guns or with the asdic gear for detecting and locating submarines or in antisubmarine exercises. Other days the destroyers screened heavier warships that were searching for a German raider or merchantman. Lookouts on both sides of the bridge scanned the horizon through their heavy 8 × 41 binoculars for five minutes, then were relieved by others for five minutes, and so on for one hour, after which both pairs were relieved. Visibility was often poor: during one five-day period the lookouts could see more than 10 miles for a total of only five hours. Many times, fog and mist reduced visibility to a mile or less. The strain, the chill of the North Atlantic, the days of four-hour watches, the wet—all wearied the men. But in some rare but lovely moments, the sea was calm and moonlit, and the lookouts could see out to the very rim of the horizon.

Then, early in 1941, orders came that broke the tiresome routine of training exercises and North Sea sweeps. The
Somali
was going to
lead four other Tribals and two troop carriers on a commando raid on German-occupied Norway.

The raid had several specific objectives. One was to destroy herring-and cod-oil factories that were providing the Germans with valuable nutrients, in particular vitamin A, it was said. Another was to perfect interservice cooperation in amphibious operations. Still other objectives were to arrest quislings (Norwegians collaborating with the occupiers), capture Germans, and evacuate Norwegians who wanted to fight for the Norwegian government in exile in London. An important purpose was to tie down large enemy forces by keeping realistic the threat of attacks anywhere along the Norwegian coast. Britain’s leaders also perhaps entertained the hopes that a success might boost British morale: a raid was practically the only offensive action that Britain could take in those days when she stood alone against a continent overrun by Nazi forces. Finally, the British would be glad for any documents that they might seize.

Preparations for the raid began late in February. The naval commander was Captain Clifford Caslon, commanding officer simultaneously of the
Somali
and the Sixth Destroyer Flotilla. More a staff officer than a sailor, he was very efficient. He could wiggle his ears, and his officers soon learned that when he laid them flat against his head he was angry. Nevertheless, Warmington regarded Caslon as rather tender-hearted.

Anchored at the great naval base of Scapa Flow, the
Somali
and four other Tribals awaited the commandos. The 500-man detachment, supported by engineers and Norwegian volunteers, arrived in the early afternoon of February 22. For a week, the naval and military officers went over the plans for the raid in minute detail. Warmington arranged for shore-to-ship communications, instructing the sailors in the use of the commandos’ radio sets. The occupants of the landing craft and their crews got to know one another. With preparations completed, the little task force of destroyers and troopships,
now codenamed
REBEL
, got under way. At one minute after midnight, on Saturday, March 1, it passed the antisubmarine booms and the blockships and headed north.