All Hell Let Loose (62 page)

The volume of Ultra intelligence was now increasing dramatically, with critical influence in every theatre. In earlier years, decrypts were priceless, especially to the naval war, but their flow was erratic. From mid-1942 onwards, with a few important breaks, the Allies became privy to much of their enemies’ signal traffic; the penetration of German and Japanese ciphers made a massive contribution to victory. Beyond the achievements of British and American decrypters, it was a secondary miracle that the Axis powers never seriously suspected that their most secret communications were being accessed by the enemy. Not all important traffic was read all the time: Axis telephone landlines, always the link of choice where available, remained secure. The quality of Allied analysis and exploitation varied in accordance with the prejudices of field commanders and their intelligence chiefs. For instance, Ultra would later reveal the December 1944 German armoured build-up in the Ardennes, but staffs failed to draw appropriate conclusions about an impending offensive. Knowing the enemy’s hand did not of itself diminish the strength of his cards, and provided no guarantee of success in clashes between armies and fleets. But Ultra revealed to the Allies more about what the other side was doing and planning than had been vouchsafed to any previous combatants in history.

The Ultra achievement owed much to three Polish mathematicians, led by Marian Rejewski, who conducted critical early work on the German Enigma between 1932 and 1939, after acquiring a commercial example of the ciphering machine. The French assisted, providing the Poles with a list of 1931 Wehrmacht keys, acquired from a German source. Though Rejewski served with the Polish Army in Britain between 1943 and 1945, he was never told of the rich fruits of his pioneering achievements. In 1939 the Poles presented both the British and the French with reconstructed Enigma machines. The following year, these enabled the British Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park to begin to break some German and Italian messages. At intervals thereafter, captures at sea of further Enigmas and monthly settings lists reinforced Bletchley’s armoury of knowledge.

Ultra was a collective Allied designation for a large variety of Axis keys, more than two hundred by 1945, some of which proved slow to surrender their secrets. Luftwaffe signals were broken first, towards the end of May 1940, followed by army and navy traffic. In 1941, a substantial volume of Wehrmacht messages were being read and their contents passed to Allied field commanders with an average delay of six hours. This proved too slow usefully to influence tactical decisions in ground fighting. It became progressively understood that Ultra could be used most effectively to guide strategy, as it was during the summer 1942 Alamein battles.

Allied handling of Ultra intelligence became superbly sophisticated, with information passed to commanders by locally deployed Special Liaison Units whose role was not merely to protect secrecy, but also to ensure that no initiative or pre-emption of German action revealed Allied foreknowledge. If a prospective naval target was located at sea through cryptanalysis, whenever possible reconnaissance aircraft overflew the enemy before an attack, to mask Ultra’s role. From 1942 onwards, Bletchley Park became an industrial centre, with 6,000 staff working in a hutted township, processing a flood of messages in shifts around the clock. The heart of its operation was Colossus, the electronic ‘bombe’ which dramatically speeded exploration of multiple mathematical possibilities. The codebreaking teams were dominated by some hundreds of brilliant academics, most of them mathematicians and German-speakers. The most influential personalities, both in their early thirties, were Alan Turing, sometimes described as the father of the computer, and Gordon Welchman. Some young men performing vital, and perforce absolutely secret, roles at Bletchley were chided by outsiders for their absence from the front. One received a letter from his former headmaster, asserting that his doggedly civilian status disgraced his old school.

The picture of enemy operations provided by Ultra was always incomplete, but it offered a reliability no human intelligence, or ‘humint’, provided by spies could match. For instance, the Allies could launch D-Day on 6 June 1944 confident that the enemy was still oblivious of their objective and timing. Churchill permitted some Ultra information about the Eastern Front to be passed to Moscow. Stalin was never officially informed of the Bletchley Park operation, but Moscow was well briefed by British traitors, who supplied their NKVD handlers in London with a steady flow of decrypts.

Full Anglo–American intelligence-sharing began only in 1943. The United States had broken the Japanese diplomatic cipher before the war, but their handling of Ultra never matched the inter-service integration achieved by the British, partly because of army–navy rivalry. The US Army ran its own decryption operation at Arlington Hall, Virginia, eventually employing 7,000 staff. The USN team, based in bleak subterranean quarters at Fourteenth Naval District, Pearl Harbor, was led by Commander Joseph Rochefort, the brilliant Japanese-speaker, cryptanalyst and intuitive thinker who contributed so much to victory at Midway. Rochefort’s men read some messages in the Japanese navy’s JN-25 operational cipher soon after the outbreak of war, and achieved fragmentary breaks at vital moments in 1942, which proved the most important Ultra achievements of the Pacific war. Thereafter, however, for some months JN-25 defied Rochefort’s team, leaving naval intelligence dependent upon coast-watchers and traffic analysis. In 1943 the operational code was again broken, and provided a stream of data for the rest of the war.

Bletchley Park and Arlington Hall played key roles in breaking Japanese army codes in 1943, the first being that of military attachés overseas. Captures of Japanese codebooks laid open bulk military signal traffic in 1944. Whereas in January that year Arlington Hall read fewer than 2,000 of the enemy’s army messages, in March this increased to 36,000, decisively influencing MacArthur’s New Guinea strategy. Interception of Japanese communications faltered during the 1944–45 Philippines campaign, when the army’s main codes changed, causing a further break in decryption. In general, US naval operations were more importantly influenced by Ultra than were those of the armies in the Pacific campaigns. No codebreaking achievement could eliminate the difficulties of assaulting strongly defended enemy positions. But the collective contribution of US and British cryptanalysts to the war effort was greater than that of any other such small body of men in history. Their operations provided the supreme example of the Western Allies’ imaginative integration into the war effort of their cleverest civilian intellects.

In the autumn of 1942, Churchill was passionately impatient for Eighth Army to attack. Once the
Torch
landings took place, the glory of every subsequent British success would be shared with the Americans. Alexander and Montgomery were relentlessly chivvied from London, though the foxy little field commander stuck to his own timetable. A cold, incisive, self-consciously professional soldier, ‘Monty’ was determined to impose on British operations an order and discipline which had hitherto been absent. He has sometimes and not unjustly been described as ‘a good World War I general’, most comfortable with limited set-piece operations. His most conspicuous attribute was ‘grip’: between August and October 1942, in a remarkable fashion he revived the confidence of the desert army. Reinforcements now gave the British a decisive advantage: Eighth Army deployed 195,000 men against 104,000 Germans and Italians, 1,029 tanks against 489, 750 aircraft against 675, and enjoyed a massive superiority of artillery.

Keith Douglas, traversing the rear areas of Eighth Army to join an armoured regiment, was fascinated by the spectacle of men and machines massing in the sands for battle: ‘Lorries appeared like ships, plunging their bows into drifts of dust and rearing up suddenly over crests like waves. Their wheels were continually hidden in dust-clouds: the ordinary sand being pulverized by so much traffic into a substance almost liquid, sticky to the touch, into which the feet of men sank almost to the knees. Every man had a white mask of dust in which, if he wore no goggles, his eyes showed like a clown’s eyes.’

On the other side of the hill, Rommel’s army inhabited the same environment, but was prey to increasing gloom about its predicament. It bears emphasis that its most numerous component was Italian, not German, and like most of his countrymen, Vittorio Vallicella was dejected: ‘We are stuck in this desolate plain of El Alamein, tired, hungry, with little water, filthy and full of lice. We know that our Great Leader [Mussolini] is 660 kms from the front, furious because we have been unable to open the gates of Alexandria for him … For 16 months we have led this life: kept going with a canteen of water (if lucky); at the mercy of fleas and lice. Maybe at this point we can only hope that a bomb takes us out and puts an end to our suffering.’ He recorded a comrade’s suicide as the seventeenth in his unit since March 1941. The RAF strafed constantly: during one attack, Vallicella’s companions were rash enough to seek cover under a vehicle which suffered a direct hit, killing them all. The ‘bomb-happy’ Vallicella gained a respite of a few hours’ sleep in a German field hospital before being sent back into the line.

The Italian army’s supply system had collapsed, leaving its men dependent on German largesse. The Afrika Korps was irked by Italian scrounging, to which Vallicella and his comrades responded by resort to ‘
arrangiarsi
’, loosely translatable as ‘every man for himself’. ‘What will become of us?’ mused the soldier. ‘How can we keep fighting so far from our supply bases and at the mercy of air attack? Not a week goes by when our supply columns are not machine-gunned and destroyed. Lack of water, food, arms, drives our morale to rock bottom.’ Many Italian soldiers were subsisting entirely on canned and dried food. After the first week, Vallicella wrote: ‘We are at the end of our tether; if our logistics have always been inadequate, now they scarcely exist.’ He and his comrades roamed the battlefield, scavenging food and water, draining fuel from the tanks of wrecked vehicles. The Folgore Division suffered shocking casualties: ‘Those young men supported only by mortars and the odd machine-gun wrote a page of history. Hundreds were wiped out for a regime that didn’t even know how to provide them with the equipment they needed to fight.’

Meanwhile, in the British camp, as Alamein began Lt. Norman Craig reflected on the challenge of junior leadership: ‘Before an attack fear is universal. The popular belief that in battle there are two kinds of person – the sensitive, who suffer torment, and the unimaginative few who know no fear and go blithely on – is a fallacy. Everyone was as scared as the next man, for no imagination was needed to foresee the possibility of death or mutilation. It was just that some managed to conceal their fear better than others. Officers could not afford to show their feelings as openly as the men; they had more need to dissemble. In a big battle a subaltern had little or no influence over the fate of his platoon – it was the plaything of the gods. His role was essentially histrionic. He had to feign a casual and cheerful optimism to create an illusion of normality and make it seem as if there was nothing in the least strange about the outrageous things one was asked to do. Only in this way could he ease the tension, quell any panic and convince his men that everything would come out right in the end. Inwardly I marvelled that they did not take to their heels. They grumbled and looked apprehensive, but nothing more … [The NCOs were thinking] “If an officer can do it, we damn well can.” The men looked to the NCOs and said, “We’ll go wherever the bloody corporals go.” Thus an army stands firm.’

On 23 October, Montgomery launched Operation
Lightfoot
, the opening phase of the twelve-day second Alamein battle, which began with a devastating bombardment. Vittorio Vallicella was chatting with some Germans, drinking captured tea, when British shells began to fall upon them. ‘I have seen many enemy barrages, but the intensity of this one is beyond our experience.’ Men choking amid the acrid fumes of explosions watched tongues of flame leaping up across the desert. Vallicella took refuge in the drivers’ dugout, seeking comfort in the companionship of others: ‘Together we feel less fear.’ He described one scene hard to imagine in any army save that of Mussolini. Ordered by a lieutenant to load the dead onto a truck and drive them to a temporary cemetery beside a field hospital, he refused. The officer threatened him with a pistol. At that moment their colonel arrived, remonstrated fiercely with the lieutenant and snatched the weapon from his hand; the crestfallen officer collapsed into tears. Vallicella and his comrades took the bodies to a field hospital, where nurses helped with the grisly task of unloading. They told the soldiers that their main task for days past had been to lay the dead in mass graves; even the necessary bulldozers had to be borrowed from their German allies.

For almost a week, Axis forces beat back repeated British attacks. In London, Churchill fumed. Lt. Vincenzo Formica recorded a surge of exultation in his unit on 1 November: the Italians briefly supposed that the British had abandoned their efforts to break through. They were heartened by the news of heavy tank losses which panzers had imposed on Montgomery’s armoured units: ‘Officers and men, who had lived through the fighting and suffered for months amid the Egyptian desert through the hottest part of the year, saw that all their suffering and sacrifices were to be rewarded with the prize every warrior craves: Victory. We assumed we would be launching a counterattack. The word was “Christmas in Alessandria!”’

Within twenty-four hours, however, the picture changed dramatically. Montgomery afterwards claimed that Alamein was fought to his original plan. In truth, he was obliged to shift his focus of attack northwards, but Eighth Army’s dominance of the battlefield was not in doubt. Attrition imposed intolerable losses on the Axis forces, whose fuel shortage had become acute. ‘All our illusions were shattered on the night of 2 November,’ wrote Lt. Formica. They set off behind a tank column, only to discover that its leader was lost. At last their colonel appeared, and personally guided them to the Ariete Division’s concentration area. There ‘it became very plain to me that the whole military situation had changed – to our disadvantage. Long columns of vehicles from different units and even different formations were moving so chaotically as to make it obvious these were not organised bodies pursuing objectives. Conditions were appalling: poor visibility, vehicles bogged in sand, collisions. I looked down from our vehicle on silent and exhausted infantrymen. Occasionally I glimpsed the plumes of the Bersaglieri, upon whom so much glory and sand had been heaped.’