Seizing the Enigma (34 page)

He captained a vessel that was called “Lucky Tartar” by her flotilla mates because of her eerie success in avoiding damage. During the German invasion of Norway, the
Tartar
came out unscathed during air attacks that sank or damaged other British vessels. A year later, during the
Bismarck
chase, she escaped untouched when Luftwaffe bombing sank a sister ship. But she spent much time based at Scapa Flow as part of the Home Fleet, to block any movement of German naval forces into the Atlantic. And Scapa was awful. The wind never stopped. Ships constantly dragged their anchors. In winter it was never light, in summer never dark. There was nothing to do ashore except to walk or fish or—for the ratings—drink beer in a club. When other ships came in, the officers sometimes went over to visit with their friends. Occasionally movies were shown. Skipwith once mentioned that he hadn’t been ashore for 100 days and a young officer rashly told him that he had him beat because he hadn’t been on land for 101; the next day the officer, realizing that prudence was better than valor when it came to his commanding officer, yielded the record to Skipwith: he went to one of the islands around the harbor and took a walk for twenty minutes.

The
Tartar
also put in months of patrolling, “basically hammering back and forth in this unfriendly sea,” an officer said, speaking
of months of “gales endured on the open bridge.” It was “very dull, soul-destroying” work. Soon the
Tartar
had established two records: she was the first destroyer to spend 200 days at sea in World War II, and she was the first to have run 100,000 nautical miles since the beginning of the war. This comforted the crew members but little. Thought one:

You don’t know what it was like, what with the cold and the wet and all. Sometimes, every time you jumped out of your hammock you’d land in water up to your knees. You were cold and wet and tired and hungry and scared and sick. You were always being thrown about. Sometimes you couldn’t stand upright for weeks on end. It was awful. And you’d think, “I’ll never go back to this.” And when you were on leave, at home, and it was almost up, you’d think of your mates, and you’d think, “I can’t let them down”—and you’d go back.

The raid on the
Lauenburg
was a change from the routine. “It was a welcome relief to be doing a particular thing,” one officer said. The men did not know their target’s name, or the secret purpose of the attack, only that they were going after a trawler.

After skirting Jan Mayen, the four-ship flotilla turned due north at 2:40
A.M.
on Saturday, June 28. A few hours later, it swung to northeast by east. At 11:15, the
Nigeria
, the flagship, tested its close-range weapons; the
Tartar
tested her antiaircraft pom-poms.

Burrough, meanwhile, reconsidered his plans. He had intended a sweep from west to east, like the one that had worked so well with the
München.
But the position of a fog bank, and the presence of icebergs, meant that this course would require the ships to steam through the ice in thick fog. So Burrough decided instead on a south–north sweep, hugging the fog bank to port. At 12:08
P.M.
he ordered the ships to form a line abreast west to east, guiding on the
Nigeria
, in this order:
Jupiter, Nigeria
, the
Bedouin, Tartar.
They were to spread out to the limit of visibility or to asdic range, whichever was greater. They were
to close toward the
Nigeria
when fog was sighted ahead and to open out in clear spaces. If they did not find the trawler by the completion of the search—a time to be specified later—the
Nigeria
would signal a new course and speed and then start a new search. Burrough ordered that when the trawler was sighted, the shells fired should not be high-explosive but practice ones set to burst above the target, as these would persuade her crew to abandon ship while not endangering the precious documents that the British were working so hard to obtain. When Skipwith told the chief gunner’s mate, Thomas R. Kelly, a wiry, intelligent hand, that “I would like you to fire at the ship but not hit her,” Kelly cheekily replied, “Christ, that should be easy.”

All the ships had boarding parties made up, with the men given belts and pistols and trained for the job. The
Tartar
’s was composed of some ten tough former merchant seamen who enjoyed a fight and who were under the command of an officer, with Kelly as second in command.

At 1:50
P.M.
, the
Nigeria
altered course to due north. The destroyers followed. At 2:02 Burrough signaled the flotilla to “Spread as previously ordered” and to steer “Course 000 [due north] speed 18 knots” until the first sweep was to end, at 9:30. At 2:15, the destroyers spread out to visibility range—some 6 or 7 miles at the time—and the search began.

Aboard the
Tartar
, Skipwith posted lookouts on the bridge and in the crow’s nest. He announced to his ship’s company, “We’re looking for a weather ship that’s giving the German bombers information to bomb your homes. So keep your eyes skinned for it.” The gunnery control officer, Lieutenant Henry Durrell, a former merchant service officer, offered a pound to the first member of the crew to spot the trawler. He was himself perched in the director tower, a housing high up on the mast for the range finder, and so had a good chance to win his own bet.

A dim sun shone; the air was calm except for an occasional puff; the sea was smooth. The sub-lieutenant, Ludovic Kennedy, was struck
by the incredible clarity of the light and by the metallic look of the water in the Arctic world, different, he felt, from anywhere else. The sky had an icy cast. Patches of fog blew in from the west, hampering visibility, and large bergs and growlers hindered the search.

At 4:11
P.M.
, the
Bedouin
obtained a radio direction-finding bearing of north by east on a transmission made by the unsuspecting trawler. The flotilla kept steaming north. The lookouts swung their heavy binoculars back and forth across their quadrants, arms growing weary, eyes growing tired as they scanned the horizon in hopes of seeing the top of the trawler’s mast. At 5:08 the Admiralty reported that one of its direction-finding stations—at Cupar, in Scotland, some 10 miles west of St. Andrews and almost directly on the meridian of 3° west longitude—had heard the trawler’s transmission on a bearing of due north, which would have put the
Lauenburg
not at 4° west, as previously reported, but at 3°. But at the
Lauenburg
’s latitude, 73° north, the distance between 3° and 4° west is only 17.6 nautical miles, and this difference, at Cupar’s distance of 760 miles, was well within the margin of error of radio direction-finding. So Burrough did not alter course.

Two hours later, at 6:50, with the sun a little south of west and low on the horizon, the
Nigeria
suddenly swung to starboard, due east, perhaps because of fog blowing in from the west. Soon the
Tartar
recognized this change of course and turned as well. At this moment, “Shorty” Allgood, the leading seaman, whose job was to train the director tower on the enemy, sang out. “There’s something behind that iceberg, sir!” he cried. The lookouts peered ahead. A dark blob with a mast emerged from behind one of the bergs. It was 6:59. The blob was bearing just to the left of dead ahead, at a range of 10 miles.

It soon proved to be the trawler. The
Lauenburg
was then 2 miles north of her announced position of 73° north and a little more than 13 miles east of her announced position of 4° west; the
Tartar
, being on the east of the patrol line, was the first to spot her.

On orders, the
Tartar
crew jumped from defense stations to action stations. Skipwith ordered full speed ahead. In the wheelhouse, the
quartermasters at the port and starboard telegraphs rang the engine room. The ship vibrated more strongly to the increased power. White water thrashed at her stern. The
Tartar
spurted ahead. Seven minutes later she signaled, “Possible two trawlers bearing 358° ahead.” The
Bedouin
, too, increased to full speed. Two minutes after the
Tartar
’s message, she had spotted the trawler. She and the
Tartar
raced for the prize.

The
Lauenburg
’s crew had been fearing some unpleasantness ever since the radio operator had reported transmissions so strong that they could have come only from nearby vessels. He also may have determined their bearing using the ship’s direction-finder. Braun and Klarman were on deck when one of the lookouts raised an alarm: he had seen the mast of a warship behind an iceberg to the south. At once Captain Gewald turned the
Lauenburg
to the north and pushed her to her top speed of about 12 knots. The British ships chased her at far greater speed.

On the
Tartar
, Chief Gunner’s Mate Kelly prepared to follow Skipwith’s admonition to fire at the ship but not hit her. He gave high-altitude practice shells, with a dollop of black powder to make a puff, to the two forward twin 4.7-inch guns of his A and B turrets. He worked out the range and the time for these to explode 75 feet above the ship. He set the shells’ 206 fuse—the latest model, with a dial like a clock on which the time from firing to detonation could be set.

The destroyers soon determined the direction of the
Lauenburg
’s flight, and at 7:01 the
Bedouin
signaled, “Enemy’s course 360°,” or due north. Two minutes later she opened fire, and a minute after that the
Tartar
did.

At the same time, the
Tartar
’s radioman, listening on the
Lauenburg
’s usual frequency of 12,040 kilocycles, heard the trawler broadcast the international radio call CT, meaning “You should not come alongside.” The call stopped almost immediately—not that the British would have heeded it anyway. The
Nigeria
began firing her 6-inch guns. The shells from all these ships exploded above or
splashed ahead and to both sides of the
Lauenburg
50 to 100 yards from her, as she steamed frantically away from the on-rushing British. The
Tartar
closed in.

Aboard the
Lauenburg
, the sight of three gray warships racing toward her, foam peeling from their bows, flames bursting from their guns, struck fear into the crew. Some members recognized that the shells being fired were not real—they took them for warning shots—and thus not intended to sink their ship. Thinking at first that they might make a stand, they broke out small arms, mostly automatic pistols, from their grease-paper wrappings. But then the ludicrousness of this attempt overcame them, and they dropped the puny weapons on the mess table. Nor did they attempt to man the feeble deck weapons with which their vessel had been equipped: discretion was the better part of valor.

Gewald and all but two members of the crew climbed into the two lifeboats and quickly rowed as far away from the ship as they could. The two men left on board, including the mate, threw overboard the most precious item on the ship, the Enigma, and then stuffed documents into the coal-burning furnace of a boiler.

The
Tartar
ceased fire at 7:12 and sped toward the
Lauenburg
, coming alongside at almost 32 knots. The two men left aboard offered no resistance and willingly took the destroyer’s lines. By then the order had been given, “Boarding party muster on forecastle.”

The head of the boarding party was the ship’s navigating officer, Lieutenant T. Hugh P. Wilson, nicknamed “Spider,” a brown-eyed, bushy-browed, popular career officer. He was glad to be in the Royal Navy. Like the others in the Senior Service, he felt equal to anyone in the realm; their place in the hierarchy of the establishment assured them of this status, and as officers they were gentlemen. He had joined the
Tartar
at her builders’ and on September 1, 1939, had been promoted to lieutenant, the basic naval rank, which meant that he could serve as officer of the watch on any ship. He had spent much of the war up to the Lofotens raid in tedious patrol duty on the destroyer.
For work in the chart room, which was warm but drafty, and for the long hours on the open bridge, he had sewn a duffel skirt onto his duffel jacket and was thereafter called, whenever he wore it, “the Widow Twankey.” Skipwith and the first lieutenant (the second in command) chose him to command the boarding party probably because they wanted a qualified officer and because he was the next in seniority.

As the
Tartar
and the
Lauenburg
rocked side by side in the slight swell, with the low sunlight diffusing through the haze, the great white wall of the ice gleaming in the distance, and the sounds of the gunfire still echoing in the Britishers’ brains, Wilson looked down from the forecastle and saw that some of his boarding party, under Kelly, its second in command, were clambering over the guard rail onto the trawler. “Come along, Wilson,” he said to himself. “You’re supposed to be in charge of this lot.” And he jumped down onto the trawler.

Unfortunately, the rising and falling of the ships in the swell caused him to misjudge the distance. His left foot struck the fish hold and was bent back against his shin, splitting his boot and pushing the toes back. In pain, he dragged himself up into the chart house and commanded the boarding party from there.

Some of its members checked the sea cocks and found them closed; no other men but the two first seen on deck were aboard. Kelly examined the ship and found her immaculate. The diesels were ticking smoothly: one of the ratings told Kelly they could have run forever. Her generators were running and her lights were on. The boarders found the handguns, still on their grease paper, abandoned on the mess table. There were some ashes in the boiler furnace, but all over the floor of the wheelhouse and chart house was paper. The boarders were wading in it.

Soon after the
Tartar
’s men boarded the
Lauenburg
, the other three warships arrived at the scene, and the
Jupiter
sent over a boat with G.C.&C.S.’s Allon Bacon. He appeared on board the trawler, saw the masses of paper lying about, and said to Wilson, “For God’s sake, man, look at all this material. Pack it up!”