THE LAST GOOD WAR: A Novel (20 page)

There was panicked shouting in German, and the crew began to emerge, hands spread to their sides. Skinner threw the grenade over the side; it sank about five feet, then exploded like a miniature depth charge, sending a spray over the sub's deck. He scampered up the rope ladder.

The U-boat crew followed, under the careful watch of the two seamen with Tommy guns. After five minutes, the whole crew of the sub was up on the deck of the minesweeper, so far as Price could tell; the gun crew had been only too eager to swim up and join their comrades, thus escaping the frigid waters.

Price ordered his men to take the Germans to the mess in the middle of the ship, providing blankets for the shivering gun crew. The mess was a small, windowless room, but submariners were supposed to like cramped, windowless quarters.

Price asked his second-in-command, Sub-Lt. Hempsted, to join him on the bridge.

"What would you do now?" he queried the Sub-Lieutenant.

"Back off, sir, and sink the sub with our deck gun."

"Doesn't that run the risk of further damage to our ship—perhaps enough that we'll never make it back to port? And isn't there a risk that the Germans might have left a skeleton crew aboard, and the sub might slip away in the fog? It's also possible our deck gun was damaged by their shell."

"Granted. But what alternative do we have, sir?"

"We could send someone down into the sub to open the sea cocks, and sink her. We might pick up codebooks on the way."

"I'm not wild about that, sir. The Germans may have set demolition charges, following their standing orders. They'll go off within ten or, at the most, fifteen minutes. Anyone in the sub would be killed."

"Suppose, Hempsted, that you were the U-boat captain. Would you have set the charges?"

"Yes.... Well, maybe. On second thought, I guess not. If we were to back off, the sub might get away on the surface, if it hadn't set the charges—as you've already pointed out, sir."

"Suppose we don't try to back off. We just sit here, talking?"

"Then when the damn charges go off, we'll all be killed—both British and German.” Hempsted's voice was rising. "If I might, sir, I think the time has come to stop talking and do something."

"Ah, but what? That's the problem. I don't think you've answered my question. What would you do if you were the German captain, and you thought we might just sit here?"

Hempsted was now sweating, but realized he would have to answer. "I suppose," he said, calming himself, "that I wouldn't set the charges. It would just mean that everyone would be killed."

"So that, regardless, you wouldn't set the charges?"

"With great respect, captain, I've a feeling you've tricked me somehow."

"I think," said Price, "the time has come for a little social visit with the German captain. Let's see how nervous he is—whether he's expecting explosions at any moment. Go below and ask him to join us. On the way, you might have the cook bring up a bottle of rum and some glasses. And, just for form, we should have an armed guard posted outside the door."

The rum, glasses, guard, and German captain all arrived within a few moments.

"We seem to be in an interesting situation," began Price, hoping that the German spoke English. He did.

"The fortunes of war," replied the German with a shrug. "But it's your move. What do you intend to do?"

"Nice question," said Price, pouring three drinks—a large one for the German. "But before we get to it, I've never met a U-boat captain before. Why did you choose this line of work? Seems a trifle dangerous.”

Price was observing the captain closely, looking for any signs of nervousness.

"Because..." replied the captain, somewhat stiffly, "because this was the best way to contribute to a German victory. Our cause is important. I am not."

"You expect to win the war?"

"
Natürlich.
We crushed the Poles in short order. You decadent Western democracies will soon experience the full force of German arms. Certainly
you
don't expect to win."

"Well, actually, we do."

"Then we'll just have to agree to disagree," replied the German. "But get used to being hungry. With our U-boats, we'll cut off your supplies.” He then proceeded with a detailed and surrealistic tale of what the Germans were about to do to British shipping.

"If you do win, what sort of a Europe will you have, with Hitler in control?"

"A disciplined, civilized Europe. Our historic mission is to save Western Civilization from the Bolsheviks."

Price had been periodically glancing at his watch. The German had not. If he was nervously expecting a series of explosions, he was keeping his concern well hidden. They had now been talking almost 20 minutes.

"As you said, we'll just have to disagree," replied Price, signaling for the guard to come and take the captain back down below. The cocktail hour was over.

Price turned to Hempsted. "The twenty minutes are up. The time has come for a boarding party."

"Who is to lead it, sir?"

"I was rather thinking of you, Hempsted. The boarding party will have two objectives—to get any codebooks and other communications equipment we can salvage. We need an officer who has a good idea of what to look for. That's you.

“The second objective, once all the intelligence has been collected, will be to open two sea cocks—one toward the bow and one near the stern, so that the sub will settle evenly. Don't look so worried, Hempsted. It will take you 10 minutes to get the boarding party together; there isn't much chance of a boom after that. In the unlikely event that charges do go off, we'll all be dead anyhow, so you don't really have much to worry about."

Price was exaggerating. Even if the U-boat's charges were powerful enough to sink the minesweeper—which was by no means clear—the crew would be able to take to lifeboats. Even then, however, their chances of survival would be uncertain, and the little exaggeration was a way to spur Hempsted to action.

"Four men should be enough for the boarding party," Price continued. “They should be able to find the radio room quickly. Bring anything that looks the least bit interesting. Oh, by the way, you might like to know. We don't have much choice. I've received a damage report. The engineer thinks our ship is still seaworthy. However, he's doubtful that it will be if we back off, inflicting more damage."

The boarding party must have set a record. They completed their job in 15 minutes, bringing back what was apparently some sort of coding machine, with a keyboard and miscellaneous wiring, together with several codebooks and arms full of papers.

The U-33 settled slowly and evenly below the waves, and
HMS Gleaner
headed back to port. Shortly after it arrived, Lt.-Cmdr. Price was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for sinking the U-boat. In private, he was warmly congratulated, not only for getting German code materials, but for doing so without the prisoners knowing. They were all locked in the mess.

Within a few months, Turing's new bombe, "Victory," came on line. With it, and with the wheels and other materials recovered from U-33, Turing and his associates were able to break Dolphin—the Enigma key used by U-boats—for several days in April, although there was a delay of several weeks in doing so. They were also able to break other German messages, including some German diplomatic traffic.

They were beginning to succeed, and their triumphs continued even after the German Navy introduced three more wheels. With the new ones—numbers 6, 7, and 8—they added a nasty twist. These three wheels moved the next wheel two notches after each revolution, not just one.

For the wizards of Bletchley Park, a nagging worry accompanied their successes. The Germans could be counted on to complicate Enigma even more.

T
hey had an even more immediate concern. A decrypted diplomatic message, from Germany's ambassador in Rome back to Berlin, contained a shock—verbatim quotations from Churchill's communications with Roosevelt. How could transatlantic traffic be so vulnerable? The hunt for the leak was on. The German message itself contained a clue. Since it originated in Rome, an Italian was somehow privy to the most secret of communications.

The culprit, it turned out, was a cipher clerk in the U.S. Embassy in London. Concerned that Roosevelt was eagerly and treacherously drawing the United States into war, he was collecting messages between the two leaders; he intended to expose FDR's duplicity by leaking them to Congress. But he made the mistake of showing them to sympathetic friends in Britain. One gave them to an official in the Italian embassy in London; they were transmitted to Rome.

In tracking down the clerk, the British searched his apartment—a violation of diplomatic norms. But the evidence they discovered was damning: not only stolen documents, but a duplicate key to the embassy's code room. The British police thereupon escorted him to Ambassador Joe Kennedy's residence. Kennedy had some sympathy with the clerk's views; he, too, resented the way Roosevelt was conniving to draw America into the war. But he could not abide the clerk's treacherous act. He waived diplomatic immunity and the clerk was on his way to Brixton Prison.

H
itler's invasion of Denmark and Norway, in April 1940, marked the end of the
Sitzkrieg
—the Phony War. Although the Germans quickly occupied those two countries, the mood at BP reflected a degree of grim satisfaction. As the enemy moved north, they introduced a new Enigma key. Within five days, the gnomes of BP had broken it. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, eagerly devoured the intercepts. He had already made one intelligence blunder, disregarding the warning of his naval attaché in Copenhagen that German warships were headed for Norway. As a result, he had been taken by surprise when the Germans struck. He had no intention of repeating his mistake.

He used the flood of information to raise the price paid by Hitler for his northern victory. British warships intercepted a German landing force near Narvik. Ten German destroyers, carrying a large fraction of the landing troops, were trapped and sunk in the Narvik fjords. In other actions near Norway, Hitler lost three cruisers, and the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were put out of action, at least temporarily, by British torpedoes.

What BP did not know was that the German intelligence service—the
Beobachtungs Dienst
or
B-Dienst
—had even more reason for satisfaction. They had broken British naval codes. Their intercepts had eased Hitler's concerns over the risky thrust across the North Sea, and had thus opened the door for the successful invasion of Norway.

With the end of the Norwegian campaign, Alastair, Anna, and others at BP had been half expecting the German radio traffic to ease off. But nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary, it intensified rapidly.

With the heavy new traffic came a shock. In most traffic, the inscrutable six were cut down to three letters. German operators were no longer repeating the wheel settings; BP had lost the cornerstone of its operations. From now on, codebreakers would be dependent on the incompetence of the German operators—on the sillies and other cribs—and on powerful new machines.

The following days were packed with history, particularly May 10, 1940. At dawn, German armor thrust westward through Belgium toward France. That evening, a troubled House of Commons replaced the ineffectual Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain with Winston Churchill. Although Churchill gave up his position as First Lord of the Admiralty, he signaled his intention to remain deeply involved in the daily details of the war. He retained the position of Defence Minister for himself.

Alastair decided that the time had come for Anna to move; he wanted a British national in the office next to him. Yvonne Snow, an equally youthful math graduate of Cambridge, was his choice; she had been working with Welchman and others in Hut 6, poring over sillies and other cribs. The two young women switched jobs; Anna would now be in Hut 6.

Although there was some gossip that this was a demotion for Anna, she took it in good grace, particularly as Alastair had warned her ahead of time that her position was temporary. She had no reason to be jealous of Yvonne; in fact the two became close friends, and had lunch together at least once a week.

At their first lunch, just three days after the job switch, Yvonne seemed insecure; the flood of information was overwhelming. “How in the world were you able to keep your head above water?”

Anna was reassuring. “The first week's always the worst; hang in there. Two main things. Try at least to glance at every paper that comes your way; don't let anything critical slip through your fingers. But then focus on the few issues that seem most important. Don't spread yourself too thin. Selectivity, selectivity. That will come with time; don't worry about it for the first few weeks. For the immediate future: try not to appear flustered, regardless of how you feel.”

A few days later, Yvonne was already feeling more confident. “Great advice. Alastair has already referred to 'the cool Miss Snow.' Gave me something of a thrill, although I do hope he won't beat that phrase into the ground.... He seems like a great person to work for. Generous—willing to give others credit.”

“An uncommon virtue, but the golden rule for any administrator. In return, people give their best.”

Yvonne seemed eager for more information about her new boss; Anna obliged. “He's more than a bit absent-minded, but that's true of almost everyone here…. It's a natural result, thinking hard on a difficult, engrossing problem. You block out everything else.”

“So I have to be careful. I can't assume he's heard, just because I've told him something?”

“Exactly. It helps to make eye contact, to see if he's actually receiving. Really important things should be mentioned again, several hours later, to make sure he heard. He doesn't mind, even if he did hear the first time, but it does take a bit of tact.”

“He has a lot of experience in codebreaking?”

“Right back to the First World War. He worked with 'Blinker' Hall at the Admiralty's cryptography office. Alastair could see how important the work was, and kept the codebreaking operation alive during the lean years between the wars.”