The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (16 page)

In fact, the entire premise is flawed; but it none the less emphasises a wider truth about the work of Bletchley. For as soon as Enigma was broken, it became utterly vital that the Germans should never suspect that this was the case. As many veterans have pointed out, if German Intelligence suspected that its communications had been breached, they would instantly have been rendered much more complex and potentially impenetrable.

There was the later occasion, for instance, of the sinking of the
Bismarck
in 1941. The truth of the matter was that the German warship had been tracked after Bletchley had succeeded in cracking certain codes. But for the Germans not to suspect this, a pantomime was necessary. And so, hours before the ship was sunk, the RAF arranged for four reconnaissance planes to conduct a survey of that area of the ocean. When one of the planes ‘spotted’ the
Bismarck
, it was spotted in turn by the ship’s crew, who alerted High Command. Thus it looked as if the vessel had been located by chance. A number of Bletchley’s other intelligence tips also had to be made to look like the inspired sleuthing of spies and agents on the ground.

But the theory proposing that Coventry was sacrificed omits certain essential details. First, Churchill had left London for the country that afternoon before getting the message. When he was told that there might be a vast raid on London, his car turned back to the city. It was only when he returned to Whitehall in the evening that it was confirmed that the target was to be Coventry.

Moreover, the jammers of the navigation beams were apparently set to the wrong frequency, an error that was not corrected until the following month. It also happened to be the case that Coventry did have anti-aircraft defences. But in the face of such an onslaught, such defences would always be of only limited use. ‘Coventry could never have been evacuated in time,’ recalled WAAFY Service operative Aileen Clayton. ‘It would certainly have been a physical impossibility to get all the guns and searchlights needed for defence, as well as the fire engines and other equipment, moved from other places to the target zone … with the information that was available to us, there was no way in which the city and its people could have been saved from that suffering.’
³

And so the centre of Coventry was consumed in flames, the molten lead of the gutters pouring hissing into the streams, the cathedral transformed into russet-glowing ruins. Some 558 men, women and children were killed, and thousands more were injured.

It is a subject that occupies Bletchley veterans to this day. Oliver Lawn – who, it should be remembered, worked on decrypting messages concerning German bomber flight paths – still thinks there is some ambiguity about the issue: ‘You will find people going on both sides of that argument. Now that’s a typical case. But there are other cities where the codes were broken in time and the bombs were diverted. Coventry is still controversial.

‘The head of our section – Stuart Milner-Barry – felt that it was Churchill,’ adds Mr Lawn. ‘Milner-Barry felt it was
not
a delay in breaking the code.’

Another who took this view was Captain Frederick Winter botham, who was there on the afternoon when it became apparent
that the city would be bombed, and wrote that there was still a chance that a decision to evacuate Coventry could be taken:

Oliver Lawn still finds himself musing on the subject: ‘There were others who took other views. We will never know.’ Perhaps so. But this was not the only instance in which Churchill and Bletchley Park were suspected of having connived to withhold information. Years after the Japanese launched their devastating surprise attack upon the US base of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in December 1941, thus
bringing the Americans into the war, it was suggested by some sources that Bletchley Park, through its work on the ‘Purple’ Japanese codes, had decrypted vital messages concerning Japanese military intentions. The allegation was that having seen such intelligence, Churchill ordered it to be suppressed so that the Americans would gain no advance warning, thus ensuring that the attack would bring the USA into the conflict.

In fact, British intelligence was anticipating an attack upon Malaya – there was no forecast of any strike against any American base. And there is one further point in the defence of Bletchley and the Prime Minister. During bombing raids carried out on British cities in the early months of 1941, the business of meddling with Luftwaffe navigational beams was much more successful; one night in May, twenty-three German fighters were brought down on Humberside. And a ferocious attack on Derby – planned to be on the same scale as Coventry – was largely thwarted.

Even so, in such situations it was often a matter of bluff and counter-bluff. According to a recent work by Rebecca Ratcliff, there were times when the cryptographers would receive irrefutable evidence of forthcoming bombing raids in certain locations.

Finally, Bletchley veteran Roy Jenkins – later Lord Jenkins of Hillhead and biographer of Churchill – observed that the attack on Coventry, while ‘shattering its monuments and shops’, ironically ‘did less damage to its aircraft factories’. He also pointed out that a raid that took place over Birmingham barely a week later was far more lethal, resulting in 1,353 deaths.
⁶

The same hideous moral dilemma implied in the treatment of Bletchley’s information about the raid on Coventry was to apply throughout the war. By the spring of 1941, the Blitz was largely over, as Hitler turned his full attention east towards Russia. But there were still those in British Intelligence who believed that a Nazi invasion of British shores was imminent, and it suited German Intelligence to give such false indications to divert attention away from genuine plans.

It has also been said that Churchill and the British government knew of the systematic extermination of the Jews which by 1941 was gathering horrifying pace, with vast numbers of men, women and children being sent in cattle trucks to Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka and Sobibor. In August 1941, there were seventeen decrypts, over the period of eight days, of German police messages; they concerned the shootings of thousands of Jews.

In a radio broadcast given on 25 August, Churchill said: ‘Whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands, literally scores of thousands, of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police-troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions in the 16th century, there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale … we are in the presence of a crime without a name.’

So why did Churchill not mention the Jews? The reason was that
to have done so would have been to reveal to the Germans, once again, that their messages had been intercepted. It was all Churchill felt that he could do to let it be known – at last – that the Allies were aware of the multiplying atrocities, and would do everything in their power to stop them.

A little later, Bletchley was able to break into the codes dealing with German railways – the same railway lines that led to the concentration camps. To a certain extent, they were able to glean from these messages the forced deportation of waves of thousands upon thousands of people, the lines leading inexorably to these places of death. As some have seen it, railway lines are easy targets for bombers – they glitter in the moonlight. Should the Allies not at least have tried to cripple this infrastructure, to try and bring the deportations to an end?

The answer, it seems, was the same: nothing could be done that would betray the Bletchley secret. In any case, such efforts would have been little more than a temporary hindrance to the Nazis; a railway line can be easily repaired. It was more fruitful to aim for larger military and industrial targets. The only way that the horror could be halted – no matter how fine and detailed the intelligence – was by halting Hitler himself.

All this demonstrates Bletchley Park’s fearful responsibilities. From 1942, the Abwehr section of Bletchley Park found itself decrypting tables which turned out to be SS returns on the numbers of people entering and dying in the camps; mass extermination reduced to chilly, efficient bureaucracy. To know exactly what the enemy is planning – to know just how many hundreds, thousands of lives will be extinguished, to know such things in advance from secret messages – now seems a burden too great to imagine.

Most of the codebreakers, of course, possessed no such knowledge, at least on a day-to-day basis; they dealt with fragments, fragments of fragments, random messages from hither and thither, before handing on the baton to the following shift. Nevertheless, they knew well the import of what they were doing. And for the
senior codebreakers, and those who ran Bletchley Park, it must, at times, have been almost unbearable. As Josh Cooper’s son Michael was later to recall of his father: ‘His was the heroism of the long, hard slog and the burden of ugly, painful secrets.’ We might also see traces of this strain in the terrible illness later suffered by Dilly Knox.

In domestic terms, given the sheer number of German bombing raids above central England – and the sheer profusion of railway lines around Bletchley at the time, pointing north, south, east and west – it seems something of a miracle that the Park itself only received two German bombs throughout the war. Both came on a single night – the same night, by coincidence, that Coventry was bombed for a second time, 21 November 1940.

The adjacent site of Elmers School, which had once housed Gordon Welchman, took a direct hit on the building’s telephone exchange and typing room. Another bomb from the same drop came down between the house and Hut 4, and was said to have lifted the naval Enigma hut off its foundations. In truth, it may not have taken that much of an explosion to achieve this.

And another bomb landed in the stable yard, just yards away from the Cottage, where Dilly Knox and Mavis Lever were at work on the Italian naval Enigma. This bomb, however, failed to go off. A couple of others apparently fell and failed to go off as well. They are still somewhere in the grounds of the Park, though no one is quite sure where …

It has been noted by some that even though Bletchley was utterly secret, and therefore there was no specific reason to bomb it, the place was still incredibly lucky; for any returning bomber who still had some load to discharge might, on a cloudless night, have been drawn by the silvery lines of the rails running through the town, and used those as a target. Indeed, given Bletchley’s geographical centrality, it is astonishing that it – and its associated signals stations across the county – weren’t simply targeted randomly.

As a postscript, Sheila Lawn has a haunting memory of the nights a little later in the war when the Luftwaffe once more turned its attentions to London. It was one such night that made her realise just how blessed Bletchley was to have escaped such a furious onslaught.

‘I do remember that the bombing of London resumed in 1944. That was when I was billeted with this elderly lady in the village. Now, I had a very nice bedroom and it looked over fifty miles, to London. And when they resumed the bombing, I could watch, at night, what looked like an amazing firework display. Flames leaping up and explosions in the sky. And I thought, the people who are there, how brave they are. What are they going to find in the morning? If they are alive in the morning.’

The disconcerting truth was that by the autumn of 1940, any progress made by Bletchley Park – no matter how ingenious – was still frustratingly slow. While there had been some success with military and air force codes, a way into the naval Enigma remained agonisingly elusive, as the German U-boat wolf packs threatened the convoys in ever more serious numbers. But the part the decoders had played in the Battle of Britain was merely a taster; as the work went on, it was not too long before Bletchley’s contribution to the war effort started to have a lasting, definitive impact on the course of events.