Table Of ContentVoices of the
CODE
BREAKERS
Personal accounts of the secret
heroes of World War II
Michael Paterson
Foreword by Robert Harris
David and Charles
This book is dedicated to Sandy Malcolm,
whose wisdom and friendship have been an
inspiration over more than twenty years.
A DAVID & CHARLES BOOK
Copyright © David & Charles Limited 2007, 2008
David Be Charles is an F+W PU,blic3tions Inc. company
4700 East Galbraith Road
Cincinnati, OH 45236
First published in 2007
This UK paperback edition 2008
Telt( and illustrations copyright © Michael Paterson 2007, 2008
Michael Paterson has asserted his light to be identified as author orchis work in accordarlce with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act, 1988.
All nghts reserved. No part of chis publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or rransmined, in any fonn
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, by photocopy;ng, recording or otherwise, without prior pennission in writing
from the publisher.
The publisher has made every reasonable effort to contact the copyright holdl!rs of images and tl!)(ts. If there have been any
omissions, however, David & Charles will be pleased to insert the appropriate acknowledgement at a subsequent priming.
A catalogue record for this book is available lTom the British library.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7153-2280-2 hardback
ISBN·10: 0-7153-2280-X hardback
ISBN-13: 978-0-715)-2719-7 paperback
ISBN-10: 0-7153-2719·4 paperback
Printed & bound by Creative Print Be Design Group, Ebbw Vale, Wales, UK
for David & Charles
Brunei House, Newton Abbot, Devon
Commissioning Editor: Ruth Binney
Editor: Emily Pitcher
Assistant Editor: Demelza Hookway
Project Editors: Valerie Porter & Beverley Jollands
Senior Designer: Tracey Woodward
Picture Researcher: Tehmina Boman
Indexer: Ingrid lock
Production Controller: Kelly Smith
Visit our website at www.davidandcharles.co.uk
David & Charles books are available ITom all good bookshops; alternatively you can contact our Orderline on 0870
9908222 or write to us at FREEPOST EX2 110, O&C Direct, Newton Abbot, TQ12 4ZZ (no stamp required UK only); US
customers call 800-289-0963 and Canadian customers call 800-840-5220.
CONTENTS
Foreword 6
Introduction 9
1 Codes and War 12
2 Bletchley Park 54
3 1940: A Fateful Year 92
4 Battle of the Atlantic 118
5 North Africa and Italy 152
6 The Resistance 196
7 Towards Victory in Europe 250
8 War in the Pacific 286
Chronology 336
Bibliography and Sources 339
Index 342
Acknowledgments 351
Picture Credits 352
FOREWORD
George Steiner once hailed the British code breaking effort at
Bletchley Park as 'the single greatest achievement of Britain during
1939-45, perhaps during this century as a whole'.
The claim will doubtless strike many as ridiculous. Surely, however
precise the information about the enemy which Bletchley provided,
it would have been useless without the courage of the sailors, soldiers
and airmen who had to act upon it? True; nevertheless, I still think
Steiner's dramatic assertion is justified. While all the major
combatants in the Second World War had navies, armies and
airforces often as good as, if not superior, to ours, none had
anything to compare with our achievements in intelligence.
Bletchley was Britain's singular contribution, not just to victory,
but to the development of the modern world.
I met my first pair of Bletchley Park veterans by accident over
dinner with a friend's parents in 1980, when I was twenty-three.
Typically, they were the daughter of an earl, and a grammar school
boy from Keighley, who had gone on to become a famous historian.
By the end of the war, he had helped compile a set of records of the
Luftwaffe, so voluminous they had to be housed in an aircraft
hangar, and which eventually proved to be more detailed than those
held by Goering's Air Ministry in Berlin. She had operated a Type-X
decryption machine - a simple clerical job - but the nature of her
work meant that, at nineteen, she held in her head the greatest
British secret of the war: a fact of which she was acutely conscious,
she said, every time she ventured out in public.
I listened, enraptured, to their stories, and fifteen years later wrote
a novel, Enigma, which tried to convey something of the atmosphere of
this haunting place, which had cut across the traditional barriers ofs ex
6
Foreword
and class. I had the good fortune to conduct my research at a time
when some of the key players were still alive and able to answer
questions: Sir Stuart Milner-Barry, former junior chess champion of
Great Britain, and subsequently head of Bletchley's Hut 6; Sir Harry
Hinsley, expert in signal~ traffic analysis, who later became the official
historian of British intelligence in the Second World War; and -
perhaps the most memorable of all- Joan Murray, one of Bletchley's
few women codebreakers, who had ,worked on the U-boat ciphers in
Hut 8, had been briefly engaged to Alan Turing, and who was now
living, widowed and solitary, in a small house in north Oxford.
All these three are now dead; and the sad truth is that within the
next decade virtually everyone who played a significant role in
Bletchley will have gone, too. Hence the need for this book, which
skilfully draws together the voices of the past. The wartime code
breakers not only produced the most astonishing cornucopia of
intelligence in the history of warfare (at its peak, Bletchley was
decrypting 10,000 enemy signals per day); they not only pioneered
the development of the computer, and so helped give birth to the
information age, they also represented the triumph of a peculiarly
British blend of genius, discretion, amateurism and eccentricity,
which seems to be vanishing with them.
Whenever I think ofBletchley, I think ofs hift-changes at midnight
and chilly wooden huts, of glowing orange valves and clanking
electro-magnetic machinery; I think of Alan Turing cycling to work in
his gas mask during the hayfever season, and of sunlit games of
rounders in front of that hideous Victorian mansion; I think of chess-
players, crossword-puzzle addicts, Egyptologists, numismatists,
philologists, lexicographers, musicologists - in short, oft hat particular
kind of quiet, self-absorbed, recondite intellect, which is often
overlooked or even mildly despised in the modern world, but which,
for a few years, came together in a suburban park in the dreary
midlands of England, and helped save western civilisation.
Robert Harris
INTRODUCTION
Thirty years after World War II ended, a relaxation of British
Government security strictures brought to light one of its most
important secrets. It was revealed, to understandable astonishment,
that the war had been won not just by military genius or by the
dogged courage of the Allied Armed Forces - though both had of
course been of vast significance - bur by groups of obscure or
unknown people who found out in advance what the enemy
intended to do, and passed on this knowledge to those who
commanded the armies, the fleets and the bomber formations.
Vital information that turned the tide of battle in the North
African desert or on the Pacific Ocean proved to have been obtained
not by the skill and bravery of spies, or by miraculous coincidence,
bur by the plodding and unglamorous work of operatives who read
the enemy's coded messages. Th~ result has been, of necessity, a re-
evaluation of reputations and a rewriting of history.
The ability to gain access to the very thought processes of the
enemy was a major epic of ingenuity, and a great adventure. What
makes it even more remarkable is the fact that the people who
carried it out (and there were thousands of them) received no
public recognition for their contribution to the war effort, and
were forbidden to tell even their families what they had been doing
throughout the long years of conflict. Without a single known
exception, they faithfully kept this silence until, an entire generation
later, they were permitted by the government to admit their
involvement. The story of these cryptographers has considerable
bearing on our own postwar world, for in the process of breaking
the secret codes· of Nazi Germany they created the compurer as we
know it today.
9
The breaking of German codes began long before the start of
war in 1939. For almost a decade, cryptanalysts in Poland had
studied and replicated the Enigma machine, which was used by
German armies from the 1920s until Hitler's defeat. Thanks to
their skill and perseverance the Western democracies, France and
Britain, were in possession of working copies of Enigma by the time
hostilities began. Though Poland itself was dismembered and
conquered, it was thus able to make a contribution to eventual
victory that was beyond calculation.
As for the Axis powers, it was fortunate that they took a view
of cryptography that was both disdainful and complacent. By
tradition, the German military mind did not approve of, or
appreciate, such skulduggery. Throughout the war, senior officers
therefore sometimes ignored opportunities to make use of
intelligence that could have been of value. They also largely took
it for granted that their communications were secure, and left it
at that.
Their greatest disadvantage of all, however, was the nature of
Adolf Hitler. Having grown accustomed to a sense of his own
infallibility, the Fuhrer saw no need to waste time or effort on
cryptanalysis, and with few exceptions he failed to take it seriously.
He had, after all, conquered Europe by relying on his own hunches.
Swift and decisive action, not painstaking intelligence gathering,
was the key to success. Hitler's entourage, and his General Staff,
could not have retained their positions without sharing, at least
publicly, this belief in his genius and thus by implication regarding
intelligence as unnecessary. The Fiihrer was provided, by several
organizations, with a great many decrypted Allied messages. These
were often highly informative. Hitler, however, committed a classic
error by failing to read them objectively. His mind already made up,
he would dismiss data that did not fit with his views. He once
scrawled across a dossier dealing with Soviet economic recovery the
comment: This cannot be.' It probably did not, in any case, help
the German cause that Admiral Canaris, the head of the Abwehr
10
Introduction
(the German secret service), was anti-Nazi. The Japanese, a similarly
militaristic nation, largely took the same view.
It was fortunate that the Allies - the Poles, the French, the
British and the Americans - were untrammelled by such a mindset.
They had appreciated all along the value of overheard chatter or
routine reports. They had the imagination and the flexibility to
assemble, analyse, distribute and act upon signals intelligence, and
thus to make their enemies' voices a weapon in their own armoury.
Because of an ongoing need for secrecy, the attainments of wartime
cryptanalysts could not be recognized. A simple but heartfelt
tribute, however, was paid to them by one British general, Lord
Gort, who told the head of the Ultra organization:
I think there are many people who would bless your
codebreakers if they knew what they had done.
The purpose of this book is to tell you what they did.
11
1
CODES AND WAR
The ether was open. Into it all nations could discharge
messages of the highest importance. Equally important was
the complicating factor that all nations might, if they
wished, receive or stop these messages. We were all involved
in the problem of. safeguarding our own information, of
discovering and nullifying that of the enemy. It was not
enough merely to prevent the latter from giving messages
to its own forces and allies. It was vital that we should
receive those messages and turn them to our own purpose'.
Parallel with the open conflict that raged between 1939 and 1945
there were other, hidden wars, and what they all had in common
was that they were wars of communication, in which success
depended on a flow of concealed and closely guarded information.
Sometimes this meant a smuggled written message, at others a
secretly transmitted wireless signal, or weeks and months of
eavesdropping on the radio traffic of the enemy.
Many thousands of people took part in these secret wars. Some
trained for long periods to carry out sophisticated campaigns of
espionage; others committed a single impulsive or premeditated act
of defiance. One of these hidden conflicts was the struggle of
underground forces against the occupying Germans or Japanese.
Another was the battle to obtain secrets, or carry out sabotage, by
the spies who served both sides. A third was the war waged by
armies of clerks, typists, linguists, analysts and assorted academics
to discover the intentions - and weaknesses - of the enemy by
breaking its codes. In Britain, it was only in 1974 that the publication
; Hugh Cleland Hoy, 40 OB, or How the War Was Won
12
