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Authors: Hervie Haufler

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British leaders knew they had two other secret advantages to bolster their defense. One was the superiority of British radar, which enabled the RAF to avoid having to fly continuous patrols and instead to send up its fighters only when the time was right to intercept the German bombers. The other was signals intelligence, most particularly the decryptions of the Luftwaffe's Red code, which was providing a steady stream of information about the Germans' plans, their order of battle and the equipment they would hurl against Britain.

For the month after Dunkirk, the German air force launched only scattered raids against Britain's southern coast and shipping in the Channel. Hitler had never anticipated having to invade Britain. He refused to give up hope that the people would come to their senses and send Churchill to the conference table to negotiate for peace. Churchill fanned the embers of this delusion by seeming to encourage the appeasers and pro-Fascist elements among the British and in neutral countries. He also directed that plans be made to relocate the government in Canada to carry on resistance from there in case Britain was invaded and occupied. Historical revisionists have interpreted his actions at this critical juncture as proof that he was, in actuality, more ready to capitulate and negotiate than admiring biographers have admitted.

More likely, Churchill was merely being pragmatic, keeping open all the options, even the grimmest ones. He was also playing for time. Every day that Hitler could be put off allowed the British to step up their preparations to meet the onslaught. Under the energetic direction of the press mogul Lord Beaverbrook, as minister of Aircraft Production, British industry was currently turning out more warplanes than the Germans.

Hitler's attitude toward the invasion of Britain remained ambivalent. After waffling on the issue through June and into July, he sent to his commanders his Directive 16, which began, "Since England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, still shows no signs of readiness for rapprochement, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against her, and if necessary to carry it out." The "if necessary" still allowed room for the slow-witted British to come to terms.

Three days later, Hitler went before the Reichstag in Berlin and delivered a speech in which he offered his "peace plan" to the British. Speaking "as a victor," he could see "no reason why this war must go on. We should like to avert the sacrifices that claim millions."

In meetings with his generals and admirals to plan the invasion, Hitler appeared only half attentive. He gave the impression of thinking more about attacking the Soviet Union than about invading Britain. His antipathy toward the Bolsheviks had intensified when Stalin exploited Germany's preoccupation with the West by annexing Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. General Brauchitsch told Liddell Hart after the war that the invasion of Britain "was not pushed forward. Hitler scarcely seemed to bother about it at all—contrary to his usual way—and the staffs went on with their planning without any inclination. It was all regarded as a 'war game.'"

The German army and navy spent weeks squabbling over how to organize the invasion. In the end, as Churchill wrote, "Both the older services passed the buck to Reichsmarshal Göring."

Göring was delighted to take on the responsibility. He assured Hitler that in a matter of a few weeks, the Luftwaffe would wipe the skies of the RAF, clearing the way for the army and navy to land troops on England's southern shores.

BP learned of the operation, code-named Seelowe, or "Sea Lion," when Göring passed on the gist of Hitler's directive to the generals commanding his air fleets. Winterbotham has claimed that it was the relay of this signal to 10 Downing Street that prompted Churchill to go before Parliament and make his ringing promise to "defend every village, every town and every city . . . we would rather see London in ruins and ashes than that it should be tamely and abjectly enslaved."

British intelligence employed a wide range of resources in order to discern German intentions. Young women who were fluent in German joined units that were listening in to conversations between GAF pilots and ground control centers as well as between pilots themselves—conversations that quite often gave away that day's intended target. The Cheadle intercept station took on the added responsibility of breaking lower-level nonmachine codes such as that used by the GAF Air Safety Service for airfield takeoff, approach and landing control. This station also kept track of the GAF's navigational aid beacons—the turning on of these beacons warned when a raid was about to start, and their sequence indicated the direction it was headed. Coast watchers phoned in their observations. All this was funneled into Bletchley Park, which added to the mix its own decryptions of the Red code.

These resources gave chilling evidence of how Hitler's directive was being carried out. Cheadle's low-level Sigint reported when GAF bomber and fighter squadrons were moved from their bases in Norway and Denmark to new airfields in Holland and France. Decrypts of Enigma messages warned of GAF units being rested and refitted for the attack on Britain, of airfields being extended to accommodate bombers, of dive-bomber squadrons being assembled, of long-range guns being positioned to fire across the Channel, and of the postponement of a ceremonial parade in Paris so that those troops could instead be shifted to the north coast. Photoreconnaissance showed barges being hurried to French ports.

Digesting these inflows, Bletchley sent its reports to the mansion outside London housing the RAF Command Headquarters. The hub of Britain's defensive air operations was a giant gridded map over which young women with croupier-like poles followed instructions to move symbols marking the course of aircraft squadrons, both German and British, keeping the onlooking officers abreast of the fast-changing aerial scene.

Hinsley has recounted one other significant contribution GC&CS made before the offensive began. Britain's Air Ministry had to estimate the number of German bombers available for the battle, and the bomb capacity they could be expected to deliver. The ministry had believed the RAF faced 2,500 bombers capable of dropping 4,800 tons of bombs per day. These alarming figures prompted the preparation of disaster evacuation and hospitalization measures. BP decrypts scaled down the estimates to a more realistic 1,250 bombers and 1,800 tons. The Air Ministry described the information as "heaven-sent" and felt able to "view the situation much more confidently than was possible a month ago."

The Battle of Britain began on July 10, 1940, when the GAF sent some seventy planes against British targets. The lines were drawn, pitting Goring firmly against Britain's Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding.

Dowding was a former Great War pilot who had risen to be a squadron commander and a brigadier. Frederick Pile, who commanded Britain's antiaircraft defenses during World War II, wrote of him that he was "a difficult man, a self-opinionated man, a most determined man, and a man who knew more than anybody about all aspects of aerial warfare."

Dowding clearly perceived that this would be a war of attrition, of whether the RAF could outlast the GAF. He wrote in his diary that time favored the British "if we can only hold on." To his advantages in radar and signals intelligence he added his own shrewd tactics for holding on. Instead of sending his Spitfires and Hurricanes aloft in masses to meet the German fleets head-on, which was what Goring wanted in order to shoot down more RAF planes, Dowding dispatched his squadrons piecemeal, ordering relatively small numbers of planes into the air at a time. His strategy gave his fliers the advantage of slipping in among the German formations and downing more planes than the RAF lost. Dowding's methods were hotly contested by other RAF commanders, but he alone among them was privy to BP decrypts, and these confirmed that his staggering of RAF planes and pilots was working. While reducing RAF casualties, it increasingly frustrated the Germans, especially Hitler.

At the outset of the battle, Goring's first goal was not only to shoot down RAF planes but also to destroy airfields, raze hangars, topple radar towers and smash aircraft-producing factories. In the days of July and August his generals sent wave after wave of German aircraft against these targets. Without a German Ultra to inform him, Göring never knew how close he came to succeeding. The RAF losses in planes and crews were so heavy, and their remaining pilots so exhausted from conducting as many as seven sorties a day, that by the end of the first week in September, Fighter Command feared it would hold out only three more weeks. Dowding confided to a colleague, "What we need now is a miracle."

The miracle came as, abruptly, the Germans changed their tactics. Their reason for the change came about because of a blunder. The crews of two German bombers on a night run became disoriented and dropped their bombs on London, going against Hitler's orders to avoid hitting English cities. Churchill retaliated by sending English bombers over Berlin. Hitler, in one of his rages that often led him to make bad decisions, ordered Goring to leave off his attacks against RAF facilities and focus future bombing runs on London.

As a consequence, just at the point when the Luftwaffe might well have gained dominance over the RAF, its planes changed course. The incessant pounding of London gave Dowding and his team the respite they desperately needed to recoup and reequip.

When repeated attacks on London failed to achieve the objective of breaking the morale of the British people, Göring again ordered new tactics. He sent his planes to concentrate on other cities, to devastate them one by one and so weaken the islanders' will.

Ultra's effectiveness in giving advance warning of Luftwaffe raids has been questioned. At this early stage of the war, Bletchley's mastery of Enigma was still too weak, and oftentimes too slow, for the decrypts to be of tactical value. Often, the raids were completed before the messages relating to them could be decrypted. Also, Goring relied largely on landlines to direct the attacks, leaving little to be intercepted.

But there was one development in which Ultra's aid was undeniable. This was the Germans' use of a radio beam system to guide Luftwaffe pilots, astonishingly untrained in navigation, to their targets and even to tell the crews when to drop their bombs. The German system was code-named Knickebein, or "crooked leg." On their runs over Britain, the German pilots steered between two streams of dot-and-dash signals; if the plane strayed too far to the left, dots grew louder, and if to the right, dash sounds increased. As they neared their targets, crossbeams told the crews the moment to unload their bombs, and in a later improvement actually triggered the releases. Bletchley decrypts tracked Knickebein's development all the way.

In his memoir
Most Secret War,
Churchill's young scientific adviser Dr. R. V. Jones told how he was alerted on June 12, 1940, to the existence of Knickebein and how he immediately began to plan counter-measures. His method was to develop signals more powerful than those of Knickebein and by this means to lure Luftwaffe bombers away from important industrial targets. Jones also used crossbeams that caused the crews to drop their bombs on open countryside. His measures succeeded. One German bomber crew dispatched to the west of Britain became so addled by Jones's trickery that they mistook the Bristol Channel for the English Channel and landed on British soil instead of France. Mindful of Jones's success in both thwarting Knickebein and developing two more sophisticated defense systems later, Churchill called Jones his "boy wonder—the man who broke the bloody beams."

One tragic error came on November 14, when the jamming transmitters were mistakenly turned to the wrong frequency, allowing Knickebein to guide a large assembly of bombers to their target, the city of Coventry. A Bletchley decrypt warned of three forthcoming attacks and gave the code name of
KORN
as the target for that night's intensive raid. Today, in Britain's Public Record Office at Kew, a visitor can gaze at BP's decrypt, with the code word thrusting itself on the eyes. But at that moment
KORJSTs
meaning was not known. As a result, the German bombers got through virtually unchallenged to drop tons of high explosives and incendiaries on Coventry, burning out the city's center, killing 554 and wounding hundreds more.

A story that gained circulation was that the Coventry bombing thrust upon Churchill an agonizing decision: either he warned the citizens of the city to evacuate, which would have tipped off the Germans that their codes were being broken, or he allowed the raid to proceed. Though a touching story, it wasn't true. Warnings of the bombers' destination came too late to permit extraordinary defense or evacuation efforts. The most that could be done was to alert firefighters, rescue squads and antiaircraft batteries. Churchill faced many hard decisions, but this was not one of them.

A week after the Coventry raid, Bletchley Park endured its own Luftwaffe bombing. The crew of a lone aircraft who probably wanted only to jettison their remaining bombs on a nearby railway junction before turning for home missed their target. One of their bombs smashed into the outer building to which Gordon Welchman had originally been banished. Another landed in the garden of the vicarage next door. Two more landed inside BP, one of them close enough to Hut 4 to break some of its windows and move it several inches off its foundations. No one was injured, but to have the war come so close no doubt boosted the spirits of the men at BP. "They tended to think of themselves," recalled Pat Bing, one of Hut 8's young women, "as 'skivers'—the word for those who pick up money without doing any work for it—and in their case for being in the war but not actually fighting. So the bombing braced them up a bit."

The bombing may also have helped the men at BP counter the sneers of locals who observed healthy young blokes engaged in some dubious unspoken rear echelon activity. As a bit of doggerel circulated at the Park put it,

 

I think that I shall never see

a sight as curious as BP.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

BOOK: Codebreakers Victory
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