Codebreakers Victory (31 page)

The plotters went to elaborate lengths to make the body itself fit the scheme. It would have to be the corpse of a youngish man who had died of pneumonia, because then he would have fluid in his lungs that would convince a coroner he had died by drowning.

He also should have been taking special precautions against losing his briefcase. Since it was common practice for couriers to chain to themselves the dispatch boxes carrying important papers, the pseudo-officer would have his case chained to his raincoat as though he had been trying to make himself as comfortable as possible on the long flight from London to Tunisia,

It was necessary to give Captain (Acting Major) William Martin a persona. In his pockets would be found a small wealth of documentation: his Marine identification card, a letter from his bank complaining of an overdraft of his account, letters from his fiancée—Pam—and a photo of her, a letter from his father warning that if he did marry Pam he should be sure to make a will, and ticket stubs from a London show he'd seen with Pam.

The ruse would be more convincing if Major Martin were going to North Africa for reasons beyond merely acting as a courier. A fabricated letter from Lord Louis Mountbatten, chief of Combined Operations, to Admiral Andrew Cunningham, the Mediterranean commander in chief, assured that the major was an expert in landing craft and therefore quite able to handle the problem that had come up.

As for the most important letter in the briefcase, the committee cooked up an "old boy" communication from "Archie" to "Alex," Archie being Sir Archibald Nye, vice chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Alex being General Sir Harold Alexander, at the Eighteenth Army Group headquarters in Tunisia. The main thrust of the letter was to sympathize with Alex about the supply problems he was facing, but to inform him that just now he couldn't be given everything he'd asked for. An almost throwaway aside mentioned that the Allied assault would come in the east, falling on Greece. The letter also reported that the idea of using a feint against Sicily as a cover for the Grecian landings had been rejected in favor of using it as the cover for another operation. That alternative went unmentioned—except that a jocular postscript looked forward to the time when these two old friends might sit down over a lunch of sardines.

The committee got permission to use the body of a thirty-four-year-old man who had died of pneumonia. They packed it in dry ice for the submarine trip to the waters off Huelva, dressed it in the proper uniform, chained on the briefcase and had the sub push it off to drift to shore.

Everything went according to plan. A Spanish doctor examined the body and certified that death was due to asphyxiation by seawater. The fictitious Major Martin was given a full military funeral at the cemetery in Huelva. As Montagu noted in his book
Beyond Top Secret Ultra,
written later when he could acknowledge the help of the codebreakers, decrypts showed that the documents had indeed fallen into German hands and that while Axis leaders still believed Sicily was the most likely invasion site, they now felt sure the Allies might try to surprise them by capturing Sardinia first and then come down onto Sicily. Axis commanders also felt compelled to plan against landings in Greece.

Their response was to send troops to both Sardinia and Corsica and to strengthen the islands' defense facilities—at the expense of Sicily. In Sicily they switched forces from the southern beaches to those in the west and the north, better for fending off an approach from Sardinia. As for Hitler, he was so sure the initial landings would be made on Greece that he dispatched Rommel to organize Grecian defenses and shifted a panzer army there as well as some Sicily-based motor torpedo boats. The Germans also laid minefields off the Greek coast. Even after the assault on Sicily had begun, Hitler thought it only a feint covering the real objective, Sardinia.

In the foreword to Montagu's first book, Lord Ismay wrote that Operation Mincemeat "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams." It "spreadeagled the German defensive effort right across Europe, even to the extent of sending German vessels away from Sicily itself."

 

 

Sicily: Patton vs. Montgomery vs. the Axis

 

Partly because of the deception, the Allied landings on the southeast corner of Sicily on July 10, 1943, met with little opposition. They confirmed, however, that a cross-Channel invasion of France that summer would have been premature. The Allies' mastery of amphibious operations was still too weak. The supply of landing craft available was inadequate to meet the needs of so large an undertaking. Command decisions were too rigid: the plan to send American and English glider forces in ahead of the landings was carried out even though high winds were prevailing over that comer of Sicily. The result was that the parachutists were too widely scattered to be effective, and many of the gliders, released against the strong head winds, never reached their landing sites, crashing instead into the sea. Communications were fouled up: navy antiaircraft gunners were not informed that approaching planes were C-47s carrying a reinforcement of paratroops; 22 of the planes were destroyed and 37 badly damaged, with 246 paratroops lost to "friendly fire."

But for the codebreakers the results might have been worse. Harry Hinsley has reported, for example, that the planners of the invasion had assumed that three hundred ships might be lost to air attack off the beaches. But decrypts of Enigma messages revealed that the bomber units based in Sicily were being withdrawn to the mainland. The vastly superior Allied air cover for the landings reduced the losses to just twelve ships.

Once landed in Sicily, Allied commanders benefited from a copious flow of signals intelligence. While the codebreakers were unable to read the Italian high-grade navy and air force codes, they more than made up for this blind spot by their mastery of the German air force Enigma. In addition, they were solving the key used by the Luftwaffe's ground organization in Italy, and that employed in army-air liaison traffic. A new high-level Fish-type German army key for communications between, the high command in Berlin and the forces in Italy was soon solved as well.

It was apparent to all the Allied leaders that once the landings were made, the goal was to reach the northeast-comer city of Messina, the closest point to the Italian mainland. It was a maneuver that could, and should, have entrapped Axis troops by the thousands. The push toward Messina, however, degenerated into a petty, publicity-seeking, never-mind-the-casualties race between George Patton and Bernard Montgomery. Under Eisenhower, Britain's Harold Alexander was supposed to be in overall charge of the operation. Both Montgomery and Patton launched major actions without consulting him. Monty, stymied by fierce German resistance in his drive along the eastern seaboard, on his own ordered a portion of his Eighth Army to swing in a westward arc directly across the front of the northward mid-island push by Bradley's II Corps. Monty's idea was that Patton and Bradley should be ordered merely to protect his left flank. Patton, detesting his British colleague, raging against so inferior a role, made his own decision: to spur his Seventh Army in a lightning strike to take the city of Palermo. Although it was on the far western side of the island and its capture no more than a needless diversion, Palermo did win Patton headlines.

He then swung eastward along the northern coast. By a combination of frontal attacks and semisuccessful amphibious end runs around the stubborn Axis defenders, Patton's and Bradley's troops closed in on Messina. Bradley's memoir has divulged how civil dignitaries attempted, on the morning of August 17, to surrender to Lucian Truscott, one of Patton's generals. The general declined. Patton had issued orders that all of that should be left to him. One result, Bradley wrote, "was we had to hold Truscott's men in the hills and watch helplessly as the last of the Germans fled the city. I was so angry at Patton's megalomania that I was half tempted to enter the city myself and greet him on a street corner when he arrived."

Patton arranged a motor cavalcade and a surrender ceremony an hour before the first of Monty's troops entered the city. The victory trappings were tarnished by a major failure of the campaign. The Allies allowed the cornered Axis troops, most particularly the Germans, to escape across the Strait of Messina to Italy virtually unpunished. The failure came about even though the codebreakers warned as early as August 6 that the withdrawals were under way. Headquarters staffs simply seemed unable to accept what the decrypts were telling them. As late as August 10 an HQ summary found "no adequate indication that the enemy intends an immediate evacuation of the Messina bridgehead." Only on August 13 was the Tactical Air Force told that "evacuation is held to have begun," when actually it was nearing completion. Thousands of Axis troops and their armor awaited the Allies on the far shore.

The conquest of Sicily, taking thirty-eight days, was a needlessly costly campaign. Allied casualties ran to 22,811—5,532 killed, 14,410 wounded and 2,869 missing. However, the invasion did succeed in its aims, particularly the goal of driving Italy out of the war and out of the Axis. Allied fliers helped by heavily bombing the railroad marshaling yards in Rome, confirming the belief of many Italians that defeat was inevitable. Magic decrypts of reports from Japan's ambassador to Rome supplied the Allies a day-by-day accounting of Italy's desire for a separate peace, information that told Allied leaders just when to give the Italians ten days to accept an unconditional surrender. On July 25, King Victor Emmanuel III summoned Mussolini to his palace, told him he was dismissed, had him arrested, and appointed Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio to succeed him as head of the Italian government. While pretending, for as long as possible, to remain on Hitler's side, the Italians secretly signed terms of unconditional surrender set by the Allies.

Any elation Allied leaders felt, however, was conditioned by decrypts verifying that Hitler was determined to fight on in Italy and was, in fact, rushing in reinforcements both from the Eastern Front and the Western Wall.

 

 

Italy: The Costly Climb up the Boot

 

Surviving German generals confessed to war historian Liddell Hart after the war that they had expected the Allies, after prevailing in Sicily, to make their next landings well up to the north on the Italian coast. Hindsight suggests that this move would probably have been the right one. Successful invasions near Rome could have saved the Allies from having to fight their way the whole length of the 750-mile-long peninsula—a campaign that became the longest, most grinding, most frustrating struggle of the war in the West. What stopped Allied leaders from such a daring move was that landings so far from their Sicilian bases would have left the invasion forces without fighter aircraft protection. The Allies settled for planning two more cautious landings—one on the toe of the Italian boot, the other 200 miles up on the boot's ankle, at Salerno, south of Naples.

Several factors accounted for the painfully slow progress made by the Allies. Most important was the terrain. It was ideal both for defense and for rearguard delaying actions; it was deadly for the offense. Down the center of the peninsula are the Apennines, a rugged range that presented to the invaders an endless series of soaring mountains. From the central spine steep ridges project east and west toward the seas, and in between are ravinelike valleys through many of which race swift streams. Following the valleys, tortuous ribbons of roads twist through narrow defiles. The German defenders became experts at roadblocks, ambushes, minefields, booby traps. Their demolition teams grew skillful at blowing up bridges, culverts, viaducts and tunnels. Their surveillance was always from on high, their big guns lying in commanding positions. In such topography tanks were of marginal use; the main task lay with foot-slogging infantry.

A second hindrance was the operation's lack of status. It was always regarded as a secondary show, with the coming invasion of France at center stage. Churchill referred to the Italian campaign as his Third Front, with the Russians first and the cross-Channel attack second. The Allies' main purpose in Italy was not so much to penetrate and conquer the nation itself as to keep German troops occupied south of the Alps and to reduce their numbers. At a key point, seven divisions were pulled out to go to England and prepare for D-Day. Both Eisenhower and Montgomery departed to take up commands for the Normandy invasion. Other divisions were siphoned off for landings on the French Riviera. To make up for these defections, the Allied command pressed into service the resources available to them from around the globe. The Italian battles were fought by what Jesse Jackson would have called a Rainbow Coalition: martial-caste Indians, knife-wielding Algerian
goumiers,
Moroccans, South Africans, Free French, Free Poles, a contingent of Brazilians, Japanese American nisei, newly formed teams of turnabout Italians, U.S. National Guard divisions and, near the end of the conflict, even a division of black infantrymen that the segregated U.S. Army deigned to send into combat. They were, of course, commanded by white officers. While many of these units distinguished themselves by their bravery, their diversity did cause problems in communications and effective coordination. Also, as John Keegan put it, "Recognition of the human fragility of the instrument under their command afflicted all the Allied generals throughout the battle for Italy and deeply affected their conduct of it."

A third factor protracting the campaign was the excellence of German generalship. Hitler told Baron Oshima he was resolved not merely to hold out in Italy but to drive the Allies back into the sea. He assigned some of his best generals to the fight. Divisions in the south were directed by the very able Albert Kesselring, aided by the astute old Prussian infantry commander, Heinrich von Vietinghoff. To head up his last bastion in the north, Hitler called on Erwin Rommel to disarm the Italian soldiery set loose by the Italian capitulation, recapture thousands of Allied prisoners and organize nearly a million captives to prepare the tough fortifications of the Gothic Line, which cut across the peninsula north of Florence.