Codebreakers Victory (35 page)

Here, too, the work was a triumph of determination over boredom. The Americans did something the Wrens hadn't been doing. They kept records of the bombes' performance. Harold Keen, BP's representative at the British Tabulating Machine Company, which produced the bombes, was delighted. He used the GIs' records to make improvements in subsequent bombes.

 

 

At BP, Two Groups of American Codebreakers

 

The first American serviceman to be stationed at Bletchley Park was a young navy lieutenant junior grade. Joe Eachus had been one of the bright lads looking after Alan Turing in his 1942 visit to the U.S. Impressed, Turing had him assigned, in the autumn of that year, to Hut 8. Eachus later recalled those times when denizens of the Hut were struggling with the U-boat codes. "You could tell by people's faces how we were doing," he remembered. "When we were locked out, the faces were grim and discouraged, because we knew what havoc the Germans were creating out there on the seas. But when we were cracking the codes and helping our ships evade the U-boats, there were smiles all around."

Eachus was a special case. Only when the BRUSA Agreement was reached were sizable contingents of Americans invited to join in the code-breaking at Bletchley Park. In the last half of 1943 two separate groups began arriving.

First were the men of the 6813th. Of the three Signal Corps detachments of "Ultra Americans," this one was clearly the elite. To be assigned to it, the men had to have achieved particularly high scores on the Army Classification Tests. They received the more prestigious title of
cryptanalysts
while the members of the other units were identified as
cryptographers, traffic analysts
and the like. The 6813th heavily featured Ph.D.s, college academicians, chess masters and accomplished mathematicians. Completing the U.S. railroad cover designations, the unit was labeled Rio Grande.

Second of the U.S. groups at BP was a contingent that reported directly to Military Intelligence at the Pentagon. When it came to staffing U.S. Army Intelligence, Secretary of War Stimson looked to Alfred McCormack, like Stimson a former Wall Street lawyer. As reported in Thomas Parrish's book
The Ultra Americans,
McCormack slipped directly into the uniform of an army colonel and went at his wartime job with great energy and unflagging intelligence. An important task he took on was to organize and oversee the daily summaries of Magic decrypts that did so much in shaping the decisions that U.S. leaders made about the conduct of the war. With the signing of the BRUSA Agreement, Secretary Stimson also asked him to seek out the best available men for duty at Bletchley Park.

When he visited Bletchley he saw it as a "personnel heaven" because the codebreaking program got first pick of the best brains available. It was not that way in the U.S. Official personnel channels confronted McCormack with the rigidities of the civil service and the stifling rules of the military branches. It was maddening, since he was determined to send only first-class minds to BP, men who would fit into that select group without embarrassing the U.S.

McCormack found ways to get around the barriers. One was to comb the ranks of men already in the service. That way he came up with Lewis Powell, an air force intelligence officer who in later life became a justice of the Supreme Court, and Alfred Friendly, subsequently editor of the
Washington Post
and a television personality. McCormack also used his contacts at Ivy League schools to enlist men such as Telford Taylor, a Harvard Law School graduate then serving as general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission.

The two groups reported to different commanders and were billeted separately. Heading the 6813th was Captain William Bundy, of a Boston Brahman family and married to the daughter of Dean Acheson, then the undersecretary of state. In charge of McCormack's group, which became known at Bletchley Park as 3-US because they were assigned to Hut 3, was Taylor.

Three members of the 6813th supplied the vanguard of the U.S. troops dispatched to BP: Paul Whitaker, Selmer Norland and Arthur Levenson. Whitaker and Norland, both fluent in German, were assigned as translators in Hut 3; Levenson worked as a cryptanalyst under Gordon Welchman in Hut 6. He was soon joined there by Bundy.

Varied placements would become the rule for the members of the 6813th. Instead of functioning as a cohesive unit, they were integrated piecemeal into the complex British operation, a few here and a few there. The unit's Walter Sharp has recollected, "We came to BP on the same trucks, dispersed to our assigned offices and under the principle of 'need to know' didn't chatter about what we or the other fellows were up to."

Sharp's assignment was in what was called the Machine Room because each of the operators there sat before an Enigma clone. "The head of the shift," he recalled,
 

 

was responsible for directing those operating the bombes, located at several remote stations, as to what problems they should attack. The rest of us were there to test the "stops" that the bombe crews telegraphed in. Once we had proved that a particular key for a given army or air force unit was broken for the day, the settings were sent to the Decoding Room, where all the messages for that day were deciphered, then to be passed on to translators, intelligence analysts and disseminators. At the same time, the bombe team working on the now-broken key was pulled off that and given another task.

 

Of his work in Hut 3, Norland remembered, "When a message was broken, the plaintext German was still in five-letter groups. We had to sort that out, try to fill in garbles and omissions and render the message into understandable English. Then we submitted it to the analyst on the watch, who determined its degree of priority and to whom it should be distributed."

A memoir by the late Jim Nielson told of his work in the Quiet Room. Here the operators took on messages that had resisted deciphering and for which there were no verified call signs. The Quiet Room's personnel made a second go against the messages to see whether they could be made to yield.

George Vergine, whom Parrish described as "a brilliant young cryptanalyst," wrote a memoir "for my relatives to tell them what I did during the war." At Bletchley Park, he worked for a time on the Enigma and then transferred to the "Newmanry," where he collaborated with Max Newman on deciphering Fish teleprinter codes. To read his memoir is to marvel at the mathematical complexities young minds could master under the pressure of breaking the codes that revealed "the thinking and planning of the whole German High Command."

As for McCormack's 3-US men, a number of them, after learning the ropes at Bletchley Park, were assigned to Special Liaison Units attached to American operational units. Don Bussey, for example, transferred over to the continent to become an officer in the intelligence section of the U.S. Seventh Army.

By being spread throughout Bletchley Park the Americans learned virtually every phase of the codebreaking program. "If someone had decided to pull all the Americans together and set them up as an operational unit," according to Sharp, "I think we could have done very well. By the end of the war we would have gained from our experience with the British folks most of the arcane skills needed to identify enemy communications, direct their interception, read and translate messages, and have some idea what to do with the information they contained."

The Americans of the 6813th were also the elite in their off-duty hours. At BP they were part of a diverse group that included many civilians and that ignored the niceties of military rank. They all were known to each other by their first names. The GIs drew neither KP nor guard duty; all that was done by people specifically assigned to those jobs. At their billet the Americans had their own very good cooks; "We probably ate as well as any Americans, at home or abroad," said Sharp. In the mess hall, officers and enlisted men did seat themselves separately. "Someone among the officers," Sharp reported, "had the idea of hanging a curtain between the two sections. The first time it was drawn, the racket from the EM side was such that the officers got the message. The curtain was not drawn again."

 

 

For the Ultra Americans, Praise and Honors

 

By war's end, the U.S. soldiers involved in Ultra had pretty well erased the idea that they were mere tokens of Anglo-American cooperation. They had earned their way. Recognition of their efforts came from the European theater's chief signal officer, Major General William S. Rumbough.

To those of the 6813th he wrote, "The extreme value of your work has been recognized." He commended the 6811th for "operating on a par with British intercept stations which had been in action for a period of three years or more and, in numerous instances, actually surpassing them in performance." He also congratulated the Teletype operators for their accuracy and reliability. The 6812th received a similar commendation from the general. The detachment's work was also praised in David Kahn's writings for "producing two to three times as many solutions as a comparable Wren unit, not because it ran the machines faster but because the men changed setups much more quickly."

British appreciation of the Ultra Americans' contributions at BP is indicated by the postwar awards they approved for individual performance. Bundy received the Order of the British Empire, while Norland was recognized as a Member of the British Empire. Robert Carrol, George Vergine, Cecil Porter and Harold Porter of the 6813th were awarded the British Empire Medal.

While the war continued, and for those thirty secret years afterward, the three Signal Corps detachments were almost entirely unaware of each other's existence. This changed when Fred Winterbotham's
The Ultra Secret
opened the floodgates of information. One member of the 6811th, Robert Fredrickson, gave himself a retirement career of locating the members of the three detachments and bringing them together. Now, more than half a century later, the Ultra Americans have begun to hold the kind of reunions that have become old hat to most World War II servicemen. In addition to posting regular newsletters and organizing the yearly reunions, Fredrickson periodically leads a trip back to the outfits' old haunts. They marvel at Hall Place, handsomely restored and with beautiful gardens replacing what had been GI drill grounds and ball fields, and they enjoy finding their way to Eastcote and the Factory. At Bletchley Park they are pleased to see that the mansion and its huts have been saved from the bulldozers bent on converting the grounds into a housing development during the thirty years when the wartime activities there remained a mystery. They are gratified to see BP made into a cryptology museum and to take part in the tours that have made it an increasingly popular tourist attraction. And in the mansion's library the American visitors take a moment to reread a plaque mounted on the oak-paneled walls that offers these lines of summary from Shakespeare's
Henry V,
act 2, scene 2:

 

The King hath note of all that they intend,

By interception which they dream not of.

 

 

 

14

 

Up the Island Ladder Toward Tokyo

 

 

Japanese intelligence about Allied plans never played a serious role in the Pacific war. For the Allies the main intelligence problems came when their codebreakers were blacked out by the system changes the Japanese introduced as security measures. Then Allied commanders were prone to the same fumbling and bungling that characterized many of the Japanese operations.

Perhaps because of that unprincipled press release that broadcast the role of codebreaking in the defeat of the Imperial forces at Midway, the Japanese became rigorous in revising their code systems during the summer and autumn of 1942. The May 28 change from JN-25b to JN-25c plunged Allied crypto teams into almost total eclipse. As the summer progressed, troublesome changes were also made in the Imperial Navy's call sign systems. In August, just as Allied analysts were making some headway with JN-25c, the Japanese made another fundamental switch, from JN-25c to JN-25d. As Nimitz's staff report on August 1 noted dolefully, "We are no longer reading the enemy mail, and today we must depend almost entirely on traffic analysis to deduce enemy deployment."

Allied codebreakers struggled mightily to regain their mastery. A few useful decrypts resulted from an occasional Japanese regression to superseded codes. Otherwise, intelligence was reduced to the less exact arts of direction finding, traffic analysis and photoreconnaissance. Invaluable aid also came from the network of coast watchers, brave men the Australians put in place to transmit observations from within the Japanese perimeter.

This extended period of frustration for the cryptanalysts came at the time when the Japanese made landings in the Solomon Islands in late June and early August, and began constructing an airfield on Guadalcanal. Word of the development came primarily from the coast watchers.

Allied commanders knew they could not allow this venture to succeed. Guadalcanal would give the Japanese a new operational center 560 miles east of their major base at Rabaul in New Britain. From the new field, the emperor's bombers and Zero fighters could provide air support for landings on still more easterly islands. To prevent the Japanese from severing the lifeline between the U.S. and Australia, Guadalcanal must be retaken before the airstrip was completed.

In long, rancorous meetings in Washington, the U.S. high command had already decided on how the war in the Pacific should be conducted. The question was how to divide responsibilities between the two strong leaders Nimitz and MacArthur. Nimitz believed that the best route to Tokyo lay along the small islands in the mid-Pacific. MacArthur, obsessed with his pledge to return to the Philippines, favored a great arc north out of Australia and northwest along the big islands of New Guinea and New Britain, concentrating on seizing Rabaul. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had compromised by endorsing both plans and drawing a line of demarcation with MacArthur in charge to the west and Nimitz commanding operations to the east. Guadalcanal lay just barely within Nimitz's vast area of control.