Codebreakers Victory (48 page)

 

RAF bomber losses, for a time, nose-dived. The tech advisers instructed Bomber Command in launching "spoof" or mock raids that, combined with screens of window, misled the night fighters into attacking the decoys rather than the main force.

When the Germans began using a radioed "running commentary" to direct their night fighters, the British counterfeited the controller's voice over a powerful transmitter and ordered the fighters to land because of the danger of fog. When the Germans substituted a woman as controller, the British were ready with a German-speaking Waaf to override
her
voice. Nearly always in the air war the advantage lay with the Allies because signals intelligence not only forecast what new measures the Germans were planning to introduce but also revealed when Allied technologies were fading in effectiveness and needed to be replaced.

An important turn in the technological struggle came when Bletchley decrypts began to suggest that the Germans were using the various types of electronic transmissions from Allied bombers to home in on them. Bomber crews left on their IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) equipment in nights over Germany, used airborne radar to detect attacking planes and made profligate use of radio in their communications—all of which provided beams the new German equipment utilized in seeking out the senders.

It took Marshal Harris a long time, and many needless deaths, to agree that his planes should avoid using transmission devices. Here, once more, Enigma decrypts supplied the clincher. A German message boasted of their new technology, claiming that in December 1943, 9 out of the 41 aircraft downed in a raid against Berlin and 6 of 26 in a later raid were hit due to exploitation of the IFF beams.

The change in the "missing rate" was dramatic. After banning transmissions, Bomber Command began achieving complete surprise in some of its raids. In an attack on Kiel, for example, it lost only 4 of 629 aircraft.

Ultra decrypts had another salutary effect on the air war. They brought reality to the delusion ardently championed by Marshal Harris that "area bombing"—the unloading of huge amounts of bombs onto broad targets such as major German cities—could by itself bring Germany to its knees. Harris held to this belief so resolutely he forbade the transfer to Coastal Command of the long-range bombers that could have narrowed the "Air Gap" that left Allied convoys vulnerable to the U-boats. BP decrypts, Baron Oshima's Magic reports from Berlin and photoreCon all verified that the effectiveness of area bombing was far below the exaggerated claims endemic among aircrews. Of 1,729 sorties in a series of raids against Berlin, for example, only 27 delivered their bombs within three miles of the aiming point. As historian Keegan put it, British fliers "were dying largely in order to crater the German countryside."

Similarly, Bomber Command's claims that area bombing was destroying aircraft production facilities were shown to be far wide of the mark. But for these corrections, Allied commands would have believed they were facing a much weakened GAF at a time when, under Albert Speer's energetic direction of Nazi production, the numbers of German fighters were actually increasing.

Reluctantly, Harris gave up his indiscriminate "area bombing" and, aided by new guidance equipment, began to concentrate more on specific targets.

Slowly, the informational and technological advantage, together with burgeoning numbers of aircraft, swung the balance. The U.S. Eighth Air Force, which for a time in the final months of 1942 had been forced by severe losses to abandon its raids, came storming back when new long-range Mustang fighters arrived to escort the bombers on their precision bombing daylight flights. The U.S. Fifteenth Air Force took off from bases in Italy against such targets as Romania's Ploesti oil refineries. Bomber Command finally joined in attacks on aircraft factories and oil facilities. BP decrypts tallied the results: the decreases in aircraft production, the desperate efforts to commandeer and train new fighter pilots, the mounting problems in rail transport and, most seriously, the immobilizing shortages of fuel.

The end of the air war could be summed up by the decrypt of one plaintive order from the Luftwaffe. Asking its pilots to avoid wasting gasoline in taxiing to and from their airstrips, it suggested that the pilots have their planes towed into place by oxen.

 

 

Across the Rhine and on to Victory

 

The U.S. First Army's capture of the Remagen bridge did more than provide the Allies a passage over the Rhine. It changed the minds of George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower on the future course of the war. Previously they had agreed to have Montgomery's northern armies cut through the low countries, cross the Rhine and lead the way toward Berlin. Churchill greatly favored this plan, but Ike himself was not entirely comfortable with it. Monty's tendency to dot every i and cross every t before making a move tore at Eisenhower's patience. Now, suddenly, a new door was open. Remagen was in Omar Bradley's sector. "Bradley," Ike has been quoted as saying, "has never held back and has never 'paused to regroup' when he saw an opportunity to advance." He told Bradley to push ahead.

However, having the Western Allies' main advance made this far to the south aimed their direction not toward Berlin but across Germany's midsection. Its success would cut Germany in two. Marshall and Eisenhower at that point put military, not political, objectives first. As they saw it, to send Bradley's troops slashing across Germany and linking up with the Russians would end the war in Europe more swiftly than to have Montgomery force his cautious way across the north.

Besides, the Soviets were thirty-five miles from Berlin; Ike's troops were two hundred miles away. He knew that the Allied leaders had agreed at their February meeting in Yalta that after the war, Berlin was to be in the Soviet occupation zone. Why should he rack up casualties to take a "prestige objective" that must subsequently be shared with the Russians? He was also aware that a more southerly drive could crush whatever the Germans were rumored to be planning for a "National Redoubt" in the .Harz Mountains, a center from which to carry on guerrilla operations.

Eisenhower asked Bradley to estimate how many casualties it would cost to take Berlin. Bradley's answer: one hundred thousand. And in fact that was close to the Russian losses in taking the city.

On March 28, Ike sent a telegram directly to Stalin announcing the decision to join hands with the Soviet forces on the river Elbe, leaving the Russians to take Berlin. The decision outraged Churchill, Montgomery and the British generally. Churchill addressed a message to Roosevelt emphasizing the political aspects, the symbolic importance, that he thought Eisenhower had overlooked. FDR, nearing his death on April 12, was too enfeebled to respond. The reply fell to Marshall, who of course sided with Ike. Churchill, already foreseeing Stalin's plans to extend an Iron Curtain across Europe, could do no more than push Montgomery to seize the North Sea ports facing Britain in order to keep them out of Soviet hands. On his bidding, Monty also drove his troops to take the city of Lübeck, whose capture would keep Denmark and its portal to Scandinavia from falling into the Soviet orbit.

With Montgomery spurred to attack in the north, Bradley moved quickly to exploit his Remagen bridge advantage. Patton's armies in the south pushed across the Rhine and into Germany. The deterioration of the German armies accelerated. The Allies encircled the Ruhr and took more than three hundred thousand prisoners. General Walther Model dissolved his army group, and he himself committed suicide. Allied advances sliced almost at Will through the pockets of German resistance.

Signals intelligence continued its strong support. Although the volume of decrypts diminished as German-controlled territories shrank, the quality remained high. Sigint tracked virtually all of Hitler's frantic orders and mindless shifts of commanders as well as his armies' final desperate maneuvers.

Notably, the Allied codebreakers were able to warn Soviet leaders of a last-gasp Hitler-ordered counteroffensive in the southeast. Magic decrypts of Baron Oshima's Tokyo reports told of Hitler's decision to accept the temporary loss of eastern territory and resources in order to group his armies for a surprise attack against the advancing Russians. BP knew when he transferred the Sixth Panzer Army to the eastern front and shifted Luftwaffe squadrons there. Bletchley decrypts also disclosed that the ultimate objective of the offensive was to reenter Hungary and recapture Budapest in the hopes of securing Hungarian oil—information that the British Military Mission in Moscow passed on to Soviet leaders. Of course, the Russians may also have been tipped off by the Cambridge clique and other sources, but unknowing, the British fulfilled their obligations as allies. In any case, when the offensive began on March 5, 1945, it made only minimal advances before being overwhelmed by the Red Army.

Hitler's empire began to come apart. Countries thankfully shook off their German oppressors only to fall under Stalin's control. The Romanians changed sides, as did the Bulgarians and the Hungarians. Vienna fell to the Russians. The Soviets signed a treaty of friendship with Yugoslavia's Tito.

The Russian armies opened their offensive against Berlin on April 16, and on April 30 they raised the Red flag on the roof of the Reichstag, in the city's center. The Americans linked up with Russian troops at the Elbe on April 25. Bletchley Park decrypted Hitler's final flurry of futile orders, including his demand that Goring be arrested for daring to suggest that if Hitler had lost his freedom of action in Berlin, he, Goring, in southern Germany, should assume control of the Reich. Hitler also ordered the arrest of Himmler for trying to open peace negotiations with the Allies. Then on April 30, as Russian shells shook the ground above his bunker, Hitler married his mistress, Eva Braun, and retired with her to his quarters, where they both committed suicide.

From then until Victory-in-Europe Day, May 8, the war became merely a mopping-up operation—a matter of reducing the last bits of organized resistance, seizing prisoners by the tens of thousands, signing surrender papers and making a start toward dealing with the great miseries that came in the battles' wake.

 

 

Hitler's V-weapons: The War Ends None Too Soon

 

One of the factors in Eisenhower's decision to seek the fastest possible end to the war was his fear of what Hitler still might spring in the way of his secret V-weapons—
V for Vergeltungswaffe,
translated either as "Vengeance" or "Retaliation weapons."

Hitler had begun boasting of them as early as September 1939. All through the war they continued to buoy his fantasies, and toward the end they became his last hope that he could still wrest victory from the closing jaws of defeat. He kept promising his beleaguered generals, as he did Manstein in the fight against the Russians, that "weapons unique and hitherto unknown are on the way to your front."

For the Allies, the fear persisted that, given a greater time span, German science might bring still other V technologies to fruition and seriously alter the course of the war.

Foremost was the specter of a German nuclear bomb. Hitler regarded it as one of his
Wunderwqffen,
his "wonder weapons" that could reverse the course of the war.

The Reich's nuclear experts had met to consider the possibilities of an atom bomb in September 1939—two weeks before Albert Einstein had sent his letter to Franklin Roosevelt warning of the German potential and suggesting that the U.S. counter with a development program. Acting on this advice from one of Germany's Jewish emigres, FDR set up a "Uranium Committee" ten days later. It was the start of the technological race in which Anglo-American cooperation in the Manhattan Project was to be victorious.

At the time, however, Allied success could not be presumed. Uneasiness grew in late 1942 when it became known that at Germany's direction, activity at the heavy-water Vermork plant in Norway had increased. Heavy water was the medium in which plutonium for nuclear weapons could best be processed. Concern was also expressed that Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning Danish scientist respected as an international authority in atomic research, might be pressed into helping the Germans. That his mother was a Jew made the prospect more ominous.

The leader of the German nuclear program was the brilliant Werner Heisenberg, a prewar Bohr protege. Heisenberg's role in the project remains equivocal. Did he vigorously pursue the development of a German bomb? Or did he, as he claimed after the war, deliberately work from within to keep an atomic weapon from being delivered into Adolf Hitler's hands? Bohr himself had no doubt that Heisenberg did his utmost to produce the bomb. In an unsent letter Bohr wrote to Heisenberg after the latter's visit to Copenhagen in 1941—a meeting dramatized in the play
Copenhagen,
by Michael Frayn—he said that "under your leadership, everything was being done in Germany to develop atomic weapons." His heirs made Bohr's letter public only in February 2002. Whatever the truth of it was, the German efforts were never so clearly directed as those of the Allies.

The British, in planning countermeasures against the Vermork plant, were helped by the widespread hatred of the Nazis. In October 1942 they gained the cooperation of Jomar Brun, Vermork's chief engineer, who supplied them with detailed drawings and photographs. Brun himself was spirited out to England, where he briefed the British team that was assigned to go in and destroy the plant. The plan, however, went disastrously awry. The British saboteurs were to land near the plant in gliders. But in heavy weather over Norway the gliders crashed and the survivors were quickly rounded up by German ski troops. The injured men were killed immediately; the others, after being interrogated, were shot—even though they were in British army uniforms. Defenses around the plant were strengthened.

Even so, the British felt they had to put the plant out of business. This time they organized much more carefully. With Brun's aid they built a model of the plant and the surrounding terrain. They formed a team of Norwegian volunteers and gave them rigorous training so that they could parachute into Norway and concentrate on destroying the eighteen stainless steel cells used to concentrate the heavy water. The team landed safely and, on a Sunday morning in February 1943, entered the plant through a cable duct that Brun had described. Securing the cooperation of the only workman on duty, a Norwegian, they placed their charges and set their fuses. The workman was told to find a safe place away from the area to be bombed. As the team scrambled away over the tough mountainous terrain, they heard the satisfying booms when their explosives went off, destroying all eighteen cells and more than a ton of heavy water.