Intelligence in War: The Value--And Limitations--Of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy (51 page)

CONCLUSION

The Value of Military Intelligence

W
AR IS ULTIMATELY
about doing, not thinking. The Macedonians beat the Persians at Gaugamela in 331
B
.
C
. not because they took the enemy by surprise—Darius, the Persian emperor, spent the preliminaries of the battle attempting to bribe Alexander not to attack—but by the ferocity of their onslaught. The Knights of St. John saved Malta from capture by the Turks in 1565 not because they got word of their approach but by the tenacity of their defence in a five-month siege. The British and Indian troops repelled the Japanese attempt to invade India via Kohima and Imphal in 1944 not because intelligence had disclosed the enemy’s plan but by stubborn, relentless, sometimes hand-to-hand combat. The Americans took Iwo Jima in 1945 not because intelligence had revealed the lay-out of the Japanese defences—the whole tiny island was one densely fortified position—but because the U.S. Marines, at the cost of thousands of their own lives, inched their way forward from bunker to bunker. In the case of none of these famous and decisive battles did thought play much of a part in bringing victory; courage and unconsidered self-sacrifice did.

War is not an intellectual activity but a brutally physical one. War always tends towards attrition, which is a competition in inflicting and bearing bloodshed, and the nearer attrition approaches to the extreme, the less thought counts. Nevertheless, few who make war at any level, from commander to soldier in the line of battle, seek to win by attrition. All hope for success at lesser cost. Thought offers a means of reducing the price. It may identify weaknesses in the enemy’s method of making war or in his system of defence; detailed reconnaissance of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall identified the best places to land before D-Day. It may reveal defects in his armoury or suggest countermeasures to his weapons; Britain’s espousal of radar before 1939 laid the basis for national survival during the Battle of Britain. It may give warning of the enemy’s concealed intentions or secret devices; foreknowledge played a major part in the—partial—defeat of the flying bomb, if not the V-2 rocket, in 1944. It may unveil treachery within; during the Cold War, patient if retrospective analysis of how state secrets were betrayed to Soviet Russia, and the identity of those responsible, closed a potentially fatal gap in national security. It may disclose the nature of an enemy strategy, which threatens to strangle essential lifelines of supply, as inspired thought by a single individual in 1917 revealed how the U-boat blockade of Britain could be defeated by a simple reorganisation of shipping. It may, at its most creative, unlock a whole world of enemy secrets, as Bletchley Park’s attack on the German Enigma ciphers did from 1940 onwards.

The story of the breaking of Enigma, and of Ultra, the intelligence it yielded, together with the story of Magic, the product of the American unravelling of the Japanese ciphers, is of the highest drama and the greatest importance to our understanding of the conduct of the Second World War. Without our knowledge of Ultra and Magic, it would be impossible to write the war’s history; and, indeed, all history of the war written before 1974, when the Ultra secret was revealed for the first time, is flawed by reason of that gap.
¹
However restrained the claims made for the influence of Ultra in bringing eventual victory—and those made by its official historian, F. H. Hinsley, are very carefully restrained—the availability of day-to-day, sometimes hour-by-hour details of the enemy’s tactical control of his U-boat forces, for example, of the resupply of his ground forces in the Western Desert, sometimes of their deployment for action also, occasionally of strategic initiatives of the greatest regional significance, such as the plan to capture Crete by airborne descent in 1941, helped very greatly to win the war for the Allies and, as Hinsley demonstrates, materially shortened its course. The same is true of Magic in the Pacific. Moreover, in both theatres, the ability to overhear the enemy was an advantage the Allies enjoyed which—with certain exceptions—their opponents did not.

If there is such a thing as an ideal of military intelligence, when one side was privileged to know the other’s intentions, capabilities and plan of action in place and time—how, where, what and when—while its opponent neither knew as much in return nor that his own plans were uncovered, Ultra—and Magic—occasionally met the ideal standard. The Americans before Midway were in such a position in June 1942; so were the British before the German airborne invasion of Crete in May 1941.

Yet, as we know, the British nonetheless lost the Battle of Crete. There have been several attempts to explain why, the intelligence circumstances appearing to make defeat an impossibility. It has been suggested that General Freyberg, commanding the island, believed the airborne assault to be the prelude to a later seaborne invasion, or that he was overburdened by the risk of revealing the Ultra secret, or both; in either case, misbelief or paralysing anxiety, he failed to redeploy his troops to positions which would have made the capture of Maleme airfield, the vital ground, impossible. Neither, in fact, seems to provide a complete explanation. Freyberg did fear a seaborne invasion and he was also weighed down by the need to keep the Ultra secret. He might, nevertheless, with the troops available, his highly capable and determined New Zealanders, have held the airfield had he impressed on the local commander, a brave man of proven fighting ability, the necessity of staying put and yielding not an inch. Instead, the local commander got the impression that it would be possible to retire, regroup and successfully counterattack next morning, giving his men a pause he thought they required. Next morning proved too late. In real time, the by then desperate Germans took advantage of a momentary weakening of the New Zealand defence to stage one of the most extreme do-or-die exploits in military history. They had already offered up to sacrifice the bulk of the Assault Regiment, by crash-landing its gliders into the waterless bed of the River Tavronitis, an attack the New Zealanders had largely blunted. On the morning of 21 May, they began to use the Ju52 aircraft carrying the 5th Mountain Division in almost the same way, landing them under fire on the airfield and ruthlessly ditching those hit on the runway. The death ride of the Ju52s should have resulted in disaster; but there was just not enough New Zealand fire, and that from too long a range, and just too much German recklessness. At enormous cost, in loss of both machines and lives, the Germans succeeded in building up a superiority of force at the decisive spot, seizing the airfield and using it as the point of departure for a battle-winning offensive.

The events of 20–21 May 1941 in Crete demonstrate one of the most important of all truths about the role of intelligence in warfare: that however good the intelligence available before an encounter may appear to be, the outcome, given equality of force, will still be decided by the fight; and, in a fight, determination, again given equality of force, will be the paramount factor. The New Zealanders were troops of the very first quality; Rommel, their opponent in the desert, testified that they were the best soldiers he ever met, including his own. On Crete, however, they met other soldiers who preferred collective death to defeat. The men of the 7th Airborne Division and the 5th Mountain Division were in berserker mood. It was their almost mindless courage that allowed them to prevail.

The events of 4 June 1942 at Midway provide another perspective: that, even when intelligence seems to provide the explanation of a victory, closer examination of the facts may reveal that some other factor, in that case chance, lies at the root of the matter. The Americans in 1942 were in much the same position of strategic inferiority as the British had been in 1940–41: though equipped to overhear the enemy’s secret signals, they were at a severe military disadvantage by reason of recent defeats. They had lost their battle-fleet, they had lost much territory of crucial importance, and they were outnumbered in key categories of weapon systems, particularly aircraft carriers. It was greatly to their credit that, during a period of acute parsimony in defence spending, they had nevertheless succeeded in penetrating the main Japanese naval code, JN-25A, before Pearl Harbor and had had success against the more complex JN-25B by early 1942. By a combination of interception, decoding, informed speculation about Japanese intentions and, crucially, a cunning exercise in the art of the baited signal—the false revelation that Midway was suffering a water shortage—the U.S. Pacific Fleet had, as events would show, accurately persuaded itself by May 1942 that the next stage of Japanese expansion would not be westward into the Indian Ocean or southward towards Australia but eastward, from the Japanese home islands, to seize Midway, the last American-held outpost in their proximity. Covert deployment of America’s only three Pacific-based aircraft carriers positioned the surviving American capital forces to take the approaching Japanese strike fleet, of four aircraft carriers, by surprise and achieve a victory.

Carrier fleets, however, consist of two elements, the ships themselves and their air groups. An air group whose carrier is sunk, while it is aloft, becomes a refugee organisation, seeking to land where it may, or to ditch if no landing place offers. A carrier without its air group is no more harmful than any cargo ship. On the morning of 4 June, the Japanese carrier striking force, surprised by five out of the six squadrons of the American carrier air groups, destroyed them all. The sixth group had got lost. Its leader, almost at the limit of fuel endurance, then spotted a Japanese destroyer, which had been detached to attack an American submarine, making speed to rejoin the main force. The white streak of its wake, on the deep blue of the ocean on a perfect Pacific day, indicated the direction he and his fellow pilots should follow. They did and, being dive-bombers arriving at 12,000 feet, while the Japanese fighters of the combat air patrol had just descended to sea level to destroy the last American torpedo-aircraft attack, found a clear run to the target. Three out of the four Japanese aircraft carriers were destroyed in five minutes.

The success of the dive-bombers made Midway a great naval victory, the greatest naval victory of all time. It was crowned later in the day by the destruction of the surviving fourth Japanese carrier. Nevertheless, it cannot be claimed that Midway was a pure intelligence victory, open and shut though the case superficially seems. The events of 4 June, up to the destruction of the fifth of the American attacking squadrons, had indeed been the outcome of decisions taken in light of an intelligence advantage; the final and decisive event, the descent of the sixth squadron on a by then defenceless Japanese carrier formation, was the result of luck. Had the U.S. submarine
Nautilus
not strayed into the path of the Japanese carriers, causing the detachment of the destroyer
Arashi
to attack it, the lost dive-bomber squadron, Bombing 6, would not have been redirected by its wake on to the target; and had
Arashi
lingered longer on its search, Bombing 6 would again not have known which way to go and would have had to turn back, mission unaccomplished, at the limit of its endurance.

There are other complexities, concerning particularly failures of reporting by Japanese reconnaissance and failure of clear thinking by the Japanese high command. Had the
Tone
’s floatplane made an earlier and more exact report when it sighted the American task force, the Japanese carriers would have been alerted to the presence of the American carriers before their aircraft took off. Had Admiral Nagumo thought more quickly and analytically once the battle began, in particular not been distracted by the intervention of land-based aircraft from Midway, he could have initiated a much earlier attack on the American carriers, manoeuvred to a new position and avoided being caught with his flight decks cluttered with ordnance, fuel lines and fully fuelled aircraft, potential—actual, as things turned out—firebombs. Though Midway turned out to be a great American victory, in the making of which the intercept and decryption services played an essential part, it might have been exactly the opposite: a great American defeat, into which the U.S. Pacific Fleet had been drawn by the very success of its own intelligence operations.

War is the arena of chance; furthermore, nothing in war is simple. Midway bears out the truth of both of these observations. Their truth is further borne out by the course of the German cruiser campaign in the Pacific and South Atlantic in 1914. On the face of it, von Spee, with his little fleet, should have been able to make his way back to Europe from China unscathed; he might even, by careful selection of his targets, have inflicted considerable damage on his enemies’ merchant shipping on the way. The vastness of the Pacific provided a perfect cloak for his movements; once in the Atlantic, an ocean half its size, a swift break for home, via the stormy waters of the northern seas, might have brought his ships back to German bases intact. The
Etappen
system, which efficiently arranged for colliers and store ships to be met at neutral harbours or remote anchorages, would have provided resupply. The ports of South America, on both coasts, teemed with German merchants and sympathisers. There promised, for von Spee and his men, the makings of a clear run home.