Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (6 page)

Aftermath:
Warsaw, September 1944
(Polish Underground Movement (1939–1945) Study Trust, London).
General ‘Boor’ in exile, London, 1956
(Hulton Getty)

1944
. Summer afternoons in wartime England could be deceptive. In London’s leafy suburbs it was easy to believe that the war, and the warfarers, were far, far away. The sun shone. Scattered clouds sailed lazily across the sky. Birds were singing in the fields and gardens. Although V1 rockets occasionally strayed into the vicinity, the mass bombing of the Blitz was already a bad memory. The fierce fighting in Normandy was safely across the Channel, out of earshot. The still grander and fiercer battles on Europe’s Eastern Front were taking place well beyond the range of close observation or accurate reporting. The mass atrocities being perpetrated in the East were sketchily reported and poorly understood. They were not troubling the public conscience. After years when Britain’s very survival had been at stake, the general mood was lightening. The Allied cause was prospering. Talk on the Continent was of impending Liberation.

From the outside, Barnes Lodge looked much like any other English country house of Edwardian vintage. Brick-built under a low-sloping grey slate roof, and largely covered in white plaster, it was set four-square on a clearing at the top of a steep drive overlooking the valley of the River Gade in Hertfordshire. A dozen main rooms were arranged on two storeys round a central staircase. They were light, airy and elegant, thanks to the high walls and moulded ceilings, and were lit by large octagonal sash windows. They offered views over a wide lawn at the front and over an unspoiled rural setting at the back.

Yet the occupants had been seeking other advantages. The building had no immediate neighbours, though it was located less than a mile from the mainline railway running north from London to Bletchley and the Midlands. Except at the back, it was surrounded either by pine trees or by thickets of hawthorn, alder, and hazel. The winding drive climbed up the hill with no sight of its destination. The iron gates, which stood back from the main road at the bottom, were wreathed in shrubbery, giving no hint of the guardhouse and the steel-net fence lurking beyond. A discreet notice read ‘Private’. Motorists driving past the village of King’s Langley on the
A41 were unlikely to give a second thought as they negotiated the bend and the railway arch just after the drive. Passengers on the express steam trains which ran alongside the road had other things to watch. On the other side of the line, they could take their fill of the garish placards, cutout cows, and mock-Tudor barns of the model Ovaltine Egg Farm. Commuters waiting on the platform of King’s Langley halt for their twenty-five-minute journey to Euston would have noticed nothing. They would only have seen the Ovaltine factory, the red-tiled roofs of the village, and a wooded hillside in the distance. Villagers drinking in the isolated Eagle pub two hundred yards from the gates, or at Ye Olde Red Lion beside the railway arch, would have known that the Lodge had been given over to ‘war work’. But they would have been warned by the local constable to ask no questions. The War Office had been looking for seclusion and convenience. They had known exactly what they were doing when they requisitioned Barnes Lodge soon after the outbreak of war.
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By 1944, the progress of the Second World War in Europe had reached its critical point. The fortunes of battle were about to swing irreversibly in favour of the Grand Alliance. For the previous twelve months, Hitler’s Wehrmacht had been retreating without respite on the Eastern Front, reeling from crushing defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk. It could still hope to organize an effective line of defence in the rapidly narrowing space between the mountains and the sea, but only on condition that an overwhelming part of its forces were concentrated on that single task. Yet in the weeks since 6 June, the armies of the Western Allies had established a powerful beachhead in Normandy, in addition to their steadily strengthening grip on Italy. The Reich was now facing the ultimate nightmare which German generals had feared throughout the twentieth century – a war of attrition on two fronts against superior numbers and superior resources. Moreover, Germany’s ordeal was made considerably worse both by its effective withdrawal from the naval contest, which had long menaced the Allies’ lifeline across the Atlantic, and by the unchallengeable supremacy of Western air power, which was steadily reducing all the major cities of Germany to rubble. If the Allied momentum was not quickly contained, two major developments loomed. Firstly, the Nazis were going to be thrown out of the countries immediately adjacent to the Reich. And secondly, the Reich itself was going to be invaded.
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Mid-1944 was also the time when the outlines of a post-war world dominated by the USA were coming into view. In the space of three brief years, the USA had created an unprecedented lead in economic production,
financial power, technological expertise, and military potential; and it was now translating its might into political muscle. Almost completely unscathed by the fighting which, with the exception of one day at Pearl Harbor, had never reached American shores, the world’s new ‘superpower’ held important levers of influence over its British and Soviet partners; and President Roosevelt was exercising ever greater clout among the ‘Big Three’. Whilst Churchill and Stalin were turning their thoughts to post-war recovery, Roosevelt’s team was drawing up plans for the perpetuation of American dominance. It was Roosevelt who had invented the Allied policy of ‘unconditional surrender’; and between July and October 1944, it was the USA which planned a new, American-led world order.

The men and women working at Barnes Lodge were in closer touch with some of these developments than almost anyone else in Britain. They formed a special unit of long-distance radio-telegraphists, maintaining constant contact with Allied forces on the Continent. To be exact, Barnes Lodge was a listening and receiving station. It was linked by a fifty-six-strand cable to transmitters a couple of miles away at Chipperfield House and Tower Hill, and by a battery of teleprinters and over 5okm (thirty miles) of landline to the 6th Bureau of Army Command in London, SW1. Codenamed ‘Martha’, it was station number eight in a chain of ninety-five, including one recently established near Brindisi in southern Italy.
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The Headquarters Communications Company based at Barnes Lodge was associated with a much wider radio network. A neighbouring unit in the village of Boxmoor, for example, was engaged in foreign radio-intelligence. Divided into two sections, German and Russian, it reported directly to the top-secret intelligence centre at Bletchley Park. The German Section was headed by two high-powered mathematicians, who had pioneered the pre-war work on the German Enigma codes, and the Russian Section by a former Professor of Sanskrit. A third unit, based in Mill Hill, was dedicated to civilian communications. It belonged officially to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and was put mainly at the disposal of the Premier. A fourth belonged to the Foreign Ministry and was used to keep contact with embassies, legations, and consulates around the world.

Barnes Lodge had a staff of 127. It was commanded by a military captain, who was also a professional engineer, and was divided into a Correspondence Section and a Technical Services Section. Of the eight officers, two were electronics experts. There were thirty-nine telegraphists, eleven radio mechanics, and five female teleprinter operators. Twenty-eight soldiers serviced the transmitters and kept the register of
transmissions. A team of nineteen maintained the antennas. Seventeen more were responsible for various clerical, kitchen, and guard duties. The senior personnel were either accommodated in rooms on the top floor of the Lodge or billeted in the village; junior ranks lived in dormitories converted from garages and stables. Everyone knew everyone else. Two men played a special role liaising with the higher British authorities. One was an affluent businessman who had worked in Belgium and volunteered for military service in 1939, the other a young cadet who had recently completed his schooling at Ampleforth College.

The Allied cause was completely dominated by the ‘Big Three’, although the routes followed by each of the three had been very different. The British Empire had been engaged almost from the start, having declared war on the Third Reich on 3 September 1939. Under the combative leadership of the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, it had moved away from the pre-war stance of well-intentioned appeasement to one of principled defiance. The United States of America, in contrast, had steered clear of the war in Europe for over two years. But President Franklin D. Roosevelt had moved in 1941 from undercover support for Britain to open engagement, and, thanks to America’s vast resources, to the status of the Free World’s leading champion. America’s role in Europe was limited only by her simultaneous commitment to the war against Japan. For its part, the Soviet Union had spent the first two wartime years as an active partner of the Third Reich. The secret protocols of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, which had made Hitler’s initial aggressions possible, had enabled ‘Marshal Stalin’ to perpetrate similar depredations. Hitler’s surprise attack on the USSR in June 1941, however, had transformed Europe’s military alignments overnight. Henceforth, the USSR and the Third Reich were engaged in a fight to the death. Moreover, the crushing Soviet victories, when they came, were all the more impressive because they were so unexpected. Despite the manifestly undemocratic character of the Stalinist regime, they gave Stalin enormous prestige and admiration even among Western democrats. So the ‘Big Three’ drew ever closer. Their aim was unconditional surrender. They called themselves ‘the United Nations’.
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In 1944, radio-telegraphy and radio-telephony were still in the early stages of their development. The equipment was cumbersome and heavy; transmissions needed high levels of electrical power. Reception was often poor. Detection was relatively easy. Allied telegraphists, as at Barnes Lodge, relied mainly on hand-operated circuit stoppers or ‘sounders’ which
required the operator to tap out the laborious dots and dashes of the international variant (Q) of the Morse code. They received incoming messages on pre-selected wavelengths through the crackling earphones and they wrote them down letter by letter with pencil and paper. Since the enemy could easily eavesdrop, they were obliged to use ciphers at every stage. This meant that incoming messages were not normally intelligible at Barnes Lodge. Their text could only be rendered recognizable by the headquarters staff and by the banks of cipher clerks who worked in support of them at the other end of the teleprinters. Security demanded that the telegraphists and the cipher clerks be always kept apart. Decipherment was still more laborious than transmitting. The clerks had to conduct all manner of checks and to refer to a series of ever-changing keys, tables, and combinations; and they worked on material according to a strict hierarchy of importance. Messages marked XXX were to be dealt with immediately. Those marked VVV had second priority, whilst those marked VV remained at the bottom of the pile. Processing, therefore, was slow. Delays were frequent. If replies to short notes of the highest priority were ready within a matter of hours, things were going well.
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Of course, it was to overcome these problems of delay and decipherment that the German Command had adopted their mechanized ‘Enigma’ system. Yet, as the Allies had discovered, the advanced Enigma machines proved vulnerable to advanced methods of code-breaking.
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Barnes Lodge was a technological museum compared to nearby Bletchley Park. But in the long run, it was better to be slow and safe than to be fast and fallible.

The wisdom of this policy had been confirmed prior to the D-Day landings. As a precaution, all foreign organizations in Britain, with the exception of American and Soviet military missions, had been forbidden to transmit enciphered radio messages. One of the Governments-in-Exile defied the order. But it was allowed to continue when the British ‘listeners’ were unable to break in. If the British experts could not master the cipher, it was correctly assumed that the Germans would not be able to do so either.
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The work of these covert communication networks was complemented by that of regular radio stations broadcasting
en clair
. By far the most important was the BBC World Service, which broadcast from Bush House in dozens of languages and which ran a dedicated section for every enemy-occupied country. But there were many lesser outfits as well, organized for special purposes. Radio ‘Vaver’, for instance, used prearranged code-words buried in open messages to communicate with
underground groups that possessed no special equipment. The messages were sent from a transmitter at Fawley Court near Henley. Their reception could be confirmed by ciphered signals received at Barnes Lodge. Radio ‘Dawn’, in contrast, which belonged to the Ministry of Information, pretended to be broadcasting from the middle of Nazi-occupied Europe. In reality, its programmes were transmitted from a ship moored off the coast of East Anglia.

As the range of BBC World Service broadcasts showed, membership of the Allied camp was considerably more diverse than talk on the top table of the ‘Big Three’ might have suggested. Britain’s war effort was supported by the armed forces of the dominions and colonies – notably by the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the South Africans, and the Indians. France had been the principal partner to begin with, and the catastrophic fall of France in 1940 had not severed the French connection. The Free French Movement, formed from ‘all Frenchmen who rally to the Allied cause’, was a permanent (and troublesome) fixture of wartime London. So, too, were the exiled Governments of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Yugoslavia. General de Gaulle, Prime Minister Pierlot, President Beneš, King George II, Grand Duchess Charlotte, Queen Wilhelmina, King Haakon VII, General Sikorski, who died in 1943, and King Peter II were all respected figures, featuring regularly in the British and American press. All of them put armed forces and intelligence services at Britain’s disposal. The Poles were specially numerous, and, by reputation, the most single-minded. It was Hitler’s attack on their country on 1 September 1939 which had started the war. Both individually and cumulatively, therefore, the so-called ‘lesser allies’ were making an invaluable contribution. Though often sidelined by the ‘Big Three’, they formed an integral element in the Allied cause. What is more, their political significance was reviving as the Allied armies advanced. It was hard to imagine the process of liberation without them.