Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [127]
On the night of 29 April, those on duty at Bletchley Park found themselves witness to Hitler’s increasing desperation. The Führer telegraphed Field Marshal Keitel from his bunker with three questions. ‘Where are Wenck’s spearheads? When will they advance? Where is Ninth Army?’ Keitel’s response was that all such forces were either stuck fast or completely encircled.
One might imagine a build-up of tremendous excitement in the huts at this time. But in fact, the events leading up to VE Day brought with them, surprisingly, an increase in security precautions. In late April, just days before German capitulation, the staff of Hut 3 were being told in memos that any decrypts involving mass German surrenders were to be extremely restricted in terms of circulation. On top of this, Director Edward Travis sent out a memo forbidding celebratory telegrams being sent out – unless they were in extremely special circumstances, in which case they first had to be presented for his approval.
Why the anxiety? First, the war with Japan was still going on. And also, even in the euphoria of victory, Travis and other senior staff at Bletchley Park would have been aware of the need to maintain security in the face of a new, chilly, geopolitical reality.
The collective image we now seem to carry of VE Day is of jubilant crowds in the streets of London, men and women with arms linked, people hanging on to lamp-posts, the night-time streets bathed in lights after the years of blackouts; people getting ‘lit-up’ themselves, as the singer Hutch put it, getting uproariously drunk, dancing and kissing that perfect night away.
And, despite the restrictions, nothing could stop the celebrations in Bletchley either. When the day came, one veteran recalls: ‘We assembled on the grass outside the Mansion to hear that war with Germany was over. There was a huge cheer and great excitement – though our delight was muted as we still had the Japanese to finish before we could go home. So back to our decoding machines.’
There was another reason for going back to the machines. Even since the beginning of the war, it had not just been German traffic that was the target for the codebreakers; it was Russian traffic too. And in Bletchley – as well as in the wider Intelligence and military hierarchy – all thoughts were now starting to focus on ‘the next war’; that was, the possibility of having to face a dominant Russia with plans of its own for European territorial gains.
Recall that as far back as the early 1920s, the British had been doing their best to monitor all Soviet secret traffic. Come 1939, there was no less reason to do so, especially in the face of the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact that foreswore any acts of aggression between Russia and Germany. So at the time of the Russian invasion of Finland in 1940, with the enormous amount of encrypted messages that were generated therewith, Bletchley managed to get a hook into the Russian codes. When the Germans invaded France, the Polish codebreakers who had been living in exile in Paris were forced to flee once more, to Britain. And from the outstation at Stanmore in Middlesex, these Poles were able to intercept and read Russian traffic emanating from the Ukraine.
When in 1941 Germany invaded Russia, the mighty bear appeared suddenly to be an ally of the British. It was officially put about that she was treated as such, and that Churchill especially ordered that any intelligence operations against Russia should desist. This was not entirely the case.
In September 1944, Sir Stewart Menzies, head of MI6, held discussions involving Sir Edward Travis, Gordon Welchman and Colonel Tiltman. These talks were about the urgent need to keep pace with (and, if