Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [51]
‘Now, there was a code which set the angles of the beams. And if you could break the code, clever engineers could bend one of the beams so that the crossing point was over green fields, and not over cities.’
London, of course, was not alone in bearing the brunt of the nightly assaults; British industrial cities from Birmingham and Liverpool to Manchester and Glasgow lived in expectation of receiving hits. The information Bletchley supplied was never conclusive, but they were able to identify squadrons and call-signs and thus report on numbers. However, Bletchley Park was not able in 1940 to accurately identify disguised place names in messages. For that, what would be needed was not a bombe, but a physical codebook, for aliases are simply impossible to guess at.
Thus the war acquired a new and terrible urgency. The deployment of British troops in foreign lands was one thing; the targeting of ordinary citizens in large cities – in other words, total war – was another. Although much was made at the time of the claim that ‘Britain can take it!’, the true effect upon morale, especially among the East Enders whose houses and streets were being flattened on a nightly basis, was more difficult to gauge.
British government psychologists were extremely concerned about the possible effects upon large urban populations of subjection to Blitzkrieg of the kind suffered in Spain and Norway. Mass panic was predicted, along with a breakdown of law and order, and the development of a sort of collective psychosis. In fact, those first Luftwaffe raids upon London had demonstrated something quite different; a tangible sense of defiance among all the smouldering bricks and the shattered houses. But London was a vast city. What would be the effect in a smaller, perhaps more tightly knit community?
The RAF campaign against German cities stepped up. That autumn, British bombers aimed for Munich and for arms factories in Essen; they also bombed Hamburg. In response, German bombers started roving more widely across Britain. And in November 1940, one particular raid led to a conspiracy theory involving Bletchley Park that has persisted to this day.
The story, according to ‘end-of-war’ reports from Bletchley itself, seemed to go like this: thanks to a ‘Brown’ message decrypt from Enigma on 11 November 1940, the Park was able to tell Air Intelligence that there was to be a very heavy raid. The codename given to this raid was ‘Moonlight Sonata’; the reason for the name was that it was apparently to take place at the height of the full moon. The German planes would be led by navigation beams. And there was a list of four potential targets, each of which had been given codenames. One of the codenames was ‘Korn’.
Just earlier, a German prisoner of war had told his interrogators that a heavy raid was planned on Birmingham or Coventry. On 12 November, a ‘Brown’ Enigma decrypt seemed to give navigation beam bearings showing that three of the potential targets were the heavily industrialised Midlands cities of Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Coventry. The date for the raid was most likely to be the 15th.
And so with this information, gleaned from Bletchley, Air Intelligence reported to the Prime Minister on the morning of the 14th, telling him that the target was possibly London – given the sheer size of the raid planned – but could also either be Coventry or Birmingham. After all, no one could know what the code word ‘Korn’ signified. Both Midlands cities were likely targets, as both had high concentrations of manufacturing plants directly involved with the war effort. In the case of Coventry, many of these factories were within the bounds of the city centre. As targets on a brightly moonlit night, they could hardly be easier.
By 3 p.m. that day, radio signals finally made it clear that Coventry was to be the target, and that the raid was to take place that night.
This is where the conspiracy theory begins. Why, it goes, were the people of Coventry