• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Another who took this view was Captain Frederick Winter botham, who was there on the afternoon when it became apparent that the city would be bombed, and wrote that there was still a chance that a decision to evacuate Coventry could be taken:

There were, perhaps, four or five hours before the attack would arrive. It was a longish flight north and the enemy aircraft would not cross the coast before dark. I asked the personal secretary if he would be good enough to ring me back when the decision had been taken, because if Churchill decided to evacuate Coventry, the press, and indeed everybody, would know we had pre-knowledge of the raid and some counter-measure might be necessary to protect the source which would obviously become suspect.

It also seemed to me, sitting in my office a little weary after the sleepless bomb-torn night before, that there would be absolute chaos if everyone tried to get out of the city in the few hours available and that if, for any reason, the raid was postponed by weather or for some other reason, we should have put the source of our information at risk to no purpose.

I imagine the Prime Minister must have consulted a number of people before making up his mind. In any case, the RAF had ample time to put their counter-measures into action, such as jamming any of the aids to navigation that the Germans might be using. In the event, it was decided only to alert all the services, the fire, the ambulance, the police, the wardens, and to get everything ready to light the decoy fires. This is the sort of terrible decision that sometimes has to be made on the highest levels in war. It was unquestionably the right one.4

Oliver Lawn still finds himself musing on the subject: ‘There were others who took other views. We will never know.’ Perhaps so. But this was not the only instance in which Churchill and Bletchley Park were suspected of having connived to withhold information. Years after the Japanese launched their devastating surprise attack upon the US base of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in December 1941, thus bringing the Americans into the war, it was suggested by some sources that Bletchley Park, through its work on the ‘Purple’ Japanese codes, had decrypted vital messages concerning Japanese military intentions. The allegation was that having seen such intelligence, Churchill ordered it to be suppressed so that the Americans would gain no advance warning, thus ensuring that the attack would bring the USA into the conflict.

In fact, British intelligence was anticipating an attack upon Malaya – there was no forecast of any strike against any American base. And there is one further point in the defence of Bletchley and the Prime Minister. During bombing raids carried out on British cities in the early months of 1941, the business of meddling with Luftwaffe navigational beams was much more successful; one night in May, twenty-three German fighters were brought down on Humberside. And a ferocious attack on Derby – planned to be on the same scale as Coventry – was largely thwarted.

Even so, in such situations it was often a matter of bluff and counter-bluff. According to a recent work by Rebecca Ratcliff, there were times when the cryptographers would receive irrefutable evidence of forthcoming bombing raids in certain locations.

During the Blitz of 1941, they worried in particular about air-raid counter-measures. Ordering the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) for the correct target well before the Luftwaffe bombers appeared in the sky would reveal foreknowledge of the bombing raid and jeopardise the intelligence source. The Hut 3 analysts directed that all ARP orders be postponed until the Germans began their raid preparations and turned on their radio guidance beams.

These beams led the Luftwaffe planes to their targets … In addition, the analysts suggested that ARP measures be ordered not only for the target revealed by Ultra but “in [other towns] also, preferably situated along the line of the … beam”. Then,