Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [81]
After the great satisfaction of Hut 8’s earlier successes, this was a stomach-punch of disappointment. It also caused a great deal of unrest and unease in Whitehall. One historian has noted that the only thing that ever truly frightened Churchill throughout the course of the war was the prospect of the U-boats gaining the advantage and wiping out the best part of the convoys.
There was a further complicating factor. After an accident in September 1941, when HMS Clyde was damaged in a collision with U-67, Admiral Dönitz had decided that the submarine codes should be set to a different key from that of the surface naval vessels. As well as decoding ‘Dolphin’, as the naval Enigma key was known, everyone in Hut 8 had now had to turn their attentions to what they termed ‘Shark’, the submarine key. With the upgraded Enigma machines, ‘Shark’ now had sharper teeth. Once more, Admiralty was faced with the nightmare prospect of all those vital supply ships and their crews effectively sailing without protection.
It could not have come at a worse possible time: the U-boats were cruising up and down the Atlantic coast of the United States, lying in wait to encircle, or even sail among the convoys; to wait, generally, until night – and then to start firing their torpedoes, so that when one ship went up in bright flame, the others would have to watch. Crews would perish in the stormy waters; vital supplies would be sent to the ocean bed.
All this coincided almost exactly with the climax of a prolonged power struggle within Bletchley Park itself. For some months, there were voices within the Park, throughout Whitehall and in other corners of the Intelligence community that the Park needed a new directorate; that it was inefficient, not doing its job properly. The Intelligence branches of the Services were becoming increasingly uneasy about the fact that Bletchley Park was producing so much intelligence autonomously (and possibly doubly uneasy about the fact that Bletchley appeared to have the wholehearted support of Churchill). In other words, it was not only decrypting, but also analysing the information.
According to Harry Hinsley’s account, Whitehall was growing restive about what was perceived as the poor organisation of the institution: ‘GC and CS had increased in size four-fold in the first sixteen months of the war. At the beginning of 1941 it was, by Whitehall’s standards, poorly organised. This was partly because the growth in its size and in the complexity of its activities had outstripped the experience of those who administered it …’ Military chiefs also had very little taste for what they saw as ‘the condition of creative anarchy, within and between the sections, that distinguished GC and CS’s everyday work and brought to the front the best among its unorthodox and ‘undisciplined’ war-time staff …’2
Churchill himself was made aware of these furious wranglings, which included a suggestion that the director Alistair Denniston got on very badly with the head of MI6, Sir Stewart Menzies. The atmosphere grew fervid. As P.W. Filby recalled it:
Edward Travis was deputy to Denniston and a crony of [Nigel] de Grey. They had endless talks in the crucial days and although they were held next door, the walls were wooden and since we were almost always working in complete silence, I couldn’t help hearing the conversation sometimes. De Grey’s voice was that of an actor and I knew ages before it happened that they didn’t feel Denniston could cope with the enormous increase demanded of Ultra …3
It was true that from the beginning of the war, Denniston had found himself swamped in administrative quicksand. The running of the Park, the efforts to ensure that there were enough personnel when demand from other departments and services was so strong, the constant battle for more machines, even enough building contractors to work on the huts … As Bletchley expanded, its