Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [86]
However, an attack on the Tirpitz itself came to nothing. A few months later, and that ‘long shadow’ was hanging over convoy PQ17, which consisted of thirty ships, sailing through the wind and the ice of the northern seas. The Tirpitz, and other enemy ships, started hunting them down; again, the codebreakers at Bletchley worked at terrific speed, and the decrypted messages were passed to Admiralty. This time however the messages were misunderstood.
The Admiralty gave the order for the convoy to be dispersed; back at the Park, Hut 4 liaison officer Harry Hinsley tried to persuade the Admiralty that the convoy should not disperse and should instead sail back towards the home fleet. The Admiralty would not listen.
Twenty-four Allied ships were sunk – some from the air and some by U-boats. This was no failure of Bletchley; rather, it was a failure of those who gave orders on the basis of the intelligence that they received.
Yet in spite of such catastrophes, and the anguish of the 1942 code blackout, Bletchley could still console itself in one small sense, according to cryptographer Edward Thomas. ‘The evasive routeing of convoys made possible by Hut 8’s [original] breaking of the Naval Enigma in the spring of 1941,’ he wrote, ‘had, according to some historians, spared some 300 merchant ships and so provided a cushion against the heavy losses to come.’16 Despite the blackout, he noted, this earlier work of Bletchley Park meant that Dönitz’s new offensive came to very little, and that losses were in decline.
And in the spring of 1942 Hut 3 made significant inroads into the Luftwaffe codes. As a result, better defensive measures could be taken as 1,000 bomber raids were carried out, meaning that the RAF could carry out more daring raids while keeping the loss of aircraft to a minimum. Although many of these raids were ineffective and inaccurate when it came to hitting serious industrial targets, they nevertheless had a powerful propaganda effect, especially among the British. The German raid on Coventry had hardened British public attitudes towards retaliation. After the destruction of the London Blitz – and horrific assaults such as that on Coventry – the RAF were at last seen to be giving it back.
Despite its disastrous start, 1942 eventually proved to be the year that Churchill was able to describe as ‘the end of the beginning’. There was the key triumph of El-Alamein, possibly the most important British battle in the war: after months of morale-corroding setbacks in North Africa, General Montgomery’s armies at last pushed behind German lines, forcing Rommel’s Axis forces into a long retreat. ‘By the summer of 1942,’ recalled Y Service signals intelligence operative Aileen Clayton, who by that stage was based in Malta, ‘there can have been little Enigma traffic between the German forces in Africa and their masters back in Berlin and Italy that we did not intercept, and now that the cryptographers at Bletchley were so quickly decoding the messages, it was almost like being a member of Rommel’s staff.’17
The results were spectacular. Thanks to Bletchley, Montgomery had access to an unprecedented amount of information about his enemy’s army; about numbers, about armaments, about the supply situations. ‘Alamein was marvellous,’ recalled one veteran, ‘because you had these desperate messages from Rommel saying, “Panzer Army is exhausted, we’ve only enough petrol for 50 kilometres, ammunition is contemptible”, and so on.’
We do see here some of the ambiguity felt by the British military towards the intelligence that Bletchley Park was providing – there is a suggestion that General Montgomery did not wholly trust what he was being told. ‘We told Monty over and over again how few tanks Rommel had got,’ recalled Bletchley Park veteran and historian Ralph Bennett. ‘So Monty could have wiped Rommel off the face of the earth. Why he didn’t, I simply do not know.’18 Nevertheless, throughout General Montgomery’s attack on the Axis forces on 23 October 1942,