Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [93]
According to historian Michael Howard:
Roosevelt’s personal bonhomie was based on a shrewd appreciation that Britain must not be allowed to lose the war, and then – once the Americans had been precipitated out of a neutrality they would far rather have preserved – that she must be humoured until the United States was strong enough to take over the direction of the war and wage it as she thought fit. He needed Churchill’s help to overcome the visceral dislike of the British that penetrated deep into his military and political elites. Ironically, Churchill was to do this so successfully that today he is far more of an iconic figure in the United States than Roosevelt.1
Some of these tensions were reflected in miniature by the workings of Bletchley Park, both before December 1941, when the USA entered the war, and after. Suspicion in some corners persists to this day that Bletchley Park learned from decrypts in early December 1941 about the forthcoming Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and that Churchill suppressed the passing of intelligence in order to ensure that the bombing would go ahead, thus ensuring that the Americans would join the war. But even in 1940, over a year before America entered the war, both countries were, at best, tentative with regard to the sharing of information and intelligence. Although it was clearly understood that Britain and America should co-operate in terms of ciphers, the extent of this co-operation soon became a cause of ill-will. According to the Bletchley official history: ‘In the British archives there is no intelligence of any importance that was not available to the Americans.’ Nevertheless, the mere fact that such a suspicion could arise is telling. And from the start, the relationship between Bletchley and American Intelligence was far from easy.
In December 1940, a full year before America entered the war, an agreement was signed in Washington between Britain and the USA which would mean both countries having a full exchange of technical information concerning German, Italian and Japanese codes.
A month later, a small party of four American cryptographers – two army and two navy – sailed over to England to see the Bletchley operation for themselves.
Having been greeted at the docks by the then Deputy Director Edward Travis and Colonel John Tiltman, they were driven to Bletchley, where they met Alistair Denniston at midnight. Denniston’s personal assistant, Barbara Abernethy, recalled:
I’d never seen Americans before, except in the films. I just plied them with sherry. I hadn’t the faintest idea what they were doing there; I wasn’t told. But it was very exciting and hushed voices. I couldn’t hear anything of what was said but I was told not to tell anybody about it. I guess it wasn’t general knowledge that the Americans had got any liaison with Bletchley. It was before Pearl Harbor, you see, and presumably Roosevelt was not telling everybody there was going to be any liaison at that stage.2
Throughout the several weeks the American party spent in England, they were put up in the nearby manor house of Shenley Park, and as well as Bletchley Park, were shown U-boat tracking stations and radar stations. One of the key elements of their visit was their mutual interest in cracking the Japanese codes. The elegant Scotsman Hugh Foss, together with Oliver Strachey, had penetrated the Japanese diplomatic code machine in 1934. Moreover, Colonel Tiltman had cracked Japanese military codes as far back as 1933, and the new army ciphers in 1938. Such expertise was naturally going to be of interest to the Americans, who had been monitoring the Japanese closely.
Meanwhile, the Americans had succeeded by 1940 in getting their own decryption machine, devoted to Japanese codes, working. The machine was called ‘Purple’. The American cryptographers brought one such machine over with them to