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By Root 2644 0

spring of 1939 there were concerns about the information on the German armed forces which SIS was able to provide. In March Rex Howard worried about the inability of stations at short notice to send agents into Germany to report on specific aerodromes. Just days before the outbreak of the Second World War, Dick Ellis reported a rather unconvincing series of steps taken by the Service to warn of an impending German attack. The highly regarded ‘22124/X’ had ‘arranged with his brother in the VDA [Volksbund für Deutschtum im Ausland - Society for Germanism Abroad] to let him know by telegram in Rome if war is certain’. A female agent, whose daughter was ‘in daily touch with the Ribbentrops’ (Joachim von Ribbentrop was the German Foreign Minister), had ‘promised to do everything to warn us by telegram’. Another agent had been sent to Wilhelmshaven ‘to warn us about sailings of warships and indications of impending air-raids’. He had ‘made his own arrangements to get into Holland or Belgium’, from where he would ‘wire or telephone’. An agent in Basel, Switzerland, was to telephone ‘if he hears from Swiss-Air (in close touch with Lufthansa) of an impending air-attack’. While this was not, perhaps, very encouraging, there was slightly more hope of identifying key German ship movements at the outbreak of war. In April 1939 Captain Russell reassured Commander Frank Slocum (G.3) that he was ‘well served’ regarding information from German North Sea ports, ‘except that after the frontier is closed we shall probably not get it out in time unless agents have W/T’. In fact, an ‘instructional’ wireless set had already been sent out to The Hague station for one of its German-based agents and SIS’s Communications Section VIII was prepared to provide more equipment when agents had been trained and ‘if C.S.S. gives approval’.

A month before the outbreak of war Menzies wisely suggested that the stations in Copenhagen, The Hague and Brussels ought ‘to consider the possibility of their countries being overrun’, in which case ‘it would be of paramount importance for them to leave behind reliable sources’. Wireless sets, he said, would also need to be provided. Evidently concerned that planning for any kind of ‘stay-behind’ organisation might appear defeatist, Menzies wanted it emphasised to the representatives that ‘they must avoid in any way alarming persons whom they approach, and they should make it clear that we consider that if the situation envisaged occurred, it would only be for a short time as we are absolutely confident of complete victory in the end’.

Following the German occupation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, attention began to focus on the growing threat to Poland, where Germany had particularly begun to target the Free City of Danzig on the Baltic and the Polish Corridor granted to Poland under the Treaty of Versailles which isolated the German territory of East Prussia. In March the Cabinet decided that a public statement should be made to indicate ‘our intention to support Poland’. In May the Foreign Office asked the Berlin and Rome embassies to spread the message informally that if Germany invaded Poland both Britain and France would come to its aid. Since a copy of this telegram was sent to Sinclair, it may be assumed that SIS was also to participate in the campaign. On 7 July a bogus Cabinet decision stating that any armed clash between Germany and Poland over Danzig would be regarded by Britain as a casus belli was prepared for SIS to communicate to the Germans.26 A week later SIS circulated a paper on ‘Germany and Poland’ which said that Hitler was determined to solve the ‘Danzig question’ during the autumn, with the danger period coming in late August/early September: ‘We are sceptical as regards “dates” for action’, but it seemed likely that whenever Hitler acted it would be ‘a lightning decision within 24 hours of the event’. The paper argued that a lot depended on how seriously Hitler took Anglo-French, and particularly British, determination to honour pledges to Poland. At the moment he still needed