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fortune. Many ministers and generals, who readily accepted that only Churchill could be Britain’s prime minister, were nonetheless convinced that he should divorce the premiership from the ministry of defence, delegating operational control of the war. But to whom? The mooted candidates were almost as unsuitable as had been the Duke of Gloucester. Leo Amery told Dill, home on leave, that he favoured appointing Wavell as “super–chief of staff … Dill agreed659, but said nothing could get Winston to face up to it however bad the present arrangement may be.” This exchange says little for the judgement of either man, but much about the mood in Whitehall towards the prime minister. Even Eden, Churchill’s most trusted colleague, was convinced that he should relinquish the ministry of defence.

Churchill later described September and October660 1942 as his most anxious months of the war. Amery complained after a Cabinet wrangle: “It is an awful thing dealing with a man661 like Winston who is at the same moment dictatorial, eloquent and muddle-headed.” Beaverbrook, unswervingly mischievous and disloyal, told Eden on October 8 that the prime minister was “a ‘bent’ man, and couldn’t be expected662 to last long … The future belonged to A.E.” Influential Canadian diplomat Humphrey Hume Wrong, in London on a fact-finding mission, wrote in his diary: “The dominance of Churchill emerges663 from all these talks. Cripps on the shelf, Attlee a lackey, Bracken the Man Friday of Churchill. It isn’t as bad as the political gossips make out, but it’s bad enough.”

If Churchill’s person was in Downing Street, his spirit was far away, in the drifting sands of Egypt. Montgomery was training troops, making plans, stockpiling ammunition, readying his new Sherman tanks. The foxy little general insisted upon launching Eighth Army’s offensive according to his own timetable, heedless of the prime minister’s impatience. A critical contribution to his campaign was already being made at sea. Guided by Ultra decrypts, the RAF and Royal Navy inflicted a series of devastating blows on the Italian tankers and supply ships fuelling and feeding the Afrika Korps. By late October, even before Eighth Army began its assault, the German logistical predicament in Egypt was desperate. The prime minister knew this from his Boniface decrypts, and dispatched a barrage of anxious, sometimes threatening, signals to Alexander. A British army strongly superior in men, tanks, guns and planes must surely be capable of defeating an enemy known to be almost immobilised for lack of fuel.

The operational value of Ultra material on the battlefield depended heavily on the receptiveness of individual commanders, and the quality of their intelligence chiefs. Some generals and admirals were astonishingly indifferent to the bounties they were offered. Montgomery was the first British desert commander to employ a top-class intelligence officer, in the person of Oxford academic Brig. Edgar Williams, and to heed his counsel. Ultra played a key role in enabling Montgomery to defeat Rommel’s thrust at Alam Halfa. Adm. Sir Dudley Pound, first sea lord until 1943, often used intelligence poorly, most notoriously during the PQ17 Arctic convoy battle. By contrast, the Admiralty’s Submarine Tracking Room was brilliantly conducted, and played a decisive role in the Battle of the Atlantic. In 1942, however, Bletchley’s inability to crack the U-boat cipher rendered Allied convoys appallingly vulnerable. November saw the worst losses of the war: some 721,700 tons of Allied shipping were sunk. Then, suddenly and dramatically, the code breakers achieved another breakthrough, and once more provided the Royal Navy with means to track U-boat positions. From December onwards, convoys could again be routed away from the submarine wolf packs. Thanks overwhelmingly to intelligence, the tide of the Atlantic battle, as well as of the Mediterranean campaign to interdict supplies to Rommel, turned decisively against Germany.

Montgomery launched his attack at El Alamein on October 23. Brendan Bracken said: “If