At the vital moment, I went to the back of the bridge to watch the other ships of the screen through binoculars, especially those ships on the outside of the turn. Suddenly, in the middle of the manoeuvre, Barham switched on her navigation lights. Then she switched on a searchlight. In the beam was, apparently, a submarine. The assumption was that the battleship had rammed a U-boat. At first, no signal was made to say what had happened. Then came a signal from Barham telling us to pick up survivors. The Captain was, of course, on the bridge by this time, so I, as First Lieutenant, went down to lower a boat to pick up survivors from a U-boat – or so I thought. As the boat was being lowered there were several loud explosions. There must be a second U-boat which had fired torpedoes and hit Barham. As an immediate reaction, I thought we should release a life-saving raft for the survivors for the time being and seek to attack this supposed second U-boat. [. . .] Then, with horror, I realised that it was the red anti-fouling on the bottom of a destroyer and that the imagined conning tower was, in fact, the asdic dome.28
Indeed it was. For reasons never fully established, the destroyer Duchess had got in the way of the battleship and been rammed and capsized. A few seconds’ lapse in alertness and the unthinkable had happened. Casualties were heavy: 137 men, including Lieutenant Commander Robin White, perished. Most ratings were below; those not sleeping were having breakfast or clearing away their gear in order to be able to leave early once they arrived in port. The massive bulk of the battleship hit the nimble destroyer with such tremendous speed that she simply turned over, trapping most of the crew within the hull. Many of those who got into the water were either killed by exploding depth-charges or succumbed to the freezing cold of the sea. Few had found the time to grab lifebelts. Only twenty-three men were saved.
Two weeks later, on 28 December, Barham was torpedoed by U30 west of the Butt of Lewis. At the time, the battleship was in the company of Repulse and four destroyers, Inglefield, Imogen, Icarus and Khartoum. No torpedo tracks were seen. The torpedo hit on the port bow abreast the ‘A’ shell room. Four crewmembers were killed. Barham stopped and reversed her engines, making a W/T signal that she had hit a mine or been torpedoed. At the same time, a signal was hoisted, but this was incorrect and no immediate search for the U-boat was initiated. By the time the signals had been corrected, Kapitänleutnant Lemp had taken his boat away and no counterattacks were experienced. In spite of extensive flooding, Barham was able to proceed under her own power to Liverpool, where she stayed in the yards until June 1940.29
Intelligence
Reviewing the general situation at the end of October, the CoS concluded that in their opinion, the only field in which the Allies could take any offensive initiative at the moment was in the economic warfare at sea, combined with diplomatic and financial pressure. This assessment was partly based on the actual strength of the Allied armed forces, partly on an analysis of the economic situation in Germany prepared by the Industrial Intelligence Centre of the Department of Overseas Trade in April 1939. The Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW) believed there to be a shortage of skilled labour in Germany as well as of raw materials such as iron, chrome, nickel, copper, tin, rubber and petroleum. In addition, a major part of German industry was concentrated in the Ruhr–Rhineland–Saar area, within reach of Allied aircraft and an eventual land offensive, should that be decided on. The treaty with Russia, it was believed, would only to a minor degree be able to make good these deficiencies.30 Until one of the parties decided the time was right to open the Western Front, it would be a naval war and its strategies would to a large extent be determined by intelligence. Unfortunately, both intelligence and operational analysis had received low priority in the interwar years and become something of a backwater. In particular naval intelligence was inadequate and fragmented at the outbreak of the war.
Coordinated acquisition of information from reliable sources was rare in Britain and the exchange of analysis and interpretation between departments and services almost non-existent. Worse, German naval communication was for all practical purposes closed to interception. On 12 January 1940, C-in-C Home Fleet Admiral Forbes, with reference to the confusion over who sank the Rawalpindi, complained with open resentment that ‘some improvement should be made in the intelligence’ forwarded to him regarding the whereabouts of German naval vessels: ‘The only intelligence I receive at present is the “Daily Summary of Naval Events” and “OIC, Daily Report” sent by post and therefore anything from 2 to 14 days old.’31
The main intelligence unit of the Admiralty, the Naval Intelligence Department (NID), was led by the director of naval intelligence (DNI), Rear Admiral John Godfrey. NID had been hit hard by the cuts in the naval budgets in the 1920s, but Godfrey had been able to reverse this trend, and an Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC) had been established in 1937, led by Rear Admiral Jock Clayton. The OIC’s main task was the maintenance of tracking plots, incorporating all available information on the whereabouts of German naval ships, on surface and below. Besides some High Frequency Direction Finding (H/F-D/F) wireless stations, known as ‘Huff-Duff’, the plots were based largely on sightings and reports of torpedoed merchantmen at sea, supplemented by intelligence from German or neutral ports by naval attachés, consuls, shipping officers and other observers.32 Reports from non-military sources reached the OIC via the Foreign Office, while sighting reports from ships and aircraft arrived via the so-called War Registry, the department of the Admiralty that distributed signals.33 In addition, Lloyds, the Board of Trade and the Baltic Exchange routinely submitted information on German ship movements. Aircraft reconnaissance was still in its infancy and would only become truly effective towards the end of 1940. To distribute the flow of intelligence quickly, the OIC was authorised to communicate directly with naval forces at sea if considered necessary.
In general, the NID was not overly successful in the first part of the war. The OIC was under-resourced, inexperienced and poorly equipped and hampered by a disruptive state of competition and mistrust between the OIC and NID 1, the geographical section of the NID covering Germany. Inter-service communication and cooperation regarding intelligence and its analysis was virtually non-existent in Britain at the beginning of the war.34
The Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, which would later become instrumental in the outcome of the war through outstanding signals intelligence and cryptanalysis, had been set up as an inter-departmental body responsible for acquiring intelligence by means of cryptanalysis in 1919. In case of a new war it was intended that the analysis of readable codes and cypher should be transferred back to the service intelligence branches while the GC&CS would work on unsolved cypher. Thus, the staffs of the GC&CS were expert cryptanalysts but not professional intelligence personnel. This would actually lead to a flexible collaboration between the GC&CS and the services later, but during its first year, a lack of experience and competence meant that the relatively new concept of Sigint or ‘Wireless Traffic Analysis’ was looked upon with suspicion and not understood by most staffs and senior officers. Eventually, the keys of the German Enigma code-machines would become available to the GC&CS but for all practical purposes, the Kriegsmarine codes remained impregnable to British intelligence until the second half of 1940.
Photographic reconnaissance had been all but ignored by the RAF in the inter-war years and had to be reinvented. Suitable aircraft types were scarce, the cameras and film in use were generally unsuitable and in those instances where good photographs were actually taken, there were few if any trained interpreters to analyse them. In the weeks before the outbreak of war, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) had fitted the private Lockheed aircraft of businessman Frederick Sidney Cotton with hidden cameras to photograph German airfields, naval installations and ships on his flights to and from Germany. After war had been declared, Cotton and his small staff were incorporated into the RAF as 1 Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) at Heston aerodrome. At first, Blenheims of Bomber Command were used to fly photographic reconnaissance sorties, but inadequate performance resulted in heavy losses. Civilian aircraft were pressed into service, but it was not until two stripped-down Spitfires could be made available in November 1939, that PRU could begin anything like proper operations over western