All this was evident from a map, but there was little sign that many members of the British government looked at a map. In March 1940 Prime Minister Chamberlain was calling blockade ‘the main weapon’. Britain’s Ministry of Economic Warfare said, and believed, that the German economy was on the point of breakdown. On 27 May 1940 Britain’s chiefs of staff predicted that Germany’s economic collapse would take place by the end of 1941. By September 1940 – with Hitler controlling Europe from Norway to the Spanish border, and the Battle of Britain still undecided – the chiefs of staff had not changed their mind. The prevailing opinion was that Germany’s inevitable collapse would now be speeded by the rebellious people of the occupied countries. The role of the British army in 1942, they cheerfully predicted, would merely be to keep order in that chaotic Europe left by the German disintegration! We must not be too hard on those wishful thinkers: such fantasies kept Britain and her Dominions fighting in a situation that more realistic minds would have pronounced hopeless.
The division of Poland, between Germany and the Soviet Union, and the trade between them was not the only bad news that the admirals had to swallow in that 1940 summer. The Admiralty had always assumed that in the event of war it would enjoy port facilities in Ireland. From fuelling bases at Queenstown (Cobh) and Berehaven and the naval base at Lough Swilly on the west coast, anti-submarine flotillas would have ranged far out into the Atlantic. Without them every escort vessel would add 400 miles to its patrol. The use of the bases in wartime had been confirmed in a conversation between the Irish patriot Michael Collins, Admiral Beatty and Winston Churchill as long ago as 1922, when Churchill, as colonial and dominions secretary, was concerned with the Irish Settlement.
The story behind this change has still to be told to everyone’s satisfaction. In April 1938 the Chamberlain government renounced the right to use the ports which it had been granted under the 1922 Irish treaty. Churchill was appalled and said that it would be hard to imagine a more feckless act at such a time. In the House of Commons he spoke against what he called a ‘gratuitous surrender’ and a ‘lamentable and amazing episode’. He found himself unsupported. Virtually the whole Conservative party, and the Labour (Socialist) and Liberal opposition, sided with Chamberlain. But when war came, the Irish Republic remained neutral and Churchill’s warnings proved exactly true. Ireland’s government resisted Britain’s requests to use the ports, although some of the material brought in the convoys was destined for neutral Ireland.
The convoys, channelled into the narrow waters around Ireland, provided rich pickings near home for bold U-boat captains. The Admiralty was still coming to terms with these difficulties when, in the summer of 1940, an even worse change came to the operational maps. The Germans conquered Denmark, so providing a gate to the Baltic, and Norway, with its bases and access to the North Atlantic. The only alleviation of this gloom was that the Norwegian merchant fleet – one of the world’s largest – sailed to England to evade the Germans. This enormous addition to the shipping tonnage was to become the margin by which Britain survived in the dark days to come.
When in the summer of 1940 France was conquered by the Germans its fleet did not sail to British ports to continue the fight. In the Atlantic and Mediterranean the Royal Navy took on the whole load the French navy had shared. France’s Atlantic coast also provided magnificent submarine bases, well away from RAF bomber airfields. From these ports the U-boats could sail directly into the world’s oceans.
When Admiralty radio interceptions and bearings indicated that U-boats were using French ports the Foreign Office insisted that it was impossible; the French would not permit it. Lt Minshall RNVR, the same young officer who had provided the globe for the Admiralty, volunteered to investigate. One of the Royal Navy’s submarines took him to the French coast, where he spotted and commandeered a French boat which he sailed into the mouth of the Gironde. He stayed there for six days, noting the U-boat movements and enough details to convince even the men of the Foreign Office that the ports were being used.12 He got back to England in the sailing boat and was awarded a ‘mention in dispatches’.13
Britain’s armed forces had gone to war expecting to fight in the way they had fought in 1914. The British Expeditionary Force would go to France and hold a small section of the Western Front while the Royal Navy – aided by the French fleet – protected the sea routes and waited to re-fight the battle of Jutland. Now everything was changed. Britain was isolated and the Germans held most of Europe, including the Channel coast just twenty-one miles away. With Italy fighting alongside Hitler the Mediterranean sea routes were fiercely contested and Britain’s army in Egypt was under constant threat. By the summer of 1940 no one could continue to believe that this war would much resemble the previous conflict.
Cracking the naval codes: Enigma
In 1920 the organization known in the First World War as I.D. 25, and usually referred to as Room 40, changed its name to the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS). This name served to hide its true purpose, which was to protect British official communications and intercept foreign ones. It was a part of the Secret Intelligence Service, and in 1925 it was moved from a building behind Charing Cross railway station to the SIS headquarters at 54 Broadway, London, near St James’s Park underground station, a site conveniently close to the Foreign Office. A few days before the outbreak of war its name was again changed – to Government Communications Headquarters – and it moved to an endearingly ugly but conveniently secluded Tudor-Gothic Victorian house at Bletchley Park, about fifty miles north of London. Its principal task was to read German radio messages encoded on Enigma machines.
The Enigma started its career as a commercial enciphering machine, a sort of typewriter that scrambled text using notched wheels or rotors. The message could be unscrambled by a recipient using an identical Enigma with its rotors adjusted to the same settings, known only to the sender and the receiver. When the Germans bought some Enigma machines they adapted them to make them more difficult to counter. The improved machine had plugs, varying the circuits, which the operators changed every twenty-four hours according to a dated instruction book of ‘keys’. This gave an astronomical number of alternatives for each letter.
The story of the breaking of the Enigma can be said to start in October 1931, at the Grand Hotel, Verviers, a town in Belgium not far from the German border. Hans-Thilo Schmidt, a highly placed official in the German Defence Ministry, made contact with Rodolphe Lemoine, an agent of the Deuxième Bureau, the French military intelligence service. Lemoine, a widely travelled linguist, had been born in Berlin, the son of a jeweller. A naturalized French citizen, he had taken his French wife’s name and, despite being a successful businessman, he went to work as a secret agent. Lemoine got along well with his fellow Berliner. Schmidt’s father was a professor and his mother a baroness, but this highly intelligent and well educated veteran of the First World War found it difficult to manage on the salary he earned as a clerk distributing cipher material. He offered to sell the operator’s instruction manual for the Enigma machine and some other notes and manuals. He also offered to continue to supply information about the updating of the machine and its codes as well as details of the workings of the German High Command (where Schmidt’s elder brother was now a lieutenant-colonel and chief of staff of the signal corps). At one time Rudolf had been the head of the cipher section – Chiffrierstelle – where Hans-Thilo now worked, and it had been Rudolf’s decision to purchase the Enigma machines that his brother was offering to compromise.
It was Lemoine’s stated belief that every man had his price, and at their