In February 1939 Edouard Daladier, the French premier, told the US ambassador William Bullitt that ‘he fully expected to be betrayed by the British’, whose prime minister was ‘a desiccated stick, the King a moron and the Queen an excessively ambitious woman’. The British had become so feeble, he said, that they would betray all their friends rather than stand up to Germany and Italy. The British harboured similar views of France. Even when it came to declaring war in 1939, Chamberlain had to wait many hours for Daladier to follow his lead. Daladier then merely said: ‘We are waging war because it has been thrust on us.’
R.T. Howard’s examination of how British and French intelligence spied on the Nazi threat shows how their efforts were continually dogged by such dislike and distrust. Even during the Weimar period, Paris was almost hysterical about German rearmament and attempted to pull the British into a much tighter alliance, something which London stoutly resisted. Once Hitler came to power, the French grew frantic – in April 1939 they successfully demanded that Britain introduce conscription – but only once appeasement had clearly failed did Chamberlain accept the need for alliance with France.
Spying on Germany was never easy, and British intelligence was anyway starved of funds. But under Hitler it became far harder. Everything was immensely tightened up and the Gestapo was ruthlessly efficient in tracking down agents, frequently beheading them. So although Hitler had launched an all-out rearmament campaign and was rapidly expanding his forces he was at first able to hide this. The Germans even managed to convince the British that the battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz were quite small and lightly armed, as also the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst. It was only when war began that the Royal Navy learned just how formidable these ships were.
But in 1935 Hitler reversed himself. Judging that Germany was now stronger and that Britain and France were easily intimidated, he did all he could to exaggerate Germany’s strength, often using such simple deceptions as making planes and tanks pass by observers and then double back so as to pass by again. The French were only too willing to believe these exaggerations. In fact in August 1938 Germany had only 378 fully trained bomber crews and its main bomber was the obsolete Junkers-86.
Gradually, most observers realised the French were in a complete funk. Colonel Moravec, the head of Czech intelligence, concluded in 1938 that the French were suffering from ‘blind defeatism’. They were terrified of the Germans and determined to avoid war at all costs. Sir Eric Phipps, the British ambassador in Paris, came to the same conclusion. France had a formal military alliance with Czechoslovakia, but at Munich she sold the Czechs down the river. The British foreign secretary Lord Halifax frequently wondered if France might ally with Germany against Britain – and Vichy did just that. The French collapse of May-June 1940 was not a complete surprise.
Both the French and the British spent much of the 1930s trying to find out more about the Enigma machine. The French even had an agent who was a cipher clerk on Enigma and delivered many of the manuals to Paris. But Enigma remained unbreakable. Finally, in late July 1939, British and French delegations travelled through Nazi Germany to meet with the Poles to discuss this burning question.
To their visitors’ utter stupefaction the Poles recounted that an Enigma machine had accidentally fallen into their hands in 1929. They had then built replica machines and, thanks to their outstanding analysts, had cracked the Enigma code in 1933. They had deciphered Enigma messages until 1938, when the Germans had upgraded the machine, making its messages wholly unreadable. With only weeks to go before the outbreak of war, the Poles cheerfully dispatched replica machines to London and Paris. Alan Turing was able to build on this extraordinary achievement.
But the Americans, too, had been keeping a secret from them. The US had discovered in May 1939 that Hitler and Stalin were negotiating the Nazi-Soviet pact. But only on 15 August – eight days before the pact was signed – did the US deign to tell the British and French. Since the pact made war quite inevitable, Paris and London could well have used the extra three months’ notice.
Howard does a creditable job with the sources available; when Britain and France release their official intelligence files, we will know much more. There are two schoolboy howlers: Howard repeatedly refers to ships by their ‘weight’, but tonnage is a measure of displacement, not weight. And he writes of the ‘UN representative’ in Danzig in 1938 seven years before the UN’s birth.
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