Have historians exaggerated Ian Fleming’s role in the cracking of the Enigma code?
Ian Fleming is best known for his novels about the superspy James Bond. But his reputation as a creative genius has been considerably enhanced by his exploits during the second world war as a lieutenant commander in naval intelligence. He has been praised in particular for coming up with Operation Ruthless, the first viable plan to capture naval Enigma codebooks for Alan Turing and his codebreakers at Bletchley Park.
In the words of the official Enigma historian, this was ‘a somewhat ungentlemanly scheme’. That was putting it mildly. The plan was that a British pilot would crash land a captured German bomber beside a German rescue ship in the English Channel, and British secret agents disguised as Germans would mow down their German rescuers so that they could seize the Enigma codebooks.
That drama never took place. But Ruthless has never been forgotten, because it inspired a series of similar schemes which eventually led to the capture of the Enigma codebooks and the breaking of the code. Fleming has always taken the credit for it: his authorship is even celebrated in an exhibit at Bletchley Park, the country estate near Milton Keynes where the Enigma codebreaking took place.
There is only one problem. Newly disclosed documents show that Fleming was not in fact the author. The documents — which were released to me by GCHQ so I could include them in an updated edition of my Enigma book, but remain Crown copyright because they have yet to be declassified — suggest that the plan was really thought up by a man named Frank Birch. Like Fleming, Birch had served his time in naval intelligence and was a writer, though he was also an actor and broadcaster. At the time he was head of the naval section at Bletchley Park. As such, he had been told by Turing and his team that Germany’s most secret naval Enigma messages, which would be vital in facing the threat posed by Dönitz’s U-boats, would never be read unless codebooks were captured. This realisation evidently fired his creative juices, and he came up with a plan that must have made Fleming green with envy.
The original wording Birch put his name to included the following:
I suggest we obtain the loot by the following means:
1. Obtain from the Air Ministry an airworthy German bomber.
2. Pick a tough crew of five, including a pilot, W/T operator and word-perfect German speaker. Dress them in German Air Force uniform, add blood and bandages to suit.
3. Crash plane in the Channel after making SOS to rescue service in P/L (plain language).
4. Once aboard rescue boat, shoot German crew, dump overboard, bring rescue boat back to English port.
Among the newly released files is an official but unattributed document entitled ‘The Handling of Naval Special Intelligence’. It says the ‘Head of German Naval section’, Birch, signed the plan, which was then forwarded to Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, on 12 September 1940.
How, then, did Fleming get the credit? Why have historians named him as the author? In their defence, the original paper describing the plan seems to have disappeared. The best evidence available on the plan’s authorship consisted of a third party’s undated report that stated Fleming was the originator of Operation Ruthless, and backed up this assertion by noting that the original note addressed to John Godfrey had an ‘F’ written in at the bottom. At the time the report was prepared, no one appears to have asked whether this mysterious ‘F’ was Frank Birch rather than Fleming. Perhaps they were dazzled by the way Fleming dressed the plan up before it was finally approved by both Godfrey and the Admiralty. As the third-party report shows, he added all kind of details:
The bomber was to take off shortly before dawn on the tail of one of the big London raids. As the German rescue-boats worked in fixed grid squares, they were unlikely to be in company, and the bomber would seek an isolated boat as far out from the French coast as possible, cut out one engine, make a distress signal if necessary, lose height fast with smoke pouring from a candle in the tail, and pancake. The crew would then put off in a rubber boat, having arranged for the bomber to sink as soon as possible so that the rescue-boat should be delivered from all temptation to summon help in an attempt to salvage the machine. The rescue boat would then take the crew on board and be overpowered.
Although at least one member of the RAF described the operation as tantamount to sheer bloody murder — he feared the plane would sink as soon as it landed in the sea and that, even if they survived, the shell-shocked British agents would not be in a fit state to capture the rescue vessel — attempts were made during October 1940 to put it into effect. It was abandoned after two reconnaissance flights revealed that while the German rescue craft targeted by Birch might well possess an Enigma machine, they did not operate at night, which was thought to be the only time when the plan might work. Nevertheless, Ruthless is often cited as being the inspiration for the series of operations that eventually did succeed in capturing the naval Enigma machine and codebooks and handing them to Alan Turing at Bletchley Park.
That being the case, one could argue that the authorship of the plot is immaterial. But the discovery that it was Birch and Bletchley Park’s Naval Section — rather than just Fleming and his intelligence colleagues in the Admiralty — who broke the deadlock at Bletchley Park is important from a historical point of view. It has opened up a new line of inquiry as to what really happened before Turing and his codebreakers became involved.
We now know that the code was only mastered after Harry Hinsley, another man working in Birch’s section, realised that unprotected weather-forecasting ships near Iceland were using naval Enigma machines for their reports. The Admiralty was quickly tipped off and, on 7 May 70 years ago, one was attacked and her Enigma codebooks seized. Two days later, more Enigma codebooks were seized from a captured U-boat, an event which is to be commemorated in a new exhibition at Bletchley Park, opening on 9 May. Within days, the teleprinters connecting Bletchley Park to the Admiralty burst into action as an avalanche of Enigma decrypts were sent down the line, and the decrypts kept on coming after — again at Birch’s naval section’s suggestion — a second weathership’s Enigma codebooks were seized at the end of June 1941. Thanks as much to Bletchley Park’s ingenious intelligence work as to its codebreakers, the code was cracked at last.
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