The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945. Max Hastings
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of the information sent back from the front by French units was so fanciful that a headquarters intelligence officer, André Beaufre, dismissed it contemptuously as a ‘fiction flood’. Gen. Maurice Gamelin, the Allied commander-in-chief, rejected every report that contradicted his obsessive belief that the Germans still planned to make their main attack through Belgium.
The campaign proved a triumph for the German army’s intelligence department, as well as for its generals. An anglophile and bon viveur, Lt. Col. Ulrich Liss, headed Foreign Armies West – FHW, the Wehrmacht’s principal intelligence evaluation department. Liss, who was exceptionally able and energetic, called sigint ‘the darling of all intelligence chiefs’, because it could be trusted as spies could not – and in May 1940 the best of it was in the hands of his own staff. During the long, static winter, German interceptors had identified the locations of most of the Allies’ formations, much assisted by the insecurity of the French army’s wireless-operators and headquarters staffs, who often discussed plans and deployments in plain language. Col. Handeeming, radio intelligence’s interception chief with Army Group A, was explicitly commissioned to monitor the French Seventh Army’s advance into Belgium, which he did with notable efficiency.
Liss’s men also benefited from securing vast numbers of Allied prisoners. All armies gleaned much from PoW interrogation. Throughout the war, even if few prisoners knowingly betrayed secrets, amid the shock of capture most gave their captors more than the regulation ‘name, rank and number’. Rommel’s intelligence staff found that British prisoners talked freely until a late stage of the North African campaign. One of Montgomery’s officers enthused to the Germans, with almost insane indiscretion, that Eighth Army’s radio monitoring service was ‘brilliant in every respect’. A German wrote that British officers were repeatedly captured ‘carrying important lists, codes and maps’. It was a standard technique for intelligence officers to engage PoWs in apparently innocent conversation about non-military subjects. The Wehrmacht’s ‘Guidelines for the interrogation of English prisoners of war’, dated Berlin, 16 April 1940, urged commanders whenever possible to use interrogators familiar with Britain and the British. ‘If cordially addressed,’ said the briefing note, ‘every Englishman will at once answer all questions entirely frankly.’ Beyond immediate tactical issues, the Intelligence Department advised:
Special value is set on probing prevailing economic and social circumstances in England. Answers to the following questions are useful:
a) What are you told about Hitler?
b) What are you told about the Nazis?
c) What are you told about the Gestapo?
d) What are you told about the Jews?
e) What are you told about food conditions in Germany?
f) What are you told about military successes?
g) How do you make propaganda?
h) How are women and children cared for?
i) Do you take care of elderly parents no longer able to work, whose sons are soldiers? …
k) What is the food situation – especially meat, vegetables, eggs, butter, and bread?
l) What do you think of the black-out?
m) Who is currently the most popular man in England?
n) Who do you consider the most forceful personality in the British cabinet?
o) Do you listen to German radio?
p) Do you like [Lord] Haw-Haw [the Nazi propaganda broadcaster William Joyce]?
q) How are your relations with the French?
r) Do you believe that Germany is bent on world conquest?
s) Would you make peace tomorrow?
The behaviour of most PoWs was strongly influenced by their own nation’s immediate circumstances. At this time, when Allied fortunes were plumbing the depths, a report on the handful of German PoWs in British hands recorded gloomily: ‘The officers (and most of the men) were quite immune to propaganda, think Hitler is a god and refuse to believe a single word of the British news.’ By contrast, a South African RAF pilot named Sgt Edward Wunsch provided his German captors with a highly sympathetic view of the Nazi cause, as recorded by his interrogator: ‘Like all South Africans who have entered Dulag Luft, Wunsch is an unashamed anti-Semite … [He says] There is no hatred towards Germany in South Africa, no enthusiasm for the war at all. Most people believe the nonsense press and propaganda tell them about German atrocities but … W. thinks it possible that one day South Africa could agree to a separate peace, if Germany continues to be militarily successful [author’s italics].’
The Allies lost the 1940 battle for France for many reasons. It has been a source of fierce controversy ever since, whether the French army’s defeat resulted from a failure of judgement by Maurice Gamelin, Allied commander-in-chief, or instead from a national moral collapse. It is unlikely that any amount of intelligence or advance warning could have changed 1940 outcomes. The German army showed itself an incomparably more effective fighting force than the Allies’, and there would be no victories until that changed. If British and French intelligence was poor in 1940, so was everything else.
As the Continent was evacuated, there was a late flurry of buccaneering by secret service officers and freelances: MI6’s Major Monty Chidson, a former head of the Hague station, rescued a priceless haul of industrial diamonds from Amsterdam. Peter Wilkinson got most of the Polish general staff out of France. Tommy Davies, a peacetime director of the Courtaulds textile business, escaped from its Calais plant with a load of platinum hours before the Germans arrived. But these little coups were fleabites in the great scheme of affairs. MI6 had made no contingency plans for stay-behind agents, to report from France in the event of its occupation by the Nazis, and Broadway would probably have been accused of defeatism had it done so. Through many months that followed, Britain’s intelligence services were thus almost blind to events on the Continent, to the frustration of the prime minister. Beleaguered on their island, they became dependent for knowledge of Hitler’s doings on the vagaries of air reconnaissance, and reports from neutral diplomats and correspondents.
The security service explored the limits of the possible and the acceptable in handling a stream of Abwehr agents who descended on Britain, and were promptly captured. MI5 spurned torture as a means of interrogation: in September 1940 at Camp 020, one of its officers intervened to prevent the captured Abwehr agent ‘Tate’ – Harry Williamson – being assaulted and battered by Col. Alexander Scotland of MI9. Guy Liddell deplored this episode, saying that he objected to ‘Gestapo methods’ on both moral and professional grounds. Col. Scotland was likewise prevented from injecting Williamson with drugs. Naval Intelligence Division interrogators tested drugs on each other as a means of extracting information, and concluded that it was a waste of time. Skilled questioning, they decided, was not merely more ethical, but more effective.
As the next act of the great global drama unfolded – Hitler’s air assault on Britain – neither Broadway nor Bletchley Park had much to contribute. The most significant aid to Fighter Command in its epic struggle to repel Göring’s air fleets was wireless traffic analysis of the flood of Morse from the Germans’ new French, Belgian, Dutch and Norwegian bases, together with monitoring of Luftwaffe cockpit chatter by the German linguists of the RAF’s infant Y Service, most of them women.
The prime minister and the chiefs of staff were for many months preoccupied, even obsessed, by two questions: would the Germans invade; and if so, when? In the mad mood prevailing in London in the autumn of 1940, a blend of heroic defiance and absurdity, the War Office’s director of military intelligence suggested exploiting captured Abwehr agents to try to provoke the Germans into hastening an invasion, which he felt sure could be defeated by the Royal Navy and the British Army. This proposal found no favour in Whitehall. Meanwhile the disaster in France had endowed the Wehrmacht with almost magical powers in the minds of the generals, many of whom convinced themselves that Hitler might launch an amphibious assault on Britain with only a few weeks’ preparation, offering no notice to the defenders.
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