War Stories Page 19

  Cave had spent all night plotting the convoys’ courses on two large charts of the North Atlantic – one issued by the Admiralty, the other a captured German naval grid, on which the ocean was divided into thousands of tiny squares. The cryptanalysts gathered round him. Cave’s finger came down on a spot almost exactly midway between Newfoundland and the British Isles. ‘There she is. She’s shadowing HX-229.’ He made a cross on the map and wrote 0725 beside it.

  Jericho said: ‘What grid square is that?’

  ‘BD 1491.’

  ‘And the convoy course?’

  ‘070.’

  Jericho went back to his desk and in less than two minutes, using the Short Signal Code Book and the current Kriegsmarine address book for encoding naval grid squares (‘Alfred Krause, Blucherplatz 15’: Hut 8 had broken that just before the blackout) he had a five-letter crib to slide under the contact report.

  R G H C D M I G

  D D F G R X ??

  The first four letters announced that a convoy had been located steering 070 degrees, the next two gave the grid square, the final two represented the code name of the U-boat, which he didn’t have. He circled R-D and D-R. A four-letter loop on the first signal.

  ‘I get D-R/R-D,’ said Puck a few seconds later.

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Baxter.

  Jericho nodded and doodled his initials on the pad. ‘A good omen.’

  After that, the pace of events began to quicken.

  At 8.25, two long signals were intercepted emanating from Magdeburg, which Cave at once surmised would be U-boat headquarters ordering every submarine in the North Atlantic into the attack zone. At 9.20, he put down the telephone to announce that the Admiralty had just signalled the convoy commander with a warning that he was probably being shadowed. Seven minutes later, the telephone rang again. Flowerdown intercept station. A second E-bar flash from almost the same location as the first. The Wrens hurried in with it: KLYS QNLP.

  ‘The same hearse,’ said Cave. ‘Following standard operating procedure. Reporting every two hours, or near as damn it.’

  ‘Grid square?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘Convoy course.’

  ‘Also the same. For now.’

  Jericho went back to his desk and manipulated the original crib under the new cryptogram.

  K L Y S Q N L P

  D D F G R X ??

  Again, there were no letter clashes. The golden rule of Enigma, its single, fatal weakness: nothing is ever itself – A can never be A, B can never be B . . . It was working. His feet performed a little tap dance of delight beneath the table. He glanced up to find Baxter staring at him and he realized, to his horror, that he was smiling.

  ‘Pleased?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  But such was his shame that when, an hour later, Logie came through to say that a second U-boat had just sent a contact signal, he felt himself personally responsible.

  SOUY YTRQ.

  At 11.40, a third U-boat began to shadow the convoy, at 12.20, a fourth, and suddenly Jericho had seven signals on his desk. He was conscious of people coming up and looking over his shoulder – Logie with his burning hayrick of a pipe and the meaty smell and heavy breathing of Skynner. He didn’t look round. He didn’t talk. The outside world had melted for him. Even Claire was just a phantom now. There were only the loops of letters, forming and stretching out towards him from the grey Atlantic, multiplying on his sheets of paper, turning into thin chains of possibility in his mind.

  They didn’t stop for breakfast, nor for lunch. Minute by minute, throughout the afternoon, the cryptanalysts followed, at third hand, the progress of the chase two thousand miles away. The commander of the convoy was signalling to the Admiralty, the Admiralty had an open line to Cave, and Cave would shout each time a fresh development looked like affecting the hunt for cribs.

  Two signals came at 13.40 – one a short contact report, the other longer, almost certainly originating from the U-boat that had started the hunt. Both were for the first time close enough to be fixed by direction finders on board the convoy’s own escorts. Cave listened gravely for a minute, then announced that HMS Mansfield, a destroyer, was being dispatched from the main body of merchantmen to attack the U-boats.

  ‘The convoy’s just made an emergency turn to the southeast. She’s going to try to shake off the hearses while Mansfield forces them under.’

  Jericho looked up. ‘What course is she steering?’

  ‘What course is she steering?’ repeated Cave into the telephone. ‘I said,’ he yelled, ‘what fucking course is she steering?’ He winced at Jericho. The receiver was jammed tight to his scarred ear. ‘All right. Yes. Thank you. Convoy steering 118 degrees.’ Jericho reached for the Short Signal Code Book.

  ‘Will they manage to get away?’ asked Baxter.

  Cave bent over his chart with a ruler and protractor. ‘Maybe. It’s what I’d do in their place.’

  A quarter of an hour passed and nothing happened.

  ‘Perhaps they have done it,’ said Puck. ‘Then what do we do?’

  Cave said: ‘How much more material do you need?’

  Jericho counted through the signals. ‘We’ve got nine. We need another twenty. Another twenty-five would be better.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Cave regarded them with disgust. ‘It’s like sitting with a flock of carrion.’

  Somewhere behind them a telephone managed half a ring before it was snatched out of its cradle. Logie came in a moment later, still writing.

  ‘That was St Erith reporting an E-bar signal at 49.4 degrees north, 38.1 degrees west.’

  ‘New location,’ said Cave, studying his charts. He made a cross, then threw his pencil down and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his face. ‘All she’s managed to do is run straight from one hearse into another. Which is what? The fifth? Christ, the sea must be teeming with them.’

  ‘She isn’t going to get away,’ said Puck, ‘is she?’

  ‘Not a chance. Not if they’re coming in from all around her.’

  A Wren moved among the cryptanalysts, doling out the latest cryptogram: BKEL UUXS.

  Ten signals. Five U-boats in contact.

  ‘Grid square?’ said Jericho.

  The ocean was alive with signals. They were landing on Jericho’s desk at the rate of one every twenty minutes.

  At 16.00 a sixth U-boat fastened on to the convoy and soon afterwards Cave announced that HX-229 was making another turn, to 028 degrees, in her latest and (in his opinion) hopeless attempt to escape her pursuers.

  By 18.00 Jericho had a pile of nineteen contact signals, out of which he had conjured three four-letter loops and a mass of half-sketched bombe menus that looked like the plans for some complex game of hopscotch. His neck and shoulders were so knotted with tension he could barely straighten up.

  The room by now was crowded. Pinker, Kingcome and Proudfoot had come back on shift. The other British naval lieutenant, Villiers, was standing next to Cave, who was explaining something on one of his charts. A Wren with a tray offered Jericho a curling Spam sandwich and an enamel mug of tea and he took them gratefully.

  Logie came up behind him and tousled his hair.

  ‘How are you feeling, old love?’

  ‘Wrecked, frankly.’

  ‘Want to knock off?’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘Come into my office and I’ll give you something. Bring your tea.’

  The ‘something’ turned out to be a large, yellow Benzedrine tablet, of which Logie had half a dozen in an hexagonal pillbox.

  Jericho hesitated. ‘I’m not sure I should. These helped send me funny last time.’

  ‘They’ll get you through the night, though, won’t they? Come on, old thing. The commandos swear by them.’ He rattled the box under Jericho’s nose. ‘So you’ll crash out at breakfast? So what? By then we’ll either have this bugger beaten. Or not. In which case it won’t matter, will it?’ He took one of the pills and pre
ssed it into Jericho’s palm. ‘Go on. I won’t tell Nurse.’ He closed Jericho’s fingers around it and said quietly: ‘Because I can’t let you go, you know, old love. Not tonight. Not you. Some of the others, maybe, but not you.’

  ‘Oh, Christ. Well, since you put it so nicely.’

  Jericho swallowed the pill with a mouthful of tea. It left a foul taste and he drained his mug to try and swill it away. Logie regarded him fondly.

  ‘That’s my boy.’ He put the box back in his desk drawer and locked it. ‘I’ve been protecting your bloody back again, incidentally. I had to tell him you were much too important to be disturbed.’

  ‘Tell who? Skynner?’

  ‘No. Not Skynner. Wigram.’

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘You, old cock. I’d say he wants you. Skinned, stuffed and mounted on a pole somewhere. Really, I don’t know, for such a quiet bloke, you don’t half make some enemies. I told him to come back at midnight. All right by you?’

  Before Jericho could reply the telephone rang and Logie grabbed it.

  ‘Yes? Speaking.’ He grunted and stretched across his desk for a pencil. ‘Time of origin 19.02, 52.1 degrees north, 37.2 degrees west. Thanks, Bill. Keep the faith.’

  He replaced the receiver.

  ‘And then there were seven . . .’

  It was dark again and the lights were on in the Big Room. The sentries outside were banging the blackout shutters into place, like prison warders locking up their charges for the night.

  Jericho hadn’t set foot out of the hut for twenty-four hours, hadn’t even looked out of the window. As he slipped back into his seat and checked his coat to make sure the cryptograms were still there, he wondered vaguely what kind of day it had been and what Hester was doing.

  Don’t think about that now.

  Already, he could feel the Benzedrine beginning to take effect. The muscles of his heart seemed feathery, his body charged. When he glanced across his notes, what had seemed inert and impenetrable a half-hour ago was suddenly fluid and full of possibility.

  The new cryptogram was already on his desk: YALB DKYF.

  ‘Naval grid square BD 2742,’ called Cave. ‘Course 055 degrees. Convoy speed nine and a half knots.’

  Logie said: ‘A message from Mr Skynner. A bottle of Scotch for the first man with a menu for the bombes.’

  Twenty-three signals received. Seven U-boats in contact. Two hours to go till nightfall in the North Atlantic.

  20.00: nine U-boats in contact.

  20.46: ten.

  ‘It’s almost dark out there,’ said Cave, looking at his watch. ‘Not long now. How many have you had?’

  ‘Twenty-nine,’ said Baxter.

  ‘I believe you said that would be enough, Mr Jericho?’

  ‘Weather,’ said Jericho, without looking up. ‘We need a weather report from the convoy. Barometric pressure, cloud cover, cloud type, wind speed, temperature. Before it gets too dark.’

  ‘They’ve got ten U-boats on their backs and you want them to tell you the weather?’

  ‘Yes, please. Fast as they can.’

  The weather report arrived at 21.31.

  There were no more contact signals after 21.40.

  Thus convoy HX-229 at 22.00:

  Thirty-seven merchant vessels, ranging in size from the 12,000-ton British tanker Southern Princess to the 3,500-ton American freighter Margaret Lykes, making slow progress through heavy seas, steering a course of 055 degrees, direct to England, lit up like a regatta by a full moon to a range of ten miles visibility – the first such night in the North Atlantic for weeks. Escort vessels: five, including two slow corvettes and two clapped out, elderly ex-American destroyers donated to Britain in 1940 in exchange for bases, one of which – HMS Mansfield – had lost touch with the convoy after charging down the U-boats because the convoy commander (on his first operational command) had forgotten to signal her with his second change of course. No rescue ship available. No air cover. No reinforcements within a thousand miles.

  ‘All in all,’ said Cave, lighting a cigarette and contemplating his charts, ‘what you might fairly call a bit of a cock-up.’

  The first torpedo hit at 22.01.

  At 22.32, Tom Jericho was heard to say, very quietly, ‘Yes.’

  The bombe was heavy – Jericho guessed it must weigh more than half a ton – and even though it was mounted on castors it still took all his strength, combined with the engineer’s, to drag it away from the wall. Jericho pulled while the engineer went behind it and put his shoulder to the frame to heave. It came away at last with a screech and the Wrens moved in to strip it.

  The decryptor was a monster, like something out of an H. G. Wells fantasy of the future: a black metal cabinet, eight feet wide and six feet tall, with scores of five-inch-diameter drum wheels set into the front. The back was hinged and opened up to show a bulging mass of coloured cables and the dull gleam of metal drums. In the place where it had stood on the concrete floor there was a large puddle of oil.

  Jericho wiped his hands on a rag and retreated to watch from a corner. Elsewhere in the hut a score of other bombes were churning away on other Enigma keys and the noise and the heat were how he imagined a ship’s engine room might be. One Wren went round to the back of the cabinet and began disconnecting and replugging the cables. The other moved along the front, pulling out each drum in turn and checking it. Whenever she found a fault in the wiring she would hand the drum to the engineer who would stroke the tiny brush wires back into place with a pair of tweezers. The contact brushes were always fraying, just as the belt which connected the mechanism to the big electric motor had a tendency to stretch and slip whenever there was a heavy load. And the engineers had never quite got the earthing right, so that the cabinets had a tendency to give off powerful electric shocks.

  Jericho thought it was the worst job of all. A pig of a job. Eight hours a day, six days a week, cooped up in this windowless, deafening cell. He turned away to look at his watch. He didn’t want them to see his impatience. It was nearly half past eleven.

  His menu was at that moment being rushed into bombe bays all across the Bletchley area. Eight miles north of the Park, in a hut in a clearing in the forested estate of Gayhurst Manor, a clutch of tired Wrens near the end of their shift were being ordered to halt the three bombes running on Nuthatch (Berlin-Vienna-Belgrade Army administration), strip them and prepare them for Shark. In the stable block of Adstock Manor, ten miles to the west, the girls were actually sprawled with their feet up beside their silent machines, drinking Ovaltine and listening to Tommy Dorsey on the BBC Light Programme, when the supervisor came storming through with a sheaf of menus and told them to stir themselves, fast. And at Wavendon Manor, three miles northeast, a similar story: four bombes in a dank and windowless bunker were abruptly pulled off Osprey (the low-priority Enigma key of the Organisation Todt) and their operators told to stand by for a rush job.

  Those, plus the two machines in Bletchley’s Hut 11, made up the promised dozen bombes.

  The mechanical check completed, the Wren went back to the first row of drums and began adjusting them to the combination listed on the menu. She called out the letters to the other girl, who checked them.

  ‘Freddy, Butter, Quagga . . .’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Apple, X-ray, Edward . . .’

  ‘Yes.’

  The drums slipped on their spindles and were fixed into place with a loud metallic click. Each was wired to mimic the action of a single Enigma rotor: 108 in all, equivalent to thirty-six Enigma machines running in parallel. When all the drums had been set, the bombe was trundled back into place and the motor started.

  The drums began to turn, all except one in the top row which had jammed. The engineer gave it a whack with his spanner and it, too, began to revolve. The bombe would now run continuously on this menu – certainly for one day; possibly, according to Jericho’s calculations, for two or three – stopping occasionally when the drums were so aligned they c
ompleted a circuit. Then the readings on the drums would be checked and tested, the machine restarted, and so it would go on until the precise combination of settings had been found, at which point the cryptanalysts would be able to read that day’s Shark traffic. Such, at any rate, was the theory.

  The engineer began dragging out the other bombe and Jericho moved forward to help, but was stopped by a tugging on his arm.

  ‘Come on, old love,’ shouted Logie above the din. ‘There’s nothing more we can do here.’ He pulled at his sleeve again.

  Reluctantly, Jericho turned and followed him out of the hut.

  He felt no sense of elation. Maybe tomorrow evening or maybe on Thursday, the bombes would give them the Enigma settings for the day now ending. Then the real work would begin – the laborious business of trying to reconstruct the new Short Weather Code Book – taking the meteorological data from the convoy, matching it to the weather signals already received from the surrounding U-boats, making some guesses, testing them, constructing a fresh set of cribs . . . It never ended, this battle against Enigma. It was a chess tournament of a thousand rounds against a player of prodigious defensive strength, and each day the pieces went back to their original positions and the game began afresh.

  Louis de Bernières

  SEND IN THE CLOWNS

  When Italian troops invade the Greek island of Cephallonia, the setting of Louis de Bernières’s novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994), the islanders prepare themselves for resistance. Their initial encounter with the enemy, however, is not quite as they had expected.

  THERE IS A story that in the Royal Palace, which was so vast and empty that the Royal Family travelled within it on bicycles, and so derelict that its water-taps spewed cockroaches, a White Lady appears as an omen of disaster. Her footsteps make no sound, her face blazes with malevolence, and once, when two aides-de-camp attempted to arrest her for attacking the grandmother of Prince Christopher, she vanished into thin air. If she had wandered the palace on this day, she would have found it occupied not by King George, but by German soldiers. If she had gone outside the city, she would have found the swastika flying from the Acropolis, and she would have had to travel to Crete to find the King.