Читать книгу The Gathering Storm - Geirr Haarr - Страница 14

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What Now?

To Die with Dignity

AT 21:30 ON 1 September 1939, the British ambassador to Berlin, Nevile Henderson, delivered a memorandum to Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, stating, ‘unless His Majesty’s Government received satisfactory assurances that the German Government had suspended all aggressive action and would be prepared to withdraw its forces from Polish territory’, Britain would fulfil its obligations to Poland. Half an hour later, a similar message was delivered by the French ambassador.

Nothing was heard from Berlin, and in the morning of 3 September, a final ultimatum came from London, setting the deadline for an answer to 11:00 British time that same day. Henderson hastened to the German Foreign Office with the note, giving it to chief-interpreter Paul Schmidt, the only one there, who brought it to the Chancellery, where most ministers and party leaders were assembled in Hitler’s office.¹ According to Schmidt, Hitler, when he received the document, sat as if petrified, before he turned to Ribbentrop with a wild stare, asking, ‘Was nun?’ – ‘What now?’ Shortly after the deadline, Ribbentrop informed Henderson that Germany refused any demands and, fifteen minutes later, a disappointed Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the British people on the radio, sounding drained, that:

This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that, unless the British Government heard from them by 11 o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

In the afternoon of 3 September, Raeder was called to the Chancellery and informed by a visibly shaken Führer that he ‘had not been able to avoid war with England after all’.² Disturbed, Raeder went back to his office and sat down to compose a memorandum for the SKL war diary. After recording Hitler’s repeated assurance that a war with Britain would not commence before 1944 at the earliest, he added:

the U-boat arm is, in spite of its determinations, too weak to have a decisive effect on the war. The surface forces [of the Kriegsmarine] are still so inferior in number and power to those of the British fleet that, even at full strength, they can do no more than show that they know how to die with dignity and thus create the foundation for a later reconstruction.³

In July 1939, the Kriegsmarine had held extensive U-boat exercises in the Baltic. Admiral Raeder came to oversee the event and Dönitz had several discussions with him in private. During these meetings as well as in the final speech to the officer corps at Swinemünde after the exercises, Raeder repeatedly held that Hitler had assured him there would be no war with Britain.

The Kriegsmarine was nowhere near the strength needed to sustain a successful war with the Royal Navy. Raeder knew this better than anyone, but it is difficult to accept his claim that he really had not anticipated that it might happen. He was fairly isolated from both the civilian and the military administration, though, and might have chosen to believe what Hitler told him out of convenience, as he could do little about the situation other than to follow the building plans and hope for the best. The navy was under constant threat to have its personnel transferred to the army and the guns taken off the ships to be used on land instead, and Raeder had no wish to rock the boat by arguing with the Führer.

Three main tasks were seen for the German Navy in September 1939: firstly, to defend the German coastlines in the North Sea and the Baltic from attacks and mine-laying; secondly, to protect German sea lanes (though these were few and less important than those of Britain and France); and, last but not least, to attack Allied sea lanes.

At 12:15 German time on 3 September, the SKL issued a signal from Berlin to all units: ‘Beginn der Feindseligkeiten mit England sofort’ – ‘Begin hostilities with England forthwith’. To gain the initiative was vital, but meeting the Royal Navy head-on would be futile. To sever or even hurt the British sea lanes, Raeder believed he would need several balanced groups of fast, well-armed battleships and cruisers as well as auxiliary raiders and U-boats. Such a fleet did not exist, of course, and, in fact, the size and composition of the German navy in September 1939 would make the North Sea the most likely battlefield.

Konteradmiral Karl Dönitz, autumn 1939. (Author’s collection)

Except for the raids of Deutschland and Graf Spee, Atlantic operations were by default limited to U-boat operations west of the British Isles. In a meeting on 7 September, Hitler made it clear to Raeder that, as a result of the unclear political situation, no offensive action should be taken against France. The U-boats were to avoid attacking passenger ships in general and all French ships in particular. Graf Spee and Deutschland were to remain inactive and French ports were not to be mined. The OKW underlined that no operations whatsoever should be initiated that could draw British attention to the Western Front until the land offensive had commenced.⁴

In spite of Raeder’s initial gloominess, the attitude of the Kriegsmarine quickly developed into a determined will to fight and not to be closed up in port, as it had been during the last conflict. Two main issues were on the agenda of the SKL during the autumn and first winter of the war: the commerce war against Britain and the role of the navy in the forthcoming offensive in the west. The former would require clever use of all of the Kriegsmarine’s resources and as much as could be spared of the Luftwaffe. There was a significant risk of loss, but the navy would receive some credit were it to gain some palpable victories. During an offensive in the west, the Kriegsmarine would inevitably play a secondary role.⁵

On 23 September, Raeder met with Hitler in Zoppot near Danzig to discuss the situation at sea. After a report on the situation in the Baltic, the North Sea and the Atlantic, Raeder concluded that the first phase of the submarine war had ended; 232,000 tons of shipping had been sunk. Now, the large stream of merchant ships returning individually to Britain was declining and convoys were being organised. The restrictions on attacking French ships had prevented actions against Dunkerque and Strasbourg, considered the main threats to the Kriegsmarine’s merchant raiders, as well as actions against the large number of convoys from Africa to France, he held. Worse, it had also prevented harassment of the troop convoys from Britain to France, as his captains found it almost impossible to distinguish between French and British ships.

Considering, Hitler sanctioned attacks on French capital ships and merchant ships in mixed convoys or those obviously involved in troop transport. A limited mining of French ports, targeting military traffic, was also permitted. Regarding Britain, Hitler approved the torpedoing of ships unmistakably identified as British without warning as these would most likely be armed – except passenger vessels. Neutral ships were still to be treated with care to avoid indicating that things had fundamentally changed. A total blockade of Britain would inevitably involve the Luftwaffe and was deferred to later meetings.⁶

In early October 1939, the Kriegsmarine was asked by the OKW for its opinion on three options: a land offensive in the west; a siege of Britain, keeping the land war idle; and a defensive war on land and at sea, limiting offensive operations and focusing on political and industrial expansion. It was fairly obvious that the Luftwaffe would favour the two former options, while the army would prefer a land offensive. The SKL, on the other hand, concluded that for the navy, the attack on France would be ‘secondary’ (Nebenfrage) and a ‘siege of Britain’ (Belagerung Englands) was the only alternative that would give the Kriegsmarine a role to play and priority of resources. It was clear that a compelling set of arguments would be needed to convince Hitler and the OKW of the strategic necessity to pursue such a development of the war.⁷ In a memorandum from the SKL to Raeder, it was concluded that:

the British methods of economic warfare oblige the German authorities to create determined defensive and offensive fronts and to adopt the same type of brutal economic warfare. [. . .] The navy, above all, must execute the operations dictated by the economic warfare [and] the defensive task of protecting our own supply lines falls unmistakably within the realm of economic warfare.⁸

Coupled with the lack of a clear, offensive naval strategy in the OKW, such thoughts would inevitably constrain the activities of the Kriegsmarine. Except for the siege-of-Britain concept, focus during the first period of the war was largely on tying down British naval forces in the North Sea to make room for the Atlantic raiders.

In a meeting with Hitler on 10 October, it was agreed that the siege should be enforced as much as practically possible. Objections from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other civilian institutions were to be ignored, as were those from the neutrals, including the USA. Now was the time to become callous. Again, Raeder emphasised that such efforts would need increased U-boat construction, but, as before, he could not secure any additional resources and would have to prioritise within those already allocated to the navy.⁹

Total Germany

On 3 September, two signals were issued from Whitehall in London to all British naval units. The first was timed 11:17 and read ‘Most Immediate: Total Germany’, which in plain language translated to: ‘Commence hostilities at once with Germany’.¹⁰ On board the destroyer Imogen in the Mediterranean, Commander Alastair Ewing put his thoughts to paper:

At 11 a.m. our ultimatum to Germany expired and we were at war. This called for champagne, not to celebrate but to mark the occasion. I was rather glad it had come. There could be no other honourable course of action and during the whole of these last few days, I have had the uncomfortable feeling that our politicians were striving desperately to find an easy way out, like Munich. But it is certainly fighting for an ideal and it will not be easy to bring any immediate aid to Poland. Italy is apparently not coming in, which simplifies our job at sea 100%.¹¹

Deciphered Admiralty telegram issued to all units at 11:17 British time on 3 September 1939. (E Skjold collection)

The second signal, a few hours later, read simply: ‘Winston is back’. The sixty-five-year-old Winston Churchill had been reappointed First Lord of the Admiralty by Chamberlain and offered a seat in the War Cabinet, both of which he immediately accepted.¹²

Churchill had been a back-bencher for quite some time and was largely considered a ‘has-been’ by 1939. It is to Chamberlain’s credit that he asked Churchill, who had been one of the harshest critics of his appeasement diplomacy and slow rearmament, to join the War Cabinet – even if it undoubtedly carried an element of curbing an opponent by giving him responsibility. Impatient and never one to hide his opinion, Churchill would be a challenge to his fellow Cabinet members. Unlike most of his colleagues, he had been to war; personally in South Africa and France, but also as First Sea Lord and minister of munitions during WWI. He had a solid understanding of the demands that would be placed on him and the other Cabinet members in the time to come. His influence over the British government in general and development of the war in particular in the early phase can hardly be exaggerated.

Churchill hastening to war on 5 September. (Author’s collection)

Though controversial and even disliked by some, Churchill was in general warmly welcomed back by the navy – largely for his naval competence, but also for his zeal and charisma. The Royal Navy would not be left in the wake of the other services while he was in office. Nevertheless, his hands-on mentality created additional work for his subordinates and diverted sorely needed resources from mundane everyday naval work to schemes that often came to nought or proved failures. Also, his habit of working late wore down many a lesser man in his staffs and sometimes gave rise to contradictory orders and unnecessary losses.

Between September 1939 and April 1940, Churchill mostly shared the common view that Britain and France would eventually prevail through German military strength being wasted in northern France, while German industry’s ability to sustain the war would be stalled through maritime blockade and aerial bombardment. Despite pleas from his senior naval advisers to increase the pace of capital ship construction, Churchill did not push the navy to the head of the queue for resources. Instead, he acknowledged that the army and air force were in desperate need for priorities, as was the merchant fleet. Beyond accelerating ongoing construction as much as possible, this meant few additional orders and no increase in the number of battleships, carriers, cruisers or even A/S escorts, beyond what had already been approved.¹³

Utilising existing resources, it became necessary to plan air and sea operations that would neutralise the surface ships of the Kriegsmarine and then release the capital ships for stations where they would deter Italy and Japan from taking advantage of the situation. Meanwhile, Asdic-equipped escorts and hunting groups would take care of the U-boats, it was believed. With France in the war, the Channel could be closed and German U-boats and surface raiders would have to pass through the northern North Sea to get into the Atlantic, giving the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force a supreme advantage. Denying Germany access to French ports through assisting the French Army on the Western Front and working in an effective alliance with the French Navy on the seas would be the best recipe for keeping Britain’s sea lanes open. The French Navy alone was bigger than the Kriegsmarine, and Churchill believed that there was every reason to use the combined Allied navies in a strategic offensive. The lack of systematic aerial reconnaissance and signals intelligence would seriously hamper the use of the superior Allied forces, however, as would the acute lack of escorts and A/S vessels.¹⁴

Once the War Cabinet had been established, the secretaries of the Cabinet and the CID were merged into a single body known as the War Cabinet Secretariat, with a civilian and a military branch.¹⁵ The War Cabinet was purposely kept small and its members largely free of departmental responsibilities so that they could focus on winning the war in the shortest possible time. Most of the detailed planning and analysis work would be done by sub-committees, and an outer tier of ministers and civil servants would, together with the Chiefs of Staff (CoS), be available to advise and consult as necessary.

The Admiralty, as the War Office and CID, reported to the Cabinet while the Chiefs of Staff Sub-Committee, consisting of General Edmund Ironside, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, First Sea Lord Admiral Pound and Air Chief Marshall Cyril Newall, reported through the CID to the Cabinet. The CoS, their deputies and the chiefs of the Joint Planning Committee and the Joint Intelligence Committee became the primary advisers to the British government on defence policy. Their collective opinion and advice to the Cabinet was usually stated through the chairman – Newall in the period covered by this book – but was often clouded by infighting and lack of inter-service cooperation. Each of the Chiefs of Staff filled a dual role – being individual and collective advisers to the War Cabinet as well as serving their respective ministers – which made them consistently overworked.

Two inter-service bodies, the Joint Planning Sub-Committee and the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee, advised the CoS; each of them comprising one or more officers from the three services, holding executive posts in their own department. The Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee had a representative of the Foreign Office as its chairman. To lessen the burden of administering the war, the Cabinet established the Standing Ministerial Committee on Military Co-ordination in October, headed by the Minister for Coordination of Defence, Admiral Chatfield, and including the three service ministers but no representative of the Foreign Office. This ensured that all crucial questions were dealt with properly – by the CoS, the Co-ordination Committee and the War Cabinet proper – but it did not favour swift, decisive assessments and quick decisions. The system suited the cautious Chamberlain but annoyed Churchill to the degree that he had it modified later in the war.¹⁶

At the outbreak of war, five battleships, two battlecruisers and one aircraft carrier were assigned to the Home Fleet, as were four cruisers at Scapa Flow and two at Humber. The cruisers of the 12th and 7th Squadrons were also at Scapa Flow, but used exclusively on the Northern Patrol.¹⁷

Two destroyer flotillas, the 6th and the 8th, were allocated to the Home Fleet, totalling seventeen ships. The 7th Flotilla, still incomplete, had already proceeded to its war station at Dover on 25 August. The K-class destroyers that were to have formed the 3rd Flotilla and relieve the I-class in the Mediterranean were instead ordered to form the 5th Flotilla and join the Home Fleet as they were completed from October 1939. The 3rd and 4th Flotillas, I-class and Tribal-class respectively, returned from the Mediterranean, and, after brief service in the Western Approaches and East Coast Convoys, joined the Home Fleet in October/November. Four I-class ships were withdrawn, converted to minelayers and formed the 20th Flotilla. In early 1940, the arrival of the 2nd Flotilla from the South Atlantic brought the total number of destroyers with the Home Fleet to forty-nine in six flotillas. The large amount of sea-time per ship in poor weather during the autumn and winter of 1939/40 resulted in unexpected wear and maintenance requirements, however, and at any one time a number of the destroyers would be in the yard for repair, maintenance or refits. The flag of Rear Admiral (D) flew from the cruiser Aurora until December 1939, at which time it was transferred to Titania and later in the month to Woolwich at Greenock.¹⁸

On 11 November, four cruisers, four Tribal-class destroyers and the 7th Destroyer Flotilla were detached under Vice Admiral 2nd Cruiser Squadron George Edward-Collins to make up the Humber Force, operating under Admiralty orders.¹⁹

In general, the forces from Scapa Flow operated in the northern waters, including convoy escort to and from Scandinavia, A/S patrols in the Fair Isle Channel and searching for German ships attempting to pass through the Bergen–Shetland Narrows or the Faeroes–Iceland–Greenland Passage. The Rosyth Escort Force, consisting largely of V&W-class destroyers and sloops, took convoys up and down the coast. The Humber Force, based at Immingham, near Grimsby, covered the east coast of England, including invasion defence.

The destroyers of the Home Fleet, when not in direct support of the capital ships, were used as much as possible in the A/S role and convoy escort. They soon proved alarmingly vulnerable to aircraft attack and poorly equipped to fight back against anything but surface vessels. Even taking on the U-boats turned out to be a bigger challenge than anticipated.

During the autumn of 1939, atrocious weather followed by severe frost with heavy ice conditions slowed the naval war. At times, smaller ships had to concentrate just on surviving; some of the British destroyers with captains reluctant to slow down in the face of the weather suffered structural damage. Impulsive was one, Kelly another, resulting in time in the yard and cautions from the Admiralty. The rudders of Rodney and Nelson as well as the cruisers Glasgow and Southampton were damaged, apparently from a weak design that rendered them incapable of withstanding the strain of continuous zigzagging in rough seas. Several ships suffered from leaks, especially the destroyers, and time spent in the yards increased.²⁰

Control of the French military was in the hands of the Council of Ministers. In September 1939, Édouard Daladier was president of the council (prime minister) as well as minister of national defence and minister for war. His chief military advisers were General Maurice Gamelin, C-in-C of the Army and Chief of Staff for National Defence, General Vuillemin, the air force Chief of Staff, and Admiral Darlan of the navy.

As a precaution, all French ports were closed in the morning of 1 September. When it became clear the next day that Italy would not join the war at this stage, the Mediterranean ports were reopened and coastal traffic permitted. The western ports and thus all transatlantic traffic remained suspended until the 5th, when war had been declared and the whereabouts of the German fleet had been ascertained. Merchant ships in the Mediterranean were allowed to sail independently along approved routes, while in the North Sea and the Atlantic, French ships would be subordinated to the British convoy system. Most of the French naval resources in 1939 and early 1940 were deployed protecting their own troop convoys from Africa to Marseille.

The first casualties of the Marine Nationale occurred on 13 September. The mine-laying cruiser Pluton had been sent to Casablanca to lay a defensive minefield off the West African coast. The order was cancelled and Pluton ordered back to disembark the mines, which had already been armed. One of them exploded, destroying the ship and killing 215 officers and men. A further 120 were injured, of whom forty-seven were harbour personnel.²¹

To ensure a more flexible use of the French ships, Churchill and Pound visited Maintenon in September to meet with Admiral Darlan. It was agreed that, in addition to helping protect the steady stream of British troops transported across the Channel, the Marine Nationale would participate in the escort of certain Atlantic and Gibraltar convoys as agreed from case to case.²² In return, Asdic-equipped trawlers would be provided as well as general A/S and mine-sweeping competence. The mistrust between the two allies ran deep, though, and it would be well into 1940 before any direct cooperation between the navies started to develop.

Also in September, Chamberlain and Daladier agreed to establish an Anglo-French Supreme War Council (SWC), to oversee the joint military strategy on which France and Britain should base the war against Germany. Each country should be represented by its prime minister and such counsellors as they decided to bring. The council would have no executive authority, and final decisions remained with the two governments. At the two first meetings of the SWC, in Abbeville on 12 September and Hove near Brighton on 22 September, France persistently argued for action elsewhere. The British delegation, on the other hand, shrank from measures that might mean an escalation of the conflict, especially into the Mediterranean. Soon, other differences emerged too, in particular as the influence of the military leaders started to grow beyond that of merely advisers to the politicians. Above all, the issue of Scandinavian neutrality in general and assistance to Finland in particular was to sour the Anglo-French relationship profoundly.²³

In September 1939, the Royal Navy could muster a little over 130,000 officers and men, including 12,400 Royal Marines who, in addition to delivering police duties and landing parties, handled every fourth turret on the larger ships. To man the ships of the Reserve Fleet – some 130 vessels of all sizes – an additional 80,000 men of the Royal Naval Reserve (RNR) and Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) had to be mobilised. The RNR were largely professional seamen from the British merchant navy and fishing fleets or retired naval officers and ratings who had completed their first twelve-year engagement but not re-enlisted.²⁴ The RNVR were amateurs who had volunteered for basic training.

In mid-June 1939, the first officers and men of the RNR were called up and in late August a general mobilisation of the navy was ordered including the RNVR and ‘hostilities only’ ratings. In addition, a restart of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS, affectionately known as Wrens), which had been abandoned after the previous war, was initiated, freeing up a significant number of men for active service. By midsummer 1939, a slow but steady re-manning of the ships of the Reserve Fleet was in progress. Few of the ‘hostilities only’ ratings had any connections with the navy at all and needed an extensive period of training before they could even be considered for war. In some of the new ships the majority of the men and officers had not served, far less served together, in a setting of war. This put a huge strain on the officers and NCOs, not least those of the RNR, who in increasing numbers were given command of the smaller vessels, sloops, corvettes, minesweepers, trawlers and auxiliaries.²⁵ Commander Jack Broome of Veteran wrote:

I commissioned the vintage destroyer Veteran from Reserve at Chatham and a veteran she surely was, built shortly after World War I. [. . .] My raw crew and their raw skipper were going through that harsh, vicious change-over from peace to war; adapting ourselves to the current technique of defending our vital merchant navy which, except for the advent of air power, was back to where the last war ended. [. . .] The magic of radar, for example, was entering our lives, complete with teething troubles. Seamen – who had never been to sea – were trained to operate it. The buzz got around that crossing the beam with the instrument switched on would make them impotent. Came rough weather, less superstitious operators promptly put paid to their precious instruments by being sick into them. Emergency signals went forth both to refute the impotence scare and telling the Medical Research to drop the pill they were working on to keep Wrens out of trouble and get cracking on one to stop radar operators being seasick. And so on. A different war with different problems, but the same old tussle with human imperfections.²⁶

Destroyer Veteran of the Reserve Fleet. (World Ship Photo Library)

Gunnery practice and torpedo-firing was lacking, in particular for the destroyers, and tactical operations such as U-boat hunting had to be learned the hard way. Soon, however, the well-oiled machinery started to work. Admiral William James, C-in-C Portsmouth, wrote in a letter to a friend on 9 September:

I take my hat off to those who planned for this war. Everything seems to have fallen into place. The boom, an immense structure, is in place with its gate vessels, the examination service is functioning and the inner patrol, a kind of water police service, is in being. The safe passage of the Army to France is my main commitment. I’ve got some destroyers for escorting the troopships which load at Southampton. The accurate ‘buttoning up’ of the troopships and escorts is a daily task for the staff, who so far have done remarkably well. I was at the barracks during the mobilisation. I wish you could have seen that perfect example of good organisation. Everything has been thought out.²⁷

There were several stark reminders that the sea was as dangerous as ever. In December, the battleship Barham was called back from the Mediterranean to the Home Fleet and at 04:00 on 12 December she and her escorting destroyers were 9 miles off Mull of Kintyre, in the North Channel, a few hours out from Greenock. It was time for another zigzag, and A/S Officer Lieutenant Reginald Whinney was on watch on board the lead destroyer Duncan:

At the vital moment, I went to the back of the bridge to watch the other ships of the screen through binoculars, especially those ships on the outside of the turn. Suddenly, in the middle of the manoeuvre, Barham switched on her navigation lights. Then she switched on a searchlight. In the beam was, apparently, a submarine. The assumption was that the battleship had rammed a U-boat. At first, no signal was made to say what had happened. Then came a signal from Barham telling us to pick up survivors. The Captain was, of course, on the bridge by this time, so I, as First Lieutenant, went down to lower a boat to pick up survivors from a U-boat – or so I thought. As the boat was being lowered there were several loud explosions. There must be a second U-boat which had fired torpedoes and hit Barham. As an immediate reaction, I thought we should release a life-saving raft for the survivors for the time being and seek to attack this supposed second U-boat. [. . .] Then, with horror, I realised that it was the red anti-fouling on the bottom of a destroyer and that the imagined conning tower was, in fact, the asdic dome.²⁸

Indeed it was. For reasons never fully established, the destroyer Duchess had got in the way of the battleship and been rammed and capsized. A few seconds’ lapse in alertness and the unthinkable had happened. Casualties were heavy: 137 men, including Lieutenant Commander Robin White, perished. Most ratings were below; those not sleeping were having breakfast or clearing away their gear in order to be able to leave early once they arrived in port. The massive bulk of the battleship hit the nimble destroyer with such tremendous speed that she simply turned over, trapping most of the crew within the hull. Many of those who got into the water were either killed by exploding depth-charges or succumbed to the freezing cold of the sea. Few had found the time to grab lifebelts. Only twenty-three men were saved.

Two weeks later, on 28 December, Barham was torpedoed by U30 west of the Butt of Lewis. At the time, the battleship was in the company of Repulse and four destroyers, Inglefield, Imogen, Icarus and Khartoum. No torpedo tracks were seen. The torpedo hit on the port bow abreast the ‘A’ shell room. Four crewmembers were killed. Barham stopped and reversed her engines, making a W/T signal that she had hit a mine or been torpedoed. At the same time, a signal was hoisted, but this was incorrect and no immediate search for the U-boat was initiated. By the time the signals had been corrected, Kapitänleutnant Lemp had taken his boat away and no counterattacks were experienced. In spite of extensive flooding, Barham was able to proceed under her own power to Liverpool, where she stayed in the yards until June 1940.²⁹

Intelligence

Reviewing the general situation at the end of October, the CoS concluded that in their opinion, the only field in which the Allies could take any offensive initiative at the moment was in the economic warfare at sea, combined with diplomatic and financial pressure. This assessment was partly based on the actual strength of the Allied armed forces, partly on an analysis of the economic situation in Germany prepared by the Industrial Intelligence Centre of the Department of Overseas Trade in April 1939. The Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW) believed there to be a shortage of skilled labour in Germany as well as of raw materials such as iron, chrome, nickel, copper, tin, rubber and petroleum. In addition, a major part of German industry was concentrated in the Ruhr–Rhineland–Saar area, within reach of Allied aircraft and an eventual land offensive, should that be decided on. The treaty with Russia, it was believed, would only to a minor degree be able to make good these deficiencies.³⁰ Until one of the parties decided the time was right to open the Western Front, it would be a naval war and its strategies would to a large extent be determined by intelligence. Unfortunately, both intelligence and operational analysis had received low priority in the interwar years and become something of a backwater. In particular naval intelligence was inadequate and fragmented at the outbreak of the war.

Coordinated acquisition of information from reliable sources was rare in Britain and the exchange of analysis and interpretation between departments and services almost non-existent. Worse, German naval communication was for all practical purposes closed to interception. On 12 January 1940, C-in-C Home Fleet Admiral Forbes, with reference to the confusion over who sank the Rawalpindi, complained with open resentment that ‘some improvement should be made in the intelligence’ forwarded to him regarding the whereabouts of German naval vessels: ‘The only intelligence I receive at present is the “Daily Summary of Naval Events” and “OIC, Daily Report” sent by post and therefore anything from 2 to 14 days old.’³¹

The main intelligence unit of the Admiralty, the Naval Intelligence Department (NID), was led by the director of naval intelligence (DNI), Rear Admiral John Godfrey. NID had been hit hard by the cuts in the naval budgets in the 1920s, but Godfrey had been able to reverse this trend, and an Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC) had been established in 1937, led by Rear Admiral Jock Clayton. The OIC’s main task was the maintenance of tracking plots, incorporating all available information on the whereabouts of German naval ships, on surface and below. Besides some High Frequency Direction Finding (H/F-D/F) wireless stations, known as ‘Huff-Duff’, the plots were based largely on sightings and reports of torpedoed merchantmen at sea, supplemented by intelligence from German or neutral ports by naval attachés, consuls, shipping officers and other observers.³² Reports from non-military sources reached the OIC via the Foreign Office, while sighting reports from ships and aircraft arrived via the so-called War Registry, the department of the Admiralty that distributed signals.³³ In addition, Lloyds, the Board of Trade and the Baltic Exchange routinely submitted information on German ship movements. Aircraft reconnaissance was still in its infancy and would only become truly effective towards the end of 1940. To distribute the flow of intelligence quickly, the OIC was authorised to communicate directly with naval forces at sea if considered necessary.

In general, the NID was not overly successful in the first part of the war. The OIC was under-resourced, inexperienced and poorly equipped and hampered by a disruptive state of competition and mistrust between the OIC and NID 1, the geographical section of the NID covering Germany. Inter-service communication and cooperation regarding intelligence and its analysis was virtually non-existent in Britain at the beginning of the war.³⁴

The Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, which would later become instrumental in the outcome of the war through outstanding signals intelligence and cryptanalysis, had been set up as an inter-departmental body responsible for acquiring intelligence by means of cryptanalysis in 1919. In case of a new war it was intended that the analysis of readable codes and cypher should be transferred back to the service intelligence branches while the GC&CS would work on unsolved cypher. Thus, the staffs of the GC&CS were expert cryptanalysts but not professional intelligence personnel. This would actually lead to a flexible collaboration between the GC&CS and the services later, but during its first year, a lack of experience and competence meant that the relatively new concept of Sigint or ‘Wireless Traffic Analysis’ was looked upon with suspicion and not understood by most staffs and senior officers. Eventually, the keys of the German Enigma code-machines would become available to the GC&CS but for all practical purposes, the Kriegsmarine codes remained impregnable to British intelligence until the second half of 1940.

Photographic reconnaissance had been all but ignored by the RAF in the inter-war years and had to be reinvented. Suitable aircraft types were scarce, the cameras and film in use were generally unsuitable and in those instances where good photographs were actually taken, there were few if any trained interpreters to analyse them. In the weeks before the outbreak of war, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) had fitted the private Lockheed aircraft of businessman Frederick Sidney Cotton with hidden cameras to photograph German airfields, naval installations and ships on his flights to and from Germany. After war had been declared, Cotton and his small staff were incorporated into the RAF as 1 Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) at Heston aerodrome. At first, Blenheims of Bomber Command were used to fly photographic reconnaissance sorties, but inadequate performance resulted in heavy losses. Civilian aircraft were pressed into service, but it was not until two stripped-down Spitfires could be made available in November 1939, that PRU could begin anything like proper operations over western Germany. The first aerial photographs of Kiel were only taken on 7 April 1940.

The interpretation of the aerial photos, every bit as important as taking them, lagged even further behind, and it was not until July 1940, after pressure from the Admiralty, that the Air Ministry set up the Photographic Interpretation Unit (PIU) to interpret photographs for all three services and to start harvesting its real operational value.³⁵

On the German side, things were far more advanced. For over ten years after WWI, the radio monitoring service or B-Dienst of the Kaiserliche Marine lived its own life, monitoring technological development and code breaking until October 1929, when it once again became part of the navy and was moved to Kiel. Much of its work was devoted to the creation of new cyphers and codes and it was in this period that the Enigma machine emerged. In the late 1930s, the B-Dienst was brought to Berlin as part of the Office of Communications and Intelligence. The staffs were increased and also tasked with collecting naval information from foreign press, public sources and German connections around the world.³⁶

Two chains of coastal radio stations were developed during the early 1930s: one for the North Sea on the Frisian Islands, equipped with receivers, transmitters and radio direction finders and one for the Baltic along the German east coast. Bearings obtained on transmissions by two or more radio stations could be triangulated to obtain a fairly accurate position depending on the strength and quality of the signal. By 1939, the stations were equipped with state-of-the art receivers and radio direction finders as well as communication tools for interception, location and intelligence analysis, far superior to anything available to the Allies.³⁷

The B-Dienst and its decryption service, the xB-Dienst, could at the outbreak of the war read and decypher a significant amount of encrypted Allied radio communications, including the most widely used code of the Royal Navy. The B-Dienst operators could on a routine basis monitor the positions of all British warships; their recognition codes and a large part of the signals they sent between themselves and between the Admiralty and the various C-in-Cs were understandable. Decrypting and dispersal of the information took time, though, and could not always be acted on in time to make a difference. It is clear from the war diary of the SKL and BdU (Befehlshaber der Unterseeboote – C-in-C Submarines) that even if the signals themselves could not be read in full, the B-Dienst could on an almost continuous basis monitor the whereabouts of most British and French capital ships and cruisers in the North Sea, Atlantic and Mediterranean. Signals to the British merchant navy were to a large extent transmitted in plain language long after the outbreak of the war, and it was not until January 1940 that the British introduced the Merchant Navy Code.³⁸

German military intelligence in the first phase of the war was handled by the OKW/Amts-gruppe Auslandsnachrichten (Bureau of Foreign Intelligence), usually known as the Abwehr. It was led by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, a firm German patriot but no friend of Hitler and his Nazi Party. Based on a counter-espionage organisation founded in the 1920s, the Abwehr had lived a clandestine life under various guises until it was brought directly under the OKW in 1938, giving Canaris unprecedented influence. Within the Abwehr, Group I handled military and economic intelligence, Group II sabotage and Group III counter-intelligence. Every morning at 10:00, Admiral Canaris and his Chief of Staff Colonel Oster met with the group leaders to hear their reports and give instructions. Thus the leaders of the Abwehr were well informed of what went on in the bureau as well as in the OKW and the Foreign Office.³⁹