Читать книгу Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II - Len Deighton - Страница 24

The Submarine Tracking Room used a wide range of incoming data. Anything that could possibly help was funnelled here. For the admirals perhaps the most disconcerting thing about this place, where Britain’s most vital battle was being fought and from which came the operational decisions that sent orders to the warships, was that by 1941 no regular naval officer was anywhere to be seen.

The room was run by Rodger Winn, a 30-year-old lawyer with degrees from Cambridge and Harvard. He had drifted into this job as a civilian, after volunteering to interrogate enemy prisoners. Winn would never have passed a Royal Navy physical examination: childhood polio had left him a hump-backed cripple who walked with a limp. Neither would he have found favour in the peacetime navy, for he had limited respect for authority. Like many barristers he was a talented story-teller with a sharp tongue. The security of having a well paid profession waiting for him encouraged him to stand firm against authority. When a decision of Winn’s was challenged by an admiral, Winn put a vast heap of reports, sightings, charts and intercepts on to the admiral’s desk and politely asked him for his solution.

When Winn joined the Tracking Room staff, the emphasis was on plotting the present state of the Atlantic battle, rather than predicting the future. But such was Winn’s talent for reading the minds of the U-boat men, that in January 1941 his boss was moved out of the Tracking Room and Winn was given sole command of it and made a commander in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. And when in January 1942 he chose an assistant, it was another ‘civilian’, a bespectacled insurance broker from Lloyd’s.

Most of the Tracking Room’s floor space was occupied by a seven-foot-square plotting table depicting the North Atlantic. It was covered with sheets of white paper and brightly lit from above, like a billiards table. Pins showed the progress of the convoys on their two-week voyages across the ocean, while others showed the U-boats on their month-long sorties. All the evidence of U-boat activity – radio fixes, sightings, signals and sinkings – was written in pencil on to the paper table cover. The coloured pins revealed the source: red-topped pins for a fix, white for a sighting, blue for Enigma intercepts. Red lines showed the extreme limits of air cover. A cluster of pins showed where a convoy was at that moment under attack by a wolf pack.

Another large table was covered by a captured map to show the German navy grid. There was also a map showing the Huff Duff stations that took bearings on U-boat radio messages. Strings could be stretched across the map to intersect. A ‘good fix’ was within 40 or 50 miles, a ‘very good fix’ meant within 10 to 15 miles. On one notable occasion a U-boat was found within three miles of its fix in the Baltic, and sunk by a Coastal Command plane, all within 30 minutes of the U-boat’s tell-tale radio transmission.²⁶

The walls of the Tracking Room were covered in charts and graphs showing such things as U-boat sinkings and estimated production. There were pictures too, including a photograph of Dönitz. Winn tried to make this room as he imagined Admiral Dönitz had his operations room.

Each day at noon the information from the table was translated into a situation report. The most vital parts of the plot were used each day to update Churchill’s map in the War Room. Once a week, during the night, staff renewed all the white paper sheets on the plotting table, carefully transferring all the current data to them. The Submarine Tracking Room became a favourite place to take VIPs. For extra security the plotting table used coded references so that visitors would not get an accurate or complete view of what was happening.

Around the Tracking Room there were offices for the watchkeepers. Winn’s office had a glass front so that he could see the civilian watchkeepers plotting the convoys while RNVR officers (wearing mufti) plotted the enemy movements. Civilian day-workers kept the records and card indexes. A nearby office held telex machines connected by direct line to Bletchley Park. Arriving Enigma messages were brought into the Tracking Room by a Wren (Woman’s Royal Naval Service) who was called ‘the secret lady’.²⁷ One of the tasks of the Tracking Room staff was to compile an account of each new U-boat. Such a record might start with the low-grade radio traffic sent while the new boat was working-up in the Baltic. From that time onwards every possible detail of boat and crew would be filed for reference. Names, sinkings, medals and commendations, damage and refits were all noted.

Because the Royal Navy gave most of its officers sea duties between spells at a desk, the plotting table often showed the hazards of friends who had recently worked here. One officer, Commander Boyle, was well known to the men in the Tracking Room and was married to a secretary who worked there. He was escort commander for a convoy of eleven tankers and his friends watched the plot day after day as its ships were picked off one at a time. Finally only one ship survived but Boyle was saved.²⁸

By using his background material, and watching all the movements on the plotting table, Winn made decisions about re-routing convoys or even detaching precious warships if the situation required it. Each morning he phoned to the Western Approaches Command in Liverpool and spoke with RAM Coastal Command too. When Enigma material was available, it made Winn’s job incomparably easier. Often he phoned directly to those other civilian boffins at Bletchley Park and asked them to keep a lookout for messages with some known component.