CONCLUSION
WAR IS ULTIMATELY about doing, not thinking. The Macedonians beat the Persians at Gaugamela in 331 B.C. not because they took the enemy by surprise—Darius, the Persian emperor, spent the preliminaries of the battle attempting to bribe Alexander not to attack—but by the ferocity of their onslaught. The Knights of St. John saved Malta from capture by the Turks in 1565 not because they got word of their approach but by the tenacity of their defence in a five-month siege. The British and Indian troops repelled the Japanese attempt to invade India via Kohima and Imphal in 1944 not because intelligence had disclosed the enemy’s plan but by stubborn, relentless, sometimes hand-to-hand combat. The Americans took Iwo Jima in 1945 not because intelligence had revealed the lay-out of the Japanese defences—the whole tiny island was one densely fortified position—but because the U.S. Marines, at the cost of thousands of their own lives, inched their way forward from bunker to bunker. In the case of none of these famous and decisive battles did thought play much of a part in bringing victory; courage and unconsidered self-sacrifice did.
War is not an intellectual activity but a brutally physical one. War always tends towards attrition, which is a competition in inflicting and bearing bloodshed, and the nearer attrition approaches to the extreme, the less thought counts. Nevertheless, few who make war at any level, from commander to soldier in the line of battle, seek to win by attrition. All hope for success at lesser cost. Thought offers a means of reducing the price. It may identify weaknesses in the enemy’s method of making war or in his system of defence; detailed reconnaissance of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall identified the best places to land before D-Day. It may reveal defects in his armoury or suggest countermeasures to his weapons; Britain’s espousal of radar before 1939 laid the basis for national survival during the Battle of Britain. It may give warning of the enemy’s concealed intentions or secret devices; foreknowledge played a major part in the—partial—defeat of the flying bomb, if not the V-2 rocket, in 1944. It may unveil treachery within; during the Cold War, patient if retrospective analysis of how state secrets were betrayed to Soviet Russia, and the identity of those responsible, closed a potentially fatal gap in national security. It may disclose the nature of an enemy strategy, which threatens to strangle essential lifelines of supply, as inspired thought by a single individual in 1917 revealed how the U-boat blockade of Britain could be defeated by a simple reorganisation of shipping. It may, at its most creative, unlock a whole world of enemy secrets, as Bletchley Park’s attack on the German Enigma ciphers did from 1940 onwards.
The story of the breaking of Enigma, and of Ultra, the intelligence it yielded, together with the story of Magic, the product of the American unravelling of the Japanese ciphers, is of the highest drama and the greatest importance to our understanding of the conduct of the Second World War. Without our knowledge of Ultra and Magic, it would be impossible to write the war’s history; and, indeed, all history of the war written before 1974, when the Ultra secret was revealed for the first time, is flawed by reason of that gap.1 However restrained the claims made for the influence of Ultra in bringing eventual victory—and those made by its official historian, F. H. Hinsley, are very carefully restrained—the availability of day-to-day, sometimes hour-by-hour details of the enemy’s tactical control of his U-boat forces, for example, of the resupply of his ground forces in the Western Desert, sometimes of their deployment for action also, occasionally of strategic initiatives of the greatest regional significance, such as the plan to capture Crete by airborne descent in 1941, helped very greatly to win the war for the Allies and, as Hinsley demonstrates, materially shortened its course. The same is true of Magic in the Pacific. Moreover, in both theatres, the ability to overhear the enemy was an advantage the Allies enjoyed which—with certain exceptions—their opponents did not.
If there is such a thing as an ideal of military intelligence, when one side was privileged to know the other’s intentions, capabilities and plan of action in place and time—how, where, what and when—while its opponent neither knew as much in return nor that his own plans were uncovered, Ultra—and Magic—occasionally met the ideal standard. The Americans before Midway were in such a position in June 1942; so were the British before the German airborne invasion of Crete in May 1941.
Yet, as we know, the British nonetheless lost the Battle of Crete. There have been several attempts to explain why, the intelligence circumstances appearing to make defeat an impossibility. It has been suggested that General Freyberg, commanding the island, believed the airborne assault to be the prelude to a later seaborne invasion, or that he was overburdened by the risk of revealing the Ultra secret, or both; in either case, misbelief or paralysing anxiety, he failed to redeploy his troops to positions which would have made the capture of Maleme airfield, the vital ground, impossible. Neither, in fact, seems to provide a complete explanation. Freyberg did fear a seaborne invasion and he was also weighed down by the need to keep the Ultra secret. He might, nevertheless, with the troops available, his highly capable and determined New Zealanders, have held the airfield had he impressed on the local commander, a brave man of proven fighting ability, the necessity of staying put and yielding not an inch. Instead, the local commander got the impression that it would be possible to retire, regroup and successfully counterattack next morning, giving his men a pause he thought they required. Next morning proved too late. In real time, the by then desperate Germans took advantage of a momentary weakening of the New Zealand defence to stage one of the most extreme do-or-die exploits in military history. They had already offered up to sacrifice the bulk of the Assault Regiment, by crash-landing its gliders into the waterless bed of the River Tavronitis, an attack the New Zealanders had largely blunted. On the morning of 21 May, they began to use the Ju52 aircraft carrying the 5th Mountain Division in almost the same way, landing them under fire on the airfield and ruthlessly ditching those hit on the runway. The death ride of the Ju52s should have resulted in disaster; but there was just not enough New Zealand fire, and that from too long a range, and just too much German recklessness. At enormous cost, in loss of both machines and lives, the Germans succeeded in building up a superiority of force at the decisive spot, seizing the airfield and using it as the point of departure for a battle-winning offensive.
The events of 20–21 May 1941 in Crete demonstrate one of the most important of all truths about the role of intelligence in warfare: that however good the intelligence available before an encounter may appear to be, the outcome, given equality of force, will still be decided by the fight; and, in a fight, determination, again given equality of force, will be the paramount factor. The New Zealanders were troops of the very first quality; Rommel, their opponent in the desert, testified that they were the best soldiers he ever met, including his own. On Crete, however, they met other soldiers who preferred collective death to defeat. The men of the 7th Airborne Division and the 5th Mountain Division were in berserker mood. It was their almost mindless courage that allowed them to prevail.
The events of 4 June 1942 at Midway provide another perspective: that, even when intelligence seems to provide the explanation of a victory, closer examination of the facts may reveal that some other factor, in that case chance, lies at the root of the matter. The Americans in 1942 were in much the same position of strategic inferiority as the British had been in 1940–41: though equipped to overhear the enemy’s secret signals, they were at a severe military disadvantage by reason of recent defeats. They had lost their battle-fleet, they had lost much territory of crucial importance, and they were outnumbered in key categories of weapon systems, particularly aircraft carriers. It was greatly to their credit that, during a period of acute parsimony in defence spending, they had nevertheless succeeded in penetrating the main Japanese naval code, JN-25A, before Pearl Harbor and had had success against the more complex JN-25B by early 1942. By a combination of interception, decoding, informed speculation about Japanese intentions and, crucially, a cunning exercise in the art of the baited signal—the false revelation that Midway was suffering a water shortage—the U.S. Pacific Fleet had, as events would show, accurately persuaded itself by May 1942 that the next stage of Japanese expansion would not be westward into the Indian Ocean or southward towards Australia but eastward, from the Japanese home islands, to seize Midway, the last American-held outpost in their proximity. Covert deployment of America’s only three Pacific-based aircraft carriers positioned the surviving American capital forces to take the approaching Japanese strike fleet, of four aircraft carriers, by surprise and achieve a victory.
Carrier fleets, however, consist of two elements, the ships themselves and their air groups. An air group whose carrier is sunk, while it is aloft, becomes a refugee organisation, seeking to land where it may, or to ditch if no landing place offers. A carrier without its air group is no more harmful than any cargo ship. On the morning of 4 June, the Japanese carrier striking force, surprised by five out of the six squadrons of the American carrier air groups, destroyed them all. The sixth group had got lost. Its leader, almost at the limit of fuel endurance, then spotted a Japanese destroyer, which had been detached to attack an American submarine, making speed to rejoin the main force. The white streak of its wake, on the deep blue of the ocean on a perfect Pacific day, indicated the direction he and his fellow pilots should follow. They did and, being dive-bombers arriving at 12,000 feet, while the Japanese fighters of the combat air patrol had just descended to sea level to destroy the last American torpedo-aircraft attack, found a clear run to the target. Three out of the four Japanese aircraft carriers were destroyed in five minutes.
The success of the dive-bombers made Midway a great naval victory, the greatest naval victory of all time. It was crowned later in the day by the destruction of the surviving fourth Japanese carrier. Nevertheless, it cannot be claimed that Midway was a pure intelligence victory, open and shut though the case superficially seems. The events of 4 June, up to the destruction of the fifth of the American attacking squadrons, had indeed been the outcome of decisions taken in light of an intelligence advantage; the final and decisive event, the descent of the sixth squadron on a by then defenceless Japanese carrier formation, was the result of luck. Had the U.S. submarine Nautilus not strayed into the path of the Japanese carriers, causing the detachment of the destroyer Arashi to attack it, the lost dive-bomber squadron, Bombing 6, would not have been redirected by its wake on to the target; and had Arashi lingered longer on its search, Bombing 6 would again not have known which way to go and would have had to turn back, mission unaccomplished, at the limit of its endurance.
There are other complexities, concerning particularly failures of reporting by Japanese reconnaissance and failure of clear thinking by the Japanese high command. Had the Tone’s floatplane made an earlier and more exact report when it sighted the American task force, the Japanese carriers would have been alerted to the presence of the American carriers before their aircraft took off. Had Admiral Nagumo thought more quickly and analytically once the battle began, in particular not been distracted by the intervention of land-based aircraft from Midway, he could have initiated a much earlier attack on the American carriers, manoeuvred to a new position and avoided being caught with his flight decks cluttered with ordnance, fuel lines and fully fuelled aircraft, potential—actual, as things turned out—firebombs. Though Midway turned out to be a great American victory, in the making of which the intercept and decryption services played an essential part, it might have been exactly the opposite: a great American defeat, into which the U.S. Pacific Fleet had been drawn by the very success of its own intelligence operations.
War is the arena of chance; furthermore, nothing in war is simple. Midway bears out the truth of both of these observations. Their truth is further borne out by the course of the German cruiser campaign in the Pacific and South Atlantic in 1914. On the face of it, von Spee, with his little fleet, should have been able to make his way back to Europe from China unscathed; he might even, by careful selection of his targets, have inflicted considerable damage on his enemies’ merchant shipping on the way. The vastness of the Pacific provided a perfect cloak for his movements; once in the Atlantic, an ocean half its size, a swift break for home, via the stormy waters of the northern seas, might have brought his ships back to German bases intact. The Etappen system, which efficiently arranged for colliers and store ships to be met at neutral harbours or remote anchorages, would have provided resupply. The ports of South America, on both coasts, teemed with German merchants and sympathisers. There promised, for von Spee and his men, the makings of a clear run home.
All the more so because of the deficiencies of contemporary wireless telegraphy. Marconi’s invention, only thirteen years old, had achieved the success of an idea whose time had come. Cable telegraphy, after the first demonstration of its practicality in 1828, had taken decades to provide links between countries, even longer between continents. Not until 1850 were Britain and France connected by an undersea cable, not until 1866 Britain and North America. Thereafter the interconnections proceeded more quickly. By 1870, Britain was connected to Africa, by 1872 to India, by 1878 to Australia and New Zealand. Nevertheless, the creation of a worldwide cable network had taken fifty years. The installation of a worldwide wireless network took only ten, but it was not perfect. There were several gaps—Australia and New Zealand, for example, did not connect with either India or Africa—and signals often had to be repeated or reinforced by cable to ensure reception. The system was also liable to interference from atmospherics, lacked directionality and was easily overheard.
Radio did little to assist directly with the interception and destruction of von Spee’s squadron, because he was generally scrupulous about maintaining radio silence (though an intercept at Samoa on 4 October 1914, transmitted in a broken code, revealed that he was en route from the Marquesas to Easter Island). British lapses, on the other hand, helped von Spee. It was Cradock’s decision to detach Glasgow to Coronel to send a cable that disclosed the presence of his squadron in those waters and led to the battle. Indirectly, of course, the influence of radio on von Spee’s fate was malign. Had he not decided to raid the Falklands, largely for the purpose of putting out of action its wireless station, he would not have run straight into Sturdee’s hands. That was bad luck, compounded by recklessness. Had he avoided the Falklands, made his way circumspectly up the east coast of South America, picking up supplies as he went and avoiding attacks on British merchant shipping, he might have got undetected to within rapid steaming distance of home and returned to a hero’s welcome. He would have had to have luck in the final stages, to avoid the cruiser patrols off the north of Scotland, but, in the winter weather of those latitudes, he might just have done it. The German battleshipBismarck, sailing an opposite course in May 1941, got from Germany to the North Atlantic, eluding the British Home Fleet for several days, and that in the era of radar and long-range aerial reconnaissance. Moreover, real-time intelligence was then provided by an Enigma transmission in a Luftwaffe key Bletchley could read; a senior Luftwaffe officer, with a son aboard the battleship, enquired where he might expect his son to arrive. The answer was Brest, which solved the mystery of where the ship was headed and directed the chase onto her course.
The vastness of the sea, the variety of its weather and the multiplicity of hiding places offered by its coasts and islands have always imbued precise intelligence of the enemy with the highest value in naval warfare. Fleets can disappear, single ships can navigate vast distances without ever being seen by another; indeed, in the months before Pearl Harbor, a Japanese ship was deliberately sailed down the planned course of the attack fleet from the home islands towards Hawaii and met no other vessel during several weeks at sea. It is therefore not surprising that Nelson lost Bonaparte’s fleet, several hundred strong though it was, in 1798. Anyone who has sailed the Mediterranean, a comparatively small sea, knows how long are the periods in which no other ship is seen. It is only in the vicinity of ports that companion vessels appear and they are soon sunk below the horizon by a change of course. Even coastwise sailing, the traditional means of passage in the inland sea, can be lonely. Headlands, peninsulas, islands intervene readily between one vessel and another and they are quickly lost to one another.
Nelson’s loss of touch with Bonaparte’s Egyptian invasion fleet, after his dismasting in the storm off Toulon, and failure to regain it, is therefore quite explicable. There were several persuasive destinations the French might have chosen, including Ireland, Spain, Naples, Constantinople and Anatolia (Turkey), as well as Egypt. The routes thither might be subsumed into two, west and east, which were mutually exclusive. Nelson took a risk, but a lesser one, in discounting the western option. Having correctly decided that Bonaparte had sailed east, a decision based not merely upon a judgement of probabilities but on the human intelligence available, including commercial agents’ reports as well as gossip and rumours from within the orbit of French influence in Europe, his method of running the fugitive fleet down was quite logical. He went from place to place, searching hiding places, questioning ship captains and following up reports. His justifiable anxiety to keep Bonaparte out of Naples and Sicily led to his being foxed when the French fell on Malta; he then not only got on the trail again but got ahead of the quarry, overrunning the invasion fleet at night and arriving at Alexandria before it. His mistake, in a campaign dogged by intelligence famine, was not to wait there but, in a fever of reconsideration, to retrace his course until he picked up firm intelligence at a place which he had already visited.
The value of any study of the Nile campaign to a modern intelligence officer is to illustrate how much better provided he is than a commander of the pre-cable, pre-wireless age. Even with the telegraph and wireless, it would prove possible, as the lamentable tale of the pursuit of the Goeben and Breslau in August 1914 shows, to let an enemy get clean away. It is inconceivable, however, that Nelson could have lost Bonaparte had the Royal Navy had the signal resources available to it in the Mediterranean even sixty years later. The simplest cable system would have ensured that Nelson waited at Alexandria on the first visit and so brought the campaign to an end. Indeed, the same result could have been achieved with the resources then available, had they been in place. Had the British maintained a network of agents around the Mediterranean coastline, and kept despatch boats at friendly or neutral ports—say in Naples, Sicily, Malta, Turkish Crete and Cyprus, something not beyond the power of diplomacy to achieve, particularly with money to grease local palms—Nelson would not have had to lament his want of frigates or to use his battle fleet also as an instrument of reconnaissance. The lack of an intelligence network in the Mediterranean was, however, the outcome of a sudden surge of French power, which put weak local states in fear and perhaps was not to be reversed without a major British naval victory; which is to say that the achievement of earlier success in the campaign of the Nile depended upon fighting an earlier battle. There, precisely, was Nelson’s difficulty: no intelligence, no battle. Hindsight solves Nelson’s intelligence problem. In the circumstances, he did no worse than realities allowed. In a big sea, with slow ships, chasing a vanished enemy was bound to be a time-consuming business.
The vastness of the ocean also defined the circumstances in which the British fought the U-boat war. The first episode, in 1915–18, which actually brought Britain nearer starvation than the second two decades later, was eventually terminated, not by intelligence process, not by offensive methods, but by an exercise in operational analysis: a clear-thinking junior officer perceived that the formation of convoy would contain the sinking of ocean-going merchantmen within bearable limits, a notion previously rejected by the Admiralty. So it proved; sinkings declined, even though contemporary escort vessels had but the most primitive acoustic search equipment and crude anti-submarine weapons. The beginning of the second U-boat war in 1939 found the Royal Navy equipped with an active underwater search device, Asdic, later to be known as sonar, but with anti-submarine weapons scarcely improved since 1918. Moreover, the number of available escorts had declined relative to the number of essential merchant-ship sinkings. As a result, large weakly escorted convoys suffered heavy losses from the outset of hostilities. The Admiralty sought to reduce losses in a number of ways: by an accelerated programme of escort building and improvisation; by diverting aircraft from the bombing campaign to maritime escort and surveillance duties, a diversion always resisted by the RAF; by improving anti-submarine weapons and search equipment; by mining the approaches to the U-boat ports and by anti-U-boat intelligence. The intelligence campaign sought to protect convoys by diverting them away from identified U-boat positions and by directing escorts—both surface ships and anti-submarine aircraft—against individual U-boats. The principal intelligence means were radio direction-finding and the decryption of signals both from U-boats to base and vice versa. Not until May 1941, however, did Bletchley break into the U-boat traffic and its successes were offset by that of the German B-dienst, which read the British convoy code for most of 1942, and by periods of blankness, brought on by German alterations of procedure or machinery in the operation of Enigma.
Despite all intelligence difficulties and failures, rerouting of convoys was a success; only a minority of convoys were attacked and, during the long periods of bad weather that prevail in the North Atlantic winter, the U-boats often could not form wolfpacks or patrol lines, nor find convoys even when directed towards them from base.
In the last resort, however, the U-boats were defeated neither by Anglo-American intelligence success, nor by the eventual failure of the B-dienst’s decryption campaign, but by battle at sea. By the spring of 1943 the combination of many new or improved measures taken by the Allies had set terms of engagement which the U-boats could not overcome. Continuous direct aerial surveillance of the convoy routes denied U-boats the freedom to cruise undetected on the surface; aggressive aerial patrolling of their exit routes from the French Atlantic ports to the high seas sank many and forced all to make their passages to war stations submerged at laboriously low speed; close protection of the convoys by escort aircraft carriers drove attacking U-boats down and resulted in frequent sinkings of those that surfaced; the multiplication of escorts, better trained and equipped to carry out group attacks, sank U-boats which found firing positions; improved radar and radio direction-finding led escorts to U-boats hovering around convoys beyond line of sight. In the end, as Dönitz was forced to admit to his own men, the balance of advantage swung so sharply against the U-boats that the German submarine fleet could be saved from destruction through attrition only by its withdrawal from the scene of action. The Battle of the Atlantic did indeed eventually become a true battle, a great naval battle extended in time and space, which was won by the Allies.
The battle against the German V-weapons was, by contrast, a real intelligence battle, in that it was intelligence that alerted the Allies to the threat and intelligence in all its forms—human, signal and imaging—that provided the beginnings of the antidote, but it ended in no such clear-cut victory. The advantage for the first four years of the Second World War ran wholly the Germans’ way. Having begun to construct an extra-atmospheric rocket, capable of carrying a warhead, well before the war began, the German army had succeeded by late 1942 in solving most of the problems of launching and propelling it in flight and guiding it to its destination. Spurred into competition by the rocket programme’s success, the German air force had meanwhile developed and largely perfected a cruise missile. Both weapons were greatly in advance of their time, measured against weapon development on the Allied side, where they had no counterparts.
From an intelligence point of view, the main aspect of interest aroused by the V-weapons is the difficulty the Allies encountered in taking the measure of the threat and then in deciding what counter-measures should be mobilised against it. To the lay mind, what impresses about the world of science are the openness of the scientific practitioner to new ideas and the readiness of the scientist to set aside prejudice in pursuit of fresh knowledge. Science, the layman believes, is the arena of rationality, unfettered by fixed beliefs, populated by pure intellectuals ever prepared to reject convention and depart upon a free voyage of experimental and theoretical discovery. The history of science contests that optimistic view at almost every turn. Scientists can be as prejudiced as theologians, particularly so if their pet theories are contested. No modern scientist in an influential position showed himself more prejudiced than Winston Churchill’s personal scientific adviser, Professor Lindemann, whom the Prime Minister had had created Lord Cherwell. He had taken the view that long-range military rockets could work only if propelled by solid fuel, which dictated that they should be of enormous size and need highly conspicuous launch pads. He absolutely rejected the suggestion that the theoretically more compact liquid fuel could be confined and controlled as a propulsive medium. He had the mathematics to prove his point of view, and so strongly did he hold it that he used his privileged position to deride and attempt to discredit scientists junior to himself in the official hierarchy who argued the contrary.
He was, as events would painfully show, quite wrong but the evidence necessary to disprove him took precious months to accumulate. Eventually only the presentation of incontestable photographic evidence of the existence of rockets and then pilotless aircraft, later supplanted by eye-witness reports of their flight and finally by the delivery of physical fragments of the objects, drove him into admission of error. By then, fortunately, his opponents had won a hearing sufficiently strong to lead the British Chiefs of Staff to authorise a raid designed to obliterate the V-weapons centre at Peenemünde. It did not altogether achieve obliteration; it certainly did not achieve the extinction of the leading V-weapon scientists, which was one of its primary objects. Nevertheless, it set the secret weapons programme back and the delay, enhanced by the final difficulties the Germans encountered in bringing the V-1 and V-2 to an operational state, postponed their delivery against British targets beyond the opening of the D-Day invasion. This ensured that their launch sites would soon be overrun, thus negating the German expectation of postponing defeat by long-range bombardment of the invasion forces’ points of departure.
The V-weapons programme has interest from another intelligence aspect—the unusual preponderance of human intelligence in influencing opinion on the other side. Human intelligence played almost no part in determining the conditions under which most of the campaigns which form case studies in this book were fought. Its importance, though paramount in the Nile campaign, when Nelson was acting as his own intelligence officer, and crucial to Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, was negligible during the U-boat war and quite insignificant during the campaigns of Crete and Midway. Paradoxically, in the high-technology struggle between German secret weapon scientists and their blinkered Allied opponents, human intelligence was of critical importance. The unattributable Oslo Report gave the first clue; eavesdropping, if that was what it was, by the unnamed “chemical engineer” later provided the trigger to Allied action. Thereafter, though photographic intelligence, imagery as it would now be called, supplied the earliest confirming substance, agent reports from foreign workers at Peenemünde and observations by the Polish underground provided the direct evidence that the V-weapons were actually airborne. Without those reports, and the evidence supplied by Swedish neutrals, including the sea captain with his watch, London would have lacked the picture—fairly clear as it eventually became—of what the hazily defined menace of flying bomb and supersonic rocket ultimately threatened. The intelligence attack on the V-weapons kept alive the importance, elsewhere so greatly discredited, of humint.
Humint, though the term was then unknown, also supplied the means, directly and indirectly, by which Jackson so successfully conducted his campaign against superior odds in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862. That campaign, in any large-scale military perspective, hovers uncertainly between the old and the new. In contemporaneous terms, Jackson belonged to the future, the future of the electric telegraph and the railway alongside which it usually ran. Practically, neither telegraph nor railway played anything but a tangential part in Jackson’s manoeuvring. Although he eventually withdrew his Valley army to Richmond by railway, he scarcely used it to manoeuvre during his campaign of bewitchment and bewilderment; his employment of the telegraph, as a means of communication within the Valley and from it to higher command elsewhere, was intermittent. Jackson in the Valley behaved as a trusted Napoleonic subordinate might have done, superior though he was in talent to his Confederate seniors; he made his own appreciations, asked for no orders, and based his decisions on his own intelligence assessments, founded on close and local observations.
Like a pre-telegraphic and pre-railway commander, Jackson was most concerned to understand the geography of the theatre in which he was operating and to use it to his advantage. A man with an intuitive sense of ground himself—in that respect he resembled that other taciturn, relentless, hard-fighting general of the war, Ulysses S. Grant—he was greatly served by his mapmaker, Jedediah Hotchkiss, a gifted, if self-taught cartographer. In the modern world, where images of every sort abound, it is difficult to visualise the difficulties of travellers and voyagers of an earlier time, when often the only picture available of the route forward was held in the head of a fellow-traveller who had gone that way before or of a local unaccustomed to explanation. Since America east of the Appalachian chain had been settled, or at least explored and travelled, for 200 years before the Civil War’s outbreak, it may seem extraordinary that much of its terrain was unmapped and indeed unknown to strangers. Such was, nevertheless, the case. Though there were turnpike roads in the Shenandoah Valley, and railroads that ran into it, the Union armies lacked maps of its topography, which was unknown in detail to their officers. Jackson, a West Virginian by upbringing, knew the outlines of the topography, but he took trouble to master the details by requesting Hotchkiss to survey the theatre and make him a military map of its most important features, particularly waterways, bridges and passes through the high ground. It was Hotchkiss’ map that gave him his advantage. Jackson’s succession of small, local victories, which frustrated the manoeuvres of his opponents, superior in numbers as they always were, was not the outcome of chance or recklessness but of careful calculation. He was his own intelligence officer, as Nelson had been during the Nile campaign, with the difference that, though similarly confined within a narrow zone of operations, his role as a fugitive, not a pursuer, was to mislead, confuse and avoid a decisive confrontation, rather than bring his enemy to a battle of annihilation.
All the cases studied in this book concern military intelligence in the strict sense: how the use of intelligence brought the enemy to battle on terms favourable to the intelligence victor (the Nile, the naval battle of the Falklands, Midway, the U-boat war) or spared the intelligence victor battle on unfavourable terms (the Valley); or else how the successful practice of intelligence nevertheless failed to avert an unfavourable outcome (Crete, the V-weapon campaign). Its purpose is to demonstrate that intelligence, however good, is not necessarily the means to victory; that, ultimately, it is force, not fraud or forethought, that counts. That is not the currently fashionable view. Intelligence superiority, we are constantly told, is the key to success in war, particularly the war against terrorism. It is indisputably the case that to make war without the guidance intelligence can give is to strike in the dark, to blunder about, launching blows that do not connect with the target or miss the target altogether. All that is true; without intelligence, armies and navies, as was so often the case in the age before electricity, will simply not find each other, at least not in the short term. When and if they do, the better informed force will probably fight on the more advantageous terms. Yet, having admitted the significance of the pre-vision intelligence provides, it still has to be recognised that opposed enemies, if they really seek battle, will succeed in finding each other and that, when they do, intelligence factors will rarely determine the outcome. Intelligence may be usually necessary but is not a sufficient condition of victory.
The reasons for the current overestimation of the importance of intelligence in warfare are twofold: the first is the common confusion of espionage and counter-espionage with operational intelligence proper; the second is the intermingling of operational intelligence with, and contamination by, subversion, the attempt to win military advantage by covert means.
Operational intelligence and espionage work in different time-frames. Espionage, usually but not necessarily a state activity, is a continuous process, of very great antiquity; so is its counterpart, counter-espionage. States seem to have always sought to know the secrets of each other’s policy, particularly foreign but also mercantile and military policy, and to deny such secrets in return. The apparatus of espionage is common knowledge: the employment of spies, the suborning of foreign nationals in positions of confidence, the use of codes and ciphers and the maintenance of decryption and intercept services. Operational intelligence, by contrast, is specifically an activity of wartime and, at high tempo, is limited to comparatively brief periods of hostilities. The rhythm of the intelligence attack on the German V-weapons programme illustrates that: most lethargic at the outset, when the evidence was scanty and diffuse, growing intense as it became incontrovertible, then slowing again when the British, after their capture of the V-1 launch sites in northern France, wrongly persuaded themselves that the danger had been brought under control.
The intermittent pattern of operational intelligence activity is explained in part by the positions military intelligence officers occupy in the hierarchy of an army or navy. They are always subordinate to the operations staff and rarely make full careers in intelligence; indeed, most seek transfer to the operations branch, in the all too understandable hope of becoming masters rather than servants. It is difficult enough, in any case, to make a reputation as a staff officer in any branch, but while there are a number of celebrated operations officers and chiefs of staff—Berthier to Napoleon, Jodl to Hitler, Alan Brooke to Churchill—there are almost no famous intelligence officers. The best known of the Second World War, E. T. Williams, Montgomery’s chief of intelligence in the Eighth Army in the desert and then in Normandy, was an Oxford don who had gone to war as a troop leader in the King’s Dragoon Guards. The best known of the First World War, Sir Alfred Ewing, founder of Room 40, was a former Cambridge don who, as a civilian, became Director of Naval Education. Williams, still a young man, returned to his Oxford college after the war.2
Espionage and counter-espionage by contrast are, or have become in the modern world, the arena of full-time professionals. The CIA and the SIS (MI6) are organs of state and, as they evolved over time, have grown into formidable bureaucracies; the former KGB of the Soviet Union was, in at least one of its aspects, effectively a parallel government, charged to maintain the internal stability of the Soviet system as well as spy on foreign enemies and defeat foreign espionage. In all those organisations, it has been possible, indeed usual, to enter as a carefully selected recruit, to be trained, usually in a particular speciality, and to make a lifelong career. Since the career was full-time, the agencies’ operatives naturally found or made activities to occupy their day-to-day working lives; and as, in practice, serious threats to state security are as intermittent as major military threats to national survival in wartime, the intelligence agencies bulked out their work by spying on each other. Indeed, if asked what spies do, the safest answer is that spies spy on spies. The parallel eavesdropping agencies—the British Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ, descendant of Bletchley) and the American National Security Agency (NSA)—are party to serious secrets, which they pluck from the ether by interception and decrypt. At their most successful, they are able to tell their own governments the most secret business of others. They guard what they know jealously, even, paradoxically, from their companion intelligence agencies. No rivalries are more intense than those between intelligence services working, by different means, on the same side.
The disdain evinced by the “hard” agencies—NSA, GCHQ—for the “soft”—CIA, SIS—is nowhere better illustrated than by the now endlessly retold story of the Cambridge spies of the early Cold War. Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross and their hangers-on were elegant young men of good family, educated at expensive schools and leading colleges, who had been seduced by the warped logic of Marxism to become Soviet agents before they joined the British Foreign Office or intelligence services. All eventually, after 1945, fell under suspicion, and three, Maclean, Burgess and later Philby, defected to the Soviet Union amid noisy media sensation. They caused great harm to their parent services and to Anglo-American trust, which took many years to restore. Indeed, for a long time the Americans took the view that the British intelligence services were fundamentally flawed, even corrupt; it was not until, much later, the Americans themselves suffered a succession of serious breaches of security inside the CIA and the military intelligence services, admittedly committed by agents who were motivated by greed rather than ideology, that relations returned to an even keel.
Yet, viewed in retrospect, the damage done by at least two of the Cambridge spies, Burgess and Philby, was superficial rather than substantial. Guy Burgess, a flamboyant homosexual and dedicated alcoholic, never rose high in the Foreign Office hierarchy. Though his background was entirely conventional—his father was a regular naval officer, and he had himself, until ill health intervened, trained as a naval cadet at Dartmouth—his personality and behaviour were not. He was an exhibitionist, a poseur, a professional rebel. Though a brilliant pupil at Eton, he wasted his time at Cambridge and had difficulty thereafter finding a job. A temporary position at the BBC led in the lax war years to a job in the Foreign Office information department; charm, reinforced by his determination to succeed in his chosen vocation as an undercover Soviet agent, then won him promotion to the post of personal assistant to the Minister of State. It did not last. His irresponsible urge to outrage the conventionally minded led to his transfer to a specialist information branch, then to the Far Eastern Department, where he continued to make a bad impression, and eventually to the British embassy in Washington. His position there was humiliatingly junior. The wonder is nevertheless that, after years of bad behaviour, the Foreign Office was still prepared to keep him on. The explanation, easily grasped by anyone who lived then, incomprehensible today, is that Burgess was protected by the indulgence felt by the well-behaved for the professional naughty boy. Their forgiveness of his excesses excused, in a sense, their own unrelenting propriety; their unwillingness to condemn absolved them of pomposity.
It is doubtful, in any case, if Burgess was ever privy to secrets that could damage his own country. The same might be said of his protégé, Kim Philby. Philby, a truly dedicated Communist convert, began life after Cambridge as a journalist but transferred at the outbreak of war, with the help of Burgess, to the subversive Special Operations Executive. Thence he migrated to the Secret Intelligence Service, which then operated under the cloak of the Foreign Office. As an intelligence officer he undoubtedly betrayed to the Russians a great deal of information about British counter-espionage and subversion and was responsible for the deaths of numbers of anti-Soviet agents, particularly Albanians and Ukrainians whom the British and Americans infiltrated behind the Iron Curtain in the early 1950s. Philby did not, however, have access to war plans or nuclear intelligence. His was a classic example of a spy spying on spies, and the atmosphere of his world is perfectly caught in the novels of John le Carré, which almost exclusively concern the operations of espionage services against each other.
Donald Maclean was a different and more serious traitor. As a promising young diplomat in the Washington embassy in 1945, he was appointed joint secretary of the Anglo-American committee on nuclear development (Combined Policy Committee) and also acquired a pass which gave him unsupervised access to the headquarters of the Atomic Energy Commission. What information he thus gained remains a matter of speculation. It was probably of less value than that supplied to Moscow by the nuclear scientists Alan Nunn May, a British citizen, and Claus Fuchs, a naturalised Briton of German origin, both committed Communists, though of much humbler social origin than the Cambridge spies. They enjoyed the advantage, however, of actually working within the nuclear laboratories at Los Alamos, where the first atomic bomb was developed, and were undoubtedly the source of the information which allowed Stalin to learn of the atomic secret before Hiroshima. Maclean, who had no scientific training, was not guilty of that betrayal. Because of the seniority of his position, however, he was undoubtedly responsible for poisoning Anglo-American trust during the early Cold War, poison that lingered for years afterwards.
The peculiar “climate” of the Cambridge spies’ treason, a word chosen by the most perceptive analyst of the episode, Andrew Boyle, goes far to explain the persistent popular interest in it.3 Not only were Burgess, Maclean and Philby privileged citizens of the society they betrayed, products of good family and its most distinguished schools and colleges; they also belonged to the social elite, knowing those who counted and at ease in the company of the fashionable and powerful. All nevertheless insisted in behaving in disreputable fashion, all three by drinking ostentatiously to excess, all three by publicly violating the sexual norms of the day: not only was Burgess a promiscuous homosexual when homosexual behaviour was still a criminal offence; Maclean, too, a married man, regularly succumbed to his homosexual impulses, while Philby, though strenuously heterosexual, treated women with cavalier selfishness. He abandoned his second wife, pregnant with their fifth child, to a lonely death by drink and drugs; he stole his third wife from a journalistic colleague after his dismissal from the secret service; he next stole Maclean’s wife during their Moscow exile and finally married a Russian far younger than himself when the ex-Mrs. Maclean saw him in his true light. The Cambridge spies were not only traitors; they were also, in different but closely similar ways, monsters of egotism. No wonder that they remained for so long objects of fascination to the prurient.
Since the substance of espionage is duplicity, it should not be thought surprising that its three most notorious practitioners of modern times—they had subordinates, they also had imitators, some Soviet, some American, but none so blatantly complacent—were such unpleasant people. Treason is an intrinsically repulsive activity, so much so that it is difficult not to despise even those who, during the Nazi era and the Cold War, betrayed their countries out of devotion to universally admired ideals, such as respect for truth or democratic freedom. Because the efficient spy lies to protect himself, and evades exposure in order to advance his work, his behaviour is the opposite of what is conventionally regarded as heroic. The hero is a fighter who bares his breast to the blows of the enemy. The spy shrinks from the fight and thinks his work best done when he attracts no attention at all.
Hence a paradox. The British—and it is a peculiarly British approach to the secret world, though one also espoused by the Americans—devised during the nineteenth century a philosophy of secret warfare in which duplicity but also the heroic ethic were combined. Because Britain has always been demographically weak but strategically strong, a country of moderate population enjoying a commanding position athwart the world’s most important maritime trade routes, it has naturally sought to maximise its power by mobilising what today would be called special and subversive forces in the flanks of its enemies. The practice perhaps began during the Peninsular War of 1808–14, when the British army in Portugal and Spain raised and trained locals to serve in irregular regiments under British officers; the Royal Lusitanian (Portuguese) Legion was such a body. The British also directly subsidised not only the Spanish army, such of it as survived after the political collapse of 1808, but also the bands of guerrillas which took the field in its place after the French occupation. The guerrillas never threatened to end the occupation or overturn French rule, but at the cost of dreadful suffering to the Spanish people, they succeeded in making Spain almost impossible to administer.
In India, meanwhile, the British applied a reverse technique in order to overcome disorder and restore central government. Acting nominally in support of the effete and effectively defunct Moghul emperors, they made extensive use of irregulars to put down the bands of pillagers who ransacked Moghul territory and to defeat the armies of overmighty Moghul subjects who had set up as provincial rulers in their own right. Typically, at the end of a successful campaign of pacification, they incorporated the defeated warriors into their own forces. By the mid-nineteenth century, the British were running two military establishments in India: a regular army of their own, recruited from Indians but organised on European lines, and, attached to it, a kaleidoscopic collection of irregulars, wearing local dress, observing local customs of discipline and commanded by small handfuls of British officers who had almost gone native: Shah Shujah’s Contingent, the Hyderabad Contingent, the Punjab Irregular Force.
When in 1857 the Indian regulars rose in mutiny against British rule, their revolt was put down largely by mobilising the irregulars against them; and when the Indian Mutiny was over, the old regular army was almost completely replaced by the irregular forces that had rescued the Indian empire from dissolution. It retained a minimum of British officers—in 1911, the year of the Delhi Durbar, which marked ceremonially the high point of the power of the Raj, they numbered only 3,000—and they, for the most part, wore a version of native dress, spoke Indian languages and prided themselves on their immersion in the customs and culture of their soldiers.
What went for India went eventually for the rest of the British empire, which came largely to be garrisoned by their own inhabitants under the sketchiest of British control. The King’s African Rifles, the Royal West African Frontier Force, the Somaliland Canal Corps, the Sudan Defence Force were native armies commanded by Britons who exerted power not by force but by imitating native habits of authority.4 The French achieved something of the same effect in their African empire, through their organisation of thegoums of the Moroccan mountains and the camel-riding méharistes of the Sahara, units even more indigenous in character than their British equivalents.5 The French, however, never embraced the idea of imperial self-policing as comprehensively as the British did. It became a peculiarly British idea that an empire could be sustained upon the personal bond established between a local warrior and the young white officer-sportsman who had learnt his language and adopted his costume.
There was a great deal to the idea. The bonds established were very strong and were to survive the most severe tests. The British, however, took the idea too far. They convinced themselves that what worked to maintain imperial authority and even to extend imperial boundaries would work also in war against fellow Europeans. So enthralled did the late Victorians become by the ideals of empire that they persuaded themselves of the overriding appeal of those ideals to the empire’s subjects. No individual was more seduced by the universality of the imperial idea than Winston Churchill. It came to him, curiously, in South Africa, during the Boer War: an attack on, and in part a rebellion by, white Afrikaners against British imperialism.
Churchill, who participated in the Boer War as both a journalist and a soldier, conceived a profound admiration for the Boer spirit. The Boers’ dedication to their fight to retain the independence of their tiny republics, and their refusal to submit even when they had been objectively defeated by superior force, led him to two conclusions. The first was that, by the exercise of magnanimity, the Boers could be transformed from bitter enemies to close friends; such proved personally to be the case, for Jan Smuts, the outstanding Boer guerrilla leader, became after his people’s surrender the pro-British leader of post-war South Africa and Churchill’s warm political colleague. The second conclusion, which was to have less benign consequences, was that the practice of guerrilla warfare, by people of free spirit, could wear down a superior power, fetter its freedom of action, distort its strategy, and eventually force it to make great political concessions not strictly won by purely military means. This belief seems eventually to have acquired universal value in Churchill’s world vision. He did not place it in context, calculating the likely reaction of a less or more ruthless enemy confronted by guerrilla action. He seems to have invested the guerrilla idea with autonomous value and come to believe that the guerrilla warrior, by the covert nature of his actions and the support he would enjoy from patriot civilians, ensured his success. Such beliefs, though founded on the Boer example, may have been reinforced by his experience of the Irish Troubles of 1918–21 and his acquaintance with another successful guerrilla leader he came to admire, Michael Collins. At any rate, by the time he became British Prime Minister in 1940, at a supreme crisis in national life, he had been involved in two large-scale guerrilla wars, one concluded successfully only with the greatest difficulty, the other undoubtedly lost, and might therefore be forgiven for holding the view that guerrilla operations were a fruitful means of undermining an offshore enemy.
“Set Europe ablaze.” That was Churchill’s instruction to Hugh Dalton, Minister of Economic Warfare in his 1940 government, uttered on 24 July. It was to lead to the creation of a network of subversive organisations which would penetrate the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe west of the Soviet Union, as well as the Japanese-occupied territories in the Far East. The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was the principal body; its chief task was to insert parties of agents, usually by parachute, into occupied territory, to make contact with the local resistance organisations, if they existed, to arrange for the delivery of weapons and supplies and to carry out espionage and sabotage. All were equipped with radio to maintain contact with base. In the smaller countries—Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway—where conditions were not suitable for guerrilla activity, the parties mainly attempted to set up reporting services (disastrously in Holland, where they were penetrated by the Germans early on and their radios used to entrap arriving agents as they landed). In France SOE organised country-wide networks of reporting agents but also trained and armed resistance bands which proliferated after the introduction of forced labour in August 1942. The French resistance, which was comparatively slow to emerge, divided from the start along ideological lines; SOE officers in the field had to play a delicate political game, since within the country itself, the Communists sought to create a secret army of their own, principally loyal to Moscow, while, outside, de Gaulle in London strove to unify the resistance and include it within his forces of Free France. In Greece and the Balkans, where there was a long tradition of local resistance to former Turkish rule, guerrilla bands formed soon after the German occupation of April to May 1941. There too, they also divided ideologically, with results disastrous for the populations. In Yugoslavia the royalist Cetniks were the group with which the SOE first made contact; their leader, Draza Mihailovic, believed, however, that his correct strategy was to build up his strength until circumstances would permit the ustanka, a general rising against the occupiers. His Communist opponents, the Partisans, under Josef Tito, preferred to create country-wide war, with the object of politicising the population and securing a position of power that would ensure the creation of a Communist government in the wake of the occupiers’ defeat or departure. On the grounds that Tito was fighting the enemy, while the Cetniks were not, the SOE, whose Balkan directorate was heavily penetrated by British Communists, transferred its support to the Partisans in April 1943. In Greece, the SOE never gave its backing to the Communists, since Winston Churchill prudently thought it essential to keep Greece out of Stalin’s orbit; nevertheless, by the ruthlessness of their internal operations, they succeeded in making themselves the dominant resistance group by 1943, and some of the arms supplied by the SOE inevitably found their way to them.
The result in Greece was civil war, which persisted long after liberation in 1944 and was not finally suppressed until 1948. Civil war was also the outcome of the Cetnik–Partisan conflict in Yugoslavia. Both conflicts led to widespread loss of civilian life, amplified by the occupiers’ reprisals, which often fell on the innocent. Yugoslavia lost a higher proportion of its population than any other combatant country in the Second World War, the majority the victims of internecine violence; the Greeks also suffered heavily.
At the time, and for years afterwards, the guerrilla campaigns conducted under the auspices of the SOE within occupied Europe were celebrated as significant ingredients of the anti-Nazi war effort. The story of the SOE contributed heavily to the myth of “intelligence” as some mysterious means of war-winning, cheaper than battle and somehow more deadly, that captured the popular imagination during the early years of peace. The SOE’s leading operatives—the organisers of the major networks in occupied France, the most prominent of the liaison officers dropped into the mountains of Yugoslavia and Greece—were celebrated as Second World War equivalents of Lawrence of Arabia, as glamorous as he and even more effective.
The heroism of the SOE’s agents should never be diminished. Those who parachuted into France risked exposure every day they spent on operations, and the courage shown, particularly by such women as Violet Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan, swept up into the espionage world simply because they were French-speakers, humbles anyone who reads of their conduct and terrible deaths.6 The dashing Balkan bravados, who endured bitter winters in the Yugoslav mountains and risked capture by the enemy day after day, displayed courage that was out of the ordinary also. When the balance is struck, however, the objective military value of what they achieved, measured against the consequences of their underpinnings of what were as much civil as anti-German wars, calls into question the justification for Churchill’s desire to “set Europe ablaze.”
Churchill’s vision of a Europe-wide uprising against the German occupier—a universal ustanka—was fundamentally flawed, by a weakness that has distorted the theory and practice of secret war, and therefore of “intelligence,” ever since. Churchill was an English gentleman, not only committed to the ideas of fair play and respect for the enemy as an honourable opponent but believing that such ideas were held by those his country fought. So they had been in the past, when European armies were commanded by other gentlemen. Not only European armies: J. F. C. Fuller, the great theorist of war and Churchill’s contemporary, called his account of the Boer War of 1899–1902 The Last of the Gentleman’s Wars. The Boers of South Africa, though determined to resist beyond the point of defeat in the open field, nevertheless conducted the guerrilla war they insisted on fighting in the aftermath by gentlemanly rules. They did not kill prisoners and they did not harm non-combatants. Though overcome after three years of resistance, they preserved their code of honour to the end.
Churchill, who as a young Member of Parliament defended the Boers in the House of Commons, though he was a veteran of the Boer War on the other side, presumed as late as 1940 that a repetition of Boer intransigence in a German-occupied Europe would evoke the same response as it had in the British-occupied Transvaal forty years earlier. He imagined that the soldiers of Nazi Germany would refrain from atrocity in the face of resistance, as his Tommy comrades-in-arms had refrained in a still-unsubdued South Africa. He had, alas, made no allowance at all for the ideological shift in continental European morality brought about by the upheaval of world war and political revolution between 1917 and 1939. He did not perceive that the overthrow of all the stabilities on which the Germans counted—monarchy and currency foremost—would usher in a regime which preached hatred against the forces of instability, primarily Communists and socialists but also deviants from traditional morality, non-German nationalists and enemies of the notion of German culture as a directing principle in continental life. He did not see that raising resistance against a regime imbued with self-righteousness, as Nazism was, would bring down vicious cruelty on those who opposed it.
Resistance, in its many forms, was an admirable movement. It kept alive in defeated and occupied countries the vision of the restoration of independence and the return to democratic life, in the longer term, when German domination would, by American and British intervention, be overthrown. In the short term, however, resistance, though preserving national honour, brought nothing but suffering to those who raised the standard and to many others who became involved unwittingly in the struggle. Resistance certainly harmed the German occupiers scarcely at all. Of the sixty German divisions garrisoning France on the eve of D-Day, none was committed to anti-resistance duty. They manned the coasts, awaiting Allied invasion, while the maintenance of internal security was left to a scattering of Gestapo units and the French police and militia. Internal security was not a German concern in the Low Countries and Scandinavia. There was no internal security problem in Czechoslovakia or even in intransigent Poland, where the Home Army observed the philosophy of Mihailovic in Yugoslavia, that of waiting upon events until circumstances favoured a national uprising; when the moment came in 1944, it was betrayed by their Russian liberators, who allowed the Germans to destroy the Polish resistance as an alternative to destroying it themselves.
In retrospect, the confusion of “resistance”—covert operations against the enemy, usually based on the concept of opposition to a totalitarian occupation or oppressive political takeover masquerading as a liberation movement—with “intelligence,” properly the attack on an opponent’s espionage and cipher systems, achieved nothing but harm to both. Resistance, perhaps best exemplified by the opposition of the French to the occupation of their country by the German conquerors of 1940, is entirely honourable, even if often, as French resistance largely was, ineffective. It sustains the concept of national sovereignty and keeps open the possibility of the restoration of legitimate government. Intelligence, in the sense of a national attack on an enemy’s secure communication, surveillance and espionage systems, is both honourable and necessary always in wartime, now, alas, in peacetime as well.
The intermixture of resistance and intelligence in the Second World War was, however, an aberration and a particularly British one. It was eschewed by the Germans who have taken since their wars of unification in 1866–71 against the Austrians and French a highly legalistic view of the duty owed by the occupied to the occupier, a view which, by reaction, underlay their extremely harsh treatment of resistance wherever they met it: the shooting of suspected franc-tireurs in Belgium in 1914, several thousand of them, including women and children, and their vicious suppression of internal disorder in occupied Europe in 1939–44, ranging from transportation of those captured in France to wholesale extermination of partisans in Eastern Europe.7 The British, by contrast, chose to foment resistance, for a variety of reasons. One was the weakness of their military position after June 1940, which encouraged them to adopt any method of warmaking that promised results. Another was their own experience, as imperialists, of rebellion in the empire, which had taught how effectively rebels could cause the dissipation of regular force. The critical reason may, however, have been that a tradition of irregular warfare ran in the British bloodstream, that of its military class at any rate. Much of the empire had been won by unconventional means, by the recruiting of tribal warriors to defeat, under the leadership of British officers, other tribal warriors, particularly in India and Africa. In the process, the British had constructed a hierarchy of most favoured nations, for military rather than trading purposes, and their names supplied the Royal Navy with those of their most powerful class of destroyers—Sikh, Zulu, Matabele, Ashanti, Punjabi and Somali. The British officers who had commanded Sikhs and Somalis admired their martial qualities, took pride in their own command of their soldiers’ languages and in their understanding of their customs and believed that the combination of warrior fighting skills and European leadership made an unbeatable military mix.8 Illogically, the irregular tradition at its most effective was personified in British eyes by the Boers, whom some of their opponents, notably Winston Churchill, chose to perceive as a white tribe.
He adopted the Boer term “commando” to denote the raiding forces he deemed should be raised to attack the flanks of Hitler’s Fortress Europe in 1940; at the same time he set out, through the creation of the SOE, to raise a Boer-style rebellion within the occupied lands. No difficulty at all was found in recruiting young officers to enter the enemy continent; their mission, to raise, arm, train and lead local resisters, lay so wholly within Britain’s military tradition that volunteers abounded. Those who went to Greece, many of them distinguished classical scholars, were inspired particularly by the memory of Byron’s Philhellenic mission in the Greek War of Independence against the Turks in the 1820s; something of the same mood animated those who parachuted into Yugoslavia, where the mountainous terrain, rough food, constant need to march, as well as to converse in local languages, recalled both the epic of the struggle against the Turks and the conditions of warfare on the Northwest Frontier of India. The SOE, in many of its manifestations, was a re-creation of the imperial ethic, with the difference that, since so many of its members were products of the leftward mood of the inter-war Oxford and Cambridge, they could imagine themselves to be fellow “progressives” with the partisans, rather than agents of a distant imperial power.
It was all an illusion. The SOE in Western Europe did almost nothing to unlock the German grip on power within the occupied territories; fortunately, neither did it do much harm. In the Balkans, by contrast, it did very great harm indeed, supplying much of the equipment which enabled the partisans to establish Communist governments after the war, and also endorsing indirectly their right to do so. Only by a whisker was Greece spared a similar fate: had Churchill not kept his own counsel and had the murderous Greek Communists not overplayed their hand, Athens, like Belgrade, might have become a Communist capital after 1944.
The damage went wider since, by the confusion of subversion with intelligence, under the common cloak of making secret warfare, the proper intelligence community was compromised. In Britain, after the disbandment of the SOE in 1946, the Secret Intelligence Service unwisely allowed itself to be drawn into the business of subversion, with disastrous results in Albania, where the officer chosen to sponsor the anti-Communist forces was the traitor Kim Philby, and in the Baltic lands, where, as in Holland in 1941–43, the resistance came under the control of the organisation its MI6 contacts were targeting, the Russian KGB. Many anti-Communist patriots in both regions died as a result. In the United States the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), set up in 1947 to replace the too hastily disbanded OSS of the war years, embraced both intelligence-gathering and subversive activities, separately conducted in Britain by MI6 and SOE at the outset. In a world of secrets, which does not disclose what it does or what it knows, it is not for the outsider to judge that such a joint mission was ill conceived. The character of the CIA’s enemies, of whom there are many, suggests that it has right broadly on its side. In principle, however, it strikes this author that the organisation of intelligence-gathering and subversion within the same body is undesirable. Subversion is a weak way of fighting, differing from conventional warfare by the total unpredictability of its results; moreover, in a democracy, it is always liable to disavowal by legitimate authority and denunciation by authority’s political opponents. Intelligence-gathering, by contrast, can yield conflict-winning outcomes and, if securely and soberly conducted, is an activity only those of ill-will can condemn.
Yet in the last resort, intelligence warfare is a weak form of attack on the enemy, also. Knowledge, the conventional wisdom has it, is power; but knowledge cannot destroy or deflect or damage or even defy an offensive initiative by an enemy unless the possession of knowledge is also allied to objective force. As David Kahn puts it simply, there is “an elemental point about intelligence . . . it is a secondary factor in war.” Reflecting on the blitzkrieg defeat in 1939 of Poland, the country whose cryptanalysts broke Enigma by pure intellectual effort, an effort not matched by any other of Germany’s enemies, he goes on: “all the Polish codebreaking, all the heartrending efforts and the heroic successes, had helped the Polish military not at all. Intelligence can only work through strength.”9
Kahn’s measured corrective is of the greatest importance and should be remembered by soldiers and statesmen at all times, particularly in these times of the so-called information revolution and its superhighway. Knowledge of what the enemy can do and of what he intends is never enough to ensure security, unless there are also the power and the will to resist and preferably to forestall him. How often have the rich, the well informed and the complacent known in their hearts what the future threatened. The last Abbasid Caliph no doubt suspected the fate that awaited him in Baghdad in 1258, when he cravenly surrendered himself to the Mongol Hulagu and his stranglers with their bowstrings. The soft Western democracies allowed Hitler to undermine their European security system until, almost too late, they took a stand. Contrarily, the Japanese persuaded themselves in 1941, against all the evidence and the warnings of their leading admiral, that they could attack America and survive. Foreknowledge is no protection against disaster. Even real-time intelligence is never real enough. Only force finally counts. As the civilised states begin to chart their way through the wasteland of a universal war on terrorism without foreseeable end, may their warriors shorten their swords. Intelligence can sharpen their gaze. The ability to strike sure will remain the best protection against the cloud of unknowing, prejudice and ignorance that threatens the laws of enlightenment.