9

Who Knew What?

‘It is pardonable to be defeated, but never to be surprised.’

Frederick II (the Great), King of Prussia

IN TERMS OF intelligence it is clear the Western Allies completely underestimated German capabilities in the autumn of 1944, with the Twelfth Army Group and its subordinate formations failing correctly to understand the threat, or mitigate the risks, of a possible offensive in the Ardennes. When discussing the inability of Ultra to warn him of the Ardennes in his second autobiography, A General’s Life, Omar N. Bradley noted, ‘One major fault on our side was that our intelligence community had come to rely far too heavily on Ultra to the exclusion of other intelligence sources. Ultra had become virtually infallible. But Ultra depended on radio intercepts … the German Army had less need of radio communications and more often used secure land lines. Moreover, it apparently did not occur to our intelligence community that the Germans could plan and launch an operation with complete radio and telephone silence imposed.’¹

Bradley’s memoirs (the first volume published in 1951 and the second, after the declassification of the ‘Ultra Secret’, posthumously in 1983), are misleading, for Ultra had actually begun to decline in importance at Allied headquarters, from being the source, to simply one of many. The key to Bradley’s opaque vision of his 1944 opponents was partly Allied ‘victory fever’ which produced a bullish mindset; personality clashes among intelligence chiefs at different levels; but mainly a failure to coordinate and assess intelligence data from multiple sources. In shifting blame to the intelligence community, Bradley was overlooking the tendency of staff at SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) and in his own headquarters to think only in terms of what they could do to the enemy and rarely about what their enemy might do to them. Thus, the intelligence community, rather arrogantly, could not entertain the idea of the Germans managing to hide anything from them, let alone have the capability to attack. Whether Eisenhower was ill served by his own intelligence staff remains to be seen, but they were certainly encouraged to reflect their commander’s optimism, rather than dampen it with intelligence estimates of a negative nature. As Ike’s overriding policy was to attack all along his front, SHAEF’s G-2 department was tuned to justify this strategy. ‘This policy required intelligence to report the German army as being incapable of mounting an offensive’, according to the Cambridge scholar-turned colonel, Noel Annan, who worked in the SHAEF intelligence office. He sensed institutional pressure on his colleagues, who ‘were regarded as defeatist if they did not believe the end of the war was in sight’.²

Admittedly, some kinds of signals intelligence (SIGINT in today’s military language) had lessened because the Germans were inside the frontiers of the Reich and had no need of wireless transmissions, instead using secure landlines and face-to-face meetings, but much SIGINT still came from two other sources: standard traffic analysis and interception of poorly disciplined radio transmissions from across the front. These were in addition to interceptions and decrypts from Enigma, the patented machine that transmitted enciphered Morse code messages in German, and ‘Fish’, the Geheim Fernshreiber (secret telegraph), which consisted of encoded teletype messages, neither of which diminished in number.

Major Ralph Bennett, a Cambridge don and wartime intelligence officer in Hut 3 at Bletchley Park (perhaps the least appealing example of an English country house one could ever encounter), has left us a description of the process by which Enigma messages were decoded and sent to field commanders.³ Churchill was sent daily a clutch of the most significant. Mathematical ability to decipher was not enough, as linguistics experts were needed to understand colloquialisms, abbreviations and slang, while proficiency with German orders of battle and equipment was also needed by others to assess the importance of a decrypt. The scale of the Bletchley operation was staggering, with three eight-hour shifts of 4,000 people each passing through its gates every twenty-four hours. The operation was so secret (‘Ultra’ was the highest level of security classification from which most were excluded) that even at Bletchley analysis of intercepted data was limited to a chosen few individuals. In order further to protect the whole operation, hardly anyone had an overview of the complete set-up and everyone worked on a ‘need-to-know’ basis. This was before any of this information was passed on to Allied field commands for them to incorporate into their plans, or not.

While Hut 5 in the grounds of Bletchley Park oversaw similar work for the German navy (mainly U-boat movements), Bennett’s office was responsible for the analysis and distribution of air and land forces intercepts, and wrote commentaries to suggest a context and background for each. This was a gargantuan task; for example, between 1 October 1944 and 31 January 1945, of the 11,000-plus messages intercepted, half concerned the Western Front, which amounted to a daily average of forty to fifty Ultra intercepts for Bennett’s team to annotate. As the original message texts were little more than meaningless translations of German abbreviations, sent by some of the 100,000 Enigma machines distributed throughout the Third Reich, Hut 3’s comments were added to each decoded message and sent onwards by secure radio and teleprinter network to military headquarters in the field.

To maintain tight security of the Bletchley intercept operation, Bennett’s team also reworked messages so that each appeared to originate from Agent Boniface, a fictitious British spy with a network of agents inside Germany, wrapping Bletchley Park within a necessary bubble of deception, even for the Allies. The recipients were twenty-eight Special Liaison Officers, trained by Group Captain F. W. F. ‘Fred’ Winterbotham, and embedded as part of a Special Liaison Unit (SLU) to each Allied army group and army or air force headquarters.⁴

In the field, military intelligence officers went through a similar process of analysis to that of Hut 3, with the difference that they could call on the wide variety of their own intelligence sources, among them patrol reports, tactical radio intercepts, signals traffic analysis, weapons and equipment examination, prisoner-of-war, civilian and refugee interrogations, assessments of captured letters and documents, interpretation of aerial photographs and artillery sound-ranging and flash-spotting. In military command posts this was undertaken by G-2 (intelligence) personnel, linguists, prisoner interrogation teams and, for civilians, by civil affairs officers. Of these sources, aerial photography usually offered the richest pickings, though this opportunity diminished rapidly in the winter months and almost disappeared while the Bulge battles were being fought. Photography was difficult throughout the five days before the offensive, 11–15 December, with all aircraft grounded on the 13th.

The liberation of Paris on 25 August swept these and other German occupation forces from Versailles, where they were replaced by the multitudes of Eisenhower’s SHAEF staff, which was so vast that the French drily referred to them as la Société des Hôteliers Américains en France. SHAEF itself occupied the Trianon Palace Hotel, where the 1919 peace conferences had been negotiated, though Ike lived in Rundstedt’s former villa at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. (Author’s collection)

The SLUs worked with the intelligence cells in their various headquarters, integrating Bletchley-originated material with locally captured data.⁵ Ultra (the codename for the whole process of interception, analysis and distribution of Enigma-derived material) evolved with the war, and was outside Anglo-American military doctrine. Thus the way each SLU was embedded with field commands, and the use made of their skills, varied with different headquarters, and often rested on personalities and politics rather than the importance of the material itself. SLUs had another crucial role, which was to ensure that any operations influenced by Ultra reports were not too obviously linked to Bletchley-originated intelligence.

The first recipient of Bletchley material was SHAEF, Eisenhower’s command, first established in London during December 1943. A year later the only place large enough to accommodate its vast acreages of staff officers (the French drily referred to SHAEF as la Société des Hôteliers Américains en France) was the sumptuous Trianon Palace Hôtel in Versailles. Ike actually lived apart from the huge headquarters in his own villa at Saint-Germain-en-Laye (the very dwelling from where Rundstedt had commanded earlier), about ten miles west of Paris and the same distance north of Versailles. At the Trianon, SHAEF’s chief of intelligence, British Major-General Kenneth Strong (the Military Attaché in Berlin who had met Count von Schwerin in 1939), had served with Eisenhower since March 1943 and was popular among US staff officers, though relations with Montgomery’s Twenty-First Army Group were frosty. Any British close to SHAEF became suspect to members of Monty’s headquarters; the latter’s own head of intelligence, the thirty-two-year-old Brigadier Edgar ‘Bill’ Williams, a pre-war German-speaking Oxford history don, later referred to Strong as the ‘Chinless Horror’.⁶ Fiercely, but not blindly, loyal to his boss, Williams had been a major when Montgomery first encountered him in the desert in 1942, but possessing a fine historian’s brain which questioned every fact and supposition, despite his youth, he rose rapidly under Monty’s patronage.

Below SHAEF was Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group, whose headquarters was established in London on 14 July 1944, activated on 1 August and had migrated to Luxembourg by December 1944. It grew into the largest US ground combat force ever created. For most of its nine months of war, Twelfth Army Group directed Hodges’ First Army, Patton’s Third and Simpson’s Ninth. Its very size made it a complicated command to handle. Indeed, the United States had never deployed an army group before, and there was precious little doctrine or experience of how to run any higher formation. Inside Bradley’s HQ, two SLU colonels, called the Estimates and Appreciation Group, operated an ‘Ultra room’ which received and collated Bletchley material with other sources to provide estimates of German strengths and intentions.⁷ Underlining Bletchley’s importance, Twelfth Army Group held two daily Ultra briefings, firstly at 09.45 a.m., attended by Bradley, after each morning staff briefing.

So sensitive was the ‘Ultra secret’ that data provided by Bletchley was forbidden from inclusion in Allied written intelligence reports or summaries unless it could be ascribed truthfully to another source (as opposed to Bletchley and its pseudo-spy ring). All intelligence assessments composed for transmission downwards had to reflect this, so that more junior headquarters would not raise embarrassing questions as to the source of knowledge. Very few officers throughout the Allied armies were cleared for access to Ultra material, and an army (or equivalent air force) headquarters was the last level at which Ultra-cleared officers were permitted to work – corps and divisional staff were not in on the secrets emanating from Bletchley.

In Bradley’s Forward HQ (‘Eagle Tac’), at No. 2 Place de Metz in the centre of Luxembourg City, Ultra clearance was limited to his chief of staff Major-General Leven C. Allen; principal staff officers; the chief of Intelligence Branch (also known by the name of his branch, G-2), Brigadier-General Edwin L. Sibert; the British Liaison Officer Major Tom Bigland; and the commander and operations officer of the Ninth Air Force.⁸ At this stage, Major-General Lewis H. Brereton’s Ninth, whose headquarters was also located in Luxembourg City, had become the largest tactical air force ever assembled under one command, comprising 250,000 people with 3,500 aircraft in 1,500 units. The previous twenty-four hours of Ultra-relevant events were reviewed, while Sibert highlighted any new German intentions or capabilities as revealed by all sources. Bradley discussed these in conjunction with his forthcoming operations, inviting debate and contributions from the Ninth Air Force, whose commander was usually present. A second Ultra daily briefing took place at 11.30 a.m., attended by their deputies.⁹

Subordinate to Twelfth Army Group was Bradley’s old command, US First Army, in December 1944 stationed at the Hôtel Britannique in the fashionable Ardennes town of Spa, where its Chief G-2, Colonel Benjamin A. (‘Monk’) Dickson, a blunt, uncompromising Philadelphia reservist and 1918 graduate of West Point with an engineering degree from MIT, recalled to active duty and thrust into intelligence because of his familiarity with French and German, presented the raw Bletchley material personally to Hodges and his chief of staff, Major-General William B. Kean, Jr, twice daily.

Unlike his contemporaries, First Army’s SLU Officer, thirty-nine-year-old Princeton graduate and Philadelphia lawyer, Lieutenant-Colonel Adolph G. ‘Rosey’ Rosengarten Jr, was not granted direct access to Hodges. Instead, ‘Monk’ Dickson bypassed him, controlling all Ultra data, personally integrating it with other G-2 analysis and presenting it to a smaller circle than at Twelfth Army Group.¹⁰ This included Major-General Elwood R. ‘Pete’ Quesada, commander of IX Tactical Air Command, who insisted his own SLU officer attend, despite strident objections from Dickson.¹¹ Rosengarten’s frequent reports of frustration make it clear he felt Dickson’s role was unnecessarily possessive and ‘obstructive’ and that ‘Ultra had a limited use in the First Army command’, where Bletchley’s material was often ‘poorly presented’ by Dickson. Furthermore, he pointed out, Bletchley Park’s valuable insights were ‘complicated by the personality of the G-2 at First US Army and his relatively unimportant voice in the Army cabinet’.¹²

In the US Army, as in British and Canadian forces, ‘intelligence’ was not considered a good career move, thus few senior officers with the necessary experience, skills or clearance were available. The US Army headquarters that deployed into France generally had inadequate information-gathering capabilities, lacking the manpower or equipment to keep accurate and timely situational awareness of subordinate corps and divisions. This improved with time and reflected the desires of the army commander; Patton echoed Montgomery’s need for efficient liaison and control, and used his 6th Cavalry Group as his personal eyes and ears in the way that Monty used his ‘Phantom’ GHQ Liaison Regiment.

Personality matters most in the assembly of a collective intelligence picture and, among others, Dickson clashed with the First Army G-3 (in charge of Operations), Brigadier-General Thurman C. Thorson. In any headquarters the principal relationship among staff officers that has to work well is that between the G-2 and G-3, and under Hodges the two were at loggerheads. But Dickson was inclined to be fractious with his peers. He had been Bradley’s chief of intelligence in North Africa, Sicily and Normandy, and hoped to move (and be promoted) with his boss when he took over Twelfth Army Group. Instead, Dickson was left at First Army and Brigadier-General Edwin L. Sibert, a well-connected career artillery officer, son of a general and brother to another, was chosen as Bradley’s new G-2 in the higher headquarters, despite the fact that he had no prior experience of intelligence work.¹³

Dickson, who had already shown himself to be a challenging personality (variously described as ‘volatile, a pessimist, an alarmist’ and ‘hard-drinking’), and whose promotion to general rank would have invited controversy, took this very personally. He vowed never to consult Sibert at his headquarters, instead visiting ‘Bill’ Williams at Monty’s Twenty-First Army Group if he needed advice.¹⁴

Chalk and cheese, thereafter Sibert and Dickson became ‘not mortal enemies, but competitive – each one insisting that his information was better than that of the other’. In retrospect, both would claim to have been right and the other wrong about the Ardennes.¹⁵ Furthermore, Dickson had also developed an antipathy to intelligence sources beyond his control, and when presented with Rosengarten made him a member of his G-2 staff, giving him work apart from his Ultra reporting. Dickson’s view of any external intelligence agencies seems to have been ‘I don’t want any spies snooping in my office’.¹⁶

The First Army was afflicted with other issues, too. Hodges, a Marshall protégé and Deputy Commander of First Army under Bradley, was very different from his predecessor. Bradley was ‘modest and gregarious in manner’ and ‘communicated well with people’ which ‘served him well in keeping in line the numerous egos within his headquarters’.¹⁷ Hodges, by contrast, who had been commissioned from the ranks in 1909 and won a Distinguished Service Cross (second only in precedence to the Medal of Honor) as a battalion commander in the Meuse–Argonne campaign of 1918, was insecure as a result of his schooling, and was said to lack Bradley’s intelligence, communicative skills and energy. He ‘preferred to work through a small inner circle; to those outside he was a remote figure’ and rarely travelled forward from his headquarters. Shy and inarticulate, his approach to any military situation was to ‘follow the book’, demonstrating little flair or imagination. By December he was somewhat tired, and by his inclination towards lower-level tactics ‘the methodical Hodges often encountered problems in maintaining the broader perspective of an army commander’.¹⁸ Slightly younger than George Patton, at fifty-seven Hodges sometimes seemed almost elderly in comparison.

Bradley noted that Hodges’ generals ‘trudged ahead with a serious and grim intensity’, while Ernest N. Harmon, commander of the 2nd Armored Division, characterised his boss as ‘slow, cautious, and without much zip’.¹⁹ If Hodges trusted any subordinate it was the affable ‘Lightning Joe’ Lawton Collins, but he deferred much authority to his domineering chief of staff, Major-General Kean, an infantryman ten years younger, and, like Dickson, a West Point graduate of 1918. During the Bulge, when Hodges’ health broke down, the capable Kean was in day-to-day charge. ‘Able, perceptive, and clear-thinking’, Kean was also a ‘hard taskmaster, efficient, but with little of the human touch’, who nevertheless held the staff together in the first few days of the Bulge.²⁰ Hodges was uncomfortable with allowing subordinates any latitude, expecting his (often vague) oral directions to be followed without question or deviation; his solution to problems was often to blame or sack individuals. In this context, Hodges, the ‘by-the-book’ commander, and Kean, his efficient deputy, were not particularly open to the imaginative possibilities suggested by Ultra and ‘Monk’ Dickson, who trod warily.

At Third Army’s forward HQ (nicknamed ‘Lucky Forward’), the process of using Ultra was evolutionary. Initially, material from Bletchley was passed by the attached SLU officer direct to Colonel W. Koch, the chief G-2; in December 1944 he was based with Patton at the Caserne Molifor in Nancy.²¹ Due to Bletchley’s success in providing a specific forewarning of the Mortain counter-attack, Ultra was thereafter presented in 09.00 a.m. briefings to Patton and his main staff officers, as in Twelfth Army Group. The SLU officer also kept a situation map posted with Bletchley-derived and open-source information, which Ultra-cleared staff could consult at any time: the opposite approach to Dickson’s furtiveness. Bletchley’s strategic intelligence outputs were fully integrated into the operational plans of Third Army, though their German Order of Battle intelligence officer was deliberately refused access by Koch, and had to develop his own picture of the Germans without the influence of Bletchley material. Koch then used Ultra as a check on the latter’s conclusions, derived from other sources. Every headquarters maintained a German Order of Battle section, whose job was to research and keep an up-to-date picture of their opponents’ locations, strengths, capabilities and commanders.

Koch (pronounced Kotch), a career cavalry officer, had been assigned to Patton’s 2nd Armored Division in 1940 and followed his boss as senior intelligence officer of II Corps in Tunisia, Seventh Army in Sicily, and, finally, Third Army. Known as ‘the spark plug of the Third Army’, with ‘the most penetrating brain in the United States Army’, Koch, forty-seven, was noted for his exceptional situation awareness of his army’s battlefield, and was ‘snooping all the time’, often far beyond Third Army’s own area. His area of interest always extended 150 miles beyond Third Army’s boundaries, the limit of his tactical air reconnaissance, but also the notional distance of any German motorised reinforcements. One witness remembered his lair as the ‘most comprehensive and spectacular in the American, British, and Canadian Armies, which contained a 1:250,000-scale map, showing the situation of the entire Western front down to division-level formations. On the flanks of this centrepiece were two 1:100,000-scale maps, one showing the Eastern front and the other Third Army’s zone, depicting units down to battalion level.’²²

Other data included terrain models, charts, graphs and orders of battle, providing any visitor with up-to-date information at a glance. Koch’s techniques were in response to his boss’s intelligence requirements, which were beyond the norm of his contemporaries, and many of Patton’s pronouncements and his famous insights arguably stemmed from Koch’s map room. When, for example, on 25 November Patton observed, ‘the First Army is making a terrible mistake in leaving VIII Corps static [in the Ardennes], it is highly probable that the Germans are building up east of them’, his comment was clearly prompted by a glance at Koch’s maps. This was in dramatic contrast to First Army, whose ‘long-range planning was deficient, corps boundaries [were] often uninspired and reflected a dismaying lack of knowledge of the ground’.²³ With his far-reaching knowledge it is easy to see why the straight-talking Koch started to badger Patton with serious concerns about Ultra-indicated German troop movements towards the Ardennes, confirmed by his other intelligence sources. Koch was less hierarchical than Dickson and persisted in his warnings up the chain of command, even when they were dismissed by Strong at SHAEF and Sibert at Twelfth Army Group, demonstrating a considerable amount of moral courage, which Patton appreciated.

In late October, Koch had produced an Intelligence Estimate noting the German ‘withdrawal, though continuing, has not been a rout or mass collapse’, that they were ‘playing for time’ and determined ‘to wage a last-ditch struggle in the field at all costs’. Yet, at the same moment, Strong at SHAEF observed that the Germans were losing the equivalent of a division at least every week, surmising ‘the dwindling fire brigade is switched with increasing rapidity and increasing wear and tear, from one fire to another’.²⁴ All these G-2 officers – Strong, Sibert, Dickson and Koch – were bright and capable, but as many have observed, ‘these chiefs of intelligence at various levels cooperated very little’.²⁵

Apart from Ultra intelligence material, at the time of the Ardennes offensive there were eight US Signal Radio Intelligence Companies deployed along the Westwall and one attached to Bradley’s headquarters; these were corps and army-level outfits, acting as the ears of SHAEF. Each company included Direction Finding (DF), Wire (to provide communications), Traffic Analysis (TA), Intercept, and Cryptanalysis sub-units, usually working out of trucks and spread over wide areas. Their ranks included mostly college-educated personnel, linguists and technicians, whose job was to build up a picture of the German order of battle, as well as interpret movements and monitor messages. Some would randomly search the frequencies for chatter, while others locked on to particular call signs, recognising the ‘fist’ of individual German operators.²⁶ One radio intelligence officer observed: ‘In cases of emergency the Germans sometimes resorted to uncoded communications. Such clear text messages were brief and without such clarifiers as articles, prepositions, adjectives, adverbs or punctuation marks. Verbs, pronouns, nouns and numbers were the usual inventoried (and sometimes abbreviated) contents of tactical messages which took knowledge and imagination to understand.’²⁷

Ray Walker was a twenty-nine-year-old lieutenant commanding the direction-finding section of US First Army’s Radio Intelligence Company. ‘My primary job was to determine where enemy radio transmissions were coming from and what unit was sending them. In early December 1944, we told Eisenhower’s headquarters the Germans were moving four or five panzer units into the Eifel Forest and maintaining radio silence,’ he recalled.²⁸ A GI with the Traffic Analysis platoon of the 114th Signal Radio Intelligence Company was monitoring the area in front of US V Corps, a twenty-mile stretch through which the German Sixth Panzer Army formations travelled to their assembly areas. Sergeant Jay C. von Werlhof remembered the German offensive ‘came as no surprise’ to his unit, which had

identified several units of the Sixth Panzer Army between 9–14 December. But to not embarrass himself or our company’s good reputation in the eyes of Higher Command, our 1st Lieutenant refused to send in our first, and then even our revised, report on the build-up, especially between Monschau and Manderfeld. In spite of identities and five-point DF fixes on eight German divisions … our lieutenant compared our data with obsolete reports from First Army, Twelfth Army Group and SHAEF that said there were only four divisions east of the entire [West] Wall between Monschau and Echternach. Several of the units we pinpointed were supposed to be on the Eastern Front fighting the Russians or in R and R. Our lieutenant was a New York social climber who hoped to make captaincy before the war ended.²⁹

This was an extreme reaction of a nervous young lieutenant determined not to ‘rock the boat’, and emphasises the prevailing mindset of the higher formations. It demonstrated that the warning signs were out there and being accumulated, if not (as in this instance) being acted upon. It is at variance with the historian Charles MacDonald’s view, among others, that these companies ‘discerned absolutely no indication of what was about to happen’.³⁰

Additionally, we now know that further intelligence along the front was provided by German-speaking agents of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services)³¹ who operated deep-penetration missions behind the lines; they included exiled Communists and Socialist party members, union activists, anti-Nazi prisoners of war and Jewish refugees. Intended initially to gather intelligence and conduct operations with partisan and resistance groups, they often masqueraded as German officials or pro-Axis civilians. Just as preparations for Herbstnebel were stepped up, what had been a torrent of OSS agent information from behind German lines suddenly slowed to a trickle after October 1944, as the Allies left French-speaking areas and advanced into Germany, where there were no resistance movements.

Just as with Ultra, there was no military doctrine written for the use of OSS, consequently relations between it and the various field formations ranged from excellent to terrible. Lieutenant-Colonel William Quinn, G-2 of Patch’s Seventh Army, was delighted to have OSS parachutes blossoming behind German lines in the south of France, dropping spies to join the Maquis and radio information about defences and troop concentrations, smoothing the way for Seventh Army’s tanks. But at this exact moment US First Army was without an OSS field detachment, which had been banished by ‘Monk’ Dickson in October due to his suspicion of outside agencies, particularly the civilian-dominated OSS.

Under Colonel, later Major-General, William (‘Wild Bill’) Donovan, OSS culture was very ‘unmilitary’, which antagonised traditionalist ‘West Pointers’ and other professional soldiers; its chief European office, on London’s Grosvenor Street, was populated by well-connected young men ‘fresh from the polo fields of Long Island and Virginia’. The voice of the BBC, writer and MI6 spy Captain Malcolm Muggeridge, remembered the early OSS men ‘arriving like jeunes filles en fleur straight from a finishing school, all fresh and innocent, to start work in our frowsy old intelligence brothel’. Kim Philby of the British Foreign Office, who knew a thing or two about spying, regarded the new transatlantic arrivals as ‘a pain in the neck’, but the two nations soon adjusted to their shotgun marriage, with views like Dickson’s only hindering their war effort.³²

The upshot of Dickson’s unilateral action against his OSS detachment was that First Army’s area had no ‘deep’ reconnaissance behind the German lines. While Hodge’s command may have deprived itself of an extra source of useful intelligence, Patton’s Third Army kept theirs, adopting ‘all-source’ collection and analysis procedures. However, there was no guarantee that one small OSS group would have stumbled on the German secret, verified the accuracy of its discovery and had time to issue an early warning to hundreds of Allied units poised on the German frontier, let alone been believed, thus altering the course of history.

Just after the war a US Army report into the workings of SHAEF intelligence observed that ‘the failure of the United States [beforehand] to establish and maintain a highly developed intelligence organisation, world-wide in scope, resulted initially in the lack of intelligence data, and trained personnel necessary for the conduct of operations in the European Theater’. The result was that ‘British influence was predominant in the G-2 Division during the planning phase of the campaign in Europe and continued in only slightly lesser degree throughout the operation on the Continent’.

Without discussing Bletchley Park, whose operations were beyond their security classification, the report concluded, ‘the greater portion of the tactical intelligence … came from agencies operating in the field’ and ‘better results would have been obtained from the Office of Strategic Services had this agency been under direct control of the SHAEF Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2 [General Strong], and its efforts been more closely coordinated with those of the military forces’.

The report team, consisting of two colonels and three lieutenant-colonels, was given added weight by the addition of Eisenhower’s son, John, then a lowly first lieutenant, to the team, which undoubtedly opened many doors which otherwise would have remained shut. It also concluded that Strong’s organisation needed to be able to conduct ‘long-range intelligence planning concurrently with military operations’ – implying it did not.³³

Also shaping the intelligence picture was RAF/USAAF tactical air reconnaissance, then called Photo Intelligence (PI), which processed the results of aerial photographic missions every day, supporting and confirming the revelations from Bletchley. Section Officer Jeanne Sowry of the British Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), who worked at the headquarters of PI, called RAF Medmenham (actually a mansion called Danesfield House), in Buckinghamshire, recalled, ‘The work of photographic interpreting was important, secret, demanding and, at times, very exciting. Our requests for photographs came from many sources … When you were given the photos, you had no idea what you might see. The missions were flown from RAF Benson nearby and the aircraft that were used were Mosquitos. We watched shipping movements daily, we studied airfields old and new, likewise aircraft, marshalling yards and railways, ports and beaches.’³⁴ In mid-January 1945 a group of six British and American senior officers was sent to Belgium to discover if there were any institutional flaws in the way the Allied air forces collected and analysed their intelligence. They found that reconnaissance flights had taken place every day before and during the campaign, except 13 December; on occasions flying conditions were so poor that most aircraft were unable to return to their operating base at Benson in Oxfordshire, and landed all over Allied-controlled Europe.

The 10th Photographic Group (Reconnaissance) supporting US First Army had flown 361 sorties beforehand, mostly with P-38 Lightnings and P-51 Mustangs, but had failed to identify anything threatening, except what they interpreted as routine traffic moving through. One of the RAF investigating officers, Wing Commander Douglas Kendall – who had spotted and correctly identified the threat of panzers lurking in the Eifel on 6 May 1940, four days before the first German invasion of the Ardennes – blamed the ‘lapse’ on the ‘failure of the many separate field units to link all the evidence that they had separately gathered’. Kendall was of the opinion that, had everything been passed to a central interpretation unit, the various elements of the puzzle would have been assembled.³⁵ Kendall was in charge of the RAF’s photo interpretation activities, and, significantly, he was the only person at RAF Medmenham cleared for Ultra; his report therefore contained a subtle message to those who knew of Bletchley Park.³⁶

The Bletchley Park Director-General, Commander Sir Edward Travis, likewise demanded a post-campaign investigation into the Allied intelligence failure. The confidential Special Report written in January 1945 by Peter Calvocoressi, its head of air intelligence, and the renowned Cambridge classicist F. L. Lucas, then head of research in Hut 3, robustly defended the code-breaking centre and its processes. The authors found that Ultra indicated a ‘substantial and offensive’ operation was likely, but could not identify a location or time. They identified a concentration of Luftwaffe aircraft and personnel, and movement by rail of divisions and equipment to the Eifel region beforehand, but these indicators were not acted upon, the authors argued.³⁷ The pair concluded the failure lay with SHAEF (Kenneth Strong), and the Air Ministry, and expected their report would cause ‘heads to roll at Eisenhower’s HQ but they did no more than wobble’.³⁸

Intelligence organisations today try to collate their information more efficiently, but tensions remain between competing agencies. Military intelligence generally tries to follow an intelligence-gathering cycle of five phases. A commander usually states an intelligence requirement in the form of a question. The staff convert the requirement into a collection plan, refining the data needed into ‘essential elements of information’. As news arrives from several tasked sources, it is collated into a readily accessible database. Other staff then quiz the resultant data with such key questions as ‘What is it? What is it doing? and What does it mean?’ Only at this stage is information turned into intelligence. The results are then distilled as a written or verbal brief, or transmitted as a signal with varying degrees of urgency. Intelligence problems nearly always arise at the collation stage, when for reasons of operational security, staff are precluded from access to all the sources and their products or from sharing their work. Intelligence organisations, by their very nature, tend to be furtive and husband, rather than share, their knowledge.

This was the case with Bletchley Park, whose secrets were restricted to very few. Additionally, military-run intelligence organisations are frequently at odds with their civilian counterparts. In wartime France there were rivalries between Communist-inspired resistance groups and right-wing Gaullist ones, which resulted in the withholding or corruption of intelligence, a story repeated in Belgium and elsewhere. Even the British Foreign Office reflected a left/right political split, expressed most obviously by the Cambridge spy ring of Philby, Maclean, Burgess and Blunt (and possibly more), all of whom were found to have been spying for Moscow, motivated by ideology, during the war. There are often issues of intelligence-sharing between nations, and while Anglo-US cooperation generally worked superbly well during the war, this wasn’t always the case, and rivalries developed between the American OSS and British SOE, resulting in duplication.

This illustrated neatly the somewhat chaotic processes of Allied intelligence-gathering from multiple sources, which varied between headquarters, and suggests how some of the warning indicators picked up by Bletchley Park came to be overlooked. Very similar clashes between intelligence organisations also led to the unpleasant surprises of the Yom Kippur war for Israel and the September 11th 2001 attacks. The 1944 intelligence failure is also partly explained by the clash between ‘top-down’ material emanating from Ultra and ‘bottom-up’ reports filtering up from the combat units via division and corps headquarters, in addition to personality and culture clashes within the Allied intelligence architecture. Be that as it may, the Allies were taken completely by surprise, at every level, on 16 December 1944.