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    Most Secret Source: The Role of Enigma in WWII
    Most Secret Source: The Role of Enigma in WWII
    Most Secret Source: The Role of Enigma in WWII
    Ebook122 pages1 hour

    Most Secret Source: The Role of Enigma in WWII

    By Darvin Babiuk

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    How did ULTRA shape the course of the war? At times, it played a major role in the turning of battle, at other times did not, at still others was fatally misused, and at still others was beneficial but not necessary to bring about victory in any case. Unfortunately, good intelligence is often badly used by its masters. ULTRA was no different.

     

    Did ULTRA win the war? No, men and tanks and bombs and airplanes did. Did ULTRA shorten the war? Given the extent to it which it provided foreknowledge, once the balance of military forces was relatively close the answer must be yes. Did ULTRA prevent an earlier end to the war either by creating such confidence that avoidable mistakes were made in the rush for glory, or by preventing acceptance of an outcome short of unconditional surrender, or by causing the Allies to discount internal German opposition and a possible suicide attempt on Hitler? No, for its benefits outweighed its negative. Does the glory of the victory become tainted in light of ULTRA? Yes, for not only does it reveal the extent to which our commanders knew in advance of German battle strengths and location, thus giving them a decided advantage, it also points out several egregious errors on their part despite possession of ULTRA. Can intelligence be counted on to provide us victory in future conflicts. No. ULTRA use and implementation was clearly deficient for two to three years, and came about only with the help of Polish and French contributions which we cannot count on in the future. As Welchman points out, that may well mean suicide in a world where computers and ICBM's reduce the drag time to seconds from years. What role did ULTRA play? To quote one of the examiners: "Ultra was a war winner" even if not "the war winner."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDarvin Babiuk
    Release dateOct 16, 2020
    ISBN9781393009962
    Most Secret Source: The Role of Enigma in WWII
    Author

    Darvin Babiuk

    Darvin Babiuk has an advanced degree in Russian History and the efficacy of using Intelligence to achieve state aims. He has lived and worked in both Japan and the former Soviet Union.

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      Book preview

      Most Secret Source - Darvin Babiuk

      ​​

      INTRODUCTION

      It was about Russia that Churchill made the last statement, but it might be made to apply to the field of signal intelligence as well. By now the story of ULTRA and how the Allies used this most secret source to assist them in conducting the war is well-known. That the Allies broke the German enciphering machine called Enigma and obtained high-grade intelligence which they christened ULTRA is abundantly clear. What is not so clear is the role this played in the eventual outcome of the war. As the son of Alastair Denniston, one of the early forces behind ULTRA's success, put it: The success of Ultra in World War II is not now to be gainsaid, though historians differ as to the extent of its influence in shortening the duration of the war.

      For intelligence is more than a great game. There must be a reason for collecting information or it is useless, however skillful the collection may have been. The riddle, then, is to ascertain what use ULTRA was put during the war and to see what role it played in the final outcome.

      That is the question this paper will address. It is not a history of the war, nor of intelligence; it deals solely with the impact of a single source: signals intelligence gained from the interception, deciphering, and analysis of German Enigma wireless traffic, or ULTRA. For when F.W. Winterbotham broke the ULTRA secret in 1974, he started a historiographical argument worthy of the name for the German encrypting machine: Enigma. Historians simply could not agree on the role ULTRA played. What made the discussion particularly inconclusive was Winterbotham's reliance on memory alone to reconstruct events, leading not only to grievous errors of omission and wishful thinking but outright mistakes.

      Prior to Winterbotham, it had been forbidden under the Official Secrets Act to make any public disclosure of ULTRA. Prompted by The Ultra Secret, the British government relented, and in January 1978 Foreign Secretary David Owen authorized those who had worked with Enigma material to admit their role. Prohibitions were retained, however, on the use and technical details of the work. Sir Arthur Bonsall, Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) director, warned that:

      ...no records about this second aspect are being released to the Public Records Office and the people concerned are not absolved from the undertakings which they gave at the time.

      There were several reasons for wanting to keep ULTRA secret: 1) properly used, Enigma was invulnerable 2) refurbished Enigmas sold to third world powers after the war were still being used and the Allied countries (now united under the secret 1947 UKUSA pact) wanted neither to compromise this illicit source of information nor create ill-will 3)  any revelation that code-breaking on such a scale was possible might tighten security around modern signals 4) it was deemed inadvisable to re-create a stab-in-the-back scenario for German defeat such as existed after the first World War and led to the rise of Hitler 5) it diminished the glamour of the winners' accomplishment.

      Impetus was given to the debate when a November 1978 conference brought together the surviving signal intelligence experts of the two opposing sides. Here, the extent to which German codes had been compromised was officially revealed. This prompted a German member who had repeatedly assured Doenitz that the naval Enigma was secure, to ask in disbelief: If the Allies could read it all why didn't they win the war sooner? The answer he got was, They did.  All agreed that Ultra had shortened the war and saved thousands of lives. Ultra was, one of its veterans has rightly said, the most important sustained intelligence success in the history of human conflict.

      Soon, various historians began to quantify by how much.  Without ULTRA, they claimed, the second front would not have been opened until 1946 and victory in Europe would have taken until 1949. Another countered this claim by stating that the Allies would have held to their invasion timetable regardless of the availability of ULTRA and make up the loss by delaying action in the Pacific. The delay would be against the Japanese, not the Germans, with 1945 finding the Americans still battling over the Philippines rather than on the verge of victory. The official historian of British intelligence in the war, F.H. Hinsley, asserted the opinion that ULTRA shortened the war by three years overall. Harold Deutsch claimed it was closer to four. Yet, when German historians demanded answers as to whether ULTRA was decisive here or there, and its overall assessment, conference members told them that no clear answer was possible.

      Such is the dilemma then. Many questions have been answered about the ULTRA mystery, but equally as many have been raised: does the history of the war need to be rewritten? Do the ULTRA revelations tarnish the glory of Allied commanders? Did the information indeed help shorten the war? If so by how much? Could it have possibly lengthened it instead? Would victory have come without ULTRA? Did ULTRA create a mood of confidence which precluded the possibility of an armistice? Did the Germans mount a similar operation against the Allies? Did they never realize what was going on? Can intelligence alone win a war? To what extent was information shared with our Soviet ally? What effect does this have on the post-war world?

      Was signal intelligence, as Ronald Lewin states, the dominant theme of the Second World War? Were, as he also contends, the official histories of the Second World War now, fundamentally misleading, inadequate and out of date? Did it necessitate a, rewriting not only of the official histories but also of most other major war-studies published before?

      ULTRA was decisive said Winterbotham. No it was not, answered Ralph Bennett, cautioning against the notion that intelligence is the main, if not the sole, determinant of military action, and calling it a grave error to hold the view that intelligence gathering consists of finding the single all-revealing item, believing instead that it is the painstaking piecing together of assorted fragments. To both, Peter Calvocoressi responded: The historian's problem is not to judge whether Ultra was crucial to victory or merely peripheral but to show where it was one and where the other: for it was both. Whatever the case, it was, as Roger Spiller wrote, as though Ultra, now the new authority, had told the authors of countless volumes to begin anew.

      And begin they did.

      Nigel West:

      By and large, SIGINT is more accurate, easier to verify, less risky and cheaper to acquire than old-fashioned espionage. The prizes attainable through good signals intelligence can help to win campaigns. Certainly, SIGINT is no substitute for numerical superiority in armed forces, but if skilfully exploited, can tip the balance and more.

      Jozef Garlinski:

      While it is probably true to say that none of the major decisions of the war was [sic] based on evidence from the Enigma decrypts alone, it is certainly true that this evidence entered in part into many operational decisions, and that in critical phases of the war, when forces on either side were otherwise fairly matched, Enigma gave the Allies a most definite and often decisive advantage.

      Phillip Knightley:

      Ultra made a significant contribution to the war effort in a few fields only, and little or none in others. It did not win the war and it is doubtful if it even shortened it. It made a negative contribution to Western-Soviet relations, and the failure to share it fully with the Russians so outraged several British officers working secretly for Soviet intelligence that they became absolutely convinced that their commitment was justified. The combination of a long-held wartime secret and the ability to articulate people to tell the story behind that secret once they were free to do so, has given Ultra in importance in intelligence history it does not deserve.

      Thomas Parrish:

      "Did Ultra win the war? Nobody would make that claim. Men carrying rifles, driving tanks, fighting off U-boats, aiming bombs—these were the war winner: soldiers, sailors, fliers. But put the question a little differently. Did Ultra change the shape of the war? Even further, did Ultra keep the war from being lost? To

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