War and Secrets

Allied freighter attacked and sunk by German U-Boat

From the German point of view, it was the Second Happy Time. During 1942, the Axis sank 609 Allied ships totaling over 3 million tons at a cost of only 22 U-boats. It was, indeed, a happy time for the Germans as they focused their attention on the east coast of North America. Lack of preparation, no blackout of American cities, and an underequipped Atlantic U.S. Navy led to enormous German success.

(The First Happy Time was in 1940 and 1941, as Germany took on the unprepared British Royal Navy and the convoys they protected).

There was one other key to German dominance of the shipping lanes: Engima. Enigma was a German cipher machine used to encrypt messages. Enemy military commanders were able to gather intelligence and send orders with little chance of eavesdropping by the Allies. Convoys were discovered and submarines ordered to intercept in complete secrecy. The toll on Allied shipping was appalling.

The British established a top-secret effort at Bletchley Park to take on the challenge of breaking Enigma. To complicate matters, there were several variations of the machine in varying degree of sophistication. With the able assistance of Polish mathematicians, the British began to gain some success in decoding Luftwaffe and German Army messages. But the German Naval Enigma was a substantially different machine and defied cryptanalysis. Our convoys were sitting ducks.

And then fortune smiled. On October 30, 1942, the British Air Force spotted the German submarine U-559 on the surface off the coast of Egypt.  The airplane summoned the destroyer HMS Hero which closed on the submarine and forced it to submerge. Other destroyers joined the hunt and U-559 was severely damaged by depth charges. Losing trim, she came to the surface and was boarded by British sailors who retrieved her Enigma machine and code books.

Meanwhile, brilliant mathematician Alan Turing, who had been working on code breaking at Bletchley Park, turned his attention to the Naval Enigma. (Alan Turing is the father of our digital computer – thank him as you use your laptop computer or iPhone). Turing was finally able to break the Naval Enigma code using his deep experience at Bletchley and the newly obtained U-559 materials. The Second Happy Time came to an abrupt end for the Germans, and the sealift of men and materiel accelerated as we prepared for the invasion of the continent.

The Bletchley Park operation was very complex. It involved spies in the field, the best mathematical minds, radio listening stations, and science-fiction room-sized calculating machines like Colossus. And all of this was top secret and continued to be so long after the war had ended. All who were involved were required to sign the Official Secrets Act and vow to remain silent. And this secrecy was vital to ensure that the Germans did not know that their codes had been broken. The lives of millions and the very outcome of the war were at stake.

In thanks, the British recognized Turing by awarding him the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1945, then convicted him in 1952 of the criminal act of homosexuality. Turing kept his silence and committed suicide two years later. (Last month, over 60 years too late, the Queen issued a Royal Pardon “in fitting tribute to an exceptional man”.)

Which is why it is so incongruous that Edward Snowden has hundreds of thousands if not millions of fans.

Snowden revealed far more than the NSA collection of telephone metadata. A Pentagon report just sent to Congress asserts that most of the documents Snowden took relate to military operations. According to House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, "The vast majority of the material was related to the Defense Department, and our military services," not NSA operations.

You might think, “So what? We’re not in a real war.” And you would be wrong. Our struggle against the virus of radical Islamic jihad is no less grave than those earlier anti-submarine patrols on the dark, storm-tossed Atlantic.

The lives of our citizens and the lives of our troops are now less secure thanks to Mr. Snowden. You can be a fan if you like. But Alan Turing, who sacrificed much and contributed even more, would most likely disagree.