Stardate 20021130.1627

(On Screen): Even after nearly 60 years, there are still reports from World War II which are slowly being declassified. This article reports that during the war, two double agents who originally worked for Germany but who were "turned" by the Brits were permitted to actually plant and detonate a pair of bombs in the UK so that they could convince the Germans they were still loyal.

The shadow war in World War II was amazingly large and elaborate, involving tens of thousands of people on all sides, quite literally armies of people. Between attempting to infiltrate your agents into their territory to perform various missions, and finding their agents infiltrated into your territory, and trying to read their coded messages and trying to make sure they don't read yours, and trying to fool them about what your intentions are so that they won't be prepared for what you actually do, not to mention trying to avoid being fooled by them when they attempt the same thing, the work was dangerous, critical, and for the most part grindingly dull and boring. The vast majority of the tens of thousands who were involved sat at desks and processed paper. But the result of it all was the difference between victory and defeat, and sometimes it was necessary to do really rather odd things, and sometimes even tragic things.

In the 1970's, information was released which showed that the Brits had been able to read the top level German ciphers through most of the war. The most famous of those was Enigma but there were others. The initial break into Enigma was actually made by mathematicians in Poland, but when Poland fell the information was sent to the UK. A combination of brilliance, hard work, luck, espionage and targeted military operations made it possible for the Brits to read the Luftwaffe's radio messages through much of the Blitz, and to read the messages being sent to the U-boats during the critical phases of the Battle of the Atlantic.

This was known as the Ultra Secret and aside from the people who actually worked on it, few were permitted to know what was going on. Only the very topmost officers in the Army knew, and some cabinet ministers were not told. But one of the problems with a source of information is that it presents you with a dilemma: if you use that information too readily, your enemy may figure out where it's coming from and cut it off. But if you don't use it, then there's no point in having it. It becomes an ongoing decision process balancing the value of reacting to a given piece of information against the risk that utilizing that information might cut off a source which might be valuable for other things later. Often you would create cover stories.

For example, one of the reasons that the Afrika Corps had supply problems is that the Italian supply convoys kept getting met by the British fleet operating out of Egypt. The reason was that the Brits were reading Italian codes and knew when the convoys were sailing, but in order to cover that, they would always make sure that a scout plane was sent over the convoy and would report back what it saw. In fact, the crews of those planes didn't know what was happening; they were told to go look in a particular place, and they'd find something juicy and radio back. Then the RN would show up.

When the Americans read a message that told them that Japanese Admiral Yamamoto would be in a plane in a certain place at a certain time, within range of American fighters, they shot the plane down and killed him. They released a cover story that his plans had been learned by the legendary Australian "coast watchers" (which was plausible considering the reputation they'd built up by that point).

Sometimes the cover stories actually survived and became urban legends. The Americans developed a radar for submarines which used very short wavelengths and thus required a very small antenna, which was actually mounted on the top of the periscope. Of course, radar works just as well at night as at day, and it was used to spot and attack Japanese shipping at night. But it was important that people not know how this was done, although the fact of many successful night attacks couldn't be suppressed. So a strange story was concocted.

At this time, the US Navy was not integrated. But most Navy ships did carry a mix of whites and Negroes, because the Negroes were assigned to work in the kitchens on the ships. This was also true on the submarines which would often carry one or two Negroes, and a rumor was deliberately started that Negroes have better night vision than whites do, and that the Negroes were being assigned to night watch duty on the subs and they were responsible for the rise in successful night attacks. For years after the war, it was popular wisdom that blacks had better night vision than whites, which is not true. (I remember hearing that when I was a kid.)

During the Blitz, there were cases when the government of Britain knew that certain cities were going to be targets of that night's planned bombing attacks, and decided to not make an extra effort to oppose the attacks. They would not alert the defenders of that area, or tell the civil defense authorities there what was coming. They could, for instance, have concentrated night fighters against the attack since they knew when and where it would happen, but chose to not do so, because if they had then there was too great a chance that someone in Germany would figure out that the Enigma had been cracked, and that would have been a disaster. It took huge amounts of effort for the British to break in, and the Germans could have completely changed the system in weeks and made most of that work obsolete (by issuing new code wheels).

This news article about the double agents emphasizes that the attack was made without casualties, but the reality of war is that sometimes they actually did things like that which did kill or wound friendlies. Sometimes they let the enemy make an attack without stopping him. In this case they did manage to make sure no one was hurt, but even if that had not been possible they might well have gone ahead with it anyway.

The process of intercepting and "turning" German agents in the UK was one of the more important aspects of this intelligence war. When a German agent was captured, he'd be given a choice: change sides or get a bullet in the head. That was no bluff; these were spies operating in plain clothes and under the Geneva Convention they could be executed without trial, and some who were more loyal than intelligent actually did go in front of a firing squad. If they refused to turn, they were of no further use to the Brits and would be summarily shot. But most of them took the better part of valor and changed sides to work for the British, who then fed them information to send back to Germany which actually was secret and actually was somewhat sensitive, because it was necessary to include enough legitimate information in the traffic so that the lies which were also being sent would be believed.

I might mention that the Germans did the same thing. They were particularly effective in the Netherlands, where they had totally infiltrated and in practice pretty much controlled the local resistance movement. So they would arrange for British or American agents to parachute in, and then capture them immediately. Most of those were executed.

And there came a time when the British figured out that the Dutch resistance had been infiltrated and kept sending agents to their deaths anyway so that they could turn the tables on the Germans and use this as yet another way to feed them false information.

These intelligence assets, providing access to the enemy's secrets or permitting false information to be fed to the enemy, were husbanded and used for special occasions. The entire structure of turned agents who were still believed by the Germans was, for instance, used as part of Operation Fortitude, the largest and most elaborate, and arguably the most successful and most important deception campaign in military history. Operation Fortitude sold the Germans on the idea that the Normandy invasion was a demonstration. The real attack would be made by the First US Army Group commanded by Patton and would strike the Calais area a few weeks after the invasion in Normandy. The purpose of the attack in Normandy was to pull the German Fifteenth Army out of Calais into the Normandy region, so that Calais would be lightly defended when the main attack actually fell there.

Actually, the purpose of Operation Fortitude was exactly the opposite: to convince the Germans to keep the Fifteenth Army in the Calais region so that it did not attack the Normandy beachhead. An entire mythical army including a couple dozen fake divisions was created in the UK, with vast parking areas full of trucks and tanks which were actually inflated rubber. Each could easily be carried by four men, but from the air they looked totally realistic. And German scout planes were permitted to see them and report back.

The kind of work which was involved in creating FUSAG, convincing the Germans that it was real, and that it would actually be the main attack was amazing; it happened on many levels and entire books have been written about the many ways in which this story was successfully sold to the Germans. And all the double agents were pressed to the task, as well. And this was the point: in war you make exchanges. In war you make sacrifices. In war your own people will suffer and die, and sometimes you let it happen in exchange for other advantages later. In order to have these double agents available for this use, it was necessary for them to be permitted to give the Germans information which was actually damaging and may have cost some British and Americans their lives. It was necessary for them to be permitted to do other things which were nominally negative such as staging bombings. It was part of the price that had to be paid to make the Normandy invasion a success. And this was far from the only time such a price was paid.

Sometimes, for instances, the analysts working on cracking a given code or cipher would actually request that the RAF or US 8th Air Force make bombing raids on certain targets because that would cause the Germans to send messages about the attack, which would give the analysts clues as to the words which were in the messages, making it easier to break in. Some of the planes involved would be shot down; and sometimes the crews died. That's the grim cost of war. But it helped them to read other messages, later, which were even more important and saved even more lives, not to mention helping to win the war.

The Germans had a program to develop nuclear weapons, and it had a significant chance of success; they certainly had both the industrial capability and the technical know-how to make it happen. But the Germans needed large amounts of "heavy water" (deuterium oxide) in order to succeed, and the only supply available was in conquered Norway. A large and irreplaceable shipment of D2O ended up being sent south to Germany, and Allied intelligence detected it by reading German coded messages.

The Norwegian underground was alerted, and it turned out that the only way they could stop the shipment was by placing a bomb in the ferry which would carry the shipment across Lake Tinnsjoe. When it detonated it sank the ferry and sent the D2O to the bottom. It also killed dozens of Norwegian civilians who were riding the ferry. That was hard, but letting the Germans get nuclear weapons would have been a lot worse. The civilians couldn't be warned. They couldn't be saved. Any attempt to save them might have tipped off the Germans and let them realize that the bomb had been planted. Those civilians had to die for the good of all. There was no rhyme or reason to it; no justice. Those who died had the terrible luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That calculation about when to deliberately sacrifice your own people for the sake of winning the war happens at all levels, all the time. Every time a general orders an attack on the ground, he does so knowing full well that his orders will cause men on his side to die. Officers at every level who make decisions about combat do so in full knowledge that if they make the wrong decision that men under them will pay the ultimate price for the mistake; but even if the decision is right some will pay that price. Many of your own men die even in a successful attack, sometimes a lot of them.

I do not know how officers learn to deal with that. How does an Eisenhower order two airborne divisions to drop into Normandy while expecting two thirds of them to become casualties? It's one of the aspects of war I truly do not understand, and I think it must be the hardest part of being an officer. I know that some do not learn to deal with it, and crack under the strain, or fail to make the hard decisions. But somehow most of them manage to deal with the responsibility of ordering men to die, and to carry that load without being crushed by it.

Some don't care. They know that men under them will die, but they simply don't care about that kind of thing. You see evidence of that when you study the way that the Soviets fought against the Germans, for instance. Zhukov was the man the USSR needed, and was there when they needed him, but part of the reason he was the man they needed was that he was willing to ruthlessly sacrifice huge numbers of men in the Red Army when necessary, and sometimes they were used up in numbers which seem unconscionable. The only justification for it, the only one there could be I guess, is that they ultimately won the war. (And let's be clear t