Bletchley Park's Secret Source

Churchill's Wrens and the Y Service in World War II

Peter Hore

• Éditeur: Greenhill Books
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781784385828
• Sujet: Historia
• Sous-sujet: Segunda Guerra Mundial

A captivating history of the highly secret group of women who helped win the Second World War. The World War II codebreaking station at Bletchley is well known and its activities documented in detail. Its decryption capabilities were vital to the war effort, significantly aiding Allied victory. But where did the messages being deciphered come from in the first place? This is the extraordinary untold story of the Y-Service, a secret even more closely guarded than Bletchley Park. The Y-Service was the code for the chain of wireless intercept stations around Britain and all over the world. Hundreds of wireless operators, many of them who were civilians, listened to German, Italian and Japanese radio networks and meticulously logged everything they heard. Some messages were then used tactically but most were sent on to Station X—Bletchley Park—where they were deciphered, translated and consolidated to build a comprehensive overview of the enemy's movements and intentions. Peter Hore delves into the fascinating history of the Y-service, with particular reference to the girls of the Women's Royal Naval Service: Wrens who escaped from Singapore to Colombo as the war raged, only to be torpedoed in the Atlantic on their way back to Britain; the woman who had a devastatingly true premonition that disaster would strike on her way to Gibraltar; the Australian who went from being captain of the English Women's Cricket team to a WWII Wren to the head of Abbotleigh girls school in Sydney; how the Y-service helped to hunt the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic, and how it helped to torpedo a Japanese cruiser in the Indian Ocean. Together, these incredible stories build a picture of World War II as it has never been viewed before. "We get to see how the work of individual Wrens helped in such operations as the interception and sinking of the Bismarck, the Slapton Sands disaster, several naval battles (Channel Dash, Matapan, etc.), the ongoing small warship clashes in coastal waters, convoy defense, and more. A good read for anyone interested in the naval side of the war in Europe or in the role of women in military service." — The NYMAS Review "Will reward a patient reader with a remarkably intimate view into the lives and times of these hidden heroes." — Naval Historical Foundation

Chapter 1

The Wireless War

The wireless war came unexpectedly to Daphne Humphrys, a third officer in the WRNS when, in late June 1940, she became the first German-speaking Wren to be recruited for very special and highly secretive work.

After the stress and excitement of the Allied evacuation from Dunkirk, there were

a few halcyon days with the pressure off, and the Wrens could swim in the harbour. I must have gone out rather far because on swimming back I realized that troops were laying double rolls of barbed wire along the beach. With a shout of “Oy, wait for me!” I scrambled out of the water and was let through with appropriate jokes on both sides to finish the war on the right side.

Presumably it was this swimming which gave Daphne an acute middle-ear infection, which was treated with the new-found M&B 692, one of the first generation of sulfonamide antibiotics.1 Daphne was recovering in the wrennery, the name given to the Wrens’ barracks, a small terraced Georgian house right on the sea-front, when Chief Officer Agnes Currie looked worriedly into her room and asked: ‘Does anybody here speak German?’

Daphne admitted, reluctantly: ‘I do a bit.’

Agnes ordered her: ‘Come with me!’

Behind locked doors Daphne told ‘chiefie’ of the extent of her German: prewar she had spent six months with a charming German family in Munich, studying the language and music, and improving her skiing. The ‘dear little Graf ’ whose home she stayed in was passionately anti-Hitler and constantly snuffled as he took Daphne through the whole German grammar in daily one-to-one lessons. She had since been back twice a year to ski and stay with her German count. Modestly she said that her knowledge was just social conversation: she was not to know, but colloquial German rather than a familiarity with Goethe or Schiller was just the knowledge that was wanted. She had also completed a secretarial course, as her father, who was then ambassador in Baghdad, had wanted her to act as his honorary attaché.2

‘The poor Chief Officer had no choice; it was me or nothing,’ wrote Daphne who was sent to the Admiralty in London where her interview was brief. She did not recall who her interviewer was.

‘Sprechen Sie Deutsch?’

‘Ja.’

‘Do you do The Times Crossword?’

Intrigued, Daphne answered ‘Yes.’ This was not true, but ever after-wards, to make amends for this white lie, Daphne would regularly compete in The Times crossword championships.

‘You’re in.’

Her orders were to proceed to an empty Trinity House cottage on the cliffs over South Foreland, where she would be joined by two more German-speaking Wrens and a couple of wireless technicians from the Admiralty's civilian wireless-listening station at HMS Flowerdown, a ‘stone frigate’ near Winchester. They would come in a van equipped with very high frequency (VHF) wireless sets. ‘The word for which I could be shot was VHF,’ she recalled many years later, ‘Now a household word, but I still feel guilty in mentioning it.’

As she settled back in her seat on the return journey from London, she reflected on her war so far. The outbreak of war had found her working as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) nurse in Canterbury hospital, whence all but the dying had been evacuated, in preparation for receiving hordes of wounded. The VAD, which had been founded in 1909, consisted mainly of middle- and upper-class girls, like Daphne, who were unaccustomed to menial work. No sooner had Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain finished announcing the declaration of war than the first air-raid warning had been sounded and she helped push the patients’ beds away from the windows into the middle of the wards. That first week of the war her old life and the new overlapped: in order to achieve her daily, unskilled stint of scrubbing and emptying bed pans, she and her sister were taken to the hospital at 6 a.m. in their father's chauffeur-driven car, and fetched again in the evening in time to dress for dinner. Nothing happened and nothing continued to happen for the next three weeks, at the end of which the matron laid off all the VADs for lack of patients. ‘We hadn’t killed them all, there were just no more coming in,’ mused Daphne.

She had, however, realised that a nursing career was not for her. She felt faint even helping with dressings, and the promise that she might be allowed to attend an operation was worrying. Daphne had spent a couple of depressing days at Canterbury labour exchange where her services were rejected, but then she heard that the WRNS was recruiting in Dover. She had been inspired by reading at an impressionable age the sea stories of Bartimeus,3 had hero-worshipped the Navy, and, if asked as a small child, she had said that she was going to be sailor when she grew up. The WRNS warmly welcomed her, and it was a proud moment when she was signed up.

So, at the end of September 1939, Daphne became a Wren (Coder) in the Casemates, the general name given to the tunnels under Dover castle, where the naval commander-in-chief, Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay, had his headquarters. The tunnels were

a rabbit-warren of passages and rooms dark, dreary, damp and airless. No luxury like air-conditioning! We worked all day in electric light. The only time the Wrens saw daylight was when they went to the heads. This was a small cupboard with a noisome thunderbox, but a beautiful view of Dover Harbour, having a window cut out in the cliff-face. A wonderful place for watching air-raids!4

Daphne and her fellow Wrens worked alongside the male ratings whom they were to replace, the men ‘gallantly treat[ing] the girls as welcome equals’. She would have happily stayed there, but after a few weeks she was sent, still without a uniform, to the WRNS officer training course (OTC) at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. She was inspired to be living in Sir Christopher Wren's masterpiece, and proudly asked her father and friends to guest nights under the ceiling of the Painted Hall. The OTC was only the second to be held and the top Wren officers had not had time to think up the rules: many young naval officers were also on courses at Greenwich and Daphne and her girlfriends freely accepted invitations to dine with them, to play squash and to dance.

Her fortnight in London was memorably happy, and she returned to the Casemates at Dover as a cipher officer. There, wearing the single blue stripe of a third officer, WRNS, she shared a tiny dormitory in the wrennery, separated by just the road from the sea lapping at the harbour wall. The Phoney War was enormous fun, she loved her work and friendships, being able to see old friends on leave, and occasionally her parents who had moved just ten miles away to Bishopsbourne.

Then, suddenly, at the end of May 1940, there was Operation Dynamo, when Ramsay and his staff had worked for nine days on end to rescue troops trapped by the German invasion of Belgium and France, when, as Daphne read in her Times newspaper ‘by a miracle of deliverance, some 335,000 troops had been rescued’.5 During Dynamo the signals piled up so that Daphne and her friends could only deal with those marked ‘Most Immediate’, and with difficulty permission was given for women like her to work night watches in order to try to cope. It seemed that almost every brass-hat in the country was working and sleeping in the Casemates, and, to deliver her decoded signals, Daphne had to pick her way among their sleeping bodies.

There was little sleep for the women when off-watch, as every evening the air-raid warnings sounded, and the Wrens were shooed out of the wrennery to take shelter in the caves at the bottom of the cliff, where her tin hat made quite a good seat. The nights were clear, and the harbour so crammed with vessels of all sizes that ‘a pebble could not be dropped between them’, and she was puzzled that while German planes droned overhead every night they did not attack shipping in the harbour. If there was any time off watch during the day, the Wrens would meet the troops coming off the boats and send off letters and messages to their families for them. She observed: ‘I think I expected them to be overjoyed to be home, but they walked like automatons, too tired for any emotion. They didn’t know then that what looked like defeat would pass into the language as a refusal to be defeated.’

Then on the night of 30/31 May the destroyer HMS Keith was sunk in the Channel, 3 officers and 33 ratings were killed, but 8 officers and 123 men survived and were landed in Dover. The indomitable Agnes Currie, a robust Scottish spinster who prewar had held a personnel position at a London department store, sprang into action, taking over the Burlington Hotel, borrowing beds and bunks, and organising a constant supply of sandwiches and hot drinks. Rosemary Keyes, another WRNS cipher officer, recalled vividly the survivors being brought to the Burlington, and serving out food and drink to them.

I started off by saying politely, ‘Do you take sugar?’ but realised pretty soon that most of these men were far too tired to care a damn what they had, or even to know what they were drinking. So, we dished out whatever happened to be there, put in the sugar, stirred it up, and handed it out. Most of them were too tired to eat or drink, they just fell on to a bed and slept for hours, dead to the world.6

The task was not without danger: in September and October 1940, the Burlington was repeatedly hit by shells (and twelve months later it would be bombed and collapse).

Daphne remembered too that one night when she was on watch reports of sinkings were pouring in, including the ship of the husband of a fellow WRNS cipher officer. The signal was whisked away so that she could not see it, but the Wrens were heartbroken for her. Then, early in the morning, there was a sudden scuffle and a figure in a blue French smock burst into the cipher office and clasped this girl to his bosom: ‘I don’t know how many times he’d been sunk and picked up that night, but there was her husband, and one happy ending.’

Daphne recalled all this on the train journey from London after her interview, and as the train pulled into Dover, she hugged herself. Her new work was so secret that she was to be out of uniform, and her scarcely credible cover was that she and her new colleagues were factory girls on holiday. She had already met some pompous officers at parties who had told her, ‘Don’t ask me what I do,’ implying that they were supremely hush-hush, but now she realised that the only way to keep a secret was by not letting anybody know there was a secret to keep. This would be difficult enough when she was already bubbling with excitement. ‘Not that there were going to be any more parties,’ she reflected, ‘No choice for me either.’

So, within twenty-four hours of her peremptory interview in the Admiralty, she was on the clifftop at South Foreland where a green van with tell-tale VHF and direction-finding aerials was parked alongside a row of three cottages, looking out over the English Channel. A friend, Jane Bennett, was waiting for her and a few days later two more Wrens arrived. Daphne also met Freddie Marshall, who was there to explain the work to the women. It was only later that Daphne realized that the whole thing, the idea of recruiting Wrens for the wireless war, ‘was his idea and that for such a young man to have pushed it through to the top says everything for Freddie Marshall’.7

Freddie Marshall

Prewar, Freddie Marshall had ‘scorned delights and lived laborious days’.8 Having won a travel scholarship to Denmark he was able to re-visit his second home and to spend wonderful summer days on the shores of the Baltic Sea. In 1938, over a beer after a rugby game, when the talk had been about the coming war, some of his friends opted to volunteer for the reserve forces. Most chose the Army, but Freddie and three others opted for the Navy. At HMS President, the London headquarters of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, they were told that there were no commissions available. Instead Freddie and his friends were happy to join as ‘Jolly Jacks’, and minutes later they became signalmen in the RNVR.9

Freddie discovered the pleasant life of a prewar RNVR rating. An annual period of service in the fleet was required and this could be stretched out to ‘see the world’, and when in uniform he and his mates liked to turn up the left sleeve of their jumpers so that the RNVR badge was hidden and they could not be distinguished from career sailors. What they lacked in experience and sea time they made up for with enthusiasm and camaraderie. On his summers in Denmark, the only cloud on the horizon was the sight and sound of the German Navy carrying out exercises, disturbing his paradise with the reverberations of gunfire, as he fished and bathed in the sea between the islands of Fyn and Langeland. As he lazed onboard on those sunny afternoons, the conversation inevitably turned to the prospect of war and what that would mean for little Denmark. Freddie would always tell his friends that they should not worry, that the Royal Navy would protect them. He would rue how tragically wrong he was.

In August 1939, with war imminent, Freddie's Danish friends in Aarhus gave a farewell party, and he left at midnight aboard a train which took him across Jutland and into Germany, intending to catch the ferry from Ostend to Dover. As the train neared the German frontier at dawn there were the usual procedures of passport and luggage examination. Freddie was last in the queue and the Danish customs officer was courteous and friendly. As the train rolled into Germany, the passengers chatted over their first smoke of the day. A few minutes later, Freddie was in Germany, a country which he knew well, but which he had not visited for two years since he had witnessed a disgraceful display of Jew-baiting that had sickened him. He found German officialdom was hostile, the trains were overfull, and his scheduled train was frequently side-tracked to allow troop trains to pass; everywhere there was a sense of foreboding, of anxiety and of sullen resignation.

When he finally boarded the ferry in Belgium, Freddie felt relief mixed with deep sadness as he reflected on what had become of a country which should have had so much to offer the world. Back in England, Freddie reported to HMS President where he was told that he had about a fortnight before his services would be required: ‘Go on leave until that happens.’ However, only a week later he was summoned to Portsmouth where he was instructed to report to Lieutenant-Commander E. M. ‘Daisy’ Manners at the signal school in the barracks. There he was told that since his service papers showed that he spoke several languages, he was...