The Unlikely Spy(35)
Even in the notoriously eccentric world of Bletchley Park, Denholm Saunders was considered an oddball. Before the war he had been a top mathematician at Cambridge. Now he was among the best cryptanalysts in the world. He also lived in a hamlet outside Bletchley with his mother and his Siamese cats, Plato and St. Thomas Aquinas.
It was late afternoon. Saunders was seated at his desk in the mansion, working over a pair of messages sent by the Abwehr in Hamburg to German agents inside Britain. The messages had been intercepted by the Radio Security Service, flagged as suspicious, and forwarded to Bletchley Park for decoding.
Saunders whistled tunelessly while his pencil scraped across his pad, a habit that irritated his colleagues no end. He worked in the hand cipher section of the park. His work space was crowded and cramped, but it was relatively warm. Better to be here than outside in one of the huts, where cryptanalysts slaved over German army and naval ciphers like Eskimos in an igloo.
Two hours later the scraping and the whistling stopped. Saunders was aware only of the sound of melting snow gurgling through the gutters of the old house. The work that afternoon had been far from challenging; the messages had been transmitted in a variation of a code Saunders unbuttoned himself in 1940.
"My goodness, but they are getting a bit boring, aren't they?" Saunders said, to no one in particular.
His superior was a Scot named Richardson. Saunders knocked, stepped inside, and laid the pair of decodes on the desk. Richardson read them and frowned. An officer at MI5 named Alfred Vicary had put out a red flag for this kind of thing just yesterday.
Richardson called for a motorcycle courier.
"There's one other thing," Saunders said.
"What's that?"
"The first message--the agent seemed to have some difficulty with the Morse. In fact he asked for the keyer to send it twice. They get testy about things like that. Could be nothing. There might have been some interference. But it might be a good idea to tell the boys at MI5 about it."
Richardson thought, Good idea indeed.
When Saunders was gone he typed out a brief memo describing how the agent appeared to struggle with the Morse. Five minutes later the decodes and Richardson's note were tucked inside a leather pouch for the forty-two-mile ride to London.
11
SELSEY, ENGLAND
"It was the oddest thing I've ever seen," Arthur Barnes told his wife over breakfast that morning. Barnes, as he did every morning, had walked his beloved corgi Fionna along the waterfront. Part of it still was open to civilians; most of it had been sealed off and designated a restricted military zone. Everyone wondered what the military was doing there. No one talked about it. Dawn was late that morning--a gray overcast sky, rain now and again. Fionna was off her leash, scampering up and down the docks.
Fionna spotted the thing first, then Barnes did.
"A bloody giant concrete monster, Mabel. Like a block of flats lying on its side." Two tugs were pulling it out to sea. Barnes carried a pair of field glasses inside his coat--a friend once spotted the conning tower of a German U-BOAT and Barnes was dying to catch a glimpse of one too. He removed the glasses and raised them to his eyes.
The concrete monster had a boat attached to it with a broad, flat prow pushing through the choppy seas. Barnes scanned off its port side--"Hard to tell the port side from the starboard side, mind you"--and he spotted a small vessel with a bunch of military types on deck.
"I couldn't believe it, Mabel," he recounted, finishing the last of his toast. "They were clapping and cheering, giving each other hugs and pats on the back." He shook his head. "Imagine that. Hitler's got the world by the short hairs, and our boys get excited because they can make a giant hunk of concrete float."
The giant floating concrete structure spotted by Arthur Barnes that dreary January morning was code-named Phoenix. It was 200 feet long, 50 feet wide, and displaced more than 6,000 tons of water. More than two hundred were scheduled to be built. Its interior--invisible from Barnes's vantage point on the harbor front--was a labyrinth of hollow chambers and scuttling valves, for the Phoenix was not designed to remain on the surface for long. It was designed to be towed across the English Channel and sunk off the coast of Normandy. The Phoenixes were just one component of a massive Allied project to construct an artificial harbor in England and drag it to France on D-Day. The overall code name for the project was Operation Mulberry.
It was Dieppe that taught them their lesson, Dieppe and the amphibious landings in the Mediterranean. At Dieppe, site of the disastrous Allied raid on France in August 1942, the Germans denied the Allies use of a port for as long as possible. In the Mediterranean they destroyed ports before abandoning them, rendering them useless for long periods. The invasion planners determined that attempting to capture a port intact was hopeless. They decided the men and supplies would come ashore the same way--on the beaches of Normandy.
The problem was the weather. Studies of weather patterns along the French coast showed that periods of fair conditions could be expected to last no more than four consecutive days. Therefore, the invasion planners had to assume that supplies would have to be brought ashore in a storm.
In July 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and a delegation of three hundred officials sailed for Canada aboard the Queen Mary. Churchill and Roosevelt were meeting in Quebec in August to approve plans for the Normandy invasion. During the journey, Professor J. D. Bernal, a distinguished physicist, gave a dramatic demonstration in one of the vessel's luxurious staterooms. He filled the bath with a few inches of water, the shallow end representing the Normandy beaches, the deep end the Baie de la Seine. Bernal placed twenty paper ships in the bath and used a back brush to simulate stormy conditions. The boats immediately sank. Bernal then inflated a Mae West life belt and laid it across the bath as a breakwater. The back brush was again used to create a storm, but this time the vessels survived. Bernal explained that the same thing would happen at Normandy. A storm would create havoc; an artificial harbor was needed.