Operation Ruthless was the name of a deception operation devised by Ian Fleming in the British Admiralty during World War II, in an attempt to gain access to German Naval Enigma codebooks.
Operation Ruthless was the name of a deception operation devised by Ian Fleming in the British Admiralty during World War II, in an attempt to gain access to German Naval Enigma codebooks.
With the help of their Polish allies, British codebreakers at Bletchley Park had considerable success in decoding the Enigma-enciphered traffic of the German air force, army and intelligence and counter-espionage service (Abwehr), but had made little progress with German naval messages. The methods of communicating the choice and starting positions, of Enigma's rotors, the indicator , were much more complex for naval messages. In 1940 Dilly Knox, the veteran World War I codebreaker, Frank Birch, head of Bletchley Park's German Naval Department, and the two leading codebreakers, Alan Turing and Peter Twinn knew that getting hold of the German Navy Enigma documentation was their best chance of making progress in breaking the code. [1]
The Royal Navy's Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC) was a leading user of Ultra intelligence from Bletchley Park's decrypts. Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming of the Admiralty's Naval Intelligence Division, who later wrote the James Bond novels, was the personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral John Godfrey. Fleming liaised with the naval department at Bletchley Park, visiting about twice a month, and was well aware of this problem. [2]
On 12 September 1940, Fleming wrote a note to Godfrey which read:
I suggest we obtain the loot by the following means:
1. Obtain from Air Ministry an air-worthy German bomber.
2. Pick a tough crew of five, including a pilot, W/T operator and word-perfect German speaker. Dress them in German Air Force uniform, add blood and bandages to suit.
3. Crash plane in the Channel after making S.O.S. to rescue service in P/L.
4. Once aboard rescue boat, shoot German crew, dump overboard, bring rescue boat back to English port.
In order to increase the chances of capturing an R. or M. with, its richer booty, the crash might be staged in mid-Channel. The Germans would presumably employ one of this type for the longer and more hazardous journey.F. 12.9-40. [2]
The plan was that the German bomber would follow on behind aircraft returning from a night bombing raid. When crossing the middle of the English Channel, it would cut one engine and lose height with smoke pouring from a 'candle' in the tail, send out a SOS distress signal and then ditch in the sea. The crew would then take to a rubber dinghy, having ensured that the bomber sank before the Germans could identify it, and wait to be rescued by a German naval vessel. When on board the 'survivors' would then kill the German crew, and hijack the ship, thus obtaining the Enigma documentation. [3]
A Heinkel 111 was available for this operation. The aircraft, Werk Nr. 6853, had been captured in airworthy condition after being operated by the German bomber unit, Kampfgeschwader 26. On 9 February 1940, it had made a forced landing near North Berwick Law after being damaged by a Spitfire over the Firth of Forth. [4] It was subsequently assigned the Royal Air Force serial number AW177 and flown by the RAF's Air Fighting Development Unit and 1426 Flight.
Fleming had proposed himself as one of the crew but, as someone who knew about Bletchley Park, he could not be placed at risk of being captured. The aircraft was prepared with an aircrew of German-speaking Englishmen. The operation was planned for the early part of the month because it was known that the code sheets were changed at the start of each month. [1]
Fleming took his team to Dover to await the next suitable bombing raid, but aerial reconnaissance and wireless telegraphy monitoring failed to find any suitable German vessels, and the operation was called off. [3] That this was a major disappointment to the codebreakers can be judged by what Frank Birch wrote in a letter dated 20 October 1940.
Turing and Twinn came to me like undertakers cheated of a nice corpse two days ago, all in a stew about the cancellation of operation Ruthless. The burden of their song was the importance of a pinch. [2]
An alternative account of why the operation did not take place was given when his niece, Lucy Fleming, visited his old office in the Admiralty. The Bond Correspondence, a BBC Radio 4 radio programme broadcast on 24 May 2008, includes an interview there. Her subject in the Admiralty says that the idea was that the Germans would see the floating bomber and the "survivors" and send out a rescue vessel; but someone at the RAF pointed out that a downed Heinkel bomber would sink rather than float. [5]
Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes (Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years following 1883 for the financier and politician Sir Herbert Leon in the Victorian Gothic, Tudor, and Dutch Baroque styles, on the site of older buildings of the same name.
Ultra was the designation adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by breaking high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. Ultra eventually became the standard designation among the western Allies for all such intelligence. The name arose because the intelligence obtained was considered more important than that designated by the highest British security classification then used and so was regarded as being Ultra Secret. Several other cryptonyms had been used for such intelligence.
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The bombe was an electro-mechanical device used by British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during World War II. The US Navy and US Army later produced their own machines to the same functional specification, albeit engineered differently both from each other and from Polish and British bombes.
Cryptanalysis of the Enigma ciphering system enabled the western Allies in World War II to read substantial amounts of Morse-coded radio communications of the Axis powers that had been enciphered using Enigma machines. This yielded military intelligence which, along with that from other decrypted Axis radio and teleprinter transmissions, was given the codename Ultra.
Cryptography was used extensively during World War II because of the importance of radio communication and the ease of radio interception. The nations involved fielded a plethora of code and cipher systems, many of the latter using rotor machines. As a result, the theoretical and practical aspects of cryptanalysis, or codebreaking, were much advanced.
Alfred Dillwyn "Dilly" Knox, CMG was a British classics scholar and papyrologist at King's College, Cambridge and a codebreaker. As a member of the Room 40 codebreaking unit he helped decrypt the Zimmermann Telegram which brought the USA into the First World War. He then joined the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS).
Peter Frank George Twinn was a British mathematician, Second World War codebreaker and entomologist. The first professional mathematician to be recruited to GC&CS. Head of ISK from 1943, the unit responsible for decrypting over 100,000 Abwehr communications.
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Commander Alexander "Alastair" Guthrie Denniston was a Scottish codebreaker in Room 40, deputy head of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) and hockey player. Denniston was appointed operational head of GC&CS in 1919 and remained so until February 1942.
The B-Dienst, also called xB-Dienst, X-B-Dienst and χB-Dienst, was a Department of the German Naval Intelligence Service of the OKM, that dealt with the interception and recording, decoding and analysis of the enemy, in particular British radio communications before and during World War II. B-Dienst worked on cryptanalysis and deciphering (decrypting) of enemy and neutral states' message traffic and security control of Kriegsmarine key processes and machinery.
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John Robert Fisher Jeffreys was a British mathematician and World War II codebreaker.
Before the development of radar and other electronics techniques, signals intelligence (SIGINT) and communications intelligence (COMINT) were essentially synonymous. Sir Francis Walsingham ran a postal interception bureau with some cryptanalytic capability during the reign of Elizabeth I, but the technology was only slightly less advanced than men with shotguns, during World War I, who jammed pigeon post communications and intercepted the messages carried.
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Ralph William Burdick Izzard, OBE was an English journalist, author, adventurer and, during World War II, a British Naval Intelligence officer.
Hut 3 was a section of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park during World War II. It retained the name for its functions when it moved into Block D. It produced military intelligence codenamed Ultra from the decrypts of Enigma, Tunny and multiple other sources. Hut 3 thus became an intelligence agency in its own right, providing information of great strategic value, but rarely of operational use. Group Captain Eric Malcolm Jones led this activity from 1943 and after the war became deputy director, and in 1952 director of GCHQ. In July 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower Supreme Commander of Allied forces wrote to Sir Stewart Menzies, Chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) saying inter alia:
"The intelligence that has emanated from you before and during this campaign has been of priceless value to me. It has simplified my task as commander enormously. It has saved thousands of British and American lives and, in no small way, has contributed to the speed with which the enemy was routed and eventually forced to surrender."