WWII

What if the Nazi's had social media when Athenia was sunk? Photo credit: National Today

A War of Words, Part 1

by Thomas Sanger • Thomas C. Sanger • Leave a Comment

This month we are going to revisit a subject covered in previous blogs, but from a slightly different angle. The subject is the Nazi’s denial of responsibility for sinking the British passenger ship Athenia on the first day of World War II. The new angle considers what might have occurred if social media had been available in 1939.

To recap, here is what happened Sept. 3, 1939. A young U-boat commander, Fritz-Julius Lemp, torpedoed Athenia just after sunset. Under maritime law, Lemp was required give warning before attacking an unarmed, unescorted merchant ship. To do so, he would have surfaced his U-boat, ordered the ship to stop, and inspected its cargo. If he found contraband cargo, he could sink the ship but only after everyone on board was safely off. 

Lemp gave no warning because he thought he was attacking an “armed merchant cruiser,” a legitimate wartime target. When he later discovered his mistake, Lemp left the scene without reporting his attack to his headquarters. As a result, Nazi officials were caught by surprise the next morning when news reports of the U-boat attack on a passenger ship began circulating. They immediately denied any responsibility for the sinking. British, American, and Canadian press reported the German denial along with skeptical reactions from Western government officials. 

Had social media been available to the Nazi’s they could have sent their message directly to their followers in the West without the skepticism of Western officials. Likewise, they could have directly communicated their explanation that a floating mine or exploding boiler likely sank Athenia.

The next day, Sept. 5, eye-witness accounts from rescued Athenia passengers arriving in Scotland and Ireland told of seeing a submarine immediately after the torpedo explosion. Social media could have allowed the Nazis to communicate directly with followers in the West that the submarine was likely British and that it had attacked Athenia by mistake. 

By now, Germany’s claims on social media and conflicting Western mass media accounts might well have caused confusion over what actually happened to Athenia. And that confusion might have been enough to blunt Britain’s efforts to turn world opinion against the Nazi’s.

Our next blog will explore how social media could have helped spread the Nazi’s biggest lie about Athenia.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announces England is at war with Germany, Sept. 3, 1939. Photo credit: Operation Meatball

How Europe Stumbled into WWII, Part 4

by Thomas Sanger • Thomas C. Sanger • Leave a Comment

With Germany’s invasion of Poland on Friday, Sept. 1, 1939 (see blog, April 4, 2021), another major European war seemed unavoidable.  Indeed, sentiment in England now appeared resigned to war: Get on with it, and get it over. While in Germany, many thought England would not allow itself to be drawn into a simple border dispute between the Germans and the Poles.

That Friday afternoon, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain met with one of the fiercest critics of his appeasement policy toward the Nazis. He offered Winston Churchill a position in a small bi-partisan cabinet Chamberlain was forming to conduct the war. Churchill immediately accepted.

Early that evening, Chamberlain addressed the House of Commons to tell the members that the Government had delivered a stern warning to the German Foreign Minister in Berlin that if the Nazis use force, Britain was resolved to oppose them with force. The Prime Minister then reviewed the many steps his Government had taken to preserve peace. He blamed Hitler for the “terrible catastrophe” Europe now faced, and said England must enter the struggle it so earnestly had endeavored to avoid, “with determination to see it through to the end.”

But Chamberlain ended his talk without any declaration of war or explanation of what steps the Government might be taking to honor its agreement to protect Poland.

Saturday, Sept. 2, saw continued attacks by the German Army in Poland and the bombing of Polish cities, but no action taken by England or France. In an afternoon Cabinet meeting, Chamberlain described a proposal by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini to hold talks to resolve the Polish crisis, and noted that German forces would have to withdraw from Poland before there could be any such talks. He also told the Cabinet members that France wanted another 48 hours to complete military mobilizations before delivering any ultimatum to Germany. The British military, Chamberlain said, opposed any such delay. Several Cabinet members said they believed that any ultimatum should expire at the stroke of midnight.

Chamberlain again addressed Parliament Saturday evening. To the distress of many members, the Prime Minister spoke less than five minutes and seemed to indicate that His Majesty’s Government would take no action if Germany promised to withdraw its forces from Poland and enter into talks with the Poles to resolve “the matters between them.”

As soon as Parliament adjourned that evening, key Cabinet members met with the Prime Minister in private and told him he must act now or risk losing their support and that of the British public. Chamberlain was surprised that his brief address had sounded like a capitulation and promised to act immediately.

That night he drafted an ultimatum that was cabled to the British Ambassador in Berlin to be delivered Sunday morning, Sept. 3, to the German Government. The message said that unless German forces ceased all action in Poland by noon, Berlin time, that same day, a state of war would exist between Britain and Germany.

The Sunday deadline in Berlin passed without any word from the German Government.

Fifteen minutes later, at 11:15 a.m. London time, Chamberlain went on the radio to announce to his countrymen and to the world that for the second time in the 20th century, England was at war with Germany.

The Second World War had begun.

Map shows Germany's systematic occupation of Czechoslovakia, 1938-39. Credit: Pinterest

How Europe Stumbled into WWII, Part 2

by Thomas Sanger • Thomas C. Sanger • Leave a Comment

When the Munich Agreement allowed Nazi troops to occupy the Sudetenland inside Czechoslovakia (see blog Jan. 5, 2021), it also turned over to the Nazis all that country’s defensive positions guarding against a German attack.

Six months later, March 15, 1939, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler informed the Czech president that German soldiers were marching out of the Sudetenland to occupy nearly half of the country. He said this was necessary to “restore order” in the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, which included the Czechoslovak capital of Prague. If his troops met with any resistance, Hitler warned, German air forces would bomb the capital. The president had no choice but to tell his defenseless countrymen not to oppose the German occupation, and Bohemia and Moravia became a German protectorate.
Germany’s actions clearly violated the Munich Agreement. In London, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said he bitterly regretted Germany’s actions but added he would not be deterred from, “our policy of appeasement.”
Parliament and the public quickly condemned Chamberlain’s words and the continued policy of appeasement. The reaction caught the Prime Minister by surprise. To record Britain’s displeasure with the German coup, Chamberlain recalled the British ambassador from Berlin.
But within days of Germany’s occupation of Prague, a new crisis loomed. A large number of German-speaking people in the Free City of Danzig, a major port on the Baltic Sea, began calling for annexation by Germany. The Free City was administered by Poland, an otherwise landlocked nation in Eastern Europe that connected with Danzig via a long neck of land known as The Polish Corridor. The corridor also separated Germany from her ethnic cousins in East Prussia.
Hitler began demanding that Germany take control of Danzig and be given permanent access to East Prussia through the Polish Corridor. Hoping to discourage Hitler, Chamberlain’s Government announced plans to double the size of Britain’s Army and reached an agreement to aid Poland if the Poles were to be attacked “by a European power.” By early April, France reached its own agreement to aid Poland in the event of a third party attack.
The sudden turn of events in Eastern Europe rehabilitated the political fortunes of Winston Churchill. For the last ten years, Churchill had been a Conservative member of parliament, but had not held any leadership positions in Chamberlain’s Government. In his writings and speeches, however, Churchill had kept up a steady drumbeat of warnings about Hitler’s intentions and the dangers of appeasement.

Despite the accuracy of his warnings and his unquestioned organizational and rhetorical abilities, Churchill was quietly rebuffed when he inquired about the possibility of serving in any capacity in Chamberlain’s Government.

After six more tension-filled months, fortune would deal a final blow to appeasement and bring Churchill back into the Prime Minister’s government.

More in our next blog.

Type VII-A German U-boat, the first of many Type VII variants Photo credit: Wikipedia

A Brief History of Submarines, Part 5

by Thomas Sanger • War History • Leave a Comment

In 1938, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler approved a grand blueprint for building a German navy capable of challenging Great Britain’s dominance of the high seas. The ambitious “Plan Z” was due to be completed in 1948, but it had to be abandoned when Hitler invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939.

The German U-boat fleet commander, Karl Doenitz, had hoped to have some 300 attack submarines before going to war with the British. Instead, he had a fleet of 65 boats, only 21 of which were ocean-going attack U-boats. The design of these boats had been distilled from World War I submarines and reworked in secret by German engineers in the Netherlands.

The result was an agile, 600-ton U-boat, known as the Type VII. Its twin diesel engines could push the boat to a maximum speed of 17 knots while on the surface, but when the boat was submerged, its two battery-powered electric motors could make only half that speed. The boat was armed with four torpedo tubes in the bow and one in the stern. Including reloads, these initial U-boats carried 11 torpedoes. An 88-millimeter (mm) cannon was mounted on the deck in front of the boat’s conning tower, and a 20mm anti-aircraft gun was typically located on the deck behind the tower or, later, on the rear of the conning tower bridge itself. The submarine had become a formidable weapon of war.

The initial design, a Type VIIA, could operate underwater for about 48 hours before having to surface to recharge the batteries and provide welcome fresh air for the 40-man crew. As a result, U-boats, despite their name, spent most of their time on the ocean’s surface. By the end of the war Germany would build more than 1,100 U-boats, 709 of which were Type VII variants.

When England declared war on Germany, Sept. 3, 1939, Doenitz had already dispatched 19 U-boats in his ocean-going fleet to stations north and south of the sea lanes into the British Isles. The primary target for Germany’s navy was merchant shipping, as the Nazis sought to deny the raw materials and food supplies so vital to the British economy. U-boats sank several merchant ships, including a passenger liner, during the first days of the war. The damage prompted the British Admiralty to quickly adopt the convoy system it had employed in the previous war.

In the lead-up to World War II, Germany had focused most of its naval resources on “capital ships,” the battleships and heavy cruisers by which modern navies measured their prestige. Within a year, however, most of Germany’s capital ships had been neutralized by the larger British Royal Navy. This left the U-boat as the Nazi’s principal naval weapon, and it would prove more than equal to the task, as we will see in our next blog.

America First Committee Rally, early 1940s Photo credit: American History USA

Why Don’t We Remember Athenia, Part 4

by Thomas Sanger • Thomas C. Sanger • Leave a Comment

When the British passenger ship Athenia was torpedoed and sunk on the first day of World War II, it took several days to assemble a comprehensive list of survivors, as well as the names of those who died. In the final counting, 30 Americans were among the 112 persons killed as a result of the attack. Despite the deaths of innocent U.S. civilians, America did not go to war with Germany following Athenia’s sinking.

Officially, the United States was a neutral country in the burgeoning war. Not long after the sinking, Americans who survived the attack began to ask the government to seek compensation from Germany for property they had lost on board Athenia. At the time, Germany was denying any responsibility for the attack (see blog post, Feb. 1, 2019), so the passengers’ requests put the U.S. government in a potentially awkward diplomatic position.

To preserve its neutrality, the U.S. State Department asked the American survivors to file affidavits detailing under oath what they saw and heard during the sinking. When all the accounts were gathered, respondents were notified that the State Department was “making a careful investigation with a view to determining the facts and responsibility for the sinking of the S.S. Athenia.” The department promised to give Athenia survivors details about preparing their claims if and when the investigation determined “a foreign government” was responsible for the damages suffered.

Based on information submitted by the survivors, the State Department could not conclusively establish that Germany was responsible for the sinking. Even though few people outside of Germany doubted that a U-boat had sunk Athenia, the recovery of damages would have to wait until after the war.

America’s neutrality was the result of strong isolationist sentiment in the halls of Congress and reflected the attitude held by many in the general public. Much of this sentiment carried over from World War I in the belief that the U.S. had been duped into helping England and France supposedly to make the world safe for democracy.

Entry into the war in 1917 eventually cost the lives of 53,000 American soldiers. Millions of dollars in loans made to allies during and after the war had not been repaid. These events had left a bitter taste in the mouths of many Americans. With Europeans once again going to war to settle their differences, isolationists contended this simply wasn’t America’s fight.

To be sure, many Americans, including President Franklin Roosevelt, felt strongly that the U.S. could not afford to ignore events in Europe and that the country should come to Britain’s aid. The president knew, however, that isolationist sentiment was too strong for him to expect Congress to support a declaration of war against Germany for the deaths of Americans aboard Athenia.

It wasn’t until two years later, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, that America was galvanized into action. By then, however, few Americans remembered that 30 of their fellow citizens had died Sept. 3, 1939, on the first day of the war.

Next month: The “rules of war” 

Sub-Lieutenant David E. Balme, R.N. Photo credit: The Telegraph

Enigma’s Mysteries Revealed

by Thomas Sanger • Thomas C. Sanger • Leave a Comment

Nearly two years after the start of World War II, the British Royal Navy for the first time put a boarding party onto a crippled German submarine. On May 9, 1942, 20-year-old sub-lieutenant David Balme led a party of nine sailors onto U-110, not knowing if the boat had been booby-trapped and half expecting scuttling charges to detonate at any moment.

Balme and his men had been sent across from H.M.S. Bulldog by her captain, Commander Joe Baker-Cresswell, with orders to gather up signal books and any other useful materials they might find (see blog post “Lemp’s Fatal Mistake, Aug. 30, 2018). Balme was the first man into the submarine, and when he was certain the boat had been abandoned, he called for the rest of the men to join him in the U-boat’s control room.

“The lights were still on and everything was lying about just as if one had arrived at someone’s house after breakfast, before they had had time to make beds, etc., coats were thrown around, bunks half made,” he later remembered. “There was complete silence in the U-boat except for the continual thud of our own depth charges [in pursuit of a second U-boat]…a most unpleasant and frightening noise.”

He told the men to ignore anything that was obviously casual reading material and to take whatever else appeared to be of interest. Speed was of the essence because U-110 was sinking and Balme was still concerned about explosive charges. Complicating matters was the fact that none of the men read German.

At one point, a sailor came out of the U-boat’s radio room and told Balme, “There’s something rather interesting I want to show you.” In the cramped radio room, Balme was shown a typewriter-like device screwed to the table. He could see that pressing one key on the machine caused a different letter to light up on a display. Balme told the sailor to unscrew it and send it up with the rest of the material being gathered. The young sub-lieutenant had no way of knowing that his party had just recovered the first working model of the German naval Enigma machine, a top-secret prize British Intelligence had coveted since the start of the war.

As the day wore on and the submarine remained afloat, Balme became less concerned about scuttling charges or the boat’s quick demise. At one point, Bulldog sent over sandwiches and a small boat to replace the one that had smashed itself on the U-110’s deck. He did worry, however, when Bulldog was called away on a U-boat sighting and a dense fog settled on the ocean.

“There was I, with my boarding party aboard U-110 in the middle of the Atlantic, alone with no ships in sight and with the wind and sea gradually increasing,” Balme recalled. Fortunately, Baker-Cresswell’s dead-reckoning navigation skills brought Bulldog back to the crippled submarine before nightfall, and the treasure trove of materials, including the Enigma machine and its codebooks, were transferred to the British destroyer.

By day’s end, Bulldog took U-110 under tow in hopes of delivering her to Iceland for careful inspection by British submarine experts. The next day, however, the U-boat sank en route. By then, the submarine’s capture and its trove of materials had been given a top-secret designation with the code name “Primrose.” Great effort went into limiting the number of people made aware of Primrose, and the capture was kept secret for several decades after the war.

U-110’s sinking may have been a blessing in disguise. Had the boat been towed to Iceland, it is entirely possible that local German spies would have relayed its capture to German authorities. German naval commanders would have assumed their encrypted communications could be compromised and they would have made changes to the Enigma machine and its codes much sooner than was actually the case. Even after the Germans made modifications in an effort to restore the naval Enigma’s integrity, insights gained by British intelligence from the materials taken from U-110 helped reduce code-breaking to a matter of hours or days instead or weeks.

At least one naval historian went so far as to characterize Operation Primrose on a scale commensurate with the outcomes of the Battle of Midway in the Pacific and the Battle of Stalingrad in Europe – not a bad day’s work for a Royal Navy convoy escort group and a junior naval officer barely out of his teens.

Alan Turing, one of the leading British cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park. Photo credit: A & E Biography

Decoding Enigma: Success and Setback

by Thomas Sanger • Thomas C. Sanger • Leave a Comment

By the spring of 1940, British cryptographers had a general idea of how the German Naval Enigma cypher device worked, but could not break its code without “cribs” ( see my blog, “British Codebreaking and the Bletchley Park Connection,” May 31, 2018).

To read the Naval Enigma messages, Bletchley Park analysts needed to know identity and order of the three wheels used to send messages, plus the settings on the wheels, and the plugboard setup for the day the message was sent. All this information had to be transmitted to the Enigma operators in the field before they could decode messages. The question was, how did the operators obtain the information?

A significant breakthrough happened in late April when a Royal Navy destroyer captured a German trawler off the Norwegian coast. The Germans had managed to throw two bags overboard filled with codebooks and the ship’s Enigma device. The bag with the Enigma sank, but the second bag did not and was recovered.

That second bag contained coded messages along with their related plain text translations (valuable cribs needed to help break the Naval code). This information, along with the Enigma wheel and plugboard settings for two of the days, allowed Alan Turing and his associates to read the first German Naval messages since the start of the war, albeit nearly two weeks after they were sent. However, access to these messages helped Turing work out how the Naval Enigma indicators were sent (see my May 31, 2018, blog).

To read the messages in real time, the codebreakers would need a copy of the bigram (a two-letter configuration) table used to send the messages, and no bigram tables were recovered from the trawler. Undaunted, British cryptanalysts were able to use the cribs to work backwards and begin to fill in the bigram pairings. With enough cribs, they were able to reconstruct most of the bigram table in use at that time.

Turing devised a system to help eliminate most of the wheel positions not used to encrypt a message. The smaller number of remaining possibilities could then be tested using his “bombe,” a pioneering computer that worked out the eventual correct wheel positions. Through this sped-up trial-and-error methodology, cryptanalysts were able to break a few months-old Naval Enigma messages without first having the wheel or plugboard settings.

But in decoding one of the messages, Turing discovered that a new bigram table would be introduced July 1, 1940. The change sent Bletchley Park’s Naval Enigma deciphering efforts nearly back to square one. Despite this setback, the British had developed more effective tools and methods for breaking the German Naval codes.

Now, however, the question was whether they would be able to read the German messages in real time before the rising U-boat toll could starve Britain into submission.

Bletchley Park estate, center of British WWII code breaking efforts. Photo credit: Art Fund

British Codebreaking and the Bletchley Park Connection

by Thomas Sanger • War History • Leave a Comment

As the German Army began invading Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, the Polish codebreakers prepared to vacate Warsaw. They were careful to take with them or destroy all evidence of their years of success in reading German military messages sent by the Enigma cypher device (see my blog, “The Evolution of Enigma,” May 16, 2018).

Two weeks later the Poles entered Rumania, took a train to Bucharest and contacted the French Embassy. By the beginning of October, they were safe in a French chateau about 25 miles northeast of Paris, along with two replica Enigma machines they had smuggled out of Poland. By now, however, the principal effort to decode Enigma was shifting across the English Channel to a country manor in Buckinghamshire, 50 miles northwest of London.

Bletchley Park, an ornate stone edifice set on 58 acres of private land, had become the new home of the British Government Code & Cypher School (GC&CS). Bletchley was considered a much safer wartime location than the school’s previous home in London.

The estate sat almost equidistant on the rail line between Oxford and Cambridge, the universities whose faculty members and top students would supply much of Britain’s codebreaking brainpower. To ramp up its efforts, the GC&CS had begun recruiting linguists, chess champions, cryptic crossword puzzlers, and mathematicians; people with skills uniquely suited to cryptanalysis.

Early efforts to read the German signals were fruitless, owing to the changes in coding procedures introduced prior to Germany’s Polish invasion. In early 1940, one of Britain’s top codebreakers, mathematician Alan Turing, visited his Polish cohorts in France and gained several key insights, including the wiring scheme for the German military Enigma. Within months of his return to Bletchley, Turing devised his initial electromechanical computing machine, which he called a “bombe.” His device helped defeat some of the new German cyphering practices..

By transmitting only once, instead of twice, the three-letter setting used to encode an Enigma message (see March 16 blog), the Germans had made it much more difficult for British codebreakers to work out the correct setting in a timely manner. Touring’s machine, however, sped up the process by quickly eliminating most of the unlikely three-letter sets.

By mid-1940 Bletchley cryptanalysts were reading the German Army and Air Force signals within days, or even hours, of receiving the coded messages. It helped that both services continued to use the same five wheels they had been using for years to make up the three-wheel combinations for their Enigma transmissions. The internal wiring of these five wheels had long-since been worked out by the Poles.

But the Naval Enigma signals remained a mystery. Instead of five wheels from which to choose, the Navy added three more individual wheels, greatly complicating Britain’s codebreaking efforts. Even more complicated was the way in which the Navy identified the three-letter settings (called “trigrams”) for encoding messages,

The process used a pre-determined list of three-letter indicators. The message sender chose one of these trigrams to encode the message and a second “dummy” trigram. The two trigrams, plus two random letters, were used to construct four two-letter “bigrams.” The sender then consulted a bigram table that showed a conversion for every possible bigram into a second, unrelated bigram. These eight letters were then sent by Morse code at the beginning of the message along with the enciphered message.

By the end of 1939, Turing believed he understood how this system worked to identify the trigram for each encoded naval message. But understanding the system did not allow him to read Navy Enigma signals without a copy of the bigram table.

By the summer of 1940, an enhanced version of Turing’s bombe was being built. If they had enough plain-text German Naval messages along with their encryptions (what cryptanalysts termed a “crib”), the “super bombe” could break the Naval Enigma. But it was a classic conundrum: without cribs they could not break Enigma messages, yet without breaking Enigma messages they could not obtain cribs.

There was, however, one other possibility, as we will see in our next blog.