In the fight against the Nazis, the British and their allies faced some of their biggest challenges with German U-boats sinking crucial supply ships in the Atlantic: at one point, 800,000 tons of Allied equipment a month was being lost to the submarines. The Nazis had developed a multi-staged process of code encryption for their navy that not even the legendary Alan Turing could break. To solve the crisis, the British military needed to gain copies of the German codebooks. Two separate plans were developed to seize this intelligence — one failed to materialize, but the second succeeded.
“Operation Ruthless” was the brainchild of Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, assistant to the Director of Britain’s Naval Intelligence. In 1940, he lobbied to get a crew of German-speaking British (he actually volunteered himself) to stage a fake crash of a German military plane (the one featured here) into the English Channel. When a Nazi vessel “rescued” the pilots, they would kill the Germans and take the intel. Fleming’s ideas never were put into action, but the Lt Commander’s sense of daring paid off artistically: Fleming became the author of the James Bond novels.
The other idea worked, even as it played out tragically. In October of 1942, sailors from the _HMS Petard_ came across U-559, a sinking U-boat. Colin Grazier and Tony Fasson stripped down to their waists and headed onto the submarine. As they searched for the codebooks, the vessel took on a sudden surge of water and drowned the men, but not before they were able to hand off to a 16-year old named Tommy Brown (shown in second slide) the “Short Signal Book” and the “Short Weather Cipher”, the critical documents. Brown amazingly got away from the submarine before it sank.
The codebooks were exactly what Alan Turing needed to break the encryptions, and after that point Allied supply ships could make their way across the Atlantic. But the whole code-breaking enterprise (the top-secret information was called “Ultra”) was kept completely hidden through World War II and into the Cold War. It would be many decades before these people’s enormous risks were recognized.
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