The Operation That Never Was

Early in 1942 the British Government sought to rally support for a war effort that was going through some of its darkest days. In the Pacific, although the United States had entered the war, it was still reeling from the blow of Pearl Harbour and, in February over 80,000 troops of the British and Indian Armies had surrendered when Singapore fell.

At sea, the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had escaped home to Germany in the Channel Dash, the first time an enemy had forced the straits of Dover in over 200 years. That came on the back of a tough 1941. The nation’s prewar flagship, HMS Hood, the largest warship in the world, had been sunk and, if the Royal Navy had got its revenge by sinking the Bismarck, the war in the grey wastes of the Atlantic was poised on a knife edge.

But it was a fight which was fought out of the public eye. The Battle of Britain had been visible in the skies above, and the effects of aerial bombardment were only too easy to see in many British cities, but the stage for the Battle of the Atlantic was the deep ocean.

One way to build support for the Navy was by twining warships with towns and boroughs across the country and raising money in donations and war loans to help pay for them. In our part of London, at that time there were two boroughs, Wandsworth and Battersea. The more fashionable Wandsworth was paired up with a sleek Cruiser, HMS Cairo (who was to have her own date with destiny later in 1942…) while scrappier, tougher, Battersea got, appropriately, HMS Bulldog, a destroyer.

On the 21st of March 1942 thousands lined the streets of Battersea to witness a parade led by ‘Queenie’ a bulldog which travelled atop “a gaily bedecked motor car”.[1]   Harry Selley, the MP for Battersea South, said that “We have now to put the B in Bulldog. If we exceed the target we shall feel we have played our part.”[2] There were dances and whist drives and local school children were encouraged to enter an essay competition on the title “What does the navy mean to you?”

Little did the cheering crowds know that the Bulldog had already carried out the action that was to immortalise her memory, well a version of her memory anyway…

In 2000 there were two controversies which dogged the launch of the film U571, a Hollywood block buster starring Matthew McConaughey and Harvey Keitel. One was simple matter of good taste and good hair. The on screen death of Jon Bon Jovi, playing a cameo, was deemed too gory for a heart throb and the film was recut to exclude it.[3] The other, not overly troubling to American cinema goers although a cause celebre in Britain, was the liberty that the film took with the true story of the capture of German code books and the fabled Enigma machine. Tony Blair called it an ‘affront’ to British sailors and a motion tabled by Lindsey Hoyle MP, now the Speaker of the House of Commons, regretted “that Hollywood has chosen to distort the truth and detract from the valour of the British sailors concerned by appropriating the story for its own financial gain”. Part of the problem was that when it came to cracking the Enigma codes the truth was kept under wraps for a very long time and so myths built up in its place. 

The feats of code breakers of Blechley Park in cracking open the secrets of Nazi Germany were shrouded in secrecy until the early 1970s. Classified ‘Ultra Secret’ during the war, the veil was maintained after it, so the Soviet Union did not know how thoroughly the codes, some of which they hoped that they alone had deciphered, had been broken. In fact, some historians had already obliquely written about the success of the British cryptographers and had hinted that they had been even more successful than widely suspected. Stepehen Roskill, the official historian of the Royal Navy in the Second World War, had written The Secret Capture in response to lurid American claims (in We captured a U Boat by Rear Admiral Daniel Gallery) to have made the first capture of U Boat complete with is code materials in 1944.[4] The Secret Capture was unofficial, but Roskill got a nod and a wink to publish it to put the yanks in their proper place: Blair and Hoyle would have approved.

The story that Roskill told was that of the Bulldog and the capture of the German Submarine U110 on 9 May 1941 but even then he couldn’t go into all the details. The U Boat’s captain was Fritz-Julius Lemp, one of a handful of so called Aces who caused havoc early in the war. Transferred to the command of the brand new U110 in the spring of 1941, Lemp was in command of a wolf pack of three submarines attacking a convoy off the coast of Greenland, when he himself was surprised by an escort group of three British ships, the corvette HMS Aubrietia, and two destroyers, HMS Broadway and HMS Bulldog. Badly damaged and forced to surface by depth charges, Lemp gave the order to abandon ship, thinking that the vessel was sinking. But he had acted too soon, the vessel did not immediately sink and Lemp died trying to swim back to her. Meanwhile, Bulldog’s quick thinking Commander Joe Baker-Cresswell immediately ordered Sub-Lieutenant David Balme and a handful of men into a small boat to see if anything could be salvaged. 

What they found was well beyond their expectations. The whole wireless office was undisturbed and the code books and the Enigma machine, which Balme and his Telegraphist, Allen Long, didn’t recognise but thought “looked interesting”, was still in working order. They were also very impressed by the amount of food the submarine’s crew had managed to cram on board. The search of the badly damaged, semi-submerged, vessel – even when surfaced most of a Submarine is below the waterline and one unlucky leak could have plunged the damaged  U Boat to the depths - was conducted in darkness and accompanied by a constant chorus of hisses, bangs and ominous sounding “thumps” as the sounds of the other ships continuing the hunt a few miles away strained the submarine’s pressure hull. After they had stripped anything that could be used from inside the submarine (including Lemp’s Iron Cross, which Baker-Cresswell returned to his family after the war; his cap is held by the Imperial War Museum) the submarine sank the following day. The secrecy was absolute. Later, King George VI remarked to Balme when he was awarding him a Distinguished Service Cross for what he called “perhaps the most important single event in the whole war at sea” that the medal was not of an even higher distinction only because of the secrecy that surrounded it – Victoria Crosses tend to be noticed…[5]

So even as they accepted the cheers of the people of Battersea, the crew of the Bulldog knew that they had already played their part in winning the war. And what of the people of Battersea? They raised a total of £480,00 (far exceeding the target of £450,000 - and the equivalent of over £19 million today) to support their destroyer.[6] The Bulldog served till the very end of the War, indeed and it was not until the day after VE Day, that, on her decks, German officers surrendered the Channel Islands, on 9 May 1945.

David Balme died in 2016. He recorded his experiences, including the capture of U110, as part of the Imperial War Museum’s Oral History project.[7]

Sources

1. Warships Week”, Southwestern Star, 27 March 1942, 1.
2. Ibid.
3. Alexandra von Tunzelmann, “You give Historical Films and Bad Name”, The Guardian, 26 February 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/feb/25/u-571-reel-history
4. Stephen Roskill, Capture at Sea, 1959. The 2011 edition of this book contains an essay by Prof. Barry Gough which updates the story and fills in some of the detail about what Roskill had to leave out (Seaforth, 2011). 
5. “Quiet Naval Hero Who Rescued Enigma Machine Dies Aged 95,” https://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/news/2016/january/06/160106-enigma-naval-hero
6. “HMS Bulldog”, Southwestern Star, 29 January 1942, 1; Bank of England Inflation Calculator https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator
7. https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80011762