Assessment 9 out of 10
I was lucky enough to hear Dr Fry at last year’s Jersey Festival of Words. The book is the product of deep research into records which were long kept secret. Some remain closed. The focus is on women’s unrecognised contribution to British intelligence during a period from the First World War until after the end of Second. Many involved took the confidentiality of their role and signing the Official Secrets’ Act with them to their graves.
Women with their meticulousness were well suited to back-office work storing and analysing data.
Even though the focus is on women the book provides a picture of the breadth of the intelligence work. The conversations of German prisoners were listened to with hidden microphones revealing German use of navigational beams and the development of the V1 and V2. Then following analysis of photographs, Peenemunde in 1943 Pomerania was subject to intense bombing, setting back the V 1 &2 Programme months. Fry refers to the British bending the beams. This analysis is disputed. Rather they were producing false signals to confuse German fliers.
Models of landing zones & the inland landscape were made from photographs, so soldiers knew where they were attacking
Fry was able to establish that in the Great War Edith Cavel was involved in Intelligence work. Her organisation escorted 15,000 French escapers into the neutral Netherland. No wonder the Germans shot her. The Germans built an electrified fence between Belgium & the Netherlands. You think of Trump.
MI19 developed escape routes out of France. 5 doubles of the original 6 kayaked up the Gironde in December 1942. Only one reached their target mining 6 vessels, The paddlers Hasler & Sparks were helped in March 1943 to cross into Spain.
Their colleagues were either killed or captured & if captured executed under Hitler’s order that captured Allied special forces should be shot, which followed the Operation Basalt raid on Sark in October, 1942.
Radio hams listened to patterns of enemy signals; Codebreakers decoded the unbreakable Enigma leading in 1941 to the sinking of the Bismark and showed false information fed to the Germans was believed. Turing deciphered signals for Naval Intelligence, until use of a 4th wheel on the machines couldn’t be broken, & them they were, leading to attacks on the U boats resulting in Donitz withdrawing them from Atlantic in March 1943.
Use of double agents sowed deception, in June 1941 suggesting a British attack on Norway which meant troops were held back from the attack on the Soviet Union. Deception suggested the V1 & V2 were missing their targets when they weren’t, so the Germans were led into undershooting the target.
This is a dense work, which moves on at pace. Each chapter had enough to be developed into a book of its own.
Of Books, Bikes & Islands 