One month before D-Day in the spring of 1944, a vital intelligence source evaporated, endangering the success of the invasion and triggering a high-level espionage investigation.
The Japanese ambassador to Nazi Germany, Lieutenant General and Baron Hiroshi Ōshima had developed a close personal relationship with Hitler. His dispatches had unique value, providing the allies with intimate, day-by-day insight into the mind of Adolph Hitler. From a top-secret Signals Intelligence Service (SIS) station disguised as a rural Virginia farm, my father led the cryptanalyst team responsible for decoding and analyzing these intercepts.
A massed Nazi force at Normandy, before we could establish a beachhead, would drive our troops back into the sea, inflicting catastrophic losses. The success of the invasion planning had come down to the Allies’ ability to read not only the German field generals’ intentions, but also the increasingly unpredictable and irrational decisions of Hitler.
From the time I was a university undergraduate, I have been gathering material for a book on my father’s service, 1943-1945, at Vint Hill Farms Station (VHFS), located in Fauquier County, Virginia, about 50 miles from Washington, DC.
Before they passed away, I interviewed my father, Richard Bradford Winslow II, PhD, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University and other members of the team, including Paul Zamoski; Daniel Allerton, PhD, Chairman Emeritus, Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania and Stefan Abassian, PhD, Dean of Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley.
The last team member, Mr. Zamoski, died in 2001 and, on November 18, via Federal Express, I received a package from the law firm of Bulkowski, Weiner and Monohan, executors of his estate. It contained seven handwritten notebooks, containing startling revelations withheld during our earlier interviews, which radically changed the direction of my planned narrative.
This is Paul Zamoski’s story. I believe that my father would have wanted it this way if he had lived long enough to learn the whole truth, as would his colleagues and, certainly, the Arundell sisters.
I will leave it to others to relate the many other contributions of the brilliant and dedicated code-breakers who many believe were responsible for our victory. However, I have added amplifications and clarifications to Mr. Zamoski’s narrative at intervals, based on my interviews with the principals and research into the five million World War II intelligence documents only recently declassified.
We begin with Corporal Zamoski’s journal entry recounting the day Baron Ōshima’s transmissions were interrupted.
Richard Bradford Winslow, III, PhD
May 2003
◙ ◙ ◙
May 6, 1944: I’d been with the team exactly a year-the best year of my life. It started as a routine day. Heat was already building up in our small round office. Summer comes early in Virginia. Mort sat in front of the input keyboard of our PURPLE machine. It looked like two portable typewriters connected by a heavy cable. You wouldn’t have guessed that something so ordinary was the most closely guarded secret of the war: Unless you saw the innards beneath the black cloth-covered wooden case. Inside, it looked like a Rube Goldberg contraption with four strange saw-toothed metal wheels like gears. Connected to the rotors was a bewildering array of wires that led back to the typewriter keyboard. Each time the operator punched a key all three rotors jerked up and moved forward one place, chattering and throwing off sparks that tinged the air in the small office we occupied with the faint odor of an electrical fire.
Sweat darkened the underarms of Mort Frankland’s oversized khaki shirt. All signs of the heavy starch the post laundry had added were gone and the shirt hung on him like a tarp thrown over a kiddy car. The epaulets of the shirt had slipped forward off his scrawny shoulders, letting the shiny gold second lieutenants’ bars, droop halfway to his chest. His signal corps patch was down around his right elbow. He looked like Lt. Fuzz in the Beetle Bailey comic strip. You never would have guessed that he was a distinguished math prodigy, who had amazed his elders with his elegant proofs and won his PhD from NYU at nineteen.
I knew the discomfort didn’t matter to Mort, or to the rest of the team-Danny, Richard, Stefan and Denise. We popped salt pills the Army provided and worked through the long days and nights. Denise Seranto was the only other team member besides me without a PhD. Like worshippers clustered around the alter, our wooden desks made a semicircle around Mort and the PURPLE machine, with the door to the stairwell just behind it. We were all up, excited, anticipating.
The Army, the miserable living and working conditions, being away from home, none of it mattered that day. Earlier intercepts had alerted us: A transmission that would contain the most vital intelligence of the war-that could very well help end the war-would be coming soon. And we were the crypto team that would decode it, translate it and analyze it for General Eisenhower and maybe even President Roosevelt!
Mort had just used the machine to decode a short intercept addressed to the Jap embassy in Berlin from the Ambassador’s boss in Tokyo, Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori. Stefan was busy translating it into English. The rest of us weren’t paying much attention.
It was Ambassador Ōshima’s report to Togo we were waiting for; the detailed treatise we expected on his recent tour of Nazi defenses on the French coast. The report that would give Eisenhower the final intelligence he needed to schedule the invasion across the Channel. Earlier intercepts had alerted us when Hitler himself had authorized the unusual mission and ordered the Nazi general staff to give Ōshima the royal treatment in France. But detailed transmission on what he’d seen and heard hadn’t been intercepted yet.
Stefan Abassian said, “Richard, you better check me. Make sure I got this right.”
Richard Winslow was the oldest. The grey in his hair had earned him his silver first lieutenant’s bars and the title of squad leader. The rest wore gold bars like Mort, except me. I’d just gotten my second strip. The hint of alarm in Stefan’s normally serene voice was enough to pull us away from our desks to look over his shoulder. The translation he’d written in flowing longhand on the paper in front of him was simple:
“Suspend transmission. Use diplomatic pouch for all communication until further notice. More later. TOGO”
Stefan had the translation right, and he knew it. He just didn’t want to believe it. None of us did. There was silence in our round windowless office-a silo, attached to a barn, with traces of barley dust in the cracks in the walls, the sour smell of stored grain still lingering. Reminders of the working farm it had been until the SIS bought the estate a year earlier and subdivided the silo into offices, one over the other.
Richard pushed his large steel-framed glasses up on his nose-Army-issue flat-sided “gas-mask” glasses-and read the message, his lips silently mouthing every word. Satisfied it really did carry the news that we would receive no more missives from Ōshima, he handed it to me, as he did every other message after it was decoded, translated and analyzed. He didn’t need to spend any time analyzing this. The meaning was obvious and disastrous.
The single sheet felt heavy, as though the message were engraved on lead. It slipped from my fingers and we watched it glide to the floor. Mort said what we were all thinking, “It can’t happen-not now. With the invasion coming…”
There’s a place on the back of my head just above the base of the skull. It’s kind of flat, not that my Dad made it that way, but it seemed like he knew it was more sensitive or something. When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, the son of a bitch used to hit me there with his open hand, rock-hard from fifteen years in front of a blast furnace. He thought it was funny to slap me as he walked by, jarring me until it felt like my eyes were going to pop out of my head. As I bent over to pick up the scrap of paper, it was as though he had just walked by and my brain was boiling.
I stumbled over to the secure TWX machine, dialed the number for SIS headquarters at Arlington Hall and started transmitting. Sometimes I greeted the Hall operator over the wire. Not today. Today the clatter, ding of the keys as they hit the ribbon said, “Doom.”
When it stopped, there was silence, until Mort asked, “What are we going to do?”
“Nothing we can do.” Danny Allerton said, rising from his desk to comfort Mort. He fashioned himself as Mort’s protector, but despite his brilliance, he could barely take care of himself.
“But it will be all over,” Mort’s high voice cracked. He loved the challenge of this work and the knowledge of its importance to the war effort, as we all did, despite the difficulties.
◙ ◙ ◙
There was, at that time, a sense of tense anticipation on both sides. The Allies had advanced against the enemy in Africa and Italy. The Russians had beaten them at Stalingrad. Nevertheless, there could be no march into Germany until France was retaken.
The Allies had been running an elaborate ruse, Operation Fortitude, for months, to throw Hitler off on the timing and location of the invasion. They had to keep him thinking that Pas de Calais, where the English Channel was narrowest (only 20 miles from the cliffs of Dover) was the planned invasion site instead of the real site at Normandy. Was it working? Ōshima’s report would tell them.
-RBW, III
◙ ◙ ◙
Thirty-seven minutes after the TWX stopped thrashing, the direct line to the Hall, a field phone in a wooden box, rang hollowly. We jumped in unison like passengers in a car hitting a pothole. People at the Hall spoke to us as little as possible. Their big-time cryptanalysts lost the Ōshima mission to our team. They were headquarters, at the seat of power just across the river from DC, and we were “the farm,” fifty miles away in rural Virginia. The Hall was still smarting from losing out to its country cousins.
The telephone rang again, a fire alarm, a storm warning, a battle stations signal. Richard took his ever-present curved meerschaum pipe from his mouth, reached gingerly into the olive-drab box next to the TWX machine. He picked up the black receiver, as though it were something alive and dangerous. “Third Signal Squad. May I help you?” he said into the phone, his baritone smooth and formal, as usual. He was the only one of us who could sound military.
“What the hell are you men doing down there? Are you absolutely sure you rendered that message correctly?”
The man on the other end was yelling so loud I could hear him clearly across the room. Richard held the receiver away from his ear and we huddled around him. Listening, his bushy eyebrows above the ugly glasses pulled close together in confusion and irritation. Questioning looks passed among us. There were only shrugged shoulders in reply.
“To whom am I speaking?” Richard said into the phone, and a voice brayed back, “This is Gen. Tilden. Do you realize you’ve just lost our most important strategic intelligence asset at the most critical moment of the war?”
That was one of those “when did you stop beating your wife,” questions the Army loved to ask. This time it wasn’t a barracks sergeant chewing out a lowly private; it was the commanding general of the SIS.
Richard wasn’t used to being yelled at. None of them were. They were eminent scholars-tops in their fields-accustomed to the civility of academia.
Without waiting for an answer, the General said, “Stay there. Don’t move. Colonel Molson and his team are on the way.”