The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939–1945

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The last link in the foreign intelligence chain before ‘Barbarossa’ was Winston Churchill. British perceptions of the Soviet Union, and of the potential of the Red Army, were coloured by the loathing of most soldiers, diplomats and Tory politicians for everything to do with the bloodstained Bolsheviks. Moreover, their expectations of German strategy were distorted by a nationalistic conviction that Hitler saw victory over Britain as his foremost objective. When Sir Victor Mallet, Britain’s ambassador in Stockholm, reported in March that ‘all military circles in Berlin are convinced of conflict with Russia this spring and consider success certain’, the Foreign Office dismissed his dispatch as reflecting ‘the usual contradictory rumours’. On 24 March 1941, Stafford Cripps cabled from Moscow, reporting his Swedish counterpart’s information: ‘German plan is as follows: the attack on England will be continued with U-boats and from the air, but there will be no invasion. At the same time a drive against Russia will take place. This drive will be by three large armies: the first based at Warsaw under von Bock, the second based at Konigsberg, the third based at Cracow under List.’

The Joint Intelligence Committee rejected this warning. In early April the JIC’s assessment was not dissimilar from that of Stalin: ‘1. These reports may be put out by Germans as part of the war of nerves 2. German invasion would probably result in such chaos throughout Soviet Union that the Germans would have to reorganise everything in the occupied territory and would meanwhile lose supplies which they are now drawing from the Soviet Union at any rate for a long time to come 3. Germany’s resources, though immense, would not permit her to continue her campaign in the Balkans, to maintain the present scale of air attack against this country, to continue her offensive against Egypt, and at the same time to invade, occupy and reorganise a large part of the Soviet Union … 5. There have been indications that German General Staff are opposed to war on two fronts and in favour of disposing of Great Britain before attacking Soviet Union.’

Here was a manifestation of the foremost sin in intelligence analysis: the JIC reached conclusions founded upon British and not Nazi logic. The prime minister, however, had long nursed a hunch that Hitler would turn East. On 21 April he dispatched a personal warning to Stalin, inspired by Cripps’s message and some Ultra indications. This was received with derision. Maisky, the Soviet ambassador, taunted Brendan Bracken: ‘Since when does Churchill tend to take the interests of the Soviet Union so closely to his heart?’ He told Bracken, Churchill’s intimate, that such missives from London had entirely the opposite effect to that which was intended. He did not add a vital corollary: that Whitehall’s traitors had briefed the Kremlin about the JIC’s disbelief that Hitler would invade. As late as 23 May, the Committee reported that a new agreement between Germany and Russia might be imminent. Foolish though such speculation sounds today, it was then less than two years since just such a satanic pact had been signed. If the two tyrants had struck a bargain before, why should they not do so again? Nor was Moscow the only place where Churchill’s sincerity was questioned. Bjorn Prytz, the Swedish ambassador in London, told Maisky he thought Britain’s prime minister had no idea how to win the war, save by trying to drag the Russians in. Cripps told the American ambassador in Moscow that he could well imagine the British acquiescing in a German invasion of Russia, if Hitler made a compromise peace offer to Britain.

When informed and influential foreigners clung to such opinions, Stalin’s cynicism about war warnings from Churchill, whom he knew to be defying the views of his own advisers, becomes less baffling. In April, Khozyain ordered the Red Army and the intelligence services to ignore both alleged German military preparations beyond the border, and repeated Luftwaffe violations of Soviet airspace. At the end of the month Merkulov submitted a report designed to silence the ‘warmongers’ and talk up prospects for a diplomatic rapprochement with Berlin. He said that German successes in North Africa had encouraged Hitler to finish off Britain before opening any new front. Much was made of the dissension between Hitler and his generals, which was real enough. The NKVD also suggested – a travesty of the truth – that the Luftwaffe was unwilling to fight Russia because of the Red Air Force’s recognised superiority. Stalin briefed his intelligence chiefs that their first objective was now diplomatic: to clarify Hitler’s demands – the price he would seek to extract from Moscow for keeping the peace. They responded that Berlin was likely to want an increased flow of grain, oil and other commodities. Von der Schulenberg’s diplomacy played its part in feeding Stalin’s delusions: as late as mid-May, the German ambassador urged the Soviet dictator to write to Hitler, exploring common ground. Meanwhile Russia’s Neutrality Pact with Japan, signed on 13 April 1941, represented a sincere and desperate Soviet attempt to avert war between the two countries, and thus to reduce the range of threats facing the Soviet Union. When foreign minister Yōsuke Matsuoka left Moscow bearing the signed treaty, in an almost unprecedented gesture Stalin went to the station to see him off.

Soviet embassies and intelligence stations adhered rigidly to orders from Molotov and Beria to report nothing which suggested the inevitability of war. On 24 May, when the Finnish ambassador in Istanbul gave his Soviet counterpart details of German formations deployed on the Soviet border, Stalin’s man asked contemptuously whether the Finn had counted the soldiers himself. A week later, Timoshenko and Zhukov were summoned to the Kremlin, and arrived expecting orders to put Soviet defences on full alert. Instead they were handed Stalin’s acceptance of a transparently fraudulent request from Berlin that squads of Germans should be allowed to roam inside Russia’s border in search of 1914–18 war dead. The generals were obliged to fume in impotence while Hitler’s scouts surveyed their chosen battlefields, protected by spades and Khozyain’s orders.

The British government’s clumsy handling of the 10 May parachute descent on Scotland by Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess converted what should have been a propaganda disaster for Hitler into a major embarrassment for his enemy. It persuaded Stalin that both the Germans and the British were toying with him, while preparing to make a separate peace with each other. Lord Beaverbrook, a supreme mischief-maker whose interventions were all the more damaging because he was a known intimate of Churchill, told Maisky in London, ‘Of course Hess is an emissary of Hitler.’ The press lord claimed, rightly enough, that Hess sought to promote a common front against Bolshevik barbarism. Maisky deduced that Britain’s future conduct depended not – as he had hitherto supposed – on Churchillian resolution, but instead on the acceptability of the German terms he assumed Hess to have brought with him from Hitler.

In the late spring of 1941 Stalin daily expected to receive details of an Anglo–German compromise peace, followed by a demand from Berlin that Russia should join the Axis and accelerate its economic support for Germany. As late as October 1942 Stalin wrote to Maisky: ‘All of us in Moscow have gained the impression that Churchill is aiming at the defeat of the USSR, in order then to come to terms with the Germany of Hitler or Bruning at the expense of our country.’ With breathtaking hypocrisy, he chose to forget that in the mood of panic that overtook the Kremlin after ‘Barbarossa’ began, the NKVD’s Pavel Sudoplatov had been ordered to pass to the Bulgarian ambassador, for forwarding to Berlin, a secret Kremlin message inviting a compromise Russo–German peace. Only because Hitler was uninterested did that approach go nowhere. At an October 1944 dinner in the Kremlin Stalin could still offer a mocking but at least semi-serious toast to ‘the British intelligence service which had inveigled Hess into coming to England’.

In June 1941 the NKVD dragged from a cell in the Lubyanka Captain Aleksandr Nelidov, an erstwhile Abwehr man in Warsaw, to invite his opinion of Hess’s flight to Britain. The old soldier responded immediately: ‘This means war, without any doubt. Hess is recruiting England as an ally against the USSR …’ Nelidov, born in 1893, was a former tsarist gunner officer who had roamed Turkey, France and Germany following the White Army’s defeat in Russia’s civil war. He struck up friendships in the German general staff, and attended several of their 1930s war games. Early in 1939 he was foolish enough to accept from Canaris an assignment to Warsaw, where he was promptly seized by the Poles. When the Russians overran eastern Poland and found him languishing in Lvov prison, as a known Nazi intelligence agent he was dispatched to Moscow.

By the time Zoya Rybkina, the tall, strikingly attractive senior operations officer of the German section of the NKVD, was handed his file in mid-1940, Nelidov was a broken man. Rybkina wrote contemptuously in her 1998 memoirs: ‘His behaviour was servile … I felt amused by him but also ashamed of him, as an officer of the old school.’ The wretched captain was repeatedly summoned from his cell to be quizzed about the Wehrmacht through the day and far into the night: ‘His lunch was brought from our canteen, and when he saw a knife and fork for the first time, he pushed them away and said in terrorised tones: “But I am not supposed to have these.”’

Rybkina set Nelidov to work composing a narrative of the German war games he had attended, complete with maps and order-of-battle details. He told the NKVD officer that the German plan for invading Russia assumed that Minsk would fall on the fifth day. Rybkina wrote: ‘I burst out laughing. “How come, on the fifth day?!” He was embarrassed and swore by every god that this was what [Gen. Wilhelm] Keitel [chief of OKW] reckoned on.’ She passed on the joke to Fitin, who snarled, ‘This bastard is such a liar. Just think about it, Minsk on the fifth day!’ Golikov, the Red Army’s chief of intelligence, laughed even louder: ‘So they have decided to drive wedges forward. And imagine – they plan to take Minsk on the fifth day! Well done, Keitel, you are a strong man, such a strong man! …’ But Nelidov also told his jailers that Gen. Hans von Seekt, the hoary old former army chief of staff, predicted disaster for a German invasion of the Soviet Union, because the logistics were unsustainable.

Doubts persist, unlikely ever to be resolved, as to what precisely the Red Army knew before ‘Barbarossa’. Marshal Zhukov insisted to the end of his days that he was kept in ignorance of much of the foreign intelligence that went to the Kremlin. If the Germans invaded, he himself expected them to drive south-westwards to secure Ukraine and its immense natural resources, though he thought possible an alternative attack on an axis Riga–Dvinsk. Soviet military attachés, especially those in the Balkans, provided detailed and broadly accurate information about German deployments. Russian frontier-watchers contributed substantially more than the NKVD’s or GRU’s foreign agents to the Stavka’s (armed forces high command) grasp of the Wehrmacht’s order of battle. By April Zhukov realised the importance of the central front in German planning – large forces were concentrated in East Prussia and Poland. But conflicting evidence reflected continuing arguments between Hitler and his generals.

It is often stated that the Red Army was wholly surprised when the Germans attacked. This is less than true. In the weeks before war, despite Stalin’s scepticism he allowed large forces to be redeployed in the West and brought to a relatively high state of readiness. The disasters subsequently suffered by the Russians were overwhelmingly attributable to the rotten condition of the armed forces and their leadership, rather than to lack of immediate preparedness. Stalin deserves most of the blame for what befell the Soviet Union in 1941, but surprise was the least of the reasons for catastrophe. The Red Army was outfought by the Wehrmacht at every level, save that some of its units displayed an animal sacrificial courage that astonished their foes. Before the invasion, on 12 May Zhukov had moved into forward positions four Soviet armies, 800,000 men. On 2 June Beria told Stalin that the Germans were at a high state of readiness along the entire border. On the 12th a further report on German deployments went to Stalin, noting a high level of hostile intelligence activity: the Wehrmacht had some two hundred ‘line-crossers’ scouting in the Soviet border region. In response, Stalin grudgingly agreed that war readiness should be reduced to two hours for rifle divisions, three for motorised and artillery divisions. This scarcely constituted absolute passivity in the face of the threat.

Both the Russians and the British were naïve enough to expect an ultimatum to precede hostilities. On 11 June, Sir Stafford Cripps returned home ‘for consultations’. The purpose of his recall was exactly as stated – to enable the British government to discuss with him the bewildering and momentous developments that were unfolding. London was dismayed by a German propaganda campaign, designed to persuade the world that a new Russo–German rapprochement was imminent. The Kremlin was shocked by Cripps’s journey, for the opposite reason: Stalin assumed that the British were preparing some byzantine diplomatic stroke, which would leave the Soviet Union isolated. On 16 June Maisky was summoned to Britain’s Foreign Office and given a cool recital of its latest intelligence on German deployments, based on Ultra. The Wehrmacht was thought to have eighty divisions in Poland, thirty in Romania, five in Finland and north Norway, 115 in all. This was little more than half the reality, substantially fewer than the GRU had already identified. It was a reflection of the limitations of Ultra in 1941, and of the War Office’s poor analytical capability at this stage, that they got the numbers so badly wrong. But even former sceptics on the JIC no longer doubted the overarching reality: Hitler was about to invade the Soviet Union.

In Moscow, the NKVD adopted a desperate last-minute ploy: its operatives intercepted two German diplomatic couriers, about to leave Moscow for Berlin with the German embassy’s dispatches. One man was trapped in a hotel lift, while the other was locked in the bathroom of his suite. In the five minutes before the lift-bound courier was freed, the NKVD photographed the German ambassador’s correspondence before restoring it to its briefcase. The contents, when examined in the Lubyanka, proved equivocal: Schulenberg reported that he was confident Soviet intentions remained peaceful. But he also stated that he had obeyed instructions from Berlin to reduce his staff to an absolute minimum, an obvious preliminary to war.

On Cripps’s way back from London he stopped in Stockholm, where he told the director of the Foreign Ministry about rumours of a new Russo–German agreement. Rubbish, said the Swede. His country’s intelligence service had intercepted orders to German forces in Norway, which made plain that they would attack between 20 and 25 June. The Swedish ambassador in Moscow, doyen of the diplomatic community, reported: ‘The only certain thing is that we face either a battle of global significance between the Third Reich and the Soviet Empire or the most gigantic case of blackmail in world history.’ Zoya Rybkina, key NKVD analyst of Germany, described how on 17 June she prepared a situation report for Pavel Fitin to present to Stalin, based chiefly, but not entirely, on the Red Orchestra’s messages – Sorge, of course, reported to the GRU. She later professed to have concluded that war was inevitable: ‘All of Germany’s military preparations for armed aggression are complete, and an attack can be expected at any time.’ In reality, however, the document was more equivocal than its drafters afterwards tried to claim. To cover themselves, they repeatedly used such phrases as ‘It is not indicated on what data the source has reached his conclusions … Harnack does not know where, when, or in what connection Halder had expressed this point of view … Harnack does not take at face value the statement of Göring, and refers to his notorious bragging.’ Knowing that the Kremlin still stubbornly rejected their own near-certainty, they felt obliged to assert doubts they did not have.

Merkulov and Fitin went together to the Kremlin at noon on 17 June. The latter, who had seldom met Stalin, afterwards acknowledged his own trepidation, which might more justly be called terror. The two grey, bleak, merciless heroes of so many state killings agreed their line before entering Khozyain’s presence: they would describe their own intelligence assessment as merely ‘likely to be true’, rather than certain. They found Stalin calm, pacing the room as was his custom. Fitin saw the most recent decrypt from Berlin lying on his desk. ‘I have read your report,’ murmured Stalin in his accustomed slow, understated fashion. ‘So Germany is getting ready to attack the Soviet Union?’ And he stared at both Fitin and Merkulov.

They had not been expecting him to address the issue so baldly, and felt lost. ‘We were silent,’ recalled Fitin. ‘Only three days before, on 14 June, newspapers had published the TASS statement saying that Germany was still unwaveringly adhering to the conditions of the Soviet-German pact.’ Both he and Merkulov preserved the stone-faced silence that seemed to offer their most plausible path to survival. Stalin fired a string of contemptuous questions about the NKVD’s sources. Fitin described the Schulze-Boysen/Harnack networks, then Stalin said: ‘Listen, intelligence chief, there are no Germans that can be trusted, except Wilhelm Pieck’ – the Comintern’s secretary, now exiled in Moscow. Then followed a silence that seemed to the visitors interminable before Stalin once more looked up, gazed hard at them and barked, ‘Misinformation! You may go.’ In another version of the conversation, he instructed the intelligence chiefs to go back to the sources, check their information and once more review the NKVD assessment. What is certain is that Stalin rejected the war warning.

Rybkina wrote later: ‘It is hard to describe the state of our team while we awaited Fitin’s return from the Kremlin. He called to his office me and [Pavel] Zhuravlev’ – the veteran director of the German section, much admired by colleagues. Fitin tossed the stapled document onto the coffee table at which his two subordinates sat. ‘I’ve reported to the Boss,’ he said. ‘Iosif Vissarionovich studied your report and threw it back at me. “This is bluff!” he said irritably. “Don’t start panic. Don’t deal with nonsense. You’d better go back and get a clearer picture.”’ Fitin told the nonplussed intelligence officers: ‘Check this one more time and report to me.’ Once alone together, Zhuravlev said to Rybkina, with the parade of conviction indispensable to survival in the Soviet universe: ‘Stalin can see further from his bell-tower. Apart from our reports he is being briefed by the GRU, ambassadors, trade missions, journalists.’ Rybkina professed to agree, but added: ‘This means that our agents, who have been tested over years, must be considered untrustworthy.’ Zhuravlev shrugged, with authentic Russian fatalism, ‘We shall live, we shall see.’ Beria, in grovelling anticipation of Khozyain’s wishes, ordered that forty NKVD officers who had passed on warnings of war should be ‘ground into labour camp dust’. He wrote to Stalin on 21 June: ‘I again insist on recalling and punishing our ambassador to Berlin, Dekanozov, who keeps bombarding me with “reports” on Hitler’s alleged preparations to attack the USSR. He has reported that this attack will start tomorrow … But I and my people, Iosif Vissarionovich, have firmly embedded in our memory your wise conclusion. Hitler is not going to attack us in 1941.’

Much ink has been expended by historians on attempts to determine what proportion of the intelligence garnered by Russia’s secret services reached the Kremlin, rather than remaining in the desk drawers of Beria, Merkulov and Fitin. This controversy seems spurious. Beyond doubt, Stalin was provided with overwhelming evidence about the German military build-up on the Soviet border. The Homeric blunder lay in his analysis of its significance. Posterity derides Stalin for rejecting obvious truth. But he merely chose to share the strategic view held by the British, and especially their Joint Intelligence Committee, with the sole exception of Churchill, until the last days before ‘Barbarossa’. This seems important in comprehending the tyrant’s conduct. Thanks to Whitehall traitors, the Kremlin knew that Bletchley Park had begun to read German wireless traffic on a substantial scale, which increased Stalin’s belief in London‘s omniscience. A perversely exaggerated respect for the skill of Britain’s secret services and the guile of its diplomacy thus caused him to accept Whitehall’s view of Hitler’s intentions in preference to that of his own marvellous networks of spies. He could never believe that Churchill’s personal judgement about Hitler’s intention to attack Russia was both honestly expressed, and superior to that of Britain’s intelligence apparatus – until the JIC changed its mind, thanks to Ultra, just before Hitler struck.

Here was the most remarkable aspect of Kremlin behaviour in advance of the invasion: ‘Barbarossa’ did not represent a failure by the Soviet intelligence-gathering machine. Few military operations in history have been so comprehensively flagged. There was, instead, simply a historic misjudgement by the head of state. Stalin’s deafness during the overture to ‘Barbarossa’ emphasised the indissolubility of the links between intelligence, diplomacy and governance. Unless all three did their parts, each one was useless.

In the early hours of 22 June 1941, the Lubyanka was almost silent. The NKVD’s heads of department customarily went home at 8 p.m., though never without a nod from Beria or Merkulov. Pavel Sudoplatov was among the building’s few occupants above cell level when, at 3 a.m., the telephone rang. It was Merkulov, who announced that a German invasion of the Soviet Union had begun. Sudoplatov began hastily calling staff into the building, including his wife Emma, who had abandoned operational work to become an agent trainer. Leonid Eitingon, his deputy, almost invariably cracked a joke or two on arrival in the office; but like every other Russian that fateful morning he found nothing to justify breaching the building’s mood of stunned near-paralysis.

The memoirs of Soviet intelligence officers sometimes convey an illusion that life within the Lubyanka was little different from that in Broadway, but glimpses nonetheless break through of the institutionalised terror. The White Russian officer Aleksandr Nelidov, one of those who had predicted ‘Barbarossa’, was told nothing of its occurrence until on 22 July 1941 he was dragged from his cell into the office of Zoya Rybkina. He grew wide-eyed when he found her sitting behind black-out curtains amid the crump of falling bombs and anti-aircraft fire. ‘Zoya Ivanovna!’ he exclaimed. ‘They are firing real shells. This is war!’ She nodded and said, ‘Today is exactly a month since it started. And Minsk did fall, not on the fifth day as you said that the Germans predicted, but on the sixth …’ A guard came running, out of breath, to take Nelidov back to his subterranean quarters. The old tsarist said gloomily, ‘Farewell, Zoya Ivanovna. You can trust all that I have written here, in this room.’ He crossed himself and bowed as he departed, plainly expecting to be shot.

Two days later, however, he was returned to Rybkina’s office, abruptly handed a suitcase of clothes to replace his prison rags, and ordered to go into an adjacent room and change into them. The guard returned a few minutes later and reported that Nelidov was sitting sobbing, paralysed by fear. The prisoner kept asking why they needed to dress him so smartly before killing him. Rybkina marched next door and told the wretched man to pull himself together. ‘Come on, Aleksandr Sergeevich, how could you let yourself go like this? You need to get a grip. I am taking you to meet my bosses.’ They proceeded first to the offices of Pavel Zhuravlev and his deputy Pavel Sudoplatov, then all together presented themselves before Pavel Fitin. The general invited the astounded Nelidov to become an NKVD agent in Turkey, a country he knew well.

Nelidov said with a choked, hysterical giggle, ‘But first of all I should be … executed …’ Fitin responded impatiently, ‘I am asking whether you would agree to work in Turkey. Turkey, as you know, is neutral.’ Nelidov muttered, ‘Whatever you want.’ Rybkina stared reproachfully at her ungracious protégé, who simply muttered again and again, ‘Whatever you want …’ She took the stupefied man back to her office, where he asked why all the chiefs he met were introduced as Pavel; was this a common codename? No, no, said his new employer irritably, merely a matter of chance. She led him out of the building to a nearby restaurant called the Aragvi, where they sat among tables occupied by Red Army officers, and she recommended the kebab.

Her guest remained too traumatised to eat. When she ordered wine, fearful of being poisoned he begged to be allowed to swap glasses. At last he took a cautious sip, then asked, ‘So when are they coming for me?’ Rybkina responded wearily, ‘Didn’t you hear the order for your release being read?’ Her guest persisted: ‘I don’t understand. How can I be forgiven?’ After lunch she suggested that she show him around a nearby agricultural exhibition, and they drove down Gorky Street, where every shop window was sandbagged and the traffic policemen carried gas masks. She left her man that evening at the Moskva hotel, telling him that Vasily Zarubin had been appointed as his case officer.

Rybkina’s narrative of these events is shot through with merciless contempt for the weakness of Nelidov. For all her striking looks, she was not a woman to whom any prudent man would offer his back, far less his lips. Nelidov never went to Turkey. When Zarubin knocked on his door next morning, it remained unopened. On breaking in, he found his new recruit suspended from a rope made of torn sheets. The transition from doomed prisoner to favoured protégé of the Lubyanka was too much for his broken spirit. Who can say that Nelidov’s last decision was ill-judged?

5

Divine Winds (#u4fc4ded5-8677-5eda-950d-acfe9e4567f1)

1 MRS FERGUSON’S TEA SET

The Japanese made less effective use of intelligence than any other warring nation between 1942 and 1945. But in the months before they went to war, their decisions were significantly influenced by an extraordinary British indiscretion. It would be an exaggeration to say that Mrs Violet Ferguson’s tea set, scarcely a masterpiece of the potter’s art, caused Japan to attack the British Empire. But the incident in which it played a part was an example of an intelligence coup that helped to decide the fate of nations.

On 11 November 1940 SS Automedon, a humble 7,528-ton British merchant ship of the Blue Funnel Line, exotically named for Achilles’ charioteer, was ploughing a lonely course for Penang, in a stretch of the Indian Ocean west of Sumatra far from any active theatre of war. Nonetheless, at 7 a.m. when the officer of the watch spotted a distant ship, he woke his sleeping captain. ‘The old man’, veteran seafarer William Ewan, quickly made his way to the bridge, just forward of the ship’s spindly funnel. Ewan peered hard through his binoculars, decided that the stranger was a Dutch liner, and held course. At 8.03 the other vessel was less than a mile distant when it broke out the international flag hoists ‘Do not raise the alarm’ and ‘Stop’, then fired a warning shot across the bows of the freighter, which had left Liverpool on 24 September, just as the Battle of Britain gave way to the Blitz, carrying a mixed cargo of aircraft, cars, machine parts, microscopes, military uniforms, cameras, sewing machines, beer, 550 cases of whisky, 2.5 million Chesterfield cigarettes, and six million dollars in newly printed Straits currency.

The interloper was the disguised German armed merchant-cruiser Atlantis, one of the most successful commerce raiders of the war, which had already captured and sunk twelve Allied vessels since leaving Bremen on 31 March. The ships’ 11 November meeting was not a matter of chance. The Atlantis’s captain, forty-one-year-old Bernhard Rogge, had captured a set of British Merchant Navy codes aboard the freighter City of Baghdad on 11 July, which assisted him in intercepting other vessels thereafter. Moreover, an Italian intelligence unit in the Mediterranean forwarded decrypts which helped to pinpoint the freighter. Automedon’s bridge crew failed to read the German flag hoist, and the ship’s radio-operator began tapping out an ‘RRR’ emergency signal. The doughty Captain Ewan shouted ‘Hard on the wheel!’ and his ship began to sheer away. He then said, ‘Come on everyone, let’s do it – we’re going to fight.’ On the stern deck of the merchantman was mounted a single elderly 4-inch gun. Unfortunately for the British, however, Atlantis carried five 5.9-inch guns and a sophisticated fire-control system. Having intercepted the British ship’s distress call, the Germans started shooting in earnest. The first shell of Atlantis’s opening salvo, fired at point-blank range, smashed into the bridge, followed by a further succession of hammer blows which brought down the wireless antenna, killed or wounded almost a score of men and transformed Automedon’s upperworks into a tangle of twisted steel interrupted by gaping holes. By now Atlantis was so close that when a British seaman ran aft, a German officer called through a loudhailer in English, ‘Do not approach the gun, or we will blow you out of the water!’

Second Officer Donald Stewart regained consciousness on the bridge to find his captain lying dead beside him. First Officer Peter Evan, knowing that protracted resistance was impossible, had dashed for the ship’s safe to destroy the confidential papers as soon as the enemy opened fire, but fell victim to the same shell that killed Ewan: Evan collapsed seriously wounded on the threshold of the captain’s cabin where the safe key was kept. In all, six crew members were now dead and twelve others wounded. Both ships stopped. Stewart and the deckhands watched grimly as a launch bore a boarding party from Atlantis to Automedon. A stream of shocked and scalded Chinese firemen emerged from a hatchway leading to the freighter’s engine room, where blast had caused steam leaks.

The Germans had planned to commandeer Automedon as a supply ship, but on seeing the scale of damage caused by their shells, instead they began to set scuttling charges. Lt. Ulrich Mohr, Atlantis’s adjutant, made a hasty tour of the capture during which he blew open its safe, removing cash and confidential papers along with a weighted green canvas bag found in the chartroom, which Automedon’s dead officers had been tasked to throw overboard in any emergency. The Germans enlisted the aid of British seamen to shift frozen meat, whisky and cigarettes to Atlantis, before the crew was transferred to the German ship. Personal money was confiscated, though their captors issued receipts for the contents of each man’s wallet. Captain Rogge was not only an excellent seaman and tactician, but a man of honour who took pains for the welfare of prisoners from the ships he seized on his remarkable eight-month cruise. Among the British personnel transferred to Atlantis were three passengers, including a chief engineer of the Straits Steamship Company named Alan Ferguson, and his thirty-three-year-old wife Violet, on passage to Singapore. Encountering the Atlantis was only the latest of several unfortunate adventures that had befallen Mrs Ferguson since her marriage in 1936, including a miscarriage and an enforced flight from France in June 1940 aboard the last ferry out of Bordeaux. Now, intensely emotional, she went to Captain Rogge and pleaded with him through tears to save her luggage – two trunks which contained almost all her worldly possessions, including a prized tea set. The German took pity. He signalled Mohr, still on the doomed Automedon