Dilly by Batey Mavis;

Author:Batey, Mavis; [Mavis Batey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 897488
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2011-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

NINE

The Battle of Matapan

Tell Dilly we have had a great victory in the Mediterranean.

The Battle of Matapan was Britain’s first major naval victory during the Second World War and coming at a bleak time in 1941 it was a real morale booster. A naval victory was traditionally encouraging to the British public, especially as it could now be seen in newsreels with guns blazing and the dashing Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham on the bridge of his flagship HMS Warspite. Prime Minister Winston Churchill hailed it as ‘the greatest fight since Trafalgar’ and Cunningham was acclaimed as a second Nelson. It was a fortnight before the Admiralty received the news of Nelson’s victory but almost before the last shot was fired at Matapan, in the early hours of 29 March, Admiral Godfrey rang through to Bletchley Park with the message ‘Tell Dilly we have had a great victory in the Mediterranean and it is entirely due to him and his girls’. All very heady stuff for Dilly’s girls and we only wished we could have told our families that we had had a hand in it.

For Dilly it was a twofold triumph, not only for breaking the Matapan messages in the Cottage but also for the special procedure by which Cunningham had received the intelligence derived from them, known as ULTRA. This was the brainchild of Wing Commander Frederick Winterbotham, the head of the SIS air intelligence section, who superintended the setting up of Hut 3 in 1939 in readiness for Hut 6’s production line of German air force and army traffic. Winterbotham was an old hand, having been sent to Germany in the early 1930s to monitor the expansion of the Luftwaffe and appeared (misspelt) on the Gestapo wanted list. He put up a plan to Stewart Menzies to ensure that the intelligence derived from Hut 3 messages would be disseminated in a way which was both operationally effective and secure.

In the normal course of events, information from a secret source would be passed only to the directors of intelligence of the service ministries and it was up to them to distribute it as they saw fit. This would work quite well with the small number of messages then in circulation but when it came to thousands, not only might the translations and interpretation differ with so many people handling them, but information might be transmitted to commanders in the field in several different ciphers, which Winterbotham had learned from the codebreakers was a dangerous practice. He also knew that those commanders in the field could be lax about security and had been known to leave secret documents in their shaving mugs. He set up Special Liaison Units to deliver ULTRA messages to commanders under constant surveillance. By 1942, after America had come into the war, ULTRA became the standard designation for intelligence derived from all decrypts of high-level messages, but at the time of Matapan it was only used as Winterbotham originally defined it.

Since the red Luftwaffe signals were

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