Ne Plus Ultra

By Curtis Prendergast

THE ULTRA SECRET by F.W. WINTERBOTHAM 199 pages. Harper & Row. $8.95.

What if? is history's forever teasing and unanswerable question. What if Marshal Ney's troops had not sat eating lunch before Waterloo while the Duke of Wellington retreated to safety? Etcetera. To all such historic posers must now be added questions raised by a retired British group captain named Frederick Winterbotham. What if a Pole working in a German factory had not defected to the Allies in 1938, bringing with him the first construction details of the Nazis' coding machine, called Enigma? And what if British cryptographers had not eventually cracked Enigma's supposedly unbreakable coding system, which throughout World War II was to carry all the German high command's secret wireless traffic? Would Britain have fallen? Would the Allies have lost the war?

After 35 years of officially imposed silence, Winterbotham reveals in The Ultra Secret that British intelligence did crack the code. From 1939 onward Churchill and later Roosevelt, Eisenhower and other Allied leaders were virtually reading over Hitler's shoulder. The whole system of deciphering Enigma's signals and relaying the intelligence was called the Ultra Operation. It sometimes produced translated copies of Hitler's orders to his generals within an hour of their original transmission. Little wonder that Churchill once called Ultra "my most secret weapon."

Terrible Decision. This is not a book on code breaking. Winterbotham passes over the mechanics of Enigma to deal with the Allied use of its output. Dissemination of Ultra intelligence had to be limited to only a few senior commanders, lest the Germans (and later the Japanese, who also used Enigma machines) should discover the awful truth.

No Ultra intercepts could be retransmitted. Allied field commanders had to mask privileged Ultra knowledge with conventional intelligence gathering (like air reconnaissance) to keep the enemy from suspecting odd coincidences. In 1943, when American pilots, armed with precise information from Ultra, shot down the Japanese navy's Pacific chief, Admiral Yamamoto, over the island of Bougainville, London protested to Washington about the lack of an adequate cover plan. Fortunately the Japanese were too shocked to notice.

The overriding military necessity of preserving Ultra's secrecy sometimes led to Allied tragedy. On Nov. 14, 1940, for instance, Ultra picked up German bombing orders for a blitz of the cathedral city of Coventry, well before the attack was due. Winterbotham relayed word to Churchill, who then faced a "terrible decision": whether or not to evacuate Coventry and almost certainly give Ultra's secret to the Germans. Churchill's choice doomed a city.

According to Winterbotham, Ultra's successes justified even Coventry. Tip-offs of enemy intent affected almost every phase of the war. During the Battle of Britain, Ultra's eavesdropping on Goring's scheme for using his 3-to-1 superiority in planes to "wipe the British Air Force from the sky" helped the R. A.F. deploy and husband its forces until the Luftwaffe, crippled too, abandoned the attempt. It was Ultra and not General Montgomery's much celebrated "intuition" that told when Rommel would strike at El Alamein, the turning point for the British in the North African desert war. As the D-day landings approached in Normandy, Ultra was scrutinized for signs of a Nazi alert; there were none, and Operation Overlord's surprise was complete.

Later, during the Allied breakout from the Cherbourg peninsula, came a Hitlerian command reflex that the Ultra team had learned to expect. Every time things went wrong, Winterbotham notes, "Hitler invariably took remote control, which was a bonus, since most of his signals went on the air." This time Hitler's frantic radio orders gave Eisenhower "the master plan straight from the Fuehrer." With the Nazis trapped at Falaise, Eisenhower sent General Patton plunging east toward Germany. "Without Ultra," Winterbotham argues, "we might have had to meet the Russians on the Rhine instead of the Elbe, and they would have stayed put."

Long Overdue. Ultra must surely be one of the best-kept military secrets of all time. A ban even on references to Ultra was enforced in Britain until this spring. Texts of deciphered messages are still locked up in Whitehall. One result is that Winterbotham, now 76, who served as the R.A.F.'s representative in Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, had to assemble this book largely from memory. "I am the only person alive who knows the whole story." He told TIME, "I didn't want my memory to start going before I got it all down on paper."

The Ultra Secret is a tremendous story, inadequately told, like a long-ago anecdote shared over cigars in an officer's mess. Typically, the Coventry section is confined to one paragraph. But the subject cries out for more ample treatment. Winterbotham speaks from personal knowledge; this is his book's strength, but also its limitation. He cites tributes to Ultra, including one from Eisenhower who said its intelligence contribution had "shortened the war." Rather qualified praise, apparently. What is needed now is the view from someone closer to the crucial command decisions, to confirm, or to question. Ultra's contribution to victory. The British government has an official history of Ultra under way. Winterbotham's tale makes it Seem long Overdue.

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