Secret Weapons of World War II , livre ebook

Secret Weapons of World War II
Books by William B. Breuer
An American Saga
Bloody Clash at Sadzot
Captain Cool
They Jumped at Midnight
Drop Zone Sicily
Agony at Anzio
Hitler s Fortress Cherbourg
Death of a Nazi Army
Operation Torch
Storming Hitler s Rhine
Retaking the Philippines
Nazi Spies in America
Devil Boats
Operation Dragoon
The Secret War with Germany
Hitler s Undercover War
Sea Wolf
Geronimo!
Hoodwinking Hitler
Race to the Moon
J. Edgar Hoover and His G-Men
The Great Raid on Cabanatuan
MacArthur s Undercover War
Feuding Allies
Shadow Warriors
War and American Women
Unexplained Mysteries of World War II
Vendetta: Castro and the Kennedy Brothers
Undercover Tales of World War II
Top Secret Tales of World War II
Secret Weapons of World War II

William B. Breuer

John Wiley Sons, Inc.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright 2000 by William B. Breuer. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., New York
Published simultaneously in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4744. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley Sons, Inc., 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158-0012, (212) 850-6011, fax (212) 850-6008, email: PERMREQ@WILEY.COM.
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Breuer, William B.
Secret weapons of World War II / William B. Breuer.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-471-37287-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-471-20212-6 (paper : alk. paper)
1. Weapons systems-History-20th century. 2. World War, 1939-1945 - Equipment and supplies. I. Title.
UF500.B74 2000
623 .09 044-dc21
99-055653
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to
GENERAL H. NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF, III
A courageous warrior in Vietnam
and later the architect of
the brilliant Allied
victory in the Persian Gulf
Contents
Introduction
Part One-War Breaks Out
German Invention Triggers Global Search
Stealing America s Radar Secrets
History s Most Important Letter
A U.S. Foundation Funds Nazi Research
A Bunch of Crazy Scientists
Charles Lindbergh Helps the Moon Man
An American Aids Japanese Nuclear Project
Supersecret Station X
Aspirins Foil the Luftwaffe
A Plan to Light Up the United Kingdom
Is a Death Ray Feasible?
A Hassle with British Bureaucrats
Conjuring Up Wild Theories
Part Two-Great Britain Stands Alone
A Nation s Survival at Stake
A Little Black Box of Secrets
A Huge Mousetrap in the Sky
Americans Break the Purple Code
The Mystery Truck from Mars
Churchill s Agonizing Decision
Duel of the Radio Beams
Enigma Betrays the Italian Fleet
Code Names Rebecca and Eureka
A Dying Genius Sinks the Bismarck
Cryptographic Sleuths Silence the Red Orchestra
A Miraculous Escape from Denmark
Bright Ideas for Winning the War
Operation Jay: An Intricate Hoax
England s Kamikaze Pilots
Part Three-Thrust and Counterthrust
Could Pearl Harbor Have Been Avoided?
The British Invade Washington
A Scheme to Bomb New York
Five U.S. Scientists Killed
Mystery of the Vanishing U-Boats
The Germans Four-Poster Beds
The Century s Most Audacious Heist
A Secret Move to a Secret Site
Poking Out Britain s Eyes
A Plan to Turn Hitler Feminine
Geniuses in a Dungeon
A Test Goes Up in Smoke
Goering an Honorary Scientist
A Nuclear Laboratory Explodes
A Gathering of Luminaries
Part Four-Turning of the Tide
A Spectacular Rocket Feat
Stealing German Weather Forecasts
I Fear We Are in the Soup!
Fiasco in Chesapeake Bay
The Soviets Secret Nuclear Laboratory
Prediction: Hitler Will Have A-Bomb
Eavesdropping on Roosevelt and Churchill
A Burglar Alarm at Gibraltar
Feuds among Nazi Bigwigs
A Chess Game in the Atlantic
History s First Nuclear Spy
A Rain of Metallic Foil
Smuggling a Renowned Scientist
A Plan to Poison the German Food Supply
Bouncing Bombs and Dambusters
Part Five-Beginning of the End
Protecting a Sacred Secret
A Triumph for German Cryptanalysts
You Scare Hell Out of Me!
Snooping on a Japanese Ambassador
A Rocket Genius Charged with Treason
German Codebreakers Pinpoint Normandy
Hiding a Mighty Invasion
Schemes to Defeat a Plague of Robots
A Soviet Plot Fizzles
Hitler Counts on Wonder Weapons
Thwarting Japanese Torpedo Planes
A Bizarre Scenario in Zurich
A Tiny Fuse Balks the F hrer
Tactics to Obstruct the Soviets
A Polish Janitor Scores a Coup
Hitler Orders Lethal Gas Assault
A Trainload of German Brainpower
Japan s Secret Weapons Await Invasion
Treachery at Los Alamos
Notes and Sources
Index
Introduction
Few persons on Planet Earth today realize that the decisive factor in the outcome of World War II was not the brilliance of highly publicized Allied military leaders and statesmen. Rather, victory or defeat in the century s climactic struggle hinged on the secret war of wits between each side s ingenious scientists and cryptanalysts (codebreakers).
Famous personalities-Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler, Mussolini, Eisenhower, Goering, Yamamoto, and others-appear often in this book. But the focus is on the high-stakes cat-and-mouse game waged behind the scenes in which first one side, then the other gained an advantage.
Both adversaries exerted gargantuan efforts to implement the often spectacular feats of the codebreakers and scientists through covert missions, plots, hoaxes, spying, conspiracies, and electronic sleuthing. The constant goal was to trick, foil, or outmaneuver the other side s armed forces.
This, then, is the incredible and little-known story behind the story that decided World War II.
Part One

War Breaks Out


German Invention Triggers Global Search
War clouds were gathering over Europe in mid-1938 when Stewart Menzies, the deputy chief of MI-6, the British secret intelligence service, had been laboring seven-day weeks in his office on Broadway, a side street near Westminster Abbey in London. These were fearful times among government leaders, because the nation s conventional defenses had been allowed to grow alarmingly weak. Now it seemed certain that Adolf Hitler was about ready to launch a war to gain the Third Reich a place in the sun.
Menzies special responsibility was collecting information about the secret plans of the German dictator and the strength and disposition of the Wehrmacht, his armed forces. Not since the conclusion of what was then called the Great War, in 1918, had British statesmen felt such a need for in-depth intelligence from inside Germany.
Britain had successfully intercepted and decoded German military and diplomatic telegrams for many years. But in 1934, two years after the German f hrer seized power, he installed a new and revolutionary communications system developed by Germany s foremost scientists. Since that time, Menzies had directed hundreds of agents in an exhaustive global search to establish the nature of Germany s new modus operandi. All the efforts were in vain.
The target of the ongoing MI-6 investigation was a compact (twenty-four inches square and eighteen inches high) electronic machine enclosed in a wooden box. Until the arrival of this device, encoding and decoding of messages had been done painstakingly for hours by human hand. Enigma (the ancient Greek word for puzzle), as the intricate machine was called, could accomplish the same thing in only two or three minutes.
Colonel Erich Fellgiebel, the Wehrmacht s chief signals officer, and his scientists had assured Hitler that Enigma would be unbreakable. It was capable of producing twenty-two billion different code combinations. If one person worked continuously day and night and tried a different grouping each minute, it would take him forty-two thousand years to exhaust all combination possibilities.

Germany s unbreakable Enigma coding machine. (Author s collection)
Even if an Enigma were captured by an enemy, it would be useless, Fellgiebel explained, because a foe would have to know the keying procedure, which was changed almost daily.
What Fellgiebel did not know was that agents of Department BS-4, the cryptographic (codebreaking) section of the Polish secret service, had acquired an Enigma. Two renowned Polish mathematicians, Henryk Zygalski and Marian Rejewski, managed to solve some of the Enigma mysteries and read intercepts. But their feat would be of minimal value in wartime, because it was mathematical and took several weeks to decipher even a short message.
In the meantime, a German in civilian clothes who claimed he was an officer in the Forschungsamt, the Third Reich s primary cryptanalytical agency, slipped into the French embassy in Berne, Switzerland. Historically neutral in European armed conflicts over the centuries, Switzerland had been a hotbed for espionage in the Great War, and spies continued to roam the mountainous country since that time.
The German told a top French diplomat that he could make a valuable contribution to the security of France against the Nazi government of his homeland. His motives, he