David Irving
recalls something of the history of this
book:
AFTER the successful publication of my book
The
Destruction of Dresden on April 1, 1963
-- which was accompanied by a serialisation in
the then fledgling Sunday Telegraph
newspaper -- I learned that the British Air
Ministry had subjected my two brothers, both
Royal Air Force officers, to critical comment
and interview.
To ease their position, I decided to write a
book about one of RAF Bomber Command's most
successful operations, the August 1943 strike
against Hitler's secret rocket plant at
Peenemünde, on the Baltic coast. Of the
legitimacy of this particular attack there could
be no question. I had read Roy Harrod's The
Prof, a biography of the late Lord
Cherwell (one of the few figures I most hope
to meet in the afterlife: a fascinating
character in Churchill's entourage), and I asked
Nuffield College, at Oxford University, if I
could use the Prof.'s papers.
The
Librarian seemed to have been unfamiliar with
their content; he gave me the key to the
basement room and steel cupboards, with the
memorable words: "We close at five." The
cupboards were filled with top secret Cabinet
records, Defence Committee minutes,
correspondence with Churchill, and Lord
Cherwell's own dossiers on TUBE
ALLOYS (Britain's wartime Manhattan
atomic project) and the infamous Morgenthau
Plan.
Fearing at every moment the tread of the
horrified archivist's feet on the stairs, I
dictated over a quarter of a million words from
those top-secret records onto a tape recorder
over the next few days. British archives were in
those days still in the grip of the Fifty-Year
Rule (a rule that I heartily endorsed, provided
I could find ways of wangling round it).
Being English of course I at once agreed to
the subsequent dictate of the Cabinet Office,
the prime minister's secretariat, that I produce
my finished manuscript to their censors for
scrutiny. The Cabinet Office and Air Ministry in
return allowed me limited access to their own
records for the book on the then usual, but
irksome, condition that I did not directly cite
from or identify them, and included a proper
disclaimer in the opening pages.
I duly produced the book to them in 1964.
Within a very few days the authorities carried
out simultaneous raids on my flat and the
publishers, William Kimber Ltd., seizing the
first chapter, entitled "Enigma" and all
supporting working papers.
What had happened was this: In that unlocked
Oxford basement I had inevitably stumbled upon
clues to the ULTRA
secret, and within weeks I had unravelled it, in
part by judicious questioning over dinner of
Professor
R V Jones, the scientific Intelligence
chief, who became a good friend (but sternly
refused to talk about codebreaking).
A few days after the raid I was hauled before
a board meeting in the Cabinet Office, attended
by one Geoffrey Evans, security chief of
GCHQ at Cheltenham -- I noted down his name as
having signed in before me -- and I was urged
never to reveal the ULTRA
secret. "We take particular exception to any use
of that word or the word Enigma," said
Evans.
They appealed to me as an English gentleman,
with some effect; more compelling was the weight
of Evans' statement that I had got the story all
wrong (I had not) and would therefore just make
myself a laughing stock.
William Kimber Ltd published the book The
Mare's Nest in 1965, to great critical
acclaim. The Sunday Telegraph again
serialised it, as did Der Spiegel in
Germany, where the Bertelsmann group published a
German edition under the title Die
Geheimwaffen des III Reiches, which
concentrated more on the technical aspects of
the story.
The ULTRA secret
remained unrevealed until 1974 when Wing
Commander F W Winterbotham was allowed to
publish a book of that name (I had introduced
him to Kimber's, who published his first book
but not this one).
A
year or two later, the Cabinet Office phoned me:
they had a small bonne bouche for me -- the
original, intact, German Army personnel file of
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, his 201 file,
which British troops had snaffled from under the
noses of our great allies in the American
occupation zone of Germany.
The authorities knew I was writing his
biography.
The file contained every document from his
father's first tentative letter to the
Württemberg artillery regiment, asking if
they would have a place for his 12 year old son,
to the last letter that Rommel wrote to Adolf
Hitler in 1944. Years later, R V Jones told
me that this was the government's way of saying
thank-you to me for having joined the thousands
of others who had kept the
ULTRA secret. "They were
very nervous," he said, "because you were the
only one who had never signed the Official
Secrets Act."
When Panther Books (Granada) published a new
updated edition in the UK in 1985 I included the
missing Enigma chapter, and it will also be
found in this Internet edition. "Enjoy," as the
illiterate Americans would say.
First posted: Saturday, January 5, 2002;
illustrated new text uploaded Monday, March 29,
2010
