Thread by @garius

Right. As requested. A thread on how a randy Italian Admiral had his reputation saved by the reveal that Bletchley existed.

Includes golf, sexy spies, post-war beef between German/Italian armed forces and the almost-forgotten work of Bletchley's female codebreakers /1

1941. The Mediterranean. Adm Cunningham is pulling a Sneaky McSneak on the Italian fleet, who think (at this stage) that radar and night battles are for losers.

They think his big ships are still in port, because he made the Japanese ambassador think he was off golfing.

Wrong.

The result: Cape Matapan, a running naval battle that culminates in battleships Barham, Valiant, and Warspite sneaking up on the Italians in the dark.

Prince Philip then turns on the lights and Cunningham hits them with the last, full point-blank broadside in naval warfare.

Not only did all that happen (no really) but was critical to Cunningham controlling the Mediterranean. Not so much due to the ships lost, but because the Italian navy realised they couldn't stand up against the Royal Navy at night. They'd gambled on the wrong tech/training.

Cunningham pulled this off because of one thing: Bletchley had broken the codes. He KNEW the Italians would be there.

To the point where Cunningham INSISTED on visiting Bletchley while on leave and thanking the codebreakers personally.

Unlike Monty, Cunningham shared credit.

That credit was owed to codebreaking legend Dilly Knox and "Dilly's Girls". The team of female codebreakers/analysts he had built up at Bletchley in the face of some opposition.

Because Dilly had this weird belief for his time that having a dick was not a pre-req for being smart

But, for years, NOBODY ELSE who wasn't ULTRA cleared knew this.

Because Dilly was also one of the peeps who'd realised you should have fake reasons for knowledge before using ULTRA intel:

Send a spotter plane first.

(He called this the 'cottage plane')

~~~ wobbly lines ~~~

It's now 1966. There's still been low level beef for YEARS between German and Italian militaries over whose fault Matapan actually was. By now, both had realised the British had broke SOMEONE'S codes, but they didn't know who.

Luftwaffe or the Regia Marina?

Whenever they ask the British and point out everyone is a nice, happy NATO family now and thus come oonnnnn man. Tell usssss.

The British just point and laugh and say:

"Nope. Still a secret."

And then this book suddenly appears on the market.

The book tells the story of 'Cynthia' (Amy Elizabeth Thorpe) who was an enormously successful seductress spy for the Americans before, and during, WW2.

And in it, Hyde announced that she'd been doing sexy times with Admiral Alberto Lais, the Italian Naval Attache in Washington.

Hyde then announced that Lais had been so madly in love with Cynthia, that when she asked him in 1941 for a copy of the Italian Naval codes, he just handed it over. The Americans then gave that to the British and BOSH: Matapan.

The Germans are DELIGHTED by this news. The Italians are furious. The British refuse to confirm or deny.

But even MORE furious are Lais' surviving family, who immediately launch a libel suit in Italy against Hyde and publisher.

This goes nowhere: Lack of evidence.

~~ wobbly lines ~~

1974.F.W. Winterbotham, the chap who'd distributed ULTRA, blows the lid on it by publishing 'The Ultra Secret'.

In it, he reveals that Bletchley had broken the Luftwaffe codes and that THESE had resulted in Matapan.

The Italians are DELIGHTED.

What you have to remember is that Winterbotham's book, and the flurry of info and books that surfaced after it existed in a weird grey area between official/unofficial info.

Those involved were frustrated that still, in 1974, the government refused to acknowledge their existence

And some people seemed to be given permission to publish their stories and histories, some didn't, and some had permission then had it revoked.

And the problem was that even in the war, everyone had been compartmentalised, so no one person had the full picture.

A lot of the big early books on Bletchley thus were really very narrow accounts, written by those men still around.

And one of those WASN'T Dilly Knox. Who'd died of cancer during the war.

Thus Dilly and his female codebreakers were left out of a lot of the narrative.

This was 100% true for Matapan. The truth was Dilly and his 'Girls' in Hut 3 had cracked the ITALIAN NAVAL ENIGMA, giving Cunningham his vital intercepts.

Dr Guilo Di Vita, who did the Italian translation of 'ULTRA Secret' even learned this, but was banned from revealing it.

And the problem was many of those codebreakers - like Mavis Batey and Joan Clarke, both of whom Dilly believed were two of the finest at Bletchley - still believed firmly in the Official Secrets act that bound them. They'd made a promise not to talk.

That's not to say that Dilly's team went entirely unnoticed. Ronald Lewin tried to correct the record in 'ULTRA goes to war' published in 1978 where he stated Knox' team had cracked the Italian codes, but still in all the big glamourous 'codebreaker' accounts overlooked it.

Then in 1980 came the straw that broke the camels back for some of them. The BBC made 'Spy', which claimed Cynthia had got the codebooks, and Dilly's team had used them.

Dr Di Vita (remember the translator) was so mad about this he FINALLY wrote an angry letter to the Times.

In that letter, he stated bluntly that Dilly Knox's team of codebreakers had cracked the Naval Enigma themselves. He then went one further and finally interviewed Mavis Batey, who told him the full story of breaking the Italian Naval Enigma. The paper published that account.

And finally, the truth is out.

Now you'd expect the Germans to be happy about this and the Italians sad. Their codes had been broken, right?

Nope.

The Italians are DELIGHTED. Because if true it meant the GERMAN Enigma system was at fault, not stereotypical Italian promiscuity

Which is how Mavis Batey finds herself, to her amusement, being written about in Italian papers as "affascinante signora, il tipo Penelope Keith" in her "bella casa di Oxford".

And then also finds herself approached by the Italian courts to testify in a reopened Lais libel case.

It's for that reopened case that she provides what must be one of the first official, on the public record acknowledgements of Bletchley's role in Matapan during her testimony.

Will leave you with her own words, describing the experience of doing that:

"I warned them that as it was forty years ago there wasn't much chance of my remembering the actual break...

...[But] when I picked up the first long message headed SUPERMARINA, it seemed that time had stood still and I was nineteen again and wearing a green jumper."

"It had been raining all day and it was still pelting down when I rushed it over to the hut, where Dilly, as I now know, was securing ULTRA treatment for its transmission... No seduction and no codebooks. Just hard cryptographic slogging by Dilly's girls." /END

Anyway. There you go. Thread. Soz it's a bit rough and ready but am busy today.

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