The Ultra Secret

The ultra secret was the description used by the British in world war two for the signals intelligence obtained by breaking into high-level high level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications .This name came about because the intelligence obtained was considered more important than that designated by the highest British security classification and was then used secretly and so was regarded as being Ultra secret. The ultra secret was a project that contributed in the allied victory in world war two by tapping in the highest level communication among the armed forces of Germany and Japan.

The ultra secret project was a vital input of intelligence to the winning of the war. Central to the new assessment of that importance has been the discovery of the fact that throughout the war the intelligence services of the Western powers especially the British were able to intercept break, and read a significant portion of the top secret message traffic of the German military. The dissemination of that cryptographic intelligence to Allied commanders under Ultra played a substantial and critical role in fighting the Germans and achieving an Allied victory. (Murrey, Strategy for defeat: the Luftwaffe 1933-1944, 1983)

Ultra affected the air war on both the strategic and on the calculated levels. British decoding capabilities were not adequate during the Battle of Britain to provide major help to defeat the German air threat. In the same way, for the first three years of Bomber Command's war over the continent, Ultra could provide little useful intelligence. Alternatively, throughout 1942 and 1943, Ultra information provided valuable approaches into what the Germans and Italians were doing in the Mediterranean and supplied allied naval and air commanders with detailed, specific knowledge of the movement of Axis groups from the Italian mainland to the North African shores. Allied information was so good, in fact, that the German air corps in Tunisia reported to its higher headquarters in a message that was intercepted and decoded by the allied.

Another considerable contribution of Ultra to Allied success was its use in conjunction with air to ground attacks. Ultra intercepts gave Allied intelligence the exact location of Geyr von Schweppenburg's Panzer Group West headquarters that were attacked and run away leaving their vehicles and radio equipment in the open. The attack not only destroyed most of Panzer Group West's communications equipment but also killed seventeen officers, including the chief of staff. The strike effectively removed Panzer Group West as an operating headquarters and robbed the Germans of the only army organization in the west capable of handling large numbers of mobile divisions.

Ultra intercepts also gave Western intelligence a glance of the location and force of German fighter units, as well as the effectiveness of attacks carried out by Allied tactical air on German air bases. Furthermore, these intercepts pointed out when the Germans had completed repairs on damaged fields or whether they had decided to abandon operations permanently at particular locations. Armed with this information, the Allies pursued an intensive, well-orchestrated campaign that destroyed the German's base structure near the English Channel and invasion beaches. These attacks forced the Germans to abandon efforts to organize bases close to the Channel and to select airfields far to the southeast, thereby disrupting German plans to reinforce themselves in response to the cross channel invasion. (Murrey, ultra-thought on its impact on the second world war, 1984)

Ultra's role in the ground war in the west was a varied one. The Allies deciphered few German Army messages until the summer of 1942 and by reading the porous Luftwaffe ciphers; they gained significant intelligence about ground dispositions. But it also required a frustrating learning period to develop a system to distribute ultra where it was most needed, that is into the hands of the field commanders. In 1941, for instance, ULTRA revealed in precise detail the German plan to attack the Mediterranean island of Crete and without a distribution system for the precious intelligence, London could order immediate action, but field commanders hesitated, either unsure about the reliability of the source or fearful of betraying it by acting on its revelations. This was so until the British deployed ultra intelligence analysts to field commands and institutionalized a system for distributing ultra to operational headquarters. In the early days of the war, Central Bureau received responsibility for solving Japanese naval land%u2010based aircraft codes and ciphers. Within nine months of its establishment in the Central Bureau cryptanalysts had solved the naval land%u2010based air cipher; the army air force's air%u2010ground code; and the Japanese weather cipher. This intelligence enabled Allied air commanders to marshal their forces to meet enemy raiders and later to catch Japanese aircraft on the ground.

Allied success in the great air battles over Guadalcanal, the central Solomons, and the Papua, New Guinea in late 1942 and early 1943 was due to alerts provided by ultra. Probably the most prominent example was to shoot down the aircraft carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto after a decrypted message exposed the admiral's route. Other most important success included the destruction of the Japanese air forces in eastern New Guinea, at Wewak in August 1943 and at Hollandia in March 1944.In the Philippines and the Central Pacific campaigns, ultra enabled U.S. submarines to interdict Japanese back up. Heavy losses of troops and supplies intended for most of Japan's troops weakened those garrisons. Ultra also uncovered the massive Japanese reinforcement of Kyushu, the next target on the Allied drive to Tokyo, thereby certainly influencing the decision to use atomic bombs against Japan.

What was ultra's greatest contribution to the victory in the west was its cumulative accumulation of details about the German order of battle. This priceless intelligence, communicated unwittingly in the Germans' own words, enabled the Allies to make accurate assessments of German strengths and weaknesses and hence to exploit German biasness and sometimes to upset German plans.

The absence of the ultra secret could have lead to far more devastating destruction and loss of life because although the allied were more; the Germans were superior in terms of weapons and strategy. Without the intelligence obtained by the ultra we cannot be sure of the allied winning the war or had they would have won, it would have taken longer by years. Intelligence is one of the most important weapons in a war and any side with superior intelligence and that can predict the plan or actions of their opponent tend to have the upper hand. We cannot imagine what would have happened had Germans won the war. Although there has been doubts of to the extend of the ultra's assistance to winning the war, it can be said without doubt that it was of immense help in ending it early. The defeat of Germans in World War II suggests that to underestimate the capabilities and intelligence of one's opponents can have only very dangerous and damaging consequences for one's own forces. (Bennet, 1979)