Eighty years ago in deep secrecy the battle against Enigma turns for the better

 

In the Mediterranean the U-559 was hunted down by British ships and aircraft. She was fatally damaged and abandoned by her crew. They neither scuttled her properly nor destroyed her confidential material. Three men from the destroyer HMS Petard boarded her and retrieved documents including the current Enigma setting sheets, which were passed to a whaler from Petard. This provided crucial material to advance GCHQ's work in breaking the cypher, which had resisted their efforts for ten months. By some measures this marked the turning point in the intelligence battle against the U-boats. Two of the boarding party were caught on the submarine when she sank and drowned. They were awarded George Crosses; by some accounts awards of Victoria Crosses were rejected because these might have drawn too much attention to the value of their sacrifce. The award citations were bland and unspecific.

A public meeting at the Albert Hall led by senior British churchmen protested against Nazi persecution of Jews. It was given token government support, but the long-standing policy of attaching little importance to Nazi racial policies was upheld. The ludicrous anti-German atrocity stories of the First World War had rebounded on their authors and British propagandists feared open and forceful condemnation of the Nazis on this score would expose them to similar scorn.

The Luftwaffe launched some thirty aircraft in a daylight raid on Canterbury, which had experienced a devastating attack at the start of the Baedecker raids in the spring. This time damage was slight and the attackers suffered severely; eleven were claimed at the time by British fighters but this might be an exagerration. The operation demonstrated just how little the Germans were now capable of serious air attacks.