Article Review: Fortuitous Endeavor: Intelligence And Deception in Operation Torch by Patch - Essay Example

ARTICLE REVIEW Patch, J. “Fortuitous endeavor: intelligence and deception in Operation Torch.” Naval War College Review Vol. 61, No. 4 (Autumn 2008):73-97. As 1942 drew to a close, Allied forces in the European theater saw the tides of World War II turning to their favor in large part due to the success of Operation Torch. Operation Torch was a massive joint effort of Anglo-American forces that called for the sailing of huge armadas of the Allies from British and American ports, crossing U-boat-infested sea-lanes in order to contest Axis control in Northern Africa and the Mediterranean. The plan was to land in Northwest and Northern Africa then held by Vichy French forces; the challenge was to bring the 1,400-ship convoy into those target areas unmolested. The planners of this operation knew that in order to do so, the true scale of the convoy must be hidden from Axis knowledge; once the Axis do learn of it, their leaders must be kept from knowing its true objectives and their forces must be kept preoccupied far from the intended landing sites of the Allied forces. In his article “Fortuitous endeavor: intelligence and deception in Operation Torch”, Commander Patch pieced together the planning and execution of this ambitious undertaking and underscored the significance of military deception and signals intelligence to its success. Torch planning commenced in August 1942 with the formation of the Armed Forces Headquarters (AFHQ) led by General Eisenhower. During the planning, signals intelligence (SIGINT) of Allied forces was greatly enhanced when the British’s Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS) broke down high-grade Axis cipher codes, providing a source of intelligence information known as ULTRA. The intelligence information gathered by Allied forces helped shaped the strategic and operational framework of Torch. Particularly, SIGINT sources provided decrypts and Y-intelligence that informed Torch planners about weather conditions in Axis-controlled areas, accounts of Axis order of battle, movements of Axis shipping and naval assets, intentions of Axis leaders, and the Axis’ perceptions of the intent of Allied Forces. The latter helped Torch planners gauge the efficacy of their deception measures, a strategy they employed to help secure their covert operation. Deception measures in war strategies have been valued as far back as the time of Sun Tzu but it has never been used in the scale that Operation Torch intended. Here again, signals intelligence played a key role. The extensive double-agent network controlled by British forces planted information that was to confuse the Axis forces regarding the true objectives of the massive Anglo-American fleet heading for the Mediterranean. Information gathered through SIGINT provided Allied forces the feedback they needed regarding the reactions of the Axis to those planted information, thereby allowing the Allies to add more to the confused information and to draw the Axis’ attention and reinforcements away from the real operation. The deceptive measures employed by the Allied forces were successful. As gathered from SIGINT, Axis forces were not fully aware of the true scale of the fleet moving into the Mediterranean until a few days before D-Day. When the Axis did, however, they misunderstood the objective to be that of a re-supply of Allied forces stationed in Malta and the reinforcement of the British Eighth Brigade in Eastern Africa. With this belief, Axis powers brought reinforcement to their strongholds in Sicily and Sardinia, but this was far to the east of the Allies’ target. SIGINT provided the Allies a window through which they were able to see these perceptions and consequent plans of the Axis forces and allowed the Allies to act accordingly. Thus, the Anglo-American fleet passed through Axis-controlled waters, landed unscathed on North Africa, and met with relatively little resistance from the Vichy French forces installed there, who capitulated within a few days of the Allied landing. As may be discerned from the above discussion, the central themes of Patch’s article focused on how SIGINT was used in Operation Torch not just to gauge the capacities of the enemies or to provide a safe passage to Allied convoy but more importantly to gain insights into how enemy leaders are reacting and exploiting that knowledge to enhance an already-working strategic deceptive effort. To piece together the complicated events of that massive endeavor, Patch drew from several primary and secondary sources relying mostly on authors who participated directly in intelligence handling at GCCS (e.g., Calvocoressi) as well as references that used now-available files that gave definitive detail pertaining to the highly-confidential ULTRA, and references that examine the influence and contribution of British intelligence on planning and operations (e.g., Hinsley et al.; Lewin); Patch also especially referred to recently declassified decrypts of Axis naval and diplomatic ciphers. What distinguishes Patch’s article from the various other accounts on Operation Torch was his focus on and conviction that intelligence and deception were the key factors that made the operation’s success possible. Instead of reconstructing the events as most of his sources did, Patch reconstructed from them an analysis of the processes of intelligence gathering and deception stratagem employed by Operation Torch and arranged them thematically instead of chronologically. This way, the article successfully compartmentalized the SIGINT-related components of Torch and then encapsulated the operation’s planning and execution to fit into the context of an effective military strategic deception founded on solid intelligence. The veracity, validity, and credibility of the author’s sources has never been in question and so it was a matter of using those sources to underscore the focal points Patch wants the reader to grasp from Operation Torch. These points aimed to demonstrate to future planners how to prepare the intelligence environment, how such preparation can be made to gain insights into enemy territory, and how such insights into enemy’s perceptions can be exploited to the planner’s advantage. But in closing his discussion, Patch lamented that the use of such strategies as employed by Operation Torch, and which secured for it as well as subsequent operations their successes, is relatively absent or is not given much importance in today’s US military. His article should be seen, therefore, not merely as an historical account of a once successful endeavor but as an iteration of a set of strategies from which lessons for contemporary war planners and intelligence leaders can be drawn. Patch articulated as much, stating further that Operation Torch was a model that set the stage for bigger efforts that determined the turning of the tides of World War II, namely Operations Husky and Overlord. Patch’s thematic approach to discussing the otherwise complicated key factors that shaped Operation Torch as well as his scholarly appreciation of its complex of frameworks did not fail to evoke the drama and suspense of so huge and ambitious an endeavor. In fact, Patch did not shy away from the high drama; he just chose not to emphasize it. His clear-cut assertions are understandable in the light of the fact that, strictly speaking, the extent of the impacts of SIGINT and deception stratagem on Allied forces’ high-level decision-making – and therefore their impacts to the campaign’s success – was not measurable to a degree that was satisfactorily quantifiable. Such influence and contribution may be said to be largely a matter of surmise. For his part, Patch singled out comprehensively those points from which the extent of influence and contribution of intelligence and deception efforts can be definitely concluded even in the absence of quantifiable measures. Patch also did not so much focus on historical details but more on historical significance, zeroing in on key points that could matter now and may be of use in the future. What Patch is asserting is that the lessons applied then are lessons that could still be and should be applied in contemporary intelligence and war deception settings. Read More