Next month sees the Greenhill reprint of Patrick Beesly's classic Very Special Intelligence , the compelling WWII history of the Admiralty's intelligence wing, first published by Hamish Hamilton in 1977. This stands as a remarkably lucid account, despite the fact that its author encountered strictures on accessing codebreaking files which no longer hamper today's naval historians. With the latter in mind, we wanted to set Very Special Intelligence in context, to acknowledge public awareness of the work of Bletchley Park, and to apply some of the in-depth technical analysis of codebreaking methods unavailable to Beesly at the time of writing. We asked two naval historians, W.J.R. Gardner and Ralph Erskine, to contribute, respectively, an Introduction and Afterword to the book, a collaboration which has resulted in around 15,000 words of new text, including a new bibliography that covers more than fifty years of naval intelligence research. Here, W.J.R. Gardner talks about his personal experience of Very Special Intelligence :
"Literature on intelligence can be of very variable quality indeed as the magic of the word has often acted as a magnetic lure to those – both writers and readers – more interested in sensation and conspiracy than solid and well-judged history. Any such enthusiast may as well stop reading this item now as Patrick Beesly's Very Special Intelligence (VSI), the story of the Admiralty's Operational Intelligence Centre during the Second World War, will not satisfy those interested in either of these categories.
I was very pleased when I heard that Greenhill were to re-publish this important book, but pleasure turned to a certain sense of apprehension on learning that Lionel Leventhal was looking to me for an Introduction to the new edition. Although I had been familiar with the book for some years, I had not, at the time of publication, read VSI, or indeed much of the other immediate post-revelation literature on Ultra, probably because I was too busy learning something about late twentieth century anti-submarine warfare. Nevertheless, as my interests subsequently turned to the Battle of the Atlantic and particularly to intelligence, VSI became first an often-borrowed library book, then an essential purchase from a second-hand dealer. When I wrote Decoding History: the Battle of the Atlantic and Ultra (Macmillan, 1999) VSI was one of the very few books that was always close by and often consulted. But the task now ahead – the forming of an Introduction to this classic text – meant that VSI should be re-read in its entirety, at least once. This proved a pleasure rather than a chore, as Beesly writes very clearly and easily. Nevertheless, there are both holes and mysteries remaining. One of the former should be viewed in light of the greater current availability of material in the Public Record Office, where there are getting on for 900 pieces, most on the Second World War, whereas Beesly's listing stops at sixty-seven. Perhaps the greatest mystery is his mention of the Denning papers, which no other researcher has ever cited or even mentioned seeing!
The overriding impression of revisiting VSI is of its balance. It has to be said that the majority of writing on naval intelligence since The Ultra Secret (F.W. Winterbotham, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974) has been about Ultra and that this has distorted the general perception, probably unintentionally. Beesly makes it all too clear that Ultra was only one of many sources, and that the production of useful intelligence products did not cease when Ultra was unavailable. He also provides useful commentary on the timeliness of information. Thus, VSI is much better balanced than much of the literature that followed it and this, together with it being that rarest of things – a memoir which neither glamorises an organisation nor overplays the role of its writer – very much marks it out as a seminal work in Second World War intelligence literature."
W.J.R. Gardner is a professional historian employed by the British Ministry of Defence. He was for many years a naval officer who specialised in anti-submarine warfare, as well as being employed in the analysis and intelligence fields. He has had many naval historical articles published and is the author of Anti-submarine Warfare (London, Brasseys, 1996) and Decoding History: the Battle of the Atlantic and Ultra (London, Macmillan, 1999). He is currently working on a biography of Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsey.
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