Stewart Menzies

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Major General Sir Stewart Graham Menzies ? / iAudio file / audio sample (born January 30, 1890 in London ; † May 29, 1968 ibid; code name : "C" ) was from 1939 to 1952, during the period of World War II and immediately afterwards , head of the British foreign intelligence service SIS (Secret Intelligence Service ) ( German  secret intelligence service ), also known as MI6 (Military Intelligence Section 6) .

Life

Stewart was born the second son of John Graham Menzies and Susannah West Wilson. The family was very wealthy, mainly dated back to his grandfather Graham Menzies, who in the late 19th century in Edinburgh a thriving whiskey - distillery had operated. After completing his training at Eton College in 1909, he joined the Grenadier Guards , a guard regiment of the British Army . A year later he switched to the Life Guards , the bodyguard of the British crown. In 1913 he was promoted to lieutenant and adjutant at the same time .

With the outbreak of World War I , he served in France and Belgium . After he was wounded at Zonnebeke in Flanders in October 1914 , he fought in the first Battle of Flanders near Ypres in November of the same year . For his bravery, he was proven on 14 November for the captain (Captain) transported and with the Distinguished Service Order ( German  Order of outstanding service award), he December 2, from the hand of King George V received personally. In the second Battle of Flanders in the spring of 1915, when German troops first used chlorine gas as a weapon , his regiment suffered heavy losses. Menzies also suffered severe gas wounds and was honored from the combat service. He switched to counterintelligence under Field Marshal Douglas Haig and was promoted to major before the end of the war .

After the war he moved to MI6 and took part in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference as a member of the British delegation . Soon after, he was appointed Lieutenant Colonel (Lieutenant Colonel) transported and General Staff Officer . After Admiral Hugh Sinclair , the 1923 line of MI6 Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming took over, he made Menzies in 1929 as his deputy with simultaneous promotion to Colonel (Colonel) . After Admiral Sinclair's death, Menzies succeeded him as the new head of MI6 . He also inherited the code name "C", which was traditionally due to the chief of service.

At the beginning of the Second World War , in addition to the further expansion of espionage and counter-espionage , his duties included monitoring British code breaking activities in Bletchley Park (BP), England . There, the Government Code and Cypher School G.C. & CS (German about: "Staatliche Code- und Chiffrenschule"; also called: Station X ) successfully deciphered the encrypted communications of the German Wehrmacht , especially the Enigma radio traffic . The intelligence gained in this way was collected and distributed under the code name Ultra . In this way the Allies gained an important strategic advantage in the war against the Germans with considerable historical consequences . Allied Forces Commander-in-Chief, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, described Ultra as “crucial” to victory, while British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill said, “It was thanks to Ultra that we won the war.” Menzies held his Prime Minister during of the war and also made sure that the staff there could be continuously expanded in order to be able to keep up with the cryptographic complications introduced again and again by the Germans and not to lose the crucial continuity of deciphering . Towards the end of the war, about ten thousand to fourteen thousand women and men in BP were working successfully to break the German encryption machines .

In January 1944 he was promoted to major general. He continued to work with the Special Operations Executive (SOE) , a British Special Forces, the British Security Coordination (BSC) and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) , the Office of Strategic Services, together, maintained contact with the Free French Forces to General de Gaulle and, with the knowledge of Churchill, made contact with the German resistance around Admiral Wilhelm Canaris .

After the war he stayed in office and prepared the SIS for its new tasks in connection with the approaching Cold War . This also included the takeover of large parts of the SOE . After a total of 43 uninterrupted years of service, he finally retired in 1952 and retired at the age of 62 to Bridges Court, near Luckington in rural south-west England in the county of Wiltshire . With his energy and leadership, he made an important contribution to the British war effort that ultimately led to the Allied victory. One clue are his nearly 1,500 meetings with Churchill during the war.

He died at the age of 78 in his native London and was buried in Luckington.

Cinematic reception

The role of Sir Stewart Menzies is embodied in different films:

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Oldest Boy of British Intelligence, The New York Times , December 27, 1987. Accessed March 18, 2016.
  2. ^ Gordon Welchman: The Hut Six Story - Breaking the Enigma Codes . Allen Lane, London 1982; Cleobury Mortimer M&M, Baldwin Shropshire 2000, p. 11. ISBN 0-947712-34-8
  3. ^ Frederick William Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret - The Inside Story of Operation Ultra, Bletchley Park and Enigma . Orion, 2000, pp. 16-17, ISBN 0-7528-3751-6 .
  4. ^ Gordon Welchman: The Hut Six Story - Breaking the Enigma Codes . Allen Lane, London 1982; Cleobury Mortimer M&M, Baldwin Shropshire 2000, p. 230. ISBN 0-947712-34-8 .
  5. ↑ David Kahn: The unsolved riddle . In Robert Cowley (Ed.) What Would Have Happened If? Knaur, 2006, p. 395. ISBN 3-426-77887-4 (Counterfactual story under the assumption that the Allies do not succeed in cracking the Enigma)
  6. ↑ John AN Lee, Colin Burke, Deborah Anderson: The US Bombes, NCR, Joseph Desch, and 600 WAVES - The first Reunion of the US Naval Computing Machine Laboratory . IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 2000, p. 35.
  7. ↑ Sir Stewart Menzies (character) in the IMDb . Retrieved March 18, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Menzies, Stewart
ALTERNATIVE NAMES C (alias); Menzies, Stewart Graham
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British general
DATE OF BIRTH January 30, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH May 29, 1968
Place of death London