Saturday, 20
February 2010
Peter Calvocoressi was a senior intelligence officer at Bletchley Park who
was picked soon after the war to lead a team of experts on the German military
at the Nuremberg war crimes trial.
For almost six
decades he was a distinguished author, urbane publisher, and human rights
activist, but those two early activities – Bletchley Park cryptanalysis and
Nuremberg prosecutions, military realities and an idealistic claim to justice –
framed his long and diverse career.
He was a child of
the Greek diaspora, born in Karachi in November 1912, to parents descended from
mercantile families from Chios. When Peter was three months old his father was
assigned to Liverpool, where his parents raised him and two sisters in a
cosmopolitan cocoon. He grew up with Greek friends, spoke French at home as
well as English and had family trips to Italy and Greece.
A King's Scholar at
Eton, he focused on history and German. In 1931 he moved on to Balliol, having
been passed over for a scholarship in favor of the future historian and master
Christopher Hill. While in Oxford Calvocoressi avoided politics, later saying
he never even knew the location of the Oxford Union. He focused on Modern
History, and had as tutors V. H. Galbraith and Sir Lewis Namier, whose
knowledge of European politics characterised his own later writings.
Leaving Oxford
with a First, Calvocoressi went to London with a view to joining the diplomatic
service. Learning that his father's French birth would preclude him, father and
son secured an audience with Anthony Eden, then a minister in the Foreign
Office. Eden confirmed his ineligibility and added that with so distinctive a
Greek name he could never rise to the top. Calvocoressi turned to law. He
joined an equity chambers in Lincoln's Inn. Shy but a good dancer, he met
Barbara Eden, daughter of Lord Henley, and in 1938 they married.
Everybody at
Bletchley Park had a story about how they were plucked from classics or
mathematics. Calvocoressi was serving in the Ministry of Economic Warfare
reviewing shipping manifests. In 1940 he tried to volunteer for the War Office
but was rejected because of a head injury he had sustained in a car accident in
which his mother died. He took umbrage at the reason listed on his file:
"No good, not even for Intelligence." Through a connection he applied
to the Air Ministry and was accepted by the Intelligence division. He was sent
to RAF bases in Northumberland to brief pilots but soon recalled to London and
sent to Bletchley Park.
Calvocoressi was
assigned to Hut 3A to work on "Ultra," the decodes of Luftwaffe
messages sent over Enigma machines. Luftwaffe units relied more than other
services on Enigma, and their principal cipher, Red, "was broken daily
[without interruption from May 1940], usually on the day in question and early
in the day. Later in the war I remember that we in Hut 3 would get a bit techy
if Hut 6 had not broken Red by breakfast time."
Calvocoressi's
job was to study decrypted messages and fill in gaps, decide their meaning,
weigh their urgency and decide on the recipients. In a typical eight-hour
shift, Hut 3 might produce 30 decodes. For most of the war the Hut was led by
Eric Jones, a Midlands manufacturer who went on to a brilliant career in
intelligence, with E.J.B. ("Jim") Rose as the head of 3A and
Calvocoressi his deputy.
Calvocoressi
impressed colleagues as competent, less ebullient than Rose but calm and
erudite. When American cryptanalysts were introduced in mid-1943, he worked
easily with them and formed lifelong friendships with their chief, Colonel
Telford Taylor, Robert Slusser, later a leading Sovietologist, and eventual
Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell. After lodging in a series of unsatisfactory
billets, Calvocoressi bought the roomy 18th-century Guise House. For the rest
of the war he hosted seven or eight personnel, including Americans, giving
preference to those who could play musical instruments.
Leadership of Hut
3A brought special responsibilities. After the setback in the Ardennes in
December 1944, Calvocoressi and the renowned Cambridge classicist F.L. Lucas,
later President of the British Academy, were assigned to investigate if Ultra had
failed or if its recipients in the SHAEF and Army Group headquarters had failed
to use it. He concluded that Bletchley Park had accurately outlined German
preparations since August, though not the timing, and that commanders had been
lulled into thinking too far ahead. Lucas and Calvocoressi "expected heads
to roll at Eisenhower's HQ but they did no more than wobble."
A more difficult
question was presented when the former 3A chief Jim Rose, now at the Air
Ministry, heard of plans to bomb Dresden. He went to the US commander Carl
Spaatz, who agreed to cancel the raid if evidence revealed no military targets,
and Air Marshal Harris agreed. Rose called Calvocoressi, his successor in Hut
3A, who stressed that Panzer units were not being routed near Dresden and that
the city should not be bombed. But British Bomber Command spurned Rose and the
Calvorocessi estimate, with terrible consequences.
After V-E Day
Calvocoressi stood in the General Election as Liberal candidate for Nuneaton, a
Labour seat where he increased his party's tally but finished third.
Days later he
received overtures from his friend Taylor, now working on the American case for
Nuremberg. US planners had realised that direct evidence might be lacking
against some perpetrators and that the Nazi state operated through institutions
as well as individuals. The answer to both issues was a proposal by Colonel
Murray Bernays to charge organisations as well as leaders; if an entity were
found guilty, prosecutors could then charge leaders with criminal membership if
murder charges were impossible. Most planners assumed that the guilty would
include the military high command as well as the Party and SS. Taylor convinced
his chief, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, that they presently lacked
evidence against the military but that Calvocoressi was the ideal man to find
it.
In January 1946,
with Calvocoressi at his side, Taylor presented the case against the High
Command, using testimony from SS General Erich Bach-Zelewski, who led
anti-partisan campaigns. One historian later complained that the two men went
easy on Bach-Zelewski, but contemporaries praised them for Taylor's eloquence
and because he and Calvocoressi had a major perpetrator testify without
promising immunity or compromising later charges.
Later, Taylor was
chosen to lead further American trials in Nuremberg. He turned again to
Calvocoress. Taylor sent him and three researchers to Washington, where for
months he supervised the archiving of captured military records. The evidence
they processed provided the basis for convictions including those involving
atrocities in the Balkans and Norway.
The plan, was
that the British would also commence major trials but they balked, yielding to
Foreign and War Office pressure and rejecting Shawcross's hopes, American
overtures and Calvocoressi's evidence.
Now came the
question of a peacetime career. Calvocoressi wanted work involving public
affairs, but a brief return to the bar and his parliamentary defeat convinced
him to find a different route. For a few years he ran a fledgling Liberal
International but found it unworkable. He wrote his first book, a survey of
Nuremberg that is more thoughtful than most. An offer came to lead a new press
organisation based in Geneva, but he turned it down, recommending Jim Rose.
In 1949
Calvocoressi joined the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the think
tank in Chatham House founded by Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee gave him
responsibility for the annual Survey of International Affairs, meaning that he
wrote a judicious but opinionated volume each year surveying world events. The
experience taught him to write accurately, elegantly, and fast.
After five years
and 10 hefty volumes, Calvocoressi left Chatham House and became a partner at
Chatto & Windus, which had published his Nuremberg book. Calvocoressi
helped build up its annual turnover from £200,000 to £500,000. It had absorbed
the Hogarth Press, whose guiding spirit was Leonard Woolf. Calvocoressi came to
admire Woolf deeply, calling him "the only man I ever met who seemed to me
to be right about everything that mattered" and taking to heart the older
man's editorial maxim that "there never was a book which could not be
improved by cutting."
He was writing
extensively on international relations – a weekly column for provincial
newspapers begun while he was at Chatham House led to a book on Suez and a
follow-up 10 years later; a monograph on the public reaction to the Sharpeville
massacre; and a general study of world order in the age of decolonialisation.
He left Chatto & Windus in 1966 for a Readership in International Relations
at Sussex. Teaching gave him enormous satisfaction, but when the opportunity
arose five years later to become editorial director of Penguin Books, he could
not resist.
The challenge was
to strengthen its position, as Calvocoressi said, as a place "for top
people to write little books about big subjects for large audiences". But
his tenure came to grief when Pearsons bought Penguin with Calvocoressi's
support ("perhaps the biggest misjudgment of my life") then squeezed
him out. He resumed writing and was hired by the Open University, which saw the
possibility of a university press that might turn the material prepared by its
faculty into books for the public. Calvocoressi supervised the effort, leaving
with an honorary degree in 1990.
From 1962 to 1971
he was a member of the UN Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination
and Protection of Minorities. His Balliol friend David Astor asked him in 1963
to chair the Africa Bureau, a study group, and like Rose, Calvocoressi was soon
writing about apartheid and racism.
From 1961 to 1971
he was on the Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies
founded by his friend Alistair Buchan, and he was twice invited to lead Chatham
House. Brought to Amnesty International to mediate an internal dispute, he
served on its executive board from 1969 to 1971. And he found time for
political campaigns with a more personal connection: he commissioned, and wrote
a sympathetic introduction to, an account of Zionist settlers who were British
spies in the First World War. He protested against the 1967 coup of the Greek
Colonels. But at least as important to the long-time editor must have been his
tenure as chair of the London Library from 1970 to 1973.
He continued to
write prolifically – his survey of the Second World War is regarded, along with
Gerhard Weinberg's, as the best general study of its kind; an elegant account
of Ultra intelligence at Bletchley Park; and a "Who's Who" of
characters in the Bible that surprised friends who knew of his fierce atheism.
He wrote a foreign-relations study of Africa, a study of peace from the Gospel
to the UN, and a study of Europe's terrible 20th century and improving
prospects with the end of the Cold War. Each book showed his breadth,
erudition, concision – his lesson from Leonard Woolf.
In his 96th year,
he published a new edition of his survey of world politics, characterised again
by tart, far-sighted judgments. He would have made a superb chief of policy in
the Foreign Office had his Greek surname not led Anthony Eden to steer him
away.
Peter John
Ambrose Calvocoressi, intelligence officer and writer: born Karachi 17 November
1912; married 1938 Barbara Eden (died 2005; two sons), 2006 Margaret Scott;
died Devon 5 February 2010.