Outcome
Fleming took his team to Dover to await the next suitable bombing raid, but aerial reconnaissance and W/T (Wireless telegraphy) monitoring failed to find any suitable German vessels, and the operation was called off. That this was a major disappointment to the codebreakers can be judged by what Frank Birch wrote in a letter dated 20 October 1940.
Turing and Twinn came to me like undertakers cheated of a nice corpse two days ago, all in a stew about the cancellation of operation Ruthless. The burden of their song was the importance of a pinch.
An alternative account of why the operation did not take place, was given by his niece, Lucy Fleming, in The Bond Correspondence on BBC Radio 4 on 24 May 2008. In this programme she stated that an official at the RAF pointed out that a downed Heinkel bomber would sink rather than float. The plan required the bomber to sink so as to avoid its identification by the Germans - the "survivors" were to take to a rubber dinghy to await rescue.
Read more about this topic: Operation Ruthless
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