The sailor in Room 53
has never, it’s true, been to sea
but though not in a boat
he has served afloat —
in a bath in the Admiralty’
Dillwyn ‘Dilly’ Knox,
Cryptographer
Room 40 .
BEGINNINGS
In London there is a building that has stood on its site since 1726. A two hundred and ninety two year old building is not unique in that ancient city, but this one contains a ‘mystical’ Room. A room where some say magic was performed, Cryptanalysis spells woven and the world reshaped. That edifice is the Admiralty Ripley building, located within Whitehall. The room is on the first floor, with windows looking inwards to a courtyard wholly enclosed within the Admiralty buildings. The previous occupants of the room had complained that no one was ever able to find it, but it was, (or is) on the same corridor as the old Board Room (Room 36) and the Chief Naval Censor (Room 37). At the southern end and around a corner is what was later in the war to become the First Sea Lord’s office, Room 42A, but in December 1914, 42A was occupied by a War Room, with its huge maps showing both the Royal and Imperial navy’s ships. Adjacent to it was the First Lord of the Admiralty’s residence (then Winston Churchill).The room was officially 40 O.B. (Old Building), or just plain room number ’40’ within the buildings numerical system. In itself it’s nothing special, it has doors and windows and is just a room. Admiral Lord West, a former First Sea Lord, described Room 40 as “an obscure little room”.
Within these four walls British code breaking was to be reborn, and it was from there that Bletchley Park and its World War Two story grew. No Room 40 , no Bletchley Park, and maybe, no enigma machine being decoded and no victory in the Atlantic in 1943. The room played a huge part in bringing the USA into world war one, and was to ensure the Grand Fleet was at sea when the High Seas fleet ventured beyond Heligoland. Quite a room…. If any room ever was, this one is too small to contain all that it achieved.
At the outbreak of World War One the codes and ciphers in use by the Army, Navy, and diplomatic services from both sides was primitive and in the main, was derived from the 19th Centuries age of the cavalry on land and of the sail at sea. There was a growing awareness for the need of secrecy, and at first signals were encoded using common codebooks. Then for additional security, they became enciphered, but the techniques used were old-fashioned, and also increasingly vulnerable to the growing science of code breaking .
The main German naval codebook, called the ‘Signalbuch der Kaiserlichenmarine’, or Imperial Navy Signal Book (‘SDK’), treated the coding of wireless signals very much as an afterthought, and it was added onto a volume that already contained the 19th centuries means of signalling at sea, flags and other visual techniques, such as signal lamps.
The design of the ‘SDK’ and the other codebooks in use by both the Imperial German Navy and Army at the start of the war was simple to the extreme. The codebooks listed the original words in an alphabetical order, but then allocated codewords in alphabetic order. This combination made the coded signals vulnerable to the British codebreaker’s, even if they obviously lacked a direct access to the codebooks being used.
Similarly, the cipher techniques, used to ‘super-encipher’ the coded signals were of a primitive level. In some cases they even used the simple ‘Caesar Cipher’, on which a fixed transposition of one letter in the alphabet for another (so for example a coded letter A is always transposed to enciphered letter D). These ciphers, even if of a slightly more sophisticated level, were easy to break.
From August 1914 the Royal Navy would develop an insight into the activities within the Imperial German navy, listening in to wireless transmissions ordering harbour lights to be turned on at a certain time, revealing that the German battle fleet was preparing to set out to sea on a sortie.
Room 40’s intelligence gathering would go on to be further enhanced by the heavy use of wireless communications by the German Navy for its fledgling U-boat service and its smaller surface vessels, such as minesweepers, as they broadcasting their departure, course and activities at frequent intervals.
PRE-WAR
The Intelligence Division was created on the 8th January, 1912, and was established with a Director, an Assistant Director, fourteen Naval and Marine officers, and thirteen civilian staff. As the war progressed those 29 would grow to be 206 personnel of both sexes.
The Naval Intelligence Division, Section 25, which was also known as “I.D. 25” was the section within the Naval Intelligence Division of the Royal Navy which was responsible for monitoring and deciphering of the German Navy signals.
The first Director was Captain Thomas Jackson (1) and he served as the Assistant Director of Naval Intelligence in the Naval Intelligence Department and Head of Foreign Division. (1913 to 1916) The Assistant Director was Captain Maurice S. FitzMaurice, (8th Jan 1912 to 14th Feb, 1914) had been additional Assistant Director of Naval Intelligence in the N.I.D.
Between the years 1910 and 1912 a member of the Naval Intelligence Division, Fleet Paymaster Rotter,(2) devoted his time and effort in an effort to break the encrypted German Naval messages. His lack of success merely seemed to confirm the gloomy predictions of senior officers that encrypted messages would never be read. Hall was to recount of Rotter post war; “…(he)was an expert German linguist & had been some years in the I.D. He had spent all his leaves in Germany for years & could pass for a German & was in the habit of mixing with German N.O.s [Naval Officers] & knew their way of thinking & expressing themselves. He was of great use when the Germans changed their cyphers for new ones as they never changed the form of words used in routine W/T signals made at stated times.”
Three years before the outbreak of the war, in 1911, a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence on cable communications, decided that in the event of a war with the Kasier’s Germany, the German-owned submarine cables should be cut. The Post Office was tasked to ensure orders were issued for the cutting of the six cross-channel cables, that connected Britain and Germany were severed from day one.
“FIXITY LONDON, FIXED”
At a few minutes past midnight on the 5th August 1914, the first full day of what would be the World War One, a coded telegram arrived at the port of Dover for an officer named Superintendent Bourdeau .
At 01:52 he was aboard the cable-ship, C.S Alert, as it set off out to sea, (not the Telconia as is so often stated), from Dover’s harbour. The bulk of the crew were unaware of their missions target, and as Bourdeau was to recount in his report “We were taking a considerable risk”. At 03:15 the Alert lowered a hook to the seabed and began to dredge. Bourdeau was overseeing one of the first strategic acts of intelligence warfare in the modern world and within a few hours he had severed almost all of Germany’s cable communications with the outside world. With his actions Germany was forced to revert to wireless transmission, a format that could be listened in on by her enemies, even if the cipher made the contents illegible to the eves dropper. Germany on learning of the action complained, and the British restored the connection,(those were different times!) for a few hours, when they were cut a second time and remained so for the next four plus years. Germany would through the course of the war, sever the Norway to Britain cables, but lacking sea supremacy could not prevent Britain from simply repairing them.
On 4th August, just before the Alert set sail, a lone man arrived at the cable station at Porthcurno in Cornwall. It was on Porthcurno’s secluded beach that the transatlantic telegraph cables responsible, for carrying traffic across the Atlantic came ashore. The ‘lone mans’ job title was a “Secret-Censor”. In Hong Kong another “Secret-Censor” walked into the offices of the Eastern Telegraph Company and all though the British Empire similar figures did the same in every far-flung corner, from Malta to Hong Kong. Once the Censor’s were in position, their instructions were to send a message to London reading “Fixity London, Fixed”. Great Britain was taking steps to ensure that her censors were in place to intercept and cut off Germany’s correspondence with its foreign agents. Over the next four years fifty thousand messages alone would pass through the hands of 180 Censor’s based at the UK offices every single day. Another 400/580 (depending on source) Censor’s worked in 120 stations overseas. In all, 80 million messages would be subject to censorship during the wars course. For the duration of hostilities, the British Censor’swould read the thousands of messages every day, often uncovering and blocking important enemy communiques. Britain was taking advantage of its dominance over the worlds telegraph system to establish the first global communications surveillance system.
SCHOOLS OUT
As a consequence of both the C.S Alert , and that man on the Cornwall beach, the amount of Germanic cable messages that were to be sent through cables belonging to other countries, and cables sent by wireless increased. Britain could now intercept these communications, but they were wrapped in codes and ciphers hiding the meaning of the messages ,rendering the contents as unreadable. Britain and Germany had no organizations established pre-war to permit the decoding and translation of these messages.
On the 3rd August 1914 the Royal Navy had just one wireless station for the interception of wireless messages, at Stockton, (County Durham). But with the outbreak of hostilities, a number of other sites belonging to the Post Office, the Marconi Company, and a number of private individuals who had radio equipment, began recording (on paper) the wireless messages from Germany.
The intercepted messages began to arrive on the desks within the Admiralty intelligence division, but there no one knew what to do with this deluge of information. Rear-Admiral Henry Oliver,(3) had been appointed Director of the Intelligence division in 1913, and now on the commencement of hostilities, oversaw a department that was to be fully occupied with the war, but he had no one with the experience of code breaking within its small staff. As a result Oliver turned to a friend, Sir Alfred Ewing, the Director of Naval Education (‘DNE’), who had been a professor of engineering with a knowledge of radio communications and who Oliver knew had an interest in ciphers and constructed ciphers as a hobby.
Oliver was to describe Swing after the war as “…a gently spoken Scotsman who was always dressed in an immaculate gray suit. Ewing had worked as a research engineer and the Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Cambridge, and had be awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Society for his research into magnetic induction, being knighted for his work as an educator. He offered a solid combination of leadership and sharp analysis to the role”.
Again after the war, on the 7th March 1919, in a letter to the Secretary of the Admiralty, Oliver wrote of Sir James A. Ewing :
“I was Director of the Intelligence Division at the outbreak of the war and realized that there was no sufficient means of dealing with the work subsequently carried out successfully by the organization known as Room.40 . Before the war the War Office had a small section for the purpose, but not the Admiralty.
The requirements necessary for the person selected to organise such a department were a very good knowledge of the German language, an expert knowledge of radio-telegraphy and very great brain power, in fact a man who stood out among clever men. He had also to be thoroughly discreet and trustworthy.
A few weeks after war began, after much consideration, I ascertained that Sir Alfred Ewing was willing to undertake the work, and I put him into communication with the War Office Section and started him organizing his department without consulting any of my superiors. He selected his staff and erected receiving stations and had a good deal of useful preliminary work done by October 1914 when a windfall of useful materials came into our hands which enabled a decided advance to be made.”
In his 1946 unpunished memoirs Oliver recounted:
For some time before the 1914 war the Intelligence Division had been trying without success to decode German cypher intercepted by wireless. Fleet Pay [master] Rotter seemed to be the most useful at the work but I wanted to get a big brain on it. The day after War began I met Sir Alfred Ewing the Director of Naval Education and we walked together to the U.S. [United Services] Club. It occurred to me he was the very man. He had been at a German University and had been a professor at Glasgow University of Engineering, he was L.L.D., F.R.S. and D.S.C. and an authority in the electrical world and spoke German fluently. I asked him to take on charge of a Dept. to unravel the German cyphers and he agreed as he said the War had closed his schools etc. and he was rather at a loose end.
After lunch we saw Mr. Churchill and he agreed to give Sir Alfred a free hand to put up W/T intercepting and directional Stations and to engage staff etc. Room 40 was handed over to him and Fleet Pay. Rotter as assistant and Sir Alfred got some of the Dartmouth masters and others as Staff. In three or four weeks they were producing some results and as time went on they got more and more perfect. To maintain secrecy Mr Churchill would not allow anyone to know about the deciphering ability without his permission….. (1).
Everyone in the country knew that the war would be over by Christmas, and during those predicted four months of hostilities, education would not be a priority. Ewing having been asked to establish a group for decoding the intercepted messages turned to the staff of the naval colleges Osborne and Dartmouth, who were available due to the school holidays and to the naval students having been sent on active duty. One of these teachers was Alastair Denniston who had been teaching German, but who would through the course of the war rise to be the second in charge of Room.40 , before going on to becoming the ‘Chief’ of its more famous offspring successor the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, during the Second World War. In addition Ewing recruited a number of civilians such as William Montgomery, a translator of theological works from German, and Nigel de Grey, a publisher.
Room 40 was to become the school teachers temporary home, until the start of the new term at the end of September. The personnel at first struggled due to the ‘novelty’ of technological and mathematical tasks set before them. A lack of financial resources and the qualified personnel from its conception were to be amongst its main problems. This new ‘School Holiday’ team included Charles Godfrey, the Headmaster of Osborne (whose brother became head of naval Intelligence during the Second World War), two Naval instructors, Parish and Curtiss, and the scientist/mathematician, Professor Henderson from Greenwich Naval College.
These ‘volunteers’ were to work on the code breaking, whilst still retaining their normal duties. The entire operation at first operated from Ewing’s office, where the ‘school teachers/code breakers’ had to hide in Erwing’s secretary’s room whenever there were visitors concerning the ordinary duties of the Director of Naval Education, (D.N.E).
Two additional recruits were R. D. Norton, who had worked for the Foreign Office, and Richard Herschell, who was a linguist, an expert on Persia and an Oxford graduate. None of these ‘volunteers’ knew anything about code breaking, but were chosen for their knowledge of the German language and the feeling they were the sort of ‘chaps’ who could keep a secret!
Another recruit was Ted Palmer, a Welsh research physicist who “even in the early morning gloom and wrapped in a heavy overcoat…..recognized the man who came in out of the London rain for his first day’s work at a new office as a ‘Parisian dresser’, and, at least by repute, already established as his department’s most ‘active, intelligent, enterprising, brilliantly deductive brain’ – which meant, ‘more properly, a true Sherlock Holmes.’
Palmer eagerly shook his colleague’s hand and welcomed him inside to the sparsely furnished upstairs corner room where he would spend much of the next three years. It was 6(th) September 1914, and some 400 miles away a million Allied soldiers were then in the process of desperately pushing their shoulders against a front line being battered by the advancing German army on the outskirts of Paris.
Palmer himself was…..attached to the British Admiralty, and more particularly to OB (Old Building) 40…
it was a maze of interconnecting ‘cubby-holes, dens, and barrack-like typing pools’ of various shapes and sizes, and at peak capacity it employed some 800 wireless operators and ninety cryptographers and other specialists….
The ‘Sherlock Holmes’ figure emerging out of the Whitehall rain that September morning was 59-year-old (James) Alfred Ewing, a silver-haired Scot who had served as the first Professor of Engineering at University College in his native Dundee before going on to take up an academic post in Cambridge, and, in April 1903, to join the Admiralty in the newly created role of Director of Naval Intelligence (DNE) at Greenwich. It was said of Ewing that he was ‘careful at all times of his appearance, his suits were mostly grey, added to which he generally wore – whatever the fashion – a white pique stripe to his waistcoat, a mauve shirt, a white butterfly collar and a dark blue bow tie with white spots.’ To this ensemble, the newly arrived DNE sometimes added an ivory-topped walking stick, which he would occasionally jab towards a surprised colleague’s nose for additional conversational emphasis.
Physically, Ewing was something of a macaw in the rookery of British naval intelligence. Professionally, he was probably the most eminent of the various intellectuals and academics to pass through Room 40 during the course of the First World War, a list that also included a ‘siren-voiced’ Presbyterian minister and biblical authority-turned-codebreaker named Revd. William Montgomery; Nigel de Grey, an Eton-educated book editor so mild mannered he was affectionately known as ‘the door mouse’, but who liked nothing more than to casually deconstruct seemingly impossible ciphers for his own amusement; Dillwyn ‘Dilly’ Knox , a classics scholar and Papyrologist (study of ancient literature, correspondence, legal archives, etc…) who absent-mindedly forgot to invite two of his own brothers to his wedding, and who was later said to have done some of his best wartime work while lying in the bathtub he had installed in his Admiralty office; and Alastair Denniston, a former Scottish Olympic field-hockey player and world-renowned e pert on German literature who would still be working as a British intelligence analyst in the Second World War.
Presiding over this group from November 1914, and matching them all for personal idiosyncrasy was 44-year-old Captain (later Admiral) Reginald Hall, known as “Blinker” (4) due to a pronounced facial twitch said to have caused one of his eyes to ‘flash like a Navy signal lamp’, a trait he combined with a penetrating stare, bushy eyebrows, conspicuously false teeth, and, according to the US ambassador to London in a cable home to President Wilson, ‘An intellect that [made] him the one genius the war has developed … Neither in fiction nor in fact can you find any such man to match him.’ The Government Code School established at Bletchley Park in August 1939 was the direct successor of this team of brilliant and often eccentric civilian scholars, lawyers, publishers, schoolteachers and theologians assembled twenty-five years earlier at the Admiralty Building in Whitehall” (By Christopher Sandford).
“Blinker” Hall had been born in 1870 into a naval family, his father was the first DNI. “Blinker” was to benefit from the patronage of Vice-Admiral Beatty, and he seemed destined for stardom, but a weak chest was to cut short his fighting career in August 1914, after the Battle of Heligoland, where he had commanded the Battlecruiser HMS Queen Mary. “Blinker” was on dining terms with a number of Government ministers, and he gave weekly ‘off ‘the record’ press briefings without once being let down by the ministers. He even recruited the American embassy to his cause. Between 1914 and 1917 he was to take no leave, and although a task master, he was quick to earn the affection and loyalty of his team members .
The Military Intelligence department of the War Office had at the outbreak of war, begun it’s own operation, which become known as ‘MI1b’. Colonel Macdonagh had in August 1914 been appointed a GSO1 (Intelligence) at British Expeditionary Force GHQ. On the 7th November 1914 he would be promoted to Brigadier-General, General Staff. He was to go onto perform distinguished service predicting enemy troop movements at the First Battle of Ypres and even predicting an enemy gas attack on the Second Army in December 1915. In 1914 Macdonagh proposed that the two organizations (the Army and Naval Intelligence divisions) should work together, but little was to be achieved beyond creating a system to collect and file the coded messages, until such time as the French obtained copies of German military ciphers. The two groups worked in parallel to each other in an effort to find a way to decode the messages from the Western Front. Russell Clarke, a barrister friend of Macdonagh, as well as a friend of Clarke’s, Colonel Hippisley, approached Ewing to explain that they had been intercepting German wireless messages. Ewing quickly stationed the two men at the coastguard station in Hunstanton, Norfolk, where they were joined by another ‘volunteer’, Leslie Lambert (who would later become known as a BBC broadcaster under the name A. J. Alan). Hunstanton and Stockton were to form the core of an interception service which became known as ‘Y’. In company with the Post Office and the Marconi stations, they rapidly grew to a level where they could intercept almost all the official German messages.
But with the close of September, all the ‘volunteer’ schoolmasters returned to regular duties, except for Denniston. However without a method of decoding the German naval messages there was little to be achieved beyond creating a hush-hush library of German coded messages.
CAPTURE OF THE FIRST CODEBOOK
The first capture of a German navy codebook was in the opening month of the war, off the coast of Australia, but it was not to reach the Admiralty in London until the end of October, ironically the same month the Baltic’s book was to arrive in London. But we will get to that in time.
In August 1914 the German-Australian steamer SS Hobart was on route from Fremantle to Melbourne, and on the afternoon of the 11th August she arrived off Melbourne’s Victoria’s Port Phillip Heads. Whilst the ship’s captain was aware of the increased international tensions, he had not heard of or received any signals revealing the declaration of war. But he decided to hove too and assess the situation, before committing his ship to entering the port.
As the Hobart lay stopped, a small boat approached, full of smartly dressed civilians. The ‘civilians’ the boat contained were in fact Australian naval officers, sent as a boarding party to seize the ship. Captain John Tracy Richardson, (R.A.N) dressed in a bowler hat and wearing a coat over his uniform, and with a pistol secreted his pocket, was only to reveal his ‘true’ identity when he was face to face with the unfortunate Hobart’s captain.
Taking off his overcoat to expose his naval uniform beneath, Captain Richardson formally seized the ship and took its crew as prisoners of war. But the naval Captain was more interested in the ships hidden codebooks, and he decided to let the German captain have his freedom to roam his former command.
Richardson secreted himself in the captain’s cabin, and waited. In the early hours of the morning, the German captain and one crew member stole into the darken room and opened a secret compartment under the bunk. Richardson, switching on his torch and raising his gun, stepped out and took possession of the secret papers.
One of the captured books was a codebook entitled the Handelsverkehrsbuch (‘HVB’), which allowed German merchant ships to communicate via wireless with German warships. But it was in addition also used for communications between the German navy and merchant ships.
The copy of the ‘HVB’ book was the only copy in British hands, resulting in all the relevant German wireless interceptions being made, forwarded to Melbourne for decoding.The task of breaking or cracking the code was given to a former Royal Australian Naval College instructor and a fluent German speaker, Frederick William Wheatley.
The code was not unsurprisingly complicated, involving 450,000 possible four letter groups. Its use was mainly used for routine announcements between ships, but the allies were at this stage, unaware of that. Wheatley became consumed with the task in hand, working on the codebook for three days and two nights, filling in the process, “thousands’’ of foolscap sheets of paper with letters, checking and cross-referencing.
Finally on (the first ever) Melbourne Cup Day, 3rd November 1914, exhausted and with little real progress having been made, Wheatley decided to take a break and to go to Flemington to watch the horse racing . But by 18:00 a refreshed Wheatley was back at his desk, with the code broken. Wheatley wrote how he discovered, “These messages…were all from the German Pacific squadron and gave their itinerary through the Magellan Straits, up to the Abrolhos Island off Brazil, …and then to West Africa”.
There is a school of thought that the decoded messages permitted the two British Battlecruisers, Inflexible and Invincible, to increase their pace across the south Atlantic to where it defeated the German Pacific Squadron at the battle of the Falkland Island, on 8th December. But given the two ships unprepared state on the morning of 8th, I have to place a large question mark over this theory. Plus having read and written a full account from the two battlecruisers entire voyage to Port Stanley, based on the ships logs, they fluctuated between a leisurely and coal saving turn of speed during the passage (5).
News of the Australian capture was not to reach London until the 9th September, while a copy of the book was made and sent by the fastest available steamer, arriving at the end of October.The ‘HVB’ had originally been issued in 1913 to all warships fitted with a wireless, to naval commands and to coastal stations. It was also supplied to eighteen German steamship companies for issuing to any their own ships that carried a wireless set. The code used, as already mentioned, a combination of 450,000 possible four letter groups, which permitted alternative sets to be used with the same meaning, plus an alternate ten letter grouping for use in cables. The cyber process was used once more but this time for general use, as it was more a straight forward version, although it was changed more often. This code was used by the German navies light forces, for example patrol boats, and for routine manoeuvres such as leaving and arriving in harbour. The code was used also made use of by the fledgling U-boat service, but with a more complex key. The submarines longer periods at sea meant that codes were changed often while they were on patrol, and messages had to then be repeated using the old key, giving immediate, valuable and a comparative pair of sources. German intelligence became aware by November 1914 that the ‘HVB’ code had fallen into British hands, and wireless messages was sent out warning that the code was compromised, but bizarrely it remained unchanged until 1916.
The replacement for the ‘HVB’ in 1916 was the Allgemeinefunkspruchbuch (‘AFB’) which was used in combination with a new method of keying. But the British managed to obtain a good knowledge of the new system from the test signals, before it was even introduced into service. The new code was to be supplied to more organizations than the previous one, including those in Bulgaria, Russia and Turkey. It contained more groups than its predecessor, but now was combined by only two letters. The first copy of this new code was captured from a shot-down Zeppelin but others were later to be recovered from sunken U-boats.
CAPTURE OF THE SECOND CODEBOOK
In 1914 the German lead ship of her class, the light cruiser SMS Magdeburg was deployed into the Baltic, where she was to have the ‘honour’ of firing the opening shots of the war with Russia on 2nd August. While she was busy shelling the Russian port of Libau the light cruisers SMS Augsburg laid a minefield outside the harbour. On the 28th August, seventeen days after the Australian adventure, the Magdeburg, in company once more with the Augsburg, and a group of destroyers, all under the command of Rear-Admiral Behring under took a reconnaissance into the Gulf of Finland. Both the captain and crew of the Magdeburg were inexperienced and having run into fog, she was to become separated from the other ships. The fog and crews inexperience were to contribute to the Magdeburg running aground on the island of Odensholm off the coast of Russian-controlled Estonia.
SMS Magdeburg run aground.
Ashore and with Russian ships within the locality, the crew tried frantically to refloat their vessel, but were to be unsuccessful in their efforts. With the ship firmly aground, the destroyer SMS V26 evacuated the crew, and the Magdeburgs commander, Korvettenkapitän Habenicht prepared his ship to be blown up once it had been evacuated. But as he made his preparations the fog chose that moment to lift, revealing the two Russian cruisers, the Pallada and Bogatyr approached and opening fire. The German demolition charges went off prematurely, inflicting injuries amongst those of the crew that were still on board, and before the ships secret papers could be transferred to the destroyer or disposed of. This series of unfortunate events saw Habenicht and fifty seven of his crew captured by the Russians.
The location of those ships papers when recovered by the Russian boarding parties is still debated one hundred years on. The cruiser carried more than one copy of the Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine (‘SKM’) codebook and German accounts state that the majority of the secret papers were thrown overboard. But conflicting with this is the near perfect condition of the British copy, which was reportedly found in the chart house safe. In company with the codebook, the current key was also required to allow use of the book to be made use of. The Russians recovered in addition, a gridded chart of the Baltic, the ship’s log and her war diaries. Two copies, numbered 145 and 974 of the ‘SKM’, were retained by the Russian Admiralty, and Jellicoe was ordered by Churchill to despatch HMS Theseus, (an 1892 Edgar-class protected cruiser), from Scapa Flow to Alexandrovosk near Murmansk, in order to collect this priceless prize offered to them by their Russian allies. Thesus arrived at the Russian Port on the 7th September, but due to undefined “mix-ups” she was not to sail for home until 30th September. She sailed with six trunks of luggage for Princess Louis of Battenburg, wife of the First Sea Lord and the Russian officers, Captain Kredoff and Commander Smirnoff couriering the recovered documents as cargo and passengers. Count Benchkendorf was to claim he brought the codes to England on a Russian Volunteer Navy ship, but he may well have been a decoy. The Theseus returned to Scapa arriving there on the 10th October. The books, including copy no 151 of the ‘SKM’, were formally handed over to the First Lord, Winston Churchill, on 13 October, (author note: three days from Scapa to London with such a treasure trove seems somewhat casual?)
The ‘SKM’ was on its own, of no use as a way of decoding the German wireless, since they were normally enciphered and coded. This level of encryption had left Room 40 with an ability to just read the weather forecasts, as the only messages that could be read. Fleet paymaster Charles.J.E. Rotter, a German expert from the naval intelligence division, was assigned to making work of the ‘SKM’ codebook, in an effort to interpret the intercepted messages, the majority of which when decoded where gibberish, since it wasn’t realized at first they were also enciphered. The solution was to be found by Rotter, who on studying the messages realized that there were several layers of code in play. Once encoded, the letters in the messages had been switched using a substitution key. Rotter began his lonely work in mid-October, being kept apart from the other code breakers until November, when he would break the cipher.
Searching through the messages, Rotter looked for the most common words and sets of letters he would expect to find in a German signal. Once he identified these common letters, he used them to work out the rest. A combination of his expertise on naval affairs, his linguistic skills, and the code books, allowed him to decode the signals within the week. The substitution table he then created allowed his colleagues to reach the same understanding he had. Soon their whole focus was turned towards naval signals. The first series of wireless signals decrypted originated from the German Norddeich transmitter, which were all numbered sequentially and then re-enciphered. The cipher was eventually cracked, then once more, when it was changed a few days later, and a general procedure for interpreting the messages was established. The Enciphering was by a simple table, substituting one letter with another throughout all the messages.
The decoded messages were found to be intelligence reports giving the location of allied shipping. Although of interest it was not important, but Russell Clarke now noticed that similar coded messages were being transmitted on the short-wave. They were not being intercepted due to a shortages of receiving equipment, in particular the aerials. The Hunstanton transmitting station was ordered to stop listening to the military signals it had been intercepting and which were proving to be indecipherable. Instead they were redirected to monitor the short-wave for a trial period over a weekend. The information was found to be about the movements of the High Seas Fleet as well as other valuable naval intelligence. Hunstanton was as a result ordered to permanently monitor these naval signals and stopped intercepting the messages for the army. The Naval personnel who had up to now been helping the army were withdrawn to work on this new vein of naval traffic, without any explanation, due to a desire to keep the new source a secret. A bad atmosphere resulted between the naval and army interception services and any cooperation between them ground to a halt until 1917.
The ‘SKM’ (abbreviated to ‘SB’ in German documents) was the code used for any important sorties by the German High Seas Fleet. It had originated from the ‘ordinary’ style of fleet signal books that had been in use by both the British and German navies pre-war. These volumes had thousands of predetermined instructions, which would be issued by combinations of signal flags or lamp flashes between ships. The ‘SKM’ alone had 34,300 instructions, each one being represented by a different group of three letters. A number of these dated from pre-modern naval operations, and did not include inventions such as aircraft and submarines. The signals used four characters, not within the ordinary Morse code (given the names alpha, beta, gamma and rho). This set up was to cause confusion until all those who were involved in the interception learnt to recognise them and then use a standardise way to record them. Each ship was identified by a group of three letters beginning with a beta symbol. Messages not covered by the 34,300 instructions could be spelled out, using a substitution table for individual letters.
The sheer scale of the book was one reason it could not easily be updated, and the code was to remain in use until the summer of 1916. Even then ships at first refused to use the new codebook simply because the replacement was just too complicated. The resulted was to see the new Flottenfunkspruchbuch ( ‘FFB’) not fully implemented until May 1917.
Within the German navy, some concerns about the security of the ‘SKM’ were raised, first by Rear-Admiral Behring, who reported that he was unsure if the Magdeburg’s code books had been destroyed. It was suggested at the court martial into the cruisers loss, that books might have been recovered by Russians from the clear shallow waters where the ship had been grounded, (the Russians were to scrap the wreck in situ). The C-in-C of Baltic operations, Prince Heinrich of Prussia, wrote to the C-in-C of the High Seas Fleet, that in his opinion it was far from certain if the secret charts had not fallen into the hands of the Russians, and a probability that the codebook and key had also been recovered. The German navy relied upon its re-enciphering process to guarantee security, but the key for this was not to be changed until 20th October and then not changed again for another three months.
The substitution table used for the enciphering was produced by a mechanical device comprised of slides and compartments for the letters. Orders to change the key were issued by wireless, and confusion would all to often result during the changeover period, resulting in messages being transmitted using the new cipher and then being repeated once more with the old key. Changes to the key continued to be ordered at irregular times, a mere six occasions from March 1915 to the end of the year, but then more frequently from 1916 onwards.
Without a copy of the new ‘FFB’ codebook Room 40 could not decipher the wireless messages any longer. Instead a study was undertaken of both the old and new messages, particularly those from the Baltic, which allowed a new book to be reconstructed. With the system once more understood, Room 40 reckoned it could now guarantee to break any new key codes within three to four days, and to have reproduced the majority of a new codebook within two months.
CAPTURE OF THE THIRD CODEBOOK
In addition to the Antipodean and the Baltic Treasure Troves, in March 1915 a British detachment impounded the luggage of Wilhelm Wassmuss, a German agent in Persia. Wassmus’s goal in the area was to bring Persia into the war in an alliance with Germany, but while spreading his message of war against the British, he was captured and sold to the British. Wassmuss managed to escape, but left his belongings behind. His luggage was shipped, unopened, to London, where Hall discovered that it contained the German Diplomatic Code Book, Code No. 13040, the code Zimmerman used so fatefully in two years time.
CAPTURE OF A FOURTH CODEBOOK
A fourth codebook was to be recovered with the sinking of the German destroyer SMS S119 in the Battle off Texel. In the middle of October 1914, following the wars opening naval Battle in the Heligoland Bight, the German High Seas Fleet was ordered not to engage with any larger opposing forces, to avoid any costly and demoralizing reverses. On the 16th October information about some potential activity by the German light forces in the Heligoland Bight became confirmed. If this information originated from Room 40 is unclear, but the Harwich Forces 1st Division of the 3rd Destroyer Flotilla, comprised of the new light cruiser HMS Undaunted (Captain Cecil Fox) and four Laforey-class destroyers, HMS Lenno , Lance, Loyal and Legion was ordered to investigate. At 13:50 on the 17 October, the five ships were steaming northwards, about 50 nautical sea miles off the south-west of the island of Texel, when it encountered a squadron of German torpedo boats. The German force of the 7th Half Flotilla, commanded by Korvettenkapitän Georg Thiele in S119, was comprised of SMS S115, S117, S118. The German squadron was about 8 nautical sea miles ahead of Fox’s force. The German group was sailing in a line abreast, about half a nautical mile apart, on a bearing slightly to the east of the 1st Division. The German ships made no apparent hostile moves against the British, nor did they attempt to retreat. As a result the British assumed that they had been mistaken for friendly vessels. The German flotilla was part of the Emden Patrol and had been ordered to sea from the Ems River, to mine the southern coast of Britain including the mouth of the Thames, but had now been intercepted before reaching its objective.
The British force out-gunned the German 7th Half Flotilla, with HMS Undaunted, an Arethusa-class light cruiser armed with two BL 6 inch Mk II naval guns and seven QF 4 inch Mk V naval guns, in single mounts, and eight torpedo tubes. Undaunted had been experimentally armed with a pair of 2-pounder anti-aircraft guns, something most of her class lacked and at best speed could achieve 8.5 knots. The four Laforey-class destroyers were armed with four torpedo tubes in two twin mounts, three 4-inch guns and a 2-pounder gun. The destroyers were slightly faster than their accompanying cruiser and could make about 29 knots.
The German ships were inferior to the British with the 7th Half Flotilla composed of ageing Großes Torpedoboot 1898 class boats which had been completed in 1904. The German boats could almost match the British at 28 knots and each of the German vessels was armed with three 50 mm (1.97 inch) guns, that were of a shorter range and shell weight than the British guns. The biggest hazard for the British squadron was the five 450 mm (17.7 inch) torpedoes carried by each German boat.
As the British drew closer, the German vessels finally realized that they were not in fact a friendly force, and scattered. The Undaunted, the closer of the British to the Germans opened fire on the nearest torpedo boat, but the German vessel managed to dodge the incoming shell fire with a change of her course, but she lost speed in doing so, allowing the British force to catch up. In order to protect Undaunted from any torpedo attack and to destroy the Germans as quickly as possible, Fox ordered his squadron to divide. Lance and Lenno were to chase down the S115 and S119, and Legion in company with Loyal was to pursue both S117 and S118. Fire from the Legion, Loyal and Undaunted manage to damaged S118 to such a degree, that her bridge was blown off the deck, and she was to sink at 15:17. Lance and Lenno had in the meanwhile engage the S115, disabling her steering gear and causing the German vessel to circle. Lenno’s fire was also to destroy the bridge of her target, S115, but the German torpedo-boat did not strike her colours.
S119, the flotilla leader, and S117, the two central boats in the German flotilla, tried to torpedo the pursuing British, but the Undaunted out manoeuvre the German boats and remained undamaged. When Legion and Loyal had sunk the S118, they came to Undaunted’s assistance engaging her two assailants. Legion attacked S117, which fired its last three torpedoes and then continued to engage with gunfire. Legion rapidly demolished S117, damaging her steering gear which forced her to circle, before she was sunk at 15:30. At the same time, Lance and Lenno had damaged S115 to such a degree only one of the destroyers was needed to despatch her. Lance joined with the Loyal in bombarding S119 with lyddite shells, but S119 managed to fire a torpedo at Lance and hit the destroyer amidships, unfortunately for the Germans the torpedo failed to detonate. With his vessel lost, the commander of S119 threw overboard all secret papers in a lead-lined chest and both sides believed the papers lost along with the ships. S119 was sunk at 15:35 by gunfire from Lance and Loyal, taking the German flotilla commander down with her. S115 remained stubbornly afloat despite constant attacks from Lenno , which sent a boarding party, who on boarding the wreck found only one German on board, who was more than happy to surrender. Thirty members of the crew were pulled from the sea by the British vessels, and the action ended at 16:30, with gunfire from Undaunted finishing off the abandoned hulk of S115.
The following month, on the 30th November a British trawler was fishing over the former battlefield and on recovery of her nets, found amongst the fish a locked lead box . This was S119’s document chest, which was passed on to Room.40 , (Hall was later to claim the trawler had in fact been searching for the chest?). The chest was found to hold a copy of the Verkehrsbuch (VB) codebook, which was used by flag officers of the German Navy. Room 40 was to refer to the find as “the miraculous draft of fishes”
The salvaged ‘VB’ code was comprised of 100,000 groups of 5-digit numbers, each with its own meaning. It had been designed for cables being sent overseas to warships and naval attachés, embassies and consulates, by senior naval officers with an alternative Lambda key. Its presence on board the small destroyer is an unsolved puzzle but it was one of the greatest Cryptologic events during the war, as it permitted the German communications between naval attachés in Berlin, Madrid, Washington, Buenos Aires, Peking, and Constantinople, to be deciphered and read.
MURDER IN BRUSSELS
When the Germans marched into Brussels they employed a young man, Alexander Szek, to undertake the job of repairing the cities damaged wireless station. Alexander was British born but with Austo-Hungarian, and he held joint British-A/H nationality. His father had returned just before the war to Vienna while his mother and sister had remained in England. The story is that through a letter from one of the female family members he was urged to help the British secret service. Alexander was asked to steal the codes and send them to the them. Szek copied portions of the code and turned them over to a British intelligence agent. Shortly after the last piece of copied code was due to be handed over, Szek went missing.
Theories of his disappearance include the possibility that the British disposed of him when his nerve broke so that the Germans would not discover that the code had been compromised. Another theory is that the Germans discovered the theft of the code and killed him. After the war Oliver told the historian Captain Roskill several times he paid £1000 to have the young man murdered. But we do know the British had secured more of Germany’s codes. However its rumoured Alexander had the last page of the code in his pocket when killed to insure the British would extradite him. We have to assume the assassin found the final page…..
In 1917 the German Navy switched to a new code,(‘VB’) for use this time by its officers, with a new key/cypher ‘Nordo’ for which only 70 messages were ever intercepted, but that code was also broken, and ‘VB’ continued to be in use throughout the remainder of the war. “Re-ciphering of the code was achieved by using a key made up of a codeword transmitted as part of the message and its date written in German. These were written down in order and then the letters in this key were each numbered according to their order of appearance in the alphabet. This then produced a set of numbered columns in what appeared to be a random order. The coded message would be written out below these boxes starting top left and continuing down the page once a row was filled. The final message was produced by taking the column numbered ‘1’ and reading off its contents downward, then adding on the second column’s digits, and so on”.
In the last year of the war the key was to be changed by the use of the keywords in a new order. But within a few days Professor Walter Horace Bruford, who had joined Room 40 in 1917 and was to specialise in ‘VB’ messages, managed to break the code. Two messages of the same length had been received , one in the new system and the other in the old, allowing the changes to easily be compared.
It had become necessary to figure out around half of the codeword in a codebook, before it could even be feasible to break enough of the individual messages to make any sense of them. This resulted in several thousand hours of work to break a code. As the War progressed the Germans started to change their codebooks more frequently, so it was now necessary to break a book quickly, before it became redundant and a new book was introduced. The codebreaker’s would begin by using a series of complex logical assumptions to identify first the codewords representing numbers, punctuation and common terms such as names, units, call signs, and such like. After that they could concentrate on more and more of the content of coded messages.
It was a slow and a boring job, and required people who normally worked with words, such as professional lexicographers, experts in ancient history, and other specialist linguists. This was in direct contrast to the Second World War ciphers which needed mathematicians to crack them.
ROOM 40
In early November 1914 Captain William Reginald Hall, the son of the first head of Naval Intelligence, was appointed to replace Oliver as the new ‘DID’. Hall was the former captain of the battlecruiser Queen Mary, but due to ill health had been forced to retire from sea duties. He was to prove a successful ‘DID’, despite the random way he was selected for the role.
Once Room 40 began to bring results and show its full potential, it needed to be established on a more permanent basis, rather than ‘squatting’ in Ewing’s office. On 6th November 1914 the organization moved to what was to be its legend, Room 40 in the Admiralty Old Building. Once in place, in effort to camouflage its existence and purposes, it took it’s room designation as its operational name. Room 40 has, since it’s days of fame, been renumbered, but it is still there in the Admiralty Building off Whitehall in London.
Those not within the rooms staff numbers , who were in the ‘know’ about Room 40 were a small select group;
1: First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill.
2: The Second Sea Lord, the Secretary of the Admiralty,
3: The Chief of Staff (Oliver), the Director of Operations Division (DOD).
4: The Assistant Director, the Director of Intelligence Division (DID, Captain William Hall)
5-7: Three duty captains.
8: Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, (who although a retired First Sea Lord, had returned to the admiralty to work with the staff)
9: The First Sea Lord’s Private Secretary.
10: The First Sea Lord’s Naval Assistant.
the C.O.s
Outside the Admiralty comprised of;
11: The C-in-C Grand Fleet.
12:The Admiral commanding at Dover.
13: Senior Naval Officer Harwich Flotilla.
14: Captain in charge of Submarines.
15?: Possibly the Prime Minister may possibly have been informed, but there is no clear evidence and Hall questions it as well.
The information from Room 40 was circulated to the Heads of Department entitled to it in Red Despatch Boxes with a special lock and key”
The information generated by Room 40 was circulated to those Head of Departments entitled to it, courier’ed in Red Despatch Boxes with special locks and keys.
All the messages that were received and decoded were kept secret, with copies only being permitted to be passed to the Chief of Staff and the Director of Intelligence. It was also decided that one person from the intelligence department needed to be appointed to be able to evaluate the messages content and to rework them, so the source was hidden. Rotter was the first to be proposed for the task, but it was finally decided to retain him within the code breaking and Commander Herbert Hope was finally chosen. Hope had been working on the plotting of the enemy ships, and was placed at first in a small office in the west wing of the Admiralty, within the intelligence section. There he would sit and patiently wait for the few messages which were deemed suitable for him to see. Hope wrote after the war how he would attempt to make sense of what he was being allowed to see and make some useful observations from them, but he found that with no access to the wider information being received his early remarks were usually of little real help to the recipient. He was finally driven to ask Hall for more information, but that was something Hall could not authorize. Then on the 16th November having ‘bumped’ into Fisher, Hope took opportunity to explain about his problems in regards to the limited information he was seeing. Fisher granted Hope full access to the information, along with orders to make twice daily reports to the First Sea Lord. Hope knew nothing about the art of cryptanalysis or of the German language, but working with the code breakers and translators allowed him to add a naval insight into the process, making ultimately for a better translations and then interpretations of received messages. In the interests of secrecy the plan to issue a separate copy of the messages to the ‘DID’ was dropped, so that only the Chief of Staff received one, and he was in turn to show it to the First Sea Lord and Arthur Wilson.
From November 1914 an officer of the War Staff, preferably from the Intelligence Department was to study all the decoded interceptions, not only those current, but those in the library that was being gradually built up with each new interception. He would then compare them and work to develop an understanding of the German mind on their ships movements and issue a report on his conclusions. All the interceptions were stored in a locked book, with the decodes and any other codes to be collected and burnt. The original interceptions was filed and kept under lock and key. Only two copies were ever made of the translations, one being sent by hand and given personally to ‘C.O.S’, and the other to ‘D.I.D’. The system was designed to ensure that the information was quickly available for the responsible people, allowing the ‘C.O.S’ to act as necessary and the ‘D.I.D’ to compare it with information from his other sources. The ‘D.I.D’s copy was kept under lock and key and was seen by no one except ‘D.I.D’ himself. Later in the war the envelopes were marked ‘To be opened only by – ‘.
As the months passed the volume of intercepted messages rapidly increased and it became part of Hope’s duties to decide which were unimportant, which should just be filed and logged, and which should be passed on to those outside Room.40 .
The German fleet reported each day by wireless the position of its ships, and the ships commanders also gave regular position reports when on patrol or out on a sweep. It became possible through this mountain of information to develop an exact picture of the German Navy’s daily routine and the operations of the High Seas Fleet. It was even possible to figure from the routes they chose, where the German minefields had been laid, and where it was safe for British ships to operate.
If Room 40 noticed a change of routine, it was an indication that an operation was about to take place and a warning could be given to the relevant fleet units that were to respond. Equally detailed information about the movement of the U-Boats could also be calculated. Most of this huge volume of information was retained within the walls of Room 40 although a few senior members of the Admiralty were kept informed. Those in the know were all to aware of the huge priority in keeping secret the British ability to read German wireless transmissions.
Admiral Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet, requested on three occasions that the Admiralty grant him copies of the codebook, which after, all one of his cruisers had brought back to Britain. He wanted to have the translated source rather than the Room.40 s interpretations, so that he could make use of the intercepting German signals. He was aware of the interception, but only a small percentage of the information ever got back to him, or if it did then at a slow pace. No messages based upon Room 40 interceptions were permitted to be sent out, unless approved of by Oliver personally (e cept for a few authorised by the First Lord or First Sea Lord). It might have been impractical as well as insecure for code breaking to have taken place on board the Iron Duke, but the staff of Room 40 were of the general opinion that the full potential of their work was not being made use of. A large bulk of the information they had collected, remained extremely secret and they were forbidden to e change information with the other intelligence departments or those planning operations.
CADS AND DIPLOMATS
In time as the war dragged on Military Intelligence (MI1b for the army, Room 40 for the Royal Navy) turned their attention to other nations diplomatic codes. Both units began to take an interest beyond that of the German diplomatic communications, even those of friendly neutral nations, such as the USA.
Room 40 cracked the US diplomatic codebook with the use of an original ploy. The British Government handed to the US ambassador in London a diplomatic note that they knew would have to be transmitted by telegram to Washington in its full text. The cable wad intercepted on-route to Cornwall’s trans-atlantic cables and was used to start deciphering the US diplomatic code.
Once broken the British military and the Government were able to read every diplomatic cable that head out into the Atlantic cables and thus follow the US diplomatic moves, such as the Presidents peace talks, and to watch Germany’s efforts to coerce neutrals into understand its situation, prior to the unleashing of unrestricted submarine warfare at the beginning of 1917. The codebooks used by that stage of the war were much more complex than the early alphabetic allocation codebooks. Codewords were now by this stage generated randomly, making it far more difficult to break the new codebooks if a physical copy had not been captured, stolen or borrowed.
EARLY CODE-BREAKING MACHINES
code-breaking was a very labour-intensive process, and the huge amounts of information collected in the process rapidly placed strain on the Room.40 ‘s team and its limited resources. In 1918 an Allied intelligence report was to note that codebreaker’s “must possess the faculty of keeping anything from a dozen to 20 theories in [their] mind in order to build-up a chain of coincidence and reasoning until each link fits into its place and forms a coherent whole”.
During 1916 one of their rooms personnel developed the idea of using machinery to work on the sequence of logical steps within the code-breaking process, or ‘flow-charting’.
Not much evidence about the nature of the Room 40 machine, or how it functioned, has survived. It was probably a form of punched card tabulator machine, but little else beyond speculation can be said for sure.
The tabulating machine was an electro-mechanical device that had been invented to help summarise information and later, accounting applications, and is from where todays computing giant IBM had its origins. The only clue left to us about the Room 40 hardware is mention of a ‘pianola’. It was quite common then for the pianola-type device to be a form of punched card machinery.
The codebreaker’s adopted the word “hatted” for these randomly generated codebooks, as if the codeword for any plain word had been drawn out of a hat. This led to the description of the team of women operating the machine as ‘grinding’ codeword meanings ‘out of the hat machine’.
There is account of the impact the Room 40 machinery had on the process of working out codewords. In a document about diplomatic code breaking, is a short account of the project: “It was not realized that this form of [randomly allocated] code required special treatment until May 1916 when leave was granted to set-up a special staff of educated women to work machinery by which the guessing process could be accelerated… By this method the [number of] guessed codewords rose at once to 20 daily, and by the law of increasing returns grew mechanically to a maximum of 100 per day by which time the code was approximately readable.”
In another example of how the mystical machine changed the nature of Room.40 ‘s work , the report added that “the reading of messages in such codes proved to be merely a matter of tedious drudgery for one or two experts and the staff of ladies trained by Miss Robertson”.
SIGNALS INTERCEPTION AND DIRECTION FINDING
At the start of 1915 both the British and German interception services began to e periment with radio direction-finding (RDF) equipment. Captain Round, who had worked for Marconi, had been conducting experiments for the army in France and Hall having heard of his work ordered him to build a direction-finding system suitable for the navy. This first unit was established at Chelmsford, but the location proved to be a poor choice and the equipment was moved to Lowestoft. Gradually other stations were established, at Lerwick, Aberdeen, York, Flamborough Head and Birchington and by May 1915 the Admiralty was able to track German U-Boats in the North Sea. Some of these stations also acted as ‘Y’ stations to gather German wireless messages, and a new section was established within Room 40 to plot the positions of the ships located by the ‘RDF’ reports. A further five stations were to be built in Ireland under the command of the Vice Admiral at Queenstown, for plotting ships at sea to the west of Britain and further stations both within Britain and overseas were operated by the Admiral commanding reserves.
The German navy was, unlike with the wireless interception, aware of the British ‘RDF’ and this was developed in order to proved to be a cover for Room.40 , when the information about German ship location was released to the fleet for operational use. The two sources of information, directional fixes and German reports of their positions, complemented each other. Room 40 was soon also able to establish through the use of intercepted wireless traffic from Zeppelins, (which were given position fixes by German ‘RDF’ stations to aid in their navigation), that the accuracy of British systems was superior to their German counterparts.
Room 40 provided daily accurate information on the positions of Germany’s ships, but the Admiralty’s priority always remained to keep the existence and source of this knowledge a secret. Hope was shown the reports regularly that were created by the Intelligence Division, about German ship locations so that he could blur them, but this was soon dispensed with, for fear of giving away what they knew. From June 1915 it was decided that no regular intelligence reports for the location of German ships were to be issued to flag officers, just to Jellicoe, who was also the only person to receive the extremely accurate charts of German minefields, prepared from the Room 40 information. A limited amount of watered down information was passed to Beatty (commanding the battlecruisers), Tyrwhitt (Harwich destroyers) and Keyes (submarines), but Jellicoe remained unhappy with the arrangement. He repeatedly asked that Beatty at least be issued with the Cypher B (reserved for secret messages between the Admiralty and him) to communicate more freely and he complained that Beatty was not getting sufficient information.
Having seen the flaws of the German system, the Admiralty ordered that all British ships refrained from use of the wireless as much as possible and then to use only sufficient power to ensure that the destination could receive the message. But in reverse, Room 40 was to benefit massively from the free chatter between German ships, which gave them access to many routine messages, which they could compare and analyse. In addition the German habit of transmitting on full power made receiving the messages much easier. Messages to the Grand Fleet base in Scapa were never sent by wireless, and when the fleet was at sea, messages were sent using the lowest feasible power and also through relay ships (including private vessels), to make interception for the Germans more difficult. There was to be no attempt by the German fleet to restrict use of its wireless sets until 1917 and then only as a response to a perceived threat of the British use of ‘RDF’, not through any knowledge of Room.40 .
SCARBOROUGH, HARTLEPOOL, AND WHITBY
Late in December 1914 with Room 40 developing into its stride, Hipper’s wireless transmissions in preparation for a sortie were decoded and Hope’s notes were laid on Oliver’s desk. Having read the offering, Oliver drafted and sent the following signal to Jellicoe;
“Good information has just been received showing that a German cruiser squadron with destroyers will leave the Jade on Tuesday morning early [15 December] and return on Wednesday night. It is apparent from our information that the battleships are very unlikely to come out. The enemy will have time to reach our coast. Send at once, leaving tonight, the Battle-Cruiser Squadron and Light Cruiser Squadron [Beatty, at Cromarty] supported by a battle squadron, preferably the Second [Warrender with the most powerful dreadnoughts at Scapa]. At dawn on Wednesday [16th] they should be at some point where they can intercept the enemy on his return. Tyrwhitt with his light cruisers and destroyers [the Harwich Force] will try to get in touch with the enemy off the British coast and destroy him, keeping the Admiral informed. From our information the German cruiser squadron consists four battle cruisers and five light cruisers and there will probably three flotillas of destroyers”.
The Raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby on 16th December 1914 was to result from Hipper’s plans. The attack saw 592 casualties, many of them civilians, of whom 137 died. In addition the Germans missed the thing they had been seeking, the piecemeal destruction of a British Capital ship’s force. Beatty’s forces and Warrender’s 2nd Battle Squadron put to sea in response to Jellicoe’s orders. It was a day that illustrated Room.40 s potential, putting the British at sea and nor scrambling from port on the news of Hipper’s bombardments.
DOGGER BANK
In the build up to what would be the Battle of Dogger Bank and Hipper’s recognizance of the Banks light forces von Ingenhol signalled the German 1st Scouting Group on the 23rd January 1915 to “proceed out at night, arrive in the forenoon, return in the evening”. Room 40 over heard and also received the wirelessed orders for the turning on of harbour lights at designated times.
At 14:10 Churchill drafted and signalled via a land line Jellicoe, (who was struggling with “man flu” or a heavy cold), Beatty, Tyrwhitt (at Harwich) and Bradford (Vice Admiral Commanding 3rd Battle Squadron):” Four German battlecruisers and si light cruisers will sail this evening to scout on Dogger Bank probably returning tomorrow evening. All available battle cruisers, light cruisers and destroyers from Rosyth [Beatty] should proceed to a rendezvous in 55.13 N 3.12 E arriving at 7 a.m.tomorrow. Commodore T [Tyrwhitt] is to proceed with all available destroyers and light cruisers from Harwich to join VA Lion [Beatty] at 7 a.m. at above rendezvous. If enemy is sighted by Commodore T while crossing their line of advance they should be attacked. W/T is not to be used unless absolutely essential.”
The last sentence is of particular interest as it clearly shows the Admiralty were wary of gifting their enemies the same level of interception. In addition there was concern any British wireless traffic might drown out German transmissions.
With Room.40 s warning that a Hipper’s squadron was heading for Dogger Bank, Beatty and Jellicoe sailed their respective squadrons to intercept the Germans. The British managed to surprise the smaller and slower German squadron, which then turned for home. During a stern chase lasting several hours, the British slowly caught up with the Germans and engaged with them in a long-range duel. The British disabled the Blücher, the rearmost of the German ship and the Germans put the British flagship Lion out of action. Due to Beatty’s inadequate signalling, the remaining British ships stopped in the pursuit to sink Blücher, by which time, the rest of the German squadron had escaped.
JUTLAND
By the time of Jutland, May 1916, Room 40 was producing good intelligence, but the Admiralty continued to value the Signals Intelligence to such a degree, that it was reluctant to issue it to the Fleet, even in a watered down form, due to a fear the Germans learned of their vulnerability. This was further complicated by the senior Royal Navy commanders, who were trained in the pre-wireless days where they were masters and commanders of their ships, held a resentment towards any interference of Room.40 s intelligence with operations.
After two years of waiting, on the 31st May Admirals Jellicoe and Scheer’s battle fleets faced each other across the Jutland battlefield on the day of ‘Der Tag’.
Room 40 knew of the German plans in advance, and issued warnings. But for the warning, Jellicoe could have been at anchor in Scapa as Scheer sailed out. As with previous occasions Room.40 s efforts put the British chess pieces into play. But as much as they got things right, things went wrong as well.
The prelude to Scheer’s Jutland adventure was a signal intercepted days before, ordering the minesweepers to sweep the northern exit routes of the Horns Reef, a clear indication that in the next few days a significant German force would be steaming North along the West Danish coastline.
At 23:02 on the 28th May 1916 Room 40 over heard Scheer’s orders by wireless to his fleet ordering them to prepare for sea on the 31st of May. The message had been dispatched most likely in the to ‘SKM’ ( or Magdeburg) code. Room 40 received the interception, recorded it and passed it on.
The following day at 16:10 Room 40 overheard a U-boat enquire of its base, how far was it possible to enter into the Firth of Forth. But with strong anti-submarine defences in place, Jellicoe wasn’t perturbed.
Seventeen hours later at 16:09 on the 30th Room 40 received and decoded Scheer’s orders for the High Seas Fleet to gather in Wilhelmshaven’s Outer Roads by 19:00. Earlier in the day at 10:08 the Bruges wireless station had issued a warning to all U-boats to be aware that on the 31st and 1st, friendly forces would be at sea, which Room 40 overheard and decoded. At noon on the same day both Jellicoe and Beatty were warned as a result of Room.40 ‘s work that the Germans would sail early on the 31st.
At 15:36 Scheer signal the fleet “most secret 2490”, which was most likelihood a wirelessed reference to an earlier written, (and thus not overheard by Room.40 ), order, referring to the coming sortie.
The ne t overheard signal by Room 40 was at 17:00 for the flagship of the 3rd BS to pass the Jade light house at 03:30, followed by further wirelessed orders to both the 1st & 2nd BS to revert to using the call sign ‘DK’ in reference to Scheer, but this was sent in a new cipher and would remain un-cracked until the afternoon of the 31st, when the two battlefleets were already in action. The next deciphered signal was addressed to KAdm Franz Mauve the Admiral of the 2nd BS, ordering him to leave his prize crews behind, which gave an insight into the sort of sortie Scheer was planning for the following day. Next came a signal announcing that the C-in-C was taking over wireless control, a sign of the fleets imminent sailing.
Jellicoe was aware Scheer had plans a foot and believed his fleet to have been enhanced with the addition of two new Battleship’s and one Battlecruiser. On the 2nd May Room 40 had overheard that the new ‘super-dreadnought’ Bayern had achieved 22.05 knots on her measured mile and Jellicoe believed by the 31st she was in place with the fleet.
Things began after such a promising start to unravel for the British, when Captain Thomas Jackson, the Director of Operations made one of his rare visits to Room.40 . He asked a simple question, but chose his words poorly. He wanted to know if the German Fleet had put out to sea yet, but asked where the call sign of its commander, Admiral Scheer, was currently located. He was correctly advised that it was still based at Wilhelmshaven. He then signalled to Jellicoe that the German Fleet had not yet left port. But Room 40 was fully aware that Scheer was at sea, and when Jackson’s error came to light the staff were furious their work had been wasted by a wrongly phrased question. They were not at fault as they answered what they were asked. In such a world as Room 40 inhabited, you did not second guess someone’s intentions. Whenever Scheer left port with the fleet, his personal call sign was transfered ashore. The Director of Operations simply miss-phrased his question.
When the advance units of the British Fleet ran unexpectedly into the main German Fleet, Jellicoe’s confidence in the Admiralty’s intelligence was shaken, and the Battle of Jutland turned into a missed opportunity. If Jellicoe had been forewarned the fleet was already at sea, he could have increased his squadrons speed and sought battle earlier in the day, with more hours of day light left to him.
The source of Jackson’s error was a post war revelation by William Clarke, who was a Room 40 veteran and would go onto serve throughout the war and on into Bletchley Park, before retiring at the end of WWII. Clarke’s explanation has been repeated by historians of the battle, and it has never been contradicted by Room 40 contemporaries.
Through the battle, Scheer’s transmissions were on a low power, making interception at sea of his wireless signals harder for Room.40 . In addition as the Battle rapidly unfolded and wireless interceptions were made, Room 40 could not decipher them fast enough to effect the battles outcome. The product of Room 40 was not a quick fix and it took time to decipher interceptions.
At 22:10 Room 40 learnt that at 21:06 Scheer had ordered for a Zeppelin reconnaissance or The Horns Reef, but Jellicoe was not informed. After a long day, during which Oliver had written every message sent out from Room.40 , he stole a few minutes to have a quick nap. Captain Everett, the assistant to the First Sea Lord assumed temporary command of Room 40 in Oliver’s place. He decided not to forward the revealing titbit to Jellicoe, which would have revealed Scheer’s chosen route home. But given Oliver’s role in the day he should have been woken. At 22:55 Room 40 learnt that Scheer had been ordered home at 22:15, and this information was also not to be forwarded to Jellicoe.
Between 21:55 and 03:00 Room 40 decoded 16 plus messages but the Operational Division was only to forward three of these to Jellicoe.
Post battle Room 40 managed to compile an accurate post battle assessment of the damage to ships and crew within the German fleet.
Who won the Battle of Jutland?
R.M.S LUSITANIA
In May 1915 the world was shaken by the sinking of the Lusitania by the “hun”. As the chess pieces on the board were moved around slowly drawing the 44,767 ton liner and 824 ton U-boat together, Room 40 was to be a prominent player in the tragedy.
By the tail end of 1914 Room 40 could proudly claim to know with reasonable accuracy the position of nearly every U-boat at least once a day and from January 1915 Commander Hope from Room.40 ‘s Intelligence Division, started giving daily location reports on the underwater boats to Churchill, Fisher, Oliver and Wilson. As the war at sea progressed through its first twelve months, the German Admirals came to appreciate the usefulness of the wireless equipment fitted aboard their U-boats. As a result of this new found appreciation the U-boat commanders were ordered to make daily location reports for their patrols, and in some cases these were even broadcast hourly! All of this wireless activity was also appreciated by Room 40 which decoded the information, and passed it onto Commander Hope. By early 1915 Hope had come to know the strength of Germany’s submersible fleet, it’s growing numbers, the number in port or at sea and the losses as calculated by the boats failure to return. Commander Hope was also through wireless reports, and painstaking work, able to build up an accurate list of every flotilla of U-boats and it’s current operational strengths. This new form of intelligence allowed the British Admiralty to know on a daily basis were the danger areas were, and broadcast a warning to those as sea. By May of 1915, Room 40 was able to paint a daily picture of almost every U-boat at sea, and Commander Hope instigated those daily briefings.
But this deluge of information was problematic. The ability of Room 40 to display the location of a significant number of German U-boats and Allied ships on a number of large maps located within the Admiralty’s War Room, and in turn help identify which of those ships vulnerable to attack was a double edged sword. The limited number within the British government who were aware and had access to Room 40 intelligence were concerned that if they responded to every piece of information and tried to protect every ship known to be in danger from a U-boat, it would alert the Germans to their vulnerability.But the Germans had some success of their own with deciphering, and broadcast by wireless on the 27th March from the Neumunster wireless station a claim to be reading the British Merchant Navy Code. Unfortunately they were unaware that the British could also listen in, and Oliver issued a series of signals ordering escorts not to give routes to merchant ship’s , even in the Merchant Navy Code. Queenstown were not told of the Germans success and didn’t cease using the comprised code until after the Lusitania’s loss.
On the 24th April the Cunard trans-Atlantic liner steamed into New York for what would be her final time. As she passed the Statue of Liberty, back in London, sat on Winston Churchill’s desk was a series of instructions awaiting his authority to be published. The instructions gave anti-submarine guidance to merchant ships captains, and for the first time in the war, they were told to zig-zag once within the designated danger areas. Churchill agreed to their being issued, but the Admiralty was not to do so until the 13th May, twelve days after the Lusitania departed from New York. The Admiralty had always claimed the liners Captain Turner had been issued with a set of instruction that hadn’t yet even been published by the Admiralty! The Lusitania was never to zig-zag once in her final Atlantic crossing.
Oliver was well aware of the dangers awaiting the Lusitania as she drew nearer to the waters around Southern Ireland and ordered two destroyers to meet with and escort the liner in on the last leg of her voyage. He also stationed the new Q-ship HMS Lyons off the south of Ireland, to ensnare the U-boats lurking within the waters there. The 2 escorting destroyer Captains, despite repeated attempts, were unable to obtain details of the Lusitania’s time, date and expected route from either Cunard or the Admiralty. They were also denied access to the merchant ship code and Lusitania’s Captain Turner refused, understandably, to broadcast in clear his route or his position. The Admiralty well aware of the submarine hazard off southern Ireland ordered three east bound troopship’s under the escort of the cruiser Essex to sail into Queenstown and to await escorts there.
While Lusitania steamed east, and escorts vainly sought for, her “Blinker” schemed a scheme to divert German troops from the Western Front, in a Churchillian and Fisher style fantasy. His ‘cunning plan’, in which he worked with an officer of Britain’s domestic counterintelligence agency, MI-5, was to convince the German military that the British planned an invasion of the Germanic provence of Schleswig-Holstein, on the North Sea. He ‘let-slip’ that the invasion plans were in the final stages of planning by supply known German espionage sources with a series of detailed, but false, information. The ‘leak’ told how one hundred warships and transports were to be gathered in harbours on Britain’s west and south coasts, rather than the east-coast ports that were typically used to resupply Britain’s continental forces. “Blinker”even managed to persuaded the Admiralty to order a halt to all ship traffic between England and Holland from the 21st April, which was just the type of order that might precede the launch of an invasion force.
Germany’s military leaders were at first understandably skeptical, but this new leaked information, and the stopped shipping, proved very persuasive. On the 24th April Room 40 listened in the on wireless messages from a German station at Antwerp. “An untried agent reports from England: Large transport of troops from south and west coast of England to Continent. Large numbers of troops at Liverpool, Grimsby, Hull.” Semi-convinced and not wishing to chance the invasion plans were real, the German Admiralty issued orders on the 24th April for six U-boat commanders (Schwieger and U20 being one of the six ) instructing them to patrol off the Heligoland Bight, and to destroy anything that resembled a troop transport.
Having finally been released from thwarting the non-existent invasion, U20 headed westward towards the English Channel. As the U-boat sailed westward Room 40 kept close watch on her as she made her way through the Channel. The boat made regular and frequent use of her wireless set to provide details on her course and speed to both her own side and a listening Room 40 . On Friday the 20th April at 14:00 she once again broadcast her location. Two hours later, U20 did so again, and continued making reports every hour until midnight, and then every two hours until eight o’clock the next morning, Saturday 1st May.
On the 1st May “Blinker”advised the Admiralty of having learnt about the German Embassy’s advertisement published in a New York paper that morning, that warned passengers against traveling on the Lusitania;
“NOTICE!
TRAVELLERS intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies; that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to the British Isles; that, in accordance with formal notice given by the Imperial German Government, vessels flying the flag of Great Britain, or any of her allies, are liable to destruction in those waters and that travellers sailing in the war zone on the ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk.
IMPERIAL GERMAN EMBASSY
Washington, D.C. 22 April 1915″.
By the days end the news was known to every Briton or American who had picked up a newspaper that day. The liners date of sailing and her expected arrival date in Liverpool a week later was now public knowledge.
In addition to “Blinker’s” New York report, Room 40 received information from the German wireless station at the Norddeich Transmitter, broadcasting the Lusitania’s schedule and signalling si U-boats which were now en route. Room 40 knew that one of those boats was U-20.
None of Room 40 ‘s information about the six U-boats or the imminent arrival of U-20 off Ireland was communicated to the liners Captain Turner. Nor was any effort made to be made to divert the Lusitania from its course, as the Admiralty had done for the same ship the preceding March, as well as for the Transylvania and Ausonia in January. Like the majority at Cunard, Captain Turner had no concept that Room 40 could, or did existed.
Two days before the loss, on Wednesday 5th May, Churchill chaired a meeting in the Admiralty’s war room. At this stage in their relationship, Fisher and Churchill did not get on well. Fisher was unconvinced by Churchill’s disastrous Dardanelles campaign once more. But Churchill was off to France that afternoon to attend a Naval convention, which would eventually bring Italy into the war on the side of the Allied Powers. Following that convention he was bizarrely to go on to visit the Headquarters of the Armies Sir John French, who in the final stages of mounting what would be another disastrous offensive on the Aubers Ridge, the following Friday, a strange diversion for the First Lord of the Admiralty.
The war room was aware of U20, under the command of Kapitan-Leutnant Schwieger, being on her way towards Fastnet. Since departing her base, U20 had continue to faithfully signal her location to the German Admiralty by wireless every 4 hours, and her reports were intercepted and deciphered immediately within Room 40 . The submarine even had her own ledger within Room 40 , a volume that is now in the National Archives at Kew, London. This ledger shows clearly how the Admiralty had intercepted and decoded every wireless message and even the sinking report of the Lusitania from U20. It demonstrates that those in charge at the Admiralty were fully aware of U20’s existence off Ireland.
As U20 lurked off Ireland’s southern shore, Lusitania steamed on towards Fastnet, and the cruiser HMS Juno had been ordered to escort her safely home. Both U-boat and cruiser would arrive off Fastnet ahead of the Cunard liner.
In the war room the three men agreed that the 5,690 ton obsolete (1895) Juno was far too vulnerable to a U-boat attack, (unlike a 44,767 ton ocean liner) and ordered her recalled into Queenstown, but no such message was sent to Captain Turner of the Lusitania, to advise him that the escort he was expecting, had now been sent into Queenstown, as they feared the Germans would intercepted (and decode) the signal. With the lone order dispatched, Churchill had lunch with his wife, before he hurried off to Waterloo station to catch his train. This left First Sea Lord Fisher in charge of the Admiralty who was aged 75, (and according to some sources sadly showing the early signs of senility). Admiral Oliver was also on duty, deputizing for Churchill while he was away. Late during that Wednesday afternoon, U20 sank a small schooner, the Earl of Lathom off Kinsale. The Admiralty received separate signals relating to the sinking by 21:30 that night, but as the ledger shows, they were already aware of the Earl of Lathom’s sinking through U20 signaling Germany at 17:30.
Before midnight, the news was received that the British Steamer Cayo Romano had been unsuccessfully attacked off Queenstown. The ledger notes that U20’s message was received before the Earl of Lathom was sunk. The only action ordered as a result was the updating of U20’s position on the great map in the Admiralty war room, while the Naval base at Queenstown issued a general signal at 22:30: “Submarines active off south coast of Ireland”. At midnight an addition was made to the regular nightly warnings”, submarine off Fastnet”.
The next day, Thursday 6th May, U-20 sank two more cargo ships, the Candidate and the Centurion, off the entrance to St George’s Channel, near the Coningbeg lightship. She also unsuccessfully attack on the White Star liner Arabic. By 11:00 on the 6th May, Room 40 had notified the Admiralty of the wireless signal confirming the sinking of the Candidate, though they didn’t inform Queenstown, for another 24 hours. During the night of the 6/7 May the Admiralty’s nightly U-boat warning excluded the Fastnet and Queenstown area, as they perceived no immediate threat, and news of the sinking’s had yet to reach Queenstown.
At around 11:00 on 7 May, the Admiralty wirelessed another warning to all ships: “U-boats active in southern part of Irish Channel. Last heard of twenty miles south of Coningbeg Light Vessel”. Turner adjusted his ships course northeast, unaware that the report related to attacks of the previous day, and his thinking being that submarines would be more likely to keep to the open sea, so that Lusitania would be safer close to the shore. At 13:00 a further message was received, “Submarine five miles south of Cape Clear proceeding west when sighted at 10:00 am”. This report was inaccurate as no submarine had been at that location, but it gave the impression that at least one submarine had been safely passed by the liner.
U-20 was by now low both on fuel and weaponry with only three torpedoes remaining to her. The morning of 7 May, brought poor visibility and Schwieger decided to turn for home. He submerged at 11:00 after sighting a fishing boat, which he took for a British patrol and shortly after was passed while still submerged by the cruiser Juno returning to Queenstown, traveling fast and zig-zagging, having received her warning of submarine activity off Queenstown at 07:45. The Admiralty considered these old cruisers to be highly vulnerable to a U-boat attack and Schwieger did attempt to target the speeding ship. As Juno ziz-zagged for port, the Lusitania steamed on in a straight line and U-20 made her way towards the English Channel.
From here we will let Kapitänleutnant Walther Schwieger, the commanding officer of U 20, log tell the tale;
2.29p.m. Sight dead ahead four funnels and two masts of a steamer steering straight for us (coming from SSW towards Galley Head). Ship identified as a large passenger steamer.
2.25p.m. Dive to periscope depth and proceed at high speed an intercepting course in the hope that the steamer will alter to starboard along the Irish coast. Steamer alters to starboard and sets course for Queenstown permitting an approach for a shot. Proceed at high speed until 3 p.m. in order to gain bearing.
3.10p.m. Clear bow shot from 700 metres (G. Torpedo set for 3 metres depth, inclination 90 degrees, estimated speed 22 knots). Torpedo hits starboard side close abaft the bridge, followed by a very unusually large explosion with a violent emission of smoke (far above the foremost funnel). In addition to the explosion of the torpedo there must have been a second one (boiler or coal or powder). The superstructure above the point of impact and the bridge are torn apart, fire breaks out, a thick cloud of smoke envelopes the upper bridge. The ship stops at once and very quickly takes on a heavy list to starboard, at the same time starting to sink by the bow. She looks as if she will quickly capsize. Much confusion on board, boats are cleared away and some of them lowered into water. Apparently considerable panic; several boats fully laden, are hurriedly lowered, bow or stern and at once fill with water. Owing to the list on the starboard side .The ship blows off steam; forward the name Lusitania in gold letters is visible. Funnels painted black, no flag on the poop. Her speed was 20 knots.
03:25 pm As it appears the steamer can only remain afloat for a short time longer, dive to 24 metres and proceed out to sea. Also I could not fire a second torpedo into the mass of people saving themselves.
04.15 pm. Come up to periscope depth and take a look round. In the distance astern a number of lifeboats; of the Lusitania nothing more can be seen. From the wreck the Old Head of Kinsale bears 358 degrees 14 miles. Wreck lies in 90 metres of water. (Distance from Queenstown 27 miles.) Position 51 degrees 22 6 N 8 degrees 31′ W. The land and lighthouse very clearly visible”.
With the Lusitania sunk and 1,962 passengers and a crew (1,266/696) we need to briefly consider if Room 40 s remarkable intelligence work was manipulated by Churchill to drag the US into the war.
There were three major obstacles for First Lord of the Admiralty to have had to overcome;
1) The Ocean of the South Coast of Ireland is vast, (really vast). In comparison the Lusitania was small and U20 minuscule. How would anyone in the days before radar and satellites bring two unaware players within a couple of miles of each other without arousing the suspicion of anyone else at the Admiralty or the liners crew and her Captain?
2) Churchill would have needed to ensure that the U-boat Captain sank the liner. The recent introduction of the Q-Ship into the Submarine war and the German knowledge of the Admiralty instructions to merchant ships to make an attempt to ram any U-boat that challenged them, the U-boat Captain could have been equally suspicious of such an apparently easy target. U20 did in the end make the attack, but Churchill could not guarantee it.
3) Lastly, Churchill would have had to manage all three criteria from France, from which he did not return until the following Monday.
At the pre-lunch Wednesday meeting all Churchill knew for certain was that U20 was heading towards the coast of Ireland and would get there at around the same time as HMS Juno. He didn’t at that point have any information other than U20’s failed attack on the Cayo Romano.
Churchill would have undoubtedly considered the possibility of such an attack taking place and how to use it to his own political advantage, but to engineer such an attack was beyond even Churchill’s capabilities.
The only area where Churchill could be found guilty was in the neglecting of his duty by “going off on a jolly” as Fisher called it, and joining in with the witch-hunt on Captain Turner. A scapegoat was needed and who better than the sunken the Liner’s Captain? Fisher was to note on a reports margin (Fisher always wrote in green ink!) on the incident “Fully concur! As the Cunard company would not have employed an incompetent man, the certainty is absolute that Captain Turner is not a fool, but a knave! It is my profound hope that Captain Turner will be arrested after the inquiry, whatever the outcome.”
Once Churchill returned from France and read the same report (Churchill always wrote in red ink! ): “Fully concur! We shall pursue the Captain without check!”. It was seemingly to quote a source: “Who shall we hang so that we don’t all hang together?” The answer, was Captain William Thomas Turner.
As to the question of the cargo and her validity as a target. Recent research has revealed the Allied hands were far from clean in this tragic saga.
In 2014 a release of papers revealed that in 1982 the British government warned divers of the presence of explosives on board.
Later in 1915, on the 1st September, acting on a coded message intercepted by Room.40 , the British boarded a Dutch ship off England’s coast, (one source claims off Falmouth and another the Downs)where the ship had briefly hove to. The American journalist James Archibald was detained after a search inside his briefcase revealed, among other things, sabotage progress reports written by the German military attaché Franz von Papen and Karl Boy-Ed, the German naval attaché to the United States.
In another effort to draw America into the war, Britain leaked the letters to the American press, (a second source claims direct to the State Department). The information while not bringing the US into the war did sow further distrust of the the Central Powers.
As an aside, in November 1916 Zimmerman had a new Diplomatic code shipped to the Washington D.C embassy onboard the mercantile Submarine , Deutschland, on its voyage to Baltimore in the USA. Room 40 struggled to break the new cipher and it wasn’t until 27th January that even a partially deciphered code could be given to Hall.
THE ZIMMERMAN TELEGRAM.
At the beginning of 1917 the American public and their Government’s opinion had swung to become anti-German, and their country was becoming more in favour of the Allies. The British Blockade of Germany had effected the degree of that swing, as it slowly impacted on the trade between the USA and Germany. But unrestricted submarine warfare and the loss of the American life’s that brought and help to negate that. Their neutrality and isolationism was still important to the Americans and the pledge to keep the country out of the war that was tearing Europe apart, had seen President Woodrow Wilson re-elected in November 1916.
Since August 1914 Britain had sought to drag the USA into the war, and in turn Germany was only to aware of the dangers to her if the US joined her enemies. But the Allied blockade was biting hard, the winter had seen a poor harvest and Jutland had demonstrated that the naval gun would not win the war for Germany. Unrestricted submarine warfare was a calculated gamble to bring Britain to her knees, before the USA could enter and have an effect on the war’s outcome. Germany finally bit the bullet on the 1st February 1917 and unleashed her submarines with all restrictions removed . Slowly with each American lost at sea, America drew closer to the Allies, but it would take one cataclysmic event to push the USA over the cliff and into the war. That push came to in February 1917, and was delivered by Germany’s Foreign Minister, Albert Zimmerman.
In 1914 the the cutting of her trans-atlantic cable’s by Britain, Germany found herself isolated from the world outside of Europe. But Germany’s neighbour across the Baltic waters was the pro-German ‘neutral’, Sweden. The Swedes were happy to let the Germans make use of their diplomatic bag and cable service for the German Government’s encrypted messages.
In 1915 the British learned of the Swedes decidedly non-neutral behaviour and complained strongly . Sweden duly apologized and promised that they would no longer permit Germany to make use of their communication systems or diplomatic bag to the USA. The Swedes were true to their word, and just redirected the German cables to Buenos Aires in Brazil.
The main user of Sweden’s generosity was Germany’s Foreign Minister, Alfred Zimmerman. His encrypted messages passed through England on route to the trans-atlantic cable’s in Cornwall, but they travelled under the Swedish flag and were bound for Brazil. From Brazil the telegrams could travel throughout north and south America making use of cables over which the British had no control. Until May 1916 Room 40 was unable to establish how the German telegrams were crossing the Atlantic.
Sources are vague over which country German used to despatch it’s copies of the Zimmerman telegram, but it would appear Zimmerman made use of two network systems to ensure his message reached Washington.
1: President Wilson had also allowed Germany to make use of the US facilities in order to communicate with the German embassy in Washington, supposedly about his peace proposals.
2: The Swedes….
Which ever country was used, the cable had to pass through England under its ‘false-flag’s and was copied on-route to the Cornish Trans-Atlantic cables by the “secret censors”, before being forwarded to Room 40 .
“Blinker” was to record later how the Zimmerman telegram contents were first shown to him;
“I am not likely to forget that Wednesday morning, 17 January 1917. There was the usual docket of papers to be gone through on my arrival at the office, and Claud Serocold and I were still at work on them when at about half-past ten de Grey [and William Montgomery], came in. He seemed excited. DID,’ he began, ‘d’you want to bring America into the war?’ Yes, my boy,’ I answered. Why?’ I’ve got something here which – well, it’s a rather astonishing message which might do the trick if we could use it. It isn’t very clear, I’m afraid, but I’m sure I’ve got most of the important points right. It’s from the German Foreign Office to Bernstorff.
“Blinker” added; “Yet as de Grey pointed out, the telegram was only of importance if we could make use of it. Could we? At the moment nothing must be done e cept to take all possible precautions to keep the news to our three selves. I thanked de Grey, and asked him to bring me the original telegram in cipher. This, I told him, ‘is a case where standing orders must be suspended. All copies of this message, both those in cipher and your own transcripts, are to be brought straight to me. Nothing is to be put on the files. This may be a very big thing possibly the biggest thing in the war. For the present not a soul outside this room is to be told anything at all. A little later the original message was locked away in my desk, and I sat down by myself to evolve a plan of campaign”. “Blinker” had in fact read the telegram two days before its recipient in Washing D.C!
As the telegram’s contents became deciphered it revealed the German Foreign Minister’s offer to Mexico for the United States’ territories of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas as an enticement to join the war on Germany’s side. The final decode that “Blinker”had read on that day in January was;
“We intend to begin on the first of February unrestricted warfare. We will endeavor in spite of this to keep the U.S.A. neutral. In the event of this not succeeding we make Mexico a proposal of alliance with the following terms: Make war together. Make peace together. We will give generous financial support and an undertaking on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you.
You will inform the President of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with U.S.A. is certain, and add the suggestion that he should on his own initiative invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time immediate between Japan and ourselves. Please call the President’s attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England in a few months to make peace.
Zimmerman”.
“Blinker” now had the problem of finding a way of releasing the telegram, but still concealing the source of its interception. If handled badly and the method of capture revealed, the Americans would not be appreciative of the thought that their signals were being intercepted. If the Germans in turn became aware of this and changed their codes, the British intelligence advantage would be lost. Only once the Admiralty found a solution to this could the decrypted telegram be sent to the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour.
The solution finally found was in that there was a number of copies of the telegram, each with a slightly different phrasing. One such copy had been issued to the embassy in Mexico. If “Blinker”could hand over that decoded version , rather than the Germany to USA copy it would hide the fact that the original message had been intercepted, so that it would appear that the document had been leaked from within Mexico instead.
In the wars earlier years, a British diplomat, Tom Hohler served as the Charge d’Affair in Mexico City. Hohler had during his time in the post, made the acquaintance of two English brothers and the three men soon became friends. One of the brothers ran a print shop and the other worked in the cities Western Union telegraph office.
Mexico was at the time a country plagued by both revolutions and coups. The latest President Carranza issued new currency which was apparently similar in quality to the cities bus tickets and just as easy to forge. Carranza in an attempt to stop the forgeries promised quick trials and executions for the counterfeiters.
One day the Printer brother returned to his workshop to find the staff away on lunch. On one of the benches was a pile comprised of counterfeited money. Shocked, he locked up and sought his brother out for advice. In the mean time the guilty worker guessing what had happened denounced the printer brother, who was arrested, and with the money found in his safe, tried and sentence to be shot at dawn.
The brother ran to Hohler and explained the dilemma. The diplomat manage to get the brother released and acquitted. Both brothers were grateful and promised if there was every any thing they could ever do…. Come 1917 the ‘Wireless-brother’ furnished the British their Mexican copy of the Zimmerman telegram.
Fortunately for the British, Zimmerman’s message had been sent using the older ‘13040’ cypher, which Room 40 had compliments of their Persian adventure with Herr Wassmusso. If the Germans were to finally realize their code had been compromised, they still wouldn’t be in a position to know that the British actually had the most up to date codes deciphered as well.
Finally on the 23rd February “Blinker” felt all was in place and he was able to show the telegram to those who could make the best use of it. The US ambassador to London, Walter H Page, was called into see Balfour, at the Foreign office and was shown the telegram. Page returned in a shocked state to his to embassy and immediately draft a cable to the President;
“Sec.state Washington. 5747 February 24th 1 p.m. My 5746 February 24th 8 a.m. Confidential for the President and the Secretary.
Balfour has handed me the text of a cipher telegram from Zimmerman, German Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, to the German Minister in Mexico which was sent via Washington and relayed by Bernstorff on January 19th. You can probably obtain a copy of the te t relayed by Bernstorff from the cable office in Washington. The first group is the number of the telegram 130 and the second is 13042 indicating the number of the code used. The last group but two is 97556 which is Zimmermann’s signature. I “Blinker”send you by mail a copy of the cipher te t and of the decode into German, and meanwhile I give you the English translation as follows….”
There then followed the text quoted earlier in the chapter.
Page then continued;
“The receipt of this information has so exercised the British Government that they have lost no time in communicating it to me transmit to you in order that our Government may be able without delay to make such dispositions as may be necessary in view of the threatened invasion of our territory. The following paragraph is strictly confidential.
Early in the War the British Government obtained possession of the German cipher code used in the above message and made it their business to obtain copies of Bernstorff s cipher telegrams to Mexico amongst others which are sent back to London and deciphered here. This accounts for their being able to decipher this telegram from the German Government to their representative in Mexico and also for the delay from January 19th until now in their receiving the information This system has hitherto been a most jealously guarded secret and is only divulged now to you by the British Government in view of the extraordinary circumstances and their friendly feeling towards the United States. They earnestly request that you will keep the source of your information and the British Government’s method of obtaining it profoundly secret but they put no prohibition on the publication of Zimmermann’s telegram itself. The copies of this and other telegrams were not obtained in Washington but were brought in Mexico.
I have thanked Balfour for the service his Government has rendered us and suggest that a private official message of thanks from our Government to him would be appreciated.
I am informed that this information has not yet been given to the Japanese Government but I think it is not unlikely that when it reaches them they will make a public statement on it in order to clear up their position regarding the United States and prove their good faith to their Allies”. The US Department of State forwarded the telegram to President Wilson, who while not a man given to public displays of emotion, exclaimed ‘Good God!’ several times as he read it at his White House desk.
“Blinker”had weighed the opportunity of being able to bring the US into the war, against revealing to the Americans the deciphering of Germany’s 13040 code, but it would allow the Americans to cross-referenced with the record of Zimmerman’s telegram coming through their wires, showing that what the copy the British had ‘obtained’ from the Western Union in Mexico was not a forgery, as pro-German elements in the US would claim.
“Blinker’s” plans went smoothly as the published story both made known Britain’s theft of the message in Mexico and it worked in conjunction with the Germans’ belief that their codes could not possibly have been cracked. They ordered a witch-hunt for a supposed traitor at their embassy in Mexico, believing the British must surely have had help.
With the American reaction,both Governmental and public turning so much against the Germans they saw little point in hiding what they had done, and Zimmerman admitted publicly on 3 March in the German papers, that he had indeed sent the cable.
On the 1st March reports of the telegram were issued in the American press. Some believed that the telegram was elaborate Allied propaganda and a fake. But all doubt ended when Zimmerman acknowledged his authorship, resulting in a public outcry in the US. On 2nd April 1917, Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany, stating, “The world must be made safe for democracy”, and war was declared on Germany on 6 April.
On receipt of the telegram President Carranza assigned a military commission to assess if it was feasible for Mexico to seize their former territories as suggested by Germany. The generals concluded that it would be both impossible nor wise for the following reasons:
1: Mexico was in the midst of a civil war.
2: The USA was far too strong.
3: Germany’s promises of “generous financial support” were very unreliable.
4: Even if Mexico won pacifying the non-Mexican part of the population which “bore’arms” was close to impossible.
5: It would have off the other South American countries.
The Carranza government was recognized ‘de jure’ by the USA on the 31st August 1917 as a direct consequence of the Zimmerman telegram, to ensure Mexican neutrality in World War I.
Japan simply said was not interested in changing sides and attacking America.
The Zimmerman telegram was ‘ Room 40 ‘s triumph and the first big “Intelligence” led triumph of the modern world. If nothing else the telegram alone assured the Room of its place in world history.
AN OFF DAY.
With the last year of the war the German High Seas fleet was to make one final sortie in war time. It was also to be the one time Room 40 didn’t fore fill it’s full potential. As the war ground on, the German Admiralty became a little more ‘savy’ with their wireless usage. They introduced a new key change to their ‘FFB’ ciphers every 7 to 10 days, and for 2 to 3 days Room 40 ‘s cryptographers would struggle to unlock the key. The navy also introduced using less power in their transmissions, which shortened the range and made them harder to receive on Britain’s East-coast. The third major change was a new system of “catch-words”. These were one word ‘tags’ for specific ships broadcast from the Norddeich Transmitter wireless station. They were selected randomly for one operation only, and with their short term use, one word construction were uncrackable for Room 40 . On the 18th January 1918 for example, Room 40 knew destroyers had sailed from the Jade, but were at a loss to say which vessels and where they were bound.
At 05:00 on the 23 April 1918, the High Seas Fleet left harbor with the intention of intercepting one of the heavily escorted Scandinavian convoys. In October and December 1917, two British convoys sailing to Norway had been intercepted and destroyed by German cruisers and destroyers (6). This resulted in Beatty, now the C-in-C of the Grand Fleet, to detach a number of battleships and battlecruisers to protect the convoys. This policy presented Admiral Scheer with the opportunity for which he had waited the entire war. It gave him the chance to isolate and destroy a detachment of the Grand Fleet.
At 20:30 every day Room 40 would contact Beatty with a daily update on the German Battlefleets movement. On the 22nd/23rd April Beatty was advised that there was “No sign of enemy activity on Bight “, but in fact Scheer had sailed at 05:30 on the 23rd. The German fleet had changed all its call signs on the 21st April and they were not to be deciphered until the 24th, by which time Scheer’s fleet operation was completed. Heavy fog was to force the German ships to anchor off Heligoland at 10:00.
While riding of anchor waiting a change in the weathers visibility Scheer signaled the the Flag Officers Code, as did Hipper, two transmission that where located by the British Direction finding equipment. But Room 40 was unsure if the fleet was off the island of Heligoland on a sortie or undertaking one of its Fleet Exercises. Between 10:00 and 11:00 five signals were overheard by the British, but they were not decoded, however that number of signals should have altered the Admiralty that something was happening within Scheer’s Squadrons.
Hunstanton’s ‘Y’ station reported change of W/T control, which was a regular sign that the German fleet was at sea, but Room 40 ‘s eyes were distracted by the raid on Zeebrugge which was underway at the same time as a Scheer lay off Heligoland. At 0:24 on the 24th April an “Urgent-Priority” signal was sent to Beatty. Room 40 had become aware that Scheer had ordered that five zeppelins should be launched and station in the North Sea, another typical indication fleet activities were under way or imminent. “Today April 24 5 Zeppelins will be stationed between North and 1.30 East and (b) 54 North 3 East [down the North Sea]. Also two Zeppelins between (a)and the Naze.’ The last Zeppelin patrol line perhaps suggested a raid east coast” .
At 01:54 another message was sent to Beatty which read ‘Not quite certain but believe catchword made submarines’, and soon after that the Harwich Force was ordered to raise steam at one hour’s notice by 05:00, but the Grand Fleet was not included in the predations. At 04:20 the temperature dropped by a few degrees and it was learned that the Zeppelin reconnaissance had been abandoned because of the high winds. If Room 40 and the Operations Division fumbled the ball, given the vagueness of the information available to it, they were once more back in the game at 08:48. Beatty was signaled: “an elaborate and unusual nature have been ordered for Regent [ a German swept channel in the Bight] at 1.00 p.m. wireless signalling is being observed and reported on. All flying stations have been ordered to attempt reconnaissance. Indications point to some enemy operation”. It wasn’t much for the Admiralty or Beatty to work with, but it was something. The Harwich Force sat at one hour’s notice, but the Grand Fleet remained unchanged. The British were aware of the fog off Heligoland, and in the Grand Fleets temporary location, Rosyth. Room 40 had no clear indication that Scheer planned to move beyond its fog bound anchorage, but surely the Grand Fleet’s status should have also been raised to one hours notice?
Scheer did venture beyond the Heligoland and steamed north seeking the Scandinavian convoys. But at 05:10 the battlecruiser Moltke was to have her starboard propeller fall off the shaft, and before the turbine could be brought to a halt, a gear wheel was destroyed. The destroyed wheel then shattered, throwing pieces of steel into an auxiliary condenser, which flooded the engine room and stopped the operation of the center and starboard engines. Saltwater then entered the boilers, reducing the stricken battlecruiser to a mere four knots. At 08:45 the captain of Moltke reported to Scheer that his ship was “out of control”, and a tow would be required. The cruiser Strasbourg attempted to take the ship under tow, but was unable to manage it, so the dreadnought Oldenburg was detached from the battle fleet to tow Moltke back to port. Room 40 overheard the Wireless report, that a ship,was under tow. Beatty was advised:”Call sign believed to be Moltke, also unknown call sign located by directional in 58 degrees 30 North 6 degrees 20 East at 7.00 a.m”. The position erroneously placed the transmitting ship twelve miles inland from Bergen, but despite that neither the Admiralty or Beatty had the sense to accepting that the signal indicated the presence of an important German unit was off the Norwegian coast. Instead, two hours passed before Beatty’s raised a query and the Admiralty explanation made this clear. Then at 09:55 Beatty was informed that, “Enemy WT procedure shows important operation in progress. Neumünster reports British unaware that German forces are at sea” . He immediately issued orders for the battle cruiser Fleet to raise steam, and half an hour later ordered the rest of the fleet to likewise. At 10:47 the Admiralty ordered the Grand Fleet to sea and despite the dense fog, 31 battleships, 4 battle cruisers, 26 cruisers and 85 destroyers had all cleared the Firth of Forth by the early afternoon. Sadly all far to achieve anything. A great change from the days of Jellicoe, when if the High Seas Fleet sneezed the Grand Fleet would sally forth.
Following Moltke’s problems, the German fleet sailed on, but at 14:10, with a convoy had still not sighted, Scheer turned the High Seas Fleet back towards German waters. The Germans Fleet’s final offensive sortie into the North Sea and was one not challenged by Beatty and his Grand Fleet.
With the coming of peace, Room 40 was deactivated in 1919 and its function merged with the British Army’s intelligence unit MI1b to form the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS). This unit was to go on to be housed at Bletchley Park during the Second World War and post war was renamed Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and relocated to Cheltenham. After the war, it was estimated that Room 40 had solved some 15,000 German naval and diplomatic communications, a very great number considering that decrypting was achieved by hand to eye brain power.
CONCLUSIONS
How important to the war effort was Room 40? That’s an easy question, vital. I can’t say Room 40 won the War, it was without, sounding to glib, a team effort. But it would have been a longer conflict and trod a different path. Its easier, or simpler to say what Room 40 brought to the war.
Jellicoe was effectively the High Seas Fleet jailer, as he sat with his Grand Fleet blockading the North Sea’s exit. But it was big jail and when Scheer brought his fleet out into the North Sea Room 40 sounded the alert and insured the Royal Navy was in place to parry the Germans blows. The only time Scheer slipped Room 40’s watch, the High Seas Fleet made it up deep along the North Sea’s eastern side, and then slipped back home to all intents unchallenged. True the Moltke was torpedoed on her way home, but that was pure chance and not a master plan. The only thing that stopped the German Fleet falling onto a Scandinavian Convoys was the fortunes of bad timing. Room 40 put the Grand Fleet where it needed to be and in most cases when it needed to be there.
The Lusitania is not so simple. Room 40 provided the clues and information, but the Admiral’s and those in command didn’t pick up on them. There is no clear evidence of the liner being the sacrificial lamb on the alter of conspiracy. I don’t think Room 40 schemed and nor do I believe Churchill plotted. He may have tried to milk the result, but I don’t think the technology of the time was up to such a conspiracy.
Herr Zimmerman’s telegram was a desperate throw in the end stages of a desperate conflict. The USA was already becoming more pro-allied and would have been dragged into the war in 1918, 1919 or 1920. But Zimmerman’s scheme just brought in the USA while the Allies were still strong enough to rally and win it. But for Room 40, the telegram would have arrived in the USA without the exposure and maybe Mexico would have had a harder decision, before they said, thanks but no thanks.
I’ve only covered Room 40’s headlines and there were countless smaller incidents, that there is not space to cover. Did Room 40 trick von Spee into thinking the Falklands were undefended? Did they help find the elusive SMS Dresden in her South American hidey-hole? Then there’s the campaign against the U-boats…… Plus if Room 40 hadn’t evolved during the war, what state would our intelligence services been in when faced by the Enigma machine?
Room 40 did not win the war, but it was game changer, maybe, just maybe, the biggest?
NOTES
(1) Captain Thomas Jackson: “During the Russo-Japanese War, Jackson was a military observer stationed on the Imperial Japanese Navy cruiser Azuma, and was present at the Battle of Tsushima. After the war, he was promoted captain in 1905,and remained as a military attaché in Tokyo in 1906…..Promoted to Rear Admiral in June 1916, he was made Flag Officer, Egypt & The Red Sea in July 1917. He was promoted to Vice Admiral in March 1920. He retired in 1925”.(Wikipedia)
(2)In 1855 the status of these officers was clarified by Order in Council. They were to be “Accountant officers for cash to the Accountant-General of the Navy …” and the ranks of assistant paymaster, clerk, and assistant clerk emerged.
(3) Sir Henry Oliver
Vice-admiral Sir Henry Francis Oliver, During the First World War, Oliver was sent to Antwerp where, with Belgian support, he blew up the engine rooms of 38 stranded German merchant vessels. He became Naval Secretary to Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, and then Chief of the Admiralty War Staff before serving as Deputy Chief of the Naval Staff and in that capacity was closely involved in directing the allied forces at the Battle of Jutland. He served as Commander of the 1st Battlecruiser Squadron in the Grand Fleet in the last year of the War.
After the war Oliver became Commander of the 2nd Battle Squadron, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet and then Commander-in-Chief of the Reserve Fleet. After that he became Second Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Personnel and in that capacity implemented the extensive expenditure cuts recommended by the Committee on National Expenditure chaired by Sir Eric Geddes and the large reductions in numbers of ships which were agreed under the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty. His last appointment was as Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet.(Wikipedia).
(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Reginald_Hall
(5) https://m.facebook.com/HMS-Invincible-and-Inflexible-Falklands-Deployment-421977311588683
(6) https://m.facebook.com/Brummer-Class-WW1-ML-Cruisers-1654707841272453/
THE TEAM
Room 40 was to be the sapling which years later would blossom into Bletchley Park. But to continue the gardening metaphor, the men who tendered the sapling were scholars and historical minded. But the men like Turing who tendered the tree twenty three years later in full bloom were mathematicians. We’re lucky now a hundred years on to be able to identify the men who gave their time and intelligence to Room 40 .Aside from “Blinker”, de Grey, William Montgomery and Rotter, the other staff of Room 40 included Frank Adcock, John Beazley, Francis Birch, Walter Horace Bruford, William ‘Nobby’ Clarke, Alastair Denniston, Frank Cyril Tiarks, Alfred Dillwyn “Dilly” Knox , and George Young, amongst many others.
GEORGE YOUNG was among the very first to be recruited into Room 40 , and he helped select the rest of the staff. Unlike his collueges and fellow cryptographers, Young had the air of a spy. He was suave, mysterious and sophisticated and was happy to take any step to defeat the enemy. After studying in France, Germany, and Russia, Young became a diplomat. He was to served in this role in Athens, Belgrade, Constantinople, Madrid, and Washington. He had a good understanding of languages as well as “diplomatic culture”. But above all, he had a good grasp of how to look for hidden meanings.
FRANK EZRA ADCOCK was born in Desford in Leicester, Leicestershire, on 15 April 1886. He was the son of Thomas Draper Adcock, who was the head of Desford Industrial School, and Mary Esther Adcock. Frank was educated at Wyggeston School, a grammar school in Leicester and went on to study classics at King’s College, Cambridge. In 1911, Frank was elected as a fellow and lecturer of King’s College, Cambridge. Between 1915 and 1919, he worked for the Intelligence Division, within Room 40 and also served as a lieutenant-commander in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, from 1917 to 1919. His role within Room 40 was as an interpreter of codes and ciphers. Post war he held the chair of Ancient History at the University Cambridge from 1925 to 1951 when he retired. Between 1939 and 1943 h worked at Bletchley Park. Frank died on the 22 February 1968.
JOHN DAVIDSON BEAZLEY was born in Glasgow, Scotland on 13 September 1885, to Mark John Murray and Mary Catherine Beazley. He was educated at King Edward VI School, Southampton and Christ’s Hospital, Sussex , before he attended Balliol College, Oxford where he read Literae Humaniores. He received firsts in both the Honour Moderations and the Final Honour School, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1907. After graduating, Beazley spent time at the British School at Athens, before returning to Oxford as a student and tutor in Classics at Christ Church. During most of the War he worked in Room 40 of the Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division? From, March to October 1916 he held the temporary rank of second lieutenant when he was on secondment to the army.
Post War in 1925, he became Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at the Oxford, a post he held until 1956. He specialized in Greek decorated pottery, and became a world authority on the subject. Beazley retired in 1956, but continued to work until his death in Oxford, on 6 May 1970. His personal library was to be purchased by the University of Oxford in 1964.
FRANCIS LYALL “FRANK” BIRCH was born on the 5 December 1889 in London. His occupation was as a Cryptographer and actor and he married Vera Benedicta Gage Birch. During the war he was to serve as a lieutenant commander with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, in the Atlantic, the Channel and the Dardanelles before joining the Naval Intelligence Division ( Room 40 ) from 1916 to 1919. Birch was to write a satirical history of Room 40 , “Alice in ID25”. and was appointed an OBE in 1919. He was a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, between 1915 and 1934 and a lecturer in history at Cambridge from 1921 until 1928. In the 1930’s Birch left Cambridge to pursue an acting career, and In 1939 he was part of a BBC television production in a Teresa Deevy play “In Search of Valour” where he played the part of Mr. Glitteron. In September 1939 he joined the Naval section at Bletchley Park and went on to become Head of the (German) Naval Section. He died on the 14 February 1956, aged 66.
WALTER HORACE BRUFORD was born in Manchester in 1894 and was educated at Manchester Grammar School, before going onto St.John’s College, Cambridge and the University of Zurich. During the War he served with the Royal Navy cryptographic intelligence division within Room 40. Post war he conducted research Zurich, became a Lecturer in German at Aberdeen University in 1920, and then a Reader at Aberdeen in 1923. Bruford was to be appointed Professor of German at the University of Edinburgh in 1929. Then between 1939 and 1945 he was seconded to the Foreign Office to work at Bletchley Park. From 1951 he was Schröder Professor of German at the University of Cambridge until 1961. Bruford died in 1988.
COMMANDER ALEXANDER “ALASTAIR” GUTHRIE DENNISTON was born on the 1st December 1881 at Greenock, Renfrewshire in Scotland. He was the son of a “medical practitioner” and studied at the University of Bonn, as well as the University of Paris. Denniston was in 1908 a member of the Scottish Olympic field hockey team and won a bronze medal.
In 1914 Denniston helped form Room 40 in the Admiralty, and in 1917 married a fellow Room 40 worker, Dorothy Mary Gilliat.
Post war Denniston having recognized the strategic importance of code breaking, kept the Room 40 activity functioning, until it was merged in 1919 with its Army counterpart, MI1b. It was renamed the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) in 1920 and transferred from the Navy to the Foreign Office. Denniston was promoted to run the new organization. With the rise of the Nazi’s and Hitler, Denniston began making preparations for what he knew was to come. Following the 1914 practice of Room 40 , he contacted lecturers at Oxford and Cambridge (including Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman) asking if they would be willing to serve if war broke out. He also chose Bletchley for the code breaking effort due to its location to a rail junction on a main line 47 miles (76 km) north of London with good rail connections to Oxford and Cambridge and MI6 boss, Hugh Sinclair, acquired the Bletchley Park property. Denniston worked at preparing the Park and designing the huts to be built within the grounds. The GC&CS was moved to its new home in August 1939, just before the Invasion of Poland and the start of the War,where its name changed to Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). On the 26 July 1939, five weeks before the outbreak of war, Denniston was one of three Britons (along with Dilly Knox and Humphrey Sandwith) who took part in the trilateral Polish-French-British conference held in the Kabaty Woods south of Warsaw, at which the Polish Biuro Szyfrów (Cipher Bureau) introduced the French and British into the decryption of German Enigma ciphers.
Denniston remained in command of Bletchely until he was hospitalized in June 1940 for a bladder stone. Despite his illness, he was to fly to the USA in 1941 to make contact with American cryptographers including William Friedman. Denniston then returned to Bletchley Park for a while, before moving to London later in 1941 to work on diplomatic codes.
Despite his knowledge of the success of Polish cryptologists against Enigma, Denniston shared the general pessimism about the chances of cracking the more complex Naval Enigma encryption, until as late as the summer of 1940, having told the Head of Naval Section at Bletchley: “You know, the Germans don’t mean you to read their stuff, and I don’t expect you ever will.” But the advent of Banburismus was to show soon afterwards his judgement had been misplaced. In October 1941, the developer of the technique, Alan Turing, along with fellow senior cryptologists Gordon Welchman, Stuart Milner-Barry and Hugh Alexander wrote to Churchill, over Denniston’s head, to warn Churchill that there was ashortage of staff at Bletchley Park, which was preventing them from deciphering many messages. An increase in the number of personnel, small by the military standards, could they said, make a big difference.The slow response to a number of previous requests had convinced them that the strategic value of their work was not appreciated or understood in the right quarters. Churchill reacted immediately to the letter, ordering “Action this day”. Fresh Resources were transferred as fast as was possible.In February 1942, GC&CS was reorganized. Travis, Denniston’s second in command and chief of the Naval section, succeeded Denniston at Bletchley Park, in overseeing the work on the German military codes and ciphers. When Travis took over, he “presided over an administrative revolution which at last brought the management of Intelligence into line with its mode of production”. Denniston and his wife were to have two children, a son and daughter, and he was to retire in 1945, later teaching French and Latin in Leatherhead
William Friedman, the American cryptographer who broke the Japanese Purple code, later wrote to Denniston’s daughter “Your father was a great man in whose debt all English-speaking people will remain for a very long time, if not forever. That so few should know exactly what he did … is the sad part.”
FRANK CYRIL TIARKS was also known as FC Tiarks, was born at Balham, on the 9 July 1874 and was an English banker. He was a son of Henry Frederick Tiarks, a banker, and Agnes Morris. Among his appointments was a directorship of the Bank of England (1912-1945); a partnership in J. Henry Schröder & Co.; a partnership in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (1917-1948); and High Sheriff of Kent for 1927. During the war he served in Room 40 , as Lieutenant-commander.
Tiarks was of German descent himself, like his wife, and he was both a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship and a prominent member of the British Union of Fascists. In Hamburg on the 18th November 1899 Tiarks married Emmie (Emmy) Marie Franziska Brödermann of Hamburg.
DILLWYN KNOX was born the fourth of six children to Edmund Arbuthnott Knox , a tutor at Merton College and later Bishop of Manchester. His father was a descendant of John Arbuthnott, the 8th Viscount of Arbuthnott.
Dillwyn, known as “Dilly” Knox was educated at Summer Fields School, Oxford, and then went onto Eton College. On leaving Eaton he attended King’s College, Cambridge from 1903, until in 1909 were he studied the classics. He was elected a Fellow following the death of Walter George Headlam, from whom he inherited an extensive research into the works of Herodas. While an undergraduate he was friends with John Maynard Keynes, with whom he had an affair at Eton. Knox was to privately coach the future prime minister Harold Macmillan, at King’s for a few weeks in 1910, but Macmillan found him “austere and uncongenial”. “Dilly ” was an atheist.
Aside from a scholar of the classics he was a Papyrologist (study of ancient literature, correspondence, legal archives, etc…) at King’s College, Cambridge, before he was recruited to be a codebreaker.
He was part of the team that decrypted the Zimmerman Telegram and is rather bizarrely know to have done some of his best work in Room 53’s bath.
In 1917, Knox followed Room 40 with its expansion into ID25 and to crack the German Admiral’s flag code by exploiting a German operator’s love of romantic poetry.
During the war he was elected as the Librarian at King’s College, but was never to take up the appointment.
“Dilly” married Olive Rodman in 1920, but forgot to invite two of his three brothers to his wedding. The couple were to have two sons, Oliver and Christopher.
Between the two World Wars Knox worked on a commentary on Herodas that had been started by Headlam, but the task was to damage his eyesight while studying the British Museum’s collection of papyrus fragments. However he finally managed to decipher the text of the Herodas papyri and published the ‘Knox -Headlam’ edition of Herodas in 1922.
After the war Knox had fully intended to resume his research at King’s, but his wife was to persuade him to remain at his ‘secret’ work. In fact his work was of such a secrecy level that his own children had no knowledge of it, until many years after his death. They were unaware of what there father had done for a living, and his contribution to the war effort.
In the years leading up to the Second World War Knox was heavily involved with the Enigma machine, working with Polish, British and French cryptographers. Knox had a skill of grasping everything quickly, almost “as quick as lightning”.
In the months before the war, Alan Turing had worked on the Enigma and occasionally visited GC&CS’s London HQ to discuss the problems he was experiencing with Knox . In addition in 1939 Turing was to visit Knox and his wife in Naphill.
Knox’s was to develop technique for cracking the Enigma used by the Italian Navy and the German Abwehr. He worked on his technique at ‘the Cottage’, next door to the Bletchley Park mansion, as head of a research section, from which he was to contribute significantly to cryptanalysis of the Enigma
The work of Knox’s team at The Cottage was to allow the decryption the intercepted Italian naval signals detailing the sailing of the Italian fleet, which was to bring about the Battle of Cape Matapan in March 1941. Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence credited the Allied victory at Matapan to Knox’s work and Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, who had commanded the British fleet at Matapan, went to Bletchley to personally congratulate ‘Dilly and his girls’.
In October 1941, Knox was to solved the Abwehr Enigma. In early 1942, with Knox seriously ill, Peter Twinn took charge of running ‘ISK’ and was appointed to the head role following Knox’s death. By the end of the war, ISK was to have decrypted 140,800 messages. The Intelligence gained from these Abwehr decrypts was to play an important part in the success of a number of double-cross operations by MI5 and MI6, and in Operation Fortitude, the Allied campaign to deceive the Germans about D-Day.
Knox’s work was to fall ill with lymphoma and when he became to ill to travel to Bletchley Park, he continued his cryptographic work from his home in Hughenden, Buckinghamshire, where he died on 27 February 1943.
CLASSIFIED POETRY BY DILLY “KNOX” AND FRANK BIRCH.
These have knelled your fall and ruin,
but your ears were far away
English lassies rustling papers
through the sodden Bletchley day”.
( Dilly Knox , Epitaph on Matapan to Mussolini).
“ Oh, if a time should ever come when we’re demobilized
How we shall miss the interests which once life comprised!”
— Dilly the Dodo, Alice in ID25 by Frank Birch.
The sailor in Room 53
has never, it’s true, been to sea
but though not in a boat
he has served afloat —
in a bath in the Admiralty’
Dillwyn ‘Dilly’ Knox,
(Biographies complements of Wikipedia).
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