Secret Warriors

by Taylor Downing

  But, of course, unlike the Russian messages, German messages (like those of the British and French) were encrypted, and the German navy employed at least three major codes. Ewing and his small team at the Admiralty had still not worked out how to decode the mass of signals that now began to arrive on their desk. For several weeks they continued with their research, and with the team growing in size they moved upstairs out of Ewing’s small office to a larger space on the first floor. Located at the end of a corridor and looking out over one of the Admiralty’s inner courtyards, adjoined by a small side room in which a camp bed was assembled for anyone working long hours who needed a break, the new office was quiet and out of the way, and the whole corridor was marked with large ‘No Admittance’ signs so that the top secret work could carry on uninterrupted and unobserved. Known innocuously by the number the Admiralty had given the office, Room 40, it would remain at the heart of naval code breaking for the rest of the war.

  There followed a series of extraordinary strokes of good fortune. In mid-August the German merchant steamship Hobart moored off the coast at Melbourne. It was possible that the captain did not even know that war had been declared in Europe. A particularly resourceful officer of the Royal Australian Navy, Captain Richardson, went on board in the civilian disguise of a quarantine officer and requested to search the ship. Imagining that the captain would attempt to destroy any confidential papers, Richardson kept a watch on him and sure enough, in the early hours of the following morning, the captain slid back a secret panel in his inner cabin and took out a set of documents. Richardson pounced and seized the documents at pistol point. They included the Handelsverkehrbuch (HVB) codebook used by the Admiralstab to communicate both with merchant ships and at times with vessels of the German High Seas Fleet.

  It was clear that no one in Australia realised how important this code book was, as it took nearly a month for them to inform the Admiralty in London of what they had seized. The Admiralty immediately instructed the Australian Navy to send the code book to London, but even the fastest steamer in those days took about five weeks to make the voyage and the precious document did not arrive until the end of October. By that time, though, a chance incident had already offered up another prize.

  On 25 August, two German light cruisers had gone on patrol near the entrance to the Gulf of Finland, only 200 miles from Kronstadt, the base of the Imperial Russian Navy. A thick fog descended and one of the cruisers, the Magdeburg, ran aground on the Estonian coast. As an accompanying destroyer tried to pull it free the fog lifted, and two Russian cruisers spotted and closed in on the German ships. However, the Magdeburg was stuck firm on the sands. In the scramble to evacuate, the Russians captured the ship’s captain and several of his men. In the confusion, the German master failed to follow his orders to destroy all the top secret code books. The Russians found in the main chartroom of the ship the Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine (SKM), the code book used by German warships to communicate with each other and with the Admiralstab in Berlin, and alongside it details of the current cipher key and a German map of the Baltic and the North Sea, marked up with the grid used by the German navy to locate their vessels. It was a spectacular find. In a gesture of considerable generosity, recognising that Britain was the greatest sea power of the day, the Russians offered to hand over the code book to the Royal Navy if they sent a vessel to collect it. HMS Theseus immediately set off from Scapa Flow and after various delays brought back Captain Smirnoff of the Imperial Russian Navy, who personally presented Winston Churchill with the priceless code book on 13 October.

  Only four days later a saga began that resulted in yet another stroke of luck. Four German destroyers were out laying mines off the Dutch coast when they were spotted by a British patrol led by the light cruiser HMS Undaunted. A brief engagement followed in which all four German ships were sunk. Following his orders this time, the captain of the only destroyer in the squadron that held secret code books gathered all his papers into a lead-lined chest before throwing it overboard. It immediately sank to the bottom of the sea. But this was not the end of the story. In the last week of November a British trawler was fishing some miles away from the incident when it dragged up the chest in its nests. It was in due course handed over to the Admiralty, who on opening it found that the chest contained the Verkehrsbuch (VB), the third major code book used by the German navy. Within a thirteen-week period the Admiralty had acquired three remarkable documents.

  The acquisition of the German code books was an intelligence coup of unique proportions. The code breakers in Room 40 now had the means to follow the daily orders to every ship in the German navy. Never again would any military service have so much vital deciphering information dropped into its lap.

  However, even with the code books in their hands Ewing’s team found it difficult to decipher the signals. Some of the messages sent in SKM appeared to be no more than weather reports sent daily to and from Berlin, while the rest were still unreadable. Luckily another figure near the centre of events at the Admiralty was able to step into the breach. The Paymaster of the Fleet, Charles Rotter, was a German expert and when he looked at the messages he realised that they had been superenciphered: once encoded, the letters had been switched according to a key to yet another set of letters. Rotter began searching the messages for the most common sets of letters in the German language and for the words that were likely to be most frequently repeated. He could make a start, for instance, by looking for regularly used call signs. Once he had decoded a few letters it was like doing a crossword – with some of the clues solved the others were easier to fill in. Working with the code book and with his knowledge of German and of naval affairs (knowledge which none of the civilian code breakers possessed) Rotter was able to find the key to the SKM signals within about a week, providing a substitution table which finally enabled the decoding of the messages.5 It was the crucial breakthrough. Denniston and his colleagues were recalled from the War Office and told to work exclusively on the naval signals. From November 1914 the code breakers of Room 40 started to read the German signals and to build up a detailed understanding of the operations of the German navy and the movements of the High Seas Fleet.

  In that same month a final change set the direction of naval intelligence for the rest of the war. When Oliver was promoted to Chief of the War Staff, Captain Reginald William Hall became Director of Intelligence at the Admiralty. Hall, known as ‘Blinker’ because of a nervous tendency to blink his eyes when talking, would play a decisive role in the operations of Room 40. Bald, with a long aquiline nose, Hall was the sort of person who, through the strong sense of energy, confidence and authority he carried with him, created an instant impact when he entered a room. He had come from a naval family, joined the Royal Navy at the age of fourteen and worked his way up, becoming a captain in his mid-thirties. He soon acquired a reputation for being strict but fair and enlightened, willing to overturn tradition when necessary and always concerned for the welfare of his men. As captain of the brand new battle cruiser HMS Queen Mary just before the war, he had pushed the ship’s crew to the highest levels of efficiency and they had the top gunnery record in the navy. At the same time he upgraded the status of petty officers and introduced the first ever ship’s cinema, a book shop and a chapel. He even installed a laundry on board, challenging the age-old tradition that sailors should wash their own clothes. Senior naval men feared this was the end of all that was highly valued in the navy. But Hall wanted to make a ship feel like the crew’s home as well as their place of work, and the men responded positively. His second-in-command later wrote that ‘there has seldom been such a loyal, hard working and happy ship’s company as the one that manned the Queen Mary’.6 Within a few years all the major warships in the Royal Navy had adopted Hall’s reforms.

  Hall led his ship to war, but his physical condition was already poor and within a few months he was forced to resign his command due to ill health. It was a bitter blow to an ambitious captain still only in his
mid-forties. It looked to Hall as if his naval career might be over just as the war was getting interesting. However, the Admiralty was aware of Hall’s special qualities and, needing to replace Oliver, offered him the position of Director of Naval Intelligence. On arriving, he was amazed to hear that a small group at Room 40 were beginning to decipher German naval messages – the secret was so tightly guarded that no one outside the Admiralty knew of this work. But he brought to his new task immense enthusiasm, great organising ability and the capacity both to lead and to manage a team, pursuing every facet of the work with relish. Tracking down spies, sending back to Germany messages with misinformation to deceive the enemy as to British intentions, and interviewing enemy prisoners were all activities he enjoyed immensely. Intercepting diplomatic cables would become a major feature of naval intelligence as well. Having rather surprisingly found himself in charge, Hall seemed to thrive in this cloak-and-dagger world. He would play a major role in the war of intelligence.

  Winston Churchill soon became obsessed with the high-grade intelligence that Room 40 was beginning to supply; he had always been interested in espionage and got a thrill from reading enemy signals in the raw. But, failing to realise the need for the material to be properly analysed and put in context by trained intelligence experts, he believed that simply having the decrypts was good enough in itself. As a consequence, when he drew up a set of guidelines as to how the record books should be kept and who should have access to them, total secrecy was the rule and as few people as possible should be allowed to see the decrypts. Churchill told the Prime Minister of the existence of the source, but kept from the rest of the Cabinet the fact that the Admiralty was listening in to and reading all the major naval and diplomatic signals sent in and out of Berlin. This limited release of information and lack of awareness of the need for field commanders to be kept fully informed, was to have fateful consequences.

  Churchill did ask Hall to bring in an expert who could extract from the German signals any matters of naval significance that the civilian code breakers might have overlooked. And Hall’s appointment for the task, Commander Herbert Hope, was a good one. Hope, like his boss, would have a major impact on the work of Room 40 for the rest of the war. But at first, in line with Churchill’s rule that secrecy must prevail, Hope was set up in a room all by himself on the other side of the Admiralty from Room 40. Every day the code breakers brought him five or six decrypted messages, his role being to assess their significance and pass this on to Hall. At first Hope felt he had been thrown in at the deep end and his ‘remarks were very amateurish’.7 He soon realised that he would be far more effective if he was alongside the code breakers and able to discuss the work with them. But the suggestion was refused, on the grounds that no one was to be admitted to Room 40. It was only after a chance meeting with Jacky Fisher, who had returned to the Admiralty as First Sea Lord, that Hope was allowed at last to build up a relationship with the code breakers, whom he came to regard ‘as fine a set of fellows as it would be possible to meet’.8 Extracting details and information from the decrypts, Hope became the first proper intelligence officer in the Admiralty and effective director of Room 40.

  It was only a few weeks after Hope joined the code breakers that the first spectacular opportunity came to make use of the decrypts. Admiral Jellicoe, who led the Grand Fleet, was stationed at Scapa Flow, the giant anchorage in the Orkneys, from where it would take time to deploy his warships to the North Sea if the German High Seas Fleet were to emerge from its harbours at Wilhelmshaven and Kiel. So his vessels were instructed to maintain long and exhausting patrols, sweeping the North Sea for thousands of miles in a fruitless search for German warships. Only some unique piece of intelligence could give him enough forewarning to place his ships in the right spot to find the enemy vessels if they ventured out of harbour.

  On the afternoon of 14 December the code breakers in Room 40 decrypted a signal sent earlier that morning in SKM code by the commander of the German fleet. It stated that on the next day a raiding party of battle cruisers led by Rear Admiral Franz von Hipper would make an excursion into the North Sea. Its objective was not clear, but the mission was possibly to shell the English coast and lay a new minefield, with the intention of drawing British ships in to their destruction. Admiral Wilson, who had come out of retirement to act as a senior operations officer, alerted Churchill and the First Sea Lord. After a brief consultation, the triumvirate sent an urgent cable to Jellicoe in Scapa Flow just before midnight, saying ‘Good information just received shows that German 1st Cruiser Squadron with destroyers leave Jade River [the estuary at Wilhelmshaven] on Tuesday morning early [15 December] and return on Wednesday night.’9 Taking advantage of the early warning, they instructed Jellicoe to send a squadron of battle cruisers, led by Vice Admiral Beatty, to a position off the Dogger Bank; they were not to attempt to intercept the German raiders, as it was not known exactly where they were going to be, but were ordered to cut them off and destroy them as they returned to Wilhelmshaven on the Wednesday afternoon.

  Churchill was in his bath in his rooms at the Admiralty the following morning when he was told that German ships were shelling Scarborough and Hartlepool on the north-east coast. He jumped out of the bath, dried himself quickly and ran down to the War Room. There he and Fisher realised that Jellicoe was perfectly positioned between the raiders and their home ports, ‘cutting mathematically their line of retreat’. Churchill was hugely excited that his ships now had in their grasp ‘this tremendous prize – the German battle cruiser squadron whose loss would fatally mutilate the whole German Navy and could never be repaired’.10 However, nothing is simple when it comes to the sea. A mist suddenly developed, dramatically reducing visibility. Hipper’s German ships withdrew on the predicted course, but Beatty and his battle cruisers could see little more than a mile through the mist. There was a minor engagement but the German ships sailed right past the British vessels. ‘They seem to be getting away from us,’ Wilson commented in the Admiralty War Room.

  It was true. Not a single German ship was sunk. A great opportunity to fatally weaken the German Navy had been missed. Instead of his moment of glory, prompted by brilliant intelligence work, Churchill had to face the howls of outrage from a furious public who demanded to know why the navy was incapable even of protecting Britain’s own coast. ‘Where was the Navy?’ screamed the newspaper headlines. As a result of the shelling, one hundred civilians had been killed and five hundred wounded in their homes. Were the Admiralty asleep, the newspapers demanded to know? Churchill reflected, ‘We had to bear in silence the censures of our countrymen. We could never admit for fear of compromising our secret information where our squadrons were, or how near the German raiding cruisers had been to their destruction.’11 He just had to hope there would soon be an opportunity to avenge this failure. He did not have to wait long.

  Churchill was in his office at the Admiralty at midday on 23 January 1915 when Admiral Wilson marched in unannounced. ‘First Lord,’ he said with a glow in his eye, ‘these fellows are coming out again.’ It appeared that German radio signals had been intercepted and deciphered giving instructions that Admiral Hipper was to lead another major raiding force of four battleships and six cruisers, accompanied by support ships, to the Dogger Bank to try to intercept British patrols. It might be that they intended another attack on British coastal cities. Churchill and Wilson (Fisher was at home suffering from a cold) discussed what their response to the intelligence should be. After two hours they sent a series of orders to Admiral Jellicoe at Scapa Flow, telling him to dispatch the Grand Fleet, and to Vice Admiral Beatty at Rosyth giving him a precise location off Dogger Bank to which he should sail with his battle cruisers. The naval commanders responded to their instructions within hours and the two sets of dreadnought battleships closed on each other in the middle of the North Sea. The British were convinced they had set a trap, and that the German fleet would sail right into it.

  As dawn broke the following morning the firs
t reports of sightings of enemy ships arrived in the Admiralty War Room. Then came reports of ships opening fire, and next the news of battle. ‘There can be few purely mental experiences more charged with cold excitement than to follow, almost from minute to minute, the phases of a great naval action from the silent rooms of the Admiralty’ wrote Churchill later. With the battle raging in a deafening crescendo of shells hundreds of miles away, he remembered that ‘in Whitehall only the clock ticks, and quiet men enter with quick steps laying slips of pencilled paper before other men equally silent who draw lines and scribble calculations, and point with the finger or make brief subdued comments … a picture always flickering and changing rises in the mind, and imagination strikes out around it at every stage flashes of hope or fear.’12 But, once again, out in the middle of the North Sea things did not go as those back in London had hoped.

  Jellicoe claimed that he had been informed too late of the German excursion and that when battle commenced he was still 140 miles from the scene. On the other hand, Beatty, in his flagship HMS Lion, was on station and ready to pursue the German warships with his battle cruisers, which were faster than the German vessels. But the German fire was more accurate than that of the British ships. Lion was badly hit and had to slow up. As the British cruisers caught up with the Germans they poured fire at the Blucher and the Derflinger, but both ships refused to sink. Then, in the late morning, the British sighted what were thought to be U-boat periscopes off the starboard bow of the Lion. The British force turned ninety degrees and in so doing lost pursuit of the enemy ships. In a final hurrah the remaining British battle cruisers sank the Blucher and severely damaged the Seydlitz, which managed to limp back to its base with the Derflinger, both ships ablaze and their decks strewn with the dead and wounded. The British claimed a victory and certainly the German navy had been given a fright. But they had once again missed the possibility of completely destroying a German naval squadron.13