Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  ‘What would the German Emperor give,’ I said to my companions, ‘to see this?’

  The Admiralty officials discussed the means by which such intelligence might get back to Germany. Submarines were causing much anxiety. After the light cruiser HMS Birmingham had sliced through the German submarine U-15 on 9 August, hundreds of miles from the nearest German naval base, the Royal Navy began to understand these vessels had greater range than anyone had realised. Churchill was anxious that U-boats could be picking up wireless messages:

  ‘… suppose a submarine flotilla were lurking about behind some of the islands and suppose a Zeppelin came over and saw the Fleet, couldn’t she tell them and lay them on at once?’ … ‘Suppose there was a spy on shore who signalled to the Zeppelin, and the Zeppelin without coming near the bay signalled to the submarines’ … ‘Suppose, for instance, … someone had a searchlight …’

  At lunch on Admiral Sir John Jellicoe’s flagship HMS Iron Duke the subject came up again. Rumours about that shooting estate, involving foreigners and aeroplanes, made Churchill even more determined to investigate. He requisitioned four pistols from the battleship’s armoury, just in case ‘the searchlight was an enemy signal and a Scotch shooting-lodge a nest of desperate German spies’.

  Churchill led an armed and uniformed naval party back to Lochrosque Lodge, and summoned its owner. The former Liberal Unionist MP and Carlton Club member Sir Arthur Bignold was surprised to be called from his dinner to explain that he actually kept a 24-inch searchlight on the battlements only because its beam picked up the gleaming green eyes of the deer on the braes at night so the ghillies and stalkers could locate them more easily the next day for the shooting parties. Churchill found this hard to believe, although it was quite true.

  Whatever the cause, the anxiety was quite understandable. No one knew the U-boats’ range, and no protective defences against them were ready in harbours like Scapa Flow in Orkney. If anyone had any lingering doubts about the vulnerability of very big ships to torpedoes, the Germans scotched them dramatically in the North Sea on 22 September 1914 when Kapitänleutnant Otto Weddingen in U-9 sank three British armoured cruisers, Aboukir, Hogue and Cressey, with the loss of 1,460 lives.

  From November 1914, Churchill encouraged the development of armed Decoy Ships, ‘mystery ships’ or ‘Q-Boats’, to help counter the menace of German submarines on the high seas. The deception was based on observation of their practice. Because the Germans thriftily saved their torpedoes for larger armed vessels, U-boats attacking merchant shipping would usually surface, force the merchant seamen crew to evacuate in their lifeboats and then sink the ship by holing the water line with 37 mm gunfire. Churchill’s ‘Q-ships’ accordingly looked like merchant navy vessels, dingy cargo ships, coasters, colliers or trawlers. They had scruffy civilian crews and they flew the Red (merchant navy) Ensign, but they also carried concealed guns ‘which by a pantomime trick of trap doors and shutters could suddenly come into action’, as Churchill wrote in The World Crisis.

  Over 300 Q-ships had gone out by November 1918, and although they claimed only eleven of the 182 German submarines sunk in WW1, their dramatic exploits stirred the British imagination that liked pirate stories. The Wonder Book of Daring Deeds, a typical 1930s volume of cheery British imperial propaganda, told how Lieutenant Stuart and Seaman Williams won VCs to match the one their captain, Gordon Campbell, had already won, when their Q-ship Pargust was torpedoed by a U-boat off Ireland on 2 June 1917. The ‘panic party’ rowed away from the ship, but when the enemy submarine surfaced, screens dropped to reveal hidden guns that opened fire.

  ‘Deception, however, was not a British monopoly’ says Edwyn A. Gray, completing the story in his book The U-Boat War 1914–1918:

  [Kapitänleutnant Ernst] Rosenow replied by sending some of his crew on deck with their hands raised in surrender. Campbell immediately ordered the guns to hold fire but suddenly realised that UC-29 was trying to escape under cover of the truce. Once again Pargust’s guns blazed, and this time no quarter was asked or given.

  The twentieth-century surge in camouflage and deception was not just a response to the machinery of new weapons on land, at sea and in the air, but also to the new information technologies which in time of war became dangerous. The secret war therefore aimed from the beginning to destroy or disrupt enemy communications.

  Early on 5 August 1914, the crew of the British cable ship Telconia, offshore from Emden on the German–Dutch coastline, dealt with five German telegraph cables that ran down the English Channel to France, Spain, Africa and the Americas, grappling them, hauling them up, and chopping the bright wires through their slimy gutta-percha sheathing.

  The electromagnetic telegraph had been born in the USA in 1846, but the British Empire was the first to get wired. In 1866, Brunel’s ship the Great Eastern laid the successful transAtlantic cable that made use of Samuel Morse’s code of dots and dashes. By 1870 the UK was linked to Bombay, and the line was extended via Dutch Java to Australia in 1871. The Pacific Cable Board was set up at the beginning of the twentieth century by the governments of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to provide telegraphy within the British Empire.

  Thirty years after Morse’s telegraph, Edison’s improved telephone arrived, which still needed wires; another twenty years later came literally ‘wireless’ communication: the magic of radio. The German physicist Heinrich Hertz had worked out the principle of radiation and was the first to produce electromagnetic waves artificially, but an Italian physicist, Guglielmo Marconi, continued his experiments in Britain, aiming to set up the world’s first permanent wireless station. By July 1900, he had installed radio apparatuses on a Royal Navy cruiser and a battleship so successfully that the British Admiralty soon contracted for dozens more warships to be fitted.

  Radio/wireless signalling – and interception – play an important role in WW1. The first British Empire soldier to fire a shot against the Germans, on 12 August 1914, was Regimental Sergeant Major Alhaji Grunshi of the Gold Coast Regiment, during the campaign to silence the German wireless station at Kamina in Togoland. This station linked Germany to Windhoek in German South-West Africa, to Dar-es-Salaam in German East Africa, to German shipping in the South Atlantic and to German agents all around South America. All the German radio stations across the Pacific – Yap, Apia, Rabaul, Nauru – were silenced by British Empire forces in August and September 1914.

  Germany’s response to this communications war was to slice through Britain’s global cables wherever their longest stretches were hardest to repair. On 7 September 1914, a three-funnelled warship, flying a friendly French flag, dropped anchor just off the north-west corner of Fanning Island, a low coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Two boatloads of men rowed swiftly ashore. The German sailors and marines of the Imperial German Navy light cruiser Nürnberg pulled out pistols and machine guns and began to wreck the cable station under the coconut palms. They harmed no one, but a demolition crew blew up the generators and accumulators. Axes smashed the control-room instruments and liberated ammonium chloride from the cells. The landing party also looted all the gold sovereigns from the superintendent’s safe, where they found Alfred Smith’s treasure map showing where he had hidden the spare instruments and the Fanning Island Volunteer Reserve’s arms and ammunition. These were duly dug up and destroyed. Meanwhile, Nürnberg’s companion ship, the Bremen class light cruiser Leipzig, had hauled up and severed the Fanning–Canada cable and dragged the long end out to sink in deep water. Then they cut the Fanning–Fiji cable, but dragged it out only as far as the shallow reef where, luckily, it could quite soon be dredged up and reconnected by the British.

  Another German light cruiser from China, the Emden, headed west into the Indian Ocean and became the most famous raider of the war, causing millions of pounds worth of havoc by shelling the oil tanks at Madras, attacking Penang harbour and capturing and sinking merchant ships. Her captain, Karl von Müller, was adept at deception. By fitting a fake
fourth smokestack and flying a Royal Navy ensign, Emden sometimes passed as the British cruiser HMS Yarmouth until she got within range and revealed her true colours.

  On 9 November 1914, Emden carried out another cable-cutting raid. This time the mission was to sever the Indian Ocean telegraph connection between South Africa and Australia at one of its junctions, Direction Island in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. Again, a landing party came ashore, harmed no one, smashed all the Morse machinery with axes and severed two cables. But there was an additional task in the Cocos: to blow up the wireless tower, because by this time shore-to-ship and ship-to-ship radio was helping the Allies to coordinate their tracking of the enemy. (Emden always kept radio silence, but listened carefully to all other wireless traffic, judging distance by strength of signal only.) The wireless demolition job was done remarkably politely; the Germans agreed not to drop the tower across the only tennis court. But they were just too late. The men of the Eastern Telegraph Extension Company had managed to transmit a signal that John Keegan has described as ‘perhaps the earliest ever piece of real-time intelligence of the electronic age’. This wireless message, ‘strange ship in entrance’, reached an Australian convoy two hours away, which sent the cruiser HMAS Sydney to investigate. Emden had to up anchor and run for it; outgunned by Sydney, she was scuttled and shelled on a reef, with half her crew killed or wounded. The other two cable-cutters, Nürnberg and Leipzig, were both sunk on 8 December 1914 in the Battle of the Falkland Islands.

  Britain was determined to rule the airwaves. The German navy or Kaiserliche Marine talked to its vessels at sea by radio, using codes. German U-boats communicated with their control centre at Wilhelms-haven, hundreds of miles away, on the 400 metre waveband. On 2 August 1914, the British government had taken ‘control over the transmission of messages by wireless telegraphy’, closing down amateur and merchant marine use. In the late summer of 1914, the Royal Navy’s Director of the Intelligence Division of the Naval Staff (DID), Rear Admiral Henry Oliver, raised to fourteen the number of radio intercept stations along Britain’s east coast. Their task was to monitor all the German Hochseeflotte signals traffic and to supply useful information to the Admiralty. These stations were staffed by ex-General Post Office (GPO) engineers and by ‘ham’ radio operators whose private sets had been banned. From 1915 onwards, the British employed the new technique of wireless direction finding (DF) to locate German transmitters and to intercept their radio transmissions. The principal site for this was Hunstanton Coast Guard Station on the Wash in Norfolk, which could ‘tap the air’ in Flanders and northern France as well as the North Sea, and sent non-naval military information about the Western Front to the War Office and thence to the Intelligence Section of GHQ France.

  Rear Admiral Oliver also asked the director of Naval Education, Sir Alfred Ewing, to set up a department to break the codes and ciphers that the German navy were using. Ewing hired the cleverest teachers and academics he knew. One of them was the hockey-playing Scotsman Alastair Denniston, who had been teaching German at the Royal Naval College at Osborne on the Isle of Wight. Denniston became the great cryptanalyst who later headed the Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS, nicknamed the Golf, Cheese and Chess Society, the forerunner of GCHQ) and who started Bletchley Park.

  In the decoding and deciphering game, the British got very lucky very soon. By the end of 1914, the Royal Navy possessed the three principal codebooks of the Imperial German Navy, one obtained in Australia, one captured by Russian allies, and one trawled up in a British fishing net from a sunken German destroyer off the Dutch coast. Foolishly, the Germans did not change their signal books, and so in Room 40 of the Old Building of the Admiralty in London, British Naval Intelligence, by stops and starts, began reading the enemy messages that would help them to win the war. It was as First Lord of the Admiralty in WW1 that Winston Churchill first got the taste for Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) that would be so important to him as Prime Minister in WW2.

  The Duke of Wellington once said: ‘All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called “guessing what was at the other side of the hill”.’

  If you get high enough, you can see right over the other side of the hill. Since 1783, when Frenchmen pioneered the new technology, balloons had offered the tantalising chance of doing this. British military ballooning began in 1878, first used in the field by the Royal Engineers Balloon Company, who kept an observer aloft for seven hours in the 1885 campaign against the Mahdi in the Sudan. In the Boer War, sappers took reconnaissance photographs from balloons, and in May 1904 they first transmitted and received wireless communications while aloft. By 1914, all kite-balloons that were fastened to the ground belonged to the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the ones tethered to ships to the Royal Navy Air Service (RNAS). Spotters in the navy kite-balloons at the Dardanelles in 1915, for example, helped to direct naval gunfire and to keep an eye out for enemy submarines.

  Captive ‘sausage’ balloons used for observation were a familiar sight along all the front lines from Macedonia to Belgium. In November 1914, the historic cloth hall and cathedral of Ypres were destroyed by explosive shellfire directed from German observation balloons. British observers in balloons were linked by telephone to field batteries below, to HQ and to the wider world. In a quiet spell in 1917, one observer gave his private number to the operator and found himself, a quarter of an hour later, high above France talking to his wife in north London. Naturally, observation balloons became targets too. When the official war artist C. R. W Nevinson went up in a kite-balloon above the Western front one night in 1917 to observe and sketch the flashes of the guns in the darkness, he was strapped to a bulky parachute, ready to jump should incendiary bullets ignite the hydrogen in the ‘gas-bag’ above him. (Nevinson was the first British artist to paint the aerial view. His lithographs of 1917, In The Air and Banking at 4000 Feet, catch the queasy yaw of looking down on patchwork fields from a small open aeroplane.)

  The Germans took balloon technology forward by investing heavily in Count Zeppelin’s rigid inflatable airships, but the French also led the way in the development of aeroplanes for use in war. By the summer of 1911, the French air corps had over 200 aeroplanes, and their coordination with the cavalry, infantry and artillery on the ground in the military manoeuvres at the Camp de Châlons impressed foreign observers. By 1914, the Imperial German Air Service, the Luftstreit-kräfte, had 246 aircraft and eleven airships compared to Britain’s 110 aircraft and six airships. The British may have come later to the game, but then they forged ahead. The RFC was formed in spring 1912 with only eighteen machines, but with the aim of creating seven ‘squadrons’ of a dozen planes, plus an airship/kite squadron in its Military Wing. The earliest, flimsiest aeroplanes of the RFC had no integral armaments because their purpose was reconnaissance. The leader of the RFC in 1914 was Brigadier General Sir David Henderson, who had been staff captain (Intelligence) in the Sudan campaign and director of Military Intelligence in the second Boer War. David Henderson had himself learned to fly in 1911, the year when aeroplanes first proved their value in both the French and German Army manoeuvres, and became, at 49, one of the oldest pilots in the world. He wrote an important primer on information gathering, Field Intelligence, in 1903 and published The Art of Reconnaissance in 1907.

  During the British Army military exercises or manoeuvres of September 1912, aircraft of the RFC proved invaluable in reconnaissanceover Norfolk. Jimmy Grierson, defending Thetford, had the army airship Gamma communicating to him (by wireless, from up to thirty-five miles away) all the daylight movements of Douglas Haig’s division, attacking from the east, trying to move under the cover of roadside hedges. They became more rather than less conspicuous to the aerial spotters when they tried a primitive sort of Birnam Wood camouflage, covering wagons and guns with branches of trees.

  The third edition of Henderson’s Art of Reconnaissance, published in May 1914, contai
ned a whole new chapter on ‘Aerial Reconnaissance’. Henderson predicted that the new aircraft would make it impossible to prevent enemy surveillance. Aerial spotting would lift the fog of secrecy from strategic moves and make commanders more cautious, because surprise would be harder to achieve. Henderson could foresee the air arm completely superseding the cavalry. Churchill too saw the appeal of the air and its freedom. He first flew as a passenger in 1912, and many hundreds of flights would follow. He encouraged the Naval Wing of the RFC to pioneer wireless telegraphy in airships, and to detect submarines from the air. Relishing the Royal Navy tradition of attack, Churchill foresaw a far more aggressive role for aircraft than Henderson’s idea of intelligence gathering and reporting.

  When early pilots on opposing sides met in the air, they either ignored each other, or saluted in a display of Brüderschaft. Then manners broke down. According to John Masters, they first began throwing objects like bricks at each other, then using small arms. Once this started, clearly they had to kill each other, and fitting machine guns with an interrupter gear to shoot through the revolving propeller was a logical development.

  Quite soon, single combat in the air became epic. In June 1915, a week after the Germans first dropped bombs on London, a monoplane flown by Flight Sub Lieutenant Reginald Warneford of the RNAS almost collided with Zeppelin airship LZ37 over Bruges, as it was returning to base after fog had prevented it from raiding England. In the ensuing fight, ‘Rex’ Warneford used a technique that had first been recommended by Churchill. Driven off by the Zeppelin commander’s gondola guns, Warneford forced his Morane-Saulnier Parasol higher and higher, then dived down from 11,000 feet into a hail of bullets from the Zeppelin’s roof gun until he was a hundred feet above the grey back of the dirigible. Straightening out, he jerked his bomb-releases and planted all six of his twenty-pound bombs along the Zeppelin’s length. The ensuing explosions blew his plane, upside down, hundreds of feet up in the air (where only his safety straps prevented him falling out), and silenced his engine. He managed to glide down, land in enemy territory, fix his fuel line with a cigarette holder and a handkerchief, take off again and coast with an empty tank until he could crash-land near Cap Gris Nez. Meanwhile, the blazing German airship had crashed on to the convent of St Elizabeth at Ghent, killing two nuns and an orphan. The crew’s only survivor was Steuermann Alfred Mühler who jumped from the flaming gondola and smashed through an attic skylight on to a feather bed. Fragments of the first wrecked enemy airship became secret souvenirs for patriotic Belgians. However, one lump of scorched metal ended up as a paperweight on the desk of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Mr Winston Churchill.