Strange Intelligence: Memoirs of Naval Secret Service

by Hector C. Bywater

  THE MEN WHO DID THE WORK

  NO ONE CAN appreciate the work of the intelligence men stationed abroad in the period of deep secrecy that marked the last five years before the war without some knowledge of the extremely technical information that they had to gather.

  No useful purpose would have been served by sending in reports that a new battleship was going to be called the Kaiser, or that 200 extra hands had been put to work on the new cruiser Emden, or that two new submarines would be laid down on 1 March. That kind of thing was the province of the newspaper correspondent, far more than that of the intelligence man. The latter’s business was to find out what technical novelties or developments were included in the battleship, what mechanical innovations were being embodied in the submarine, or what engine-room improvements characterised the cruiser.

  The newspaper correspondent could not have sent this sort of information to his paper – or, if he did, he would have been very speedily invited to leave the country. And the invitation would have been one he could not well refuse.

  A good idea of the brand of technical knowledge with which the intelligence men had to be equipped can be gathered from the very interesting discussion that broke out after the war between Sir Eustace Tennyson d’Eyncourt, who was director of naval construction at the admiralty, and Dr Bürkner, who held a corresponding position in Berlin as chief of the shipbuilding division of the Marineamt.

  Sir Eustace, after he had visited the interned German ships at Scapa Flow and carefully examined them, presented a commentary on their designs to the Institution of Naval Architects.

  Dr Bürkner, in reply, published lengthy comments in the German technical paper Schiffbau (shipbuilding). We may take a few of his disclosures about German design as indicating the abstruse technical details for which our intelligence men had to search.

  In claiming for Germany the rank of pioneer in the development of underwater protection, Dr Bürkner gave some new and interesting particulars of what had been done in this direction before the war. As early as 1905 experiments were initiated to determine the best method of protecting a ship’s vitals against attack below water, and these were continued up to the outbreak of war. They involved the use of explosives against various models, including a huge floating target of 1,700 tonnes.

  ‘We never heard that any other navy went in for similar experiments on a corresponding scale,’ he comments.

  In ships of the British Navy underwater protection is provided by the ‘bulge’. Much of the bulging has been done since the war. The German ships built before the war had an ‘outer torpedo bulkhead’ and Dr Bürkner claimed that this gave greater protection than the British system because, in order to reduce the resistance to the water, the bulge has to be fined down considerably at the extremities. Of the German ships equipped with the bulkhead system of sub-surface protection, only the Blücher was sunk by torpedo. Nine others were damaged by underwater attack (mine or torpedo), but all survived.

  This bulkhead idea, or the sub-division of the ship into many watertight compartments, has been much discussed since the war. Sir Eustace d’Eyncourt, in his paper before the Institute of Naval Architects, said that the Baden and most of the more recent German capital ships were sub-divided more minutely than the British in some parts, but less so in others, so that the arrangement as a whole did not make for any greater safety than in the case of the British ships.

  To this Dr Bürkner replied that, since the plans of the Queen Elizabeth and Royal Sovereign classes were unknown to him, he could not express an opinion about them, but as regards the earlier ships, he was able to give a comparison of the sub-division of the rival types, based on plans of the Emperor of India and Princess Royal that fell into German hands during the war. (An interesting disclosure, that, of a success for the enemy intelligence service.)

  He contrasted them in a tabular statement with the König and Derfflinger, ships of corresponding size and date.

  This table shows that the number of small compartments (double bottom, passages, etc.) was practically the same in the British and German ships.

  SUB-DIVISION BELOW THE ARMOUR DECK GIVEN IN PERCENTAGES OF TOTAL SPACE

  König E. of I. Derfflinger P. Royal

  Small compartments

  (less than 300 cbm)

  75 70 65 49

  Medium compartments

  (300 to 1,000 cbm)

  25 7 28 9

  Large compartments

  (more than 1,000 cbm)

  0 23 7 44

  While, however, the German ships had many more medium compartments but practically no large ones, in the British ships the large compartments occupied from one-quarter to one-half of the total space below water.

  Dr Bürkner points out that if damage to the armour deck of the Princess Royal caused one of the main engine rooms and its adjoining wing compartments to be flooded, the ship would assume a list of 15 degrees, whereas corresponding damage in the Derfflinger would produce a heel of only 9.5 degrees. In actual fact we know that the Derfflinger was so damaged at Jutland that she took in 3,400 tonnes of water, and yet remained in the fighting line and got home again after the battle.

  Incidentally, Dr Bürkner is among those who deny the truth of the story, first told by Lord Fisher, that the German secret service was tricked by the British counter-espionage over the design of our first battlecruisers. Lord Fisher’s story was that he had caused faked plans to be prepared, and carefully planted them, a section at a time, with known German agents in Britain, these plans considerably under-estimating the actual strength of the ships that we were building. And he claimed that, misled by the bogus drawings, the Germans built the Blücher; thinking she was an adequate reply to our ships.

  Dr Bürkner, in his article in ‘Schiffbau’, said:

  The ship was in no sense a reply to the Invincible, for England’s decision to build dreadnought cruisers was known in Germany only when work had progressed so far that her armament and leading dimensions could not be modified. Blücher was simply a later development of the Scharnhorst class and, within the limits of the design, a very successful ship. Her armour was far more extensive and no less thick – on the belt it was actually thicker than that of the Invincible, and her underwater protection was not limited to the magazine spaces, as in the British ship, but was continued in way of all vital parts.

  Blücher had also a 5.9-inch secondary armament, which the Invincible lacked, and her maximum speed of 25.8 knots, practically the same as the Invincible’s made her the fastest large reciprocating-engined vessel in the world. The real, though belated, reply to the Invincible was the Von der Tann, and the Battle of Jutland proved the ‘reply’ to be quite satisfactory.

  If British comment may be allowed on this point, it may be said that the Blücher was probably the best and most powerful armoured cruiser (as opposed to battlecruiser) ever built. The hammering she took at the Dogger Bank before going to the bottom revealed the staunchness of her protection.

  British and German designs did, of course, follow each other pretty closely in those days, but Dr Bürkner challenged Sir Eustace d’Eyncourt’s statement that the Baden, the last German battleship to be built, was designed as soon as Germany heard of the Queen Elizabeth class, of which, he said, the Baden was a ‘fairly close, but inferior copy’.

  ‘That is a myth’, Dr Bürkner declared:

  Except in the calibre and disposition of her guns, and in the general arrangement of her external armour, the Baden exemplifies totally different ideas of construction. In point of fact, not even in respect of her artillery can we admit her to be a copy of the Queen Elizabeth, for the calibre and arrangement of her guns were approved by the Kaiser on 6 January 1912, after endless discussion, and at that time no news as to the Queen Elizabeth had reached Germany beyond a rumour that a heavier British gun than the 13.5-inch was contemplated.

  In parentheses it may be pointed out here that this statement puts Dr Bürkner in a dilemma. Either he implies that the German
secret service was ineffective, or else he is saying something that is not strictly true. The plans of the Queen Elizabeth class were drawn in 1910. The ship was on the stocks in 1912. If by that time the German secret service had not discovered something more than ‘a rumour’ about bigger guns, it was far less efficient than even those who were battling against it supposed it to be!

  He seems to realise this danger, because in the next sentence he goes on to say:

  Surely Sir Eustace does not suppose that we had knowledge of the Queen Elizabeth’s armament, etc., nine months before she was laid down?

  The Baden class was, in truth, developed out of the König class in all essential features except armament, and the latter was decided on in the first days of 1912.

  Dr Bürkner contends, on the other hand, that the armour protection of the Queen Elizabeth was modelled after that of the German Kaiser class, which had been begun at the end of 1909; and, further, that we adopted German ideas in restoring the 6-inch secondary armament in the Iron Duke and later types.

  He deals next with the statement that the Baden’s speed was inferior to that of the Queen Elizabeth and her protection inferior to that of the Royal Sovereign. As regards protection he writes:

  The Royal Sovereign is inferior to the Baden in defence above and below water excepting only the 2-inch armour deck in the citadel, and even this deck would offer small resistance to armour-piercing shell with good delay-action fuses, owing to its high position, pronounced slope, and want of coal protection.

  The corresponding arrangement in the Baden consists of a 1.1-inch steel deck, a 1.1-inch and 3-inch splinter bulkhead, and bunkers filled with coal.

  Sir Eustace mentions that the Baden steamed 3 knots less on trial than the Queen Elizabeth, and that she suffers from the drawback of mixed boiler firing. The creation of a fast battleship division had been repeatedly discussed in Germany, and was a pet idea of the Kaiser’s, but it had been dropped at the time when the Baden was designed. Unless we had sacrificed fighting power or increased the dimensions beyond the permissible limit, it could only have been realised by adopting oil fuel only, and this was objectionable on two grounds: first, because it was impossible to guarantee an adequate supply in wartime; secondly, because coal afforded excellent protection against shell fire, mines, and torpedoes, whereas oil fuel required protection itself.

  Consequently, we contented ourselves in the Baden’s case with a speed no higher than that of the preceding König class.

  It is to be hoped that readers will not have skipped all this technical material, which, by the way, is not nearly so technical as much that could have been put in to serve the same purpose. But it is important to realise that the work of discovering what was in progress behind the scenes could not be done by any untrained volunteer who simply had an itch for adventure.

  The useful intelligence man had a fund of knowledge about engineering in all its aspects. He knew a great deal about gunnery. He had a practical knowledge of electricity. He was grounded in naval architecture and familiar with the problems of ship forms and the resistance of water to propeller thrust. He was not ignorant of metallurgy, and he had more than a bowing acquaintance with optics. Moreover, in the last years before the war he had to master the technicalities of wireless, which was then developing rapidly.

  And having all that knowledge, he had to be very careful that none of the German naval authorities suspected him of knowing much about any of those subjects!

  He had to play the simpleton if the conversation ever turned on technical subjects, and he had to swallow the most outrageous inaccuracies without a blink of an eyelid. He never knew what trap there might be in the apparently innocent chatter.

  Some of our intelligence men were extraordinarily good actors. There was one character who was known to the inner circle as the ‘Hunting Parson’, though his name never appeared in Crockford’s Clerical Directory, nor ever will. He was one of the wonders of our intelligence service, with his bawdy comic songs, his hunting crop, his brick-red neck, and his voice of a bull of Bashan.

  He did splendid work in southern waters during the war. Here is a description of him and his methods, by a man who met him out there:

  It was a breathlessly hot night in the last summer of the war. There were a dozen of us in his room, of five different nationalities – six, if you count the Scottish journalist. We were not all intelligence men, that goes without saying; but every man in that room was a trained student of international politics. And yet not one of us had a tenth part the knowledge that lay behind the apparently vacuous, happy-go-lucky countenance of our host. There was no other man in Europe, I believe, who had as much secret knowledge of the currents, cross-currents, and under-currents of international life in the area he had to watch without seeming to watch. His reports were always accurate, down to the last detail.

  And he sat at the piano that night, with a tumbler twice the normal size on a stand beside him, full of whisky and soda. He bawled his risqué songs in a cracked baritone to his own vamped accompaniment, and had us all in fits of laughter.

  But he did not touch his drink all the evening.

  Our glasses he filled time and again; his own drink he spilled surreptitiously at intervals into a wide bowl of flowers.

  I knew, because I was a trained watcher, and I watched. But I don’t believe another soul in the room spotted it.

  As we came away and walked to our respective hotels when the night was far advanced, a young foreign officer who was in his own country’s intelligence service accompanied me.

  ‘Good chap, X------’, he said cheerfully, as we meandered along the moonlit street. ‘Good company and, like all you English, quite mad. But, my God, what a fool to drink whisky as he does, in this climate!’

  That incident served to show how useful it can be for an intelligence man to build up a certain reputation.

  There were plenty of men willing to do secret service work, of course. There was, from the outside point of view, a glamour, an air of romance and adventure about the whole idea, which led dozens of young men to think they would like to try their hand at it. Dozens of them were rejected simply because they had not the necessary technical knowledge to enable them to pick up useful information, or to check what they did gather for accuracy and reliability. Dozens more were rejected because they had not the right temperament.

  Secret service work before the war was not romantic to the men who were doing it. No doubt, looking back after the lapse of years, those who survive may find food for laughter in some incidents they recall. There were hair-raising moments, which are better regarded from a distance than from the storm centre. There was the continuous stimulus of pitting one’s wits single-handed against a great organisation.

  But in actual practice the work was often dull enough and discouraging enough. There were plenty of failures. Months of hard slogging and patient research would suddenly be found to be wasted. Many an absolutely blank wall was encountered, through which no wits could find a way.

  And it was a lonely life. More than one intelligence man was separated from his family for two or three years at a time. Most of the volunteers imagined that it was a job for a week or two, a sort of raid into ‘enemy territory’ and a dash back to safety. It was not. The good intelligence man had to dig himself in and stick it, bearing loneliness and fear and excitement and triumph in complete silence. There was not a soul he could talk to about the work, not a soul to whom he could go for advice if he was doubtful. He might, perhaps, know the name of one or two other men who were doing the work also, but he did not foregather with them, or indeed get into direct touch with them in any way. His whole life had to be self-contained. He had to cover his own tracks and take the utmost care not to uncover anyone else’s.

  Strong nerves were needed to stand the strain. ‘The strong silent man’ of the lady novelists was the right type, and even he cracked occasionally and had to be rested.

  CHAPTER 3

  WHILE GERMANY PREPARE
D FOR WAR

  BEFORE THE WAR the secret service budget of Great Britain was very considerably smaller than that of any other of the great powers. Precise figures are not available, but, roughly speaking, Germany was spending six times as much money as this country on that branch of intelligence work that was concerned with the discovery of the military secrets of neighbouring states.

  Without proposing to discuss at length the ethics of such activities when conducted in time of peace, we feel it necessary to attempt to differentiate between secret service or intelligence operations on the one hand, and downright espionage on the other. The intelligence agent is in much the same position as a newspaper reporter, in that he is generally trying to procure information that the other side in unwilling to divulge. In both cases the work involves not merely the collection of basic facts, but also their analysis and logical amplification by methods of deduction. In intelligence as in newspaper work, some of the most brilliant coups have been achieved by the shrewd appreciation and collation of isolated facts, which, taken by themselves, appeared at first sight to possess only minor significance.

  There can be no question as to the moral right of the state to keep a vigilant eye on the military preparations of any foreign power for which there are reasonable grounds to suspect them to be a potential enemy.

  In pre-war days Germany ranked first in that category. In her case, indeed, it was a matter of certainty rather than suspicion. Apart from her intensive naval activities, the object of which was unmistakable, German agents swarmed into this country for the sole purpose of prying into our maritime defences.

  During the period from 1908 to the outbreak of war, for every agent we had in central Europe there were five or six German emissaries in Great Britain. These figures apply only to professionals. Were amateurs to be included, the ratio of German to British would be ten to one.