The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War

by James Wyllie

  Despite working at a heightened level of efficiency, delivering information at almost real-time speed, Room 40’s operational usefulness was still being treated with scepticism by naval staff, while the procedural protocols that inhibited rapid and coherent processing of its intelligence remained stubbornly in place. During 1915, when the German High Seas Fleet was relatively idle, these potentially lethal fault lines were not exposed to undue stress; in 1916, there would be nowhere to hide.

  In the spring of that year, Admiral Reinhard Scheer took control of the High Seas Fleet. A firm believer in submarine warfare, he was determined to confront the British using the same tactics that had previously failed because of his predecessor’s caution. An attack on the coastal town of Lowestoft was attempted in late April but abandoned when Scheer got a warning from his codebreakers at Neumünster that the British Grand Fleet was on the move.

  Admiral Scheer, head of the German High Seas Fleet during Jutland and the U-boat campaign

  Scheer’s next major outing was scheduled for the last weeks of May. Delayed by bad weather, he finally set sail on the 31st. Room 40 had been alerted as early as the 17th that something was up and on the 30th produced definitive evidence that Admiral Hipper’s battle cruisers were about to leave their bases. Jellicoe was duly informed, and with Beatty scouting ahead, he put to sea that evening, not yet certain whether Hipper was alone or accompanied by Scheer and the rest of the High Seas Fleet.

  Given the importance of establishing Scheer’s position, it was particularly unfortunate that the task fell to Captain Thomas Jackson, director of the Operations Division. Jackson, who was making only his third visit to Room 40, had nothing but contempt for the codebreakers: ‘these chaps couldn’t possibly understand all the implications of intercepted signals’. Rather than asking directly about Scheer’s whereabouts, he enquired instead about the location of his flagship, denoted by the wireless call sign ‘DK’. Room 40 dutifully supplied the answer: intercepted signals placed the call sign ‘DK’ in the Jade Bight, home of the High Seas Fleet. Satisfied that this provided confirmation that Scheer had not left port, Jackson passed on the news to the Admiralty, who then informed Jellicoe. The problem was that Scheer, hoping to outwit the British DF stations, habitually abandoned the ‘DK’ call sign when he set sail, assigning it to a local onshore outpost instead.

  Room 40 was well aware of this routine deception, and had Jackson either been clearer about the purpose of his question or bothered to make further enquiries, the codebreakers would have revealed the real state of affairs: the placement of the call sign proved that Scheer was not staying put. Had Jellicoe known that the High Seas Fleet was behind Hipper, he would have been able to act accordingly: either by laying a trap for the enemy or by disengaging altogether. As it was, when he did discover the startling truth, it dented his confidence in any other intelligence coming in from the Admiralty over the course of the battle.

  Ironically, the Germans were equally convinced that Jellicoe and the Grand Fleet were not heading in their direction either, despite getting word from Neumünster that their codebreakers had intercepted British wireless messages suggesting otherwise. In his account of the battle, Scheer claimed that he disregarded these reports because they ‘gave no enlightenment as to the enemy’s purpose’. His decision was supported by the German official history of the naval war: ‘this intelligence, therefore, in no way affected the projected plan. On the contrary, it only increased the hope that it would be possible to bring part of the enemy’s fleet to action.’

  So it was that the two largest fleets ever assembled were, without realising it, on a collision course. The British force easily outnumbered the Germans, with 28 dreadnoughts against their 16 – in addition to six pre-dreadnaughts and 113 other craft – light cruisers, battleships and torpedo-armed destroyers – against their 72. As for battle cruisers, Beatty had nine to Hipper’s five.

  Between 3.45 and 4.40 p.m., Beatty and Hipper clashed violently, the German getting the better of an intense gunnery duel, losing only one battle cruiser while destroying three of Beatty’s. To see a warship go down was a harrowing and unforgettable experience. When the end arrived, these great nautical beasts would disappear beneath the waves in a matter of minutes. One German commander remembered the demise of the Queen Mary: ‘black debris of the ship flew into the air … gigantic clouds of smoke rose, the masts collapsed inwards … finally nothing but a thick black cloud of smoke remained where the ship had been.’

  For the few survivors plunged into the freezing North Sea, conditions were nightmarish. A midshipman recalled how ‘the surface of the water was simply covered with oil fuel which tasted and smelt horrible. I smothered myself all over with it, which I think really saved my life as the water was really frightfully cold.’

  Meanwhile, on the severely scarred ships limping away from the fight, terrible fires were raging, their venomous and vengeful flames inflicting horrific suffering: ‘some of the dead were so burned and mutilated as to be unrecognisable. The living badly burned cases were almost encased in wrappings of cotton wool and bandages with just slits for eyes … a grim, weird and ghoulish sight.’

  Having come off worse, Beatty pulled away and began to draw Hipper towards Jellicoe, still unaware that Scheer was close by. Suddenly the High Seas Fleet came into view. Beatty signalled their presence to a shocked Jellicoe, who immediately began to assemble the Grand Fleet into a fighting formation. Still unaware of what lay ahead, Scheer kept up his pursuit of Beatty until, at 5.59 p.m., he spotted Jellicoe. It was too late for evasive action. The moment that both sides had done their best to avoid had finally come.

  The power of Jellicoe’s guns was too much for Scheer to bear: to stay and trade blows was suicidal. He ordered his fleet to veer away sharply, then, in a moment of madness, turned it back towards the British dreadnoughts before realising his error and signalling another retreat, this time for good. To cover his escape, Scheer sent his destroyers directly at the British, hoping their torpedoes would delay Jellicoe. Their appearance was enough to make Jellicoe hesitate, and with darkness falling he instructed his ships to pull back rather than risk destruction by Scheer’s underwater missiles.

  Scheer had escaped a severe mauling but was still a long way from home. Not wanting to face Jellicoe again at dawn, he opted for the most direct way back to port, which entailed literally passing in front of the Grand Fleet. Jellicoe, keen to avoid a night battle, and ignorant of his opponent’s intentions, decided to put his fleet in a position to intercept Scheer come daylight. Even though there was sporadic fighting as his scouting squadrons ran into Scheer’s rearguard, Jellicoe did not realise how close he was to the rest of the German force.

  He would have done if the stream of information coming out of Room 40 had been properly handled. At 10.41 p.m., the Admiralty forwarded a message to Jellicoe: ‘German battle fleet ordered home … course south-south-east.’ After the Jackson debacle, and having received another message shortly before this one that he knew to be inaccurate – the error was down to the German commander who sent it rather than Room 40 – Jellicoe, who felt that ‘experience earlier in the day had shown one might be misled if trusting too much on intercepts’, chose to ignore it.

  Then a decode that included Scheer’s request for Zeppelin reconnaissance at dawn near the German coast – which, as Jellicoe later observed, ‘was practically a certain indication of his route’ – was not even sent to him. Between 10.43 p.m. and 1 a.m., seven other messages never got beyond the Operations Division. Jellicoe was scathing in his criticism: ‘the lamentable part of the whole business is that, had the Admiralty sent all the information which they acquired … there would have been little or no doubt in my mind as to the route by which Scheer intended to return’.

  No one ever claimed responsibility for this unforgivable failure in communications. The rumour was that Henry Oliver, the conduit for Room 40 intelligence, who was often on duty 24 hours a day, had crept away to catch a few hours’ sleep an
d left only a junior officer in charge.

  As a result, Scheer made it back to port without further serious loss. Afterwards, both sides claimed victory. Certainly the Germans had reason to be triumphant: they’d lost 11 ships but had sunk 14, had suffered 2,551 dead and 507 wounded yet killed 6,094 British seamen and wounded another 674, while taking 177 prisoners. Yet the overall strategic position had not changed. The British navy’s pride and aura of invincibility had been dented, but its strength was not diminished enough to alter the balance of power.

  This was cold comfort to the Admiralty as it faced a barrage of criticism. Jellicoe was accused of excessive timidity and replaced by the more cavalier Beatty. Detailed examination of the course of the battle led to the obvious conclusion that the current method of disseminating Room 40’s product was not fit for purpose.

  Blinker Hall, who had long resented the Operation Division’s hold over Room 40, was now able to wrest control away from it. At last he could realise his ambition to turn Room 40 into a fully fledged and properly integrated intelligence organisation supplying its own daily reports. Under this new regime it would go from strength to strength, aided by the fact that the Germans continued to reject any suggestion that their codes were compromised, even though, once again, the British had miraculously been in the right place at the right time.

  Scheer, bloodied but not beaten, shifted the focus of his strategic thinking to his beloved U-boats. He believed that ‘a victorious end to the war … can only be looked for by the crushing of English economic life through U-boat action against English commerce’. The outcome of the war at sea would be decided in the Atlantic.

  While wireless communications were fundamental to the war at sea, on the Western Front the British were reluctant to embrace the new technology. Unlike the navy, the army was yet to be convinced of its usefulness. Initially, the chiefs of staff had been intrigued by radio, but when Marconi’s magic boxes were test-run during the Boer War, the results were disappointing. Though it was the engineers who operated them who were at fault, the army blamed the equipment. Experiments with radio did continue, but on a small scale. In 1905, the first Wireless Section was formed. By 1914, their number had risen to a mere ten, and the portable sets they used were extremely unreliable. According to the Royal Engineers’ account of the conflct, The Signal Service in the European War of 1914–1918 (1921), wireless was ‘looked upon with suspicion and dislike’. The generals preferred the telephone.

  Unfortunately for them, in early 1915 the Germans developed an ingenious listening device that could eavesdrop on Allied phone activity. The Moritz set had the capacity to tap into telephone signals over a 3,000-yard radius by accessing the earthed current that relayed British messages: copper plates buried in the soil picked up the low voltage generated by these signals and Moritz translated them back into their original form.

  Operators were sent to Berlin for a six-week training course that included lessons on British slang expressions. For extra protection, the Moritz sets were kept in specially reinforced dugouts. They were under strict instructions not to let any fall into enemy hands, while soldiers were ordered not to say a word about the device if they happened to be taken prisoner.

  Field set trench telephone

  The Moritz sets fed on a rich diet provided by the careless and sloppy use of telephones by the British – though the French weren’t much better. As neither had developed equivalent technology yet, they operated in blissful ignorance of the German capability, nattering away en clair, or when using code, using it badly.

  In the major offensives launched by the Allies, the elusive goal was ‘breakthrough’ – getting beyond the ranks of German defensive lines and into open country – where the cavalry, not yet abandoned as a potentially decisive weapon, could run riot. To achieve this, the first days of battle, before the enemy could rally, pour in extra troops and launch counterattacks, were critical. Surprise was essential. However, the Moritz sets meant that the Germans were forewarned and forearmed. Their defensive capability gained immeasurably from insights into who was facing them, in what numbers and where. The exact locations of the series of assaults launched by the French during 1915 were known well in advance.

  Major R. E. Priestley, author of the Royal Engineers history of the Signal service, wrote that ‘the question of enemy overhearing had arisen in the summer of 1915’. A disturbing pattern was emerging: carefully planned raids and minor attacks were ‘met with hostile fire, exactly directed and timed to the minute’. This was happening too often to be mere coincidence. All the indications suggested that the leakage of information was ‘intimately connected to the extension of telephone to the front-line trenches’.

  However, the warning signs were ignored. In his diary entry for 4 April 1915, Brigadier General John Charteris, Haig’s intelligence supremo, the man responsible for keeping the Commander in Chief of British forces up to speed, noted in his diary a conversation he had with the commander of the 9th Battalion Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Highlanders), who thought the enemy had ‘very good information on our front-line dispositions’ based on the fact that when his men approached the German trenches they were greeted by ‘a good imitation of a Glasgow tram conductor’s voice’ and a gramophone playing ‘Stop Your Tickling Jock’.

  Though Charteris found this amusing, he also saw the serious side: clearly the Germans had some source of information, most likely captured British soldiers. It did not even occur to him that there might be another explanation or that the incident was alarming enough to merit further investigation. This failure to join the dots was to have even more serious consequences – so serious that they finally alerted GHQ to the problem – during the Battle of the Somme.

  The British army was not meant to lead a major offensive in 1916; that dubious honour had fallen to the French. The massive German onslaught on Verdun, designed to bleed the French army to death, necessitated a change in plan. The onus was now on the British to take the initiative. Haig pondered his options and settled on the Somme. This five-month campaign, the biggest battle of the war so far, would consume hundreds of thousands of lives for the gain of a few miles; it has become synonymous with everything mind-numbingly awful about the Western Front. Had telephone security been better, things might have turned out differently.

  The British plan relied on achieving major gains within 24 hours of the infantry going over the top. Intelligence derived from Moritz gave the Germans a clear picture of what to expect; what they couldn’t discover was when the assault would come and when the immense, relentless artillery barrage that preceded it would end. Day after day they prayed for the guns to fall silent as hell rained down on them.

  A few hours before dawn on 1 July, as the Tommies readied themselves in their forward trenches, the Germans were gifted the information they needed: a Moritz station intercepted a message from British HQ offering encouragement to the troops waiting to advance. Any possibility that the Germans would be taken by surprise was gone, and with it the chance of a decisive outcome.

  The first day on the Somme was a disaster as yet unparalleled in the history of the British army. Reflecting on the reasons for this unholy mess, commanders finally woke up to the problem of loose talk. A memo issued by the General Staff on 23 July noted that there was clear evidence that a ‘German system of overhearing’ was being extensively used, and that ‘it must be assumed that the enemy has listening apparatus’.

  Incontrovertible proof that these suspicions were well founded came during July, when the German stronghold at Ovillers-la-Boisselle was captured after numerous costly attacks. The occupying troops discovered that the Germans had left behind a complete copy of the operational orders of the British corps that had repeatedly tried to storm the position.

  Stringent efforts were made to enforce greater discipline. A lengthy memo appeared in October on ‘The Indiscreet Use of Telephones’. It demanded an end to unnecessary gossip, and the introduction of silent hours, and warned that any disobedience
of those orders would be severely punished. It was too little, too late. The Moritz sets were still able to identify 70 per cent of the British units deployed over the course of the battle, knowledge that was used to devastating effect.

  One of the most revealing accounts of life as an intelligence officer on the Western Front was written by Ferdinand Tuohy, a journalist who’d worked for the Northcliffe press. In it he constantly drew attention to the lack of imagination displayed by his superiors and their tendency to be reactive rather than proactive. That he was eventually to pioneer a wireless interception and codebreaking system that would help the British learn something useful from the Somme campaign is testament to his persistence and his refusal to play by the rules.

  Tuohy began the war reporting for The Times and covered the First Battle of Ypres. In January 1915 he was sent to Poland to investigate the situation there; stuck in Warsaw, and unable to get to the front, he ‘had no option but to continue writing the stereotypical stuff’ about ‘fearless and faithful Ivan’, though in reality he found the Russians ‘boorish and primitive’. Nevertheless, he pitied the peasant conscripts who formed the majority of the army; they were ‘massacred like mutton’, had no leave, no pay and no mail and, due to 80 per cent illiteracy, were ‘unable even to break, by reading or writing, the desperate boredom of trench life’.

  Eventually Tuohy got amongst the action, finding himself at the Second Battle of Bzura, fought along a 30-mile front that was ‘bleak, freezing, desperate’. Signing on with an ambulance unit, he then moved on to the great Austro-Hungarian fortress Przemyśl, which guarded the gateway into the Carpathian Mountains and had fallen to the Russians in March 1915 after a bitter siege. He witnessed scenes of appalling devastation, ‘ruined, diseased and starving villages all around’. By the end of May, the citadel was back in enemy hands and Tuohy was back in England recounting what he’d seen to a shocked Northcliffe, who was appalled that ‘we know practically nothing of all this … and I don’t believe the cabinet does either’.