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

by James Wyllie

  The two men who would mastermind the Bolshevik takeover, Lenin and Trotsky, were both in exile when the tsar was driven from his throne, and might not even have made it to Russia had it not been for the Germans and the British. The Germans, keen to promote chaos in their enemy’s back yard, furnished Lenin with a special train to make sure he got home unmolested. Trotsky took a more circuitous route. His bizarre journey was an unforeseen consequence of yet more carnage on American soil.

  On Tuesday 10 April 1917, just a few days after the United States had declared war on Germany, a series of explosions rocked ‘F’ Building at the Eddystone Ammunition Corporation in Chester, Pennsylvania, 17 miles down the Delaware River from Philadelphia. Working in ‘F’ that morning were 380 people loading shrapnel into shells with a highly explosive black powder known as the ‘base charge’. ‘Nearly eighteen tons of black powder, ignited in some way not yet determined, set off 10,000 shrapnel shells in the loading and inspecting building,’ the New York Times reported, ‘completely demolishing that structure and causing a series of detonations that shook a half dozen boroughs within a radius of ten miles of the munition plant.’

  One hundred and thirty-three people, mostly girls and women, were killed in the deadliest act of sabotage yet staged in the United States, and initially, German agents were fingered as the likely suspects. However, the shells that exploded were part of a rush shipment to Russia, and reports soon surfaced that the plant’s large contingent of Russian workers had received letters telling them to stay home on that day. An account in the Philadelphia Inquirer quoted a Russian inspector at the plant as saying he believed the explosion was caused by sabotage. A later report by an American investigator said: ‘At the time of the explosion, a great many Russians were employed in the Eddystone plant, including a commission of inspectors, but on that day, not one of these inspectors was in the loading room where the blast occurred.’

  That same investigator claimed to have intercepted a telegram to a man named Meyers in New York City, just an hour after the blast, which read: ‘Explosion occurred at Eddystone. Our crowd safe. Woskoff.’ The investigator thought that ‘Meyers’ could really be Leon Trotsky, who had arrived in New York in January and had been working for Novyi Mir, a socialist Russian-language newspaper. It was no secret that Trotsky opposed the war and supported German socialists as part of his dream of an international revolution; he would not want any armaments to reach the provisional government in Russia because he was planning to overthrow them. But by the time of the explosion at Eddystone, Trotsky was on his way to continue the revolution in Russia, one that had toppled tsar Nicholas’s government and the tsar himself, who had abdicated on 15 March.

  Trotsky was detained on his way back to the revolution thanks to a warning sent to London by Blinker Hall’s naval attaché in America, Australian Guy Gaunt, who had been promoted in rank to commodore. Five days later, Trotsky, his wife Natalya, his sons Sergei, 9, and Lyova, 11, along with five other revolutionaries, had sailed from New York for Europe aboard the Norwegian-American liner SS Kristianiafjord. On 30 March, the ship arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the closest North American port to Europe, and the assembly point for ships heading via convoy into the U-boat-infested Atlantic.

  The day after the Kristianiafjord arrived in Halifax, a message flashed from London to the British naval control officer in Halifax, Captain O. M. Makins, instructing him to remove Trotsky and his fellow revolutionaries from the ship and await further instructions. The cable said that Trotsky and his companions were ‘Russian socialists leaving [the United States] for the purpose of starting revolution against present Russian Government for which Trotsky is reported to have 10,000 dollars subscribed by socialists and Germans’. The British were worried about further destabilisation of their Russian ally which was in internal revolt but still fighting on the Allied side. Trotsky’s aim and that of his ilk was to make peace with Germany, allowing the Germans to devote more men and resources to the Western Front.

  Trotsky’s family were lodged in Halifax, and he was carted off to an internment camp at Amherst, 100 miles north-west of Halifax, commanded by Colonel Arthur Henry Morris, whom Trotsky claimed treated him worse than the tsar’s secret police. The internment camp was located in the former buildings of the Canadian Car and Foundry Company, which had been confiscated from its German owner. When Trotsky arrived in April 1917, it housed 851 German prisoners of war. Of these, about 500 were captured sailors and another 200, according to Trotsky, ‘workers caught by the war in Canada’, while 100 or so were German officers and ‘civilian prisoners of the bourgeois class’.

  Before long, the multilingual Trotsky, a spellbinding orator, had turned the camp into a mini socialist state, lecturing the prisoners about the revolution in Russia and the glories of the coming new world order, one where the government of the people would end the criminal war. The men were so in awe of him that they tried to prevent him from doing camp chores, or having to queue for food, and when Colonel Morris put him in solitary confinement after the German officers expressed alarm that he was going to turn all the Germans into communists, the prisoners responded with a petition bearing 530 signatures calling for his release.

  So too did the Russians call for his release, and on 3 May Trotsky was sent on his way to join the revolution. Later that year, after helping to overthrow the provisional government, and with the Bolsheviks now in power, he became People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and began negotiating a separate peace with Germany.

  As the Russian will to fight crumbled, both sides on the Western Front were pushed close to breaking point during 1917. Though the Germans stood firm against another series of titanic offensives, the morale of their battle-weary troops began to dip dangerously low. The French army was gripped by a serious mutiny after the cataclysmic failure of yet another onslaught that promised victory but delivered only massive casualties. Order was restored, but the feeling remained that its soldiers could no longer be relied upon. For the British, many months of grinding slaughter lay ahead. By the end of the year, even the Tommies were nearing their wits’ end.

  All this misery was accompanied by frenetic technological innovation: anything that might provide even the most marginal tactical advantage was seized upon and hurried into action. The wireless finally came into its own, with the Germans taking the lead. The relative security of the German telephone system could not protect it from the realities of combat: the cables and wires it relied on were extremely vulnerable to the destructive force of artillery, and were constantly severed or mangled beyond use.

  Passchendaele, 1917

  As a means of battlefield communication, the telephone’s limits were clear. The brave men who ran frantically from one position to another clutching messages were a poor substitute. Seeking a better method, the Germans designed a wireless that could be operated at the front. Known as the ‘trench set’, it was much less cumbersome than the standard wireless sets, which needed a horse and cart to transport them around. The Allies were quick to follow suit with their own version that had a range of 2,000–3,000 yards. Soon the air was buzzing with wireless signals.

  Both sides were fully aware that any messages they sent could be intercepted, and set about encoding their wireless comunications. However, if wireless was to make any meaningful tactical contribution to the ebb and flow of combat, transmission and reception had to be as instantaneous as possible. Speed was essential if a message was to have any impact at all. Having to encode then decode the signals inevitably slowed things down. In the heat of battle, and under intense pressure, it’s not surprising that operators made mistakes.

  Many found the process extremely frustrating. As the Royal Engineeers’ account of the British Signal service put it, ‘the chief obstacle to the free use of this method of signalling was the stranglehold exercised upon it by the need for … the use of cipher’. A senior wireless officer agreed: ‘ciphers have always been the bugbear of wireless. People don’t like, or they have not the t
ime, to do the enciphering.’

  As a consequence, both sides introduced codes that were relatively easy to use. The British relied mostly on the Playfair Cipher. Created in 1854 by Sir Charles Wheatstone, a pioneer of the telegraph, and popularised by his friend Lord Playfair, a fellow scientist with political influence, it substituted one pair of letters for another in the text and used a keyword inserted at the beginning of the message. The German army, which had by now established a codebreaking unit, the Abhorchdienst, had no problems deciphering it. Though the British looked for an alternative and tried four different versions of another cipher, none of them was foolproof.

  Equally, the Allies were rarely troubled for very long by the German codes. They were contained in two books: the Befehlstafel, designed for trench sets and made up of bigrams of common words or expressions; and the regimental-level Satzbüch for whole sentences, which eventually included 4,000 mixed-letter code words. To compensate for their simplicity, the German code books were changed with increasing frequency.

  At first, a new code book was issued every month, then every 15 days. MI1(b) in London dealt with some of these and managed to crack more than 30 trench codes. According to Tuohy, the ‘toughest code the Germans ever evolved … puzzled our experts for precisely three days and nights back in Cork Street’.

  To try and avoid, or at least delay, the inevitable penetration of their codes, both sides tried to confuse their opponents by inserting nonsense into their messages – false or misleading information – as well as dummy groups, a random assortment of material such as quotes from popular songs, poems and proverbs mixed in with irrelevant code book entries. Though these techniques were not sophisticated enough to prevent decryption, they were often too sophisticated for the hapless wireless operators who were supposed to use them. Whether through inexperience, incomprehension or plain incompetence, errors in application persistently undermined efforts to improve cipher security.

  The main challenge facing the codebreakers was the sheer volume of messages that had to be processed. In France, the numbers employed by the British for deciphering duties, though small, continued to grow, effectively trebling between 1916 and 1918. The qualities needed were outlined in a memo put together by the intelligence staff. Suitable candidates should possess ‘a lively intelligence … imagination tempered by a highly developed critical faculty’, combined with ‘natural flair’ and ‘untiring patience’.

  The reflections of a British officer attached to a codebreaking unit give a picture of the men chosen to work round the clock to unlock the enemy’s messages. There was a schoolmaster, a stockbroker, a solicitor’s clerk and a designer of ladies’ hats – ‘a very rum bird’ – who together occupied a ‘dirty little rabbit hutch’ filled with pipe smoke. They hadn’t a ‘scrap of discipline’, and neglected to wash or shave. When a new code appeared, ‘they pounced upon it like vultures on their prey’ and ‘would wrestle with that new problem until they had made it as clear as day’. If a code was too easy, it angered them; if it was a ‘real hard nut to crack’, they were in seventh heaven. Overall, there was not a single code they were not able to solve within 36 hours.

  Perhaps the most talented of these codebreakers was Oswald Thomas Hitchings, who ended the war in command of the Code and Cipher Solution Section at GHQ. Before volunteering in 1914, he was a teacher. A gifted organist, he taught music at two preparatory schools before becoming a modern languages master at Bridlington Grammar School: he learnt French and German via a correspondence course offered by London University. As a musician and linguist, cryptanalysis came naturally to him. However, due to his humble background, at least relative to the social elite poring over intercepts in London, he was attached to the field censor’s office in France. By chance, his commander approached him one day and asked him to take a look at some German messages. He unravelled them with ease. More followed. Hitchings was put in contact with MI1(b) and a steady stream of letters flowed back and forth as he swapped ideas and notes with one of Malcolm Hay’s staff, Duncan Macgregor, a professor at Balliol College, Oxford. Their exchanges bore fruit and Macgregor was sent over to France to assist him. Hay had great respect for Hitchings, and they became firm friends.

  The British interception infrastructure grew rapidly during 1917. Wireless observation groups were formed. Each one had around 75 personnel overseeing six interception and two direction-finding stations, dealing with 150–200 messages a week. All the energy and manpower invested in the operation of these new technologies produced a steady stream of knowledge. Its value, however, in terms of delivering materially different results was negligible. The appalling truth about the campaigns of 1917 was that nobody seemed to have learned anything from the horrors of 1916.

  During the Third Battle of Ypres, which began in early summer and ended at Passchendaele in November, the British were supposed to break out of the salient and reach the Belgian coast, cutting deep into German-held territory. Within a few weeks, the offensive was hopelessly bogged down, yet Haig persisted in his belief that victory was within his grasp: if not, then at least the Germans were being worn down by the incessant attacks. The trouble was, so were the British.

  However much historians argue about the extent to which new tactical thinking was being introduced to break the stalemate, it’s hard to escape the feeling that nothing had changed. The same relentless carnage. The same stubborn adherence to the belief that one more big push would do the trick. The same indifference to the appalling suffering of the troops, sacrificed on the altar of attrition.

  Had Haig, at any time from mid August, bothered to actually visit the front lines – if the flimsy, porous, mud-soaked trenches inhabited by the drenched, shivering Tommies, carved into a poisonous bog laced with shell craters filled with fetid water and rotting corpses, can even be called a front line – surely he would have seen that continuing the offensive when any realistic hope of obtaining its targets was gone was not only suicidal but criminal.

  The one clear-cut strategic success of 1917 was pulled off by the Germans. Without alerting the Allies, they were able to mount a major withdrawal on the Somme front to a newly prepared defensive bulwark, dubbed the Hindenburg Line by the British, some way back from where fighting had ground to a halt at the end of 1916.

  This secret move was achieved through wireless and telephone silence, misdirection, and fake preparations for an offensive at Ypres. Tuohy penned a snapshot account of the moment British interceptors, listening in on the German short-wave trench set, realised they’d been fooled. At around 10 p.m., a ‘bored and jaded NCO’ picked up a signal that indicated that several battalions had retired. Using direction-finding, he then tried to get a better fix on the signal, which showed the German troops were ‘five miles behind where they ought to have been’, leading him to conclude that ‘the whole bloody German army’s gone back’.

  What paltry gains the British made during the Somme were now worthless and the Germans were hunkered down in a far superior position. Worse was to come. A year later, they pulled off an even greater feat of deception when they concealed the timing and location of the huge spring offensive that, having taken the Allies by surprise, almost won them the war.

  Chapter 20

  OVER THERE

  On 4 July 1917, the first contingent of the American army made a triumphal entry into the European war. After a perilous journey across the Atlantic that saw the US navy repel U-boat attacks without losing a single US ship or serviceman, and sinking at least one German submarine, a battalion of the First Army of the American Expeditionary Force survived a rainstorm of flowers and adulation as they marched through the star-spangled streets of Paris, with their commander General John J. Pershing at the helm, to return a martial favour.

  ‘Lafayette, nous sommes ici!’ proclaimed Colonel Charles Stanton, an aide to Pershing and a fluent French speaker, as the Americans paid homage at the tomb of the Marquis de Lafayette, whose French forces had sailed to America in 1781 to help the rebels win thei
r independence from the British.

  Though the Americans were welcomed in France with a tumultuous cocktail of hope and relief, their mere presence would not be enough to declare the war an Allied victory: the collapse of Russia had eventually freed up 50 German divisions of battle-hardened Eastern Front troops to head west for one big push towards victory. Despite their muscular ambition, the Americans would not win the war by themselves.

  A New York Times reporter, one of many covering the American Expeditionary Force’s (AEF) arrival in France, met up with a French drillmaster, who put the task into war-weary perspective, admiring the American troops as the very finest of ‘human beings and raw material’. He issued a caution, however, one born of three and a half years of seeing soldiers march to their doom. ‘But they need a deal of training. The hardest thing to teach them is not to be too brave. They must first learn to hide … Methods in this war are largely those of stealth.’

  One of Pershing’s soldiers was largely invisible back in the United States, but he not only became the defining face of the AEF – he and his fellow Choctaw troops would contribute to US military intelligence in a way that neither General Pershing nor Private Otis W. Leader could imagine in July of 1917. Leader had been picked out of General Pershing’s 4 July parade by French artist Raymond de Warreux, who had a commission from his government to paint the ideal US soldier. The artist saw in the handsome 35-year-old Leader ‘a half-blood Choctaw Indian from Oklahoma, straight as an arrow and standing over six feet tall; keen, alert, yet with calmness that betokens strength and his naturally bronzed face reflecting the spirit that they took across with them, the spirit that eventually turned the tide’.