by James Wyllie
Indeed, the unique contribution of the Choctaws would help the American army begin to turn the tide of battle against the Germans, but Pershing had many other things on his mind that summer. Pershing had come to Europe as commander of the AEF bearing the weight of a great tragedy, as well as great and unusual advancement. In 1913, he had been appointed commander of the 8th Brigade, based at the Presidio military base in San Francisco. The brigade was deployed to Fort Bliss, New Mexico, when the Mexican revolution threatened to boil over into the US. In 1915, Pershing summoned his wife and four children to join him in New Mexico, but on 27 August 1915 he received a telegram that would have destroyed most people: there had been a fire at the Presidio, and his wife and three young daughters were dead. Only his six-year-old son had survived.
Choctaw soldiers
True to his training and persona, Pershing, his hair gone grey and his face lined with grief, soldiered on, drawing on his vast reserve of experience and support. Indeed, President Teddy Roosevelt had thought so highly of Pershing’s military skills in the Spanish—American War that he wanted him promoted from lieutenant to colonel in 1903. Since the US army only promoted by seniority, Pershing was out of luck until Roosevelt pulled rank of his own in 1905. The President couldn’t promote a captain to colonel, but he could make any man a general, and so he promoted then Captain Pershing to brigadier general, leapfrogging him three ranks, and past 832 senior officers.
Pershing had learned the value of stealth and secrecy in his hunt for Pancho Villa, and while that mission had ended in failure to achieve its objective, he brought with him in the first AEF wave many of the men who had fought in that campaign, and a profound belief in the need for a vast and deep intelligence network.
Pershing knew that the American military intelligence was at best at the back of a very sophisticated class, and at worst scorned by the Allies as yet another liability brought to the war by the still undertrained, undersupplied United States army, whose commander stubbornly insisted on keeping them together as a unit rather than loaning them to the French and British as replacement troops.
The First World War proved to be a revolutionary event for American intelligence, with the exigencies of an army in the field creating the dynamic and necessary conditions for the Americans to fully commit to the world of military intelligence. The man Pershing picked to create his field intelligence programme had served as his adjutant general in the Philippine—American War, and was twice cited for gallantry in the Spanish—American War, but at heart, Dennis E. Nolan was a football coach.
Born in 1872, the eldest of six children of Irish immigrants, Nolan grew up with the classic American trifecta of hard work, faith in God, and love of country as the keys to success. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1896, where his talents on both offence and defence at football earned him the coveted All-American award of excellence, and those with the bat and glove won him his varsity letter playing baseball. After serving in the field with Pershing, Nolan married the niece of American Civil War Union General Ulysses S. Grant, then returned to West Point to coach the 1902 football team to a 6-1-1 record (they beat Navy but lost to Harvard) and to teach history until being called to Washington to become part of the US army’s first General Staff.
Dennis Nolan, now a Colonel, in May 1918
By July 1917, Pershing had followed the French model and organised the AEF staff into four equal units: G1 was Personnel, G2 Intelligence, G3 Operations and G4 Supply. The intelligence service took its prefix ‘G’ from the British and ‘2’ from the French intelligence Deuxième Bureau. In the summer of 1917, Major Nolan borrowed more from the British, particularly their system for tactical support. Pershing directed that intelligence units should exist at all levels of the AEF, so Nolan created an intelligence presence from the top of the army, which at its largest in August 1918 had 1.3 million troops, down to the AEF’s smallest unit, the squad, which consisted of between four and ten soldiers. At field grade, the intelligence units were known as S2.
Nolan also realised that he needed another kind of intelligence, which came down to the reality of fighting a foreign war: he needed French speakers to protect his soldiers from enemy espionage and subversion. In July, 1917, he requested ‘fifty secret service men, who have had training in police work [and] who speak French fluently, be enlisted as sergeants of infantry in service in intelligence work and sent to France at an early date. As these men will be in intimate relation with the French people, it is a matter of great importance that they not only speak the language but are men of high character.’
A French-speaking officer with experience in police work was dispatched to New Orleans and New York City to find 50 French speakers who were willing to do intelligence work in France. He put advertisements in local newspapers and accepted those who could pass the army’s physical examination and answer a few simple questions in French.
The first wave of men aiming to be Intelligence Police, as might be expected, were a diverse lot, and not always of ‘high character’. They included a French Foreign Legion deserter (and murderer), a Russian train robber, a deposed Belgian nobleman, as well as a few French army deserters. By the end of the war, the Intelligence Police were 418 strong, and one of their group, Sergeant Peter Pasqua, a Portuguese immigrant to the USA and master of languages, became the first Intelligence Police agent to win the newly created Citation for Meritorious Service after successfully infiltrating and disrupting a group of Spanish subversives working for a German agent.
At field level, intelligence-gathering involved everything from interrogating prisoners, to interpreting aerial reconnaissance, to watching the movement of enemy units on trains – in order to parse their upcoming order of battle – to espionage, to anything else that would help command to understand what the enemy was doing on the ground. Of course, there was also all the information that passed through the air: Nolan appointed Major Frank Moorman to head G2-A6, the Radio Intelligence Section, whose job was to intercept German messages and decode them, as well as to send American communiqués as securely as possible.
Moorman was a 40-year-old blunt-speaking career army man from Michigan who had risen from private to major, and had graduated from the Army Signals School in 1915. In September 1917, Pershing moved his GHQ to Chaumont, a hilltop city in the valley of the Marne, about 150 miles south-east of Paris. It was there that the AEF created its own Room 40, though theirs was called, perhaps with irony, the Glass House, and was housed in a single-storey concrete and glass shack hidden behind one of the main barracks buildings, near the sheds that contained the commissary stores.
Inside was the eclectic brainpower of the codebreakers of G2-A6, who were divided into four sections: traffic analysis, cryptanalysis, telephone intercept of enemy air artillery spotters, and the Security Service. Enlisted men were selected not because they knew codes and how to break them, but because they knew German and had potential, displayed by their application of logic and rigour to other disciplines. One officer was a lawyer who had become an expert in archaeology; another a chess master; another was an architect who had spent years learning Hebrew, Farsi and other Oriental languages.
The codebreakers were isolated from the other men by choice and, after one or two indiscretions, by necessity. Indeed, Major Moorman had established the Security Service with four stations to monitor American radio and telephone transmissions and to report any offending breaches to prevent disaster. ‘There certainly never existed on the Western Front a force more negligent in the use of their own code than was the American army,’ Moorman later recalled, but then, the American army codes were often the problem. It was something that Herbert Yardley, the original MI-8 codesmith, was about to find out the hard way.
When Captain Herbert Yardley, America’s leading codebreaker, arrived in London in August 1918 on the orders of General Pershing, he came with the swagger of having seen the USA’s cryptographic unit, MI-8, grow from a staff of himself and two civilian em
ployees to nearly 200 men and women working to save America from her encoded enemies. He also had his own natural swagger, one born of naiveté and robust self-belief, so he was nonplussed when the British didn’t immediately open their code vault and share everything with him. ‘For days I made no progress,’ he recalled, but ‘I consumed a great deal of tea and drank quantities of whisky and soda with various officers in the War Office. They were affable enough, and invited me to their clubs. But I received no information.’ Doubly frustrating was the fact that Yardley – or the US taxpayer – was often footing the bill for this British hospitality. Yardley’s dinner for himself and five British officers at the Ritz Hotel cost £5 14s 6d – or about £250 in today’s currency.
Pershing had ordered Yardley to London to learn as much as he could from the British codemasters, but Blinker Hall didn’t like the American, pegging him as a talkative braggart, and wouldn’t let him anywhere near Room 40. Part of Yardley’s problem was his need to convince the Allies that America could pull her weight in the codebreaking war, and that meant doing a sales job. So he auditioned by cracking a new British cipher destined for the front lines, and won admission to the War Office’s cryptanalytic bureau, where he studied their methods, describing the experience as ‘finishing my education’.
The British wanted Yardley to fly to their GHQ in France to meet the musician-linguist Captain Oswald Hitchings, whose cryptanalytic skills were said by his superiors to be worth four divisions to the British army. Colonel Ralph Van Deman, head of US military intelligence, also then in London, dissuaded him, suggesting that Yardley would have more to learn from the Bureau de Chiffre in France. So he went to Paris.
The French Chambre Noire was just as shuttered to Yardley as was Room 40, but his letter of introduction was good enough to get him an audience with Captain Georges Painvin, ‘just recovered from a long and serious illness (the fate of most cryptographers)’. The tall, dark, 32-year-old Painvin cast his black eyes on Yardley without any interest, though Yardley would eventually win him over with his code skills and the two would become lifelong friends.
Painvin, who had graduated near the top of his class from the fabled École Polytechnique, had taught paleontology at the École Nationale Superieure des Mines in Paris, and had won first prize as a cellist at the Nantes Conservatory of Music. He had come to cryptanalysis from the trenches after the Battle of the Marne, and was doubtless certain that this visiting American had nothing to teach him. After all, he had just saved the Allies from astonishing defeat.
Captain Georges Painvin, the French cryptologist who broke Germany’s most difficult code
In March 1918, the war was nearing its fourth anniversary. A generation of young men had been slaughtered, wounded or traumatised, Russia was in revolt, Germany was starving and restive, and her unrestricted submarine warfare had solved nothing. Now that spring was near, with the Americans massing troops in France, the Germans knew that they had to do something huge to win the war before the Americans could make a difference to the Allied cause.
The Allies expected a massive German offensive, but the problem lay in determining from where. Not only did the Germans bring up artillery in stealth; they introduced a new code, one of the most difficult in the history of cryptology. Called the five-letter AFDGX cipher (the V would come later), it was created by Colonel Fritz Nebel and his team of cryptologists, who chose the letters because they sound very different from each other when tapped out in Morse code. And they were certain it was unbreakable.
Nebel’s code used the Polybius square – an ancient Greek invention consisting of a 5 by 5 grid, numbered 1–5 both horizontally and vertically, with each square of the grid filled by a single letter. Nebel’s ingenious twist on this standard of cryptography was to swap out the numbers and replace them with letters. Each German letter was enciphered by two AFDGX letters, so the coded message would be twice as long as the original. The Germans then separated these pairs of letters, and scrambled them according to a key, one that changed every day. The cipher was thus in three parts: substitution, division and transposition.
When the AFDGX cipher first appeared on 5 March, it did indeed seem as if the Germans had conquered the French cryptologists. Painvin worked logically through different strategies to decipher AFDGX, failing at them all while the head of the Bureau du Chiffre, Colonel François Cartier, looked over his shoulder pessimistically observing, ‘This time I don’t think you’ll get it.’
Painvin had to get it. Direction-finding equipment showed the Allies that the messages were flowing between the Germans’ top levels of command: divisions and army corps. This meant they were the overarching messages of attack. On 21 March, at 4.40 a.m., 6,600 German guns unleashed a hellish barrage against the British Fifth Army on the Somme – and the right wing of the British Third Army further north near Cambrai, a worse thunderstorm of artillery than the British had inflicted on them when the Battle of the Somme began in 1916. Five hours later, 62 German divisions – of about 15,000 men each – surged forward along the nearly 50-mile front between Arras and La Fère, and by 5 April had penetrated 38 miles into the Allied lines.
In a war whose gains and losses were measured in yards, the profound shock struck to the core of Allied intelligence. The reeling head of the Deuxième Bureau at France’s GHQ said: ‘by virtue of my job I am the best informed man in France, and at this moment, I no longer know where the Germans are. If we’re captured in an hour, it wouldn’t surprise me.’
The Allies retreated to Amiens, and staunched the German assault. As the Germans requested more artillery support, they generated more messages, giving Painvin more codebreaking ammunition. Painvin worked like a man staring death in the face to crack the cipher. By the beginning of April, after working 48 hours straight, he had solved the AFDGX. But the Germans kept changing it, forcing Painvin to keep pace. By working through old messages from April and May, he was able to create the German code key they had used for their March offensive. By late May, he could use this key to break the current codes.
But the situation had moved from dire to desperate. The German stormtroopers had pummelled their way another 30 miles south, and were now just 40 miles from Paris, which they were shelling with a terrifying new weapon. The ‘Paris Gun’, which with its range of 75 miles and its 100-foot barrel was so large it had to be mounted on railway cars, had rained shells seemingly from out of nowhere down in front of the Gare de l’Est, by the Quai de la Seine, and in the Jardin des Tuileries. On Good Friday, one of its 234-pound shells had landed on the roof of the St-Gervais-et-St-Protais church while a Mass was in progress, killing 88 people and wounding another 68. In all, the Paris Gun killed 250 Parisians and wounded 620, its fatal shell reaching an altitude of 25 miles at the highest point in its trajectory. It was the greatest height yet attained by a weapon of war, one requiring the gunners to calculate the rotation of the earth before they fired. For the first time in history, death came down on humanity from the stratosphere.
As if that wasn’t enough pressure on Georges Painvin, on 1 June the Germans added another letter to their fiendish code. The AFDGVX cipher was now in play, and yet within 24 hours Painvin had solved it. The challenge now was to intercept the message that revealed where the next attack would be launched.
At around 9 p.m. on 1 June, the French listening post at Mont-Valérien intercepted a message that according to direction-finders had been sent from German HQ to its 18 corps. The message read: ‘Rush munitions Stop Even by day if not seen.’ The Germans were desperate, moving arms by daylight if they could to Remaugies, and now the Allies could plan on how to counter them there. When 15 German divisions attacked on 9 June, they only advanced six miles before being repelled by five French divisions. The French called the deciphered message – thanks to Painvin – ‘La Radiogramme de la Victoire’.
Painvin’s codebreaking had not won the war. But he had stopped it from being lost. And now the AEF was reaching strength and about to enter the fight – with a secret c
ode weapon that no amount of code-logic could teach, or break.
The US army had marched off to war with three authorised code and cipher systems, none of them inspiring confidence in the Allies. The Telegraph code was a fragile system designed for headquarters communications; the Signal Corps had created a highly flammable celluloid device called the Army Cipher Disk, but it was a simplistic tool for mono-alphabetic substitution, the kind of elementary code-making that uses a fixed alphabet where letters are substituted for other letters – for example, a = z, b=y, and so on – and which can easily be solved by analysing the frequency of letters and corresponding them with the frequency of likely letters in the original language (for example, in English, the letter ‘e’ would appear most frequently in whatever its substituted form).
The British taught the Americans how to use the Playfair cipher, which had been in use since the mid nineteenth century and which replaces pairs of letters in plain text with pairs of letters in cipher text. While far more complicated than mono-alphabetic substitution, it too could be solved with frequency analysis, but the point was to give the Americans a crash course in code creation. The British and French also provided the Americans with obsolete code books to show them how it was done, with the result being the first American Trench Code in 1918, containing 1,600 words and phrases designed to be used with ‘super-encipherment’ – enciphering a message more than once. The Trench Code was used for training only, and was never sent to troops on the front lines for fear of capture.
The US quickly needed its own set of codes that could be easily used by operators in battlefield conditions, and yet which were secure enough to confound the Germans. They devised the River codes, a series of two-part codes, separated into encoding and decoding, named after great American rivers, which were issued to front-line forces in August 1918.
