The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (39 page)

The Battle of Amiens began, appropriately, with an intelligence feint. Though under the command of General Sir Henry Rawlinson and following the battle plan, Currie had taken charge in his own effective way, keeping the attack under wraps from even his most senior officers until 29 July, and in the days leading up to its launch, dispatching Canadian medical units to Flanders, knowing that German spies would detect them and report that the Canadians were going to attack at Ypres, 110 miles to the north. He also sent two infantry battalions into the Ypres sector, and the corps’ wireless section headed north as well, transmitting messages with the full intention of having them intercepted by the Germans, further confusing them as to the location of the assault.

The Canadians had established their wireless school in June 1918, to train operators for the coming push. The wireless system was complex, requiring knowledge not only of sending and receiving messages, but also of setting up, maintaining and repairing the set in battlefield conditions. As a result, only operators who were already trained in Morse code and ciphers were sent to the school, as time was of the essence.

Even so, the Canadian Corps believed in the power of the wireless to win wars. When the Battle of Passchendaele was raging around him, Canadian ‘gadget king’ Brigadier General Andrew McNaughton ran a test, handing over a message to be sent simultaneously by pigeon and wireless. The wireless operator had the message off into the ether in five minutes; the bird had not yet made it into the air.

By the end of the first day of the Battle of Amiens, the Canadians had penetrated an astounding nearly ten miles into German territory, though at a significant cost: 1,036 killed and 2,803 wounded. Because the attack had moved so far so fast, it was a challenge to maintain a portable telephone system. Cable had to be laid and relaid as the Canadians surged forward, with lateral communications proving difficult due to the fact that the cables could not keep pace with the advance.

The Canadian Independent Force, a reconnaissance unit, countered this problem by sending motorcycle riders with wireless sets in advance of the attack, to report on German activity and transmit back to the counter-battery officer, who could then target Canadian artillery on the Germans as a further safeguard for the attacking Canadian troops. It was dangerous work. Private A. L. Bebeau rode his motorcycle through the enemy’s lines a seemingly suicidal ten times, on each occasion drawing German fire. Bebeau transmitted the locations of the German machine-gun nests, which ‘were successfully dealt with by the Armoured Cars and Machine Gun Batteries following up’.

Indeed, so important was this rapid transmission of battlefield intelligence that on 10 August, when the Canadians altered their sending wave length to avoid interfering with French wireless operators, the Canadian Corps headquarters was besieged with phone calls from the British front asking why they had closed down. All the wireless stations within the British army had been listening in to the Canadian traffic in order to obtain intelligence, since the Canadian Independent Force had penetrated so deeply into enemy territory. During the battle, more than 120 wireless messages were transmitted, providing invaluable intelligence to everyone who was listening in – except the Germans, who were too ravaged to do anything about it.

German General Erich Ludendorff, who led Germany’s war effort on the Western Front, called 8 August ‘the black day of the German army’ in the history of the war. Three German divisions had been pulverised, and more than 5,000 troops captured. The next three months would see the Canadians, with their allies, punch through the Hindenburg Line and chase the Germans eastward. It would come at a cost – 45,800 casualties, an eighth of the entire BEF, over the 100 days, even though the Canadians formed only about 15 per cent of the combined infantry. But the success was in part due not to intercepting information, but to rapidly gathering and transmitting it, and Arthur Currie was rightly proud of the Canadian Corps’ intelligence service, writing that its ‘system of collecting and co-coordinating information … could almost be categorised as perfect’.

The first people to realise that Germany was about to collapse were the Room 40 codebreakers. Though peace negotiations had begun during September, spearheaded by President Wilson, the German military and the Kaiser still hoped to preserve some of their power intact and avoid the shame of unconditional surrender. So the killing went on.

In the Atlantic, the U-boats continued to hunt their prey. On 4 October, a passenger ship was sunk with the loss of 292 lives. Six days later, another one went down, taking 176 souls with it. Furious, Wilson demanded the Germans cease their attacks. Reluctantly they agreed.

This decision did not sit well with Admiral Scheer, the key figure in the German navy since 1916. The thought that his mighty High Seas Fleet should simply accept its fate appalled him. Better to go out with a bang than a whimper. Scheer believed that the only way to save his beloved fleet was to risk its destruction. As he put it in his account of the war at sea; ‘among the naval commanders the idea still held force that the navy had to demonstrate and justify its further existence. Now this could only be done through a last decisive battle with the British.’

His plan was to concentrate his U-boats in the middle of the North Sea, protected by row upon row of freshly sown mines, with a force larger than that assembled for the Battle of Jutland waiting nearby, ready to pounce. The trap was to be set by 30 October. Room 40 got wind that something was afoot on the 22nd. Other messages deciphered over the next few days seemed to confirm that a major operation was being prepared, and Admiral Beatty, in control of the Grand Fleet at its base in Scapa Flow, was warned to be on his guard.

The man on duty during the early hours of the 30th, when Scheer planned to be at sea, was Francis Toye, a musician and journalist who had only joined Room 40 at the beginning of the year and was completely in awe of Hall, ‘the most stimulating man to work for I have ever known … when, blinking incessantly, exuding vitality and confidence, he spoke to you, you felt you would do anything, anything at all, to merit his approval’.

Toye was alone on night watch – ‘my senior colleague was prostrate with influenza’ – when ‘various signs and portents’ began to come in that suggested the High Seas Fleet was actually on the move. As a new recruit, he was understandably hesitant about sharing his suspicions with the Operations Division, but at around 2 a.m., as the evidence multiplied, he summoned up the courage to inform them. The staff there reacted with ‘benevolent scepticism’ and insisted they would only act if Toye was sure that the German navy was preparing a full-scale attack.

This put Toye in an unenviable position: should he give the go-ahead for the Operations Division to contact Beatty and thereby set the Grand Fleet in motion? Or err on the side of caution? As he put it, ‘to have the Fleet sent out was to incur an enormous responsibility … not to have it sent out, if sent out it should be, was to incur a greater responsibility still’.

Just before 4 a.m., he bit the bullet: ‘I went again to Operations to tell them it was my opinion that the German Fleet was moving.’ This information was immediately cabled to Beatty, who began to mobilise his forces. All Toye could do was pray he’d made the right call, as ‘in the space of an hour or two England spent some half a million pounds’ and ‘the DNI (Hall) and … the First Lord of the Admiralty, not to mention the sea lords and a whole bevy of admirals and captains, were roused from their beds by the insistent ringing of the telephone’.

Around 8 a.m., the tone of the messages being decoded suddenly changed. Apparently the Germans weren’t going anywhere after all. That afternoon, Room 40 learnt that there would be no operations for a week. The next day it intercepted similar orders regarding routine manoeuvres. On 1 November, it decoded messages that referred to desertions and court martials. Clearly, something strange was happening. What Scheer bitterly described as ‘insubordination’ had broken out amongst the rank and file. German sailors were simply not prepared to be ‘uselessly sacrificed’. Crew on shore leave refused to return to their ships; others gathered on decks to sing peace songs.

More ominously, the Red Flag, the international symbol of revolt, was raised and Bolshevik slogans were chanted. Months of inactivity, poor food, squalid conditions and the rigid separation between the men and their overbearing, arrogant, patrician officers had taken their toll. Now, with the example of the Russian Revolution to spur them on, a full-blown mutiny erupted. Sailors took command of their ships, made common cause with equally disenchanted soldiers and workers, formed self-governing committees (Soviets) and took control of the ports. By 1 November, the disturbances had reached the main naval base at Kiel. Then they spread to Cuxhaven, Hamburg and Bremen. The momentum was unstoppable.

While both President Wilson and Lloyd George were still unaware of the scale of the revolt, the codebreakers knew that it spelled the end of German resistance. Room 40 intercepted requests for U-boats to fire on any ship flying the Red Flag, and for officers to lock away all sensitive documents, including code books and cipher keys. On 5 November, they decoded a message sent to U-139 informing it that Kiel was in a state of revolution. The writing was on the wall. Anticipating victory, Room 40 overflowed with ‘excited members of staff’. Hall appeared, and ‘as the signals were handed to him, he knew his work was done’.

Disgruntled sailors in Keil march in protest, November 1918

Not that Hall could resist one final stunt, one last chance to mess with the enemy: he had photographs of British ships doctored so it appeared they were also flying the Red Flag. Hoping the fake pictures would encourage German sailors to follow the example of their British comrades, he got his agents to smuggle the images into all the major ports.

By 7 November, the gathering storm had swept inland: rebellion gripped Cologne, Hanover, Frankfurt, Dresden and Munich. Germany was staring revolution in the face. The government in Berlin, confronted by massive demonstrations by workers and communist agitators, tried to stem the tide. They demanded a ceasefire and the immediate abdication of the Kaiser. But he was reluctant to step down, believing his generals would stand by him. They didn’t. On the 10th, he slipped over the border into Holland, and Germany became a republic. The following morning, at 11 a.m., the guns fell silent. The war to end all wars was finally over.

Under the terms of the armistice, the German navy had to present itself to the British at Scapa Flow, where its ships would be interned. At 11 a.m. on Thursday 21 November, Admiral Beatty signalled that ‘the German flag will be hauled down at sunset … and will not be hoisted again without permission’.

Appropriately enough, given Room 40’s crucial role in countering the threat posed by the High Seas Fleet, one of its earliest recruits, Alastair Denniston, was present at the formal surrender. While Beatty felt only contempt for his beaten enemy and said that ‘the whole German navy was not worth the life of a single English blue-jacket’, Denniston could not help but feel sympathy for his vanquished foe: ‘I confess I did feel sorry for the senior officers there. They had been efficient men, who had learnt their work, and made the German navy their career, and this was the end of it.’

The final act of the Kaiser’s vainglorious attempt to build a navy to rival the British occurred seven months later, when the Germans, effectively imprisoned at Scapa Flow, scuttled the fleet in a smoothly executed nighttime operation; the majority of their ships slid to the bottom of the sea.

With the German fleet out of action, the war was well and truly over for the staff of Room 40. Their farewell party was held on 11 December 1918. Suitable entertainment was provided by Frank Birch and Dilly Knox. Together they wrote a version of
Alice in Wonderland
set in Room 40. The short play was titled
Alice in ID25
(ID25 became the official designation for Room 40). Birch wrote the majority of the text, while Dilly contributed a number of poems that mimicked the style of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense verse.

Carroll’s surreal comic fantasy provided the perfect vehicle for parodying the world of Room 40. The novel, in which reality is disrupted and logic and reason are used as weapons to defeat logic and reason, related directly to the life of the codebreakers, sealed in their own universe with its own peculiar rules, where every day they confronted words whose meaning was concealed by a semantic fog. Birch and Dilly’s approach was extremely faithful to Carroll’s original, an act of homage to one of their favourite writers. Their script followed his narrative step by step, while Carroll’s characters were transformed into Room 40 personnel.

The play begins with Alice walking down Whitehall, where she notices a scrap of paper with gibberish scrawled on it. As she reads it, ‘a curious feeling came over her. She seemed to grow smaller and smaller and the people in the street began to fade away.’ Suddenly, up pops the White Rabbit (Frank Aldcock, an eminent classicist), in a great hurry. Alice follows him and finds herself falling down the chute used for the pneumatic tubes into a room full of huge creatures, who are fast asleep. She is immediately accosted by one of them, who demands to know her time group; when no satisfactory answer is forthcoming, the creature decides she must be NSL (Not Logged or Sent) and dumps her in a big tin, where she dozes off.