The Codebreakers: The True Story of the Secret Intelligence Team That Changed the Course of the First World War (5 page)

After the German navy’s initial attempt to catch the British Grand Fleet off guard during their attack on Scarborough, the next foray by Hipper’s battle cruisers occurred in late January 1915. On the 23rd, Room 40 got wind of it and Churchill was told that ‘these fellows are coming out again … and a raid upon the British coast was clearly to be expected’.

In fact Hipper intended to lurk near Dogger Bank with the rest of the German High Seas Fleet close by, and wait for the British battle cruisers to arrive, which they duly did. Unfortunately for Hipper, Ingenhol, his commander-in-chief, did his disappearing act again and withdrew, leaving him outnumbered by Beatty’s ships. During an inconclusive engagement, Hipper lost the
Blücher
but managed to escape further punishment when Beatty, wrongly believing that U-boats were in the vicinity, did not pursue his prey.

Despite once again proving its worth, Room 40 was generally regarded with suspicion by naval personnel. What could a bunch of civilians possibly know about the complexities of war at sea? Clearly, during the first few months of the war, this was a valid concern; as Denniston freely admitted, ‘of naval German, of the habits of war vessels of any nationality, they knew not a jot’. Schoolboy errors were made that seemed to confirm the prejudices of the Operations Division, whose job it was to interpret Room 40 material. On one occasion, Room 40 reported on the movements of a German ship, the
Ariadne
, which had in fact been sunk a few weeks earlier.

Incidents like this gave the Operations Division every excuse to exclude Room 40 from decision-making. When the codebreakers asked for a flagged map of the German coastline, the Operations Division refused. As Denniston caustically observed, ‘no attempt was made to develop the intelligence side of the work’.

Blinker Hall was the first to recognise the problem and take steps to address it. On 16 November 1914, he appointed a naval expert, Captain H. W. W. Hope, to act as Room 40’s guide and improve their intelligence analysis. With the volume of intercepted messages increasing and the direction-finding network expanding rapidly, Hope was able to put his knowledge to good use. Luckily, the Germans made life easy for him, as he was happy to acknowledge: ‘experience showed that the Germans were exceedingly methodical in their methods and a large number of routine signals were made day after day, which were of great assistance’.

This accumulation of data gave Hope and his team ‘a good working knowledge of the organisation, operations and internal economy of the German fleet’, and he was proud of the fact that nothing out of the ordinary happened without some kind of warning. Though Room 40 had begun as a skeleton crew struggling to come to terms with the unique language of naval warfare, it had in a short time become a well-oiled machine with an intimate knowledge of the enemy.

However, this transformation was not reflected in the processing of its intelligence. Decodes were still handed over with minimum comment to the Operations Division; there they were scrutinised by Henry Oliver, Chief of Staff, who personally decided what to show the Admiralty top brass, who then agreed amongst themselves what to tell their boss, Admiral Jellicoe.

Frustrated by a system that often meant he received important decodes too late or not at all, Jellicoe asked for the material to be sent directly to him. His request was denied. The negative consequences of sticking to a procedure set up in the first few weeks of the war, when Room 40’s potential was an unknown quantity, would be fully felt in 1916 at the Battle of Jutland, one of the largest naval actions in history.

But for now, all attention was focused on the German U-boat campaign under way in the Atlantic, where the Kaiser’s submarines were sinking large quantities of British shipping and threatening to sever the vital trade link with America.

The potential impact of Germany’s U-boats was severely compromised by the rules of maritime engagement. Under international agreements, submarines approaching a civilian vessel were required to announce their presence and confirm without a shadow of doubt what the ship was carrying before engaging it. This procedural limitation blunted the U-boats’ offensive capability.

In early 1915, after much heart-searching and head-scratching, the Germans took the fateful decision to ignore these conditions and embark on unrestricted submarine warfare against vessels sailing in waters around the British Isles (except for a route north of Scotland): no warnings, no special pleading; any boat was fair game if the U-boat commanders suspected its cargo included war material, whether it be food, raw materials or weapons. The discretion to sink a ship, neutral or otherwise, was theirs.

It was a gamble, and a dangerous one. The chances of avoiding collateral damage while prosecuting an unrestricted submarine campaign vigorously enough to attain Germany’s goal of forcing Britain out of the war by crippling its trade with America were slim. The risk that civilians would become casualties was high. The unknown quantity was how America would react if German U-boats attacked American interests. As far as the Germans were concerned, it was a risk they had to take, for ships leaving neutral American ports were bringing war supplies to Germany’s enemies, so the submarine warfare policy, Germany hoped, would act as a deterrent to the USA, and not a provocation.

The man charged with performing this balancing act was the German ambassador to the United States, 51-year-old Count Johann von Bernstorff, a tall, polished, cold-eyed charmer with a blonde moustache. One of his first actions after the war began was to hold court for journalists in his suite at the Ritz-Carlton, a three-year-old luxury hotel in midtown Manhattan, conveniently located near all the New York social clubs of which von Bernstorff was so fond, as well as a short taxi ride away from the German Club on Central Park South. As newspapermen peppered the count with questions about the war in Europe, he paced the room excitedly, explaining to them in his flawless, witty English that they and their journals were wrong about the ferocious and unprecedentedly fatal battles being fought in Europe: the French were thoroughly beaten, the German invasion of Paris was imminent, and in any case, the Russians had started all the trouble.

Count Johann von Bernstorff, the German ambassador to the USA, 1908–17

This was the first shot in a publicity war that von Bernstorff would wage as he tried to construct the ‘right kind of news’ for America by planting stories in pro-German newspapers like
The Fatherland
and
Staats-Zeitung
, throwing money at the
New York Evening Mail
and even attempting to buy the
Washington Post
.

Von Bernstorff had been recalled to Berlin in early July, shortly after the assassination of heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the flame that lit the fuse of war. While there, he met with Lieutenant Colonel Walter Nicolai, head of
Abteilung Drei-Bai
, or Section 3B, Germany’s military intelligence unit. Nicolai explained to the ambassador that all of the country’s military intelligence officers had been deployed to the conflict zones of Europe. It was now up to von Bernstorff to add to his diplomatic duties the most undiplomatic of missions: he was to become Germany’s unofficial spymaster and saboteur in North America. To help him on his way, von Bernstorff received $150 million in German treasury notes (worth almost $3.5 billion today), in order to buy ‘munitions for Germany, stopping munitions for the Allies, necessary propaganda, forwarding reservists – and other things’.

Von Bernstorff’s chances of being able to keep the United States out of the war were boosted by US President Woodrow Wilson’s isolationist attitude to the European conflict. On 4 August 1914, the day that Britain declared war on Germany, Wilson, who was under heavy stress due to his beloved wife Ellen’s terminal nephritis, which would kill her two days later, issued a detailed proclamation of American neutrality, which barred any American or anyone living in the United States from aiding any of the belligerents in prosecuting the war. Even so, in reality, the USA’s economic machinery soon started to work in favour of the Allies.

When war broke out, the United States was suffering from an industrial recession and a bear market. The intense lobbying of J. P. Morgan & Company and other financiers in Washington and London would by October see the US allow sales of war products to the combatants, which of course meant the Allies, as the Germans couldn’t get through the British blockade. On top of that, the British awarded all their US war purchasing to J. P. Morgan, to prevent war profiteering and create price stability, a contract that saw Morgan take a staggering commission of $30 million. The relaxing of restrictions also created a boom for American manufacturers, farmers and banks, and would see the US replace England as the world’s financial superpower by the war’s end.

As far as many Germans were concerned, these developments effectively made the US a belligerent in the conflict: an enemy power and therefore a legitimate target, not just at sea but also on home soil. At the same time, the countries on its immediate borders, Canada and Mexico, offered opportunities for causing the Allies trouble.

Canada, to the north, was a young, muscular and resource-rich Dominion of Great Britain eager to assert its own identity in the war with Germany; Mexico was aflame with a revolution that had begun in 1910 and that would last for a decade, illuminating its long, bloody history with the US. And the United States itself, with nearly 100 million people, of whom 2.3 million were German-born immigrants, was a wealthy, diverse and powerful base from which to work German propaganda – or outright sabotage against America’s allegedly neutral war machine.

Von Bernstorff had spent the first 11 years of his life at the Court of St James in London, where his father, Count Albrecht, served as Germany’s ambassador to the United Kingdom. When his father died in 1873, von Bernstorff moved back to Germany, and graduated with a baccalaureate from Dresden before joining the diplomatic service. He took the fast track: from military attaché in Constantinople in 1899 to first secretary in London in 1902, where he caught the eye of Kaiser Wilhelm as a man who could win goodwill for Germany with his keen political skills and considerable personal charm. After serving as consul general in Cairo from 1906–8 – a launch pad to the diplomatic big league – von Bernstorff was appointed Imperial German ambassador to Mexico and the United States in 1908. Along the way, like so many other European aristocrats who had ancient titles to dangle, he acquired a wealthy American wife (and eventually an American mistress).

The first real test of his capacity to calm American fears about German intentions would be brought about by U-boat action in the Atlantic. On 1 May 1915, the day that the
Lusitania
set sail on her final journey, 40 newspapers across the United States published a chilling notice from the Imperial German embassy in Washington DC, one echoing those it had published since launching their submarine war on Atlantic shipping. Its message was lethally simple: ‘travellers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain or her Allies do so at their own risk’.

The German warning to passengers sailing on transatlantic ships of the dangers they faced

The
Washington Times
splashed the warning at the top of their front page, next to a photograph of a sinisterly arrogant von Bernstorff, and an ominous piece reported how nine prominent passengers about to set sail on the Cunard liner the RMS
Lusitania
from New York to Liverpool had received anonymous telegrams threatening trouble on the seas.

‘Alfred G. Vanderbilt was told in one of these messages that the vessel would be torpedoed,’ the
Times
article revealed. ‘Other passengers were warned that the liner would meet some mysterious end. The messages were ‘followed up’ by the circulation, by a number of strangers on the crowded pier, of similar veiled warnings. The strangers hurried away as soon as the fact that they were accosting passengers was reported to the Cunard private detective force.’