In the post mortem that followed it was clear that there were problems with gunnery control on some of the British ships and it seemed that the side armour of Beatty’s battle cruisers was not as protective as it was believed to be. But when it came to the intelligence it was evident that the Admiralty were keeping too much control over their precious decrypts. As a result of Churchill’s insistence on keeping the intelligence to as few people as possible, when the decrypted German signals first became available only four men outside Room 40 were allowed to know what the German signals were saying: Lord Fisher, the First Sea Lord; Admiral Oliver, the Chief of the War Staff; Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, chief of operations, and Churchill himself. They alone decided how to act on the intelligence they received. ‘Blinker’ Hall, as Director of Intelligence, was not consulted, nor was Hope, the chief intelligence officer in Room 40, who might well have picked up a broader picture of what the Germans were up to. In the case of the Battle of Dogger Bank, as it came to be known, not only had there been a delay in getting the information to Jellicoe which meant that he did not take part in the battle, but, even worse, it had been known all along, from intercepted signals sent to Berlin, that the German U-boats were forty miles south of the action. But this was never conveyed to the commanders in the battle. So Beatty had pulled away from the pursuit at the critical moment and allowed the German ships to escape for no reason at all. It was one thing to intercept the German signals and to decipher them, but if the intelligence discovered was not then used effectively the whole advantage was lost. Churchill and the old men of the Admiralty (two of the four were in their seventies and Wilson had fought in the Crimean War) had not understood this. The battle had not shown up a failure in the gathering of intelligence, it had revealed a failure to process intelligence.
There was however an amusing postscript to the Battle of Dogger Bank. HMS Lion, Beatty’s flagship, was forced in to dock on the Tyne for repairs. German signals indicated that a U-boat had been sent to wait outside the port to torpedo the ship and finish it off when it left. At this point of the war, Hall and an MI5 officer were using the identity of ‘D’, a German spy who had been secretly arrested and tried, and was awaiting execution, to feed misinformation to the Germans. Hall remembered seeing a Japanese album containing photos of Russian ships damaged in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5. Here he found a photo of a badly damaged Russian ship that looked very much like Lion. He sent the photo to Berlin as if from ‘D’, saying it showed Lion in for repairs and so badly hit that it would not come out for at least two months. The Admiralstab decided this was far too long to wait and the U-boat was quietly withdrawn.
Hall continued to send signals from ‘D’. In April 1915, as a decoy for the attack on Gallipoli, he passed on information that the Allies were planning to invade Schleswig-Holstein. Observers reported that German troops from another front suddenly arrived in the district and frantically began to dig trenches. As a final payoff to this saga, it was known that ‘D’ was one of the spies who only supplied information for money. So Hall continued to charge large sums for each piece of misinformation he supplied to the Germans. When the money came through the MI5 officer bought a new car and Hall redecorated his office with the proceeds.14
The Admiralstab in Berlin was still unaware that the British were deciphering most of their signals. An inquiry after the capture of the Magdeburg had concluded that the Russians had probably not found the SKM code books, and when Hipper’s fleet found the British waiting for them off the Dogger Bank, instead of becoming suspicious they concluded that a spy must have reported their departure from Wilhelmshaven. They believed that their code books and superenciphering system were impregnable; it was utterly impossible that an enemy could decipher their signals. They did however tighten up their procedures. It was a complex business to issue new code books, which might take months to reach ships on the other side of the world. It was much easier to change the ciphering key which reset the substitution table. Earlier in the war the key had been changed only about once every three months. This was increased to once a week and by 1916 to once every twenty-four hours, at midnight. However, the cryptanalysts in Room 40 grew so sophisticated that it soon took only a few hours to find the new key. This would be the task of the night shift; it was thought a very poor show if by the time the morning shift arrived the new day’s ciphers were not completely readable. Still the Germans went on transmitting in their codes and ciphers, believing that no one could possibly read them, while the staff of Room 40 grew continuously until by 1916 there were about fifty code breakers working throughout the day and night.
In May 1915 The Times had revealed that the British assault at Neuve Chapelle in March had been effectively strangled by the lack of shells. Because no one in the War Office had anticipated the huge numbers of shells that the artillery would need in order to sustain trench warfare, it was widely felt that Asquith’s Liberal government were not doing enough to lead the war effort, and the ensuing political crisis led to the government’s collapse. Anew coalition government of Liberal and Conservative ministers was formed, with Asquith continuing as Prime Minister, but the price of Conservative support was Churchill’s removal from the Admiralty. He was blamed for what was called the ‘fiasco of the Dardanelles’ and the failure of his plan to knock Turkey out of the war by sending a naval expedition to capture Constantinople. For months, whenever he got up to speak in the House of Commons, Conservative members would interrupt him with shouts of ‘Remember the Dardanelles’. Devastated, and feeling that he had been made a political scapegoat, Churchill was out of office and influence for the first time in nearly ten years. Many thought his political career was finished. He went into a profound depression, what he called his ‘black dog’.15 The Conservative politician Sir Arthur Balfour became First Lord of the Admiralty, while, for separate reasons, Fisher resigned as First Sea Lord. But the system the two men had created with regard to keeping the spoils of intelligence within a tiny clique, survived them. No significant change in the processing of intelligence was made at the Admiralty.
After the Battle of Dogger Bank, the German High Seas Fleet remained holed up in its harbour at Wilhelmshaven for the next fifteen months. But in May 1916, Admiral Reinhard Scheer decided to make another venture into the North Sea. The plan was for Rear Admiral Hipper once again to take out his battle cruiser squadron in the vanguard and when spotted by the British fleet, to turn and lure the British ships into the guns of Scheer’s waiting High Seas Fleet. In addition, several U-boats were withdrawn from the Atlantic and stationed off the British coast, from Aberdeen southwards, to alert the German admirals to the British fleet’s movements and to be on hand to close in for the kill during the engagement. The Germans never thought they could totally defeat the Royal Navy, but they hoped to cause sufficient losses for its fleet to be reduced in size to something more equal to that of the Germans, and to weaken or even to break the ever-tightening British naval blockade of Germany.
The first signals relating to their intentions were picked up and deciphered in Room 40 in the last week of May. As usual, the coded messages provided only fragments of evidence and needed interpretation. Admiral Oliver insisted on keeping control of the intelligence and asserted that only he could send out orders to the British fleet. Assisting him now was the Director of Operations, Captain Sir Thomas Jackson, an officer steeped in the traditions of the Royal Navy and deeply suspicious of new-fangled developments. According to William Clarke, one of the new code breakers who joined Room 40 in March 1916, Jackson had only ever visited the intelligence room twice, the first time to complain that he had cut his finger on one of the red boxes containing the decrypts and the second, when a delay in finding the new cipher key had caused a temporary suspension in forwarding the decrypts, to say how pleased he was not to be bothered with all that ‘damned nonsense’.16
By the late afternoon of 30 May, Oliver believed there was enough evidence to order Jellicoe to depart Scapa Flow and Beatty to leave Ros
yth, and for them to rendezvous off the Scottish coast. The Grand Fleet, the pride of Britain, now assembled in the North Sea with a mighty force of twenty-eight dreadnought battleships, nine battle cruisers, thirty-four cruisers and seventy-nine destroyers. Jellicoe hoped for the chance of another Trafalgar, to destroy the German fleet and to establish British naval supremacy for the next hundred years. Scheer and Hipper sailed out towards them with a fleet of twenty-two battleships, five battle cruisers, eleven light cruisers and sixty-one destroyers.17 It would be the biggest confrontation of the giant dreadnought battleships in history.
Soon after midday on 31 May, a single small incident fundamentally turned the outcome of events. Again, it involved the mis-transmission of intelligence received in Room 40. As Scheer left Wilhelmshaven on the afternoon of 30 May, he had issued a spate of orders by radio. One of these was an instruction to switch call signs and to inform all vessels that his usual sign ‘DK’ would now be used by the wireless telegraph station in Wilhelmshaven harbour. Late on the following morning, while the Grand Fleet was awaiting orders, one hundred miles east of the Scottish coast, Captain Jackson made one of his extremely rare visits to Room 40. Knowing Scheer’s usual call sign, he asked for ‘DK’s current location. Wilhelmshaven, he was told. Asking no further questions and not waiting to be told that the ‘DK’ call sign had been switched, he turned and marched out, reporting to Oliver that Scheer and the High Seas Fleet were still in their base port. Oliver immediately sent a message to Jellicoe telling him that it seemed the German fleet was still in harbour. Jellicoe therefore thought he had stolen a march on the Germans and so made no attempt to speed his warships to the rendezvous. The resulting delay was to prove fatal.
Ninety minutes after Jellicoe received Oliver’s signal, Beatty’s battle cruisers, now seventy miles ahead of Jellicoe and the rest of the Grand Fleet, sighted Hipper and his battle cruiser force. They immediately gave chase and Hipper turned and ran, heading south. His orders were after all to draw Beatty and the rest of the British ships into the guns of the High Seas Fleet, about fifty miles behind him. Hipper opened fire on the warships chasing him and once again, as at Dogger Bank, the German gunnery proved lethal. Two of Beatty’s fastest ships, HMS Indefatigable and HMS Queen Mary, were hit and the ammunition magazines on both ships blew up, causing massive loss of life. Beatty is supposed to have turned to his flag captain and uttered the legendary words, ‘Chatfield, there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.’
Further south, the captain of HMS Southampton, who was leading a light squadron to search out enemy vessels, now spotted the main German fleet and passed this information on to Jellicoe and Beatty. Amazed, both men began to question the accuracy of the intelligence they were being sent from the Admiralty, who had told them that the German fleet was still in harbour.
Beatty halted his pursuit of Hipper’s ships and turned north to head back towards the rest of the Grand Fleet. Hipper turned his force around and joined Scheer in pursuit of them. The two giant fleets were now heading directly towards each other, and at around 6.30 p.m. they made contact. The Germans succeeded in hitting another battle cruiser, HMS Invincible, proving again that the British armour was not good enough. The ship exploded and went down so quickly that only six men out of a crew of more than 2000 survived. And Beatty’s flagship, the recently repaired HMS Lion, was badly hit once more. But the German ships themselves were now taking an immense hammering. Hipper’s battle cruisers received a particularly heavy mauling, and the Lutzow was seriously damaged. Scheer ordered his fleet to do an emergency ‘battle turn away’ and, laying down a smoke screen, started to withdraw. However, British ships had come between him and his direct route back to Wilhelmshaven. As the light began to fade there were a confusion of ships scattered across the sea off the point at Jutland, and the British sank one of the pre-dreadnought battleships, the Pommern. Finally, at 8.30 p.m., as darkness fell, the last shots were fired.
Back in the Admiralty, Commodore Hope and the team in Room 40 were working flat out decoding and passing on intercepts of messages between Scheer, Hipper and their ships within thirty to forty minutes – fast enough for the information gleaned to be of major value to the commanders at sea. Jellicoe, who had slowed his approach to Jutland, still had enemy ships within his sights and could have caused a vast amount of damage to the German navy. But it seemed that the fog of battle had descended. He hoped to regroup his forces and to continue to press his attack on the German fleet at dawn. At 9 p.m., Room 40 received an intercept from a German destroyer giving the detailed position and course of the rear cruiser in Scheer’s fleet, the Regensburg. This was deciphered and Oliver sent it on to Jellicoe less than an hour later. When Jellicoe checked this, it turned out that he was in the exact position given for the Regensburg. It was an unfortunate piece of luck. The German destroyer had got its sighting wrong by ten miles. Room 40 correctly passed on the location they were given, but as far as Jellicoe was concerned this was the last straw. What with the earlier message saying that the German fleet was still in harbour when they were already at sea heading straight for him, it appeared that the Admiralty seemed to be sending him nothing but duff intelligence.
The problem was in reality the same old issue of the failure to pass on effective intelligence. As the British admiral regrouped his ships and waited for action in the morning, Scheer was conducting a night manoeuvre to escape south and head for home. Between 10 p.m. that night and 3 a.m. on the following morning, Room 40 produced sixteen decrypts, every one of which would have provided help for Jellicoe in taking out Hipper’s badly damaged battle cruisers. But only three were passed on.18 In the Admiralty, Oliver continued to insist that he and Admiral Wilson alone were capable of drawing the right conclusions from the intelligence that Room 40 delivered to them almost minute by minute. It was yet another dismal failure of the system Churchill had created for processing intelligence.
When dawn came up, the German fleet had got away. They had suffered badly, but not as badly as the Grand Fleet. The British had lost more than 6000 men, the Germans 2500; the British had lost fourteen ships, the Germans eleven. Both sides claimed a victory -the Germans because they had sunk more ships and killed more men than they had lost themselves, the British because they had forced the German High Seas Fleet to flee back to its base port, from which it was rarely to emerge again for the rest of the war.
There was never another confrontation between the two powerful navies. The era of the great battleships was over. The British blockade of Germany continued slowly to strangle the country of food and other supplies, while the Germans concluded that they must now resort to an all-out U-boat war to try to starve Britain into seeking a truce. But the controversies about what became known as the Battle of Jutland raged for some time. The press and no doubt most of the British people were disappointed that there had been no outright victory. They wanted to know who to blame. Behind closed doors, Beatty blamed Jellicoe for being over-cautious and allowing Scheer to escape, and a feud between the two men lasted for many years.
As the dust settled, the Admiralty reassembled the players. Jackson, who had fatally misunderstood the position of the German fleet, was promoted to rear admiral and sent out to command the fleet in the Red Sea. Beatty was promoted to commander-in-chief of the Grand Fleet and Jellicoe to First Sea Lord. At the Admiralty over the next two years, he used to regularly visit Room 40 of an evening before dinner and read the log of all the major decrypts that had come in. He was ‘polite and gracious’ and would discuss the day’s key issues with the code breakers themselves.19 He, at least, appreciated the need to understand the whole situation revealed by the decrypts.
Room 40 had performed well. On three occasions it had provided an early warning to the British fleet that German warships were coming out to fight. The first time, the British response had been spoilt by the weather; the second, by failures at sea. And on this third occasion, when it really mattered, at the Battle of Jutland, it was a series o
f errors by the Admiralty that denied the Grand Fleet the victory it desperately hoped for. To have passed on the information that the Home Seas Fleet was still at Wilhelmshaven when in fact it was already in the North Sea heading north, without even checking with ‘Blinker’ Hall or Commodore Hope that such intelligence was accurate, was a blunder of massive proportions. It meant that Jellicoe slowed down and only reached the German fleet in the early evening. If his superior firepower had had more than just two hours to assault the German ships then victory would almost certainly have been his. Further blunders throughout that evening meant that Jellicoe was unaware of the location of the German ships. Hope later said he had a full list of every German ship that had been sent out and at any one time a good intelligence assessment could have provided an overview of their location. Instead, at the critical moment, Jellicoe had lost all confidence in the intelligence he was getting from London. It was a pathetic outcome from what had been a brilliant opportunity.
Britain could nevertheless be proud of its code-breaking record in the First World War. Room 40 had made extraordinary progress. It was a precursor to the far more celebrated work that would be carried out at Bletchley Park in the Second World War. By then, Churchill, who was this time in full command, and those around him had learned how to use the intelligence received far more effectively; whereas Room 40 had played an important part in the war at sea, Bletchley Park would perform a vital function across the entire war effort. However, the impact of the work carried out in Room 40 was itself to reverberate far more widely than in the naval war alone.
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