It might be noted here that the German Signal Book used four additional morse letters to which they gave the names alpha, beta, gamma and rho (delta, epsilon and lambda were added in later books). Ordinary morse had no signs for these and the transmission on the land lines caused the office endless confusion. Russell Clarke evolved a suitable alphabet in which he instructed the Admiralty Telegraph Room, who in turn instructed the various intercepting stations. Later on in the War the army evolved another alphabet and the French yet another, but 40 OB refused to come into line, and stuck to the plus sign and equals sign and the rest of them which Russell Clarke had invented and which had been learnt in the pain and turmoil of those early days.
It was now clear that the Admiralty cryptographic section had found a task which concerned the Navy alone, and that there might be an enormous outlet for their energy. The watchkeepers were therefore recalled from the W.O. and started to keep a continuous watch on the naval signals. As stated above, the relations between the two offices were already somewhat strained and, as the new activities in the Admiralty were a closely guarded secret, a definite breach occurred which endured till the Spring of 1917 when, as will be seen later, a liaison under completely new conditions was effected. Looking back over the work of those years, the loss of efficiency to both departments caused originally by mere official jealously is the most regrettable fact in the development of intelligence based on cryptography.
The watch on the naval signals began with the staff mentioned above in Sir Alfred Ewing’s room. Work was complicated by the crowd, the need for secrecy and the equal need for charwomen. Sir Alfred’s visitors were now denied entrance to the room and it is remembered how the august Assistant Secretary to the Admiralty was refused admittance by a temporary civilian ignorant of his identity. This apparent indiscretion bore good fruit, for very early in November a new room was placed at the disposal of the Section. This was the original 40 OB where the work was carried on till once again the growing staff was overcrowded.
To preside over this room came Herbert Hope, then Commander. It has always been alleged by himself that he knew no German, no cryptography, nor why he had come. His official duty was to keep the operations Division and Intelligence Division informed of the activities of the German Fleet as elucidated by the D of E’s cryptographic staff. Before very long, however, he was able, by his constant presence, to be the connecting link between the watches and to be the guide and helper of all such as were in difficulties, either with the German language or cryptography.
The First Lord, Winston Churchill, now took official note of the existence of the Section and issued its charter. As is seen, he laid down certain instructions for the distribution of the translations. One is bound to confess that the First Lord’s view of the possibilities of cryptography appear now distinctly limited. To have carried out his instructions literally would, no doubt, have safeguarded the secret but must also have nullified the value of the messages.
The Operations Division under the Chief of Staff should have been most interested in these messages, but this Division was at first most sceptical. Two unfortunate incidents in the days before the staff moved to 40 OB were perhaps the cause of this scepticism. Owing to poor interception and lack of knowledge on the part of the staff, a signal was circulated alleging that the Ariadne was proceeding to the Jade. The Operations Division knew that the Ariadne was sunk in the Heligoland Bight action. Worse than that, a message was circulated on two or three successive evenings purporting to order destroyers to patrol the Inner Gabbard. The C.O.S. took counter-action and, at some considerable trouble and expense, English destroyers also patrolled that spot and never found the enemy. Subsequently it was found that the German destroyers had merely been ordered to proceed to Heligoland, which island could only be distinguished from the Inner Gabbard by the bar over the letter ‘A’ which had escaped the notice of the inexperienced and geographically ignorant watchkeeper.
Further, any signal which could be read was circulated without comment and for reasons best known to W/T experts, many of those emanating from Bulk were among the best intercepted and hence most easily read. The poor watchkeepers had the haziest of notions as to the whereabouts of Bulk but the Operations Division cannot be blamed for their lack of enthusiasm for the times at which the Kiel barrier was opened. The watchkeepers knew nothing of the German Fleet, very little of the geography of the German coastline, while their ignorance of English and German naval phraseology was profound. Hope did his best for them, while Lord Fisher pointed out that warships did not ‘run in’ and begged the staff to adopt the word ‘proceed’.
At the beginning of November 1914, the work of watching the German Fleet seriously began and the organisation known popularly as ‘40 OB’ began its career. The personnel was as follows: Sir Alfred Ewing in charge, Commander Hope and Fleet Paymaster Rotter dealing respectively with the intelligence and cryptographic, sides of the work, Herschell, Denniston and Norton watchkeepers in 40 OB, Russell Clarke and Hippisley at the Hunstanton intercepting station. The permanent educational staff of the D of E, Naval instructors Parish and Curtis and Professor Renderson, gave all the assistance they could when their other duties permitted.
The gear consisted of one copy, the original, of the Naval Signal Book. However, Russell Clarke turned himself into a photographer and his private house into a studio and by the end of the month three additional copies were available. Lack of apparatus forced him to reduce the size considerably and as time went on it was found that the strain on the eyes of the watchkeepers using electric light was too great, so the Admiralty provided a suitable apparatus and Naval Instructor Curtis again reproduced this book (and many others) in the course of 1915.
The other ‘gear’ arrived from Australia during November. It was the Handelschuffs Vertehrsbuch (HVB) captured very early by the Australians, photographed and sent home for distribution. It had been found that the merchantmen acting with the German cruisers used this book for communication, but once in 40 OB it was soon discovered that the whole High Sea Fleet and especially outposts, submarines and airships used it very extensively of course always in reciphered form. It continued in force till March 1915 and was of the greatest value, especially in the matter of air raids.
With this gear, then, the staff started work. There was no traditional routine to be followed. New methods had to be evolved to meet new needs. It may be of interest to sketch out the daily routine as it was in November 1914. Hope and Rotter were present daily from 9am till 7pm, the former dealing with the translated messages, the latter working on the many fragments and examining the unknown. The man on watch had to sort, decode and translate the new.
Hunstanton, Stockton Leafield and Hall Street had direct lines to the Admiralty. There was a never-ending stream of postmen delivering bundles of intercepts. In a few months these men were replaced by an automatic tube which discharged the goods into a basket with a rush which shook the nerve of any unwitting visitor and very much disturbed the slumbers of a nightwatchman taking his time off.
In the very early days every message which appeared to give sense to the man on duty was ‘logged’ and ‘sent’. That is, the translation was written in the current log book and three copies were made for circulation, one for the C.O.S., one for D.I.D. and one for Hope. With luck, there were three or four copies of every message from the various stations. These had to be pinned together and stacked in the file of logged messages. But still there was a vast number of fragments, of messages which failed to satisfy the fastidious German taste of the watchkeeper, or messages in unknown codes and languages. All these were bundled into a tin on which was printed large and black ‘N.S.L.’. It was a very important tin, nearly always very full in those days, but to explain it to the many newcomers was one of the most complex points in a very complicated system. Truly N.S.L. only meant ‘neither sent nor logged’. When the war was finished there was still a box called N.S.L. when there had been no log for the last two years. N.S.L. was a livi
ng thing with a specific meaning, and it is recounted how a night watchman woke trembling in a sweat - he had dreamt he had been sent in the N.S.L. and got lost.
The log became an object of hatred before long. The First Lord had called into being that particular form of filing the current work and it was over two years, when its originator was elsewhere, before a more labour-saving and less soul-destroying method was allowed to replace it. In the days when a watchkeeper averaged 12 messages it could be written up, though even then it was the fashion to let the messages accumulate and allow the new watch to write up the log, and thus appreciate the situation! But it was beyond a joke when naval actions were pending or zepps fluttering and the watchkeeper had 12 to 20 pages of the book to write up.
For two months at least the night man had a lonely time, though he was probably too busy to note it. It was no good bringing pyjamas in those days or hoping the Admiralty would provide a bath. All that was needed was plenty of sandwiches. Tastes in drinks varied and only one man is alleged to have worked throughout the night with a revolver at his elbow.
It was already obvious that an increase of staff was essential when a further access of ‘gear’ made it imperative. Trawlers working in the neighbourhood of the spot where four German destroyers had been sunk on …. dragged up a heavy chest with German markings. This was at once forwarded to D.I.D. and was found to contain a copy of the V.B. (Vertehrsbuch), a most secret code book used by the German Admiralty and senior officers, also a mass of secret papers dealing with navigation. The D.I.D. handed over the former to Sir Alfred Ewing and collected a staff under Herschell to translate the latter.
The V.B. was found to be of the greatest immediate value in dealing with the German cruiser fleet, while the fact that it was solely used for the correspondence with the Naval Attaches abroad, especially in Madrid, escaped notice for some months. The pressure of purely naval work on the small staff rendered research into new problems impossible in those days. To fill the vacancy caused by Herschell’s transfer to D.I.D., and to bring the watches up to two-man strength, Monk Bretton, Hopkinson, Freemantle, Lawrence and Morrah joined in December.
None of these men had more qualifications than the original men. They knew ordinary literary German fluently and they could be relied on. But of cryptography, of naval German, of the habits of war vessels of any nationality, they knew not a jot. Their training was of the shortest before they were sent off in watches of 2-men each and given the responsibility of looking after the German Fleet. Worse than that, they had to learn the intricacies of the office routine. They probably had more than their fair share of log-writing, and they had to sort and circulate. They had to turn the German squared chart into latitude and longitude of which they had not heard since the geography class of their school days.
It is to be imagined that Hope had an anxious time when he arrived each morning, fearing to find that the German mineseekers had found a mine apparently off New Zealand which on closer examination proved to be off Heligoland and then a hurried correction ‘in our no. XYZ for so and so please read thus and thus’ would be circulated in triplicate. However, it was already a cheerful party by New Year in 1915.
Everything the Germans said was contained in one of the three books in 40 OB and in those days the Germans were by no means discreet or cryptic in their W/T. The exact disposition of the High Sea Fleet, the submarines and the airships was mentioned from time to time, and duly read and circulated.
It is not the function of these notes to go into any details of the actual signals but merely to record how and why the organization which read them grew. When 1915 began, 40 OB was fairly pleased with itself in its innocence. All German naval signals which the stations could intercept were read and circulated. No attempt was made to develop any intelligence side of the work, beyond Hope’s duty of instructing the authorities on the real meaning of certain signals. The request that 40 OB should be allowed to keep a flagged chart of the German coastline was vetoed as an unnecessary duplication of the work in the Operations Division. (In May 1917 this request received sanction.) But all naval signals were read even if without intelligence. True it is that in certain cupboards there were increasing piles of ‘stuff’ which was not read but it was not naval German. The art of reading other peoples’ telegrams was still in extreme infancy; no one then imagined that all those piles contained telegrams possibly of the greatest interest which could be read and, in 1915 it may be said, read without extreme difficulty.
In those days the possibility of a change in the cypher key was prophesied with bated breath and the authorities were informed that such a danger must be reckoned with. Should it happen, it was generally considered that our source of intelligence would dry up for several days at the very least. At last, one evening early in January, the watch was confronted with signals which would not yield to the ordinary treatment. The dreaded change had come! All the available staff were summoned by telephone and after a night long struggle the new key was obtained to the joy and admiration of all concerned. The First Lord called early next morning and congratulated the experts who had solved the key so promptly.
In the course of the day it was discovered that the key had not changed but that the existing key had been ‘slid’ and that the actual work involved need not have taken five minutes. This discovery 40 OB kept to itself and when, a few days later, the key really did change one morning, the new one was produced quietly and without much trouble in a few hours.
Two years later when the key changed every night at 12 o’clock, the night watchmen were greeted by the cold contempt of their relief had they failed to evolve the new key.
During the early Spring of 1915 the increase in the number of intercepting aerials controlled either by Russell Clarke or the Marconi Company led to a very large increase in the numbers of telegrams received. It was, of course, necessary to have two or three copies of each message in order that the text might be absolutely sure. But the intercepting officers were now learning a lot about the methods of German naval W/T and it was possible to allot aerials to various wavelengths and even districts. Thus the operators soon realised that the Baltic and North Sea Fleets were on different circuits and under different controls. The submarines formed a separate group and the small outpost craft in the Bight yet another. 40 OB learnt these things too and, even at this period; Baltic messages received scanty treatment.
It was again found necessary to enlarge the staff to cope with the increased daily bag and Lytton, Young, Talbot and W.L. Clarke came in, one into each watch. There was at this moment no thought of enlarging the scope of our activities, but merely competing efficiently with the current naval messages. However, one day in April, D.I.D. produced a fresh line of goods - treasure trove in Persia it was said, obtained by sandbagging said one, by payment said other. Later it was alleged that the India Office had obtained the effects of a German Consul expelled from Persia and, knowing nothing of such things as code books, had turned the lot over to D.I.D. The so-called cryptographers examined the books. They were obviously not naval but diplomatic codes but were no good to us unless we also had the telegrams. So the cupboards where the ‘stuff’ was piled were made to disgorge.
CHAPTER THREE
Scapa Flow 1919
After his war at Room 40 OB, AGD was given a medal and sent north to Scapa Flow to interpret for Admiral Beatty, C in C of the British navy, at the surrender of the grand fleet to the victors. This is his report (Churchill College Archives).
It appears necessary that I should write a few lines on my travels to the north, for which I have not yet received a bar to the O.B.E. Let me issue a word of warning. I was a landsman on board a battleship, and a lot of my time was taken up in trying to conform to the life therein, no easy matter if you remember that it is really a foreign land where the inhabitants have a distinctive mode of life, even a distinctive language and very distinctive habits which to learn in a few days is not an easy matter for a visitor to this foreign land. My impressions of this
particular foreign land have nothing at all to do with the matter in hand, namely the surrender of the German Fleet and the end of the motive power which has driven the British Navy for the last twenty years and made it into such a wonderful machine. First of all I should like to confess that, for the last four years I had considered myself, and the department in which I worked a very important cog in the machine; now for the first time I ran across the ‘business end’ of the weapon and I realised most strongly what a little cog we were. Practically no one I met had any idea of the existence of such a cog, which was satisfactory to know, as we had tried to conceal our identity. I had to keep a straight face, and lie right well to many an old friend from Osborne days whom I met up there, who wanted to know what my job was. On the whole I fancy I gave myself and my department a highly sensational appearance, such as would rejoice the readers of William le Queux.
Very well, let me miss out all the strange impressions in this foreign land, and get on to the business.
I went up to act as interpreter at the surrender of the German Fleet. I had practically no interpreting to do! This was the reason - on arrival at Rosyth, I went at once to the Q.E. [HMS Queen Elizabeth] the flagship of the C. in G. to find out what my duties were. There I at once met an old friend, one Spickerwell, now secretary to the Admiral. “You are allotted to us,” said he, and thus I was to do my share on board the flagship. But the C. in C. had detailed the Admiral commanding the 1st Battle Squadron to arrange for the actual examination of the surrendered ships, while he himself concentrated on the general policy to be adopted and only concerned himself with his opposite number, the C. in C. of the German High Sea Fleet, with whom he parleyed by means of wireless. My duties therefore consisted in acting as go between in all these discussions, and I need say no more of them, save that Sir David Beatty is a very wilful man, and has no mercy on a man or nation he despises.
Thirty Secret Years Page 4