by DAVID KAHN
Disappointment was intense in the British Navy, which had been straining to test its mettle against the German High Seas Fleet. But opportunity recurred little more than a month later, when Wilson marched into Churchill’s office about noon on January 23, 1915, and announced:
“First Lord, those fellows are coming out again.”
“When?”
“Tonight. We have just got time to get Beatty there.” Wilson explained that the chief source of his intelligence was Room 40’s translation—undoubtedly with the Magdeburg codebook—of a message sent at 10:25 a.m. that morning to Rear Admiral Franz von Hipper, reading: “First and Second Scouting Groups, senior officer of destroyers, and two flotillas to be selected by the senior officer scouting forces are to reconnoiter the Dogger Bank. They are to leave harbor this evening after dark and to return tomorrow evening after dark.”
England elected the same tactics as before, and units under Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty sailed to block the German homeward trip. This time they were luckier. Contact was made at 7:30 a.m. next morning. When von Hipper saw the numerous English forces, he collected his ships and ran. The British, in their faster super-dreadnought class battleships, gave chase. By 9 a.m., Lion, carrying Beatty, could open fire at 20,000 yards. The action soon became general between the four British and the four German capital ships. Blücher was sunk, and Seydlitz and Derfflinger heavily damaged, but confusion in the British squadron after a shell had crippled the flagship allowed the German ships to escape. The Germans staggered into port, flames leaping above their funnels, their decks cumbered with wreckage and crowded with the wounded and the dead, not to stir again for more than a year.
This Battle of the Dogger Bank settled the confidence of the Admiralty in Room 40, and shortly afterwards the terrifying Lord Fisher, the new First Sea Lord, gave Ewing carte blanche to get whatever he needed for the betterment of his work. Ewing augmented his staff, installed improved equipment in his intercept and direction-finding stations, and increased their number to 50.
At about this time, the old German superencipherment failed to yield the correct codegroups. Room 40 was now more familiar with the quirks and characteristics of these codewords, and, after an all-night effort with all available staff, the new key was discovered. It seems to have been this:
This key was used in a message of February 19, 1915, directing the captain of the interned naval auxiliary Odenwald to act according to his judgment and to “avoid expenses for the empire”:
Vowels represented vowels, and consonants, consonants, to retain the pronounceability of the codewords. In the morning Churchill himself called to offer his congratulations.
Solution of the superencipherment—then worthy of a call from the First Lord—soon became routine. The Germans gradually accelerated their key changes from once every three months at the beginning of the war to every midnight in 1916. But by then Room 40 had become so proficient that the new key was sometimes solved as early as 2 or 3 a.m. and nearly always by 9 or 10 a.m.
Consequently, when Vice Admiral Reinhard Scheer, chafing under his enforced inactivity, decided to try to entice the British Grand Fleet to where his submarines could attack it and his High Seas Fleet fall upon a section of it without risking a general engagement, his orders lay at the mercy of British cryptanalysts. But it seems to have been noncryptanalytic intelligence that led the Admiralty to inform its Navy at 5 p.m. May 30, 1916, that the High Seas Fleet was apparently putting out to sea. On this news, virtually the entire Grand Fleet, that mighty armored pride of England, built up steam and sallied forth majestically from Scapa Flow, Invergordon, and Rosyth. It sought the major fleet action that would give England the undisputed control of the seas on which her strategy in the war so heavily depended.
Then there occurred one of those trifling errors on which history so often turns. On sailing, Scheer had transferred the call-sign DK of his flagship Friedrich der Grosse to the naval center at Wilhelmshaven in an attempt to conceal his departure. Room 40 was aware of this procedure, but when queried on May 31 as to where call-sign DK was, simply replied, “In the Jade River,” without mentioning the transfer. Whitehall radioed Admiral Sir John Jellicoe that directional wireless placed the enemy flagship in harbor at 11:10 a.m. Three hours later, with Jellicoe believing the Germans to be in port, the two fleets made contact in the middle of the North Sea. This rather shook Jellicoe’s faith in Admiralty intelligence. It was further jolted when he plotted the position of the German cruiser Regensburg as given by an Admiralty report and found that it appeared to be in almost the very same spot as he himself then was! No one then knew that the Regensburg navigator had made an error of ten miles in his reckoning and that the fault for the absurd result lay with the German officer and not with the cryptanalysts of Room 40.
After the brief flurries of action, inconclusive and unsatisfactory to both sides, that constituted the Battle of Jutland, Scheer at 9:14 p.m. ordered: “Our own main body is to proceed in. Maintain course S.S.E. 1/4 E; speed 16 knots.” At 9:46, he altered it slightly to S.S.E. ¾ E. Both messages were decrypted with almost unbelievable alacrity by Room 40, and by 10:41 a summary of them had been received aboard the flagship. But Jellicoe had had enough of Admiralty intelligence. Furthermore, the summary had omitted Scheer’s 9:06 call for air reconnaissance off the Horn Reefs, which would have confirmed his intentions, and thus there was nothing to contradict a battle report from Southampton that suggested a different enemy course. Jellicoe therefore rejected the Admiralty information, which this time was right. As a result, he steered one way, Scheer fled another, and Britain’s hope of a decisive naval victory evaporated in a welter of errors, missed chances, and distrust.
After Jutland, the German emphasis on submarine warfare intensified Room 40’s concentration on the U-boat messages. These were encoded in the four-letter code of the High Seas Fleet, but were superenciphered by columnar transposition. The Germans called the one for the regular U-boats “gamma epsilon” and that for the larger cruising submarines, whose keyword differed, “gamma u.” Keywords changed often but not daily. Three or four staffers specialized in this; they became so adept that they usually managed not only to restore the scrambled codewords to their original form but even to recover the keyword for the transposition tableau. The solutions greatly assisted British operations, and eventually the Germans could no longer chalk off as coincidental the repeated apparitions of substantial British units athwart their course. In August of 1916, they changed their code. But Room 40’s direction-finding and call-sign sections were so well oiled that they nevertheless maintained a fair flow of intelligence.
They did not have to bear the burden very long, however, for in September a badly burned but legible copy of the valuable new codebook was recovered from the Zeppelin L-32, which had been downed at Billericay. Nor did the Admiralty rely entirely on fortuitous circumstances. In an attempt to obtain whatever intelligence it could on new apparatus aboard the German submarines, the Admiralty had some months previously sent a diver into a U-boat sunk off the Kentish coast. He was Shipwright E. C. Miller, a thin, pale, but wiry young diving instructor possessed of an unusual courage and capacity to stand pressure at greater depths than most men. On his first descent, he entered through a hole in the U-boat’s hull and reconnoitered through a chill blackness with things bumping up against him—which his flashlight showed to be corpses. Pushing through them, he opened a small door aft of the officers’ quarters. Inside the compartment was an iron box, which was found to contain the vessels’ codes.
Miller brought up so much valuable material that he was sent down again and again. It was not pleasant work. The dogfish, he said, “are always about and will eat anything. In the mating season they naturally resent any intruder, and on lots of occasions when they chased me I offered them my boot, and they never failed to snap at it …. There were some pretty weird scenes inside the boats. … I found scores of conger eels, some of them seven to eight feet long and five inches or so thick, all bus
ily feeding. They gave one a bit of a shock.” Despite the gruesome aspects of the job, Miller succeeded nearly every time in finding the now familiar iron box, and from one of the 25 U-boats that he explored—no Englishman was more familiar with their interior than he—he recovered the badly needed new German naval code. After the war, he was decorated at Buckingham Palace by the king.
Miller’s find helped the cryptanalysts in reading the increasing volume of enemy messages. Room 40 was now approaching the height of its power. Intercepts poured in through the pneumatic tube so fast that at times the discharge of its small containers sounded like a machine gun. (After the war it was estimated that from October, 1914, to February, 1919, Room 40 had intercepted and solved 15,000 German secret communications.) Work went on round the clock on the naval messages, even during the Zeppelin bombings, when the lights were dimmed behind the close-fitting dark blinds. The staff was further increased by wounded officers and by German university scholars, many of whom were commissioned in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve so that they could wear uniforms to forestall icy looks from the public. Women were enlisted to free cryptanalysts from clerical tasks. Separate sections were established for naval and political cryptanalysis. Heading the former was A. G. Denniston, one of Ewing’s original four musketeers, who proved exceedingly skillful at cryptanalysis, who came back to do similar work in World War II, and who in recognition was made a Companion of St. Michael & St. George and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. The chief of the political cryptanalysts was George Young, who had a background of diplomacy that included posts in Washington, Athens, Constantinople, Madrid, Belgrade, and Lisbon, whence he quit a sinecure to work in Room 40, and who later succeeded to a baronetcy.
With the increase in traffic, Room 40 ceased simply passing edited intercepts to the Operations Division and began sending daily summaries that integrated the cryptanalytic with the direction-finding and other radio intelligence. Captain H. W. W. Hope was replaced as editor and correlator of the cryptanalyzed naval messages in May of 1917 by Commander William James, who later became administrative head of I.D. 25, or Room 40. Starting in November of 1916, Hugh Cleland Hoy, secretary to the director of naval intelligence, read through the hundreds of intercepts to sift the wheat from the chaff and to send the kernels on to the proper division of government—the Cabinet, the War Office, or Scotland Yard.
The staff included several men who already had or later would achieve a modicum of fame. In addition to Toye, Tiarks, and Ewing himself, there were Ronald Knox, who later became a Catholic priest and made a highly praised translation of the Bible; Dr. Frank Adcock, dean of Kings College, Cambridge, who was later knighted for his work as one of the three joint editors of the 11-volume Cambridge Ancient History, and who also served as a cryptanalyst in World War II; Desmond McCarthy, a widely known author and critic, later knighted, who, like Knox, joined only late in the war; the second Baron Monkbretton, who served as chairman of the London County Council from 1920 to 1930; and W. Lionel Fraser, later chairman of three substantial financial firms—Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, Cornhill Insurance Company, and Scandinvest Trust, Ltd.—and president of Babcock and Wilcox, Ltd.; Gerald Lawrence, the actor; and Professor E. Bullough, chiefly known as the son-in-law of the famous actress Eleanora Duse.
Less well known—sometimes unknown—to the public, but outstanding as cryptanalysts, were Ronald Knox’s older brother, Dilwyn, who is credited with having solved the three-letter German naval flag code in his bath, and who found cryptanalysis so to his taste that he made a career out of it in the War Office; Dr. John D. Beazley, then a tutor at Oxford and later professor of classical archaeology there, later knighted; Dr. Gilbert Waterhouse, professor of German at the University of Dublin, regarded as a “first-class performer”; Dr. Leonard A. Willoughby, lecturer in German at Oxford and later a Freeman of the City of London; Professor E. C. Quiggin, who enjoyed considerable success with the Austrian messages; and Dr. Douglas Savory, professor of the French language and Romance philology at the University of Belfast, later knighted, who, after Quiggin died, took over the Austrian traffic and produced some important solutions.
Not all in the Room 40 galaxy were cryptanalysts; in fact, in the entire personnel, there were only about 50 of this exalted breed. The others were support troops or worked on the other aspects of radio intelligence. Tiarks and Lawrence, for example, unraveled the directional bearings; the call-sign section, where Toye worked, was directed by W. F. Clarke, son of the attorney who had defended Oscar Wilde. Edward Molyneux, later a famous dress designer, came to work in Room 40 answering a telephone and sorting incoming messages as one of several wounded officers sent over by the War Office. The place was loaded with peers and social types and seemed to be sort of an Eton Alumni Club: McCarthy, Lord Monkbretton, Young, Knox, and others all had attended. The very typists had to be daughters or sisters of naval officers with a knowledge of at least two foreign languages! Their chief was Lady Hambro, who smoked cigars.
The most important personnel change came with the retirement of Ewing and his replacement as immediate overseer of Room 40 by the director of naval intelligence. On May 6, 1916, Ewing had been offered the principalship of the University of Edinburgh. It was an attractive offer, especially to one who had spent the 25 years before becoming director of naval education in 1903 as a professor of engineering or of applied mechanics. In addition, Ewing was by this time taking little part in actual cryptanalysis, for as his staff had grown, it had come to include persons whose talent for the work far exceeded his own. They would leap or fly to conclusions with an agility incomprehensible, he said, to his own pedestrian wits. He was mainly administrator of the department. He discussed the Edinburgh offer several weeks later with his chief, the new First Lord, Arthur Balfour, who also happened to be chancellor of the University. Balfour told him that he had organized Room 40 so well that he could safely delegate its supervision. Accordingly, Ewing accepted the offer as of October 1, 1916, the date on which he ceased to be director of naval education, a post he had held—not without a certain amusement—during his captaincy of Room 40. He continued to make weekly visits to Whitehall in an advisory capacity, but by the following year the claims of Edinburgh were becoming too insistent for double duty, and on May 31, 1917, he said goodbye to his Admiralty friends once and for all.
The reins of Room 40 had by then been long since in the firm grasp of a most remarkable man, a man who made an unforgettable impression on all those who met him and whose positive brilliance in espionage ably served his country just when it needed it most. He was Captain William Reginald Hall, R.N., director of naval intelligence. He had almost literally been born for intelligence work: his father had been the first director of the Admiralty’s intelligence division. Hall had joined the Navy at 14, had been promoted to captain at 35, and, after commanding a cruiser and a battle cruiser, had been appointed to the intelligence directorship in November, 1914. A dapper, alert man with a perfectly domed, prematurely bald head and a large hooked nose, Hall, then in his middle forties, looked like a demonic Mr. Punch in uniform.
But his eyes, with their penetrating, hypnotic quality, were his most remarkable feature. “Such eyes as the man has!” the American ambassador, Walter Hines Page, wrote to President Woodrow Wilson. “For Hall can look through you and see the very muscular movements of your immortal soul while he is talking to you.” A nervous tic caused one of his eyes to twitch incessantly, giving him the nickname “Blinker.” He burst with energy and confidence. “He was the most stimulating man to work for I have ever known,” Toye later wrote. “When … he spoke to you, you felt that you would do anything, anything at all, to merit his approval.” Page summed him up best: “Hall is one genius that the war has developed. Neither in fiction nor in fact can you find any such man to match him. Of the wonderful things that I know he has done, there are several that it would take an exciting volume to tell. The man is a genius—a clear case of genius. All other secret-service men are ama
teurs by comparison.” Hall and Page were soon to swirl together through a grave international gavotte of intrigue and propaganda that was to have the most crucial effects on the war. But neither of them guessed any of that when Hall took over officially from Ewing in the fall of 1916.
Despite its efficiency, England’s Room 40 held no monopoly on naval or diplomatic cryptanalysis during the war. In the cryptanalytic section of the French War Ministry, Lieutenant Paul Louis Bassières and the reserve interpreter Paul-Brutus Déjardin reconstructed a German U-boat code as the first triumph of their diplomatic-naval branch. Captain Georges Painvin solved the four-letter German naval code, superencipherment and all, and Commandant Marcel Givierge the three-letter flag code.
Later in the war, the French discovered that each midnight the Nauen station broadcast to U-boats in the Mediterranean the sailing times and itineraries of French ships departing Marseilles—information that had evidently been sent to the Germans by waterfront spies. French radio posts intercepted the coded messages and telegraphed them to the cryptanalytic bureau. Depending on the accuracy of the transmission, the French crypt-analysts took between 30 minutes and an hour to crack the messages. A messenger took the solutions to the Ministry of Marine by bicycle, and by 3 or 4 a.m. the harbormaster at Marseilles had been notified in time for him to alter schedules and foil the waiting submarines. Ships that had already sailed were radioed to change course. In one case, the transport Alger could not be contacted at sea because of an electrical storm. It was torpedoed and sunk with a loss of 500 soldiers and considerable matériel. The spies were later captured.