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

by James Wyllie

  Despite the American soldier’s casual use of en clair communication when speaking to colleagues on field telephones, a common offence that drove commanders and cryptanalysts to distraction, the US soon stumbled on a code so secure that not even their best cryptanalysts could break it: the mother language of the army’s aboriginal soldiers.

  Solomon Bond Louis was underage when he volunteered to go to war for a country that didn’t even consider him a citizen – and wouldn’t until 1924. As a member of the Choctaw Nation, Louis hailed from an aboriginal group that had been moved from its ancestral homes east of the Mississippi River to the flat, hot scrub of Oklahoma by the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which opened up the lush homelands of the five ‘Civilised Tribes’ in Louisiana, Georgia, Florida and Alabama to European settlers.

  Louis attended Armstrong Academy in Bryan County, Oklahoma. Like so many soldiers of the Great War, when he saw his older friends joining up, he wanted to go with them. So he pretended to be 18 years old, and after basic training that saw the aboriginals prepare for war with sticks simulating rifles (so too did African-American soldiers), he wound up with 17 of his fellow Choctaw soldiers in the 36th Division, going to the Western Front on 6 October 1918.

  Leader and Bond and their fellow Choctaw would indeed turn the tide via a dynamic intersection of old world and new. For the AEF command to communicate with troops in the front lines, the US army overwhelmingly preferred the telephone. Switchboards were built underground at division headquarters to withstand enemy shelling, and in order to release men for the front lines, the AEF recruited 200 French-speaking female telephone operators from commercial telephone companies to serve overseas as civilian members of the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit, known to all who dealt with them in their postings from Chaumont to Paris to London as the Hello Girls.

  For troops in the field, phone lines were strung on four-foot stakes or run along trench walls from the switchboards to each infantry battalion, and they also linked adjoining battalions. As Colonel A. W. Bloor, commander of the 142nd Infantry Regiment later explained in a memo to the division’s commander: ‘The field of rocket signals is restricted to a small number of agreed signals. The runner system is slow and hazardous. TPS [telegraphie par sol – driving iron poles into the ground to pick up electrical currents by means of induction] is always an uncertain quantity. It may work beautifully and again, it may be entirely worthless. The available means, therefore, for the rapid and full transmission of information are the radio, buzzer and telephone, and of these the telephone was by far the superior – provided it could be used without let or hindrance – provided straight to the point information could be given.’

  The Germans – like the Allies – would tap into phone lines to listen in on conversations between the front and command, and civilian soldiers, such as those conscripted into the AEF, didn’t always appreciate the need to use code when transmitting messages: it was more complicated than anything they had been used to in civilian life, it took longer, and under extreme conditions, time was always of the essence.

  On 8 October 1918, the 36th Division was part of a fresh Allied attack, supported by artillery fire. As they captured German positions, the Americans noticed that the Germans had left their communication lines uncovered, as if tempting the Americans to use them. So they did so in a way that the Germans – and even the Americans – had never imagined.

  The origins of how the Choctaw became the US army’s code-war weapon vary from a white American officer stumbling upon them conversing in their own language to someone at HQ remembering that they had aboriginals in uniform, but far more likely is the claim from the men who were there that the Choctaw themselves suggested that they might be able to help out. Despite the team of highly-educated codebreakers who pushed their formidable intellects to the edge to decode the enemy’s plans, the Choctaw brought something that no codebreaker could penetrate: their ancient language. The AEF quickly agreed, and the Choctaw were soon relaying messages over the phone in their native tongue.

  As the Choctaw language had not evolved with the exigencies of mechanised warfare in mind, some improvisation was necessary. ‘Big gun’ was used to indicate artillery, while ‘little gun shoot fast’ meant machine gun. The battalion numbers were indicated by one, two and three grains of corn, and the regiment itself was referred to as ‘the tribe’. The Germans were utterly confounded, having no idea what this new code was, and no way – with their Eurocentric dictionaries – to break it. When a captured German asked, ‘What nationality was on the phones that night?’ he was told only that it was Americans who had been on the phones.

  Within 72 hours of taking code command, the Choctaw had demonstrated their value in helping the Americans succeed in that October attack. The war was far from over, but thanks to another colonised group of soldiers and their field-code ingenuity, it would be soon.

  The man who would lead the push to victory for the Allies was a pear-shaped insurance salesman with a high-school diploma who had embezzled regimental funds, but Sir Arthur Currie was also a fine military mind that also knew its own limitations. Which was why he believed in intelligence.

  Arthur Currie had begun his life at arms in 1897, aged 22, at the lowest rank of gunner in a militia regiment in Victoria, Canada. By the time war broke out, his skill as a marksman, his absorption of military strategy and history through books and manuals and courses, and his reputation for discipline had earned him promotion to brigadier general and command of the Canadian Expeditionary Force’s 2nd Brigade.

  Currie went to war burdened by a crime. He had used the profits from his successful insurance business to speculate in real estate during a land boom on Canada’s Pacific coast. When the boom went bust, Currie was land rich and cash poor, and so he borrowed $10,000 of regimental funds to cover his debts, on the understanding that the regiment’s honorary colonel was going to underwrite the regiment to the tune of $35,000. When he did not, Currie had become an embezzler, and it wasn’t until 1917 – after Canada’s prime minister Robert Borden learned that the man who would lead the Canadian army to glory was one step away from jail – that his own officers loaned him the money to resolve the theft. Indeed, such was the concern about this matter at the highest levels of Canadian government that Currie almost didn’t win the command, and the final months of the war could have taken a much different turn for the Allies.

  Currie, a lively wit when among his officers, appeared stiff and stern to his men, a six-foot-two, overweight taskmaster whose lack of military bearing was made even more apparent by his refusal to sport a moustache. But he cared deeply for his men, and planned every attack with their lives in mind, having learned at the Battle of Festubert in 1915 what havoc could result from poor planning and poor intelligence. Sloppy strategy thanks to commanders in the rear saw Currie’s brigade lose 1,200 men in the course of just a few days.

  In August 1918, Arthur Currie had both a knighthood and command of the Canadian Corps, a 100,000 strong force that, until his elevation in June 1917, had always been commanded by British officers. The massive German surge of March had been repelled, but the Canadians had been stationed in quiet sectors and had avoided most of the fighting. As a result, they were fresh and well trained in their battle plan when Currie launched the assault from 10 miles east of Amiens on 8 August 1918. It would be the beginning of a period known as ‘The 100 Days’ but for the young nation of Canada, they took those 100 days as their own particular triumph.

  The war that had been dug into a spider’s web of trenches across the muddy, cratered Western Front was, in its final phase, a largely fast-moving operation that put heavy demand on fast-moving intelligence. The Canadian Corps had learned much from their French and English colleagues, and now, by necessity, they had to improvise and innovate when it came to battlefield intelligence to keep pace with their astonishing progress.

  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’.

  Chapter 21

  FINISHING LINE

  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 i
nternational 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.