Just Finished Reading: Code Breakers – The Secret Intelligence Unit that Changed the Course of the First World War by James Wyllie and Michael McKinley (FP: 2015) [306pp] 

When radio first appeared on the scene in the early days of the 20th century military forces across the globe immediately saw its potential. First amongst them were nations navies who now, at last, had a method of communicating with ships at sea previously out of touch as soon as they left harbour. But there was a problem and it was a significant one – radio was broadcast and open to interception. Signals lost a lot of their power if potential enemies could easily read your instructions. The obvious solution was to encode the messages at transmission and decode them on receipt. As inevitably as day follows night radio produced codes and codes produced code breakers. 

One of the first acts of the British navy when war broke out in 1914 was to cut the trans-Atlantic cables used by the belligerent powers (as well as the neutral powers in Europe) forcing them to use cables that went through London and thence onto America and points East. Amazingly it was considered at the time that gentlemen simply didn’t read other people’s private messages. The infant Intelligence services – split at that time between Army and Navy – had to fight to gain access to the diplomatic telegrams that, as a matter of course, the cable companies kept copies of. With a wealth of materials and some fortuitous acquisition of enemy code books and other materials from around the globe it slowly became possible to read telegrams and radio communications almost in real-time. You can imagine how important this became for the prosecution of the war – once a few ‘wrinkles’ were ironed out. 

But message interception was only one aspect of the work. From the start, even before codes had been broken, it was possible to use radio receivers to pinpoint the locations of U-boats at sea (thereby allowing ships, and later convoys, to be redirected away from them), zeppelins on their way to bomb London and even locations of enemy army units at the Front. More than once it was possible to guess upcoming attacks and to act accordingly. Likewise, it was possible to direct warships to intercept U-boats at sea and, eventually, to direct fighters to intercept incoming zeppelins and, again eventually, shoot them down. 

Covering the whole war and, indeed, the whole world this was a fascinating insight into a new way of war. Britain had a number of advantages in the effort to break enemy codes – both technical and personal – and they used these advantages (mostly) to their great advantage – at least when listened to by those they had been created to advise. From tracking the German High Seas Fleet to decoding the infamous Zimmerman telegram that finally brought the US into the war on the side of the Allies the effect of the activities of a hand-full of men working to extremely tight deadlines and with matters of life and death always front and centre cannot be overstated. These units were the antecedents of the more well-known Bletchley Park of WW2 and the present GCHQ. Those with an interest in such things will find LOTS of fascinating information to absorb here. Definitely recommended for fans of espionage and the less obvious nooks and crannies of World War history. More of that sort of thing to come!