France '14 Update 1.03 Released

[Mr Grumpy]

By 1914, radio communications, or wireless telegraphy as these communications were then known, were used by the world's military and naval forces. The relationships of frequency or wavelength, power, directivity and range were not well understood. Signals officers and commanders in the field and at headquarters rarely took into account the possibility of interception, or deception. The troops and sailors of the European nations soon bore the costs of such negligence.

In 1914 British radio operators organized as the basis of the Royal Navy radio intercept service, feeding traffic to Admiralty Room 40 for cryptanalysis and providing the foundation for the World War One success of British Intelligence:

Maurice Wright became a Marconi engineer in England in 1912 (and was later Engineer in Chief). Wright experimented with the then new triode vacuum tube in a radio receiving circuit in 1914. Two days before the outbreak of hostilities in August of 1914, he received German wireless traffic. He worked with Captain H. J. Round, (later a colleague and supporter of Major E. H. Armstrong after America entered the war). Their circuit details are lost to time, but it was undoubtedly a regenerative configuration, for it "made the interception of long range communications possible for the first time" as later reported by Peter Wright, Maurice's son, later a high official in the British Counter Intelligence Service (MI-5).

Working at his lab at Marconi at Chelmsford, Wright realized he was listening to the German Navy. He got the intercepts to Captain Reggie Hall of Naval Intelligence. Hall realized the bonanza in his hands, and put Wright to work building a chain of intercept stations for the Admiralty. Wright and Round also developed aperiodic direction finding techniques to track the German fleet, proving sufficient warning for the British fleet to engage it on the high seas. In the process, Wright established a clandestine intercept station in Norway in 1915.

The intercept stations set up in this effort were known as the "Y" stations. Marconi receiving stations, British Post Office stations and an Admiralty "police" station all provided intercepts to Hall's Room 40 codebreakers. These stations were soon joined by enthusiastic amateurs. Barrister Russell Clarke and Col. Richard Hippisley had been logging intercepts of German traffic at their amateur stations in London and Wales. They so reported, and went to work for Hall. New intercept stations soon went up on the coast. Soon practically all German naval wireless traffic also found its way to Room 40.

The German high power long wave station at Norddeich provided fodder for the codebreakers through the Y stations, which also soon turned to higher frequency interception as well. In 1915 these intercepts helped the British to win the naval battle at Dogger Bank, and played vital roles in later naval engagements.

The direction finding stations working under Round also provided intercepts to Room 40.The directionals tracked U-boats and Zeppelins as well as naval craft.

The Y station intercepts showed that the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania had the approval of the German high command, despite its denials.

The leading history of the astonishing success of British intelligence in the First World War concludes: "[the] Y stations made it all possible." The most famous intercept of all was the infamous 1917 Zimmerman Telegram that brought America into the war. Germany promised Mexico it could have back the territory it lost in the Mexican American War, if it would join Germany against the United States.
Snatched from the ether by intercept stations and decrypted by Room 40, it enraged Americans.

As early as November, 1914 there had been a call in the British press for the use of private wireless stations to monitor for spy transmissions out of England. (SIGINT, 46). While there is no evidence ofany wireless transmission of espionage out of England in that war, the demand of the amateur radio fraternity to be useful was met, and the system that would be so effective in the next war was foreshadowed.

The British Navy successfully intercepted wireless messages on the high seas as well. In an outstanding feat of codebreaking, Signal Officer Charles Stuart of the cruiser Glasgow determined that the German cruiser Dresden would coal at Juan Fernandez Island (Robinson Crusoe's old second home) off Chile, from deciphering an intercept from the Nauen Telefunken station.

British intelligence also sent Sir Hercules Langrishe and A.E.W. Mason to destroy the German station in Mexico at Ixtapalpa in 1918. This Mason did by smashing its Audions, putting the German agent Herr Jahnke out of business.

The success of British Army signals units in intercepting German wireless traffic convinced British commanders that wireless was too dangerous to use. The signals units thus turned almost exclusively to monitroing and intercept work. (SIGINT, 54)

Imperial German army interception of Russian wireless traffic leads to the decisive German 1914 victory at Tannenberg, blunting the Russian advance west:

The Russian Army used wireless to coordinate its campaigns. It took perhaps no precautions against interception and did not encode its traffic. In 1914, the Germans won the decisive battle of Tannenberg against the Russians. The Germans had all of the Russian traffic in hand and readable, overheard by the German radio station at Thorn, and in Koenigsberg in East Prussia. While the Germans may not have made as much use of this traffic as its importance would dictate, Generals Paul von Hindenberg and Erich Ludendorff could and likely did know as much about what the Russians would do as they did themselves. Tannenberg showed how important intercepts could be, and the Germans set up wireless intercept stations on all fronts. Yet the intercepts had gone to Hindenberg by motorcycle at the personal initiative of the chief of the Thorn station, and the whole effort began as an amateur and even sporting endeavor of the operators with time on their hands.

Tactical intercepts by all belligerent signal services provide important battlefield intelligence, but radio deception becomes a weapon:

In early September, 1914 the Russians intercepted a message from German Army Staff Headquarters from which the Russians inferred a threat from a new large force, and therefore held back forces of their own in the upcoming battle. The German Eighth Army staff, however, anticipating interception, had transmitted in plain text from its station at Koenigsberg the completely false message. Radio deception thus began to play its counterpoint to radio interception at the commencement of the festivities. The Germans used radio deception again successfully within weeks.

The Battle of Tannenberg taught the Germans the value of their nascent intercept efforts. The Russian traffic was read from August 1914 to the close of 1915. OneRussian General officer termed the Russians use of plain text and failure to take precautions "unpardonable negligence." (Flick, 10). The Austrians had integrated their intercept service into their Chancellery cryptographic section at the beginning of the war. (Flicke, 14). They regularly intercepted and decrypted Russian traffic all throughout the war.

The Germans made in the West the very errors from which they profited in the East. The French even before the war strove to intercept relevant traffic. At the beginning of the war in the West, the Germans sought to thrust into France to defeat the French armies east of Paris. The French had the whole order of battle by radio intercepts, and up to the minute tactical intelligence. Just as the Russian thrust failed in the East for want of radio discipline, so to the German thrust in the West turned to defeat at the Battle of the Marne for exactly the same reasons.