On 12 September 1916, the Daily Mail reported large concentrations of British troops in Harwich and Dover. The Germans were convinced that the news had been leaked to the newspaper and printed before the censor could intervene. Accordingly, they moved large numbers of their own forces from the battlefields of the Western Front to the Belgian coast. In actual fact, the author of the report was Captain Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, the head of the Naval Intelligence Division (NID). It was a classic piece of misinformation that was to be repeated many times by Hall’s successors during WW2.
Hall was responsible for several other intelligence successes, but the most dramatic was in 1917 when Room 40 intercepted a top secret telegram from the German Foreign Minister to his ambassador in Washington. Room 40, the forerunner of Bletchley Park, was by then part of Hall’s intelligence division. The Germans had decided that the only way to win the war was to revert to unrestricted submarine warfare and, by destroying Britain’s maritime trade, to starve her into submission. Inevitably, the policy would bring about the loss of neutral shipping and risk alienating the US or worse, bring the US into the war on the side of Britain’s allies. Accordingly, in order to distract the US, the German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, instructed his US ambassador to offer the Mexicans German munitions, finance and other support to invade the southern United States. In the same telegram, he instructed the ambassador to attempt to persuade the Japanese to change sides in order to threaten the US’s Pacific coast.
Britain was desperate to persuade the US to join the war. The conflict was bankrupting Britain and was at a stalemate in France. Anxious to force Britain to accept peace terms, President Wilson had stopped Britain from borrowing further money from the US. Hall knew that were he to allow the contents of the Zimmermann telegram to be leaked to the US Government, it might very well tip the balance in persuading a dithering US president to come off the fence and enter the war. However, it had to be done in a way that would not cause the Americans to think the telegram an elaborate hoax to draw the US into the war, and to protect the fact that Room 40 was reading and decrypting both German and US diplomatic signal traffic. I will reveal how this was done in my forthcoming novel, The Suicide Club, but suffice to say, the leaking of the telegram’s contents caused outrage in the US newspapers and Congress and the US finally declared war on Germany. It was only just in the nick of time. Some months later the Russian forces on the Eastern Front collapsed entirely and Germany was able to transfer 80 divisions to the Western Front. Without the US reinforcements, Britain and France would surely have lost the war. Those who knew the full story recognised how indebted the country was to Hall and he was immediately knighted for his services.
My second novel, Now the Darkness Gathers, centres on naval intelligence activities in the build up to WW1, including the formation of the Secret Service. Its successor, The Wings of the Wind, describes how Room 40 came about. All my novels have an average rating of over 4 stars.
Comments