Before Enigma Quotes

“To understand the background to the most momentous telegram ever sent, we have to go back to July 1916. Jutland has just been fought, the British and their allies are dying in unprecedented numbers on the Somme, and the American general John Pershing is fighting in Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa. It isn’t going well for him.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“By May 1917, Room 40 had been integrated into the intelligence division, and there was another important breakthrough. Paymaster Commander Ernest Thring had been plotting the position of U-boats using other available intelligence, a job he would take on for a second time in 1939, and he was finally let in on the great secret and given the decrypts which could help him. Six months later, with the U-boat threat becoming intense, Jellicoe formed the Anti-submarine Division at the Admiralty, and its chief was allowed to see the decrypts too.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“With great difficulty, Hall managed to extract Commander William James, who had been his second-in-command on Queen Mary. James had the nickname ‘Bubbles’, because it was well known in the navy that he had been, as a curly-haired child, the original for the famous Millais painting of the boy blowing soap bubbles, which was used eventually for advertising Pears Soap.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“Jutland had been the biggest clash between fleets in history – at least before the age of the aircraft carrier made direct clashes rare. It remains so, in that sense, to this day. It was also, at least for the British, a massive disappointment. The battle might not have happened at all if it had not been for the Room 40 cryptographers, but with Churchill and Fisher’s arrangements and Oliver’s proprietary control over Room 40, the opportunity to end the war with a titanic naval battle had been missed.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“It was Churchill himself who described Sir John Jellicoe, the commander-in-chief, as “the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon”.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“In fact, when Admiral Godfrey took up the same job in 1939, he asked Hall for his advice, and good quality assistants with links to other areas of public life was high on his list. It was the main reason why Godfrey recruited Ian Fleming, the creator of the fictional spy James Bond. Hall’s influence is clear, though indirect, on the creation of Bond’s world.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“While Hall was taking it upon himself to re-arrange the leadership of the navy, and shuffle the cabinet, he was also perfecting the art of the intelligence dirty trick. He created his own fake code book, to be used only at a time of national crisis – called the Secret Emergency War Code – and had it sold to the Germans by a representative in Rotterdam for £500.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“But Hall was not stopping there. The next stage was for him and Drake to send false reports back, using the names of spies who had actually been arrested – a technique that was perfected in the Second World War – to give the impression that they had uncovered military preparations to invade the German coast in Schleswig-Holstein. The purpose was to force the enemy fleet out to defend their coast.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“At his instigation, Churchill sent dummy battlecruisers – as well as a real one – to the Dardanelles, hoping that it might tempt Hipper out under the impression that Beatty’s force was below strength. Together with Lt Col Reginald Drake, later head of G Branch at MI5, he faked a series of photos which appeared to show that Beatty’s flagship Lion was taking much longer to repair after the Battle of Dogger Bank than had been expected. In doing so, he successfully lured away the U-boats which had been lying in wait for her first sea trial out of dry dock.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“From the windows of Room 40 behind the Admiralty, the emergence of the spring of 1915 could be seen blossoming throughout St James’s Park. The various fleet encounters had now sunk the careers of Warrender, Moore and von Ingenohl. Poison gas was used for the first time in April, the Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk in May and Hall was stepping into his stride as the malevolent genius of signal decrypts. His key objective, as director of naval intelligence, was somehow to lure the German High Seas Fleet out from its anchorage at Wilhelmshaven, so that it could be brought to action.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“The British signal system was archaic. In battle, British ships hoisted enormous ‘battle ensigns’ to prevent them from being mistaken for the other side, but the signal flags remained as small as ever, and easy to misinterpret in the heat of battle.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“In fact, it was the German battlecruisers which sent the first signal which alerted Room 40 that something was being planned. It was sent by the commander of their battlecruiser scouting force, Admiral Franz Ritter von Hipper, on the 14th of December. He was asking for air reconnaissance over a sector of the North Sea and revealing that his force would leave the Jade Estuary at 0330. The signal was successfully decoded and, at 7pm, Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson – known to the navy as Old ‘Ard ‘Eart, and recalled from retirement to the inner circle at the outbreak of war – asked for an urgent meeting with Fisher and Churchill.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“This might be the moment to explain the origin of the idea of ‘battlecruisers’ which were to play such a role in this and the other actions in the North Sea. It was originally Fisher’s idea to launch a new class of warship that was as big, or bigger, than a capital ship – a conventional battleship – but was faster and therefore less well protected. They would be “stronger than anything faster and faster than anything stronger”. Their high point was the successful destruction of Von Spee’s squadron in the South Atlantic. After that, they tended to be used as fast scouting units ahead of the battlefleet, which took them into conflict with other battlecruisers, for which they had not really been designed. The British battlecruisers, sleek, vast and beautiful and under the command of the dashing Sir David Beatty, lay at anchor in the Firth of Forth, so that they could speed south to prevent the bombardment of English seaside towns by units of the German High Seas Fleet.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“But we do know more about the fleet action that so nearly took place a few days after the battle of the Falkland Isles in December 1914, because it was the first naval action of any kind where one side was able, and with some clarity, to listen in to the thoughts, preparations and orders of the other.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“One of the problems with writing about Room 40, especially as a pioneer for Bletchley Park, is that Hall was operating, not just outside the law, but outside all conventions. He kept his ruses in his head, managed them by force of personality and his own charm, and wrote very little down. In the years after the war, he tried to deflect the real story over and over again by inventing little untruths and obscurities. So we will probably never know, for example, if it was Hall’s fake signal to Admiral Maximilian von Spee’s squadron in the Pacific which lured them so disastrously to the Falklands, where the battlecruisers Invincible and Inflexible lay in wait.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“In fact, by the end of the war, 20,000 wireless signals had poured into Room 40 and most of them were successfully decoded.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“It was an obsessive secrecy which meant that the full benefits of knowing what the signals meant could never be realised. Worse, it brought the whole intelligence from the Admiralty to the fleet at sea into disrepute. When individual naval commanders on their bridges at sea had no idea of the significance of what they were being told, they would often ignore it, even when it was both vital and accurate. The verdict by one post-war expert on German signals security was that they “elaborately hid from subordinates facts and intentions which at least for three quarters of the war, they failed to conceal from the enemy”. This probably applied to both sides, though on the German side it was made worse by the fact that – before the war – nobody had any idea just how powerful their wireless transmitters could be: their high power transmitter signals could be picked up as far away as China, so they could certainly be heard by a small group of friends sheltering on the roof of a lifeboat station in Norfolk.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“Later in the war, the German naval cipher would be changed every day at midnight, and it was the duty of the night duty team to crack it before daybreak. But that was some years ahead.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“It was pretty clear, once the SKM codebook was in British hands, that the signals were not just coded but also enciphered. Codes substitute whole phrases with numbers or letters. The German navy then added an extra layer using a cipher for each number, so that each one stood for something else, using another key that the Room 40 team clearly did not possess.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“In those days, wireless signal codes worked rather as they did in the age of signal flags and sail. The words or phrases were in numbered groups, usually of five figures. The first numbers usually referred to the page of the codebook where the phrase was listed, the next number to the column and then the numbered code. It meant that signals could be pretty short, reducing the time the wireless was running, unless they were complex instructions or introducing orders that were very specific to the situation.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“The Hunstanton station became the core of what became known in the Second World War as the Y service, the wireless interception and tracking service, and – together with the Post Office – they were eventually able to intercept enemy naval signals systematically. The difficulty for inter-service co-operation was that this was now so important to the Admiralty, at least potentially – if they could find a way of understanding the signals – that they pulled rank as the Senior Service. Hunstanton was to be used exclusively for listening to naval signals. No discussion was allowed. As a result, the War Office withdrew its co-operation. Nobody tried to dissuade them.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“The British military and naval authorities were also about to fall out with each other. There had been a great deal of co-operation between the two services in the first weeks of war and the Hunstanton Lifeboat Station was among the fruits of that relationship. But Clarke wandered into the Admiralty one day and suggested a weekend trial of listening in to the less powerful German naval transmitters. Ewing wasn’t keen, but agreed to try and the test was a huge success. Suddenly a whole world opened up for them. The air was alive with signals which they had no idea could reach so far before. The signals were loud and clear and directed towards the German fleet base of Wilhelmshaven from their naval transmitter at Norddeich. By trial and error, Clarke, Hippisley and Lambert found themselves listening directly to wireless signals to and from the High Seas Fleet itself.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“Meanwhile, the War Office cryptographers at MI1(b) were also gearing up, though we know less about their activities because all their records were destroyed at the end of the war, under retired Brigadier General Francis Anderson, a mathematician who had been in charge of tapping Boer telegrams during the South African war.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“One of the first to help out was Alastair Denniston, later head of the Government Codes and Cipher School and in charge of Bletchley Park at the outbreak of war in 1939, and an Olympic hockey player. He was teaching German at Osborne Naval College, and he was one of the first to be involved in Room 40. Ewing also spread his net a little further than Osborne and Dartmouth, tracking down and inveigling a diplomat, Lord Herschell, also a well-known collector of Persian armour, and Robert Norton, a former Foreign Office official, then living in what had been Henry James’s old home, Lamb House in Rye.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma

“One of the controversies about the history of Room 40 was how much the British authorities had thought about codes before 1914. They had certainly not prepared for the sheer flood of coded, intercepted signals that would pour into the Admiralty or War Office. But recent scholarship suggests that they had in fact been making preparations to intercept and, in a quiet way, attempt code-breaking, whereas before, the whole story had been reduced to an amateur series of lucky coincidences.”
― David Boyle, Before Enigma