Castles of Steel (63 page)

[The facts were not quite as luridly dramatic as this. No codebooks were taken from “arms rigid with death,” nor was the copy the Admiralty received “sea-stained.” In fact, the fat blue volume, Number 151 of the SKM, now in the Public Record Office in London, shows no sign of immersion in salt water: it came from the thoroughly dry interior of Captain Habenicht’s safe.]

The codebook went immediately to the Admiralty’s new codebreaking agency. Ewing’s codebreakers were still struggling to unscramble it when they received from Australia the copy of the Handelsverkehrsbuch, or HVB, taken from the German merchant ship off Melbourne. Together, the SKM and HVB codes gave Ewing’s handful of cryptanalysts plenty to do. More experts were recruited and a new, larger workplace—Room 40 of the Old Building of the Admiralty—was found. On the same corridor as the First Sea Lord’s office, the room was twenty-four feet by seventeen feet, looked out on an inner courtyard, and was quiet and remote from the rest of the Admiralty. Eventually, as work and personnel expanded, more space was needed and nearby rooms were commandeered. But, to the few people who knew of its existence, “Room 40” became and remained the unofficial name for the codebreaking office.

The work was complex, but during November the British began to succeed in translating portions of German naval messages. Mostly, they were of a routine naval housekeeping character, but, increasingly, collection of these scraps provided a body of information from which the enemy’s arrangements in the Heligoland Bight could be understood. Then, early in December, Room 40 had another stroke of luck when a third major German navy codebook arrived in Ewing’s office. It came as a result of the battle on October 17 when a British squadron had sunk four German minelaying destroyers off the Dutch coast. Before
S-119
went down, the destroyer’s captain had properly dropped his secret papers overboard in a lead-lined chest. They remained on the seabed for six weeks until, on November 30, a British fishing trawler happened to haul up the chest as part of its daily catch. Inside were secret charts of the North Sea marked with the German operational grid used to plot the location of friendly and enemy warships. The chest also contained a codebook new to the British, the Verkehrsbuch (VB), intended primarily for cable communication with warships overseas or with naval attachés or embassies, and sometimes, with special reciphering, used by senior naval officers at sea. By December 3, the book and the charts were “drying before Ewing’s fire.” The new book was immediately useful. “Some days earlier”—the story is told by David Kahn, the preeminent contemporary historian of codes and codebreaking—“the British had intercepted two almost identical German naval messages. One was encoded entirely in the
Magdeburg
codebook and so could be read by Room 40. A small part of the second was encoded in the newly found code. . . . [Thus] the
Signalbuch
gave meaning to the coded portion of the
Verkehrsbuch
message. . . . Comparison . . . revealed the formula for conversion.” Now virtually any wireless signal made by the German navy and intercepted by the British could be read by the Admiralty.

Once deciphered by Room 40, intercepted signals were placed in a red envelope and rushed by messenger to Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, who personally carried the most critical messages to the First Lord, the First Sea Lord, and the Admiralty War Group. From there, the information—although never the source—was disseminated to those who needed to know. For months, the existence of Room 40 was kept secret from everyone in the fleet except Jellicoe and Beatty. Churchill was even more convinced that this policy was correct when Jellicoe, complaining that too much time was lost having messages decoded in London before being sent to him, pleaded to have intercepted coded messages sent directly to a decoding staff aboard his flagship. This request from the Commander-in-Chief arrived at the Admiralty in a lower-level British navy code. Churchill, who feared precisely that low-level leaks would inform the Germans that their code had been broken, was furious.

The German Naval Staff was determined not to believe that its secret codes had been compromised. Immediately after the loss of
Magdeburg,
the admiral commanding the German squadron dutifully reported, “
SKM
key not known to have been destroyed.” The Naval Staff replied, “No fears of dangerous consequences are entertained here through the possible loss of the signal book.” Subsequently, Prince Henry of Prussia, the kaiser’s brother, and, at that time, Commander-in-Chief of the Baltic Fleet, declared it to be a “virtual certainty” that the Russians had acquired the grid naval charts from the wreck of
Magdeburg
and a probability that they also had recovered an SKM. The Naval Staff refused to act on this warning, and although the reciphering keys were changed—at first every three months, then as often as every week—the basic SKM remained in service until May 1917, two years and nine months after
Magdeburg
was sunk. When, with the passage of time, the appearance of British ships directly in the path of German surface squadrons or U-boats could no longer be ascribed to coincidence, the Naval Staff and the Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet looked frantically for explanations. Traitors inside the German navy, spies in the ports and dockyards, secret radio messages from British and neutral fishing trawlers: all were suspected. The one explanation the German navy flatly refused to believe was that the enemy was decoding German wireless messages.

The Germans contributed to their intelligence defeat not only by this exaggerated belief in the security of their codes, but also by excessive use of wireless transmissions. Ironically, they fell into this trap partly because of the excellence of their transmitters. The radio tower at Nauen, near Berlin, for example, could broadcast to the Mediterranean, the Americas, southern Africa, and even China. All German warships carried excellent radio equipment and could transmit signals over hundreds of miles; thus equipped, captains and radio operators tended to be garrulous. With this unintended assistance, British interception of German wireless traffic increased rapidly; by 1917, all messages from the Bight were being intercepted; by the end of the war, signals between German ships in port were routinely picked up. Eventually, 20,000 German naval wireless messages passed through Room 40 and were decoded. Without the breaking of the German codes, the battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland would not have been fought. Nor, later, would the U-boats have been defeated.

CHAPTER 18
The Scarborough Raid: “Within Our Claws”

Before the Great War, Scarborough, on the Yorkshire coast, was known as the Queen of Watering Places in the north of England. The town’s reputation owed much to its magnificent site: rolling green moors ended abruptly in a sweeping curve of high cliffs overlooking wide beaches of brown, tidal sand. Two broad bays, north and south, are divided by a headland rising 300 feet from the sea; the headland is crowned by a ruined medieval castle with walls eighty feet high and twelve feet thick. Towering over the surf at its base, the great castle on the high rock rears up like a symbol of a defiant, unconquerable England.

The fine sea bathing brought vacationers to Scarborough; once there, they were offered other diversions. The South Cliff promenade provided a panoramic view of the broad sands, the castle, the bay, and the North Sea. Footpaths, crisscrossing down the cliffside, allowed strollers to pass through gardens, rest on gazebo benches, and eventually emerge at a handsome spa on the water’s edge. The town had two theaters, a music hall, an aquarium, and a museum, all permanently booked or heavily patronized. In the summers, Scarborough’s population swelled from a winter low of 40,000 to a high of 200,000, and the large hotels along the clifftop esplanades had no rooms to let. The largest of these, the Grand Hotel, an immense Victorian pile of red and orange brick, was famous throughout Europe. The architect had invoked a chronological theme: four corner towers represented the seasons of the year, twelve stories represented the months, fifty-two chimneys the weeks, and 365 rooms the days. Ultimately, not all of the chimneys or rooms were built, but when it opened in 1867, a journalist reported that in its “greatness, vastness of enterprise, magnificence of appearance and sensational result,” the Grand Hotel “reflected the tastes and tendencies of the pres-ent age.”

In winter, the bathers and strollers departed and a northern austerity settled over the town. As sea and sky turned gray, the fishermen still came and went with the tide, but the rest of the permanent population retired into semihibernation. The war did not change this behavior. Scarborough had no harbor, only a small stone-walled tidal basin, beneath the castle rock, which gave refuge to North Sea herring boats. The town had no industry, no military significance, and no defense.

On Wednesday, December 16, 1914, a heavy mist hanging over the sea and harbor made early morning even darker than usual. At eight o’clock, some townspeople were still in bed; others were getting up; others were having breakfast by gaslight. Suddenly, over the drowsy town, there burst a series of explosions. Hotel guests with rooms on the sea stumbled to their windows. Through the mist they saw and heard stabbing spurts of flame, followed by loud, reverberating booms. “I could see in the mist the outline of a ship only about a mile and a half from the shore, north of the castle headland,” said one hotel guest. “It was steaming slowly south across the bay, discharging salvos.” Fay Lonsdale, a well-known actress, was appearing at a theater in town and staying at the Grand Hotel. “Just before eight o’clock, I heard a tremendous noise and got out of bed,” she said. “I looked out the window and saw a huge flame and cloud of smoke. . . . Then, near the front of my room, a shell struck and the room shook. I got under the table, still partly dressed. Someone shouted, ‘Come downstairs.’ I joined the other residents and maids in the cellar.”

There was more than one ship off Scarborough and the sound of guns merged into a continuing roll of thunder. The flames flashed in the fog; there followed a brief pause, then the boom of the guns, another pause, then the rumble of explosions somewhere in the town. Again and again, the townspeople heard the whistling shriek of incoming shells. When the projectiles came close, the shriek was cut short by a tremendous crash, the shattering of glass, the rumbling of collapsing roofs, and the sudden upward boil of a column of dirty smoke.

The townspeople understood that they were under bombardment. Some remained calm: Sir George Sitwell, father of Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell, went down to the cellar, but his wife, Lady Ida, remained “resolutely in bed.” Most people, some still in nightclothes, ran into the streets. Men tended to run to the cliffs or the seawall to see what was happening; women grabbed their children and rushed away from the sea, looking for a cellar or some other place of shelter. Soon, thousands of people were streaming through the streets, making their way to the railway station, where they crowded into every railway car standing there, even those not attached to engines. Others jammed the main road, which led up onto the moors behind the town.

Not everyone escaped. At eight o’clock, a postman named Alfred Beal was delivering mail in Filey Road. Margaret Griggs, a maidservant, had just opened the door and Beal was handing her letters when a shell burst against the side of the house. Beal and Griggs both died instantly. John Hall, a member of the town council, was dressing in his bedroom when a shell broke his leg and arm and pierced his chest. When his daughter ran into the room, he told her that he “was killed.” He died on the way to the hospital.

Scarborough Castle, the town’s most prominent landmark, became a target. The high walls of the keep and the outer southern wall were hit and an old yeomanry barracks was demolished. The Grand Hotel, perched on a cliff above the South Bay beach, was another target. Shells punched three large holes in the seaside façade. A glass-fronted restaurant café running along the seafront was wrecked. The following morning a reporter found a welter of bricks and plaster, smashed tables and chairs, and shattered glass. In the middle of the room, he was surprised to discover an unharmed table on which stood a decanter of red wine, untouched.

The town had become a landscape of gaping holes, roofless houses, smashed timbers, scattered bricks, stones, and broken glass. The top half of a severed telegraph pole dangled from its own lines. Live wires from broken tram lines whipped on the pavement. Every hotel window facing the sea on the South Cliff was broken. Three churches were hit. One was St. Mary’s, in whose churchyard Anne Brontë, the younger sister of Charlotte and Emily, was buried. Anne, who had come to Scarborough hoping to cure, or at least stave off, her tuberculosis, died in 1849 at the age of twenty-eight. Sixty-five years later, a German shell passed over her grave and smashed in the western door of the ancient church.

At 8:30 a.m., the guns stopped firing and the ships disappeared into the mist. Seventeen people were dead and ninety-nine had been wounded, all civilians.

Whitby was next. A fishing village twenty-one miles north of Scarborough at the mouth of the river Esk, Whitby possessed an architectural treasure in its twelfth-century abbey standing on a cliff above the town. At nine o’clock that morning, two warships approached from the south. About a mile from shore, they opened fire at their primary target, a coast guard signal station on the cliff near the abbey. The first shell exploded against the cliff just below the station. Frederick Randall, a thirty-year-old coast guard boatman who happened to be walking out of the station, was decapitated by a flying splinter. Another shell struck the brown sandstone ruins of Whitby Abbey a few hundred yards away. Still others burst amid the red-tile-roofed houses of the town below. William Tunmore, a sixty-one-year-old railway cartman, was trying to calm his horse at a rail crossing when a shell burst nearby. He died with a splinter in his chest. Ten minutes after the bombardment had begun, it ceased. The warships departed, leaving behind two dead and two wounded.