Seizing the Enigma (5 page)

Baker-Cresswell saw red when the U-boat surfaced. She had just sunk two ships, and now this embodiment of all the evil he was fighting had appeared before him. Firing his heavy guns, he ordered 12 knots—suitable ramming speed. But as he saw the German crew boiling out of the conning tower, he realized that they were abandoning ship.

At that moment, there flashed into his mind a story he had heard at the Naval Staff College in Greenwich in the mid-1920s. It may have made an impression because it involved the father of a fellow student, Lieutenant Louis Mountbatten. During World War I, the Russians had salvaged a German codebook from a German cruiser that had grounded in the Baltic, the
Magdeburg.
They had delivered the code to Mountbatten’s father, who was first sea lord, the head of the Royal Navy. The codebook had enabled the Admiralty to solve many German coded messages during the war, to great advantage.

As Baker-Cresswell saw the U-boat rocking on the surface of the ocean, he asked himself, “Is there a chance we can do another
Magdeburg?
” And he ordered full astern to stop the
Bulldog
from ramming the sub.

O
N THE AFTERNOON OF
A
UGUST
24, 1914,
A GRAY
G
ERMAN
warship steamed out of the East Prussian harbor of Memel toward the most fateful accident in the history of cryptology. She was the
Magdeburg
, a four-stacker, what the Germans called a small cruiser to differentiate the type from the larger light cruisers. She was new (three years old), well armed (twelve fast-firing 4-inch guns), fast (27.6 knots)—and unlucky. Her acceptance test had not gone well: her commissioning was delayed several months. She never participated, as was intended, in the fall 1912 naval maneuvers. Some equipment was still not in order when she was declared “ready for war” and when the ancient city of Magdeburg, southwest of Berlin, for which she was named, sponsored her in two days of festivities. One of her turbines gave trouble. And, unlike her sister ships, which got assignments suitable for cruisers, the
Magdeburg
became a torpedo test ship.

During one of her cruises in 1913, when she sailed to the Canary Islands off the northwestern shoulder of Africa to test the range of the naval radio station at Neumünster, her radio officer, a young lieutenant named Walther Bender, bought a puppy. Schuhmchen, the puppy, became a favorite of the crew. Later, in Kiel, whenever Bender spent the night ashore, Schuhmchen went down to the gangway in the morning as the launch shoved off from the dock to return to the
Magdeburg.
How did he know that Bender was aboard?

The
Magdeburg
was part of the Baltic Fleet. When war with Russia, France, and England broke out in August 1914, she dropped her test assignment and undertook more typical cruiser tasks. These were directed against the Russians, whose empire included the countries bordering the eastern Baltic: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In her first operation, the
Magdeburg
and another small cruiser, the
Augsburg
, arrived off Liepaja, Latvia’s naval port, to lay mines. They gained an unexpected success: the Russians, thinking the appearance of the two ships portended a major fleet operation, blew up their own ammunition and coal dumps and scuttled ships in the harbor entrances. In the two ships’ second and third operations, they shot up some lighthouses and a signal station and laid a minefield not far from the mouth of the eastern arm of the Baltic Sea, the Gulf of Finland, at whose farther end lay the Russian capital, St. Petersburg (now Leningrad).

A few days later, on August 23, the commander of a new flotilla ordered his vessels, which included the two cruisers, to assemble for operations. The
Magdeburg
, in Danzig, then a German port, went first to Memel, at the extreme east of Prussia, for some gunnery exercises meant to reassure the population, nervous because the border with Russia was not far from the city limits. The next afternoon the warship set out for the rendezvous, and early on the twenty-fifth it joined the
Augsburg
, three torpedo boats, a submarine, and three other warships off Hoburgen lighthouse on the southern tip of the Swedish island of Gotland. There the officers were told the plan. The ships were to slip by night behind a Russian minefield believed to protect the entrance to the Gulf of Finland and attack whatever Russian ships they found. At 8:30
A.M
. that same day, the flotilla set out, moving northeast at the fairly high speed of 20 knots. The sailors aboard the
Magdeburg
, who suspected the presence of enemy armored cruisers, thought the assignment was a suicide mission.

By 5
P.M
., in a calm sea, the air misty, the navigational plots of the
Magdeburg
and the
Augsburg
differed by a mile. But this raised no concern, since the
Magdeburg
was to follow the flagship by half
a mile: if the
Augsburg
struck a mine, the
Magdeburg
could avoid hitting any herself.

Soon, however, fog—common in those waters in summer—rolled in. By 9
P.M
., it was so thick that even with binoculars an officer on the bridge of the
Magdeburg
could not see the lookout on the stern. At 11
P.M
., the
Augsburg
, intending to run along the supposed Russian minefield before swinging east to enter the Gulf of Finland, turned onto a course south-southeast ½ east—and ordered the
Magdeburg
to do the same. She did so, maintaining the same speed, about 15 knots, that had kept her at the proper distance from the
Augsburg
during the afternoon. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Richard Habenicht, had soundings taken. These showed the depth decreasing: 190 feet, 141 feet, and, at 12:30
A.M
., now of August 26, 112 feet.

At the same time the radio shack reported that a message was coming in; four minutes later it was decoded and on the bridge. It ordered that course be altered to east-northeast ½ east. The helmsman spun the wheel and, at 12:37, just as he reported that the new course was being steered, still at 15 knots, the luckless vessel hit something. She bumped five or six times and, shuddering, stopped. The cruiser had run aground. As a consequence of her navigation error, which put her a mile south of the
Augsburg
, she had struck shallows 400 yards off the northwestern tip of Odensholm, a low, narrow, sandy island 2½ miles long at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland.

At once, Habenicht sought to free his ship. He reversed engines; he rocked her with various engine speeds; he assembled the entire 337-man crew on the quarterdeck to push the ship’s stern down and her bow up and then went full speed astern; he had the crew carry munitions aft. The ship didn’t budge. Soundings showed that at the bow, where the
Magdeburg
normally drew 16½ feet, the water was only 16 feet deep to port and 9 feet to starboard; at the stern, with normal draft just under 20 feet, the depths were 13 and 17. The vessel needed to rise between 3 and 7 feet. The tides of the Baltic, measured only in inches, would not suffice for this.

Habenicht let go the anchors and their chains. He had the drinking and washing water pumped out. Ash ejectors flung coal into the sea. All but sixty boxes of munitions were dumped over the side. All movable steel parts—the minelaying rails, bulkhead doors, doors on the forward turrets, steel cables, coaling equipment—were pushed overboard. The Germans’ efforts were spurred by the likelihood that the officials on Odensholm, which was Russian territory with a light-house and a signal station, had alerted superior authorities at the major Russian port of Tallinn, only 50 miles away. Habenicht again ran the engines forward and backward at various speeds. The
Magdeburg
moved not an inch.

Habenicht worried that the cruiser’s secret documents might fall into the hands of the Russians. In addition to the charts of German minefields and the ship’s war diary, these included the main Imperial German Navy code and the cipher key used to encipher its codewords and thus provide another layer of secrecy. Bender, who was in charge of the destruction of these documents, brought the codebook that was in the steering room, together with its cipher key, to the stokehold and burned it. Sailors did the same for other secret documents. But two other codebooks—one on the bridge and one in the radio shack—as well as a cipher key were retained for communicating with rescuers and higher commands. A fourth lay hidden and apparently forgotten in a locker in Habenicht’s cabin.

As dawn approached, the seabed and the stones on which the ship was lying became visible. At 8:30, with the fog lifting, the fast and powerful German torpedo boat V-26 appeared, attached a line, and tried to pull the
Magdeburg
off. She failed. Habenicht decided he might as well do some damage and fired some 120 shots at the lighthouse, chipping it, and at the signal station, setting it ablaze. By then the radio shack was reporting many signals from Russian ships; apparently they were on their way. Since all attempts to free the
Magdeburg
had failed, Habenicht regretfully concluded that he had to blow her up instead of letting her fall undamaged into enemy hands.

Charges were set fore and aft. The crew was to get off the ship and onto the V-26, which was to come alongside. Suddenly a shout rang through the ship. “The fuses are lit!” Habenicht had not ordered this; it had been done by mistake. The vessel would blow up in only four and a half minutes! In the tumult that ensued, Bender, the first radio officer, directed the second radio officer, Lieutenant Olff, to have the codebook and the cipher key from the radio shack brought to the V-26. On Olff’s instructions, Radioman Second Class Neuhaus grabbed the codebook, and Radioman Third Class Kiehnert the cipher key papers. The bridge’s codebook was in the hands of Radioman Second Class Szillat. The first officer, unable to find Habenicht as the seconds ticked away, ordered the crew members to the afterdeck, where the V-26 was to pick them up. He called for three cheers for the kaiser, had the two ship’s boats lowered, and commanded, “All hands abandon ship!”

Upon hearing this, Szillat flung the codebook he was carrying over the side, toward the stern. It splashed into what he said was a “dark” place about 15 feet from the ship and immediately sank. Then he leaped overboard. Kiehnert, too, jumped into the water, holding the radio shack’s cipher key. He was struck by men following him, and when he came to the surface, he noticed that he had lost the key. Then, at 9:10, the forward charge detonated. It split the vessel in half, tore open the fore part from near the bow to the second smokestack, and hurled huge pieces of steel into the air. They rained down upon the scores of men who were trying to swim to the V-26. Neuhaus, who had the radio shack’s codebook, was seen in the water before the explosion but was missing later; no one knew what happened to the codebook he was carrying.

The V-26 picked up many of the swimming men, including Szillat and Kiehnert. For fear of being destroyed in the explosion of the
Magdeburg
’s after charge, the V-26 stayed away from the cruiser and did not rescue the men still aboard. The Russian ships, appeared and began to fire at the torpedo boat. One shell swept eight men overboard; another smashed into her starboard side, destroying the
officers’ wardroom and killing all who were in it, mainly wounded men from the
Magdeburg.
But the V-26 got away.

Habenicht appeared briefly on the
Magdeburg
’s bridge when he heard the cheers for the kaiser, then vanished again into the bowels of his cruiser. Along with a few others, he awaited his fate on the ship. Bender, his little dog, and a few dozen sailors, among them Neuhaus, swam to Odensholm, where they were taken prisoner. One of the Russian ships, the torpedo boat
Lejtenant Burakov
, sent a boat with armed men, led by its first officer, Lieutenant Galibin, to the
Magdeburg.
The crew members still on board offered no resistance and were taken prisoner. Habenicht, whom Galibin thought was “a true gentleman,” offered the Russian his dagger, which Galibin courteously declined. The Germans on both the ship and the island were rowed to one of the Russian cruisers and were later sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia; on the way, the little dog Schuhmchen was taken from Bender. He was never seen again.