CHAPTER 17

The Yarmouth Raid and Room 40

At dawn, HMS Halcyon, a small, twenty-year-old minesweeping gunboat, nosed out of the port of Yarmouth into the drifting mist off the Norfolk coast to take up her daily duty: hunting for drifting mines in the coastal shipping channel. Two elderly destroyers, Lively and Leopard, followed Halcyon to begin their own routine offshore patrols. It was November 3, 1914, and these three ships along with four other old destroyers constituted Yarmouth’s defense. There were no land fortifications. Before the war, a territorial battery of mobile 6-inch guns had been stationed nearby, but when the army had gone to France, the guns went too. Since the sinking of the three Bacchantes on the Broad Fourteens, no heavy ships were anywhere nearer than the old predreadnoughts at Sheerness, a hundred miles away. Beatty’s fast battle cruisers were 300 miles to the north, at Cromarty, and most of Jellicoe’s battleships were twice that distance away, at Lough Swilly in northern Ireland.

In the early light, Halcyon made her way northeast through calm water toward the Cross Sand light vessel. Lively and Leopard were two miles astern. Suddenly, two unknown ships, both four-funneled light cruisers, appeared five miles to the north. Halcyon signaled a challenge. This was greeted with nearby splashes from shells fired by small-caliber naval guns, followed by towering waterspouts created by 11-inch shells. In the mist, Halcyon could not make out the identity of her assailants, but in fact she was confronting three German battle cruisers, a large armored cruiser, and four light cruisers. Rear Admiral Franz Hipper and the battle cruiser squadron of the High Seas Fleet were conducting the German navy’s first major offensive into British home waters.

One month earlier, on October 3, Admiral von Pohl, Chief of the Naval Staff, and Admiral von Ingenohl, Commander-in-Chief of the High Seas Fleet, had met on board Friedrich der Grosse to discuss the kaiser’s decision to keep the fleet on the defensive in the North Sea. The imperial decision, however, did not preclude offensive minelaying off the British coast; the first result was an effort on October 17 by four German destroyers to lay mines off the Thames. When all four destroyers were sunk before laying a single mine, Ingenohl decided to retaliate, taking advantage of William’s ruling that “the battle fleet must avoid heavy losses, but there is nothing to be said against the battle cruisers trying to damage the enemy.” If they were fortunate, battle cruiser raids would draw units of the Grand Fleet south onto German-laid minefields and across a line of U-boats. Besides, attacks on English coastal towns promised a strong morale effect: positive in Germany, negative in Britain. Hipper was eager to undertake the mission.

Final authorization for a raid on the Norfolk coast came on October 29. Light cruisers were assigned to lay mines off Yarmouth and Lowestoft in order to disrupt coastal shipping lanes and fishing traffic while Hipper’s battle cruisers bombarded Yarmouth. Typically cautious, Ingenohl had not admitted to the kaiser that a bombardment was planned; in his telegram requesting permission for the raid, he merely mentioned that battle cruisers would “escort the [mine-laying] cruisers.”

At 4:30 on the afternoon of November 2, Hipper’s flagship, Seydlitz, along with Moltke, Von der Tann, and Blücher, departed the Jade with four light cruisers, Strassburg, Graudenz, Kolberg, and Stralsund; the latter was to lay the mines. At 6:00 p.m., two dreadnought battle squadrons of the High Seas Fleet followed them into the Bight to provide support. The battle cruisers swung north in an arc past Heligoland to avoid patrolling British submarines and then, out in the North Sea, Hipper altered course to the west and increased speed to 18 knots. On the bridge of Seydlitz, the admiral’s excitement was obvious; for the first time in the war, a major German naval force was about to enter enemy waters. Not much concerned about British surface opposition because he expected to surprise the enemy, he worried mainly about mines. “I don’t want to go to the bottom so ingloriously,” he said. “To run on mines and sink off the English coast is hardly what I’m out for!” At midnight, the advancing squadron encountered clusters of fishing trawlers. Hipper feared that some might have wireless sets that could be used to report his presence and he tried to avoid them, but the small vessels were too numerous.

Approaching England in darkness at high speed, Hipper’s captains found themselves uncertain of their exact position. (At the outbreak of war, the British Admiralty had removed most North Sea navigation buoys and lights.) Then, at 6:30 a.m., Seydlitz spotted a buoy marked “Smith’s Knoll Watch.” Now that he knew where he was, Hipper steamed south across Yarmouth Bay, preparing to bombard the town. Almost immediately, however, the Germans noticed a small warship five miles away on the port beam and Strassburg and Graudenz quickly opened fire. Hipper, afraid that the two light cruisers were too close to the British minefields, ordered them to cease and instructed Seydlitz alone to fire from a distance on the little Halcyon. Nevertheless, the other German battle cruisers immediately joined in. The eagerness of the German gun crews was responsible: this was their first sight of an enemy vessel in wartime. The result was that so many large shell splashes smothered the small target that accurate spotting was impossible. Drenched and lucky, Halcyon escaped.

When the German guns began firing, the destroyer Lively hurried up and, seeing Halcyon’s acute danger, laid down a smoke screen between her and the enemy. For a quarter of an hour, the two small ships were under heavy fire. Halcyon was struck on the bridge, her radio room was damaged, and three men were wounded; Lively was not hit. At 7:40 a.m., Hipper realized that he was wasting time fighting these small ships and that a further pursuit to the south would take his force into a known minefield. He ceased fire and turned his battle cruisers back to sea. As they departed, the battle cruisers flung a few scattered shells toward Yarmouth, but the projectiles hit only the beach. Meanwhile as the light improved, Stralsund finished laying a line of mines five miles long in the Smith’s Knoll passage.

Once out of danger, Halcyon repaired her radio and began broadcasting a general warning. Leopard also was signaling: “Two battle cruisers and two armored cruisers open fire on Lively and myself.” Local British forces began to move. The destroyer Success joined Lively and Leopard in following Hipper eastward out to sea. The three “off-duty” destroyers of the Yarmouth patrol began raising steam. The submarines E-10, D-5, and D-3, lying in Yarmouth harbor, put to sea. Coming out on the surface, D-5 struck a mine—whether one of Stralsund’s or a drifting British mine, no one ever knew—and in less than a minute the submarine went down. Two officers and two men in the conning tower were saved; the rest of the crew was drowned. None of the other submarines saw anything of Hipper’s squadron.

Through all this, the Admiralty was silent. Normally, shells falling on an English beach would have triggered an instant signal: “Send the navy!” Nevertheless, since 7:00 a.m., the Admiralty had been monitoring wireless signals but doing nothing; no warnings went out, no orders flashed that ships and squadrons were to get under way. In fact, the Admiralty and the British navy were in temporary disarray. It was a difficult time: the new First Sea Lord, Jacky Fisher, had been in office only three days and, at 3:10 that morning, the first word had come of the disaster in the South Pacific at Coronel. In addition, for the first time in the war, the Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet was absent from his fleet. Jellicoe had been summoned to London for an Admiralty conference on November 2, and on November 3 he was returning by train to Scotland.

At 8:30, Halcyon reached Yarmouth and was able to send a more accurate report: the enemy force had included four battle cruisers and four light cruisers and was last seen twelve miles off Lowestoft. Owing to the time necessary for decoding, there was further delay before the Admiralty received this information. Then, for another ninety minutes, the Admiralty remained silent, intercepting and recording signals but taking no action. By 9:55 a.m., when the Admiralty, coming to life, ordered Beatty south with his battle cruisers and summoned Jellicoe’s battle squadrons—without Jellicoe, who was still in transit—from their Irish anchorages, Hipper had left the coast of England fifty miles behind.

Later, Winston Churchill made the case for delay:

Early in the morning of November 3 . . . heavy shells were reported to be bursting in the water and on the beach near Yarmouth. The First Sea Lord and I reached the War Room from our bedrooms in a few minutes. The question was What did it mean? It seemed quite certain that German battle cruisers would not be sent only to throw a few shells at an open town like Yarmouth. Obviously, this was a demonstration to divert the British Fleet from something else which was going to happen—was perhaps already happening. . . . We had no means of judging. The last thing it seemed possible to believe was that first-class units of the German fleet would have been sent across the North Sea simply in order to disturb the fisher-folk of Yarmouth. If the German demonstration off Yarmouth was the prelude or concomitant to a serious attempt to break into the Channel, the very greatest naval events would follow. Meanwhile, nothing to be done but put everyone on guard. . . . Several hours of tension passed; and then gradually it became clear that the German battle cruisers were returning home at full speed and that nothing else was apparently happening; and the incredible conclusion forced itself upon us that the German Admiralty had had no other purpose than this silly demonstration off Yarmouth beach.

Before the affair was concluded, however, the German navy suffered a serious loss. On the night of November 3, the returning fleet found the river mouths covered by dense fog, and Ingenohl ordered all ships to anchor overnight in Schillig roads. At dawn the next day, although the fog was still so thick that it was impossible for one ship to see another, the 9,350-ton armored cruiser Yorck received permission to proceed into Wilhelmshaven for repairs to her fresh-water tanks. To do this, the ship had to pass through a small gap in the double row of mines that guarded the southern side of Schillig roads. In the murk, Yorck lost her way. A change of current carried her to the wrong side of the moored mine-warfare vessel marking the entrance to the swept channel. Turning hard to correct her error, the cruiser was carried south by the current and struck broadside against a mine. A minute later, she hit another mine, capsized, and sank. Many in the crew saved themselves by clinging to the keel, now protruding above the shallow water. Others, numbing in the icy sea, attempted to swim to safety. Two hundred and thirty-five men drowned.

The Imperial Navy’s first major surface offensive into the North Sea had been an embarrassment. Weak British forces in the Yarmouth area had been surprised, but largely undamaged. The shore bombardment had churned only sand and water. The one success the Germans could claim was that their newly laid minefield had destroyed one British submarine and three fishing trawlers. The German Naval Staff was disappointed and Hipper, in a temporary fit of depression, refused to pin on the Iron Cross the kaiser had awarded him after the raid. “I won’t wear it,” he declared, “until I’ve done something.” And, as it happened, most German officers were eager to try again. Ingenohl continued to be averse to risk, but, as he admitted after the war, “It appeared that the risk [in such a raid] was not as [great as] it seemed. If the battle cruisers suddenly appeared on the spot at daybreak, remained there for an hour or an hour and a half, and then retreated at high speed, it would be a very unfortunate coincidence indeed if, just at this time of the year, when the days were so short, superior enemy forces were met before dark. For so much time would have elapsed before the enemy forces could get up steam and put to sea . . . that our ships would already have a considerable lead.”

In this hopeful forecast, Ingenohl left out two factors, one of which he ought to have considered, the other about which he could not have known. The first was bluntly spelled out later in a critical paragraph of the offi-cial German naval history: “One could not assume so great a factor of safety in the superior speed of our battle cruisers as it might appear here [in Ingenohl’s argument]. A single casualty by mine or submarine or any other accident—for example a machinery failure or an unlucky hit by enemy guns on a single ship—could suddenly decrease the speed of the battle cruiser squadron so that the assistance of the [High Seas] fleet, all too far astern, would come too late.” As it happened, Hipper’s raids continued, and eventually just such a scenario became a reality.

The other danger to German ships engaged in raids on the British coast—a danger that Ingenohl did not know or even imagine—was that soon the British would know in advance when his ships were putting to sea and where they were going.

Wireless telegraphy was used by all warships and many merchantmen in 1914 and already, through the foresight of Rear Admiral Henry Oliver, the prewar Director of Naval Intelligence, the British navy had constructed radio directional stations along the east and southeast coasts of Britain. By taking cross bearings, these stations enabled listeners to establish the position—and from successive positions, the course—of any enemy ship sending wireless signals. But once hostilities began and British wireless stations began picking up German messages, establishing only the positions and courses of ships seemed insufficient. The intercepted German wireless signals were in code, and the Admiralty wanted to know what the coded messages contained. While the messages, forwarded to the Admiralty, piled up on his desk, Oliver moved to create an organization that could discover exactly what the Germans were saying to one another—an organization, that is, which could break the German codes. To tackle this job, Oliver turned to a friend, the former Director of Naval Education, Sir Alfred Ewing. Described by his son as a “short, thick-set man with keen blue eyes overshadowed by ill-kept, shaggy eyebrows,” Ewing invariably wore a gray suit, “a mauve shirt, a white butterfly collar, and a dark blue bow tie with white spots.” He had been a professor of engineering in Tokyo, had held chairs at Dundee and Cambridge Universities, where he had done pioneering studies of Japanese earthquakes, and was married to an American whose great-great-uncle was George Washington. Ewing agreed to Oliver’s request and immediately went off to the library of the British Museum to study its collection of old codebooks. Then, gathering around him a small group of German scholars and university dons, he established a secret Admiralty department, which began working in his own cramped office. In their first weeks, they sorted and filed intercepts and learned to identify call stations and to distinguish naval messages from military ones, but they made no progress in deciphering German naval messages. And then—twice from German captains’ shipboard safes and once from the bottom of the sea—the Admiralty was handed the solutions to these mysteries. The German navy began the war with three principal codes. Within four months, the British navy was in possession of all three.

The first German naval codebook fell into Allied hands in the first week of the war when, on August 11, the German steamship Hobart was seized off Melbourne by a boarding party of Australians. The German captain attempted to destroy his confidential documents; he was seen in the act and the papers were confiscated. They included a copy of the “Handelsverkehrsbuch” (HVB), a codebook originally intended for communication between German warships and merchantmen, but expanded for use by naval shore commands, coastal stations, and, eventually, U-boats and zeppelins. Its importance was not realized in Melbourne until September 9, when the Naval Board there belatedly informed the British Admiralty of its prize. A copy was dispatched by steamer to England, but it was not until October that the HVB code finally reached London. By then, the Admiralty had acquired a second and even more secret German code contained in the “Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine” (SKM).

The book, six inches thick, fifteen inches long, twelve inches wide, and bound in blue leather, was a gift from the Russians. This is what happened: just after midnight August 26, the German light cruisers Augsburg and Magdeburg and three destroyers were moving through dense fog along the Russian Estonian coast in the upper Baltic. Unable to see the other ships, Magdeburg became separated and went aground 400 yards off the northwestern tip of Odensholm, a small, sandy island with a lighthouse and a signal station, at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland. Magdeburg’s captain tried desperately to free his ship, running the engines forward and backward at full speed, throwing overboard anchors, anchor chains, coal, ammunition, minelaying rails, bulkhead doors, and most of the vessel’s fresh drinking water. Magdeburg refused to move. At 8:30 a.m., the fog lifted and the German destroyer V-26 arrived. Her effort to tow Magdeburg into deeper water failed. Soon, Magdeburg’s radio room was reporting signals from approaching Russian ships. Captain Richard Habenicht, realizing that his situation was hopeless, decided that his duty was to blow up his ship. Explosive charges were placed, and V-26 came alongside to take off the crew. Suddenly, there came a shout: “The fuses are lit.” This was premature; the crew was not ready and now the vessel would blow up in four and a half minutes.

Besides wishing to save his crew, Habenicht was urgently concerned that the cruiser’s secret documents not fall into Russian hands. On board were four copies of the principal German navy codebook, the SKM, one on the bridge, one in the chart house, one in the radio room, and one hidden in a locker in the captain’s cabin. The radio officer had already taken one of the copies to the engine room and burned it. In the confusion following the cry that the fuses had been lit, he directed his men to carry the codebooks from the bridge and the radio room to the V-26. At this moment, the ship’s First Officer, unable to find the captain, ordered “Abandon Ship!” Hearing this, the signalman carrying the bridge copy of the codebook threw it over the side and then jumped overboard himself. When the explosive charge detonated, pieces of the ship splashed down on the men in the water. The radioman carrying the codebook from the radio room disappeared, along with the codebook he was carrying. V-26 picked up some of the men, struggling to swim, but for fear of being destroyed by a second explosion, the destroyer backed away and left the stricken ship. Soon afterward, the Russian light cruisers Palladia and Bogatyr appeared and sent a boarding party to Magdeburg, which, being aground, could not sink. Searching the wreck, a Russian naval lieutenant broke open the locker in Habenicht’s cabin. Inside, he found the fourth copy of the SKM, forgotten in the excitement. Later, Russian divers inspecting the seabed around the stranded vessel found two more codebooks; the bridge copy that had been thrown overboard and the other lost by the vanished radioman.

The Russians now were in possession of one of the deepest secrets of the German navy. Recognizing its value, they notified their ally and set aside for the British the undamaged SKM, the one found in Habenicht’s locker, which bore the serial number 151. They kept the waterlogged codebooks for themselves. As Churchill told the story later, “[When] the German light cruiser Magdeburg was wrecked in the Baltic, the body of a drowned German under-officer was picked up by the Russians a few hours later, and clasped in his bosom by arms rigid with death, were the cypher and signal books of the German Navy. . . . On September 6, the Russian Naval Attaché came to see me. He had received a message from Petrograd that . . . the Russians felt that, as the leading naval Power, the British Admiralty ought to have these books and charts. If we would send a vessel . . . the Russian officers in charge of the books would bring them to England. We lost no time in sending a ship and, late on an October afternoon, Prince Louis and I received from the hands of our loyal allies these sea-stained, priceless documents.” *28

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.