Sea Control - Sea Control 182 - In the Shadow of Ultra with Keith Bird and Jason Hines

Episode Date: June 14, 2020

Links:1. In the Shadow of Ultra: A Reappraisal of German Naval Communications Intelligence in 1914-19182. Very Special Intelligence: The Story of the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre 1939-19453.Room 40: British Naval Intelligence, 1914–19184. Germany's First Cryptanalysis on the Western Front: Decrypting British and French Naval Ciphers in World War I5. Technology, Shipbuilding and Future Combat in Germany, 1880-1914.”6. Sins of Omission and Commission: A Reassessment of the Role of Intelligence in the Battle of Jutland7. Ludwig Föppl: A Bavarian Cryptanalyst on the Western Front8. The Ultra Secret

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guests today are Keith Byrd and Jason Hines. We're going to be discussing their award-winning 2018 article, In the Shadow of Altra, a Reappraisal of German Naval Communication Intelligence in 1914 to 1918. Gentlemen, welcome, and thanks for agreeing to come on. Thanks, Jared. Thank you.

Thanks. So before we go into the article, then, I'd like to give each of you the opportunity to introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your backgrounds as well. So, Keith, would you like to begin? Certainly. Thank you, Jared. I'm a retired college university administrator, faculty member. I began my studies in German naval history as an undergraduate in the 1960s. I earned my Ph.D. from Ted Ropp at Duke University.

I spent significant time in the German Naval Archives in Freiburg when I was at Duke, and then I also had the advantage to take of the Free University in Berlin as an exchange student in Fulbright in 1969-70. In fact, I was among probably the first major group of international historians to take advantage of the newly opened military archives that had been returned to Germany. I had a chance to meet a number, a large number of German naval leaders and academics who played later a significant role in my publications. And in 1975, I had a German grant to study at the German Military History Research Office, also in Freiburg. And so I've continued my archival research and writing ever since. Thank you. And Jason, how about you? So I'm a retired Navy captain and I'm currently a doctoral candidate in military history at the University of Potsdam in Germany. You know, as a historian, my focus has been on naval intelligence history and especially naval intelligence in the First World War.

In fact, my dissertation is on this very topic, the Imperial German Navy's decryption service during that First World War. As I'm sure we'll talk about today, this is a story that really has not yet been told. Thanks, Ed. I'll just take this opportunity to remind listeners that our opinions are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we may be otherwise associated. Thank you both for agreeing to come on with us. So what drew the two of you to this topic? And I think, Keith, you're going to lead off here. Right. As the elder senior, I think, I had been working with a colleague, Randy Papadopoulos, who's a fellow German naval historian.

He's also the naval historian in the U.S. Secretary of Navy's office. And we were looking to identify new topics in German naval history that really needed to be addressed, that had been neglected. I recently had finished a chapter on Karl Dönitz, which was published in Germany. And then my biography of Admiral Raeder was published in 2006. And, you know, he, like German communications intelligence in World War I, was often lost in the shadow of Dönitz because people were more interested in submarine commander. But we were looking to do some collaborative work with other notable people in the field. And so the first thing we discussed was about annotating and publishing the evaluation of the German code-breaking effort in World War I, which is written by Gustav Kleikamp, who we will be talking about later, particularly Jason. We also decided at that time I'd present a paper at the Society for Military History,

Failures of German Codebreaking in the First World War, which we thought might give us some ideas in terms of the larger communication security issues for Germany in both world wars. The paper was well received. I was encouraged to publish the paper, but I needed to spend significant more time in the archives to follow up on a number of the references that had started to emerge from the German records, and also recent classifications of German intelligence materials by NASA that covered World War I. And at that point, Randy fortuitously introduced me to Jason, whom he had

just met, and the rest, they say, is literally history. Thanks. And Jason, how about you? Is this just a natural offshoot of your dissertation work? In some ways, it is. I mean, I had written an article back in 2008 for the Journal of Military History on communications intelligence in the Battle of Jutland, but that focused on the British side of the battle. And the center of that story was Room 40, the British Admiralty's code-breaking unit. And as I wrote the article, though, one question repeatedly came up, and that was, did the Germans have a similar organization? So fast forward eight years to my last tour in the Navy, I was an assistant professor at the German Command and General Staff College in Hamburg, and I had the opportunity to earn a

master's degree at the Helmut Schmidt University. And for that thesis, I decided to focus on that very question. Did the Imperial Navy have a code-breaking unit, and what did it do? And so I reached out to an expert in the field, Dr. Michael Epkenhans, who was my master's thesis advisor, Worked on that, completed that master's thesis. When I was leaving Germany to retire, he, Dr. Epstein-Hans, who is now my doctoral advisor, recommended I reach out to Randy. He put me in touch with Keith, and as Keith mentioned, the rest is history. So you mentioned the code-breaking unit. The code-breaking unit is necessary because the wireless communications technology.

Was World War I the first widespread use of the wireless communications technology at sea in conflict? Yes, it was, actually. So when the war commenced in August 1914, wireless telegraphy was a relatively new technology. Marconi had only built the first commercial wireless device in 1894. He made the first successful transmission of a signal across the English Channel in 1899, the first across the Atlantic in 1901. This was only 13 years before the war broke out. Those first German systems had been produced soon after Marconi's, and the first wireless systems were installed on German warships in around 1902, John Frank.

The big German wireless company, Telefunken, which would dominate German wireless for the next several decades, was founded a year later. Those first shipboard wireless systems, though, were really rudimentary. I mean, the ships had to use a kite to take the antenna wire high enough to receive distant transmissions, And radio operators had to use a machine reader for incoming signals. It was not efficient. It wasn't fairly reliable. But by 1909 timeframe, Telefunken had introduced its quenched spark transmitter, and the Danish firm Pulsum had introduced another advanced system. These offered improved reliability, arranged three times the out-of-existing transmitters,

and they allowed radio operators to use headphones for the first time to listen to incoming signals. In many ways, though, these navies were still learning the potential of these wireless systems when the war broke out. Keith, did you want to jump in? Yeah, I'd just add briefly whether the German Navy had worked with Telefunken as their supplier of wireless equipment and technology improvements during the war. The Royal Navy had reaped benefits, as you said, much earlier from its association, close association with Marconi, and had access to the latest scientific, engineering, and technical resources, as well as getting some help in developing the wireless stations in England and the Mediterranean throughout the war. The Kaiser, interestingly enough, played a role in the founding of Telefunken to counter the monopoly of Marconi,

and by 1906 to 1908 had been working more closely with the Navy to develop the high-power radio station about an hour northeast of Wilhelmshaven on the Baltic coast to equip the High Seas Fleet with the latest technology. Interestingly enough, though, is after the war, Tirpitz was receiving criticism. So he charged that the Kaiser and Telekugel had insisted on the adoption of wireless before it was fully developed, and he complained that he had been blamed for its ineffectiveness.

And this is 1919-1920 period when he published his memoirs. He also complained that after the Navy acquired wireless, its technical development had stalled. So there's an interesting history in and of itself. Jason, you had mentioned that the two fleets were really experimenting with this technology when the war broke out. How did they envision its use pre-war? So I can certainly address the German side. I think Keith can probably address the British side in a moment. But as those first German wireless systems were being installed on German warships, the Imperial Navy, their focus was on the decisive battle, that Mahanian concept of naval warfare that sea control was best achieved through the destruction of the enemy battle fleet.

The Imperial Navy felt that a key part of any decisive battle would be played by their reconnaissance force, their cruisers and later battlecruisers. they were expected to reconnoiter the battle space to gain contact with the enemy and once gained to hold that contact until the main body of the high seas fleet could be brought to bear you know wireless was seen as the tool that could allow the battle cruiser force to maintain contact with the main body of the fleet at extended range that's really key extended range so it became imperative for the imperial navy to understand how foreign navies and especially the Royal Navy, were using wireless within their fleets. So in 1908, the Imperial Navy instituted a robust collection program

to intercept and analyze British transmissions. Cruisers were seen as the natural primary collectors, and their wireless officers were tasked with copying British signals and providing an assessment of the traffic they were seeing. So the wireless officers would report on the types of transmitters used by the British on the wavelengths, the speed and precision of the Morse transmission. They tried to break British call signs and figure out who was speaking with whom. The wireless operators were also tasked, though, to analyze the signals themselves,

and in particular, the encrypted signals, to look at the structure of the signals, whether the signals used letters only or numbers or a mixture of the two, the size of the code groups. But from 1908, though, to the eve of war in mid-1914, there was no real effort put into breaking the encryption, with one single exception. There was a wireless officer who, in 1908, was assigned to the Torpedo Research Command, which had responsibility for the development and testing of these new wireless systems. And he was stationed on the island of Helgeland in the North Sea, and he carried out collection against a group of British warships that were operating near the Horn's Reef. Now, his report showed a genuine attempt to decrypt a code group that had appeared in multiple encrypted British signals, and it was singled out by the Admiralstab, the German Admiralty staff, for his work. That officer was Lieutenant Junior Grade Martin Browning, and significantly, Browning would go on to lead the Imperial Navy's code-breaking service throughout the war. Keith, did you want to add anything?

Yeah, regarding the British, and not to spend a lot of time on it, but several researchers have highlighted the development of the Abnerley system of strategic naval command and control, which actually led the British to use wireless to create the first example, what Nicholas Lambert calls information dominance, through the adoption of the war room system, which was a key intellectual breakthrough that occurred before the war. Consequently, Britain used its advantage in global communications and the centralization of global intelligence for what they call a strategy of maneuver warfare. And so Room 40 was part of a larger pre-existing information processing system. And there's also suggestion by another scholar who suggested the original purpose of Room 40 then was to intercept German military, political, and diplomatic signals from the shore-based, high-powered, long-wave German radio transmitters. But the well-prepared, I mean well-prepared, British disruption of the German strategic

communications at the outbreak of the war, particularly the cutting of all the trans-oceanic cables, left Germany's communications relying on their high-power radio transmitters to overcome their political, their military, and their economic isolation, which made Germany even more dependent upon wireless, and therefore the work of Room 40 was even more significant. The acquisition of the code books quickly enabled Room 40 to take advantage of what was the Imperial Navy's prolific use of wireless for what the British called a more profitable area of study of the tactical signals of the German high seas fleet. And Keith, I think this goes directly to the next question that we had discussed, is at what point did the two sides realize the

electromagnetic spectrum was a medium to be exploited but based on what the two of you have told me it sounds like almost immediately is the answer is that correct yes yes and one of the phrases i really like is that one of the leading participants in germany's development of signals intelligence throughout the the world wars noted the practice of disguising one's radio traffic and the use of of the system was much more intensive and on a larger scale at sea than on land and this was especially true for the imperial navy as i said after they cut the oceanic cables the navy employed wireless extensively jason will talk about this more for command and control to intercept enemy messages especially in the tightly coordinated tactics which were favored by the

high seas fleet wireless certainly enabled the germans to find enemy warships and shipping and send operational intelligence location of mine it would be a major asset in the u-boat war which came to the attention very quickly as a pressure, you know, on the intelligence system to get developed. The Navy's frequent and undisciplined use of wireless, however, created a major security problem and a rich opportunity that Room 40 would quickly exploit, especially after they got the German code books, one can say almost by accident. But they also then, as I alluded to before, they They really spent a lot of time during the war attempting to salvage any downed Zeppelin or any sunk ship to salvage German code-breaking materials. And so in the naval war, World War I, intelligence became as important as strategy and armaments.

Jason, anything to add on that? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so the British did immediately recognize the potential value of radio intelligence. I mean, at the day the war was declared, the British Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear Admiral Henry Oliver, asked a colleague, Alfred Ewing, the Director of Naval Education, to put together a group to crack the Imperial Navy's codes. And that group later became Room 40. The Imperial Navy really was much actually slower to recognize the value that decryption could bring. I mean, this is really ironic considering that they had that very robust pre-war collection program. But as the war began, Imperial Navy warships kept collecting those British signals

that they were tasked to before the war and sending them back to the Admiralstab, where they sat. And at one point in September 1914, the Admiralstab actually asked the fleet to stop sending them these British signals because they had no use for them. And it was the German army, in fact, not the Imperial Navy, that made those first breaks in the British encryption. In the radio headquarters command for the Bavarian 6th Army, In German, it was the Funkerkommando, was on the Western Front in late 1914 across the units of the British Army. And they were copying these British radio transmissions, including those between the Army units and the Royal Navy ships.

And one man in particular, a war volunteer named Ludwig Fokke, mathematics professor in civilian life, brilliant man, he decided to see if he could break the British encryption. And he was successful, and the German general staff passed that first cipher solution on to the Upper Auschwitz, who then sent it to the High Seas Fleet and asked them to see whether that new cipher solution could allow them to decrypt Royal Navy's signals that they had already collected. Well, the cipher was different from the one used by the Grand Fleet, but it was the same one used by British patrol ships in the Channel. And the Channel at that point was particularly important since that was the main patrol area for U-boats at that stage of the war. And the discovery that they could now read these British codes set off a scramble in the Imperial Navy to focus on further decryption. There's a German historian, Hans Detlef Bruckner, who wrote really a groundbreaking article on that Funker commando that made the first break. And a separate British historian, Martin Samuels, who wrote a separate profile of that war volunteer, Foku.

Both are tremendous articles and really well worth reading. Thank you, Jason. How much encryption was actually in use in World War I? so before the war there was a healthy mixture of encrypted and unencrypted traffic in both royal navy and the imperial navy the royal navy for example would encrypt their operational traffic but much of the administrative traffic was sent into clear unencrypted but once the war began both navies encrypted nearly all of their traffic but the quality of the encryption varied though the british used several different ciphers of varying complexity as i mentioned a minute ago the security forces in the English Channel and along the southeast coast of England

used a relatively simple cipher. That was that first cipher that the German army broke in late 1914. By mid-1915, the Germans were routinely reading the traffic from the channel area. But the Grand Fleet, on the other hand, used two much more complex ciphers. There was a three-digit alphabetic cipher and a five-digit numeric cipher. These Grand Fleet ciphers were much more difficult to break, and they would continue to cause problems for the Germans throughout the war. The Imperial Navy, on the other hand, used three code books. There was the Signalbuch, or the main signal book, that was used throughout the Navy by ships and shore stations. There was a Verkehrsbuch, a traffic book, that was used primarily at sea by flag

officers, and a Handelsschiffsverkehrsbuch, or the merchant ship traffic book, that was used not only by merchant ships, as the name implied, when they talked with warships, but it was actually used more broadly throughout the high seas fleet, especially by U-boats and zeppelins. Now, the Germans would add a cipher on top of these encoded signals, a process known as super encryption. But unfortunately for the Germans, the British, as Keith mentioned, had acquired copies of all three code books within the first four months of the war.

So the fact that the British knew the underlying structure of the encryption made it easier for them to break the ciphers and read the signals. By the end of 1914, Room 40 was able to routinely decrypt all Imperial Navy signals and would do so for the rest of the war. Anything to add on the amount of encryption that was in use during World War I?

I just know an interesting story that the French and Austro-Hungarians recognized much earlier than the British and Germans the importance of intercepting wireless messages for intelligence purposes and the whole importance of photography the austro-hungarian navy which of course uh has not gotten very much attention i only found one major study on their work in intelligence and it was only from 1917 to 1980 but their pre-war development of wireless was due to admiral anton house and the

fact that the balkans was such a tinderbox in the first decade of the 20th century i mean the The Austro-Hungarian Navy kept very close tabs on the Italians, who actually were an ally at the time, because they did not totally trust them. And, of course, they had the French. And then overall, their wartime code-breaking system was generally considered highly efficient. And they also provided the centralized service for all intelligence services. So I think it's worth noting that the British, and now hopefully through Jason, the Germans are getting more attention. Thanks. Keith, most of the communications encryption war was conducted in secret. How did these stories eventually become public? Well, both sides tried to keep their wartime activities secret, but there were several

discrete closed disclosures that the astute reader could have caught in post-war publications and memoirs and so forth, and several indiscretions, including a December 1927 lecture by Sir Alfred Ewing, the wartime chief, as Jason mentioned, of Room 40, that mentioned several code-breaking successes, which was then covered by the British press, and also at the same time, the disclosure of over 10,000 Room 40 decrypts to an American lawyer who was seeking information on the German sabotage efforts in the U.S. during the war, which actually led Germany and its intelligence agencies to a cipher crisis. But the first public discussion of the wartime activities actually came in the 1970s. Heinz Bonatz, who was chief of the German decoding

service in the Second World War, published a book in 1970 that provided the first history of service in both wars. And he had limited access to the German military archives, so he had to rely on the German and British official records, along with recollections from several wartime participants, you know, given his work. But in 1974, a day that changed the book I was writing, retired Group Captain F.W. Winterbotham published The Ultra Secret, which disclosed for the first time the Allied ability to break the German Enigma machine in the Second World War. And this, of course, created a huge stir in the writing of history for both the Second World War

And as we'll see, ultimately, for World War I, because Patrick Beasley then followed with his groundbreaking books. His first one was actually on World War II, Very Special Intelligence, which he published in 78, 1978. And five years later, he published Room 40. And both of them discussed in great detail what the British and Germans were doing in both world wars. But as I said, the British shelter-seeker in the Battle of the Atlantic has really dominated the discussion, scholarly and both public interest, and really overshadowed, literally, thus the title of our article in World War I. There have been a multitude of books and articles on Room 40, but oddly, very few on the German service. Jason mentioned two recent articles by Bruckner and Samuels. The only other one I mentioned is the German historian Heinrich Wada, who wrote a very good chapter using the German naval records, intelligence records, in a book during the 100th anniversary of the German U-Boat service.

But by and large, though, the German naval archives and intelligence archives have been remained largely untapped, at least until now. Jason has really been doing very extensive work in the German files of the EDINST intelligence service over the past three years. So, Jason, we had hinted at him before, but who is Kleikamp and what's his significance in this story? So, Gustav Kleikamp was a junior officer in the First World War, and he had served on the battle cruiser SMS Dörflinger during the Battle of Jutland. By the early 1930s, he had served as the director of the Navy's Communications Research Command. But his importance really comes, though, from a report, a secret, by explaining a study. He wrote in 1934 while he was a lieutenant commander on the influence of radio intelligence on naval warfare in the North Sea during the First World War. The study itself was one of a series of Navy reports exploring key operational and tactical aspects of the war.

So in his report, Clyde Count was critical of the Imperial Navy's poor state of preparedness for the wireless war. He did acknowledge the success of the ED and gathering key intelligence on the movements of the Royal Navy. But he was very, very sharply critical of the Navy's failure to take decisive action in resolving its security problems. Once they had suspected that their codes and ciphers had likely been compromised, they did not change those codes for several years. And he characterized the Navy as having played with open cards in 1915. His critique really comprises the majority of his report, but those views would persist long afterwards. They would influence future historians. Patrick Beasley, that Keith just mentioned, in his book Room 40, used Kleikamp as his primary German source on the Ediths, and he really echoed Kleikamp's criticisms.

But we have to still take Kleikamp with some care, because like Bolinatz, he did not have access, though, to the original files from the First World War. And so in some areas, you have to really read him with a grain of salt. You've actually written more on Klykant than I have. Do you want to take it from here? Right. I particularly want to focus on his 1934 evaluation in terms of how he concluded it to look at how his motivation was generated by what was going on in Germany at the time. He closed with a summary of the causes of the British intelligence and deciphering successes

with his final admonition to the German Navy as being that future leaders and officers need to do careful planning in peacetime to avoid the Imperial Navy's failures. I mean, for three years, the failure to recognize and institute changes in its radio security. And given the timing of his reporting, I mean, Hitler came to power in 1933 and had tremendous emphasis on rearming Germany. Kleikamp's primary purpose, we believe, was to deliver a strong message that the Navy needed to build the organization and foundation for the further development of the Naval Intelligence Service, as well as to make continuous technical improvements in the equipment and tools of radio intelligence, if it was to avoid the errors and miscalculations of the past war. Like other naval officers, Kleikamp was obviously aware that Hitler's political and military goals included removing the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty, that particularly had limited his personnel and armaments, the size of the capital ships and the billing of airplanes and submarines.

In 1934, naval armament was certainly at the beginning of its expansion, which was a good time for him to write this particular review, evaluation, and although Kleiton does credit the successes that both B-Dienst and the Navy did experience, both in gathering vital intelligence on the enemy's activities and later measures to strengthen radio security, his pronounced one-sided critical note reflected the urgency in his call to action. which coincided, which the Navy's first stage of expanding BDNs both organizationally and in personnel. And additional information on the ease and speed of Room 40's wartime decryption that they already had gotten an idea of led the Navy to acquire the Enigma machine in the early post-war years to secure its communication, and they continued to work on it and improve it into the 1930s. Thank you. There's a really good note in here about the German Naval Officer Corps' fragmented organization, and we'll call it a disregard for new technology. Jason, how is the German Navy organized from a command and control organization compared to the British Navy?

So the Royal Navy was a centralized organization. I mean, you had the Admiralty, and you had the first Lord of the Admiralty, the civilian in charge of the Royal Navy. You had the first sea lord, that leading British admiral. They led the Royal Navy. I mean, the Admiralty ordered the Grand Fleet to sea and provided goals for their operations. But the Imperial Navy had a starkly divided command structure. I mean, there had been, when the country was first united in 1871, there was a unified command structure for the Navy. But that had been divided by Kaiser Wilhelm II into multiple naval commands, all with competing roles and responsibilities, and each directly responsible to the Kaiser.

So before the war, the most influential command was the Reichsmarineamt, the Imperial Naval Office, led by Admiral Alfred Tirpitz. And the Imperial Naval Office had purview over administrative matters in the Imperial Navy, with responsibility for naval construction, equipment, etc. So Tirpitz was ultimately in charge of the purchase and testing of these new wireless systems and the installation of the systems on board German warships. I mentioned before the Admiralstab, the Admiralty staff. They had peacetime responsibility for developing naval strategy, for carrying out intelligence collection and analysis and training staff officers. They were really responsible for planning how wireless would be used. the commander of the high seas fleet the imperial navy's battle fleet had primary responsibility for the active ships of the fleet and their operations the north sea naval station of

was independent naval command as was the baltic naval station at keel and the commands of these two naval stations also enjoyed direct access to the kaiser and they also had roles in the development of wireless. The bottom line, though, the Abgerallstab was no admiralty. There was no equivalent in the Imperial Navy of the First Lord or First Sea Lord. And this divided command structure would have a direct impact on the development of radio intelligence in the Imperial Navy. Keith, do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I was going to say this whole issue of the divided command and the structure, I mean, there's also a huge institutional problem here that the Army shared, and later on in World War II, the Luftwaffe would be just part of it.

So it's this much larger issue, but it's all dealing with the fact that Tirpitz is divided and conquered. You know, he could not get control of all the units because these other departments reported directly to the Kaiser. And so what Tirpitz was hoping to do, that if war came, he would be the leader of the Navy. That never happened for a variety of reasons. But it really is the bureaucratic, narrow-minded focus on the interest of one's own department to the exclusion of other related spheres of influence that really marked the naval organization and enhanced this whole divided command, which, as I said, extended beyond the Navy.

In a history of German naval intelligence, which included all the military and all the other governmental intelligence organizations, William Wilhelm Flicka, a leading German Krippnaus from the First to the Second World War, decried that Germany's decentralized intelligence services could never overcome a petty concern with their own interest and egotistic pride in their own unit. And as Jason knows, the Battle of Jutland dramatically showed the chronically understaffed edicts and the shortage of personnel, particularly trained and experienced radio operators and photographers, reflected the larger problem of Germany's inability to create an effective centralized war economy that was directed by a unified national strategy. And you could kind of say defending one's departmental interest and the lack of coordination with the army during the war and concern always for its independence always, always took precedence. Thanks, Keith. I'd like to ask a follow-up question, as we talked a little bit about disregard for new technology on the German side.

Was that a uniquely German problem, or did the British wrestle with that as well? Well, it's not a yes or a no. From the standpoint of the Germans, it's quite marked, But there have not been the kind of comparative studies that are now emerging that would reveal what I feel strongly would be both similarities and differences between the navies would be quite constructive. I mean, we have two very recent examples of this that have occurred in the last couple of years with Dirk Bonker's militarism in a global age, naval ambitions comparing Germany and the United States before World War I. That definitely shows some common themes of both navies and then where the differences came that were a result of their particular philosophical, educational, and military environment. And we also have one for the Battle of the Atlantic and the Second World War. But from the German perspective, there are many factors at work here.

I mean, first, going back to Tirpitz, he reflected a bias against technology. In his memoirs, he relates that he had to deal with a throng of inventions that threatened to turn the Navy into a museum of experiments. And despite his own technical background in torpedoes, where he had been an innovator, of course, that was also a way for promotion, one writer has suggested, The admiral limited most technical developments, as would his successors. Tirpitz relied on his instincts to refrain from adopting any what he called premature ideas until they proved that they were practical, just as the submarine had proven earlier in the war. Regarding wireless, as I mentioned before, despite his instincts in the case of wireless, the Kaiser had actually outvoted him in favor of developing Germany's capability of communications technology with Telefunken. And so, although the Navy had the capability to explore innovative technologies, Tirpitz displayed an almost paranoid apprehension that adopting unproven technologies

or considering strategic alternatives would threaten the political and financial requirements for his fleet plan. Because remember, Tirpitz had to work through both the Kaiser and through the Reichstag. However, the rapid pace of innovation forced even a reluctant Tirpitz to invest what funds he could make available or the pressure suppliers in improving U-boats, the diesel engine, and developing not one but two types of aviation, both the airship and the airplane. Innovations that would play, certainly the airplane, obviously, would play a significant role in future naval operations. And again, there's many factors.

A second one I would say is the Kaiser's emphasis on character, on personnel, personality building, his emphasis on command, contributed to the attempt of the Office of Corps to differentiate what they called the executive sea officer from mere technical specialists. The growing complexity, however, of naval warfare required more familiarity with technology. And this was done at the expense of other subjects that had been in the Naval Academy before, foreign languages. But they required a general overview of ship's machinery, the new technology, and mastery of its weapons.

And we also see from a recent study how the senior leadership of the Navy's top commanders in World War I, they show how Tirpitz's dominating influence and dogmatic adherence to a strategic concept crippled their own strategic thinking and prevented alternatives that they might consider. The growing rise of technology also created a growing gap between the command officers and the engineering officer corps and other technicians as well. And these problems would not fully be resolved until really after World War II. A third point, I'd say the climate, the lack of scientific and technical instruction in the education and training of German officers limited their ability to appreciate the principles of technological process, especially the older generation because they had to go through the tremendous growing pains of the earlier stages of innovation in weapons and shipbuilding in the period actually even before 1870 particularly had bad memories the officers inability to understand the capabilities and

threats of wireless as well as not ignoring recommendations made and not implementing played a key role in the navy's inability to address its security issues in wartime for For example, despite their belief that the range of German radio transmitters to sea was too limited to be received by more distant land-based British listening stations, you know, they just ignored it. And the Navy's wartime experiences later showed otherwise, that they were wrong. And this was an assumption that Kleikamp actually judged as a fatal error. Fourthly, as in the case of the investigation of Germany's intelligence security, The assumptions of selected evidence, whether in signals communication, the surface fleet, or the U-boat war, reflected the self-blinders imposed by the German Navy's intellectual limitations and biases.

Inside the service, both before and during two world wars, rationality clashed endlessly with irrationality. And as in the case that the German Navy made for unrestricted submarine warfare, the military experts and civilian supporters set the tone of the debate, laid down its ground rules, defined its parameters, and closed off all other options, which, in the case of evaluating the effectiveness of German signals intelligence, meant failing to effectively address problems for almost three years. And then just the final problem, to bring it up to date, the same rationalization of the Navy's conduct of the war and approach to weapons technology, which, of course, we later saw as operations research, mirrored the Navy's reactions to warnings and indications that it allowed its intelligence to be compromised from the very beginning of the war in early 1914, which Klykon calls the most egregious one as the disastrous capture of the Mataberg signal book in August 1914, when again the Admiralty staff simply ignored the warnings and didn't take any effective action or to revise the code books or do the necessary costly labor and time-intensive changes that might impact tactics, organization, or other procedures. Beasley also notes the cumbersome size of the captured signals book, a result of the design for visual signaling that the Germans used in emergencies,

but it included over 34,000 three-letter groups. The German confidence in deciphering the coded messages without frequent keys changing shows that they had no conception, says Beasley, at all of the requirements of signal security In a similar pattern to World War II, the Germans suffered from a false sense of security in regard to the codes as secure, but were too preoccupied with a physical compromise of the codes rather than an analytical solution. Perhaps the most telling summary of the British approach to its security, its success, and the German failure is, again, another statement of Wilhelm Flicka, who stated at the end of World War II that Route 40 had ensured that the German Navy could not possibly be successful. Thanks, Keith. I'm going to ask my final question, but I think we may have covered it already. You tell me if you have anything to add. Was there a difference between the way the Germans approached their communications and intelligence from the way that the British did? Jason, were you taking this or I was doing a little bit more? If you want to start, go ahead.

Okay, well, there was a marked difference in recruitment and staffing. Both Kleitamp and Bonatz, again, as I said, formerly headed B-Deans, acknowledged a bias against civilians and military matters by many of the naval officers. B. Deans, for example, at one point added six academics in mathematics, linguistics, interpretation, engineering, and chemistry. The German Navy believed that familiarity with life aboard ship in general, that naval routine proved a great help in intelligence. And, of course, one officer observed mathematical knowledge is regarded as a lesser value, causing mathematicians to often lose themselves in, quote-unquote, useless theoretical research. But the British, on the other hand, as we all know, and there's movies about this, had a quite different appreciation of the ability of their academics to add value to communications intelligence. While Room 40's recruitment process initially had difficulties with staff distinguishing between naval and military messages or differentiating codes from ciphers, the bottom line is that the rich diversity of talent, of personnel, that the British brought in proved invaluable. Just to add quickly on, so there are actually some even more fundamental differences between the British and German approaches.

I mean, the Royal Navy had a, as I mentioned before, a strictly centralized effort in radio intelligence. Room 40 was established in the Admiralty's old building right next to the operations division. And they had one primary duty, decryption of enemy or foreign signals. The Admiralty recognized early that this new source, radio intelligence, could give them a strategic advantage. It could provide early warning assorties by the German high seas fleet. It could allow them to sail the Grand Fleet in time to intercept the high seas fleet. So the Admiralty did everything they could to protect this new source. They limited its use until they could find an opportunity to catch the German fleet at sea.

They severely restricted knowledge of this new source, access to the product, to only the most senior naval officers. I mean, the first lord of the admiralty, Swinson Churchill, the first sea lord, second sea lord, the chief of the Navy war staff, director of naval intelligence. There was only a handful of admiralty or of senior officers within the admiralty that had access to this material. And as far as sea-going admirals, just Jellicoe, Beatty, Bacon, and Commodore Turbott were the only ones that could get any product while they were at sea. The Germans did this totally differently. They had that divided command structure, and that was reflected in the intelligence organization. The main decoding station was in Neumünster in northern Germany, near between Hamburg and Kiel. Neumünster fell under the administrative control of the naval station at Kiel.

There were three other decoding stations, one in Tondern on the Jutland Peninsula, just north of the current German-Danish border. It was administratively under the North Sea Naval Station in Wilhelmshaven, a station in Bruges, which was under the administrative control of the Marine Corps in Flanders, and a station in the eastern Baltic at Libau, modern-day La Paya. On paper, these stations were all under the operational control of the Apparel Shop in Berlin. But in reality, there was always tension over who commanded these stations and who led the effort in radio intelligence. And the way the Germans approached this new source is also different. I mean, they used it as a tactical or operational level tool. They did not use it as a strategic tool. You know, warships were tasked to collect British signals.

And the radio officers on board were expected to carry out first-level decryption of those signals. So the station at Mill and Munster would periodically publish decryption guides for the fleet. You know, top-secret material. And they would push up to 200 copies of these documents for distribution to every ship that had a radio on board. This was simply a totally different model than the one we're used to reading about. In addition, I mean, Room 40, again, had that one single task, decrypt enemy signals. The German decryption stations were all dual tasks. They were all responsible for monitoring German fleet communications and relaying operational messages in addition to collecting and decrypting enemy signals.

And this was just a tremendous drain on their manpower. They didn't have access to any captured British code books. So every success the Germans had was achieved through pure, brute cryptologic work. And it's really quite a fascinating story. It's what I think Keith and I are both thrilled that we've been delighted to be working on. Yeah, Jason, if I could put my Milan Vigo-shaped hat on for a second here and talk about operational functions. As I read the story and as I've listened to the two of you speak today, it seems like the British are using function intelligence to support maneuvering fires very specifically. But I cannot come up with a purpose for the German intelligence gathering other than for the sake of having gathered the intelligence.

Were the Germans attempting to actually exploit what they're gathering in a certain way? Or is there a piece of this story that I'm missing? No, they were, but it was for a tactical use. I mean, again, so you have the Battle of Jutland that takes place, and this is not part of the article, but it's part of my dissertation. And Room 40 is looking at, did the German fleet sail? Where are they? The Neumannstrasse is trying to sort of do that,

but they're doing it in the sense of ensuring that every battleship, every warship afloat is copying their own foreign traffic and doing their own decryption on board and then using that to figure out what's going on well that simply was not going to happen and it didn't happen and it was a huge failure from that perspective so they're really end up using it throughout the war more for the u-boat war for finding targets for u-boats they do try to look the fleet but it's it's really just a different mindset that the germans had than the one we're used to seeing with the british and later or two the americans thank you both very much for agreeing to come on today uh any final thoughts from either of you before i close it out keith

and when i go no i'm i'm set so i just take my side thank you very much for having us on board i mean it's it's been an absolute pleasure to talk about this i think keith and i love to talk about this, and it's great to do so in this forum. So thank you very much. Yes, absolutely, Jared. Absolutely. Well, thank you both for coming on. I'd like to thank my guests, Keith Byrd and Jason Hines, for joining us. Keith, can we find you online, and what are you working on next? Right. Well, I'm on academia.edu and researchgate.net, and I've been corresponding with people all over that are interested in German naval history through that medium. I'm currently finishing part two of one of Oxford University's online bibliographies. This is German Naval

Seapower from 1918 to 1995. And actually, in doing that and other work I've done, I'm hoping to follow it up with a major article or even a book based on the theory of Germany's long, difficult struggle with its trying to deal critically with its past from basically its beginning in 1848 to the present, and its effect on civil-military relations, strategic operational thinking, and planning through two world wars. I think there's a very large story to be told there, and it's never been brought together in one place. So it's an ambitious project. I look forward to reading it. We just did record a podcast a couple weeks ago about German civil- military relations, and a lot of it had to do with dealing with their past. Jason, how about you?

any projects in progress? It sounds like you were definitely still working on the dissertation. And then can we find you online anywhere? So like Keith, I'm on academia.edu and researchgate.net. Those are the two places I'm online. And as far as projects go, I am consumed by my dissertation. And we'll leave it at that. But again, thanks so much for everything. Absolutely. Gentlemen, thanks again. And to our listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll We'll see you next week. Thank you for watching.