VICTORY FROM THE AIRWAVES: A coded history of World War I
Most of them were not even in the armed forces, but their contribution to the Allied victory in the First World War — tracking movements of the German fleet and its lethal submarines, detecting German saboteurs and Indian and Irish revolutionaries in North America, and facilitating the huge intelligence coup that brought US into the war on their side, and much more — was immense but not that known.
Their achievements have largely been overshadowed by the prominence earned by the activities of Bletchley Park in the Second World War, due to novels like Robert Harris’ ‘Enigma’ and films like its 2001 screen adaptation starring Kate Winslet, and Benedict Cumberbatch’s ‘ The Imitation Game’ (2014) about the tragic life of Alan Turing,l the father of modern computer science. But those leading these activities had themselves earned their spurs in the Great War.
And it is this group of some British men — and later women — of singular talents but united with a penchant for problem-solving that finally receive their long-deserved place in the spotlight here. They were a diverse and “eccentric bunch”, says authors Wyllie and McKinley, “recruited mostly from academia — linguists and classicists were highly prized — but they also included writers, artists, theatre folk, crossword fanatics, retired military men.” It was the early dawn of the Age of Information that ensured that their services would be required — a revolution in communication technology had been seen with advent of the telegraph and wireless, which ensured nearly instant communication over huge distances, but was not secure against interception. Thus the requirement of coding transmissions, which in turn, required those who could break these codes.
The British were not the only ones in the game. As Wyllie and McKinley note, “over the course of the war, all the combatants set up codebreaking organisations and they all achieved notable successes. The French w were extremely effective on the Western Front; the Germans cracked Allied naval and army codes; the Austro-Hungarians broke the Russian codes and vice versa; even the Americans, latecomers to the conflict, established their own ‘Black Chamber’ of cryptanalysts”.
But, as the authors argue and demonstrate, “none of them matched the sheer scale, scope and diversity” of the British codebreakers who “achieved the most significant and wide-ranging results, ultimately c changing the course of the war”.
For this, they not only sketch the genesis, c composition and activities of the British Navy’s ‘Room 40’ and the Army’s ‘MI Ib’ sections, but also how their actions played in the real world, and the escapades of some field agents, like Compton Mackenzie and A E W Mason, both who would go on to become successful novelists. — IANS