Churchill the Young Warrior, page 33
Churchill himself had looked around the crowds of passersby in the streets of London and observed that most of them would be incredulous if they had been told that we might be close to war.7 There were, for example, allegations that railway union leaders were receiving payments from a German agent, and Churchill thought there might be some truth in it. One of his attributes was that he had no illusions about the corruptibility of anyone, and turned his attention to the dangers to Britain’s essential resources, in particular coal, which was used to fuel the British fleet at the time.
What seems obvious about sabotage to anyone today had never before entered their minds because, for example, Churchill himself had only just bought one of the newly-invented motor cars. He began to imagine how such a vehicle could be used for sabotage, and how easily it could also be made useless by cutting off the fuel supply to the engine. It was a symbol for much larger vehicles in the modern age, like railway engines and battleships which were dependent on coal as fuel. He heard from the owners of the South Wales Coal-Owners Association that four gentlemanly Germans had been noticed in the Rhondda Valley, because they had Ordinance Survey maps on which they were making notes of the positions of collieries. He invited the Secret Service Bureau to discussions on surveillance of the railways as well as the coal mines, two years after the Agadir Crisis.
By arrangement with Churchill, Captain Vernon Kell of the War Office was keeping his eyes focused for other clues of war preparation by Germany. He noted that they were making large purchases of wheat; they were practicing war maneuvers close to the Belgian border; the price of flour had suddenly risen because of Germany’s heavy purchases. What Kell’s reports suggested—although much was wildly at fault—was that on one hand Germany was taking natural precautions, and on the other, they were also focusing their own intelligence searches on Britain. As usual with all intelligence, the value was in the analysis of the intelligence material that was gathered.
One result of the Agadir Crisis was that it initiated Prime Minister Asquith’s decision to appoint Winston Churchill’s to head the Admiralty. What Churchill found there was that just as Army officers had been resisting reforms to modernize the British Army, the Admirals had been resisting reforms in the Royal Navy. He would spend the next three years reforming and modernizing it.
German Spies
Gustave Steinhauser was the German spymaster in Britain. Massive in build, he was a previous naval officer and a former Pinkerton detective. He had chosen his agents from German nationals in towns and cities with naval installations. Fortunately for Britain, none was much good at spying. They reported largely on the comings and goings of ships and the type and amount of work going on in the docks. The first one to enter the glare of press publicity was Dr. Max Schultz when he appeared in court for attempting to bribe a local solicitor for information about Admiralty secrets for an annual fee of a thousand pounds. The solicitor had immediately reported him to the police. Schultz’s ways of making contacts and obtaining information was much like some other foreign spies, by conspicuously throwing parties for local influential business or government individuals and assessing their weaknesses and possibilities for exploitation under the effects of alcohol.
Immediately after Schultz was sentenced to prison, along came Heinrich Grosse, who had persuaded a naval pensioner to supply him with information about coal supplies in Portsmouth naval barracks. Or he thought he had. But the result of his contact was the same—he too informed the police. But this time, Kell fed the spy with false information to send back to Germany. Grosse was imprisoned, too. Armgaard Karl Graves was caught in Glasgow where he was spying on an arms manufacturer making heavy guns for the new and improved dreadnought class of battleship. But he was apparently so clumsy that Kell was able to intercept his mail. A search of his premises produced incriminating evidence and he too was tried and imprisoned.
The only Englishman who was tried for espionage at this time was George Charles Parrot, a naval gunner. He had been lured by a honey trap, and an incriminating document was found in his possession. As a traitor to his country, he was sentenced to hard labor.
There were only two more cases before the outbreak of war in 1914. One was a dentist in Portsmouth with a German background and an assumed English name who offered to spy for the German Admiralty. They wanted to know about recent torpedo trials. He was trapped by a British agent and served five years’ hard labor—an increase in sentence resulting from the so-called spy scare. Adolphus Schroder ran a pub under an assumed name and had been hired to pick up any gossip useful to Berlin. Kell had been watching him secretly. He was sentenced to six years with hard labor.
While Churchill was Home Secretary, and when First Lord of the Admiralty, he had access to all the files and read them avidly to obtain more and more information about the secret world of espionage. One of the causes of naval secrets slipping across the Channel, he found, was discontent in the Navy regarding poor pay and generally poor treatment, which he was able to improve as soon as he arrived at the Admiralty. There had often been past mutinies in the British navy for those very reasons. Treatment in the British navy had always been harsh and primitive, particularly in the lower decks when sailors had been treated like the scum of the earth, and often were. They were frequently flogged in front of the other men as punishment for trivial offenses. It was intended as a warning to the others, for mutiny on board a ship on the high seas could be a terrifying ordeal for young and inexperienced officers—so the brutes had to be kept down in case they became too impertinent to control.
Churchill’s improvements came as a sign—small though it was—of a slight change in attitude towards the lower social and economic classes. And it probably came just in time, as later mutinies in the German and Russian fleets and the French army would show—for once they mutinied, they had to kill their officers.
Churchill appears to have kept the British Secret Service alert to every possible danger. But by 1913, he admitted to himself that as far as a possible sudden and unexpected invasion was concerned, British Intelligence was hardly able to detect it well enough in advance. His cry was “How are we going to get early intelligence?”8 Two British agents sent across the channel for surveillance of a coastline had been arrested immediately, perhaps because that stretch of coast had been featured in a popular adventure novel called The Riddle of the Sands.9 Consequently, their trial became an embarrassment to British Intelligence. (And, as it would turn out, the novelist’s wife was a passionate supporter of the Irish revolutionaries, even to supplying them with arms.)
Churchill did not rely entirely on Kell (sometimes known as “K”), or Smith-Cumming, for his intelligence information. He had a personal contact he called “Captain Tupper.” Tupper was a burly individual with a huge drooping moustache who had organized the National Seamen’s and Fireman’s Union in 1911. He had led a strike at Cardiff docks and also became a legend as the hero of the Bristol Channel Ports. It is typical of Winston that he could mix easily with an individual with such an unconventional and dubious reputation and do business with him. But Churchill enjoyed unconventional people, even if their imagination extended to telling tall stories about themselves. He admired their adventurous spirit. Among other extraordinary reminiscences, Tupper claimed to have been wounded twice when fighting as an irregular with the Boers in South Africa—a story that would have appealed to Churchill and was probably invented for that purpose.
Most of Tupper’s tall stories turned out to be “Walter Mitty” fantasies to cover his lifetime failures. “Tupper was born in Worthing, Sussex, the son of a coachman turned publican who ran local meetings for the Conservative Primrose League.”10 He had begun his career as an errand-boy delivering groceries while claiming he owned the shop. Today, he would probably be encouraged for his imagination and initiative.
Churchill is likely to have marvelled at his imagination and applauded his initiative, since he was unconventional himself—whereas most self-important people working in a government department or institution in those days of false moralities would have been self-righteously shocked and ready in an instant to punish the young Tupper for his impertinence. Churchill, instead, recognized how effective he was. He had been impressed by him at the Tonypandy colliery riots, when the miners grew rebelliously ugly, and Churchill had been the Home Secretary with a difficult problem of whether to call in the army to quell their rioting. But he saw Tupper cajole them, and soon have them marching around happily singing Welsh hymns. Churchill had faith in him from then on.
To a broadminded individual like Churchill, Tupper was an “irresistible bounder” who could be useful to him. His faith in him was repaid when Tupper gave him a list of possible spies for Germany among the seamen in the union who had been “too nosey about naval vessels and guns” in the Hull docks.
As the irrepressible master spy and irresistible bounder himself, Sidney Reilly remarked to a friend about Churchill, “His ear would always be open to something sound.”
Penetrating the Enemy’s Future Intentions
Churchill had given the possibilities of the uses of intelligence information a great deal of thought by the time he decided that its major goal was to put together every link in the chain of the enemy’s secrets in order to “penetrate their future intensions.” And the means to do it was by intercepting their telegraph messages. Wireless had only recently been invented and not many people knew anything about the new technology. But they learned fast, and so did Churchill. At first he accepted the common view that “interception posed no threat to naval radio transmissions.” And surely the messages between the armed forces would be in cipher? He wanted to know how it all worked. So he agreed heartily to the suggestion of setting up a new department in a room to find out. The result was SIGINT (or Signals Intelligence).
Immediately war was declared, he received a visit from Sir Henry Oliver and Sir Alfred Ewing, Director of Naval Intelligence. Ewing had two major interests at that time—one was radio telegraphy and the other was cryptography. As soon as war erupted, he was swamped with intercepts of German messages that had come by wireless, with no way to decipher them. But British Intelligence had broken Boer ciphers in the South African War. Now Room 40 became their interception room for the First World War.
One of the new inventions that the Royal Navy was worried about was the submarine. So Churchill used Room 40 to track German U-boats as soon as Germany announced it would no longer follow the traditional international convention of stopping to search unarmed enemy merchant ships: instead, they now felt free to torpedo them on sight. Each U-boat tracked was recorded with its position and number, and general comments about where it could be headed and its relationship with Allied convoys. It was in that way that they traced U-20. But they did not know that it planned to fire a single torpedo into a luxury passenger liner named the Lusitania.11 The German press proudly admitted it as a victory, but, as well as the loss of around 2,300 lives, some 10 percent were American citizens. It was one of the early signs that Britain and America were treating the First World War like some previous ones in which there had been some kind of a gentlemen’s agreement between enemies. But honor among gentlemen had already broken down. It had apparently not occurred to either nation that a Cunard passenger liner would automatically be treated by the German Navy in the same way as a cargo ship. The disaster left great scope for conspiracy theories, some of which have still not subsided.
Soon after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, labor unrest began in some of Britain’s munition factories where some workers with socialist hopes undertook storm waves of sympathy. Communist subversion now joined German espionage. It was soon followed by sabotage that included arson by foreign agents working in munitions factories. Churchill did everything possible to improve and maintain his output of arms and armor and ammunition when he was appointed Minister of Munitions. He allowed nothing to stand in the way of British troops receiving deliveries of the weapons and ammunition they needed to prevent a German victory.
“As for the Bolsheviks,” he informed the House, “they destroy wherever they exist.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
IN THE FINAL WEEK OF NOVEMBER, a German officer wrote a report about the weak points of the British tanks. They were able to conquer ground, but they couldn’t hold it. And they had no free field to fire in when limited by narrow streets or alleys where their movements were restricted on all sides. Now that the surprise element had gone from the new tanks, so had the fear. The German Army learned how to hunt tanks down and throw several hand grenades underneath them to blow them up. The Battle of Cambrai, which had begun so well, was ending in a whimper.
Prime Minister Lloyd George believed that the German army was planning a knockout blow to the Allies before the American Army was sufficiently trained for combat on the front line. They were needed urgently this summer. But Pershing resisted his pleas for battle-ready American soldiers, although he did agree to a few black regiments already in France, who would fight alongside Pétain’s French division.
In the meantime the dissolution of Austria-Hungary had begun to look like a possibility as national aspirations grew, and different ethnic and religious groups, who had always been in conflict, saw an opportunity to split away from the Habsburg Empire. First the Czechs wanted independence for their territories in Bohemia and Moravia. Then the German-speakers in Sudetenland wanted their own province separated from other “foreign” people whom they found historically repellent.
US President Wilson addressed Congress with a fourteen-point program for peace in Europe. He called for openness in diplomacy and in making treaties. Freedom of navigation on the seas would be established for all. Economic barriers must be removed, with equality of trading conditions. There would be a reduction in arms and armaments. The interests of the colonial peoples must have equal weight with the government (whose title would be determined). German forces must leave all Russian territory. German troops must leave Belgium, and the country and its economy must be restored. French territory must be freed from German occupation, and Alsace-Lorraine restored to it. Italian frontiers would be established in accordance with clear national lines, with South Tyrol going from Austrian rule to Italy. Austria-Hungary would be given an opportunity for autonomous development. In the Balkans, Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro would be restored to independence, and Serbia provided with sea access. Turkish parts of the Ottoman Empire should have secure sovereignty, and other nations in Turkey should be assured of autonomy. An independent and autonomous Polish state should be created with unrestricted sea access. And an association of nations must be formed in order to guarantee political independence and territorial integrity to all states.
Those fourteen points were intended to act as a counterweight to the growing mass appeal of Bolshevism. But the aspirations of the South Slavs for their own state were not mentioned, and many Czechs did not find anything in the language that would give them independence. Nor were the Croats or the Slovenes mentioned. And, two days after Wilson announced his fourteen points, a Finnish delegation arrived in London to obtain British support for their own independence. As with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, even in its heydays, no ethnic or religious group wanted to cooperate, or live with, or share anything with anyone else.
More lobbying took place with other small nations who sought independence by obtaining patronage from more powerful ones. Both the enemy powers and the Bolsheviks supported Ukrainian independence, while Latvia announced its independence from Russia in January. Lenin and Stalin declared support for Armenian self-determination. At the same time, Trotsky used all his wits and threats to limit any demands from Germany or Austria for any Russian territory. The Turks also sent a delegation to seek the recovery of their old lands in Eastern Anatolia.
Meanwhile, in Britain, Lord Balfour insisted that all the horrors of war were preferable to a German peace settlement. Britain had two million armed servicemen and planned to add another 420,000 or more. On the other hand, the German home front was beginning to show war-weariness and even resistance to war. Four hundred thousand workers went on strike in Berlin. The strike-fever spread to six other German cities. The German government declared martial law in Berlin and Hamburg, and drafted many of the strikers into the army. But hunger from the efficient and dogged British sea blockade left German civilians only with dogs and cats and rats to eat for meat, and bread was now made out of potato peel and sawdust.
Regardless, Austrian and German Government representatives showed no inclination to meet the conditions that the Allies insisted were essential for peace. “Isn’t German mentality a depressing thing,” remarked Edward Grey, the former British Foreign Secretary. His own solution was economic equality after the war was over. He added, “I do not see how there is to be peace with the people who still run Germany.”
Germany supported independence in the Ukraine, but Lenin’s forces invaded and declared it a Bolshevik state. Russian Bolsheviks and Ukrainian nationalists became embattled at Lutsk. Lenin’s troops entered Kiev and Odessa, then transformed Russia into the USSR or Soviet Union. The creation of a Red Army and a Red Navy followed. More mutinies occurred at sea, where sailors raised the Red Flag and attacked their officers. There were bread shortages in France and looting by thousands of hungry people.
The First American Division
New American troops were arriving every day. The 1st American division appeared on the frontline on January 18 at the St. Mihiel Salient, to gain experience without taking any action. As soon as the Germans knew they were untrained and ineffective, they attempted to demoralize them in hit-and-run raids, by killing, wounding, or capturing them a few at a time. Meanwhile, the Kaiser announced in Bad Homburg, on February 10, that “War is a disciplinary action by God to educate mankind.”1 Three days later he complained that there was a conspiracy against Germany by the Bolsheviks, President Wilson, Jews, and Freemasons.
