World War One – little known aspects of the great catastrophe

With the 100^th anniversary of the official (but not the actual) end of what is now known as the First World War, the volume of the commemorations grows ever louder. Poppy mania grows too, threatening to become a consumer splurge of celebration rather than a discreet remembrance of the Urkatastrophe (the original catastrophe) of Europe’s 20^th Century.

Without the WWI there would have been no such cataclysm of millions of dead and injured in the war itself, but also no Bolshevik Revolution (and consequent millions of deaths), no war-debt generated slump in the 1920s & 30s, no rise of fascism, no WWII (with consequent millions more deaths and injuries) and no Cold War.

How the 20^th Century would have unfolded we can hardly guess at. No doubt there would have been other challenges but it’s hard to imagine any outcomes worse than those generated by the ‘Great War’.

In this posting, I want to mention a few of aspects of the war that have received little attention in the UK over the last few years of commemorating the war.

The discussion about the war in the UK has rather concentrated on criticising the allegedly undesirable effects of the role of the ‘war poets’ and ‘Oh What A Lovely War’ play/film in shaping modern attitudes to the slaughter in the fields of Flanders. Behind this theme lies the objective of many British military historians to challenge the dominant ‘lions led by donkeys’ narrative of the war.

A sub-theme of the hundredth anniversary in the UK has been whether Britain was right to engage in the war.

The strongest argument against that participation is the point made above – that the long-term outcome of the war was worse than any other conceivable course of events by not partaking.

The weakest argument against participation is that it was, one way or another, unavoidable. It is said about two neutral nations, the Netherlands and (until 1917) the United States, that while they weren’t interested in the war, the war was interested in them and, one way or another, were dragged into some form of participation.

It is difficult to escape two guesses as to what would have happened if Britain had stayed out of the war: first, that Germany would have won and become the dominant power in Europe and second, that dominance would have led to conflict between the would be imperial power (Germany grossly dissatisfied with its scattering of islands and handful of continental African possessions) and the existing imperial power (Britain with its global empire).

The outcome of the war would have been interested in Britain and it would have faced a much greater continental power than in 1914 and one in control of the continental Channel ports thus threatening Britain’s naval hegemony.

Historians still debate whether the German invasion of neutral Belgium was the real cause of the British government’s decision to partake in the war or whether that was a suitable justification for a war effort primarily aimed at defence (and eventually expansion) of empire.

I will only say that there is substantial evidence that the British government seriously considered invading neutral Netherlands to gain control of Rotterdam and its entrepôt port through which German trade predominantly flowed.

For balance it should be said that Germany too considered invading the Netherlands (it could easily have swatted the small Dutch armed forces). In the end both Britain and Germany decided that a neutral Netherlands was more useful to them than a conquered one.

But the point remains that Britain’s righteousness over Belgian neutrality was convenient. Britain certainly bullied neutral Netherlands into helping the British Royal Navy enforce its trade blockade of its foe.

Another point that needs to be made for British audiences is that the First World War was indeed a world war and not one restricted to the trenches of north-west Europe (and with a nod to the Dardanelles). There was ground fighting in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The fighting continued after 11/11/1918 in Eastern Europe and the Balkans as well as Russia until depending on your definition, to at least 1923. (And at the other end there is actually a case for arguing that the war actually started in 1911 with the Italian invasion of North Africa).

But, if we stick with the traditional timescale, the war had its immediate cause in the Balkans in July 1914 and the first battles were fought in Serbia. In British historiography it is all too easy to overlook that the war on the eastern front was as important as the brutal struggle in the trenches. The Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire effectively never really recovered from the defeats they suffered in, respectively, Galicia and East Prussia in 1914. But both empires stumbled on until 1917/18.

The British myopic focus on the trenches of Flanders prevents us from developing a proper understanding of the global nature of the war.

Another little known aspect of the war is the German sabotage campaign in America (and on its Atlantic trade) in the sinking of scores of ships (by placing delayed effect fire bombs in their cargo holds) and blowing up American port facilities culminating in the massive ‘Black Tom’ explosions. Even less well known are the, fortuitously, botched attempts to use biological weapons to kill horses in America (and on the border between neutral Spain and Portugal).

The story is little known for two reasons: first, it took time for the US to realise what was going on and to blame Germany and second, because Woodrow Wilson was desperate to keep the US out of Europe’s imperial war and thus didn’t want to have to confront Germany over its sabotage activities and thus risk conflict.

As is well known, America declared its neutrality, but Germany saw an asymmetric neutrality that allowed the US to grow rich by exporting food and military supplies to Britain and its Allies, while saying it would happily export food and munitions to Germany and the Central Powers. But, this was an empty offer, as Germany couldn’t get at those supplies because of the British naval blockade.

This led, as is also well known, to Germany in January 1917 declaring ‘unrestricted submarine warfare’ with subsequent sinking of American merchant ships. This in turn brought the US into the war (aided by the revelations of the famous Zimmermann Telegram proposing to bring Mexico into armed conflict with the US, see: The Zimmermann Telegram).

What is less well known is that this is really a rather too pat a narrative. Woodrow Wilson in 1916 became increasingly frustrated with Britain and the Allies for not going along with his peace initiatives, while Germany at least gave the impression of going along with them even though it was actually planning intensification of the war through the use of unrestricted submarine warfare.

This conflict between Britain and the US came to a head just before Germany made its fatal mistake by declaring the submarine offensive. Wilson by the end of 1916 tried to stop private loans (arranged through the J P Morgan banking empire) to Britain just as it was running out of assets to sell. If the loans had dried up Britain would no longer have been able to pay for its war with Germany. And as the loans to Britain were used in part to lend on to France and Russia, German victory would have been all but inevitable.

But Germany did not know this as it lacked the Intelligence Service capability of acquiring this level of information in the US, concentrating its efforts instead on its angry response to the perceived asymmetric neutrality of the US with its sabotage and submarine operations.

As is well known, despite the defeat of Russia between March and October 1917, the entry of the US into the war in April 1917, effectively ended Germany’s chances of fending off defeat by introducing the potential for large numbers of fresh, new troops to the Allied side. However, again there are some less well-known aspects to this apparently simple narrative.

First, American troops did not actually arrive until the British (and Empire) and French troops had already effectively militarily defeated the German armies. The entry of America affected the German troops’ morale more than the material.

Second, Germany’s military dictatorship’s greed squandered the benefits of Russia’s defeat, as formalised in the Treaty of Brest Litovsk. The German military decided to occupy and pacify large sections of Russia for their economic and agricultural provisions. But this required a large occupying force. In turn this meant that the number of troops that could be released from the eastern front for the March 1918 ‘Kaiserschlacht’ (‘Kaiser’s battle’, but really Ludendorff’s) offensive on the western front was inadequate to gain victory.

Defeat in that offensive was the other factor that ineluctably destroyed the morale of the German armies and led, from August 1918, to the successful Allied advances towards (but not into) Germany and the armistice.

Another little talked about aspect of the war is that the British Empire that came about as a result of the war reached its greatest extent ever, having acquired German Empire’s territory in Africa and the Pacific and the Ottoman Empire’s territories in the Middle East. But even at its zenith, the British Empire was beginning its decline. Having achieved the great imperial dream of having territory all the way from the Cape to India and beyond, the Empire had over-reached.

Partly this was because of the way the war undermined the acquiescence of Empire’s subjects who saw their European masters in a new light and many of whom had been engaged to fight in the European’s wars (especially, but far from exclusively, in the Middle East).

Historian Guoqi Xu wrote in 2014, “China, India and, to a certain extent, Vietnam, in 1918 were fundamentally different from the way they had been in 1914 – socially, intellectually, culturally and ideologically. The sea changes that had taken place occurred to a great extent because of war experiences and broad dissatisfaction with Paris Peace Conference. The war also served as a turning point in Japanese history.”

But the dramatic change in the position of the European empires was also partly about power and finance. Despite being one of the winning side of the war, Britain’s global position was fundamentally changed. At the start of the war, Britain was the world’s greatest financial, communications and shipping power as well as a leading economy. In 1914, it could realistically expect to be able to use that power to strangle Germany. But over the course of the war that power was increasingly transferred to the United States.

Writing in 2014 American historian Richard Striner quotes Woodrow Wilson from 21/7/1917: “England and France have not the same views with regard to peace that we have by any means. When the war is over we can force them to our way of thinking, because by that time they will, among other things, be financially in our hands.”

Arthur S Link (one of Woodrow Wilson’s biographers), writing in the 1970s, observed that “British gold and other reserves would be utterly exhausted by April 1917; after that date, a [British] Treasury official said, Great Britain and the Allies would be at the mercy of the President of the United States. Wilson probably did not know the precise details. But he did know that he had the power to absolutely coerce the Allies.”

As I am writing this blog posting (3/11/2018), the BBC News is reporting that Donald Trump, the US President, is imposing tight sanctions on Iran and intends to use American control of the global financial system to force third parties, such as European companies, to conform to the sanctions. It will, the President said, prevent international payments to and from Iran by its control of the global payments transfer network, Swift.

One hundred years on from the end of the First World War, if anyone needs any sense of the way Europe’s nations lost their sovereignty between 1914 and 1918, today’s news provides a good example.

It is directly relevant to this to discuss one other very little known aspect of that war, namely the Allied Maritime Transport Council. Formed in 1917, according to economic historian, Adam Tooze, writing in 2014, the Council “based in London, was made up or representatives of all the combatant governments, headed by Britain and France. Though each delegate owed primary loyalty to his national government, they collectively constituted a inter-governmental authority capable of making decisions affecting the lives of literally every inhabitant of Europe, whether civilian or solder. Given the extremity of their situation, by early 1918 it was the Entente Powers, not Wilson, who were exploring radical new forms of cooperation and coordination.”

This included joint economic decision-making, a joint military Supreme War Council and the Allied Maritime Transport Council. “British and French rations were weighed against each other in common purchasing and shipping plans. … In 1918, if Belgium continued to be fed, it was not only on account of Hoover’s organizational genius, or America’s largesse, but because the inter-Allied shipping Agency placed the priority of American relief shipments even above the needs of the home fronts of France, Britain and Italy.”

Among the governmental delegates was the French minister, Jean Monnet, better known for his involvement in post-WWII inter-governmental institutions that led to the creation of the European Economic Community. Lessons about national sovereignty have been learnt the hard way in Europe – although not if Brexit goes ahead in Britain.

A final little known aspect of the war. After the Armistice, Belgium made territorial claims on neutral Netherlands on various spurious grounds, such as the Dutch government allowing some German troops after the Armistice to return to Germany on foot through Dutch territory. The major powers, fortunately, disregarded the Belgian claims. But it is sobering to think that, even after all the sorrow, misery, hunger death and injuries of the war, land-grabbing remained a key concern in many countries – even ones which today enjoy very close relations. Elsewhere, especially in Eastern Europe, the carve up of former enemy territories prolonged the fighting with consequences we can still see today.

Intergovernmental cooperation is surely the most important product of the First World War, even if it took another, even more disastrous war from 1939 to 1945, to realise that lesson.

As we commemorate the ‘peace’ of 1918, let us not lose sight of important lessons that can be learnt from the lesser-known aspects of the Urkatastrophe as well as the major events that dominate the narratives.

The full story of Codebreaking in the First World War see

Paul Gannon: Before Bletchley Park: The Codebreakers of the First World War

“Colossus arrives today”

‘Colossus arrives today.’ These words were written by Max Newman at Bletchley Park at the end of a rather technical internal note on 14^th January 1944. Colossus was the world’s first large-scale electronic computing machine, so in retrospect we can interpret Newman’s words as announcing the birth of the computer age.

But at the time these three simple words were just one item of information passed from Newman to the head of Bletchley Park, Edward Travis. Newman was in charge of one of two major codebreaking units at Bletchley Park tackling what is now usually called the ‘Lorenz cipher machine’. The main content of the note (reproduced below) is  about the day to day challenges of cracking the cipher.

We can recognise now that the comment about Colossus arriving that day was historic, but Newman and his team might easily have found that Colossus didn’t perform as well as needed and Colossus’s arrival would merit only a footnote.

The Lorenz cipher machine (a version of a class of machines known as the Geheimschreiber or ‘secret writer’) was used at the highest level, linking Hitler with his army commanders in the field (while the less complex Enigma cipher machine was used at lower levels in the German Army).

The Lorenz SZ40/42 Schluesselzusatzgeraet (Cipher attachment device) version of the  Geheimschreiber class of cipher machines (seen here without its cover and showing its 12 cipher wheels) were connected to a landline & wireless telecomms network linking ‘teleprinters’ and allowing ciphered messages to be transmitted all over occupied Europe. 

The Geheimschreiber was an immensely complex cipher. It required flawless performance of about 18 million logical calculations repeated several times over to decipher a 2,000 word message using complex statistical methods – and had to do so within a short time. The cipher machines were attached to electric typewriters called teleprinters (known as ‘teletype’ in American English and as ‘Fernschreiber’ in German). The teleprinters were linked in a wide network (known as WANDAnetz) all across occupied Europe and Germany itself. Bletchley Park had intercepted the ‘non-morse’ messages (sent in a binary code rather than the dots and dashes of morse) from 1941 and the German armed forces started to bring the new system into operation.

By 1943 Bletchley Park was intercepting dozens of non-morse messages every day and had worked out how to crack the cipher, but it was a slow, gruelling task. Mechanical aids were needed to speed up the process.

Newman and his staff didn’t know if Colossus would work. Some influential people at Bletchley Park doubted whether 1,500 electronic valves (known as ‘tubes’ in the US) could be harnessed to perform millions of calculations in a few seconds with perfection – any transient electric current which affected the valves would cause Colossus to produce garbled information rather than the precise statistical data it sought in order to decipher the secret messages.

The bulk of Newman’s note concerned rather obscure technical issues related to an electromechanical machine, called the Robinson, which had proved that the statistical approach could work, but which was not reliable enough or fast enough to offer a practical solution. The electromagnetic ‘relays’ used by the Robinson operated in milliseconds, while electronic valves worked in microseconds. Valves were thus the only chance of producing an effective machine.

Tom Flowers of the Post Office Research Establishment had come up with the idea for the valve machine, Colossus, in 1943 and he and his team worked for months to construct the first version. Meanwhile, as the note shows, Newman’s team at Bletchley Park was struggling to keep up with the intercepted messages. No wonder he was eager to inform his boss that Colossus was due to arrive that very day.

A reconstructed working version of Colossus is on display to the public at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park: http://www.tnmoc.org

It took a while for the machine to be wired up at Bletchley Park and it went into service in February 1944.

The machine performed brilliantly, better than anyone had expected. The failure rate was ‘negligible’, said Newman later. The fears about the reliability of valves were proved to be unfounded. And, though the German Army signals service introduced a new complexity to the cipher machine at this very time, it caused Newman and his codebreakers little problem as they had the power of Colossus to calculate its way through the added layer of security.

The decryption process involved several stages and initially Colossus was intended to perform one task, discovering the ‘wheel settings’ in use for all messages sent that day (or longer). Other steps were still necessary to decrypt the message into plain language as each message had its own ‘wheel starting positions.’ Human codebreakers used pen and paper to break each individual message once Colossus had worked out the wheel settings.

An example, from February 1945 (not 1944 as marked along the top), of a ‘plain language’ decrypt. The plain language is confusing as it includes teleprinter commands as well as letters and figures encoded as letters; eg HEERESGR = Heeresgruppe or Army Group. 

But the flexibility built into Colossus’s design meant that when more Colossus machines became available, they could be deployed working out the ‘wheel starting positions’ as well, so reducing the time taken for messages to be deciphered down to a few hours. The flexible use of the basic logic circuits is a key aspect of what we call the computer.

Colossus is only the best known of various electronic machines, with names such as Dragon and Proteus, that were subsequently designed and introduced at Bletchley Park for the Geheimschreiber decryption operation, along with an array of other electro-magnetic machines. Thousands of messages were intercepted, often by machines, at distant wireless stations, transmitted to Bletchley Park over ‘teleprinter’ lines and then processed by machines and people, producing hundreds of decrypts.

Bletchley Park was not just the site of Colossus, the first large-scale computing machine, it was also the world’s first electronic information processing factory.

Bletchley Park and the National Museum of Computing

A Bletchley Park internal report in August 1944 recorded that the Lorenz/Geheimschreiber ‘has the highest strategic value of all sources of Signals Intelligence. The problem of solution has always been the complex and, owing to the introduction of new precautions by the enemy, has recently become tougher … The solution has always had to be carried out by mathematicians of the first rank.’ One can only add, aided by telecommunications design engineers of the first rank.

Notes:

1 – Quote about Colossus arriving today, National Archive file reference HW14/96, 18/1/44 (reproduced below). Quote on the strategic value of Geheimschreiber decrypts, HW14/110, 25/8/44.

2 – Colossus lacked a key component of modern computers, namely stored program control, but it made the same type of logical calculations in electronic fashion as modern computers so it is best called a ‘computing machine’ rather than a ‘computer.’

3 – There were different versions of the Geheimschreiber used by the Luftwaffe and German Navy; these machines were broken but they were not exploited. This was because Enigma gave good intelligence on navy and Luftwaffe operations but not on the German Army. The Lorenz version of the Geheimschreiber was used by the German army command so at Bletchley Park all resources were concentrated on it to fill that critical intelligence gap. Geheimschreiber also means ‘private secretary’.

4 – Chi and Psi are names given by Bletchley Park to different ‘layers’ within the Lorenz cipher. Colossus’s primary task was to ‘de-Chi’ an intercepted message by using statistical techniques to identify and remove the Chi layer of the cipher; this then allowed further ‘hand’ and, later, machine operations to remove the Psi layer of the cipher as well to reveal the original message.

5 – the whole project was codenamed ‘Fish’ at Bletchley Park and individual wireless links used by the Germans were given fish codenames. Bream was Bletchley Park’s codename for the German armed forces wireless link between Berlin and Rome

For an account of the cipher machine, the intelligence it produced and the role it played in the war, see:

Colossus: Bletchley Park’s Greatest Secret by Paul Gannon

http://paulgannonbooks.co.uk/styled-5/

National Archives file reference HW14/96, 18^th January 1944

Memo from M H A Newman to E Travis

Report on Progress

I

1 – On the basis of about a month’s experience of the P5-limitation it can be said that there is no substantial increase in difficulty in the machine methods of setting Chi’s. The motor setting has not been seriously attempted so far, since they can be found without difficulty by hand. The Psi-settings cannot be found on the Robinson machines, but should be obtainable on Colossus if corruption is not too great.

2 – Contrary to our expectations, the Bream wheels did not change on 10 January, so that the methods which have been worked out in detail for the machine-breaking of wheel-patterns (made necessary by the P5-attachment) have not yet been tested.

3 – Examination of that last 80 messages attempted shows that 20 failed to come out, and all but 7 of these 20 gave no break-in (ie, the first run having failed to give anything, the message was at once abandoned.)

II

1 – Although the coupled (4-tape) Robinson is not yet in operation, the number of messages has been rising, principally owing to the increase in the number of Wrens.   In the last three weeks the number of messages set was week ending 5 Jan 20, 12 Jan 18, 19 Jan 22 (six days only). Before this the best was 12 per week.

2 – When the number of messages set increases still further, a hold-up is threatened on the tape-making and decoding side. The Post Office thought that they could find all the necessary Auto-transmitters and Reperforators, but suddenly discovered that the supply has dried up, with the result that both our tape-making plant and Tester’s decoding machines are held up. Unless some Auto-transmitters are rapidly found, Tester will not be able to decode all the messages we set, from early February onward. [handwritten note: ‘Welchman is doing what he can.’]

3 – in conjunction with the installation of a direct teleprinter line from Knockholt to this wing of Block F, the general (non-operational) registeries of this section and Tester’s are being amalgamated, in a room in this wing.

4 – Colossus arrives today.

M H A Newman

The Zimmermann Telegram, January 1917

One hundred years ago, in the middle of the First World War, after a period in which it had scaled down its submarine attacks in the Atlantic to appease the US government, Germany was preparing to launch what was called Unrestricted Submarine Warfare.

Some German diplomats feared that this would be an error and would enrage the US and bring it into the war. But the German military dictatorship had made up its mind. The bloody stalemates at Verdun and the Somme during 1916 made such great attritional ground offensives unattractive to the military and the increasingly effective British sea blockade of German trade made life difficult for German people and for the economy.

And the German military leadership was not especially worried about the US, which it considered to be a military irrelevance (following the poor performance of the US army when it was sent into Mexico in 1914 to pursue a Mexican gangster and ‘teach the Mexicans to elect good people’).

Also, the German military leaders were convinced that unrestricted submarine warfare, which would threaten neutral ships heading to Britain and France, would bring the Allies to their knees in a few months, long before the US could ship any troops over to the European battlefields (and, they hoped, such troop convoys would anyway be sunk en route).

An intercepted message, September 1916 from the German Chancellor, Theobold von Bethman Hollweg, to the German ambassador in Washington, Count Johann von Bernstorff, illustrates the drive to unrestricted submarine warfare. Despite victorious battles with the Russian army, ‘It is, however, still doubtful if we shall succeed here [in Central and Eastern Europe] in attaining a success which would terminate the war in the course of this year; we must therefore reckon for the present with a longer duration of the war. In connection with this the Imperial Navy promises itself by a ruthless resumption of the avoided submarine [warfare] in view of the economic position of England a rapid success which will make the arch-enemy England in a few months more inclined to thought of peace. For this reason the High Command of the Army has had to include a ruthless submarine warfare in its measures, (with a view) among other things also to relieve the position on the Somme.’

The new German foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann (appointed to replace someone who opposed unrestricted submarine warfare), had the job of informing the German embassy in Washington about the new policy. The German ambassador would, in turn, have to inform the American government of the onset of attacks on its ships and citizens on the ocean waters. So Zimmermann drew up a telegram giving details of what the German ambassador was to say to the US secretary of state. He also instructed the German ambassador to wait until the day the submarine campaign was launched to tell the Americans in order to achieve as dramatic announcement.

Zimmermann, or perhaps others in the German government circles, also devised another little plan. It was decided to offer the Mexican government support in reclaiming Texas, New Mexico and Arizona (acquired from Mexico by the US between 1845 and 1848) if it would declare war on the US jointly with Germany. There were also vague hopes of enticing Japan to join the war but these were not progressed.

German Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg told US representative Colonel House and American ambassador in Berlin, Gerard, on 22^nd November that ‘If his suggestion that Germany wanted peace should be continually ignored, Germany would be forced in response to adopt hard measures, but this would not be Germany’s fault … What do these matters in Belgium matter compared to the hecatomb of [German] lives lost on the Somme since last July?’

Zimmermann faced one very substantial problem in all this. At the start of the war in August 1914 Britain’s first bellicose action was to cut through Germany’s transatlantic telegraph cables so it had no easy way of communicating in secrecy with its foreign agents and diplomats – except by radio signals which would have been open to easy interception by the Allies.

At the end of 1916 and the start of 1917, as Germany was discussing and deciding on submarine warfare, the recently re-elected US president, Woodrow Wilson, was intent on getting peace talks going between the European belligerent powers.

Wilson agreed to allow the German government to communicate with Bernstorff in Washington by bundling in some German diplomatic telegrams (in a German code) with US diplomatic telegrams (in US code) on US channels on the transatlantic cables between Copenhagen and Washington.

The condition was that any telegrams sent in this way should concern only German preparations for responding to the Wilson’s peace plans.

But, Germany had already decided on a stepping up in the war with its submarine campaign. And it used Wilson’s ‘peace channel’ to prepare for its fierce war in the Atlantic.

However, here we need to bring in another player, Britain. The cable from Copenhagen did not cross the Atlantic. In fact it went to a cable station just north of Newcastle on England’s north-east coast. From there telegram traffic for America would be relayed on a landline to London, to the Central Telegraph Office and then re-transmitted on another cable to Cornwall, finally it would be sent on a cable from there to dive into the Atlantic to resurface in Newfoundland and another series of landlines to Washington. In Washington the cable would have been directed to the State Department to be handed on (with great reluctance by the Secretary of State acting only on direct instruction from the president).

At each state the telegram (encoded) contents were written down for re-transmission. This made it easy to make a copy in London that was forwarded to Room 40 of the Admiralty building in Whitehall, where the naval codebreaking unit was based. It arrived in Room 40 on 17^th January, well before it reached the desk of the German ambassador in Washington. So even before Bernstorff saw the telegram,  Room 40 codebreakers were busy trying to pry the message open.

This was a difficult task for the code used to hide the plain language contents of the telegram had only recently come into service for use between Berlin and Washington. Room 40 had only broken very limited parts of the code when the message was intercepted so its initial efforts revealed some tantalising glimpses of a potentially important message but without revealing the key detail.

The partially decoded message read: ‘Most secret, decipher yourself. We propose to begin on the 1^st of February unrestricted submarine warfare. In doing so however we shall endeavour to keep America neutral …? If we should not (succeed in doing so) we propose (to Mexico) an alliance upon the following basis: (joint) conduct of the war; (joint) conduct of peace. (…An obscure passage…).Your Excellency should for the present inform the President secretly (that we expect) war with the USA (possibly) (…Japan) and at the same time to negotiate between us and Japan … (Indecipherable sentence meaning please tell the President) that … our submarines … will compel England to make peace in a few months. Acknowledge receipt. Zimmermann’.[i]The sections in brackets are marked as such on the archive copy of the files on the Zimmermann telegram affair and indicate guesses as to a meaning. Elsewhere there are wholly indecipherable parts indicated by ‘…’.

When the telegram arrived in Washington at the German Embassy the staff there set to work to decode it and then prepare to forward the message intended for Mexico City. However, the German Minister in that city did not have the new codebook and it was necessary to use a code that had been employed for some time. Room 40 had broken about 50% of this codebook, so Room 40 arranged for a copy of the message to be acquired in Mexico City (by early February).

Whether this was achieved through bribery, blackmail or theft is not clear, but once so acquired it was rapidly forwarded to Room 40 where the whole of the Zimmermann Telegram could be decoded.

The dilemma then for Room 40’s boss, Captain Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall, was then what to do with the telegram. The contents of the telegram were pretty explosive if they could be revealed. But two key secrets had to be kept. First, it was vital that Germany did not discover that Room 40 was intercepting and decoding its radio and cable diplomatic traffic. Second, it was very important that the US government did not realise that Room 40 was also eavesdropping on its communications.

In fact, Room 40 had broken the US diplomatic codes earlier in 1916 and studied its diplomatic messages with intensity. America was the key to the Allies sustaining and potentially winning the war. Knowing as much as possible of its attitudes and plans was critically useful to the British and French.

It was because Room 40 was tapping American diplomatic traffic that it saw the Zimmermann Telegram, an obvious German code (to experts who could notice that sort of thing), bundled in with traffic in American code. Rather than proteting to teh USA about its unneutral action, Room 40’s Hall decided it was better to observe Germany’s diplomatic communications.

The Mexico ruse served both purposes. The Americans and the Germans thought that the telegram had been intercepted in Mexico – though there was a subtle difference in that the Americans were aware that it was British Intelligence had acquired the telegram, while the Germans led into thinking it was spirited away through ‘treachery’ within their own Foreign Service.

The contents were revealed to the US Ambassador in London and then to Woodrow Wilson who – on realizing that he had been duped by the Germans into thinking they were using the cable channel to talk peace but were actually stirring up war against the US – exclaimed, ‘Good Lord, Good Lord’.

The full text of the telegram in English is: ‘Foreign Office telegram 16 January No. 1. Most Secret, decipher yourself. We intend to begin on 1 February unrestricted submarine warfare. We shall endeavour in spite of this to keep the United States of America neutral. In the event of this not succeeding we make Mexico a proposal of an alliance on the following terms: make war together, make peace together. Generous financial support and an undertaking on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. The settlement in detail is left to you. You will inform the President of the above most secretly as soon as the outbreak of war with the USA is certain, and add the suggestion that he should on his own initiative invite Japan to immediate adherence and at the same time mediate between Japan and ourselves. Please call the President’s attention to the fact that the ruthless employment of our submarines now offers the prospect of compelling England in a few months to make peace. Acknowledge receipt. Zimmermann’.

Congress and the press were informed and stories were invented cover up the fact that the British had originally intercepted the telegram. It was anyway denounced as a British forgery by pro-German newspapers and Senators, but Zimmermann acknowledged that it was genuine.

Already pushed close to the limit by loss of life following the introduction of unrestricted submarine warfare, but not enough to convince Wilson that he should take American into the bloody slaughter of Europe, the Zimmermann Telegram finally impelled the US into the war.

It was just in time for the Allies. The Russian empire had been knocked out of the war by the German army and was about to experience revolution, counter-revolution, revolution anew, civil war and famine.

Fortunately for France and Britain, the Germans were unable to restrain themselves from occupying large parts of Russia, which needed large numbers of troops to maintain the occupation. This meant that fewer troops than expected were available for transfer to the western front by Germany. When it launched its last hope offensive in March 1918, hoping to split British and French lines before large numbers of US troops could be shipped to Europe, the German army failed to breakthrough and eventually was beaten back, leading to the Allied summer offensives which put Germany on a back foot and then to its surrender in November.

The interception, decoding and timing of the decoded Zimmermann Telegram thus were handled to perfection. But there was still a big secret to maintain. When the war ended some details of what had happened leaked out, but Blinker Hall had already prepared false leads and dodgy information. For example, it is commonly claimed (even in recent books) that the Zimmermann Telegram was despatched in two or three different ways. But we now know that it was only sent on the US channel. This is thanks to the fairly recent release (just over 10 years ago) of four previously secret documents on the Zimmermann Telegram held at the National Archives.

The fascinating story of the Zimmermann Telegram is only one aspect of the way Room 40, and its army equivalent MI1(b), helped the Allies to win the First World War.

The full story is told in Paul Gannon Before Bletchley Park: The Codebreakers of the First World War

Relevant National Archives, file reference numbers: HW7/1; HW7/17; HW7/34; HW7/19; HW3/35; HW3/187; HW3/177; HW3/178, HW3/182; CAB8/16; ADM223/773.

The Secret War

nonmorse review of

The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939-1945

by Max Hastings

Max Hastings takes on a massive subject in his latest book, the role played by intelligence and secret operations in the second world war. He covers the activities and operations of all the major belligerents, on both sides of the conflict, gathering in one sizeable volume an overview of a war within a war.

There have been scores of books written about the British codebreakers of Bletchley Park, but the spies, codebreakers and guerrillas of the wider global secret war have been covered in less copious detail. Hastings succeeds in bringing some form of order to this unwieldy topic and he details the exploits of the variously brave, craven, frightened, shameless, devious, dedicated, comic and, above all, clever people who helped, or failed to help, provide the warring nations on all sides with ‘intelligence’.

The term ‘on all sides’ is an important one as, while the major thrust of the war was the binary opposition between the Allies and the Axis, there were in fact all sorts of sub-plots and sub-conflicts, especially in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Hastings deftly exposes how many spies and guerrillas, paid or harrassed into danger by one side, actually worked for another side (or both, or more, or none except their own bank balance).

One can’t help raising a quiet cheer on reading about Dr. Wilhlem Bitter, a psychiatrist at a Berlin hospital who agreed, late in the war, to find a channel for negotiations between the Western Allies and Germany to stave off total Soviet victory. As Hastings recounts, ‘Having got a safe distance from Germany, Bitter sent just one hysterical message home, saying that the only answer was to overthrow Hitler, then vanished forever.’

Inevitably, for all the side conflicts, the core of the book necessarily focuses on this titanic struggle between Nazi Germany and its opponents.

Hastings takes an unemotional look at the secret war. This is no thrill-seeking account of daring do. ‘The only question that matters,’ says Hastings right at the outset, ‘is how far secret knowledge changed outcomes.’

“The only question that matters is how far secret knowledge changed outcomes”

He illustrates this theme by pointing out that the ‘scale of Soviet espionage dwarfed that of every other belligerent and yielded a rich technological harvest from Britain and the United States, but Stalin’s paranoia crippled exploitation of his crop of other people’s political and military secrets.’ Stalin’s failure to accept ample intelligence of the German attack in June 1941 is one of the greatest intelligence failures in history, though, unlike Hitler, Stalin did learn to be slightly less impervious to things he didn’t want to hear, though his subordinates, fearful for their lives, were careful about what they reported to him.

Similarly, Hastings judges that Germany and Japan lost the secret war not so much because of failures by their intelligence agencies, but because the military and political leaderships discounted the need to know about those they had chosen to attack. ‘The German and Japanese leaderships made their decisions shrouded in bewilderment and ignorance about their enemies, partly because of an institutionalised resistance to the objective examination of evidence, emphasised by Hitler’s refusal to explore the economic potential of the Soviet Union and the United States before he declared war on them.’

“The German and Japanese leaderships made their decisions shrouded in bewilderment and ignorance about their enemies”

Hastings also lays bare the failures of Allied intelligence, including long periods when British or American wireless communications were intercepted and decrypted due to security weaknesses. He suggests, however, that these Allied lapses may, in the long run, have been unwittingly advantageous. The Nazi military machine may have been encouraged to believe that their Enigma and Geheimschreiber cipher machines were invulnerable to Allied codebreakers because there was no hint at all of any Allied breaks of German ciphers in any of the Allied messages, especially British naval communications, that the German military could read. This led them to conclude that an enemy who could crack German messages would have the sense to plug the holes in their own systems.

In reality, the work of British and American codebreakers was becoming critical to Western Allied military operations against Germany although Ultra did not start to fulfill this role until late 1942, by which time it had become obvious that the Germany would, sooner or later, be defeated. Access to the information made available by Ultra did not guarantee military success, as shown by the muddled operations that followed the great success of D-Day and the ‘break out’ from Normandy in 1944 and the failure to predict the Battle of the Bulge.

Hastings concludes that ‘The indispensable element in making all intelligence useful, in peace or war, is that it should pass into the hands of a wise and effective leader; if such a person is absent, whether general, admiral or statesman, then even the most privileged information is worthless’.

The global intelligence war during the second world war included many pointless operations that saw agents sent to certain death. Hastings estimates that perhaps as little as ‘one-thousandth of one percent of material garnered from secret sources by all the belligerents in World War II contributed to changing battlefield outcomes’.

“perhaps as little as ‘one-thousandth of one percent of material garnered from secret sources by all the belligerents in World War II contributed to changing battlefield outcomes”

For all the efforts of spies and agents, Hastings is clear that it was eavesdropping on enemy wireless communications that was the key aspect of the intelligence war. The achievements of British and American codebreakers, ‘were very great’ he writes. ‘They elevated intelligence, hitherto a little respected branch of staff work, to an unprecedented importance in operational planning.’

This aspect of the second world war is highly relevant in the modern world. As Hastings observes, ‘the importance to national security of intelligence eavesdropping, codebreaking and counter-insurgency has never been greater. Cyber warfare is a logical evolution of the process that began in Room 40 during World War I and expanded vastly’ among British, German and American codebreakers during World War II.

“the most deadly threat of all – a few hundred tweedy bespectacled young English academics labouring in drab suburban Bedfordshire”

On Bletchley Park he comes to the view that ‘Many things about the 1939-1945 era remain disputable, but few informed people would question the proposition that Bletchley was one of the most remarkable institutions the world has ever known, and one of the greatest achievements in British history, towering over any narrative of the nation’s part in the conflict … While the Third Reich executed wholesale spies, traitors and saboteurs who threatened its security, its functionaries remained insistently oblivious of the most deadly threat of all – a few hundred tweedy bespectacled young English academics labouring in drab suburban Bedfordshire.’

Gordon Welchman and Tom Flowers at Bletchley Park

nonmorse review of BBC2 programme, ‘Bletchley Park: Code-breaking’s Forgotten Genius‘ on Gordon Welchman and Joel Greenberg’s biography, ‘Gordon Welchman: Architect of Ultra Intelligence‘

On 7^th September 2015 BBC Television broadcast a documentary about Gordon Welchman, one of the key figures at the British codebreaking operation Bletchley Park during the second world war. The programme set out to boost Welchman’s reputation which it implied had suffered from lack of attention in contrast with the much better known figure of Alan Turing.

The programme claimed that Welchman was  a ‘forgotten genius’ who was in reality on a par with Turing, in his contribution to both Bletchley Park’s wartime work and to the post-war information and communications revolution. The commentary declared that Welchman’s improvements to Turing’s codebreaking machine, known as the Bombe, deployed to decrypt Enigma messages, was an example of Welchman’s ‘fantastic mathematical intelligence, easily a match for that of Alan Turing.’

 Welchman had a ‘fantastic mathematical intelligence, easily a match for that of Alan Turing.’

A recent biography by Joel Greenberg, Gordon Welchman: Bletchley Park’s Architect of Ultra Intelligence, makes similar if less dramatic claims for Welchman. “Along with Alan Turing, he had in effect developed a radically new production-oriented approach to machine cryptanalysis. [Bletchley Park] then turned to Welchman to put his plan in place and he too on leadership of the group which would ultimately decrypt over one million German Air Force and Army signals. In 1943 he was given responsibility for all ‘machine’ developments at [Bletchley Park] and while he was not directly involved in its creation, the world’s first electronic computer, Colossus, was designed and built on his ‘watch’… Welchman’s contribution is seen by many historians and former [Bletchley Park] colleagues as being fundamental to its ultimate success.’

Welchman was undoubtedly a brilliant mathematician, consummate information processing engineer, talented administrator and celebrated figure in the development of systematic analysis of electronic surveillance intelligence. His work at Bletchley Park on ‘traffic analysis’, inventing a way of speeding up Turing’s bombe codebreaking machines, and from 1943 as head of mechanisation, as well as his post-war work, especially in the US on military communications systems, certainly places him among the founders of the modern electronic surveillance, communications and information processing world.

Welchman’s worked with Turing during the period when Turing conceived a a machine, the Bombe, that could help work out the initial wheel settings on the Enigma. Welchman also developed a technique, known as the ‘diagonal board’, which speeded up the work of the bombes and made them practical devices for timely decryption of intercepted German Enigma messages.

Traffic analysis, first developed during the first world war by the French and British codebreaking units, uses any information about intercepted messages excluding the message content. Today that sort of information is known as ‘metadata’ and is subject of controversy over the scope of security and police access to such data in democratic societies. Welchman certainly organised and extended traffici analysis into a significant tool alongside systematic decryption.

However, all this does not necessarily mean that Welchman was a genius on a par with Turing. He was undoubtedly one of many brilliant people, both at Bletchley and in the US who invented and developed electronic computers and telecommunications. To say more than that is difficult to justify.

Bletchley Park today

Welchman was a complex human being, who damaged his own life and career by breaking the lifelong loyalty to the code of silence imposed on Bletchley Park’s staff in his desire for recognition of his contribution. His 1982 book, The Hut Six Story: Breaking the Enigma Codes, led to his downfall within the eavesdropping and military intelligence community in Britain and the US. His security clearance was withdrawn and he could no longer work on classified projects in the US or Britain.

Both the BBC2 documentary and Greenberg’s book liken Welchman’s treatment with that meted out to Alan Turing who was prosecuted and chemically castrated by the British state in the early 1950s, probably causing Turing to commit suicide. However, Welchman’s downfall (comfortable retirement on the eastern seaboard of the US) was the outcome of his choice to speak out about things his former colleagues expected would be kept quiet. Turing did not, as far as we know, ever give away details of his wartime work. His downfall (prosecution and suicide) was the outcome of the state outlawing his essential nature. The two are not really comparable. Welchman’s motivation for publishing his book was primarily about gaining recognition for his wartime contribution and about ensuring an income in old age, though he added an ending to his book concentrating on modern lessons of traffic analysis and related military communications issues, warning the western world that it was ignoring lessons learnt during the second world war.

Tony Comer, GCHQ historian and former analyst says that, ‘What ‘Welchman and his advisors] didn’t stop and think was the way in which the cryptanalyst approached the breaking of Enigma was as sensitive in the 1980s, and is as sensitive today, as it was at the time’.

Unfortunately both the BBC2 documentary and Greenberg in his biography have decided to paint Welchman, not just as a genius equal to Turing, but also as a superhero. As well as being a fine administrator, perspicacious communications analyst and innovative cryptographer, they convey the story of a flawless personality hounded to his death by a cold, callous bureaucracy.

At one point Greenberg writes that, ‘Welchman would not let a particular episode with a colleague distort his overall view of him.’ Elsewhere he observes that, ‘Throughout his professional career, before, during and after the war, Welchman demonstrated the admirable quality of being able to separate personal issues from professional ones.’

Greenberg writes that, ‘Welchman would not let a particular episode with a colleague distort his overall view of him.’

To test the veracity of these statements we need to take a look at one particular episode that we do know about from Welchman’s own reports written at the time and now open to public view at the National Archives at Kew.

In 1943 Welchman was appointed Assistant Director (Mechanisation) at Bletchley Park. This put him in charge of all the projects using machines at the Park. As noted above, Greenberg writes in his biography of Welchman, that ‘while he was not directly involved in its creation, the world’s first electronic computer, Colossus, was designed and built on his ‘watch’.’ Colossus was invented, like the bombe, to work out the initial settings of a cipher machine, but rather than Enigma, the machine was known as the Geheimschreiber or ‘secret writer’ (or to be more precise a version known as the Lorenz SZ42). This was a much more complex machine than Enigma and demanded more complex machinery than the Bombe to work out the initial wheel settings. The first machine intended to do this was an electromechanical monster known as the Heath Robinson. It proved that the codebreakers, working under Max Newman, could use machinery to decrypt Geheimschreiber messages, but the codebreaking machine was plagued by mechanical faults and ran too slowly. Colossus, invented by Tom Flowers of the Post Office, was a massive electronic replacement.

Flowers began working on the machine at the same time that Welchman was head of machine developments at Bletchley Park. Yet Welchman was strangely diffident about Colossus and its inventors. Writing in his book, The Hut Six Story, Welchman said, ‘There were many developments of which I knew nothing until I saw [Professor Brian] Randell’s [1975] paper on the Colossus … Randell tells us that, some time after the start of the [Heath] Robinson project, T H Flowers – who was a high-ranking telephone engineer in the British Post Office research organization – was brought into the picture, probably at the suggestion of Turing who had worked with him on an earlier project and had acted as an advisor to the Testery [another part of the team working on the Geheimschreiber enciphered messages]. Flowers threw all his electronic expertise into solving Newman’s problem with the machine that became known as Colossus.’

‘But I was too occupied with other work to find out much about what had happened before I became A.D. (Mech). There were many developments of which I knew nothing until I saw Randell’s paper on the Colossus, mentioned above. In particular I was not aware of the major contribution that had been made by Max Newman … Toward the end of the war I worked a little with Max, but I was not aware of his early work at Bletchley. According to Randell, Newman volunteered his services, joined a research section under Major G W (Gerry) Morgan in September 1942, and was assigned to the team known as the “Testery”. This was a sub-section under Major (later Colonel) Tester that was struggling by manual means with the [Geheimschreiber] problem.’

‘I was never in close touch with Tester’s work, and have forgotten the details of the problem, but Randell claims that it was Newman who had the idea for tackling the problem by mechanical means. He went to Travis, as I had done in 1939, to obtain permission to set up a new section that came to be known as the “Newmanry”. He collected a team of mathematicians, and got Wynn-Williams to build the first machine, an electro-mechanical device known as [Heath] Robinson.’

Bletchley Park mansion

This half-hearted account of Colossus, and Welchman’s connection with it, may well in part be due to the problems Welchman encountered from the authorities when he tried to write about Bletchley Park. The details of the Colossus story were then still considered too sensitive to be made public. Welchman cleverly tells us that he didn’t know about Max Newman’s early contribution or the early work of the Testery, but fails to give any other information – except what could be gleaned from Professor Randell’s paper. This neatly met the restrictions of the authorities. But as Assistant Director (Mechanisation) Welchman was more intimately involved with Flowers and Colossus than he lets on.

In fact there was much bad blood between Welchman and Tom Flowers (and his boss Gordon Radley at the Post Office). The Post Office men were at the pinnacle of the technical hierarchy of the Post Office telecommunications system and arrogantly criticised the work of those who had worked with Welchman on the bombes and other projects. It is little wonder then, that these men did not get on at all with Welchman.  He even tried to have Flowers reprimanded for his ‘reckless use’ of scarce electronic valves. If this reprimand had been issued it would have meant an end to Flowers’s work at Bletchley Park – so that Colossus would never have been invented, built. Eleven Colossus machines were in operation by the end of the war.

 Welchman even tried to have Flowers reprimanded for his ‘reckless use’ of scarce electronic valves.

The best documented row between Flowers and Welchman involves an intricate story involving different solutions studied at Bletchley Park for dealing with the introduction, at a critical stage in the Battle of the Atlantic, of a fourth wheel in German navy Enigma machines. Bletchley Park called on the help of the company, BTM, which built the Bombes, of the radar development centre TRE, and Flowers’s department at the Post Office. This mix of groups did not work well and some intense personal dislikes got dragged into different technological approaches. More detail of the technical aspects behind the row can be found in Colossus: Bletchley Park’s Greatest Secret (pages 250-253) and in part only in Greenberg’s biography of Welchman (pages 77-79).

Welchman wrote in a memo to his boss at Bletchley Park that he had visited a Mr. McLarren of the Admiralty supply division to discover the position with availability of electronic valves.

‘I also wanted to find out the truth about the valve supply situation, because Mr. Flowers does not seem to mind how many valves he uses, while BTM are being urged by the Admiralty to use as few valves as possible. Mr. McLaren said at once, apart from all other considerations, we should certainly use [electro-mechanical] relays instead of valves if we possibly can because of the serious shortage of valves. He said that Dr. Radley must know this perfectly well. He took a very serious view of the reckless use of valves by Mr. Flowers, and said that the Post Office could be very seriously reprimanded for this offence, if it could be established … He [Radley] might have informed us [Bletchley Park] of the acute shortage of valve instead of encouraging Flowers to squander them … The influence of Dr. Radley and Mr. Flowers must be completely removed.’ [File reference: National Archives, HW62/5, 8^th June 1943]

Welchman wrote to the director of Bletchley Park: ‘The influence of Dr. Radley and Mr. Flowers must be completely removed’

Welchman’s assessment of Flowers’s technical and organizational brilliance was, in hindsight, extraordinarily wrong. Welchman wrote: ‘…Mr. Flowers’ idea of co-operation is to run things himself … It may be that Mr. Flowers honestly thinks that he is better able than Mr. Keen [of BTM], Dr. Wynn Williams [of TRE] and myself to direct the policy of Bombe production, but, if so, I am quite sure he is wrong. He is probably very good at his ordinary work, and also at designing apparatus for a definite problem that he can understand, but I have found him very slow at grasping the complications of our work and is minds seems altogether inflexible.’ Incredibly, Welchman went on to say that Flowers was ‘not very good with electronics.’ Clearly, there is an element of condescension here towards Flowers, the engineer of working class origins, a man who wasn’t even a university graduate, let alone a Cambridge academic.

Welchman said of Flowers: ‘He is probably very good at his ordinary work, and also at designing apparatus for a definite problem that he can understand, but I have found him very slow at grasping the complications of our work and is minds seems altogether inflexible.’

Joel Greenberg cites part of this document in his biography of Welchman, but surprisingly he makes no reference to Welchman’s grossly erroneous judgment on Flowers, whose work on Colossus, both in conceiving of how electronics could be brought to bear on the complex Geheimschreiber problem and in getting the machines constructed in an incredibly short time and getting them to work, was one of the great technological advances of the information age.

If Welchman had had his way in removing Flowers’s influence, the result would have been that Colossus would never have happened and the intelligence it revealed, especially in helping the success of the D-Day landings in north-west France would have been lacking.

The D-Day and post-invasion intelligence produced with the aid of Colossus ‘has the highest strategic value of all sources of Signal Intelligence’ [Intelligence report: HW14/110, 25th August 1944]

In promoting Welchman’s claim to be ‘architect of Ultra intelligence’ or classifying him as a genius that shortened the war by two years, we do history a disservice by redacting his great blunder.

Max Hastings, in his overview of the role of intelligence in the second world war, The Secret War: Spies, Codes and Guerrillas 1939-1945, concluded that ‘while he [Flowers] forged a close working relationship with Turing, who often visited Dollis Hill, the formidable and influential Gordon Welchman took against the engineer, who was certainly no ‘gentleman’ in the parlance of those days. Welchman treated him with disdain, as a mere artisan with ideas above his station.’

‘Welchman treated [Flowers] with disdain, as a mere artisan with ideas above his station’, Max Hastings

It is likely that it was Alan Turing, who had long discussions with Flowers and could see his ability to understand Bletchley Park’s problems and to apply technological innovation to solving them, who spoke up for Flowers and prevented Bletchley Park management from removing his influence as demanded by Welchman.

Colossus was in fact only one of several electronic machines developed for working on breaking the Geheimschreiber ciphers. Other machines had names such as Dragon and Proteus. They played specific roles within the Newmanry and were not as advanced or complex as Colossus, but Flowers’s invention showed that electronics could be harnessed to the codebreaking effort of Bletchley Park.

Greenberg writes in his biography of Welchman that, ‘Throughout his professional career, before, during and after the war, Welchman demonstrated the admirable quality of being able to separate personal issues from professional ones.’ Yet this row with Flowers shows that this was not the case. Clearly Welchman allowed his disagreement with Flowers to cloud his judgment. Flowers’s achievement is on a historic scale that dwarfs that of Welchman.

 Greenberg wrongly claims that ‘Throughout his professional career, before, during and after the war, Welchman demonstrated the admirable quality of being able to separate personal issues from professional ones.’

Let Welchman’s achievements stand on their own, part of the array of brilliance displayed by many at Bletchley Park. But let’s not promote him to mythic, flawless status. Welchman was a brilliant mathematician, information scientist and administrator, but on one of the biggest questions facing Bletchley Park he was a fool who allowed his personal dislike of Flowers and Radley to get in the way. Luckily, the true genius at Bletchley Park, Alan Turing, did appreciate Flowers’s understanding of the cryptographers’ needs and of the potential for electronics to address those needs and was able to undermine Welchman’s foolishness.