SECRET SERVICE REVELATIONS

Evening Star, Issue 21220, 29 September 1932, Page 1

SECRET SERVICE REVELATIONS

DRAMAS OF NAVAL WAR The thrilling story of how our Naval Secret Service came to penetrate many Gorman secrets during the war is told in a book called ‘ Their Secret Purposes,’ by Hector C. .Bywater (states the London ‘Daily Telegraph’). It is a worthy companion volume to tha same author’s ‘Strange Intelligence.’ Most of the episodes of the naval war dealt with are revealed or elucidatedfor the first time, and an astonishing mixture of grim tragedy, mystery, ro - mance, and comedy is presented with expert knowledge by an author .assessing personal experience of intelligence work. Facts which might have been conceived in the agile brain of a writer of thrillers are to be met in almost every chapter of this authoritative volume, as witness the episode of the German sailor who, haring supplied his country’s foes with information, assured thereby his own doom.

This sailor reported to Allied secret agents that two German mine-laying boats would be leaving Zeebrugga on ;v given date to sow mines in the Enpli-a Channel. The information was received in time for a counter-attack to be prepared. But by an irony of fate the spy was transferred from his own submarine tq one of the mine-layers, a't the last moment, and when the vessel reached the Channel, she was torpedoed and sunk with all hands. FLOATING RAMS.

One chapter tells how the Admiralty came into possession of German plans for striking a blow at the Grand Fleet by means of an “Iron Divi-i sion.” The idea was to build a squad-1 ron of unsinkable battleships to act as a battering ram, and conceivably the sudden intervention of these mail-clad mastodons might have had something of the effect of the first British tanks in France. Mr By water writes:

They were to be low-lying, broadbeamed vessels of moderate speed, plated with armour thicker than that of any existing ship and impervious to the heaviest projectiles except at pointblank range. . . . It was their mission to steam straight for the enemy and to engage simultaneously with all guns at the closest range, possible. But although four of these supermonitors were ordered, the keels were never laid.

In these pages we learn of the great secret-service coup at Alhorn Zeppelin Aerodrome m 1918, when the airships of the latest type were destroyed, become acquainted with the methods of warship saboteurs, read the curious history of a haunted U-boat, surely one of the best documented ghost stories of the sea, and get a ne)v light on Jutland in an ‘investigation into the disappearance, “ without trace,” of the Black Prince and other ships. There is also an extremely interesting account of the latest developments in naval gunnery. If there are persons who doubt the efficiency of the Naval Secret Service during the war, ‘ Their Secret. Purposes ’ will convict them of error. Fop this startling work proves that we knew all that was going on behind a screen of secrecy which the Germans fondly believed to be impenetrable.