SECRET WAR CODE

Greymouth Evening Star, 21 November 1939, Page 5

SECRET WAR CODE

CRYPTOGRAPHERS’ VICTORIES Francis Bacon left a message in cipher which no cryptographer has been able to interpret. It may hold the answer to that long-debated question of whether or not this learned philosopher actually wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare. Mary Queen of Scots lost her head because her secret messages weren’t clever enough to baffle cryptographers. The famous French Captain Dreyfus was first exiled to Devil’s Island, later released and honoured, all through the deciphering of secret messages. The Man in the Iron Mask, a mysterious ■prisoner who walked the walls of French prisons with head shrouded, was discovered by a cryptographer to be General Bulonde. Bulonde, whose disobedience and cowardice resulted 'in his imprisonment, was a 200-year mystery. to France until a French Army officer broke down the great cipher of Louis XIV. in 1890 and revealed his identity. (This mystery is usually regarded as unsolved. —Ed.) But it wasn’t until the outbreak of the World War that the secret writing art reached its peak of importance. Even in the Boer War, the well-in-formed British officers were able to send secret messages by’ simply writing them in Latin, a language which made any script a cryptograph to the less learned Boers.

For every cipher that was devised there was a cryptographer who could break it. That single fact was responsible for some of the most dramatic episodes of the war. Starting with that August day when German-owned radio stations flashed out the message, “A Son is Born” (their code-phrase for war), every victory and every defeat had its echo in the code-rooms of the warring nations. ’ On the night of September 2, 1914, i one German army, commanded by yon Kluck, was ordered by radio to drive the French south-west away from Paris. Von Kluck never got the message, but the French did! Cryptographers easily worked out its meaning. General Joffre changed his plans. The French Army swept from Paris into the Battle of the Marne.

In October, 1917, two Zeppelins, returning from a. raid on England, hit a storm over the Channel. One was blown across France and disappeared for ever in the Mediterranean Sea. The other settled more or less gently in a French field and was captured singlehanded by a very surprised old French policeman. Colonel Richard Williams, of the United States Army Intelligence section, was very interested in knowing what had happened to the Zeppelin’s code-books. They couldn’t have been dropped on land. They couldn’t have been burned with a hydrogen-filled bag above the crew. But they might have been torn up and thrown overboard just, before the ship came to earth — and they had been!

CODE CHART Colonel Williams got a detail of men. The men got 22 sacks _ full of paper scraps. The job of piecing them all ,together proved too great. Colonel Williams was about to give up when another officer, a former yachting enthusiast, noticed some pale blue pieces among the other scraps of paper. Collected and pieced together, they proved to be the code chart of all German waters for which the Allies had yearned for two years. In addition to this chart a small book was picked up. It contained a picture of all German naval craft, together with a list of the call letters and changes in call letters for each! That’s why November, 1917. marked a Hew low- for subifiarim* warfare. Six

went to the bottom that month. Shipsinking also sank to a new low, a low from which it never recovered. The sryptographs had solved the submarine menace. It was their skill in reading and sending Russian cipher that allowed the Germans to carry out what was perhaps the biggest joke of the war. Two German cruisers were based at Constantinople—at the western end of the Black Sea. Naturally these two German vessels were greatly outnumbered by the Russian fleet which controlled that body of water. They wanted to accomplish something, but to do it while the Russians were near by would have been suicide. So the Germans waited until the Russian Fleet put to sea. Then one of the cruisers sneaked between the Russians and their land base and sent a message in Russian naval code. The message ordered the whole fleet to Trebizond —at the opposite end of the Black Sea! Days later, when the puzzled Russians returned, they discovered that the two German cruisers had made good use of their absence. Port facilities had been raided and coastwise trade had been badly crippled. • In the matter of sending their own secret messages, too, Germany hit upon a novel and, for a time, very successful scheme. The Allies realised that something of the sort was going on. Each evening, after the great German radio station at Nauen had completed its regular broadcast, a lot of what was called “lightning gibberish” flower out. over the ether. Too fast to lie understood, let alone deciphered, this “static” continued for months. The Allies recorded it. played it over, but still remained entirely in the dark as to its meaning. That is, they retrained in the dark until a group of bored British naval officers gathered in the wardroom of their small vessel in a hot harbour in the Eastern Mediterranean. With no place to go and nothing to do. they sat sipping iofig drinks and listening to a portable gramophone. Finally the last tune had been played. “Nothing left but some recordings of that Nauen lightning gibberish,” one officer announced. “Put it on. Anything’s better than nothing.” The record was put on, but the gramophone wasn’t wound up. The blurred signals slowed, became clear. A code officer, who was there, sat up excitedly. He recognised the old prewar German cipher, long ago cracked

by the Allies. The message on the record was from the German High Command to a general in East Africa. The Germans’ trick had simply been to record the message as one would a gromophone record; then to play it at five or six times its normal speed over the air. By failing to wind the gramophone, the British officer had reduced that speed to normal and solved the' secret.

It’s a dangerous and fascinationg and very important business to the nations of the world, this art of cryptography. Traps are sprung and victories won when secret' writing remains secret. Heads and kings and countries fall when they don’t.