DRAMAS OF THE WAR

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 22 April 1935, Page 10

DRAMAS OF THE WAR

ROOM OF MILLION SECRETS AMAZING STAFF AT WHITEHALL WORK THAT ENDED IN SMOKE

Just a tiny wisp of blue smoke, wriggling and writhing up into the clouds from out of a tall chimney stack crowning a great building in Whitehall ... A-

Had you chanced to stroll along Trafalgar Square any evening .during the fateful years of the .Great »*ar you would have seen that wisp of smoke leaping skywards from the Admiralty—always at the self-same hour.

Only a puff of smoke—yet it carried into oblivion secrets the bare whisper of which might have sent whole battalions of men to their death; might have laid London in ruins and strewn it shell-battered streets with corpses .... For it came, that smoke, from the fireplace in “40,0.8.” —the Room of a Million Secrets, the “Bluebeard’s Chamber” of the War years in Whitehall.

Here, in this mysterious room, the existence of which was known only to a little group of men, the secrets of which were zdnlousiy guarded, Sir Alfred Ewing, scholar and. ■ scientist—whose death has just been reported—and his amazing staif of cryptographers, decoded every enemy wireless message, every telegram, every spy’s cunningly written scrap of information—and saved Britain and jjjie Allies from disasters 1

So dangerously secret, so valuable was every fragment of data that passed through the hands of the men at “40, O.B.” that. each' evening before the staff ceased work they had to see that every single document used. during the day was burnt to ashes in the fireplace.

“LEAVE NO TRACE 1”. “Leave no Trace!”—this was the order they were sworn to obey. “The ‘4O OBJ of the Great War is gone,” said one the staff. “It remains only as a symbol of the work carried out there by my old friend, Sir Alfred Ewing—the real ‘Man Who Won the War.’ “But the remembrance of its secrets, its tense drama and infrequent ■comedy; the mind picture of some of the fateful hours I spent doing this confidential work, will cling to me for the rest of my life.

“Sometimes I seem to see again the ghostly figures of the men and women whose fates were sealed, who were trapped and sent to their doom through the ruthless, systematic unravelling of their innermost secrets that went on at ‘4O, 0.8. ‘ “I think of the poor, misguided Roger Casement, the rebel Knight, of the brave Carl Lody, the first German spy to be executed in England; of the voluptuous, unscrupulous Mata Hari, Princess of Espionage; of the terrible drama of the Jutland battle, the first news of which trickled in to us through an intercepted wireless message. . . -

“I think of all these tragic figures of tho War, and of the high dramas in which they played their part—and, frankly, I sometimes shiver a little at the thought of the load of secrets which in those days I was forced to carry locked in my breast .... “While I was at ‘4O, 0.8.’ the men and women who worked alongside were known to me. only as X or Y or Z. To mention their real names meant looking for trouble, and to have given a hint of what they were doing would have meant the Tower of London..

“The usual procedure at ‘The Room’ was that round about midnight the word ‘Silence’ in German would come stealing out from the ether from the enemy’s chief wireless station. “From that’ moment Sir Alfred Ewing and his staff would he on tiptoe with expectation and keen attention . . . Then would follow a stream of cyphers;and figures which kept the staff hard at work throughout the night, trying to get these into plain English. “Even Scotland Yard knew nothing of tho existence of ‘The Room.’ But sometimes there would trickle through to us the name of a man said to be highly dangerous and of whom we had no record.

“This name would be passed on to Sir Basil Thomson at the Yard. , If the name was on the Yard’s ‘Black List,’ then its owner would immediately be swoopotl upon and find himself confronted with Thomson at Scotland Yard.

“The night of my greatest suspense was when the battle of Jutland took place. “We got to know that the German Fleet had come out. It was noticed that all during that terrible day officers were running up and downstairs . . . An Oxford professor who worked with me whispered, ‘There’s something big happening.’ Well did I know it. I knew that the biggest naval battle in history was impending. “But I remained dumb. Laie that night, when the staff had gone home, the features of the chief officers were a study. We had just got the news of the loss of the Invincible, the Queen Mary ancl the Defence.

“Even then we did not know what our losses amounted to. We did not even know whether the engagement had resulted in a German or a British victory* ....

LUSITANIA HORROR ‘T was present on the awful day when an innocent-looking message Hashed from the German submarine U2O was handed to the decoding staff. “Judge our horror when we read

the news that the U2O had sunk the Lusitania! “There were times when the German ciphers Uecame unreadable, or almost impossible to read. At these times gloom would descend upon us, and the fear that Potsdam had discovered ns. Naturally, when even part of a message would be decoded —then our hearts beat high with joy.’’