Decisive Battles: Frontiers 1914 - Part 5c (Interlude) SIGINT

 

On the last Frontiers post commentor Carsten reminded me (Thanks, Carstens!) of another August 1914-thing that changed how armies fought; "Signals Intelligence", or in the term the U.S. Army uses, SIGINT.

Now you could say that SIGINT wasn't exactly a new 1914-thing. Enemies had been trying to steal each others' secrets and communications since, well, probably the Late Stone Age. After all, when you know what your enemy is going to do, and when and where, you can be there (or not be there...) sooner, in greater force, and with surprise.

And both battles and campaigns before the 20th Century were affected by the loss (or gain) of communications, obviously in the form of things like written orders. Back in 2008 we discussed the 1862 Battle of Antietam, where the accidental discovery of the Confederate operations orders ("Special Order 191") should have resulted in a crushing U.S. victory.

The big difference between 1862 SIGINT and 1914 SIGINT was the invention of "wireless telegraphy" (principally) by Guglielmo Marconi around 1895.

Of course the use of electrical power - which the new "WT" or "Radio" depended on - to send signals was as old as the mid-19th Century, when the electrical telegraph had replace the "optical" telegraph (stuff like this thing, a signal station with movable panels or arms to send semaphore signals...)...

...and telegraph wires were strung all over the world.

The problem with wires - and all the armies of 1914 still strung and used miles and miles of wire, mind! - were multifarious. First you had to string them, which took people and time, since existing wires often didn't run where the armies needed them.

Then you had to protect them, particularly from artillery fire, which as you can imagine was a very "1914" kind of problem.

And third, the wires literally tied you in place. If you moved away from the existing wires you'd be voiceless and deaf until you reached (or ran) a new set of wires,

So the ideal way to use electricity would be to power some sort of equipment capable of sending and receiving electrical pulses (since that's all the telegraph was; turning "on" the current for a signal, turning it off for a gap or pause) through the air, without the wires.

Marconi did that, building on the work Hertz had done, using a form of electromagnetic radiation; "radio waves".

Here's the thing about those early radio sets, though.

They were big and heavy. They were also fairly fragile, and didn't like rough handling which, as you can imagine, is kind of a "war thing". And they required a steady supply of electricity, meaning if you couldn't just plug into the wall socket (not a "war thing", either) you needed a generator, also big, heavy, and fragile (or two guys riding a stationary bike...

...which is kind of weird when you think of it as "war", but, then, war is fucking weird.)

Which is why the first radio SIGINT was by navies and directed at warships.

Which is where we talked about this in our 2013 discussion of the Scarborough Raid and the activities of the British "Room 40" naval SIGINT people involved.

By the time the first rounds went downrange in 1914 the armies of all the major combatants had radio, though, and were developing their own SIGINT capabilities. The U.S. Naval Institute has a good little summary of early radio warfare, including the drawbacks, including that...

"...its use alone might reveal one’s presence and position to the enemy. (T)he very presence of wireless messages in the air will enable the enemy to guess that something is happening. By the time World War I broke, radio-direction-finders were coming into existence, which would enable the enemy to pinpoint one’s forces."

What didn't help was the crudity of the early radio transmitters:

"(I)n the early days of radio...any time one sent a message over the air, practically any one with a set could pick it up. (W)ith the spark system and the primitive receivers, there was no selectivity of stations...as late as 1914 the equipment in use emitted a signal many kilocycles wide, one signal covering perhaps the whole of the present broadcast band."

To a former GI used to the frequency-hopping sophistication of modern military commo gear that's utterly horrifying, the COMSEC equivalent of adorning your foxhole with flags and streamers and ginormous speakers blaring Bohemian Rhapsody whilst you prance around it in a pink tulle' tutu. 

Why not just paste a sticker on the front of your helmet reading Just Shoot Me Now!?

The SIGINT people of 1914 kind of had to figure this out for themselves, though. 

Famously the German radio intel people were reading Russian e-mails in August that provided extremely useful intelligence about the Russian offensive in East Prussia that led to the thumping win in the Battle of Tannenberg, but as noted in this NSA briefing,

"When the war broke out...there was no fixed organization in either the German or Austrian side for intercepting foreign radio traffic...field regulations for German telegraph troops did foresee the the possibility of listening in...when their own was dormant.

At the time there were two rather large fortress radio stations in eastern Germany which had relatively little traffic of their own and were consequently in a position to listen to the enemy...(e)ntirely on their own initiative a few operators (at the fortresses of Konigsburg and Thorn (Note: this 19th Century fortification was located near the current Polish city of Toruń), and the former civilian station at Breslau) attempted...to listen to Russian army traffic as a sporting proposition, so to speak; it was not long before the first messages were intercepted but no one knew quite what to do with them..."

Fortunately for 8. Feldarmee commander GEN von Hindenburg the fortress CO at Thorn decided to send these intercepts on to Army HQ on his own hook. 

But you get the idea; this was an ad hoc sort of thing for the German Army.

It sounds like the French were a bit better organized. Here's what the WarHistory.org article about SIGINT on the Western Front says:

"The French Deuxième Bureau on the Western Front was well prepared for the signals war...even though they did not have the benefit of the plain text messages that Hindenburg enjoyed reading during his campaign in the east. However, they were able to decipher the German messages quite easily."

Some of the French SIGINT was simplified by sloppiness in German COMSEC brought on by the stress and pace of the "right wing sweep".

"(German 1. Feldarmee commander) Von Kluck’s rapid advance...used radio extensively to co-ordinate the units of his army according to plan. German radio operators...sent transmissions correctly in cipher to begin with, but as the heat of battle increased, messages were sometimes sent in plain text and security procedures began to flag."

Apparently the German Höheres Kavallerie-Kommandos (the HKKs) were the big problem:

"The Cabinet Noir was the cryptographic department of the Deuxième Bureau (French Military Intelligence) and intercepted over 350 radiograms transmitted by the German cavalry corps over a two-week period during the campaign. Radio station staff had no clear instruction on wireless security so the call-signs of each station in the army invariably started with the same letter and remained unchanged as their advance progressed, nor was there any change in wavelength of the broadcasts. 

Cavalry units were the worst offenders, probably due to stress of their fast-moving formations...Each German cavalry control station, for instance, had an identifying letter: ‘S’ was the designation of units in Belgium, ‘G’ in Luxembourg, ‘L’ in the Woëvre and ‘D’ in Lorraine. Confirmation from some messages came in plain text and could even be clearly signed by the sender with their rank and name"

I'm not an intel weenie but even I can figure out that's not good. 

As you can imagine, the Eiffel Tower made a terrific radio listening post

It's difficult for me at this distance to tell how each element affected the course of the Battle of the Frontiers. Certainly reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance on the ground made differences, both from what the aviators and cavalrymen discovered...and what they probably should have and didn't.

Certainly SIGINT (and it's "opponent", COMSEC) made differences, too. The author of the War History piece certainly thinks that French SIGINT was crucial:

"Von der Marwitz’s cavalry were ordered by radio to provide a thin screen of lancers to cover the widening gap between First and Second armies. The French identified this as a weak spot in the German front that began to stretch for miles as the two armies advanced at an uneven pace. Using signals intelligence gleaned by the Deuxième Bureau on 8 September, the French general struck at the critical point between the two German armies’ line of advance. They soon began to threaten the German First Army with encirclement and outflank von Bulow’s Second Army in the process, causing both German armies to retreat...the German Army retreating in the face of a desperate French resistance became known as ‘The Miracle’ in public parlance. The French High Command and the Deuxième Bureau, however, knew better."

As we'll see in the next several parts, reconnaissance troops on the ground and in the air played a big part in the "Miracle" as well as the engagements leading up to it, so...is there a definitive "answer"?

No. Like much of modern warfare - indeed, like much of warfare, period - the real effects and impacts of all the various factors; physical, emotional, intellectual, as well as things like weather, terrain, organizations and equipment, doctrine...are all related and interacting with each other.

All we can do from a distance is try and tease out how and why each affected the outcomes.

Certainly the radios, both as part of each side's "C3I" (command, control, communications, and intelligence) as well as the SIGINT people's use of them as enemy intelligence sources, played a role. Befitting the relative unfamiliarity all the armies had with radio, though? My guess is that those roles varied significantly, from critical to marginal to overlooked entirely.

Anyway...I thought the SIGINT part of the story was worth discussing. Thanks again, Carstens, and we'll be back later in May with the "big story" of the Frontiers; the critical Battle of the Ardennes that kicked off in the third week of August 1914.