Category Archives: Telegraph

Signalling at the Battle of Passchendaele, July to November, 1917

By Dr Elizabeth Bruton

Military communications in World War One evolved to meet new battlefield and military challenges during this period. Battles were won and lost on the strength of an army’s ability to communicate on the battlefield. New and old systems of communications were used side-by-side and interchangeably.

This was as much true of early battles on what became known as the Western Front as well as later battle such as the Battle of Passchendaele (also known as the Third Battle of Ypres) which took place from 31 July through to 1o November 1917. The Allied plan was for French, Belgium, and British troops as well as those from the British empire including Australians, Canadians, Indians, New Zealanders, and South Africans to take the high ground (ridge) south and east of the city of Ypres. The Battle of Passchendaele is of particular interest not because it was the site of any particular telecommunications innovations but rather because signalling failures contributed to the ultimate failure of the Allied attack and secondly because the battle is representative of signalling practice and operations at this stage of the war.

IWM Q 6050 Battle of Poelcappelle. Royal Engineers taking drums of telephone wire along a duckboard path up to the front between Pilckem and Langemarck, 10 October 1917. Image available in the public domain via IWM.

Communications failures occurred at both the First and Second Battle of Passchendaele. During the early stages of the First Battle of Passchendaele on 12 October 1917, the two lead British commanders Douglas Haig and Herbert Plumer believed – due to delays in communication and misleading information – that the advance had been successful and were unaware that the German counter-attack in the afternoon had wiped almost all of the Allied advance. Of particular problem was terrain in the area around Passchendaele as well as Ypres and Messines which was unsuitable terrain for laying cables. Furthermore, the ground had been heavily bombarded by German artillery as well as intense rainfall in the weeks leading up to the attack. At the Second Battle of Passchendaele which took place between 26 October and 10 November 1917, the retreat of the 4th Canadian Division from Decline Copse was due to communication failures between the Canadian and Australian units to the south as well as German counterattacks.

The British Army commonly used telegraph cables and telephones on the Western Front to communicate between the front line soldiers and commanders. But heavy artillery (gun) bombardment meant these lines of communications were easily broken. These lines of communications were also easily intercepted by the German army, as were the very basic wireless telegraph sets used by the British Army. Despite this, the speed of telephone and telegraph communication meant they were the most commonly used telecommunications systems used by the British Army.

Ruins as telephone posts by Le Section Photographique de L’Armee Francaise, n.d. Image available in the public domain.

Belgian Field Telephone, n.d. Image available in public domain.

As a brief aside, these two evocative of photographs of field telephony in the war representing life more generally on the front were reproduced in various publications including printed periodicals such as War Illustrated News as well as postcards. These two particular photographs were kindly provided Dr Kate MacDonald from Postcards box GB9 – WW1: Postcards of life at the Front in the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera held by the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. The former postcard of Ruins as telephone posts was produced by Newspaper Illustrations in England and credited as an official photograph of Le Section Photographique de L’Armee Francaise.

IWM Q6230 Carrier pigeons: A bus converted into a mobile pigeon loft on the Western Front, July 1916. Image available in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons and IWM.

Hence alternative methods of communication were required until (so the plan went) the higher ground was taken where cables could be used. Problems with these alternative methods of communications including carrier pigeons being hindered by high wind and messenger dog handlers becoming casualties were in part the cause for the misplaced belief by Haig and Plumer that the initial stages of the attack were successful.

More generally from 1915 onwards, non-telecommunications systems of signalling were used in parallel with and as a backup to telegraph and telephones. The British Army was forced to adapt, using older forms of communication such as carrier pigeons and written messages delivered by runners and messenger dogs to keep the lines of communications open. Messenger runners had one of the most dangerous jobs in the war having to run across open ground and risk being shot by snipers in order to make sure a message was delivered. Signalling flags were also used but could be only used in the daytime but were easily visible to the enemy.

Tactically, it was around the time of the Battle of Passchendaele that the German Army switched tactics and began to use “defence in depth”, that is delaying rather than preventing an enemy attack with the hope that the enemy would lose momentum as they cover an increasingly larger area. This had an impact upon signalling: Allied forward signal parties frequently became involved in the fighting and the larger areas covered by the Allies as a result of this tactic required artillery stations to be moved necessitating the improvisation of a fresh series of artillery signal communications.

Art.IWM ART 2920 BE2c aircraft of the Royal Flying Corps fly above the clouds amidst the small puffs of artillery fire. A small section of the landscape is visible far below the cloud line (1920). Image available in the public domain via the IWM.

During the war, aeroplanes developed rapidly from kite-like aeroplanes where pilots shot at each other with small guns to bombers and fighter planes. As the aeroplanes developed during the war, so did their means of communications. At the start of the war, pilots communicated using visual signalling such as rocking their wings and flags. By the time of the Battle of Passchendaele in late 1917, aircraft were commonly used for reconnaissance and long-range artillery spotting. Indeed by this stage of the war, most artillery spotting was done by aircraft using wireless communications: pilots communicating wirelessly with artillery stations on the ground, correcting the aims of British guns firing beyond the “line of sight” (what they could see) to German targets. Wireless communication was achieved using a mixture of radio telephony (voice over wireless) and wireless telegraphy (Morse code over wireless).

For example, on 12 October 1917 – the day of the First Battle of Passchendaele – there were one hundred and twenty-four zone (ranging) calls to the artillery for fire on active batteries, troops, transport, and machine-gun posts. Source: Jones, H. A. The War in the Air, Being the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force Volume 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 206. By the end of the war, pilots were equipped with radio telephony (voice over radio) and were able to communicate over short distances with other aeroplanes and over longer distances with ground wireless stations.

National Library of New Zealand 1/2-012945-G Unidentified New Zealand World War 1 signaller on a German dug-out, Gallipoli Farm, Belgium, 12 October 1917. Photograph taken by Henry Armytage Sanders. Image available in the public domain via the National Library of New Zealand.

To conclude, the Battle of Passchendaele was not the site of any particular telecommunications innovation and indeed the lack of British success was in part due to communications problem. The landscape did cause some limitations in terms of problems laying cables but otherwise it was representative of telecommunications operations at the time: old and new signalling systems being used adjacent and interchangeably. By late 1917, wireless communication in aircraft was commonly used for co-ordinating artillery and this was very much the case at the Battle of Passchendaele in mid- to late-1917.

Sources and Further Reading

BBC iPlayer – The Great War Interviews – 8. John Willis Palmer (recommended by Graeme Gooday)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01td2np/the-great-war-interviews-8-john-willis-palmer#group=p01tbj6p
John Willis Palmer, a Signaller with the Royal Field Artillery, recalls how the mud and fatigue at Passchendaele broke his spirit.

IWM Podcast 31: Passchendaele by Kate Clements
http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/podcasts/voices-of-the-first-world-war/podcast-31-passchendaele

Jones, H. A. The War in the Air, Being the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force Volume 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934).
Internet archive: https://archive.org/stream/warinairbeingsto04rale

Priestley, R.E. The Signal Service in the European War of 1914-1918 (France) (Chatham: W. & J. Mackay & Co. Limited, 1921).
Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/signalserviceine00prie

Wikipedia: Battle of Passchendaele
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Passchendaele

About the author: Dr Elizabeth Bruton is a historian of science specialising in history of communications and former postdoctoral researcher for “Innovating in Combat”. See her Academia.edu profile for further details.

British cable telegraphy in World War One: The All-Red Line and secure communications

By Elizabeth Bruton

1902 British All Red Line map, from Johnson’s The All Red Line – The Annals and Aims of the Pacific Cable Project (1903). Image available in the public domain.

In a previous article, we’ve discussed German cable telegraphy in World War One, and now it is time to examine British cable telegraphy in the conflict. Much, if not all, British long-distance telecommunication relied on the “All-Red Line”, the network of British-controlled and operated electric telegraph cables stretching around the globe and so called due to the colour red (or sometimes pink) being used to designate British territories and colonies in the atlases of the period.

The origins and early history of the “All-Red Line”

The “All-Red Line” was operated through a mixture of public and private enterprise with the Eastern Telegraph Company (ETC) operating many of the telegraph cables in Asia, Africa, and beyond. By the late nineteenth century, telegraphy cables from Britain stretched to all corners of the globe forming a massive international communications network of around 100,000 miles of undersea cables.

News which had previously taken up to six months to reach distant parts of the world could now be relayed in a matter of hours. In 1902 the “All Red Line” route was completed with the final stages of constuction of the trans-Pacific route and connected all parts of the British empire.

This telegraph network consisted of a series of cable links across the Pacific Ocean, connecting New Zealand and Australia with Vancouver and through the Trans-Canada and Atlantic lines to Europe. Submarine telegraph cables remained the only fast means of international communication for 75 years until the development of wireless telegraphy at the end of the nineteenth century.

Security and telegraph cables

Security and reliability were an important part of this vast international telecommunications network: there were multiple redundancies so that even if one cable was cut, a message could be sent through many other routes, operating a bit like the modern day Internet (which actually has far more redundancies built in). Further security was added in the location of telegraph line landfall: the “All-Red Line” was designed to only made landfall in British colonies or British-controlled territories although this may have compromised on occasionally.

In 1902 and around the time that the All-Red Line was completed, the Committee of Imperial Defence was established by the then British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour and was made responsible for research and some coordination of British military strategy. In 1911 and with the possibility of a war in Europe looming, the committee analysed the All-Red Line and concluded that it would be essentially impossible for Britain to be isolated from her telegraph network due to the redundancy built into the network: 49 cables would need to be cut for Britain to be cut off, 15 for Canada, and 5 for South Africa. Further to this, Britain and British telegraph companies owned and controlled most of the apparatus needed to cut or repair telegraph cables and also had a superior navy to control the seas.

British telegraph cables at the outbreak of war

As a resullt, when war broke out in August 1914 and some isolated telegraph stations such as the one at Cocos Islands asked for further security and military protection due to the risk of German attack, they got none and were left to their own devices in terms of protection. Some of the staff on the Cocos Island station constructed a fake telegraph cable and this was one that was cut by the Germans in their attack on the island in November 1914 and so telegraph communication via this telegraph station was able to continue.

Indeed, as a result of the redundancies built into the system and British naval superiority, the “All-Red Line” – a network which was strategically important to businesses, government, and military and a keystone in British imperial activities – remained robust, secure, and essentially uninterrupted for the duration of the war.

Sources and further information

A Short History of Submarine Cables

History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications from the first submarine cable of 1850 to the worldwide fiber optic network

Johnson, George. The All Red Line; the annals and aims of the Pacific Cable project. Ottowa: James Hope & Sons, 1903. Available via Internet Archive.

Kenndy, P.M. Imperial Cable Communications and Strategy, 1870-1914, The English Historical Review, Vol. 86, No. 341 (Oct, 1971), pp. 728-752. Available via JSTOR.

About the author: Dr Elizabeth Bruton is postdoctoral researcher for “Innovating in Combat”. See her Academia.edu profile for further details.

Leeds University Officers Training Corps (OTC) and signalling during World War One

by Elizabeth Bruton

Dave Stowe, Kate Vigurs and others at the Legacies of War project at the University of Leeds have been doing some fascinating research into World War One materials in the University Archive at the University of Leeds.

Through their research, they came across a scrapbook of photographs of University of Leeds War Work from 1914 to 1916. Alongside photographs of laboratory research and experimental farms were included evocative photographs of the Leeds University Officers Training Corps (OTC). The OTC photographs showed general military training of the OTC including rifle training, physical exercises, and some basic signalling including Morse code tapper training and flag signalling. These two methods of signalling, one old and one new, were key to British Army signalling during World War One.

Leeds University OTC

The Officer’s Training Corps (OTC) was officially established in July 1908 as part of the general reform of the regular and auxiliary forces of the British Army instigated by Lord Haldane. However, their origins lay in voluntary military work in the education sphere from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The formation of the OTC was a direct response to concerns about the supply of adequately trained officers in the event of war. The OTC was divided into the Senior Division for universities and the Junior Division for schools and Leeds University OTC, established in 1909, was part of the former.

Further details on Leeds University’s OTC during World War One has been provided by Dave Stowe from the Legacies of War project at the university:

It is estimated that no less than 1600 officers from Leeds University were commissioned during the Great War. These numbers included past and present and ex-members and cadets of the university officer training corps among the staff and lecturers who also served. More than 290 officers and other ranks are known to have been killed or died of the 328 names listed on the memorial panels. Many more were wounded or injured and more than 290 military honours were awarded in total – including one VC. Captain David Philip Hirsch was awarded the Victoria Cross (Posthumous) for his part in the fighting when serving with the 4th Yorkshire Regiment in April 1917. D.P. Hirsch had joined the Leeds University OTC as an extra-mural cadet in December 1914 and was commissioned four months later.

Military communications during World War One

A pigeon being released from a port-hole in the side of a tank, near Albert in August 1918. IWM Q9247. Image licensed via IWM Non-Commercial Creative Commons license.

Military communications during World War evolved to meet new battlefield and military challenges during this period. Battles were won and lost on the strength of an army’s ability to communicate on the battlefield. New and old systems of communications were used side by side.

On the Western Front, the British Army used telegraph cables and telephones to communicate between the front line soldiers and commanders. But heavy artillery (gun) bombardment meant these lines of communications were easily broken. These lines of communications were also easily intercepted by the German army, as were the very basic wireless telegraph sets used by the British Army. Despite this, the speed of telephone and telegraph communication meant they were the most commonly used telecommunications systems used by the British Army.

However, other systems of communications were also needed to be used in parallel with and as a backup to telegraph and telephones. The British Army was forced to adapt, using older forms of communication such as carrier pigeons and written messages delivered by runners and messenger dogs to keep the lines of communications open. Messenger runners had one of the most dangerous jobs in the war having to run across open ground and risk being shot by snipers in order to make sure a message was delivered. Signalling flags were also used but could be only used in the daytime and were easily visible to the enemy.

Morse code during World War One

Signalling: a transmitting station; a receiving station, University of Leeds OTC, c.1915. Image courtesy of University of Leeds Special Collections and used with permission.

This photograph shows two young officers being trained in the use of a Morse code. It is impossible to tell from the photograph whether they are using wireless telegraphy, ordinary telegraphy or the use of the buzzer telephone but all three used Morse code during the war.

Wireless telegraph sets were used by soldiers in the trenches to communicate with generals in headquarters. Wireless sets were useful when telephone wires were broken but could be easily listened in to or intercepted by the enemy. Wireless sets were also heavy and could be unreliable and soldiers needed to know Morse code to send messages.

These were also problems for Royal Flying Corps pilots when they began to use wireless sets early in the war. In 1915, Royal Flying Corps pilots began to experiment with wireless to tell soldiers where to aim their large artillery guns. However, it was still a new technology and was difficult to use while flying an aeroplane. As with use in the trenches, wireless messages could also be intercepted by the enemy.

Morse code continued to be used as an international standard for maritime distress until 1999 but had been discontinued by many navies prior to this. When the French Navy ceased using Morse code on 31 January 31 1997, their final message was “Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence.”

Flag signalling during World War One

Signalling: a signalling parade, University of Leeds OTC, c.1915. Image courtesy of University of Leeds Special Collections and used with permission.

Alongside modern electrical apparatus, other, older methods of communications continued to be used throughout World War One and beyond. Visual methods of signalling included Begbie lamps (a paraffin-burning lamp which could be used over relatively long distances), trench signalling lamps, heliographs, and flag signalling.

Flag signalling was used on land as well on sea and was usually referred to as “semaphore” when used at sea. In both cases, fabric flags were used and, in the case of flag signalling on land, blue and white flags were usually used. In the case of lightweight silk flags, a competent operator could reach about 12 words per minute,were used to send the fastest messages.

Flags were portable but needed good visibility and daylight. Semaphore flags used a form of signalling based on Morse code and required a trained signaller and a trained receiver, with a telescope, pencil and notepad, at either end.

Signalling: a signalling demonstration, University of Leeds OTC, c.1915

Signalling: a signalling demonstration including the use of telescope to receive signals, University of Leeds OTC, c.1915. Image courtesy of University of Leeds Special Collections and used with permission.

Signallers were regularly employed in forward positions to assist with artillery spotting and provide to information about their targets. In these often-isolated positions, signallers were often vulnerable to enemy shelling and attack and, as a result, many signallers lost their lives.

Visual signalling were quicker than sending a messenger but were easily intercepted by the enemy and could only be used over short distances. As a result, flag signalling fell out of use in conflict communications by 1916.

For further details of flag signalling in the British Army, see The Royal Signals .. Signalling with Flags.

Images

These photographs were supplied to Legacies of War by Joanne Fitton, Special Collections Manager at the University of Leeds, and are used with kind permission.

These images are from material in the University Archive at the University of Leeds. The University Archive was set up in 1977 to preserve the records of the University of Leeds and its predecessor bodies the Yorkshire College of Science, Yorkshire College, and Leeds Medical School, from 1874 to the present day. The archivist actively collects material, preserving the memory of the institution, providing the evidence base for its activity and making its records accessible to researchers.

The University of Leeds also holds the Lidde Collection which includes the personal papers of well over 4,000 people who lived through the First World War, and approximately 500 who experienced the Second World War.

Sources and further information

For further information, see the Leeds University OTC tribute video put together from original historic and archive material by Legacies of War‘s Dave Stowe. Dave has collected a number of images and press cuttings linked to his research into the Brotherton Library’s War Memorial at the University of Leeds.

The University of Leeds OTC and Roll of Honour by Dave Stowe via Western Front Association

The O. T. C. and the great war (1915) by Captain Alan R. Haig-Brown

University Archive at the University of Leeds

Liddle Collection at the University of Leeds

Royal Signals Museum: World War 1&2 Communications

The Royal Signals .. Signalling with Flags

Worcestershire Regiment: A Signaller in World War 1

About the author: Dr Elizabeth Bruton is postdoctoral researcher for “Innovating in Combat”. See her Academia.edu profile for further details.

German cable telegraphy in World War One: Yap Island

By Elizabeth Bruton

CS Stephan off the New Guinea coast, laying the Dutch East Indies – Yap – Guam cable, c.1906. Image available in the public domain via Atlantic-cable.com.

Located in the western Pacific Ocean and forming part of the Caroline Islands, Yap Island was a major German naval communications centre in the early twentieth century up to World War One and was an important international hub for cable telegraphy.

Map of Yap Island, courtesy of Missing Air Crew Project: the search for the Coleman B-24 Crew.

From the seventeenth century up to 1899, Yap Island was a Spanish colony within the Captaincy General of the Philippines. After the defeat against the US in 1898 and subsequent loss of the Philippines, Spain sold these islands and its other minor Pacific possessions to Germany.

In the early twentieth century, the Deutsch-Niederlandische Telegraphen-gesellschaft (German-Netherlands Telegraph Company, sometimes translated as German-Dutch Telegraph Company) was established with the remit to link the German Pacific Colonies into the main submarine telegraph networks. As part of this, in 1906 the company laid telegraph cables from Menado, Dutch East Indies to Yap Island and to Guam. At Yap Island, a spur was run into Shanghai. Yap Island formed part of the Menado-Yap-Guam-Shanghai undersea cable route and this route meant that Germany was no longer reliant on British-controlled (“All Red”) telegraph cables in the Pacific.

German-Netherlands Telegraph Company District Office and Cable Station, Yap. CS Stephan is at centre right. Dated 2 July 1908, the card was sent to a member of the staff of the German Atlantic Telegraph Company Cable Station at Vigo, Spain. Image available in the public domain via Atlantic-Cable.com.

Between 1906 and 1914, Yap became a major German naval communications centre and was an important international hub for cable telegraphy as it offered one of the two key alternative routes to the US-controlled Commercial Pacific cable. Yap Island formed a key node in the German telegraph cable line which also included Guam, Shanghai, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines. Some telegraph messages sent to the German South Sea domain were delivered on from Yap by ship and, after the construction of a wireless station around 1910, by wireless.

Around 1910, the German South Sea Radio Company (a subsidiary company of the German-Netherlands Telegraph Company) established a wireless station on Yap Island to provide wireless communication where a telegraph cable would have been costly and difficult to lay: to Rabaul in New Guinea and to Nauru. The station, issued the callsign KJA, had a range of 300-500 miles and was commercially operated.

Upon the outbreak of war in early August 1914, Yap Island as well as its telegraph station came under the mandate of Japan. The wireless station was destroyed by British naval cruisers shortly after war broke out on 12 August 1914 and the Japanese shut down the telegraph station for the duration of the conflict. The Japanese mandate continued for a short period after the end of the war and this was confirmed by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

However, this tiny island in the middle of the Pacific was of immense strategic importance in the overall global telegraph cable network and was one of only two alternative routes to the US-controlled Commercial Pacific cable from Manila to San Francisco; the other alternative route passed through Japan.

The US was deeply concerned about control of the Pacific Ocean and competition with Japan, both in terms of shipping lanes as well as the telegraph cable network. As a result, the US objected to Japanese control over the island. This was eventually rectified by an agreement signed in December 1921 and which came into effect in 1922 which recognised the Japanese mandate over the island of Yap but gave the US equal access to the island and shared control, management, and operation with the Japanese of the telegraph station and the cable from Yap to Guam. The Japanese fortified the island and continued to control the island until it was occupied by the US towards the end of World War Two.

Jetty & buildings on Yap Islands, probably dating from German colonial period. With narrow-gauge tramway tracks running down the jetty. Image available in the public domain via Spontoon Island: Pacific Island Architecture.

Sources

Wrinkler, Jonathan Reed. Nexus: Strategic Communications and American Security in World War I (2008).

Memorandum on Cable Communications in the Pacific.Memorandum (Institute of Pacific Relations, American Council), Vol. 1, No. 16 (Sep. 1, 1932), pp. 1-3.

Knoll, Arthur J. and Hermann J. Hiery (eds). The German Colonial Experience: Select Documents on German Rule in Africa, China, and the Pacific 1884-1914 (2010).

The World at War: CAROLINE ISLANDS 1898 – 1919

History of Yap by William Hampton Adams

History of the Atlantic Cable & Undersea Communications: German Cable Companies by Bill Glover

Department of the Navy and the Bureau of Steam Engineering. Wireless Telegraph Stations of the World including shore stations, merchant vessels, revenue cutters, and vessels of the US Navy, updated to 1 January 1912 (1912).

About the author: Dr Elizabeth Bruton is postdoctoral researcher for “Innovating in Combat”. See her Academia.edu profile for further details.

Guest post by Andreas Marklund: Female Censors at the Danish State Telegraph during World War One

Two young telegraphers at the Main Telegraph Station in Copenhagen c.1915

Two young telegraphers at the Main Telegraph Station in Copenhagen, Miss Galschiøtt and Mr. Henriksen, aiding a secret military intelligence unit called Kystcentralen, circa 1915. Post & Tele Museum, Copenhagen.

On June 1, 1918, ten “ladies” with “excellent language skills” had their first day of work as telegram censors at the Danish state telegraph. They had all been tested in foreign languages – German, French and English – by a professor at the University of Copenhagen, and all of them were quite literally daughters of the elite. The first two names on the list of employees are illuminating: “Miss INGER GRAM, daughter of the Supreme Court President, Dr. Jur. R.S. Gram”, followed by “Miss ASTRID HERTZ, daughter of the Medical Officer, Dr. Med. Poul Hertz.”

Inger Gram and Astrid Hertz, and their eight, equally unmarried colleagues, were employed by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs but their office was located at the Main Telegraph Station in Copenhagen. Here, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had a unit for cable censorship, which had been in operation since November 1916. In fact, the system of censorship and secret monitoring had been up and running since August 1, 1914, when the Telegraph Directory decreed that no telegrams transmitted from Denmark should contain “sensational and false messages about Danish conditions and popular moods“. However, the system was loosely organized in the beginning of the war, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was anything but satisfied with the practical handling of censorship issues, which initially sorted under the Telegraph Directory and the so-called Ministry for Public Works. Accordingly, after a harsh debate in the Danish parliament, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs took charge of the surveillance system and established its own Censorship Office at the Main Telegraph Station, which was staffed by four external censors who had no previous connections to the Danish State Telegraph.

Yet the system remained inefficient and defective. The Ministry of Foreign Affair’s censorship director, Marinus Yde, complained in a memo to his superiors that merely 500-600 telegrams, out of the approximately 7 000 telegrams that the Danish State Telegraph transmitted on a daily basis, were handed over to his censors. Thus, there was clear lack of cooperation between the censors and the ordinary telegraph staff. In another memo, dated to 29 April 1918, Mr. Yde bemoaned this glitch in the system in a rather candid tone:

The whole mountain of telegram correspondence is thus being processed without any other control than that which is carried out by the (often very young) telegraph operators, while they are transmitting and charging the telegrams. This kind of control is of no value at all.

This is where Miss Inger Gram and her nine female colleagues entered the picture. They were definitely not the first women within the Danish telecommunications sector. The first female telegraph operator in the country, the famous author and feminist Mathilde Fibiger, had entered service as early as in 1863, and there had been women working for the Censorship Office before the summer of 1918, for instance as stenographers and record keepers. Yet the idea of employing women as cable censors was a novelty of World War One – and its origin was seemingly Swedish. In the above-mentioned 1918 memo, Mr Yde wrote about an excursion to the Main Telegraph Station in Stockholm, where female censor clerks functioned as a kind of basic control filter, by “sifting” the “whole mountain” of incoming and outgoing telegrams. And whenever they discovered a suspicious message, it was forwarded to senior (male) censors in a neighboring office.

Mr. Yde was greatly impressed by this model and recommended it with enthusiasm to his superiors. The gender aspect was explicitly highlighted: “The main work could definitely be carried out by female employees, who would be provided by the State Telegraph, thereby keeping the expenses at a minimum.” As the quotation makes clear, there was a financial dimension to the employment of female censors: qualified women with the necessary language skills were far less expensive to keep on the pay-roll than equally qualified men.

Electric transporter, anno 1917, carrying telegrams between the departments at the Main Telegraph Station in Copenhagen. In the background, busy female operators are typing on their Morse apparatuses. Post & Tele Museum, Copenhagen.

So, the Censorship Office was re-organized yet again and it assumed a bicameral structure. The original censorship unit at the Main Telegraph Station was supplemented with an extra department called the Control Office, where the staff was made up by the ten language-skilled “ladies” (damer) and one man: a young PhD in philosophy named Kort Kristian Kortsen, who was affiliated with the University of Copenhagen. As in the case of the Swedish surveillance system, the mission of this office was to “carry out the preliminary, crude assessment of the massive load of telegrams, and put all those telegrams aside, that calls for a closer inspection by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ current censors.” This kind of surveillance work was labelled “control” (kontrol), whereas the senior office dealt with something called “prohibitive censorship” (prohibitiv censur).

Both offices were managed by an Official from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs named Lauritz Larsen, who was considered to be equipped with “exactly that interest for general patterns and small details, which is necessary for the perfect overall result.” To speed up the process and reduce the number of customer complaints, the offices were connected through a logistical device called an “electric transporter”: a cart that ran on rails in the ceiling with telegrams, censorship minutes and other kinds of messages. Yet the friction between the censors and the cable station staff remained an unresolved issue, and the system continued to be haunted by delays, misunderstandings and direct conflicts, but that is another story for another day.

Andreas Marklund is Researcher and Research Coordinator at Post & Tele Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Great Profits during the Great War?

Ahead of next year’s centenary, Elizabeth Bruton and Graeme Gooday ask what were the different motivations of scientists, the military and industry in terms of World War One innovation and research – patriotism, profit, or both?

Should innovators profit from warfare? Is it reasonable instead to ask scientists and engineers to act from pure patriotism alone? As Scientists for Global Responsibility has recently voiced alarm about UK science’s reliance on military funding, it is revealing to look back to a time before science entered a Faustian pact with armed conflict.

Prior to World War One, Britain did not have a military-industrial complex in which scientists routinely participated with industry to facilitate ever more warfare. Even in the first year of the war, rather than safely researching in a laboratory, a brilliant scientist such as Henry Moseley could die at Gallipoli, shot by a sniper while serving as a signals engineer. Reflecting on such tales, we think we know about the Great War: the patriotism and sacrifice of those in the armed forces and the terrible and pointless loss of life – especially on the Western Front – throughout the four long years of war.

But numerous historians have recently rethought these stereotypes. How was it that the war continued for four years, with 16 million dying while millions more of pounds and dollars were spent on armaments and the routine expense of war? Who was manufacturing such weaponry and ammunition, and who developed the infrastructure of scientific research that helped to win the ‘Great War’? More importantly, what were their motives: patriotic altruism, private profit – or an uneasy mixture of both?

In light of the impending centenary of this global catastrophe, we find that patriotism was not always the sole or indeed the main rationale for industrial activity in wartime. Indeed, afterwards the financial rewards for war-winning innovation were treated somewhat differently to equivalent creative acts during peacetime.

Portrait of Guglielmo Marconi from 1908. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

When Britain entered the war on 4 August 1914 the Marconi Company, with evident patriotic fervour, offered its wireless operators and training to facilitate the armed services’ use of wireless communications. It did so without any initial upfront demand for payment. The Company also allowed government ‘censors’ to monitor all communications through their long-distance wireless stations. Suspicious communications were intercepted and passed onto code-breakers in the Admiralty’s secret ‘Room 40’. During the war, the Company apparently received no compensation or out-of-pocket expenses for this work: in summer 1915 Marconi’s General Manager complained that “not one penny-piece has yet been refunded to us.”

By now, it was clear that the German model of state investment in research could win wars more decisively than uncoordinated private industry, laissez-faire invention, and British heroism. Stung into action by German innovations in poison gas warfare and devastatingly effective interception of French and British telecommunications, in 1915 the UK government established its own national Department of Scientific Industrial Research (DSIR).

Supported initially by the ‘Million Fund’ – approximately £45 million today – the DSIR both hired scientists for laboratory research and encouraged private industrial firms to establish co-operative industrial research associations. Unlike the Marconi Company, however, many companies did not willingly offer their services to the state. This is evident from the 1915 extension to the Defence of the Realm Act (1914): now key British industries were compelled to prioritise government and military orders.

The production of armaments and industrial infrastructure was thereby raised to a level that, when combined with American input from 1917, could support a military force capable of winning the war. By then increased state support for science and industry was having a noticeable effect. For example, the aeroplane invented just over a decade previously was adapted dexterously to the purposes of aerial combat and the ‘tank’ changed the nature of battle when first introduced in France in 1916.

Soon after the so-called ‘Great War’ was concluded in November 1918, a Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors rewarded hundreds such wartime innovations. It eventually handed out £1.5 million (about £75 million today) in a Britain nearly bankrupted by the cost of conflict. The distribution indicates just how much the British establishment acknowledged national inventiveness, crediting tanks and aeroplanes as crucial to the recent victory. The Commission rejected claims about other inventions it deemed to lack genuine novelty or life-saving significance.

Telecommunications had been of great importance during wartime, especially when threatened by interception. The catastrophic interception of British and French forward communication by Germans early in the war resulted in the development and widespread deployment of an interception-proof alternative. This was the so-called Fullerphone, invented and patented by a serving military officer Captain Algernon Clement Fuller in 1916. When Fuller took his device to the Commission soon after the war ended, however he was offered much less than he requested: not only did his device rely heavily on the work of others, his patent rights would reap him further international rewards. Fuller perhaps took comfort from his post-war promotion eventually reaching the rank of Major-General.

A young Henry Moseley, taken in the Balliol-Trinity Laboratory, Oxford, c.1910. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In contrast, the Marconi Company’s wartime contribution was more richly rewarded than that of Fuller. This was due in part to the eventual recognition of the Company’s important role in supporting the British government and the Admiralty. Not only had Marconi intercepted hostile communications, but its “direction finders” had tracked German navy and airships in the open sea.

Despite this, the Marconi Company entered into an extraordinary post-war dispute with the British government, demanding large rewards for its wartime contributions. Marconi’s lawyers actually accused the government of infringing the Company’s wireless patents: exploiting its intellectual property without due payment. So difficult did the discussions become on the six-figure royalty claims that the matter was devolved to a private adjudication. Although the final amount paid was never publicized, the Marconi Company was soon able to buy up telegraph companies to fulfil its long-held ambition to become a telecommunications giant – later known as Cable and Wireless.

So how then shall we commemorate Fuller and Marconi and indeed their industrial production teams for their wartime innovations? Were they like Moseley nobly donating their all to the cause, seeking only recompense to endure the hardships of war? Or to rephrase Clausewitz’s old dictum, was warfare for them just profit by other means…?

This article was first published on Monday 28 October as a guest post on the Guardian’s H-Word blog and is in advance of a free public lecture on Patriotism and Profit during World War One we are giving at the Science Museum, London on Saturday 2 November.

Elizabeth Bruton is the postdoctoral researcher and Graeme Gooday the principal investigator for Innovating in Combat: Telecommunications and intellectual property in the First World War, an AHRC-funded project at the University of Leeds and Museum of the History of Science, Oxford.