History should be rewritten to show how the British Postal Service contributed to winning the war.
The ink had barely dried on Britain's declaration of war against Germany when a shadowy figure dressed as a Postal Inspector walked the long, dark concrete berths towards an equally shadowy and ancient paddlewheel ship. A shadow not just against the grey concrete docking berth in England but a shadow of a time past, called upon at literally the 11th hour for a secret mission in an emerging global war that would see millions dead. Postal Inspector Bordeaux's secret and sealed instructions would guide the paddle wheeler through wartime waters, cutting German undersea cables that connected her to the outside world, in so doing, shaping the globe until the present day.
What is the story of the ancient vessel that conducted one of Britain's first actions during the war, initiating the opening salvo in an information war that eventually led to the US entry years later?
Photo: HTMS Alert. One of the United Kingdom - K. R. Haigh, Cableships and Submarine Cables, Adlard Coles Ltd., 1968, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=148679677
The ship was His Majesties Telegraph Ship HTMS Alert. Its two large side paddlewheels gave it remarkable turning capability, which is necessary for placing cables and dredging them up. Still, these wheels also placed it visually within a maritime age long past. This unassuming relic, born in 1871 for a private company, was initially christened Lady Carmichael. However, upon the nationalization of the British Postal Service (GPO) in 1890, it was renamed the HTMS Alert and transferred to government service along with formerly private telegraph equipment.
On the terrible night of August 4th, 1914, just moments after Britain declared war against Germany, the weathered and aged HTMS Alert was waiting in the dark for an equally unassuming but critically important person to arrive and launch her from the berths at Dover, initiating the first, and perhaps most critical, hostile actions against Germany in the First World War.
Upon Inspector Bordeaux's arrival, the Alert set sail in the darkness. She sailed without escort despite the fact that Britain had mobilized the fleet since July 15th and massed them at Spithead. The orders that the Alert was to undertake had been long planned, as had the war Britain was now entering. Surprise was paramount in order to ensure the cables linking Germany with the outside world were severed.
Once cut, places as far apart as Spain, Africa, and the Americas would have to resort to radio signals, with all their security and technical limitations, to communicate. Britain now not only hobbled Germany's ability to communicate effectively and gather foreign intelligence, but she could force communication into the open, intercept it, and weaponize it against Germany.
Intercepted communications from Germany and her allies were sent to Room 40, the infamous cryptanalysis department under the British Admiralty. The German codes deciphered over 15,000 messages there, with millions of data points valuable to Britain's ability to continue the war against Germany.
One famous example is the Zimmerman Telegram, which was used to enflame the American public and push her to war alongside Britain against Germany. Britain's first shot in the war was a global information one, and perhaps it was the most effective operation in history in terms of return on investment.
All were from a postal inspector and a 40-year-old paddlewheeler named HTMS Alert. ——
CS Alert. Initiating the opening salvo in the information battlespace during WWI. Illustration by Henry Daniel Wilkinson (1857-1932) - Wilkinson, Submarine Cable Laying and Repairing, p. 339, London: "The Electrician" Printing and Publishing Co. Ltd., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=148679798
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BACKGROUND
Recent news announcements that CCP ships have been cutting undersea communication cables have been met with shock and surprise. The most recent incident involved the Yi Peng 3, which spent two days slicing the cables in the Baltic Sea between Sweden, Lithuania, Germany, and Finland.
However, the history of severing undersea communications cables is nothing new. Since their inception, the cables have been targets of nations wishing to control communications and engage in intelligence operations. From Chile in its 19th Century war with Peru, the US in the Spanish-American War, and most effectively by the British against the Germans in the even and opening phases of World War I, cutting cables is a time-tested system during a conflict. Especially vital during the opening phases.
Undersea cables have been a vital link in global communications since 1850 when England and France connected telegraphs between the nations via underwater cables. Technological development increased so rapidly that a joint venture by the US and UK Atlantic Telegraph Company was laying telegraph cables across the Pacific to link the two growing Empires.
In 1858, the Atlantic Telegraph Company successfully linked the UK and the US, although it took a lot of work and was beset by multiple problems. The British Empire's Queen Victoria sent a message to US President Buchanan congratulating all the effort and highlighting the ability to communicate almost instantly across oceans. Progress continued, and by 1900, almost all major cities and critical organizations such as trading houses, military control nodes, political offices, and more were linked into what is essentially a parallel of the early internet less than 100 years later.
Telegraphs and ticker tape machines were ubiquitous at social clubs, train stations, and horse racing tracks. Information was flowing, in some cases, almost as fast as it does today across the globe.
Whoever controlled that technology and had the power to cut it off would gain an advantage in any global competition or conflict.
The technology that allowed the lay and maintenance of telegraph cables underwater was then applied to the military problem of severing these lines of communication in wartime.
Due to its global domination by the late 1890s, Britain relied heavily on cables to maintain control of the occupied regions a world away from London in far-off Malaysia, Burma, India, and numerous remote island monitoring and control nodes along vital sea lanes. Britain hardened its international information network through several innovations and simple redundancies. The vaunted “All Red Line” was a global information network, and it was hardened to attack.
Captain Douglas R Burnett and Kristin Berdan noted in a July 2024 article for the US Naval Institute Proceedings that in 1911, just before the war, "British strategists on the Imperial Defence Committee, however, understood the system would be vulnerable in a military conflict…they estimated it would take 49 cable cuts to isolate Great Britain and between 5 and 11 cuts each to isolate its major colonies." (1)
England knew her dependence on cables for the operation of her Empire and recognized the effect if she could deny wartime adversaries the same.
Germany had long been in the British's crosshairs since the late 1890s. Early on, the British planners set their sights on cutting the undersea communication cables.
A 2022 article by the Maritime Foundation examining undersea cable security reflected, "Once the imperial system was complete, the British planners focused on cable-cutting to disrupt the communications of potential enemies in wartime. In 1912 (other sources say 1910-ed), the Committee of Imperial Defence approved plans for the Post Office, under Admiralty direction, to cut all Germany's main international cables, if need be, to isolate it from the outside world. "(2)
On the outbreak of war in August 1914, HMTS Alert cut German cables from Emden down the Channel to France, Spain, Africa, and the Americas. Separate operations severed the cables to Britain, those between Liberia and Brazil, and those to the Azores and New York. Similar operations had been conducted in wartime, including the Spanish American War, but none had so great an impact as the little Alert in 1914.
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