Admiral Reginald “Blinker” Hall and Room 40

The outbreak of World War One was accompanied by new strategies, innovations, and inventions that developed modern warfare. World War One saw the widespread use of everything from artillery to machine guns and airplanes to submarines. World War One also saw the world’s most powerful navy, Great Britain’s Royal Navy, pitted against the up and coming German Imperial Navy. From Britain’s effective use of the naval blockade to Germany’s terrifying unrestricted submarine warfare, both sides were constantly looking for new strategies to implement.

One of Great Britain’s most important naval developments was the founding of the top-secret Office of Naval Intelligence, better known as Room 40. Specializing in cryptography, “the science of writing in secret code” in order to hide sensitive information, Room 40’s cryptanalysts worked around the clock to break the secret code. Decryption is vital in secret transmissions concerning strategic war movements, as the enemy will be looking to intercept information concerning movements and positioning. Great Britain was aided in that the German Navy started the war with three primary codes, and within four months the British Admiralty possessed physical copies of all three of them.

The primary codebook was the Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine (SKM), which had been seized by the Imperial Russian Navy on August 26, 1914 from the German light cruiser SMS Magdeburg. The second codebook was the Verkehrsbuch (VB), found by a British trawler in the North Sea. The third codebook was the Handelschiffsverkehrsbuch (HVB), captured by the Australians early in the war. The VB was used at sea by German flag officers, while the HVB was used by the entire High Sea Fleet, including submarines, Zeppelin a...

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