Pinned post for Q&A :)

Germans: It's an older code, but it checks out

When the French Navy caught a civilian British cable-ship searching for underseas cables off the French coast in the first days of WW1, he threatened to arrest them.  Once the British commander explained what and why they were trawling for the German cables, the French Captain sent over champagne and "good fishing!"

The book having 35000 instructions and being insanely large and overly complicated is the most German thing I've heard today. :D

Dilly Knox was a famous and brilliant member of the Room 40 codebreakers who did some of his best analytical thinking in a bathtub (installed at his behest in Room 53).

Associate Frank Birch rhapsodized about this:

“The sailor in Room 53
has never, it's true, been to sea
but though not in a boat
he has served afloat —
in a bath in the Admiralty”.

Germany:  We want you to declare war on the United States
Mexico: No hablo Alemán

The problem of telegraph decoding precedes navies. When telegraphs first started to be used commercially, messages were charged by the letter. This was very expensive, especially for transatlantic cables, and prompted various commercial entities, including Western Union, to come up with number blocks and code books so entire phrases could be transmitted using a single code block of five numbers or letters. This didn't provide signal security since codes books were widely available. However, large business soon developed their own encoding techniques and private code books so competitors wouldn't be able to read their messages if they were intercepted. This was the beginning of using codes for operational security.

As a Cyber Security Engineer.....this is AWESOME. This should be required viewing as part of Cyber Security subject matter. And Ewing? He deserves more recognition!

16:43 - The sound of a British guy taking a deep breath before attempting an impossible German word. Drach is a trooper, of course, and went for it, lol.

So let me see if I got this right: most important for British codebreaking in both World Wars were *checks notes * the Germans with their poor radio and cypher discipline.

Wow Drach is a fan of
The Last Airbender. Cartoon I hope and not the M Night Shyamalan movie

8:15 There was a disappointing lack of proper Oom-pah music for the German radio network. 8.8/10, would scuttle in Scapa Flow.

Having worked in the US Army's Military Intelligence (never mind the oxymoron) branch for almost a decade as a signal/voice interceptor and German linguist, I found this video very enlightening and entertaining. Always liked working with my Brit counterparts. Well done.

As a German I find your attempt to speak a German dialect hilarious, it's really amusing to hear

It still boggles my mind to see anything about the laying of communication cables under the ocean. The sheer distance, the incredible depth, and the need for accurate navigation makes these operations some of the most astounding yet unsung engineering feats in human history. Especially when you see these maps of the various networks and realize that we started to wire this planet up even before we developed aircraft. It's amazing.

Great content!!! Thank you.
As an engineer of 30+ years who did his degree in Communications Engineering this is a fabulous reminder of the progression of radio telegraphy and other signalling, plus the practicalities of actually using the available technology.
I'm well acquainted with the role of radar both in naval and airforce operations but didn't realise the lead (pardon my pun!) the British had in terms of telegraphy infrastructure at the start of ww1 and the effect this had.

34:22 MI5 OPEN UP!

A detail that's really outside the scope of this video but is pretty important to the larger picture of how the British and the Germans dealt with signals in WWII is that Winston Churchill wrote a detailed memoir of his actions in WWI, including lots and lots of info about Room 40.  This was part of why the Enigma Code, which was too complex for breaking it by hand to be practicable on a large scale, was introduced, as well as other, similar mechanical and electromechanical systems used by Germany and Japan.


This also meant that after WWII, Britain kept a tight hold on knowledge of what had really happened at Bletchly park, with things only coming out in the mid-1970's.  This contributed to things like the persecution of Alan Turing, since nobody was going to cut him any slack for his critical part in saving Britain when they didn't know about it.  It also tarnished the reputation of George Patton for the wrong reason, as the cover story for his removal from command was his striking a soldier who had PTSD, rather than the real reason, which was he wasn't following the strict rules for using information from Project Ultra.

An excellent intro to anyone interested in the Room 40 story. There are a number of books out there on that topic and others that touch on radio intelligence to some degree or other. It's worth noting that not all the Germans were so apparently clueless. After MAGDEBURG was lost, Prince Henry (Kaiser's brother and commander of Baltic ops) voiced some concern about the codebooks being compromised. He was assured this could not be the case. Meanwhile in the Rufiji Delta, Max Looff of the KONIGSBERG was having suspicions about the security of the codes and tried to warn the Admiralstab. He went so far as to arrange a fake rendezvous with a supply ship and sent some crew to the meeting place to see if anyone showed up: three British cruisers (Heilige Schiesse!). However, if the crown prince down the road was ignored by the Admiralstab what chance was fregatten-kapitan in Africa going to have? (Sigh!)


May I suggest Captain Hall as someone worth reviewing? Someone who knew how to use intel material and seems to have engaged in some very interesting skullduggery regarding the Falklands and who seems to have spooked invasion fears on both sides of the North Sea.

Room 40 was the origin of much of the Royal Navy's edge over Germany in both world wars. In both wars, the Germans assumed their encryption was practically unbreakable. They knew codebooks were vulnerable (especially in WWI) and the WWII Enigma machines were nearly identical to the British Typex radio encryption devices, so it's hard to understand this assumption. Dilly Knox worked in Room 40 (WWI) and Bletchley Park (WWII). Churchill at Admiralty oversaw much of the Room 40 setup and was very personally involved with using  Bletchley Park decrypts. Many don't realize that the Germans were readily decrypting British merchant naval messages in WWII, giving their U-boats great info. Bletchley Park finally helped the British figure this out in 1943 and the codes were finally improved.