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Nexus: Strategic Communications and American World Security during World War I

af Jonathan Reed Winkler

MedlemmerAnmeldelserPopularitetGennemsnitlig vurderingSamtaler
2011,091,121 (3.67)Ingen
In an illuminating study that blends diplomatic, military, technology, and business history, Jonathan Reed Winkler shows how U.S. officials during World War I discovered the enormous value of global communications. At the outbreak of war in 1914, British control of the cable network affected the Americans' ability to communicate internationally, and the development of radio worried the Navy about hemispheric security. The benefits of a U.S. network became evident during the war, especially in the gathering of intelligence. This led to the creation of a peacetime intelligence operation, later termed the "Black Chamber," that was the forerunner of the National Security Agency. After the war, U.S. companies worked to expand network service around the world but faced industrial limitations. Focused on security concerns, the Wilson administration objected to any collaboration with British companies that might alleviate this problem. Indeed, they went so far as to create a radio monopoly and use warships to block the landing of a cable at Miami. These efforts set important precedents for later developments in telephony, shortwave radio, satellites-even the internet. In this absorbing history, Winkler sheds light on the early stages of the global infrastructure that helped launch the United States as the predominant power of the century.… (mere)
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The subject – the United States government attitude toward global communications during World War One – sounds excruciatingly dull. Author Jonathan Reed Winkler does not have an engaging writing style and doesn’t organize his presentation very well: this was a tedious read. However, there’s a bunch of pretty cool stuff here if you dig for it.


When the war started in 1914, the US found that almost all global communications systems were in the hands of belligerents. US firms – Western Union and Commercial Cable Company – owned some transatlantic cables, but to save distance they had been laid from Nova Scotia to Ireland; thus both landings were in British hands. There were some German cables direct to New York but they were raised and cut by a British cable ship on the opening day of the war. The only transoceanic line that was entirely in US territory and owned by a US firm was the Commercial Cable Company Pacific cable from San Francisco to Hawaii to Midway to Guam to Manila to Shanghai. What’s more, almost the entire world’s cable manufacturing firms and cable laying ships were British, and the British controlled the world’s supply of gutta-percha insulation. American firms attempting to order new cable were out of luck; by the end of the war, British firms had a 14-year backlog in cable orders. When the war started, the British quickly introduced cable censorship. Pre-war commercial messages commonly used code – not so much for cryptography but as “shorthand” to reduce the number of words (and thus the cost). Now, British authorities insisted that all messages be in clear and include the recipient’s complete address rather than the “cable” address, doubling or tripling the average message link. What’s more, the military censors frequently delayed or completed halted “suspicious” messages – in case German agents were using seemingly innocent commercial messages to send coded military information. American firms began to complain to the State Department – their businesses messages were delayed for weeks, without notice, and when they finally arrived a suspicious number of transactions had gone to British firms in the interim. The situation got so bad that Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan ordered the US Ambassador to Sweden to violate international law and include commercial messages in diplomatic transmissions – whereupon the British Foreign Office immediately complained, rubbing Uncle Sam’s nose in the fact they were reading US diplomatic code.


The Germans were aware that their cables were vulnerable and sought to make up for it with a radio station network. (This was one of my head-slap moments in the book – “radio” automatically invokes music and entertainment broadcasts nowadays, but in before 1920 or so it was used to transmit commercial messages – as an alternative to sending them by cable). The Germans built powerful stations in their African and Oceanic possessions, and in neutral Liberia, Venezuela, and New Jersey. The stations in German colonial territory were quickly picked off by British, French and Japanese troops. The neutral stations lasted somewhat longer; international law permitted the stations to continue operating as long as they transmitted in the clear and didn’t send any military information. Nevertheless, Liberia and Venezuela were pressured to close and seal theirs. The New Jersey station lasted somewhat longer. (I learned another interesting thing here. Winkler, who is weak on technology, has a confusing section where he describes the New Jersey messages as sent off “tape”. This can’t mean magnetic tape; I assume they were punched into paper tape by a telegrapher, and then automatically transmitted at speed. The British had their own station nearby – American Marconi was a wholly-owned subsidiary of British Marconi – and a station employee had the “hobby” of recording German messages (on wax disks). Apparently – again, Winkler isn’t very clear – there was a standard protocol for correcting errors in Morse messages, presumably an ancestor of checksums. The British “hobbyist” noted to his surprise that the German messages contained a number of error-correction strings, which shouldn’t have been necessary at all, since the master paper tape just could have been cut and spliced with the correct data. What’s more, the error-correction came in interesting patterns. The information was forwarded to the US, and the United States Navy seized and operated the station for the duration).


Winkler’s weak to non-existent explanations of radio technology handicap his discussion of long-distance radio. The early transmitters were all spark-gap style, and about all Winkler says about them is that they were difficult to tune – something of an understatement – and interfered with other stations – again something of an understatement. Although “arc” transmitters were available – Winkler sometimes calls them “continuous wave”, without really explaining what that means – they had problems of their own, both institutional and technical. The institutional problem was that many commercial vessels had installed Marconi spark-gap transmitters as required by maritime law and were not inclined to turn around and invest in new equipment. The technical problem – Winkler explains this very poorly – was that spark transmitters only send a signal when the key is closed. Thus the operator can listen for a return signal when not transmitting. An arc transmitter broadcasts continuously (it’s too hard to continuously make and break the arc plus it would defeat the whole purpose of a continuous wave transmitter) and the signal is sent by amplitude modulation. (The modern AM radio band was once reserved for the US Navy). Thus the arc transmitter tends to overpower a nearby receiver. The solution to this was what was then described as “remote control”, which once again doesn’t explain things very well – the transmitter and receiver were separated by some distance and linked by a land telegraph line – not very applicable to shipboard use.


The German reliance on long distance radio or routing messages over neutral networks lead directly to US involvement in the war – although Winkler doesn’t dwell on it much, presumably because Barbara Tuchman has already covered the same ground. The Germans had persuaded Woodrow Wilson that international communication could only aid the cause of peace; therefore the State Department was allowing coded German messages to be sent as part of US diplomatic traffic, trusting that German honor would not abuse the privilege. The German Foreign Minister sent a message by this means to the German ambassador in Mexico City, offering Mexico Arizona, New Mexico and Texas at some future date if they kept the US out of the war in Europe by involving the US in a war with Mexico (for some reason known only to the Kaiser, Japan was supposed to switch sides and join with Mexico). Since the British were still reading US diplomatic traffic, the message eventually got to Wilson. Rather amazingly the Germans later did almost exactly the same thing with Argentina - previously on good terms with Germany - when they ordered U-boats to sink Argentine ships “without a trace” and the message was picked up by the British cable intelligence (this time under cover of Swedish diplomatic traffic).


The Germans engaged in a small amount of anti-cable warfare as well; German surface vessels lifted and cut some cables off the Norwegian coast (carrying signals from Russia) and in at least one case attached devices that would mislead cable repair ships trying to locate the break. The Germans also outfitted U-boats with cable cutting grapples; the degree of success these had is still unclear. When a surface vessel grappled a cable, it could be lifted on deck, inspected, and cut; the U-boat device could only operate underwater, since the boats didn’t have enough buoyancy to surface with a cable attached. Thus the Germans never knew if they had cut a cable or just snagged something on the bottom.


The last half of the book tends to bog down in politics, diplomacy, and personality. The US Navy very much wanted an extensive long-distance radio network, and one of the most knowledgeable officers, Lieutenant (later Commander) Stanford Hooper, was very much in favor of having private industry develop the technology, contending that competition would work much better than direction from above. Unfortunately, being knowledgeable does not equate with being influential, and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels and (later) Secretary of State Robert Lansing both favored absolute US government control over all radio and cable communications. This put them in the interesting position of blocking attempts by US firms to expand service in South America and the Pacific (because they wanted these stations and cables to be built by the US government). All this did was allow radio and cable in these areas to go to foreign firms. In one astonishing case, after the war, the Navy sent a destroyer and subchasers to block a Western Union cable ship from landing a cable in Miami that would have connected to Barbados and Brazil.


Woodrow Wilson, as I’ve read so often recently, comes across as an earlier Jimmy Carter – earnest, sanctimonious, and incompetent. (By and large, I think I prefer Carter – but not by much). Wilson took enough of an interest in communications to ask for submarine cable internationalization at the Versailles conference, but was deluded on how cables worked and what had happened to them during the war. He was under the impression that the British and French had merely cut German cables instead of lifting them and bringing them to new landfalls in British or French territory – thus his proposal that German cable be returned to German control to help Germany pay war reparations was met with astonishment (although eventually Germany was credited with the cost of the cable minus depreciation against the war debt). Similarly, Wilson was unable to arrange for the internationalization of Yap Island and thus Japan was left in control of much of the former German Pacific cable network. Wilson did arrange for an international conference on communications – which never met.


Thus, the US ended the war in a worse position with regard to submarine cable access; all the former German cables went to Britain, France, or Germany and US attempts to start a domestic cable industry foundered. On the other hand, the US did fairly well in long-distance radio despite ham-handed efforts by the Navy and State Departments. When Congress eventually rejected efforts to nationalize the radio industry, the seized German stations on US soil went to private firms, as did many radio patents that had been assigned or purchased by the Navy. The Navy’s own internal communications stayed in good shape, as there was now a global network of radio stations and the most modern ship borne equipment.


Slow going and difficult, despite interesting material. There are lots of names – military officers, radio and cable company executives, diplomats; I wish I had made a list. Technology sections are very weak and it seems Winkler doesn’t understand some of it; I had to look up a lot on the Net to figure out what was going on. Excellent references, though. Absolutely don’t pay list price for this; I got mine from a remainder house. ( )
  setnahkt | Dec 16, 2017 |
"Winkler's valuable and judicious book expands our knowledge of a formative period when American policymakers considered and sought to overcome the telecommunications vulnerability of their country."
tilføjet af JRWinkler | RedigerDiplomatic History, David Nickles (Apr 1, 2010)
 
"For military professionals seeking historical context relating to cyber warfare, this is an ideal monograph....The author concludes that strategic communications issues were vital to the American war effort and provided clear lessons for later twentieth-century conflicts."
 

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In an illuminating study that blends diplomatic, military, technology, and business history, Jonathan Reed Winkler shows how U.S. officials during World War I discovered the enormous value of global communications. At the outbreak of war in 1914, British control of the cable network affected the Americans' ability to communicate internationally, and the development of radio worried the Navy about hemispheric security. The benefits of a U.S. network became evident during the war, especially in the gathering of intelligence. This led to the creation of a peacetime intelligence operation, later termed the "Black Chamber," that was the forerunner of the National Security Agency. After the war, U.S. companies worked to expand network service around the world but faced industrial limitations. Focused on security concerns, the Wilson administration objected to any collaboration with British companies that might alleviate this problem. Indeed, they went so far as to create a radio monopoly and use warships to block the landing of a cable at Miami. These efforts set important precedents for later developments in telephony, shortwave radio, satellites-even the internet. In this absorbing history, Winkler sheds light on the early stages of the global infrastructure that helped launch the United States as the predominant power of the century.

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