The First World War has all but faded from living memory. No veterans survive, of course, and the centennial commemorations that will continue for another year hark back to a time that seems as distant to many people as the Age of Chivalry. Yet the conflict raged not so very long ago, in historical terms, and its repercussions echo today in Europe and beyond. World War I’s impacts on the military art, on political structures, and on international relations proved enormous. Its effects on the practice and the influence of intelligence seem lesser only by comparison; being an ancillary field, intelligence can never eclipse the disciplines that it serves. The war altered many aspects of intelligence profoundly, and added new fields of the intelligence craft that had not existed prior to 1914. Indeed, by the war’s end four years later none of the major combatants ran their intelligence functions as they had at the conflict’s beginning. No other conflict changed intelligence as much in so few years.
To understand this sea change we can look back a century or so before the First World War, specifically to the writings of the Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz. Reflecting on events he had experienced in the struggle against Napoleon, Clausewitz in his classic On War (1832) proclaimed his suspicion of intelligence. He regarded information as vital to the general’s art but saw it as inherently suspect and thus only a minor factor to be considered by a commander on the battlefield. A great captain must instead be a wise and imperturbable rock against the shifting emotions and alarms of all campaigns and battles.
Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain. What one can reasonably ask of an officer is that he should possess a standard of judgment, which he can gain only from knowledge of men and affairs and from common sense. He should be guided by the laws of probability
The readings in this special issue illuminate how the intelligence functions of the great powers improved sufficiently in the First World War to realize at least some of the potential that Clausewitz had implicitly foreseen for military intelligence. The authors focus for the most part on advances in military intelligence, with the primary focus being on the Anglo-American forces. Two articles discuss military intelligence for the Germans and the Russians, and several hint at French advances as well. All the authors present original archival findings, some of them from sources that have remained quite obscure to scholars writing in English. What they evince is a shared and growing sense that World War I must be seen again as an intelligence struggle; that the conflict was both influenced by intelligence and influenced the trajectory of intelligence in ways that have been neglected by mainstream scholarship and yet merit serious research and reflection. The only important development in the intelligence that was caused by the war and is not addressed in this special edition is the emergence in 1917 of ideological or Party-based intelligence in Russia. The real impact of the Cheka can be argued to have occurred after the First World War, however, so its absence here in an edition focused on military intelligence is not a flaw.
The context preceding the events narrated in these articles merits a brief summary. The telegraph had already enabled generals to remain in near-real time contact with their capitals; in the First World War wireless telegraphy (radio) suddenly allowed such communication to reach out to the forward edge of battle on land, as well as to individual warships and soon aircraft as well. The spread of wireless was quickly followed in turn by the emergence of traffic analysis, direction finding, and the improvement of codebreaking. Aircraft supplemented cavalry for reconnaissance from the first days of the conflict, and aircraft soon acquired cameras as well to photograph enemy trenches and batteries. Both the new disciplines of communications intelligence and imagery intelligence required analysts by the hundreds, moving intelligence analysis appreciably closer to a science. The suddenly stunning proficiency of real-time communications accompanied by analyzed data enabled a shift in information that opened the way to modern battlefield communications and surveillance – and the current debate over a Revolution in Military Affairs. It seems no exaggeration to call World War I the linchpin of intelligence history, linking ancient and modern.
This revolution, however, happened fitfully, and painfully. That pain becomes apparent in the opening article by Andy Smoot (husband of Betsy Rohaly Smoot, who appears later in the volume). Mr. Smoot revisits the all-but-forgotten battlefield at Gumbinnen, a tactical German defeat in the war’s opening days that set the stage for Germany’s strategic victory over two Russian armies at Tannenberg the following week. Gumbinnen today is known mostly for what did not happen there. The Russian invasion of East Prussia failed spectacularly at Tannenberg, of course, but at Gumbinnen it still seemed to be working according to plan. German generalship lost its nerve; while German troops fought hard to check the Russian steamroller, the Germans after Gumbinnen retreated deeper into East Prussia. Mr. Smoot explains that Gumbinnen and the early battles of the East Prussia campaign unfolded (at least from an intelligence standpoint) along wholly traditional lines. German commanders relied on cavalry patrolling, prisoner interrogations, and reports from refugees fleeing the Russians to maintain situational awareness; their understanding of enemy intentions and capabilities thus extended little farther than the latest rumored sightings of Russian troops. A few insights emerged from radio intercepts of Russian messages, but these received no particular attention from German commanders, if they were seen at all. Indeed, the main result of Gumbinnen was to get the German commander relieved by Paul von Hindenburg and his aggressive deputy, Erich Ludendorff. This pair would triumph over the Russians in detail soon after at Tannenberg, famously helped by intercepted Russian radio messages that showed how dispersed the two invading Russian armies had become, and how they could not support one another if struck by vigorous German counterattacks.
The war soon settled into to a 400-mile long siege on the Western Front after the fall of 1914, with both the Germans and their French and British adversaries grappling for advantage in the trenches. Britain found itself enmeshed in a war of attrition it had neither wanted nor expected, but the Empire’s vast resources and productive capacity tempted the army’s leaders to believe that the sheer weight of British ordnance fired in Flanders had to be wearing down the German army. This argument wanted evidence, and high command expected intelligence to produce it. Louis Halewood narrates the result, which in hindsight seems cruelly predictable. The analysts found scant data to prove or disprove the hypothesis that Germany was bleeding out its men of fighting age, and so they filled in the evidentiary gaps with inference and guesswork. Yet in making the effort to find ground truth the army’s analysts had actually done more than anyone in London who opposed the strategy of attrition. In this case, as in so many others in military history, bad evidence beat no evidence, and thus General Douglas Haig was allowed to continue his bloodletting through the quagmire of Passchendaele in 1917.
The Eastern Front stayed more fluid, at least on land. The Russian military regained its balance after Tannenberg; though the Russians suffered enormous casualties against the Germans and the Austro-Hungarians, they held their own for two more years. Russia did not lack for technical talent and innovative drive, and soon created a communications intelligence arm to monitor German air and naval forces around the Baltic, as Ivo Juurvee, Director of Internal Security Institute at the Estonian Academy of Security Sciences, explains in his article. Though Russian and German minefields and coastal batteries limited freedom of maneuver in the Baltic, reducing naval operations to something like maritime trench warfare, the Russians still profited somewhat from improved knowledge of German intentions and capabilities. The early Russian commitment to improving communications intelligence not only helped preserve the strategic stalemate in the Baltic region. The high command in St. Petersburg found that communications intelligence helped to cement relations with allies, as the insights gained from captured German naval codebooks was prized by Great Britain; British codebreakers made excellent use of this windfall, which has long been known but is explained in more detail here from the Russian side.
Betsy Rohaly Smoot (wife of Andy Smoot) explains how sigint came to the Americans. The American Expeditionary Force arrived on the Western Front in strength only in the war’s final year, having been hastily formed around the nucleus of the United States’ small peacetime army. That army had not fought a major war in half a century, and thus reached France woefully unprepared for a modern battlefield. The British and French – whose formations would soon find the Americans on their flanks in the trenches – understood immediately what had to be done to get their new allies into fighting shape. As Ms. Smoot demonstrates, this involved prolonged and intensive tutelage of the AEF, particularly its intelligence function. The Americans had arrived in France with no organic intelligence capability worth the name; their regular army had left off patrolling the Mexican border and manning coast artillery batteries, and the vast majority of the doughboys were recent enlistees led, more or less, by amateur officers. Into this void stepped British and French officers determined to teach the Americans enough about battlefield intelligence to make them more dangerous to their German foes than to themselves and their allies. James Beach ably explored this massive transfer of intelligence tradecraft from the perspective of the British Army in an earlier INS article, but Ms. Smoot adds color and detail, concluding that the AEF’s rapidly expanding and soon helpful communications intelligence units learned as much or more from the French as they did from the British.
John Ferris of the University of Calgary shows how the whole thing could be put together in the field, and was by the Canadian Army. The Canadians fought as part of the British army, but had considerable leeway in how they organized and trained. They had far fewer men than the Home Isles, however, and took pains to find ways to take their objectives with minimal loss of life. Having no regular military tradition, moreover, the Canadians had to learn on the fly through improvisation while feeling fewer compunctions about jettisoning doctrines and traditions that seemed less useful under the new conditions of the Western Front. A core of able British officers – including Edward Ironsides and Alan Brooke – ensured their lessons stayed learned. All of this produced a fertile field for intelligence innovation, which the Canadians produced primarily by doubling or trebling the numbers of analysts assigned to large field formations. By 1917 the Canadians had probably the best intelligence in the British Army. It was good enough to be adopted by the British Second Army, and from there to find its way soon the American Expeditionary Force as well, where (although Ferris does not say so) it formed the seed of modern intelligence doctrine for the US Army in World War II and beyond.
Translate that synergy of many perspectives achieved by the Canadian army up to a national scale and one encounters something like what Mark Stout of Johns Hopkins University describes in his article on the World War I origins of an American “intelligence culture.” The United States as well as its army came hurriedly and late to the conflict, with the result being a great deal of amateurism in Washington and across the federal government. This was not all bad; it meant that officers and government civilians with an interest in and need for intelligence found one another in Washington and created what today would be called a “community of interest” to perform and improve American intelligence functions. These men (as they virtually all were) became dazzled by the power that all-source analysis promised to make sense of what the new collection means had compiled. That capacity for all-source analysis came together only in embryonic fashion for the Americans by the end of the war, and it did not live long. Still, it gave promise and inspiration; as one American air officer reflected:
This war has been responsible for the development to a hitherto unknown degree of the science of military intelligence. Whereas previous generals have been content to learn of large enemy movements with questionable accuracy from their spies, and of a number of minor unrelated details from the occasional capture of prisoners or documents, it has become possible through the careful exploitation of all sources of information for Commanders in the present war to reconstruct the major part of the enemy’s organization and intentions with dependable completeness.Footnote2
The lessons of the First World War sank deeper in the British military establishment, as John Bruce explains in his article. The conflict saw both the Admiralty and the War Office building their own communications intelligence arms, with the former becoming mildly famous a half century later but the latter sinking back into an undeserved historical obscurity. Indeed, the British Army’s communications intelligence effort – a federation of entities loosely headed by M.I.1b in London – grew from halting beginnings to effective and geographically far-flung work against the land, air, and diplomatic campaigns of nearly all of Britain’s enemies (not to mention various neutrals and allies as well). It did so, moreover, in collaboration with the Admiralty and with the communications intelligence arms of allies, particularly the French. At war’s end the Admiralty was content to subsume much of M.I.1b in a new, joint cryptologic organization called the Government Code & Cypher School, and the Foreign Office was happy to take over the resulting GC&CS in 1923 – thus creating what would remain the world’s premier cryptologic organization for least a generation to come. Bruce attributes the subsequent historical amnesia toward M.I.1b to a combination of bureaucratic, personnel, and personal factors (which seem by no means unique to Britain or to intelligence, a century ago and now).
That forgetting is something this volume should help mitigate. The consummation of the developments started by the British, Canadians, Americans and their allies and adversaries would take decades and the refinement of the technologies used for communications and battlefield surveillance. The Germans would restore movement to land warfare with the blitzkrieg in 1940, and the Western Allies would hone blitzkrieg to razor sharpness during their dash across France four years later. These campaigns added technologies and practices that were only glimpsed in 1918, including tactical radios linking aircraft, tanks, and self-propelled artillery, often guided by ULTRA intercepts of German communications. The result, in France in 1940, and then again in 1944, was the fastest and most devastating advance in history to that time.
But all this was in the future when World War I ended in 1918. Ms. Smoot’s contribution hints at a key reason why all the combatants required another world war to realize the potential they had glimpsed in the first. After the Armistice the victorious allies and their armies saw little reason to continue the close communications intelligence liaisons they had devised on the Western Front. The US Army set off on its own course of intelligence innovation. When war came again, none of them (perhaps excepting Britain) were ready for the ensuing intelligence struggle, and had to relearn old lessons. This fact suggests why so much of the material presented in this special issue will seem so new to readers in 2017. A great forgetting, as Bruce helps to explain, descended on much of the intelligence conflict in World War I, thus many of the personalities, events, and issues discussed here have not been seriously examined for a century.
The experience of World War I should be pondered anew by everyone taking a side in the debates among scholars and practitioners over the Revolution in Military Affairs. Writing some months before the Armistice, British staff officer J.F.C. Fuller envisioned a startling future:
As our present theory is to destroy ‘personnel,’ so should our new theory be to destroy ‘command,’ not after the enemy’s personnel has been disorganised, but before it has been attacked, so that it may be found in a state of complete disorganisation when attacked.Footnote3
Notes on contributor
Michael Warner serves as an historian in the US Department of Defense. His most recent book is The Rise and Fall of Intelligence: An International Security History (Georgetown, 2014). The opinions expressed in this Foreword are his alone and do not reflect official positions of the Department or any other US Government entity.
Notes
1. Clausewitz, Carl von, On War. Translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989 [1976], see book I, chapter 6 on “Intelligence War,” 117.
2. Bellinger, Alfred R. “Relations of the Air Service with G-2,” n.d., RG 120, M990, in “Gorrell’s History of the American Expeditionary Forces Air Service, 1917–1919,” Series M, Vol. 2, NARA.
3. Fuller, JFC. “Plan 1919”; this is from the first version, dated May 24, 1918, which was apparently titled “Strategic Paralysis as the Object of the Decisive Attack,” and reprinted as “Plan 1919” in Fuller, JFC. Memoirs of an Unconventional Soldier. London: Nicholson & Watson, 1936; accessed January 1, 2015 at http://www.alternatewars.com/WW1/Fuller_1919.htm.