An article in The Spectator last week by Sinclair McKay sent me to a bookcase to pull this out. His piece was about Old Etonian, Nigel de Grey, who decoded the Zimmermann Telegram in 1917 with a Presbyterian pastor, the Rev William Montgomery.
They were part of a Naval Intelligence team known as Room 40 OB, the “OB’ standing for Old Building. This was the First World War equivalent of Bletchley Park, where de Grey served in WW II. It started with just a handful of code-crackers in Room 40 but by 1917 it had moved to larger quarters and there were 800 wireless operators and some eighty cryptographers and clerks.
I suspect, if you are my age, you will have read some of Tuchman’s books. If you are half my age you have probably never heard of her. She is described as a “popular historian” which sounds patronising but of course really means that to a layman she is highly readable. Her history of the Zimmermann Telegram starts in 1895 with Kaiser Wilhelm’s conviction that Japan is a Yellow Peril threatening the West in much the same way that ragwort is smothering Margravine Cemetery. She is an excellent story teller and, so far as I’m aware, pretty accurate.
The telegram was sent by Germany’s Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, to the German ambassador in Mexico. It proposed a military alliance between Germany and Mexico against the United States and if successful the ceding of Texas to Mexico. When this top secret message was published and later acknowledged to be accurate by Zimmermann it brought the US into the war and sealed Germany’s fate. It’s a riveting tale of espionage.
After two and a half years of sustained attempts by President Wilson to keep America out of World War I, the existence of the Zimmerman Telegram in which Germany offered to help Mexico regain territory lost in battle to the United States during the 1800s was one of a series of fateful events during the first months of 1917 that resulted in Wilson reversing his position and entering the conflict with the cause celebre of “a war to end all wars.” An America which pivoted from its former isolationist sentiment and began to look outward upon the world at large would never be the same again.
Twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Barbara Tuchman is a historian who writes riverting accounts of the United States experience, “Stillwell and the American Experience in China” representing, in my opinion, the very best.
I have The Guns of August and The Proud Tower and now must get Stillwell and A Distant Mirror. The Proud Tower, incidentally, is a quotation from The City in the Sea, a poem by Edgar Allan Poe.
“While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.”