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The Zimmermann
Telegram
The
Independent
On 9 January 1917, the German
Supreme High Command held a momentous meeting. Previously,
they had agreed that U-boats must surface before firing their
torpedoes, a restriction that would limit accidental attacks
on civilian shipping, but now German commanders were about to
agree on a course of all-out U-boat aggression, which was set
to begin on 1 February. Although such a change of policy would
cut off supply lines and possibly starve Britain into
submission within six months, there was a risk attached to
this strategy. Up until this point, President Woodrow Wilson
had kept America neutral, but the inevitability of civilian
casualties resulting from all-out
U-boat aggression
threatened to draw America into the war. Consequently, the
German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, decided to draw up
an insurance policy.
Zimmermann sent a telegram to the
President of Mexico, stating that in the case of America
entering the war, then Germany would support a Mexican
invasion of America, helping it to reclaim territories such as
Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. If Zimmermann’s plan worked,
then America would be too busy defending itself at home to
become involved in the European conflict. Ideally he would
have sent the message via Germany’s own transatlantic cables,
but before dawn on the first day of the war, the British ship
Telconia had approached the German coast under cover of
darkness and severed Germany’s transatlantic cables. This act
of sabotage forced Zimmermann to send his telegram via cables
that touched Britain.
Zimmermann had encrypted the
telegram, and assumed that the German codes were strong enough
to protect his message, but he underestimated the skills of
the British codebreakers, who immediately set to work
deciphering the telegram. The Admiralty’s codebreaking office,
known as Room 40, were well versed in cracking a whole variety
of codes. For example, Room 40 had solved the mystery behind a
Turkish postcard that had been addressed to Sir Henry Jones,
184 King’s Road, Tighnabruaich, Scotland. Sir Henry assumed
that it was from his son, a prisoner of the Turks, but he was
puzzled because the postcard was blank, and the address was
peculiar – none of the houses in Tighnabruaich were numbered
and there was no King’s Road.
Room 40’s codebreakers realised the
address alluded to the Bible, First Kings, Chapter 18, Verse
4: “Obadiah took a hundred prophets, and hid them fifty in
a cave, and fed them with bread and water.” Sir Henry’s
son was simply reassuring his family that he was being well
looked after by his captors.Although Room 40 rapidly
deciphered the Zimmermann telegram, the British did not
immediately show it to the Americans. If the Americans entered
the war because of the hostile contents of the telegram, then
the Germans would realise that their diplomatic code had been
broken, and they might then upgrade their codes, depriving the
British of a valuable source of intelligence. Furthermore,
unrestricted U-boat warfare was due to begin in just a matter
of days, and this in itself might provoke the Americans into
entering war. Why risk losing a source of intelligence, if the
Americans might already be on the verge of joining the Allies?
On 1 February, Germany embarked on its strategy of
unrestricted U-boat warfare, but two days later President
Wilson announced to Congress that America would continue to
remain neutral. This left the British with no choice but to
reveal the contents of the Zimmermann
telegram.
At the beginning of the year Wilson had
said that it would be a “crime against civilisation”
to lead his nation to war, but the Zimmermann telegram forced
him to change his mind:
“I advise that the Congress
declare the recent course
of the Imperial Government to be
in fact nothing less
than war against the government and
people of the
United States, and that it formally accept
the status
of belligerent which has thus been thrust upon
it.”
A single breakthrough by Room 40’s
codebreakers had succeeded where three years of intensive
diplomacy had failed. |
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