of how it affected the enemy is like reporting on the effects of
artillery-fire or bombing raids, for they happened on the other side
of the line, “where visibility was poor.” Any one who has listened to
the interrogation of German prisoners can hardly fail to have been
struck by the wide variance in the replies given by soldiers from the
same unit. Questioned about the effect of a barrage, for example, one
man would state that it destroyed the German wire, demolished their
trenches, and cut their communications, and that he and his companions
were demoralized and panic-stricken; while another prisoner, from the
same company, perhaps, would defiantly insist that the Yankee shell did
no great damage, that casualties were light, and that he never missed a
meal or a night’s sleep. Or, when interrogated in regard to the damage
caused by our bombing squadrons, one prisoner would insist that, beyond
killing a cow and breaking a few windows, absolutely no harm was done,
while another, visibly shaken by his experiences, would assert that all
that remained of the town in which he was billeted was a hydrant and
two paving-stones. German officers, when questioned about the effect of
our propaganda, invariably made the stock reply, “The men laughed at
the leaflets,” but the enemy privates generally admitted that they read
and believed the _flug blätter_. On the other hand, captured officers
frequently complained about the depressing effect which the leaflets had
on the morale of their men, while many privates stoutly denied having
been influenced by propaganda, even when the much-thumbed leaflets were
found on their persons. It must be remembered, however, that no soldier
likes to attribute his defeat to pieces of paper; he prefers to blame it
on lack of food, the enemy’s overwhelming superiority of numbers, and
to his preponderance of artillery and machine-guns. If a historian ever
has an opportunity to delve into the files of the German Intelligence
Bureau, however, I imagine that he will find ample evidence that the
showers of leaflets falling from the blue played no inconsiderable part
in the collapse of the German war-machine. But, whatever the results of
our efforts in this direction, as revealed by the light of history, the
American people can be assured that never was a campaign of propaganda
waged with such scrupulous regard for the truth. Though certain of our
allies sent out material for distribution over the enemy lines which took
considerable liberties with the truth, to put it mildly, and though the
French quite frankly made use of Bolshevistic arguments, appeals, and
promises, the distribution of our own propaganda leaflets was delayed
time after time in order that the General Staff might sift and weigh the
statements which it contained until they contained nothing save sincerity
and truth.
In the weeks that followed Foch’s great offensive in the summer of 1918,
it became increasingly apparent to those who were in a position to judge,
that German morale, both in the heart of the empire as well as at the
front, was imperceptibly but none the less steadily deteriorating. No one
realized the significance of this to the Allied cause better than the
chief of the Psychologic Subsection, who determined to watch the progress
of the movement, just as a physician watches the progress of a disease,
and to indicate its trend by means of a chart, like those on which nurses
record the variations in the pulse and temperature of their patients. In
pursuance of this plan, which was put into execution about the 1st of
September, 1918, a daily report was prepared which contained in brief
form all news in any way relating to German morale which had come in from
all sources during the preceding twenty-four hours. At the end of each
week an interpretation of the drift of these news items was attempted in
a weekly report. Using as a basis for its estimates material contained
in these reports, supplemented by information obtained from every source
open to Military Intelligence, the subsection worked out its famous
“Chart of German Civilian Morale,” which, during the closing months of
the war, occupied a conspicuous place on a wall of Secretary Baker’s
office. The chart was drawn on a sheet divided into cross-sections,
each of which represented a day, while the heavy black line, writhing
across the paper like a dying serpent, showed the wavering morale of
Germany’s civil population. Secondary lines depicted in graphic form the
German military situation, the degree of political unity in Germany,
the situation in Austria-Hungary, the state of the food supply in the
Central Empires, and the U-boat sinkings. But it was, of course, the line
indicating the state of civilian morale which most accurately gauged the
situation. Starting in August, 1914 (nearly three years before our entry
into the war), at the top of the chart, the line runs almost straight
until the battle of the Marne, when there is a sudden drop. It recovers,
however, with the continuance of the German advance, declines during the
winters of 1914-1915 and 1915-1916, only to ascend again with the coming
of spring; falls sharply after the final reverse at Verdun, drops to a
still lower level than before during the anxious winter of 1917-1918,
rises almost to its highest peak during Hindenburg’s tremendous onset in
the following spring; begins a gradual decline in ratio to the steady
increase in the strength of the American armies, and finally, beginning
with the defeat of the all-conquering Germans at Château-Thierry, goes
plunging downward until, on November 11, 1918, the line ends at the
bottom of the chart in the abyss of national despair.
Shortly after the Armistice, when the morale of Germany’s civil
population was no longer of any interest save to the Germans themselves,
the symptoms of a new and even more alarming disorder became apparent to
the specialists of the Psychologic Subsection, whereupon, in order to
keep this new menace to the health of the world under observation, a new
chart was started and a fresh series of reports were begun, the personnel
of the section being instructed to immediately note all movements and
manifestations likely to prove destructive of good order and stable
government. On huge wall-maps of Europe and Asiatic Russia various
kinds of disturbances or threatened disturbances—revolutions, mutinies,
riots, racial and religious troubles, strikes, labor and political
demonstrations—were indicated by pins of different colors:
Red: Bolshevism, Syndicalist, or Socialist.
Brown: Political revolution, counter-revolution,
anti-Bolshevist or social disturbances.
Blue: Industrial strikes.
Green: Food riots, plundering, or difficult food situation.
White: Racial troubles.
Black: Military mutiny.
Yellow: Disease epidemic.
Each day a report was made out, compiled from various sources, covering
the subject of European disturbances, these reports being arranged
geographically. Every Friday a weekly summary was prepared in numbered
paragraphs, condensing the daily reports and giving, if possible, an
interpretation of the trend of unrest during the preceding week. As the
most threatening disturbances during the winter of 1918-1919 were of a
Bolshevist nature, it was deemed advisable to issue a weekly report on
the activities of Trotzky, Lenine & Co. and their followers.
The Fifth Section of the Military Intelligence Division, known as M I 5,
is charged with the duty of obtaining positive intelligence, that is,
of locating direct and indirect sources of information; of supervising
military attachés, who, within the limits of their activities, obtain
essential information, and of forwarding this information to such
sections of the Intelligence Division as may find it of value. Now
I am perfectly aware that the army officers who are attached to the
American embassies and legations in various foreign countries do not
stand particularly high in the estimation of the American people. They
are generally regarded as men who have been selected for their wealth
and social distinction rather than for their abilities as soldiers; who
have had more experience in ballrooms than in bombarded cities, and are
more successful in leading cotillions than at leading troops in battle.
As a matter of fact, this estimate of our military attachés is bitterly
unjust. As showing the type of men who represented the army abroad, I
might mention that our military attaché in England during the early years
of the Great War was Major-General George S. Squier (then a colonel),
chief signal officer of the army and one of the foremost scientists in
America, if not, indeed, in the world; our attaché at Paris was Colonel
Spencer S. Crosby, one of the most able engineer officers in the army;
while at Berlin our military representative was Major-General (then
Colonel) Joseph A. Kuhn, who, after organizing, training, and commanding
in action the 79th Division, eventually rose to the command of an army
corps.
Everything considered, the American military attachés have done more
valuable work and received less recognition for it than almost any
class of officers that I know. They have been placed in the unenviable
position of taking orders from two departments—War and State; they
have been forced, by the very nature of their duties, to play the rôle
of onlookers while their fellow officers were fighting, and they have
repeatedly been accused of being spies. Though the duties of our attachés
in the capitals of our allies have been largely ornamental during the
war, owing to the fact that they were virtually superseded in their
military functions by the various American military missions, their work
in the neutral countries of Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Spain,
and Switzerland was of enormous importance, for they provided Military
Intelligence with its most reliable and important source of information.
Those officers stationed at The Hague, Copenhagen, and Berne could look
across the barbed wire, figuratively speaking, and see for themselves
what the enemy was doing. Through all sorts of agents—spies, smugglers,
deserters, refugees, business men whose affairs took them into the
territory of the Central Powers, and returning travellers—they were able
to keep their fingers constantly on the military and economic pulse of
the enemy, and to report the information thus obtained to the A. E. F.
and to Washington. It goes without saying that this work called for the
exercise of the highest degree of patience, resourcefulness, and tact,
for they were always surrounded by German agents, and particularly in
those countries where German sympathizers predominated, the slightest
indiscretion would have resulted in a demand for their recall. No news
that came out of Germany was too trivial to escape their attention. Every
one who crossed the frontier, from Dutch and Danish bankers to German
deserters, was adroitly questioned and cross-questioned by the attachés,
certain of the information thus obtained exercising a profound effect
on America’s military policy. For example, our attaché at The Hague
was dining one evening with a Dutch banker who had just returned from
a business trip to Germany. While chatting over the coffee and cigars
the Hollander remarked that, though he had been the guest of a German
nobleman of great wealth, he had not been quite as comfortable as on
previous visits, owing to the absence of his host’s butler.
“What has become of old Franz?” the Hollander had asked his host. “The
place isn’t the same without him.”
“He was called to the colors last week,” was the answer.
“But surely he is too old for active service,” the banker protested.
“He must be nearer sixty than fifty; he is blind in one eye and he is
crippled with rheumatism.”
“Ach, yes,” admitted the German. “But what would you? The Fatherland has
need of every man.”
This incident, related quite casually over a dinner-table, though trivial
in itself, gave our military attaché—and through him our Military
Intelligence—an intimation of the enormous depletion of Germany’s
man-power. Taken in conjunction with similar reports from other sources,
it convinced him that Germany was fast becoming desperately hard up for
men.
The attaché in Switzerland, perusing, as was his custom, the current
issues of the German newspapers, had his attention attracted by an
advertisement, inserted by a citizen of a south German city, offering
to rent a pair of stout leather boots, in good condition, for six weeks
for forty marks. When the equivalent of ten dollars is demanded for the
use of a pair of boots for six weeks, there is only one conclusion to
be drawn. “Germany must be at the last gasp for leather,” argued the
attaché, and he so informed Washington. His surmise proved perfectly
correct.
Our military representative at The Hague was materially aided in his
quest for information by a former sergeant in the American Army, who,
upon his discharge, had bought a small truck-farm in southern Holland,
within a few rods of the frontier. His dwelling was a recognized
rendezvous for smugglers and deserters, the old soldier sending reports
of the immensely important information which he obtained from them to the
attaché at the capital as regularly as, when stationed at an army post in
the Indian country, he turned in his company reports.
All cable messages sent by the military attachés to the Military
Intelligence Division habitually ended with the sentence “Pershing
informed,” which signified that the information had also been
communicated to the Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary
Forces. Shortly after the arrival of the former Kaiser at Amerongen, the
newspapers carried circumstantial accounts of serious political unrest
in Holland. In order to correct the impression thus created, the attaché
at The Hague, who was evidently blessed with a sense of humor, sent the
following message to Washington:
“_Everything quiet in Holland. The Kaiser is still with us.
Pershing informed. God also._”
Outside of Tiflis, in the Caucasus, in whose bazaars eighty languages
are commonly spoken, I suppose that the Sixth Section of Military
Intelligence, familiarly referred to as M I 6, is the nearest modern
equivalent to the Tower of Babel. This section is charged with
translating into English books, periodicals, newspapers, pamphlets,
posters, proclamations, army orders, war diaries, confidential reports,
Heaven only knows what besides, which appear in pretty much every
language under the sun. The translators at present employed in the
section make translations from the French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese,
German, Dutch, Dano-Norwegian, Russian, Swedish, Greek, and Icelandic.
This comprises only a portion of the section’s work, however, for it
also makes translations from Roumanian, Ukrainian, Czecho-Slovak,
Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Polish, Lithuanian,
Lettish, Finnish, Ladino (there’s a strange one!), Hebrew, Yiddish,
Turkish, Armenian, Assyrian, Syriac, Arabic, Hindustani, Bengali,
Chinese, Japanese, Choctaw, and other North American Indian dialects,
Samoan, a dialect of the Philippine Islands, and Esperanto. By an
ingenious system of filing and indexing the information thus obtained,
the section has become a sort of clearing-house for data gleaned from the
foreign press.
M I 8 is the Cable and Telegraph Section of Military Intelligence. A
portion of its work consists in sending and receiving telegrams and
cables between the division and its intelligence officers on duty outside
of Washington, including the military attachés in foreign countries.
By means of special wire connections, remarkably fast service has been
provided, particularly with the most important centre, Paris, whence
messages in plain text have been delivered in Washington four hours
earlier by the clock than they were despatched, while code messages have
been delivered at approximately the same time by the clock that they were
sent. As an illustration of the peculiar tricks played by the change
in time, I might mention—though it has nothing on earth to do with the
subject of Military Intelligence—that the news of the death of Queen
Victoria was received in New York three and a half hours before the time
at which she breathed her last!
By far the greater portion of the enormous amount of cable correspondence
handled by this office has been in the form of code messages. Since
the necessity for security has required that the code words of each
message be enciphered to prevent the possibility of the message being
intercepted and read by the enemy, it has been necessary to subject each
code message to two complete translations. It has also been the duty of
this section, in order to insure secrecy and to secure economy in the
transmission of messages, to prepare five code-books for publication.
Few persons realize, I imagine, that the use of code by the Military
Intelligence Division, the Adjutant-General’s Office, and other branches
of the War Department, as well as by the American Expeditionary Forces,
has resulted in a saving to the government of at least 50 per cent in the
cost of telegraphic and cable communications. The use of the Geographical
Code has brought about an even greater economy by eliminating the
necessity of spelling out foreign place names. Though hundreds of plays,
novels, and magazine stories have been based on the work of code and
cipher experts in this and other countries, the writers have usually
painted in too vivid colors the romantic side of the calling. Though
code and cipher work is frequently productive of exciting and dramatic
moments, it is usually the intellectual excitement of a chemist who,
after weeks of laborious experiments, discovers a new reaction, rather
than the physical thrill which a detective experiences when he discovers
a clew to a crime.
* * * * *
Because of the enormous number of foreign-born citizens who were brought
into the army by the draft, or who entered it through the National Guard
or as volunteers, the work of counter-espionage within the military
establishment itself was of vital importance, for a single traitor in
the expeditionary forces might well have turned victory into disaster.
Had it not been for the vigilance and efficiency of the Third Section of
Military Intelligence, which was charged with counter-espionage within
the military establishment itself, our hastily recruited and somewhat
loosely organized armies would have afforded countless opportunities for
the operations of enemy agents. I can give no higher praise to the work
of this section than to say that, though numerous enemy agents succeeded
in gaining admission to the military service in the United States,
they did not succeed in getting overseas, where they might have done
irreparable harm. So active were our intelligence officers, so carefully
did they investigate the record of every man destined for service in
France, that, of the two and a half million men in the A. E. F., not a
single one, so far as I am aware, was convicted of espionage.
Every military organization operating independently, from a division
down to a quartermaster depot, possessed its own counter-espionage
organization, built up within itself for its own protection but operating
according to a general plan and reporting directly to the Military
Intelligence Division in Washington. During the war there were over
400 intelligence officers reporting to Military Intelligence, either
directly or through department intelligence officers. In addition to
these, there were special intelligence officers at certain highly
important points: New York, Hoboken, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, St. Louis,
New Orleans, Seattle, and San Juan, Porto Rico—and twenty-one district
intelligence officers stationed in centres of somewhat less importance.
The privilege of direct communication, granted by the Secretary of War,
enabled the counter-espionage organization throughout the United States
to be controlled and co-ordinated without interference by the normal
military command, thereby insuring additional secrecy for its operations
and eliminating the enormous amount of time and red tape involved
in sending communications through the usual military channels. Each
intelligence officer corresponded directly and freely with every other
intelligence officer, copies of such lateral communications being sent to
Military Intelligence, the files of M. I. thus becoming a great central
reservoir for intelligence information of every sort. As a result of this
organization, the Director of Military Intelligence, sitting at his desk
in Washington, was the centre of a vast network of intelligence officers
and other agents which covered not only the whole of the United States
but, indeed, the greater part of the world.
The ever-present problem presented by counter-espionage work within the
army was the determination of the loyalty of officers and men. Experience
proved that the pro-German was almost certain to reveal himself sooner or
later, or to be reported by some one who had known him, the loyal rank
and file themselves constituting the most effective counter-espionage
service of all. Investigations of men thus reported frequently showed,
however, that, though the suspect might have been pro-German before our
entrance into the war, he had been apparently loyal since. If he was
an enlisted man it was usually deemed safe to put him with line troops
and send him to the front, for, even were he to prove disloyal, his
opportunities for acquiring important information were comparatively
few, and his opportunities for transmitting such information to the
enemy almost infinitesimal. In the case of an officer, however, the
question took on a far graver aspect, and only after the most searching
investigation was such a man permitted to go overseas.
The activities of the men under investigation assumed many forms. First
in importance, of course, though not in numbers, were those enemy agents
who had entered the army for the express purpose of acquiring information
for transmission to the enemy. These were, in plain language, spies, and
had they been caught “with the goods,” they would have been subject to
court martial and execution. In order to silence the countless stories
and rumors which have been circulated, I will avail myself of this
opportunity to state that _not a single American soldier or civilian
was executed for espionage during the entire course of the war_. The
bulk of the cases which were investigated concerned men who, because of
their foreign birth, or antecedents, or sympathies, _might_ have been
willing to impart information of military value to enemy agents. The most
difficult class to deal with, however, was the man who was spreading
stories, with or without thought as to their effect, which would tend
to lower the morale of the army. The reports upon which investigations
were initiated varied greatly in definiteness, ranging all the way
from specific statements as to a man’s utterances or acts to a vague
rumor that in such and such a place there was a man, name not given, who
should be investigated. It was the policy of the section, however, to
pursue any clew, no matter how vague, until the guilt or innocence of
the suspect was definitely established. Where the original information
was anonymous, that point was always sharply emphasized, so that the
suspect’s reputation might not be injured should the allegations prove
to be unfounded, for it was found that anonymous charges were very
frequently made from motives of spite or revenge or because of some real
or fancied injury. In such cases it was the policy of the section to push
the investigation only far enough to show their character and then drop
them promptly, without burdening the field intelligence officers or other
investigating agencies with useless work.
The converse of this policy was followed in cases where the charges
appeared to be well grounded, the man then being kept under surveillance
until something, no matter what, was picked up which would place him
where he could do no harm.
One of the commonest problems was the one presented by the officer of
German extraction who had been born and bred amid Teutonic influences,
and who was naturally pro-German in sympathy and utterances before
the United States entered the war, but who had been guilty of no
act or utterance since that date which could be construed as in any
degree disloyal, and who, from a military point of view, was extremely
efficient. Such cases, in the last analysis, always resolved themselves
into the question: “Is he fit to go across?” Each case was, of course,
considered on its own merits. While it was obviously impossible to lay
down a rule-of-thumb applicable to all, two considerations in the main
governed the decision. In the first place, an effort was made to obtain
the opinions of the officers serving with the man in question and to
learn whether they would be satisfied to go into action against German
troops with him. If his fellow officers felt that they could trust him
under such circumstances, it was a fair judgment in his favor. The second
consideration was to ascertain whether his name, lineage, or appearance
would make him unacceptable to our French allies. If such were likely to
be the case, international courtesy, if nothing else, made it inadvisable
to send him overseas. Surveillance of these men naturally was continued
in France, but the Intelligence Division of the A. E. F., in reporting
that such a case could be considered closed, frequently said in effect
that any taint of disloyalty which might once have existed had been
burned away by the fire of battle.