Part 26
What were the results of this propaganda offensive? Making an estimate 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.
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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.