Seizing the Enigma Read Online Free PDF Page B

the Admiralty to solve many German coded messages during the war, to great advantage.
    As Baker-Cresswell saw the U-boat rocking on the surface of the ocean, he asked himself, “Is there a chance we can do another
Magdeburg?
” And he ordered full astern to stop the
Bulldog
from ramming the sub.

2
T HE W RECK OF THE
M AGDEBURG

    O N THE AFTERNOON OF A UGUST 24, 1914, A GRAY G ERMAN warship steamed out of the East Prussian harbor of Memel toward the most fateful accident in the history of cryptology. She was the
Magdeburg
, a four-stacker, what the Germans called a small cruiser to differentiate the type from the larger light cruisers. She was new (three years old), well armed (twelve fast-firing 4-inch guns), fast (27.6 knots)—and unlucky. Her acceptance test had not gone well: her commissioning was delayed several months. She never participated, as was intended, in the fall 1912 naval maneuvers. Some equipment was still not in order when she was declared “ready for war” and when the ancient city of Magdeburg, southwest of Berlin, for which she was named, sponsored her in two days of festivities. One of her turbines gave trouble. And, unlike her sister ships, which got assignments suitable for cruisers, the
Magdeburg
became a torpedo test ship.
    During one of her cruises in 1913, when she sailed to the Canary Islands off the northwestern shoulder of Africa to test the range of the naval radio station at Neumünster, her radio officer, a young lieutenant named Walther Bender, bought a puppy. Schuhmchen, the puppy, became a favorite of the crew. Later, in Kiel, whenever Bender spent the night ashore, Schuhmchen went down to the gangway in the morning as the launch shoved off from the dock to return to the
Magdeburg.
How did he know that Bender was aboard?
    The
Magdeburg
was part of the Baltic Fleet. When war with Russia, France, and England broke out in August 1914, she dropped her test assignment and undertook more typical cruiser tasks. These were directed against the Russians, whose empire included the countries bordering the eastern Baltic: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In her first operation, the
Magdeburg
and another small cruiser, the
Augsburg
, arrived off Liepaja, Latvia’s naval port, to lay mines. They gained an unexpected success: the Russians, thinking the appearance of the two ships portended a major fleet operation, blew up their own ammunition and coal dumps and scuttled ships in the harbor entrances. In the two ships’ second and third operations, they shot up some lighthouses and a signal station and laid a minefield not far from the mouth of the eastern arm of the Baltic Sea, the Gulf of Finland, at whose farther end lay the Russian capital, St. Petersburg (now Leningrad).
    A few days later, on August 23, the commander of a new flotilla ordered his vessels, which included the two cruisers, to assemble for operations. The
Magdeburg
, in Danzig, then a German port, went first to Memel, at the extreme east of Prussia, for some gunnery exercises meant to reassure the population, nervous because the border with Russia was not far from the city limits. The next afternoon the warship set out for the rendezvous, and early on the twenty-fifth it joined the
Augsburg
, three torpedo boats, a submarine, and three other warships off Hoburgen lighthouse on the southern tip of the Swedish island of Gotland. There the officers were told the plan. The ships were to slip by night behind a Russian minefield believed to protect the entrance to the Gulf of Finland and attack whatever Russian ships they found. At 8:30 A.M . that same day, the flotilla set out, moving northeast at the fairly high speed of 20 knots. The sailors aboard the
Magdeburg
, who suspected the presence of enemy armored cruisers, thought the assignment was a suicide mission.
    By 5 P.M ., in a calm sea, the air misty, the navigational plots of the
Magdeburg
and the
Augsburg
differed by a mile. But this raised no concern, since