Quotes About Room 40

It was pretty clear, once the SKM codebook was in British hands, that the signals were not just coded but also enciphered. Codes substitute whole phrases with numbers or letters. The German navy then added an extra layer using a cipher for each number, so that each one stood for something else, using another key that the Room 40 team clearly did not possess.

In fact, by the end of the war, 20,000 wireless signals had poured into Room 40 and most of them were successfully decoded.

Only holders of a cipher "key" could divine the underlying text, but possessing the codebooks made the whole process of solving the messages far simpler. To exploit these treasures the Admiralty established Room 40.

Captain Hall had no direct control over Room 40—as of early 1915 his intelligence division and Room 40 were separate entities—but his name more than any other would come to be associated with its achievements.

Where Room 40 promised to give Britain the clearest advantage was in the battle for control of the seas, and there Britain's strategy had undergone a change.

One of the really amazing things about the Lusitania saga was that, at the time, there existed in the admiralty a super-secret spy entity known as 'Room 40'.

One of the controversies about the history of Room 40 was how much the British authorities had thought about codes before 1914. They had certainly not prepared for the sheer flood of coded, intercepted signals that would pour into the Admiralty or War Office. But recent scholarship suggests that they had in fact been making preparations to intercept and, in a quiet way, attempt code-breaking, whereas before, the whole story had been reduced to an amateur series of lucky coincidences.

Room 40 knew a U-boat was heading south to Liverpool - knew the boat's history; knew that it was now somewhere in the North Atlantic under orders to sink troop transports and any other British vessel it encountered; and knew as well that the submarine was armed with enough shells and torpedoes to sink a dozen ships.