Communications. An army lives and dies by it. Where must the men be? When must they
get there? How strong is the enemy? Where is the enemy? During the First World War,
one of the biggest problems of all was poor communications, even though technological
advances were made all the time. Let’s check it out.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War special episode about communications in World War .
The main methods of communications that were used from the war’s beginning to end, runners
and telephones, were relatively reliable in static trenches, but often failed completely
once soldiers left the trenches. The defense would be able to receive information and updates
about the attack. Their telephone lines were dug in and could withstand some artillery
hits and their runners could use the communication trenches for some protection. They could then
react by calling artillery or machine guns into action or effectively commit their reserve
forces, but the army on offense, once the soldiers left the trenches, lost all communications
and often did not have any real awareness of what was actually going on. They could
often not change their axis of attack nor effectively commit their reserves to exploit
success. Any pieces of information that did make it back to a higher HQ were often very
brief and only dealt with the situation in the very near vicinity of the person sending
the report. Collating reports to determine the overall state of the entire attack was close to impossible
They did, of course, try everything they could think of to maintain communication in the
attack, including runners, but they were as vulnerable as everyone else and often failed
to make it back across no-mans land; they carried telephone wire forward, but both carrier
and wire were seriously exposed to the enemy; they used spotters in planes and balloons,
which had a slew of problems. Early on there was no radio, so pilots would write their
dispatches down and drop them at HQ, but that caused delays, and it was often tough to tell
what was going on anyhow. Several times this problem was tackled by having soldiers wear
reflective signs on their backs, but if they retreated or lay down they became brilliant
targets for the enemy. Pigeons were used, but they were a one-way communication and
also took time since the coops were often at senior headquarters, not regional. They
used semaphore, but that was also one-way since the sender with the troops would have
to expose himself to send, and they used flares, but you couldn’t do complex signalling with
only a couple of different color flares, especially when the enemy was using the same color flares,
which could create tragic misunderstandings. By 1918, the infantry carried radios and they
were becoming more common in tanks, but even at the end of the war, they were still comparatively rare.
At the very beginning of the war, the telegraph was the quickest and most efficient communications
method. However, it wasn’t very suitable during the Allied retreat to the Marne because
of the time it took to lay the cables, so they would often have to rely on other means
during that mobile phase of the war. The dispatch riders used motorcycles to carry messages,
and did an excellent job, considering that they often had poor maps, incomplete information
about unit locations, were on poor roads with no signs, or riding at night. The allies also
had the French phone system, but it wasn’t very reliable and they were in conflict with
French civilians for use of the lines.
It was the Germans who first effectively practiced electronic warfare. At the Battle of Tannenberg,
the Germans intercepted unencrypted Russian radio communications. See, the Russians had
two codes, an older code that they knew that the Germans had broken before the war, and
a new code, but they didn’t have enough of the new codebooks to go around, so they
just hoped the Germans weren’t listening. They were wrong.
On the Western Front, the British were using a lot of field phones. These phones were of
the ‘earth return’ variety, which meant that a single strand of cable was laid with
the circuit being completed through the ground itself by putting a stake in the ground on
both ends. That was good, as you only needed to lay a single strand of cable, but bad because
all the Germans had to do was put their own stake in the ground and listen in, which they
did, using Moritz listening sets. The British did not figure out that the Germans could
listen in until the summer of 1915.
That year saw much less visual signaling and a big increase telephone use, and this was
the main communication system for most of this year. This year also saw the increase
of almost all other types of signaling including pigeons, dogs, flares, rockets, and a more
sophisticated system of runners, like Adolf Hitler, who was a Regimental runner during
WW1 and would have primarily been responsible for messages going from Regiment HQ down to
Battalion HQ and back.
Radios had made little headway in the army and really only at the higher HQ, but were
used by the Royal Flying Corps for artillery spotting. One big problem, though, was the
weight of the radio, 70 lbs, meant that the spotter had to be left behind and the pilot
had to both fly and operate the radio.
By this time the Germans were getting good at intercepting British phone communications
and often knew of the British plans in advance – to the point of shouting welcomes to new
British regiments at the front. So the British needed a better system of communications,
and toward the end of the year Captain Algernon Fuller, later Major General Fuller in World
War Two, invented the Fullerphone, a DC line telegraph that was mostly immune to interception.
This helped, but by 1916, as artillery increased in intensity, the lines were frequently cut
and had to be buried deeper and deeper. By the battle of the Somme, the ‘deep bury’
was common with lines dug in to at least 3 feet- about a meter. In the Ypres Salient,
lines had to be buried twice as deep just to survive the regular, heavy artillery.
As the year progressed, concerted efforts were really being made to maintain line communications.
First, they had signals detachments located very far forward who were available to fix
any broken lines as quickly as possible; second, they began developing sophisticated line layouts
so that if one line was broken you could be connected to different lines that were not
broken, and third they started to use ‘ladder lines’. These lines were wired together
in a ladder format – two parallel lines several hundred meters apart going backward
from the front, and they were interconnected with lines between them every 50 or 75m. They
could take a lot of damage and still pass the signal.
In 1917, the use of wireless radio became much more widespread, but continued to be
at Divisional HQ and higher. The sets were bulky, heavy, and had large inefficient batteries,
so they were physically hard to move around and they also had big antenna systems until
the loop antenna was invented later in the war. A few tanks had radios installed, but
they also had to have extensive antenna systems mounted on them. Command structures and the
duties of Signals units constantly evolved, and everyone eventually saw that signals had
to be controlled all the way down to the unit level; any other systems produced chaos.
Even so, still in 1918, there could be huge problems. The German offensive resulted in
the loss of a significant amount of signals equipment, phones, lines, radios, etc. The
only way Allied communications continued to function at all was through a secondary, emergency
cable system, undetected by the Germans. By the last few months of the war, though, the
Allies had developed very effective and efficient communication systems that were able to provide
reliable communications during the final, mobile phase of the war.
Signals, like many of the other branches of the army, was completely reinvented during
the war. In 4 years Signals really went from its infancy to an organization that was very
close to what it would remain for the rest of the 20th century and even today. The technology
has changed and there are many more soldiers trained in signals but the doctrine is very
similar – even the line diagrams from the end of the war look like our current line
diagrams. It’s really amazing when you think of how far communications developed in just
four years, think of the thousands of men killed in botched operations that may have
lived had it happened earlier.
Now, this special has, as you may have noticed, focused pretty much on the Western Front.
The reasons for that are that that’s where you saw the development most clearly, and
also the research for this was provided by Mike Hayes, a communications and signals officer
in the Canadian army for over 20 years. Thank you, Mike, we’re very grateful for your help.
I briefly mentioned Adolf Hitler and even though he was “only” a dispatch runner,
the war had a profound impact on him. You can find out all about him during the war right here.
For some cool pictures of battleships, you can check out our Instagram page. Don’t
forget to subscribe and see you Thursdays.