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was of course universally used
by all literate people of Nelson's time, although in the mid to late
18th century and early 19th century not all had yet mastered the art.
For those who had, exchanging written correspondence was a laboured
event indeed, with long waits before an answer was received. No airmail;
no first class post [rather like today in 2005] and a stage coach, which
conveyed the letters, likely to be intercepted by highwaymen often
resulting in the mail being lost. |
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| Nelson was
brought up in a period where other forms of
communicating were the norm, when flags, sound signals, and the
guard-boat [in harbour] made or conveyed signals around the gathered
fleet. Outside this gathered group of ships, sending and receiving
signals was painfully slow often taking a couple of weeks to get an
answer, and admirals had to despatch small sloops or frigates [called
pickets] from their group to act as messengers. On land, messages were
passed from the Admiralty by semaphore involving many semaphore towers
each within sight of one another. This was regularly used from London to
Chatham and to Portsmouth. You may occasionally see a church flying a
white ensign {most fly the flag of St George}, and this is allowed
because once upon a time, that church, probably because it was the
tallest building in the area, had a semaphore tower on top of it
and was part of the Defence Communications System of the 18th and 19th
centuries. |
| Also by
Nelson's time, codes, albeit in their infancy,
had been formulated and were used mainly for military purpose. However,
they were codes employed for speed [brevity] rather than for security
and were rarely seen or intercepted by the enemy. On the other hand
[pardon the pun] hand written letters regularly used a secret code just
in case they were intercepted. Today, still considering brevity
and speed, much of what is in the International Code of Signals [INTCO], used by
all sea farers and which transcends all languages and national
custom/rules/regulations, comes from the time of the Napoleonic Wars and
the early 19th century. It therefore started with naval sayings,
doings, manoeuvres and the like, and picked-up mercantile terms as it
grew in size to its present volume. |
| Land armies
therefore had an advantage over naval
fleets, by using semaphore signals over long ranges, heliograph signals,
fast horses in relays, hot-air balloons, spies, fifth columnists etc to
extend their communications, but for Nelson and his captains, the
crows-nest was as good as it got. Moreover, for the next 80 or so years,
naval fleet communications were stuck in a time warp, whilst army
communications had a head start. |
After 1805
the navy had little opportunity to hone its
communication skills in battle, and apart from local skirmishes,
particularly in the Far East and on the Indian sub-continent, and the
difficult war of 1812 against America, the next big thing for them was
the Crimean War. The armies in Europe fighting Napoleon, kept
going for a further ten years until 1815 and during that time their
communication skills had increased many fold, even integrating
orders with the Germans [and others] at Waterloo. After that period
and until they were required for Crimea, they Garrisoned many large areas
around the world, each requiring extended communications. Once
again, the Crimean War mostly involved land armies, where, because of
the shallow waters of the Sea of Azov, the naval input, although vital,
was limited to the Black Sea often well away from the Russian enemy.
Communications at sea without radio [still some 32 years hence] was
always going to be laboured beyond the gathered fleet. Within the
gathered fleet, communications got better on each voyage and the skill
was practiced over and over again until perfected. The introduction of the
Ironclads , at a time when the Army were fighting the Indian Mutiny War
and several others on that Continent, did nothing to ease the
frustrating problem of long distance naval communications - despite the
size and colour of the signal flag, it could only be seen from a finite
distance, made the more difficult in heavy seas and the masking of the
flags by the sails of the transmitting ship and the receiving ship, and
all this of course in day light only. In the 1860's the Telegraph
had been invented and was used world wide to send telegrams along wires
and cables, and these two gentlemen were responsible for fine
tuning land army communications and establishing a military telegraph of
their very own. They are of course General Robert E Lee and
General Grant.
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| The British army also used it
with success and of course it revolutionised land communications
overnight. At sea, the navy couldn't use it [cables and wires not
long enough!] and their only salvation was the signalling lantern made
available by the introduction of electricity. At least the
signalling lantern could dramatically increase the range over which
visual communications were possible, so a step in the right direction.
The navy missed out again when the telephone was invented, it too being
a land tool, which armies used to supplement the telegraph, the
semaphore towers, their heliographs etc etc. |
| When first invented [do you
remember the cowboy films of those days when the telegraph was always
involved in some plot or other and the baddies shinned up posts in the
outback to cut the wires?] and used for civilian purposes, it was
expensive because each word, or even letter, was charged for separately.
Thus people [except the Marshal of course] used it sparingly. Bit by bit
the system was improved, but come the start of the American Civil War,
it was still very expensive to civilians. Very soon after the first
shots were fired both the
Damn Yankees and the Johnnie Reb's set-up their own military
telegraph, and they used code words and occasionally, encryption.
This increased the speed of transmission, but slowed things down for the
coder and the decoder ends. By 1865, after four years of dreadful all
out war, military communicators were au fait with codes and
encryption and could assemble and disassemble telegraph stations
wherever required either for an advance or for a retreat. Soldiers had
become able communicator's. |
| At the
time of Queen Victoria's Ruby Jubilee in 1877, several
attempts had been made to standardise and internationalise a telegraph
code, so that a message leaving say, London, could be fully understood
in say, Durban and all points south which handled the message. By
this time, the INTCO [see above] was in full and daily use at sea, and
telegraph systems were now world wide even in undeveloped areas of the
world. Places like Great Britain already had codes of their own
run by the General Post Office and then the BBC, and they were jealously
guarded: anything but international. A man called Causon-Thue had
publish a book containing codes which he called the ABC of Telegraphic
Codes in the 1870's, but in 1879, there was an international conference
on the subject, which led Causon-Thue to issue the fourth edition of his
ABC. This edition, he proudly states, is specially adapted for the use
of Financiers, Merchants, Shipping Owners, Brokers, Agents etc and
guarantees SIMPLICITY [everybody can understand it], ECONOMY [fewer
letters and words are required] SECRECY [the encryption of the code is
easy and virtually impossible to break by code-breakers]. |
What follows
is a very quick look at an example of
his codes taken from the ABC Telegraphic Code of 1883.
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| First,
I want you to imagine a book which has no fewer than 25,400 sentences or
groups of words and each one is given a unique number called a CODE
NUMBER and a CODE WORD. Here is an example of just a couple of pages of
the book . When a suitable sentence does not already exist, users can
invent them by choosing their own 5 figure numbers and code word. |
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| Using
the page example above, let us imagine that the message to be sent is
all about
Wrens going to sea for the first time, and the crew, all males as yet,
have been at sea for six months. From the pages our
message will be "10th September" [from page 260] "For the good of the
Service" [from page 261] "keep them separate" [from page 260] "it is
very serious" [from page 261]. Using the ABC, the message to transmit is
simply the CODE WORDS for the four sentences viz "SIGILADO SIMILARITY
SICCATIVE SILLABUS" and that is it. Alternatively one could have
transmitted the CODE NUMBERS, when the message would have been "12981
13014 12959 13004" which might have been neater and better anyway.
Clearly all CODE NUMBERS must have five figures and that is all well and
good for sentences 10000 to 25400 and beyond. For sentence number 1 to
9999, noughts have to added to bring the number up to five figures.
Thus sentence 1 becomes 00001 and sentence 9999 becomes 09999. |
| Now lets
assume that the admirals wanted this message
concealed from the fleet at large, after all, everybody has a copy of
this ABC Book. We need some crypto, and as yet, one-time-pad and
seascout have not been thought of. |
Mr Clauson-Thue has printed in his book the
following cipher table. His way is simplicity itself. He writes down two
rows of data, one above the other. In the top row he fills each space
with the numbers 1 to 0, and in the bottom row, ten different letters
[no repeats]. In this example I have used the word CUMBERLAND
which gives a matrix of:-
| 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
0 |
| C |
U |
M |
B |
E |
R |
L |
A |
N |
D |
To encode this message,
we use the CODE NUMBERS, and not the CODE NAME. Take the first CODE
NUMBER namely 12981 from the example above. Looking at the two lines of
data above, a '1' becomes a 'C', a '2' becomes a 'U' etc., until the
code for 12891 becomes 'CUANC'. The rest of the message is ' CMDCB CUNEN
CMDDB'. This message will afford better than good security in a limited
period, and was no less sophisticated in its time than naval ciphers.
However, I did spy a couple of potential weaknesses. |
In these pages he has produced many
variables each again of ten separate letters, and you can see that the
pattern has endless possibilities, which can change hourly, daily [like
our old keycards] or as a one-off for a specific message. |
