An Ordinary Day in the First World War

One hundred years ago today, September 18, 1916, was a fairly typical day during the First World War. Lots of things were going on around the world.

In France, around the fortress city of Verdun, one of history's longest and nightmarish battles was still ongoing. Between February and July, a titanic German offensive against the French Army there had been repelled by the narrowest of margins and only at a terrible cost in human life. The land surrounding Verdun had been turned into a surreal quagmire of mud churned up by unprecedented amounts of artillery fire. Chemical weapons had been used on a massive scale, including the first employment of diphosgene gas by the Germans, against which the gas masks of the French troops were initially ineffective. Now, the French army was preparing a major counter offensive to retake the lost ground, which was seen as a matter of national honor. The attack would open the following month and, by December, drive the Germans back to the positions from which they had launched their initial attacks nearly a year earlier. Over the course of the Battle of Verdun, in a space of ground roughly the size of a typical American county, about 300,000 men had been killed on both sides, and hundreds of thousands more had been wounded. The front lines ended pretty much where they had begun.

To the north and west, another ferocious battle was raging along the lines near the Somme River. Back on the first day of July, the British army had launched a mighty offensive designed to smash through the German lines and win the war. It had not gone according to plan. The first day of the attack proved to be the most disastrous day in British military history, with 60,000 casualties (including 20,000 dead) being suffered for minimal gains. The attacks continued for months, extending to September 18 and beyond, but the British eventually gained only about seven miles of ground. Over the course of the battle, the British lost more than 400,000 men and the French, who supported the attack, had lost about 200,000. The Germans lost about 500,000 men in repulsing the attacks.

On the Eastern Front, the Russians had mounted a great offensive against the Austro-Hungarians back in June, under the command of their best general, Aleksei Brusilov. At first the attack had achieved great success, taking the Austro-Hungarians by surprise and punching a huge hole in the front. The Eastern Front had always been more fluid than the Western Front and the Russians made some impressive territorial gains in the first days, taking thousands of enemy prisoners. In this sense, the Brusilov Offensive represented the greatest Russian victory of the First World War. But as the weeks past, Russian momentum had slowed down, the Austro-Hungarians had recovered, and heavy German reinforcements had arrived. The offensive was eventually brought to a halt. All told, the Russians lost about half a million men, the Germans about 350,000 thousand, and the Austro-Hungarian a whopping 900,000.

The initial success of the Brusilov Offensive had persuaded Romania, which had remained neutral up to that point, to join the war on the side of the Allies. Being a bit on the greedy side, they hoped to seize territory held by Austria-Hungary which was largely peopled by Romanians. Their initial attacks into Habsburg territory succeeded in gaining some territory. On September 18, however, the Germans under the command of Erich von Falkenhayn launched a major counter offensive, effectively coordinating German, Austro-Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Turkish forces. By the end of 1917, Romania had been crushed and its army had suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Meanwhile, down in the Alps, the Italians were busy banging away at their Austro-Hungarian enemies in an endless series of battles along the Isonzo River. The mountainous terrain was tailor-made for the defense, with soldiers being asked to launch attacks in an almost vertical direction. The Italian commander, Luigi Cadorna, might be a candidate for the title of most incompetent general of all time and he simply flung his divisions against the Austro-Hungarian positions again and again, resulting in nothing but heavy casualties. He blamed his troops rather than his own lack of imagination for the successive defeats, dealing out incredibly harsh punishments. The Sixth Battle of the Isonzo had been fought the previous month, resulting in minimal gains and heavy casualties. On this date a hundred years ago, the Seventh Battle of Isonzo was coming to an end, having resulting in no gains and heavy casualties. The following month, the Eighth Battle of Isonzo would be fought. You won't be surprised to learn that it resulted in no gains and heavy casualties.

In northern Greece, fighting raged along what was known as the Salonika Front. An Allied army consisting of French, British, and Serbian troops faced off against the Bulgarians and a few German units, each side attacking and defending in turn, rather like partners at a dance. Bizarrely, Greece was officially neutral in the war and nobody seemed to know why the Salonika Front even existed. Though the fighting there was not as intense or costly as the battles raging on other fronts, thousands of men still died along its lines.

Battle raged in subsidiary theaters of the war this day in 1916 as well. Russian and Turkish troops clawed away at one another in the Caucasus Mountains, which each side advancing and retreating in turn. In the Sinai Peninsula, the forces of the British Empire faced off against a Turkish army reinforced by German machine gun teams and Austrian artillery; having successfully defended the town of Romani, the British would soon go over to the offensive. In Mesopotamia, having suffered a humiliating defeat at Al-Kut earlier in the year, the British were reorganizing their forces and preparing for a major offensive when the weather turned favorable. In German East Africa, the intrepid German commander Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, a master of mobile warfare, continued to run rings around the British forces sent against him, though this would change the following year. In the North Sea, the Grand Fleet of the British and the High Seas Fleet of the Germans, having fought the enormous, costly, and utterly inconclusive Battle of Jutland a few months earlier, continued to eye each other warily. In the air, German zeppelins were periodically bombing London and Paris, a prelude to the much more destructive bombing campaigns that would take place in the next war, but in this conflict something that didn't achieve anything aside from killing a couple hundred civilians for absolutely no purpose.

This, then, was the state of the war on the completely ordinary day of September 18, 1916, exactly one hundred years ago. In France, the British and French slugged it out with the Germans, with both sides suffering massive losses at Verdun and the Somme. The Brusilov Offensive by the Russians on the Eastern Front had spent itself, having gained some ground at heavy cost, while dealing massive casualties against the Austro-Hungarians. Romania was about to be crushed. The Italians continued attack along the Isonzo, suffering massive losses for little or no gain. And fighting on the "minor" fronts continued to cost the lives of many thousands of men.

It might fairly be asked by a rational person what all of this fighting was about. The answer is a very sad one. It was about nothing.

The war, of course, had started because a Habsburg archduke got shot by a Serbian nationalist. The Austrians thought this would be a good chance to knock the Serbians down a peg or two and so provoked a war over it. The Russians, fearful of looking weak, decided that they had to back up the Serbians. The Germans, through foolishness or inattention, decided to back the Austrians. The logic of entangling alliances then brought in the British and French and the war was on. As it progressed, other powers jumped into the fight out a greedy desire for territory: Japan on the Allied side, then the Turks on the German side, then the Italians on the Allied side, then the Bulgarians on the German side, then the Romanians on the Allied side, and so on and so forth.

The First World War was the worst of all possible wars, because it was caused by human vanity and human stupidity. There was no great ideological or religious issue at stake. It was about nothing. The men who bravely fought and died in the First World War fought and died for nothing. There have been many useless and unnecessary wars in history, but the First World War was surely the largest and most bloody such conflict. The Second World War had to be fought, because Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan represented truly evil forces which were trying to subjugate the world and had to be defeated. The aggressors in the First World War were not evil so much as stupid.

A mother in 1942 or 1943 who received one of the dreaded telegrams informing her that her son had been killed fighting against the Germans might eventually, in the fullness of time, have been able to have console herself in the knowledge that he had died fighting against a truly monstrous evil. A mother receiving a similar telegram received on September 18, 1916, would never have such comfort, for the First World War was an entirely unnecessary and stupid war.

The British writer Rudyard Kipling (one of my favorite authors) is largely known for his jingoistic and patriotic poems and short stories written in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, when the British Empire was at its height. The First World War changed him, especially after his son John was killed fighting against the Germans during the Battle of Loos in September of 1915. I think that a two-line poem he wrote in response to the war, taking the voice of a common soldier, pretty much sums up how we should all feel about the war.

If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

Ranked Choice Voting Would Improve American Democracy

Back in July, I wrote about the urgent need for reforming the system in which congressional and state legislative districts are drawn. Today, I'd like to write about another reform is our election system that I think is badly needed: the implementation of Ranked Choice Voting. It goes by other names, such as Instant Runoff Voting or Alternative Vote, but in this piece we'll be using the term Ranked Choice Voting, or RCV.

Virtually all elections in the United States, from those in which we choose the President of the United States down to those in which we choose our city council members, are decided by a "winner-take-all" system (called "first-past-the-post" in the United Kingdom and other countries), in which the candidate who receives the largest number of votes wins. Whether the winner actually receives a majority of the vote doesn't matter. In any winner-take-all election with more than two candidates, the winning candidate can actually be a person whom the majority of people voted against.

Consider, for example, the 1992 presidential election, which featured Republican George Bush, Democrat Bill Clinton, and independent Ross Perot. Bush received 37.4% of the vote and Ross Perot received 18.9%. Clinton, the winner, received 43%, considerably more than either of the other two candidates, but considerably less than a majority. It's impossible to know, had Perot not been a candidate, how much the 18.9% of the vote that Perot received would have gone to Bush and how much would have gone to Clinton, but the fact remains that the majority of the American electorate voted against Clinton and yet Clinton became President. This was nothing out of the ordinary. Indeed, out of the fifty-seven presidential elections held since the founding of the republic, sixteen have seen the winner take office without having won a majority of the vote.

Winner-take-tall elections limit the choice of a voter to a single choice for a single candidate. Suppose, for example, that a voter in 1992 really wanted Perot to win, but simply couldn't stand Clinton and wanted him to lose. Should he vote for Perot, whom he really wanted to win, or should he vote for Bush, who had a better chance of beating Clinton than Perot did? In other words, can he cast a ballot for the candidate he really likes if it increases the likelihood that the candidate he really dislikes will win the election? This is a conundrum faced by many voters in countless elections in the United States, whether we're choosing the President of the United States or our representative on the local city council, and one I have confronted many times myself.

Ranked Choice Voting differs from winner-take-all elections in that, rather than simply casting a single vote for a single candidate, voters get to rank their favored candidates on a scale, with their first choice ranked as 1, their second choice ranked as 2, and so on. If any candidate wins 50% or more of first choice votes, that candidate wins. If no one does, then the candidate with the lowest number of first choice votes is eliminated and the second choice votes of the voters who choose the eliminated candidate as their first choice are moved into the columns of the other candidates. The process repeated until there a candidate receives more than 50% of the first choice votes.

Imagine a city council election with four candidates, which we'll call A, B, C, and D. First round results are as follows: Candidate A wins 35%, Candidate B wins 30%, Candidate C wins 25%, and Candidate D wins 10%. This means that D is eliminated and his second choice ballots are distributed to the other candidates. Assume that supporters of Candidate D really liked Candidate B, so half of them choose him as their second choice and the remainder were split between Candidate A and Candidate C. This means that the second round results were as follows: Candidate A wins 37.5%, Candidate B wins 35%, and Candidate C wins 27.5%. This means that Candidate C is eliminated and his third choice ballots are distributed between the remaining two candidates. Let's assume that three-fifths of Candidate C backers choose Candidate B as their third choice and two-fifths choose Candidate A. This means that the third results have Candidate A winning 48.5% and Candidate B winning 51.5%. Since Candidate B has secured greater than 50% in this round, he or she is the winner of the election.

Even though Candidate A received more first choice votes than Candidate B, the eventual outcome is more reflective of the actual desires of the electorate than would have been the case in a winner-take-all system. The RCV process sounds complicated, but in the age of computers the result can be known in seconds. As far as the voter himself is concerned, it's as simple as 1-2-3.

The key advantage of RCV is that it eliminates the "spoiler effect" of candidates, which have bedeviled many an American election. Perhaps the best-known example is the role played by Green Party candidate Ralph Nader in the 2000 election. Down ballot, there are many examples over the years of Democrats beating Republicans because Libertarian candidates won a share of the vote larger than the Democratic margin of victory. Under RCV, voters are free to vote for their truly preferred candidates without the risk of helping an unfavored candidate win.

The Republicans and Democrats don't like the idea of RCV, because protecting the two-party stranglehold on American politics is one of the few things the two major parties can agree upon. RCV would give much greater influence to marginalized third parties and independent candidates. At the same time, the prospect of obtaining genuine political influence would encourage such players to move away from the radical fringe and adopt a more serious and practical role in the political process. In the United States, the Green Party is something of a joke, whose members spout outlandish ideas and often adhere to conspiracy theories. By contrast, in many European countries where Green parties actually win elections, the Green Party is a genuine political player which participates in government in a responsible and respected manner (albeit supporting policies with which I often disagree).

In short, RCV would inject American democracy with a breath of fresh air, giving the electorate a means of choosing their representatives in a manner that better reflects the true wishes of the people, which is the whole point of a representative democracy. It would also help break the two-party stranglehold over American politics, which has been a powerful means of the establishment to maintain its control over the functions of government, often to the great detriment of the people.

It's also been pointed out that RCV reduces negative campaigning. After all, in a race with more than two candidates, the people seeking office will need to appeal to the supporters of their opponents in the hopes of gaining their secondary votes in the event that no candidate wins a majority in the first round. Studies by Rutgers University have suggested that negative campaigning in municipal elections using RCV were considerably lower than in similar elections using the traditional winner-take-all systems. Living as we do in an age of hyper-negativity as far as politics are concerned, this is a point not to be underrated.

Skeptics would say that RCV is overly complicated and too cumbersome to be used as an election system in the United States. This is manifestly false. The same Rutgers study that found that RCV reduced negative campaigning also found that the considerable majority of voters in RCV elections found the system simple and easy to understand. Moreover, RCV has been used successfully in many parts of the world, most notably in elections to the Australian House of Representatives and to Australian state legislatures. Systems very similar to RCV are in use in Ireland, Malta, and India, and are also used to elect the Mayor Of London. In the United States, RCV has been used for municipal elections in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and other communities. It's been used in primary elections by the Republican Party in Utah and the Democratic Party in Virginia. It's also been used in non-political elections, such as the vote for the Academy Award for Best Picture. In all these cases, RCV has worked just as it is supposed to work.

I consider Ranked Choice Voting to be among the most critical electoral reforms needed in the United States in the early 21st Century. If I had my way, a constitutional amendment would be enacted that simply read, "All elections for public office in the United States of America, on all levels of government, shall be conducted using a system of ranked choice voting." Those few words would go a very long way towards more firmly establishing democracy in this nation and represent a big step forward towards the ultimate realization of our country's potential.

What If The Invasion Of Japan Had Taken Place In 1945?

Yesterday was the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In America, this means we have engaged in our annual tradition of debating whether or not using the bomb was the right thing to do. I've mentioned in the past that I abhor the existence of nuclear weapons and dearly wish that they vanished from the face of the Earth, but I'm not among those who believe that dropping the bomb was the wrong thing to do. What I want to talk about in this piece is the alternative choice that the Allies had to dropping the bomb: an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands.

By mid-1945, the war in Europe was wrapping up as the Americans, British, French, and Soviet armies swept through Germany and closed in on Berlin. However, the war in the Pacific, while running strongly against Japan, appeared likely to continue for a year or more. It had been a long and hard struggle. Following the sweeping and astounding successful Japanese offensive in late 1941 and early 1942, which saw them gain total control over the western half of the Pacific Ocean, the American victory at the Battle of Midway had begun to turn the tide. Through the following two years, in brutal fighting in the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, the Gilbert Islands, and the Mariana Islands, the Americans slowly pushed back the Japanese in a series of island-hopping campaigns. Meanwhile, the British struggled against the Japanese in Burma and the Chinese continued their own efforts to expel the Japanese from their territory.

In late 1944, the Americans landed in the Philippines and, in a series of bloody land and sea battles, took the islands back from the Japanese. It was at this point that the Japanese resistance reached the level of desperation, exemplified in the appearance of the kamikaze suicide attackers, who intentionally crashed their aircraft into Allied ships. In February of 1945, the Americans landed on Iwo Jima and, two months later, Okinawa. Both battles were characterized by fanatical Japanese resistance and heavy American casualties. Nearly 7,000 Americans died on Iwo Jima and more than 20,000 died on Okinawa. The closer the Americans approached the Japanese Home Islands, the fiercer the Japanese resistance seemed to become. At the same time, American B-29 bombers had begun to operate from airfields in the Mariana Islands, bringing death and destruction to Japanese cities on a previously unimaginable scale.

Before 1945, the battles in the Pacific War had been characterized by slowly increasing American experience in amphibious operations and a gradual refinement in Japanese defensive tactics. By the time Iwo Jima and Okinawa were invaded, the Allied operations were models of efficiency and effectiveness. For their part, the Japanese had given up the practice of defending the beach and instead allowing their enemies to consolidate on the shore and move inland before engaging them, thereby avoiding the worst of American naval bombardment. Both sides were planning on making the best use of their respective advantages in what was expected to be the largest amphibious invasion of all time.

It was going to be called Operation Downfall, a fitting name if ever there was one. It was envisioned as taking place in two phases. The first phase, code-named Operation Olympic, would be the invasion of Kyushu, the southernmost of the four main Japanese Home Islands. The intent was to capture the southern third of the island and to destroy the bulk of Japan's remaining military formations. The target date for the operation was November 1, 1945. Airfields would then be constructed on Kyushu to provide air cover for the second phase of Downfall, code-named Operation Coronet. It would be the decisive invasion of the main Japanese island of Honshu east of Tokyo, driving westward to secure the enemy capital. It was expected to be launched on March 1, 1946.

It would be an invasion on a scale that dwarfed even the Normandy campaign. The United States Sixth Army, which had been fighting the Japanese for years, was selected to lead Operation Olympic. It would consist of fifteen divisions, plus assorted attached units. with a total strength of more than 400,000 men. Backing them up would be the enormous naval forces of the Third, Fifth, and Seventh United States Fleets, which together deployed dozens of aircraft carriers and battleships, not to mention hundreds of cruisers and destroyers. The air power intended for the invasion was similarly massive, with tens of thousands of fighter and bomber aircraft being made ready.

Astonishingly, the forces being prepared for Operation Coronet were even larger. Two complete United States armies, the First and the Eighth, were to be involved. All told, thirty-one divisions would land on Honshu, more than twice as many as were going to land on Kyushu. The same immense naval and air power available for Operation Olympic would be available for Operation Coronet, much of it being based on the captured portion of Kyushu.

Not all of the invasion force was to be American. The British Pacific Fleet, one of the largest forces ever assembled by the Royal Navy, would place its battleships and aircraft carriers at the disposal of their American allies. A very large proportion of the aircraft involved would be provided by Australia. Moreover, a Commonwealth Corps consisting of British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand troops would participate in Operation Coronet, although the participation of Indian units had been vetoed by the Americans. It was even proposed that French troops be involved, if only in symbolic numbers.

The Japanese had pieced together exactly what the Allied invasion plan was going to be, expecting an initial invasion of Kyushu followed by a final attack on Honshu. They decided to position most of their remaining forces for a do-or-die defense of Kyushu. Through the spring and summer of 1945, Japanese troops were moved onto Kyushu in enormous numbers. In mid-June, American intelligence estimated that around 350,000 Japanese troops were on Kyushu. In reality, the number was closer to 600,000.

On Iwo Jima and Okinawa, almost all Japanese soldiers had fought to the death rather than be captured, as had been the case in most previous island battles. There was no reason to think that the troops defending Kyushu would behave any differently. Orders issued in preparation for repelling the invasion specified that units were not to retreat, that no soldier was to stop fighting in order to care for a wounded comrade, and that any unarmed soldier should be prepared to take up the arms of a wounded or killed comrade. Indeed, one senior Japanese officer proposed killing all of the infirm and elderly people in Japan so as to free up food for the fighting forces.

Indeed, the Japanese were going to enormous lengths to ensure that the invasion would be as costly for the Allies as possible. Massive production of aircraft intended for kamikaze attacks was underway throughout 1945 and, by summer, around 10,000 were ready. During the fighting for Okinawa, around 2,000 kamikaze sorties had been mounted, which had sunk dozens of American ships, damaged many others, and killed thousands of men. The kamikaze attacks planned for the defense against the invasion of Kyushu would be five times more massive. Despite their best efforts, the Allies had been unable to provide an effective defense against kamikazes. At Okinawa, the Japanese had inflicted roughly 1.76 casualties per kamikaze sortie, but at Kyushu the attacks were likely to be more effective, for the approach would be of a much shorter distance and almost all of it overland, thus giving American air defenses much less time to respond. It seems reasonable to estimate that the casualty ratio would be as high as 2 per sortie, suggesting that the kamikazes would kill around 20,000 soldiers and sailors at sea during the landings. In addition, the Imperial Japanese Navy was preparing huge numbers of manned torpedoes, essentially underwater kamikazes, to attack American and Allies ships and landing craft.

Civilians were being mobilized in the defensive effort on an unprecedented scale. Women were trained to use weapons, from rifles to bamboo spears, and were expected to act as ammunition carriers during the fighting. Fishing and agricultural implements were fashioned into weapons and given to schoolchildren. Considering the behavior of Japanese civilians on Saipan and Okinawa, where many had preferred to commit suicide rather than turn themselves into the Americans, there was ever reason to believe that the coming invasion would be resisted by a civilian population ever bit as dangerous as the opposing army. American intelligence estimated that more than ten million civilians were being given rudimentary weapons training of some sort. If even one percent of them succeeded in causing an American casualty, one hundred thousand American soldiers would be killed or wounded.

Despite the lavish Japanese defensive preparations, there is no way the American invasion of Japan could possibly have failed. The Japanese were on the verge of starvation, under tight blockade, and so short of fuel that they were engaging in such desperate expedients as trying to liquefy plant roots into gas (which failed miserably). The Allies, by contrast, literally had the resources of the entire world to draw upon. Even the Japanese leadership recognized the hopelessness of their situation. Lacking the resources to repulse the invasion, the Japanese hoped only to cause such massive Allied casualties that some sort of negotiated settlement short of an outright surrender might be obtained. The odds of this happening were only slightly above zero, but it was the only hope the Japanese had on which to cling.

While ultimate success was guaranteed, there can be no doubt that any American invasion of Japan would suffer hideous casualties. Estimates of the number of killed or wounded were controversial even before the end of the war and have only become more so over time, especially in relation to the debate over the use of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So how many casualties might have been sustained?

On Iwo Jima, the American invasion force of 110,000 had suffered roughly 7,000 men killed and 19,000 men wounded. This comes out to 6% of the force killed and 17% wounded, for total casualties of around 23%. On Okinawa, out of roughly 250,000 troops landed on the island, 20,000 were killed (8%) and 55,000 were wounded (22%), for total casualties of 75,000 or 30% of the invasion force. Assuming a similar ratio for Operation Olympic, we can assume about 30,000 dead and 80,000 wounded, for total casualties of 110,000. For Operation Coronet, an operation twice as large, we might assume casualties twice as heavy. Added together, we'd get 90,000 dead and 240,000 wounded, for a casualty total of 330,000.

This assumes, of course, that the invasion force would suffer casualties roughly equivalent to those suffered by the Americans on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Considering the vastly more extensive defensive preparations made for the defense of the Japanese Home Islands, the expected participation of a huge and hostile civilian population, and the fact that the invasion of Japan would last much longer than the campaigns on Iwo Jima or Okinawa, I think it's safe to assume that rate of losses would be much higher. Well-informed observers, including Secretary of War Henry Stimson, estimated that American casualties might run close to a million men. Indeed, so many Purple Heart medals were ordered in anticipation of the expected casualties that the stockpile has never been used up; men wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan were presented with Purple Hearts that had been made in 1945.

What if the invasion of Japan had gone forward in 1945? We can be sure that it would have been an American victory and that, when the dust settled, the American flag would be fluttering over the ruins of Tokyo. We can be equally sure that it would have been the most nightmarish battle the world had ever seen. It's entirely possible that more Americans would have died in the invasion of Japan than had fallen in all the battles of the Second World War up to that time. Japanese casualties, military and civilian, would have been vastly larger than the total number who lost their lives in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with millions probably perishing. That being the case, we can only thank God that the invasion never had to take place.

Gerrymanding Must Be Abolished

It's a presidential election year and it has already proven to be one of the most bizarre elections in living memory. I know for whom I'm going to cast my vote in November, but haven't decided if I'm going to mention it in my blog. I'm not a member of any political party, nor do I fit the generally accepted definition of either a liberal or a conservative. When anyone asks me to define my political views, I usually reply that I am a 21st Century Jeffersonian. So I don't think I will be posting blog pieces that support or oppose Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, though I reserve the right to change my mind later on.

I don't want to ignore the election altogether, though, so I have decided to write about various proposed election reforms that I think are urgently, even critically, needed here in the United States. I personally feel that election reform on all levels of government is the single greatest issue facing America today, for the lack of such reform has been the root cause of our national inability to deal with the great challenges such as climate change or the national debt. The media, ever the guardians of the status quo, rarely bring the subject up, because the last thing they want to see is substantial change in the way politics works in America. Unfortunately, unless we can enact such reforms in the very near future, I fear for the survival of ultimate survival of democracy in our nation.

Today, I'm going to write about what I think is the most urgently needed measure: the abolition of gerrymandering.

The principle of government in a republic is that the voters choose their legislators. In most of modern America, however, we are faced with the absurd reality that legislators choose their voters. This is due to the process known as gerrymandering, by which the majority party in a state legislature draws the lines of congressional districts in such a way as to pack as many voters who support the opposition party into as few districts as possible. This has the effect of maximizing the number of districts their party will win and minimizing the numbers of districts the opposition will win, regardless of the actual difference in the number of votes each party gains. In pursuit of partisan advantage, absurd district shapes are created, usually taking no account of such things as natural borders or keeping communities such as towns or cities within the same legislative district.

Gerrymandering is not a new invention. During elections for the very first Congress in 1788, Patrick Henry tried to gerrymander James Madison out of a congressional seat in Virginia (thankfully, Henry was unsuccessful). Indeed, the very term "gerrymander" comes from Elbridge Gerry, a governor of Massachusetts in the early 19th Century who used the gerrymandering of his political enemies as a standard tactic. But the fact that it has been done for a long time is no justification for its continuation, for partisan redistricting is blatantly undemocratic and should be abolished as soon as possible.

Because of gerrymandering, the vast majority of congressional districts in America have become extremely skewed towards one of the two major political parties, usually by a ratio of around 70% to 30%. This means that if a person is unfortunate enough to be a Republican in a Democratic district or a Democrat in a Republican district, he or she has no real representation. A member of Congress who represents such a district can safely ignore the concerns of a constituent who supports the opposition party and suffer no electoral punishment for doing so. A reasonable case can be made for the idea that the majority of Americans are not genuinely represented in Congress at all. In that case, we might fairly ask whether America is really a republic anymore.

Another negative consequence of partisan redistricting is that a shockingly large number of representatives face no competition on election day. Since the minority party in a gerrymandered district sees little chance of victory, they often decide it is not worth the effort and resources to contest the election and either don't run a candidate at all or simply put up a token candidate who they know stands no chance. This means that the incumbent need not fear the judgment of the people, and can act in ways that would otherwise get him thrown out of office by his constituents. The easier it is for an incumbent to remain in office, the less attention he needs to pay to the wishes of his constituents, thus degrading the very principles of representative democracy.

Gerrymandering also contributes to voter apathy. Seeing the incumbent win reelection over and over again, citizens often see little or no value in casting their vote on election day. Why bother, when the outcome has already been settled ahead of time by the gerrymandering process? Even worse, since a representative in a heavily gerrymandered district is more likely to have to worry about a challenger from his or her own party in a primary election than a challenger from the other party in a general election, office-holders are pushed into more extreme positions, with Republicans increasingly moving to the far right and Democrats to the far left. This increases partisan gridlock and rancor in Congress, making it more difficult for the two parties to compromise on important issues and alienating the moderate voters, who have no one for whom to vote.

The essence of any democracy is that the wishes of the people form the basis for the actions of the government. Through gerrymandering, however, partisan factions can achieve decisive political power even if the majority of the people do not want them to have it. Gerrymandering stifles political debate and allows incumbents to be free from the threat of defeat by their constituents. In most years, well over 90% of incumbent members of Congress win reelection, even though polls suggest that less than 20% of the people approve of the job Congress is doing. For a country that is supposed to be a vibrant democracy, this is ridiculous.

I've been speaking about the gerrymandering problem in terms of Congress, but it is equally detrimental to democracy in terms of drawing the district lines for state legislative races, where precisely the same problems apply on a more local scale. Indeed, incumbency is perhaps an even bigger problem in state legislative races than in congressional races, since the constituents are ironically less likely to have information their representative due to lack of media coverage. Most people, frankly, are hard-pressed to name their congressman, let alone their state legislator, which is a state of affairs the office-holders are usually fine with, though they would tell you otherwise.

Rather than allowing state legislatures to keep the power to draw congressional and state legislative districts, which will inevitably result in the continuation of the practice of gerrymandering, each state should have a nonpartisan committee of citizens to undertake the redrawing of district maps after each census. This, in my opinion, is the single reform measure most urgently needed in the United States today.

Seven states - Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, New Jersey, and Washington - currently have redistricting commissions which possess full authority to draw congressional and legislative districts. Three others, Florida, Maine, and New York, have commissions which draw up proposed plans, though the legislature still has final say. Iowa has a unique system in which a bipartisan group of legislative staff draw up district maps and, if the legislature rejects them, the state supreme court makes the decision. It's no coincidence that congressional elections in those states have become more competitive, resulting in greater attention paid by incumbents to the wishes of their constituents and more fruitful debate and discourse in their political campaigns. Indeed, of the 25 most competitive congressional districts, sixteen are in one of these eleven states (and Montana doesn't really count here, since it only has one representative in the House).

The legislation creating such commissions must be carefully crafted to prevent the politicians from pulling a fast one on the people, giving them the appearance of a reform without its reality. As an example of a good piece of redistricting reform legislation, consider the bill repeatedly introduced in the Texas Legislature by State Senator Jeff Wentworth, a San Antonio Republican. Wentworth's bill envisioned a nine member commission, with four members each from the largest and second largest parties in the legislature (the Republicans and Democrats, for all practical purposes), with a ninth member being chosen by the other eight. Membership on the commission was barred to people who held elected office or people who held official positions with political parties. The legislation required that whatever plan put forward by the commission creates districts of roughly equal population, must be "compact" and "convenient", and (most important) not be designed to discriminate against any political party of group. Had this bill become law, the days of packing members of one political party into as small a number of districts as possible would have been over.

Redistricting reform could happen on the level of the individual states, as has already taken place in many states. It can also happen on the federal level. Under the Constitution, Congress has the authority to require the states to create independent redistricting commissions. Indeed, during the last few sessions of Congress, well-intentioned congressmen (there are a few, believe it or not) have proposed legislation which would do exactly that. However, it should come as no surprise that the bills have gone nowhere in Congress. After all, because the members of Congress are the ones who benefit from gerrymandering, why should we expect them to vote against their own individual self-interest?

What must happen is a comprehensive grassroots effort by American citizens to put enough pressure on both state legislators and their congressmen and senators to get them to get these bills passed. As seen above, many states have already done so, and as more follow suit momentum will be built to the point where it will be like a snowball rolling down a hill. If enough momentum is built, it can overcome the political inertia that currently holds the process back. We, as citizens, must make redistricting reform a priority, because until we do, the idea of a true representative democracy will remain a mere dream. More to the point, until the power of the ruling political elite is broken, the country's most pressing problems will remain unaddressed.

Don't Invade Russia

Last Wednesday was the seventy-fifth anniversary of the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany. If I made a list of mistakes to avoid if you want to conquer the world, it would have just three things on it. First, don't mess with the Royal Navy. Second, don't underestimate American resolve. And third, whatever you do, absolutely never, never, never invade Russia.

Hitler broke all three of these rules, and a good many others, in his bid for world domination. He underestimated British resolve and, crucially, failed to understand the advantage the British had in the form of the Royal Navy. He terribly misunderstood the character of the American people and foolishly declared war on the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, even though he was under no treaty obligation to do so. His interference in military procurement led to countless delays in the development of new weapons systems that could have greatly impacted the course of the war. He thought that the Italians would be a useful ally, he ordered foolish offensives when his generals urged caution, he diverted critical resources away from the war effort towards his sinister program of industrial-scale murder, and generally made a thorough mess of being a war leader. Indeed, there have been some suggestions that proposals to assassinate Hitler were rejected by the Allies because removing him from the stage would only help the German war effort.

But of all his mistakes, none matched the sheer stupidity of his invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. It was a mistake that would bring to ruin Hitler's sick dreams of a European empire centered around his conception of Aryan racial purity, as well as cost him his life. True, the Soviet victory would not have been possible without the crucial contribution of the United Kingdom, the United States, and the other Allied nations (most directly in the form of Lend-Lease supplies sent directly to the USSR, without which the Soviets would not have been able to resist the Nazis). But we can see that the invasion of the Soviet Union was the event around which the outcome of the Second World War swung. From the moment the panzer divisions crossed the border, Nazi Germany was probably doomed.

Hitler was fully confident that his armies could crush the Soviet Union quickly and easily. After all, they had already conquered Poland, Denmark and Norway, the Low Countries, and the Balkans. Most impressively, they had defeated the French, believed before the war to have the strongest army in Europe, in a mere six weeks of fighting. The might of the German panzers on the ground and the Luftwaffe in the air had appeared to be invincible. The Red Army, by contrast, had had a humiliatingly difficult time defeated the Finns in 1940, despite outnumbered them by a massive margin, and many of the best Russian commanders had been executed in Stalin's political purges.

The invasion led to the most brutal and nightmarish war that the world has ever seen, a titanic struggle between two equally evil dictators and two equally malevolent political ideologies. At the onset, it seemed that nothing could stand in the way of the Germans, whose panzer divisions sliced through the Soviet lines as though they were butter and whose Luftwaffe obliterated the Soviet Air Force before it could take off. For months, the German armored spearheads advanced, killing or capturing millions of Soviet soldiers, taking Kiev and Minsk, and coming within a hairsbreadth of Leningrad and Moscow.

It was then that two crucial elements played into Russian hands. First, the weather turned on the Germans, trapping them at the end of their supply lines in subzero temperatures beyond anything they had ever experienced. Second, Russian reserve armies launched a massive counteroffensive, for the Germans had failed to grasp the power of the Russians to raise armies of enormous size almost at will. In nightmarish fighting around Moscow in the winter of 1941-42, the Germans were hurled back.

They tried against the following year, launching a spring offensive that drove eastwards towards the Volga River, threatening the city of Stalingrad and the crucial Russian oil fields in the Caucasus Mountains. This ended in complete disaster that winter, with the massive Russian victory at the Battle of Stalingrad, which snuffed an entire German army out of existence. The following year, a last ditch German offensive was turned back in the Battle of Kursk, by some accounts the largest land battle in history. After that, the Russian steamroller really got going. Soviet war production, by itself, now significantly outstripped that of the Germans and the Soviet armies seemed to have almost limitless reserves of manpower. By the spring of 1945, the shattered remnants of the German forces were utterly defeated in the Battle of Berlin, Hitler shot himself inside his famous "Fuhrerbunker", and the Soviet flag was raised over the Reichstag. The Second World War in Europe was over.

The German Fuhrer wasn't the first man to invade Russia with dreams of an easy victory. One hundred and twenty-nine years ago almost to the day, the enormous army of Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, had crossed the Neman River to begin the invasion of the Russian Empire. His army of six hundred thousand men, not only Frenchmen but Germans, Italians, Poles, and Dutchmen, was quite possibly the largest army ever marshaled in European history up to that point. Napoleon had defeated Russian armies in the past, at Austerlitz and Friedland, having always found them poorly led and slow to maneuver. The French Emperor, perhaps the greatest military genius in history, had no doubt that his invasion of Russia would succeed and leave him master of the world.

Napoleon's invasion of Russia went off in much the same way as that of Hitler's a century-and-a-quarter later. The Russian armies withdrew in the face of the overwhelming onslaught of Le Grande Armée trying to avoid being pinned down and losing much territory in the process. Eventually, the Russians stood and fought at the cataclysmic Battle of Borodino, the largest and bloodiest single-day battle of the 18th Century. Napoleon won a tactical victory, but a Pyrrhic one at best, for he suffered massive casualties and the Russian army withdrew to survive as a fighting force. Napoleon entered Moscow a week later, but the city almost immediately began to go up in flames thanks to Russian arsonists. He found that he had taken not a grand city, but a charred ruin.

The great retreat began a month later. It was a nightmare almost without parallel in human history. The Russian winter engulfed the French and allied soldiers, like the icy grip of the Grim Reaper, to the point where men who fell out of the ranks from exhaustion froze to death on the side of the road. Food ran short and many men starved; there were scenes of men frantically rushing towards any horse that fell down to cut away its flesh and consume it in a frenzy, whether or not the poor animal was dead. The Russian army constantly sought to interpose itself between the French army and its route of retreat, nearly succeeding in November at the Battle of Berezina, where the French suffered heavy losses as they crossed the river from which the battle took its name. Through it all, Cossacks and rural partisans swarmed around the French army like white blood cells attacking bacteria. The horrific tortures they inflicted upon French prisoners are almost too terrible to bear reading about and I shall not repeat them here.

Napoleon had entered Russia with an army of 600,000 men. When it limped out of Russia six months later, only about 100,000 had survived. Although Napoleon would miraculously raise another army and fight on for another three years, the disaster in Russia spelled the true end of his dreams for dominating Europe. He was never able to recover from the disaster of 1812 and the combined might of the British, Russian, Austrian, Prussian, and Swedish armies gradually wore him down. Napoleon met his final defeat at Waterloo in the summer of 1815, but his doom had probably been sealed when he had invaded Russia three years before.

Hitler and Napoleon are the two best known would-be conquerors who came to grief in the snows of Russia, but they are not alone. Just over a century before Napoleon's invasion, the Swedish king Charles XII had tried his luck. A figure almost unknown to modern Americans, Charles XII was one of the most fascinating people of the 18th Century. He led his nation through the long and bitter Great Northern War for the first two decades of the 18th Century, fighting against an alliance of Denmark-Norway (then united as a single realm), the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, various German states, and the Russian Empire. Against such a coalition, no one gave Sweden much of a chance.

Yet Charles XII quickly proved himself to be one of the most gifted military leaders of his time. At the Battle of Narva in 1700, with only 10,000 men, he destroyed a Russian force four times his strength, seemingly knocking them out of the war altogether. That accomplished, Charles turned to campaigning in Germany and Poland for the next several years, winning many victories and attempting, with varying degrees of success, to place friendly monarchs on the thrones of the various states.

Unfortunately for Charles, the Russian Empire at this time was led by the most ferocious and implacable man who would ever sit on the throne, Czar Peter the Great. Stung by the humiliating defeat at Narva, he embarked upon a massive military reform program, slowly building up the strength of the Russian army, improving its training and tactics, and equipping it with up-to-date weapons. With his new forces, Peter began attacking Swedish holdings along the Baltic Sea, slowly chipping away at vital Swedish territory.

Realizing that he had been wrong to write Russia off after the victory at Narva, Charles XII now decided upon a full-scale invasion. With a battle-hardened army, he set off on his march to Moscow in January of 1708. At first, everything went well. Despite superior numbers, Russian forces were defeated in a number of battles, including the Battle of Holowczyn that summer, in which 12,000 Swedes trounced twice their number of Russian troops. But inevitably, things began to go wrong. An anticipated anti-Russian uprising by the Cossacks was thwarted by a devastating preemptive Russian attack. A reinforcing Swedish army was intercepted by the Russians and defeated at the Battle of Lesnaya. Worst of all, the Swedes were forced to endure what the French and Germans in future turns would endure, as the winter of 1708-08 turned into the coldest in living memory, resulting in countless Swedish soldiers freezing to death amid the wastes of Russia.

With a weakened army reduced to less than 25,000 men, Charles XII faced off against Peter the Great's much larger army at the Battle of Poltava in the summer of 1709. The result was probably a foregone conclusion. Attacking with great gallantry, the Swedes fought as hard as men could fight, but against vastly superior numbers, strongly entrenched and backed by strong artillery, they had no chance. The Swedish army was crushed in one of the decisive battles of history, forever ending Sweden's status as a great power and marking the emergence of Russia on the stage of the world. Charles himself would escape into the Ottoman Empire, to pursue further adventures in the years left to him, but his dream of conquering Russia ended in the bloodbath at Poltava.

Adolf Hitler. Napoleon Bonaparte. King Charles XII. In each of the last three centuries, a mighty warlord has attempted to conquer Russia. Each of them failed, and for remarkably similar reasons. In each of these three examples, the same three factors inevitably led to failure.

First, the Russians were always able to put into the field enormous numbers to resist the invaders. Even if the invaders were qualitatively superior in fighting capability, Russian numbers often proved able to turn the tables. No matter how many Russians were killed by the Germans of Hitler, the Frenchmen of Napoleon, or the Swedes of Charles XII, there were always more to replace them. This was due not only to the large Russian population, but to the autocratic nature of the Russian government under both the Czars and the Communist dictatorship of Stalin, which could mobilize an unimaginable proportion of their people into military use. Anyone invading Russia can expect to be at a severe numerical disadvantage.

Second, Russia is simply too big to be conquered. Invaders might inflict defeats upon the Russians, but there was always enough territory behind the Russians for them to retreat and regroup.This is why several serious defeats, such as the Battle of Holowczyn during Charles XII's invasion, the Battle of Smolensk and the Battle of Borodino during Napoleon's invasion, and the Battle of Kiev during Hitler's invasion, did not turn out to be truly decisive. The Russians were able to regroup and reorganize their forces father to the east and continue their resistance. Even Napoleon, who actually was able to capture Moscow, simply discovered that the Russian army withdrew to the east and remained ready to fight. There was simply too much land in Russia for it to be taken under any kind of occupation.

Third, and finally, the Russian winter played a critical role in defeating all three of the invasions. It's entirely likely that more German, French, and Swedish soldiers froze to death as were killed in battle. It not only killed and maimed men, but it destroyed morale and made the movement of food and supplies all but impossible. The Russians were quite familiar with this extreme form of weather and operated much more freely under its constraints. Making a bad situation even worse, the spring thaw following the winter turned the roads into a morass of mud and sludge, almost immobilizing the movements of the invaders. This was especially problematic for the mechanized German forces in the Second World War.

These underlying three aspects of Russia - its ability to mobilize immense numbers, its vast size, and the terrible ferocity of the winter - make the country effectively immune to direct invasion. So please take my advice. If you're in the world-conquering business, don't invade Russia. Trust me on this one. It's just an all-around terrible idea.

Unless, of course, you happen to be the Mongols.

Room 40

A week-and-a-half ago, the world commemorated the one hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Jutland, the largest naval battle of the First World War. During the famous engagement, the British Grand Fleet sortied to intercept the main force of the German High Seas Fleet, which itself was trying to catch what they thought was an isolated portion of the Royal Navy.  The Germans were mystified when they were suddenly and unexpectedly confronted with a superior British force that seemed to know their exact location and course. At the time, they put it down to an unlucky coincidence. They could not have been more mistaken.

In fact, the Royal Navy knew exactly where the German fleet was and where it was headed because they had pulled off one of the greatest intelligence coups in military history. They had successfully broken the secret codes of the German Navy. This victory, bloodlessly achieved by brains rather than brute force, was one of the most important of the entire war.

Wireless telegraphy, what we today call radio, was still a new factor in warfare when the Battle of Jutland was fought. After all, it had been barely a decade since the experiments of Marconi proved the usefulness of long-range wireless transmitting. The advent of wireless technology made possible instant long-range communication, and with it, the coordination of military operations on a scale much larger than that ever achieved before. A commander was now able to give instant commands to armies or fleets hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

The problem with wireless is that anyone can listen in on it. It thus became necessary to deny the enemy knowledge of what was being said through the use of codes and ciphers. Failure to do this would allow the enemy to listen in on one’s own radio transmissions and could conceivably lead to disaster. Earlier in the war, the 1914 Russian invasion of East Prussia had resulted in a catastrophic defeat largely because the Russian commanders had communicated in the clear, without any attempt at using codes or ciphers, and the Germans therefore knew almost as much about Russian troop dispositions and movements as the Russians did themselves.

It was recognized quite quickly that wireless would be of particular use in naval warfare. While generals could communicate with their forces on land by cable or written message, admirals had to coordinate the activities of warships across vast stretches of ocean, and wireless was the only way to accomplish this. Before the war, in order to safeguard the security of its wireless transmissions from prying British eyes, the German Navy had carefully created a complex encryption system that consisted of three different codes.

Each code was known by a two-or-three letter codename. Perhaps the most important German code was SKM, which the Germans used only to communicate with important naval units during major operations. It was made up of more than 34,000 three-letter groupings, each of which represented an order, a name of a ship, or some other piece of information the German admirals would need to communicate to their vessels. A code of lesser importance was HVB, which the Germans used to issue various routine commands that were done on a regular basis, and also when warships needed to communicate with German merchant vessels. The final code, VB, was used by the German Admiralty to communicate with its naval attachés overseas, and also used by flag officers when they were at sea.

Wireless telegraphy was such a new innovation that few countries had put much thought into intercepting and decrypting enemy transmissions. When the war broke out, the British knew that the maintenance of their naval superiority was going to be a critical factor in the final defeat of Germany. If the Germans were able to seriously challenge British mastery of the seas, it would be impossible to maintain the naval blockade of Germany and the British Isles might find themselves threatened with invasion. Very early in the war, therefore, it was decided that an operation had to be set up to break the German naval codes.

The Royal Navy turned to a somewhat unlikely person to tackle this key problem: Sir Alfred Ewing, a Scottish engineer who taught at the University of Cambridge and had spent many of his pre-war years working in Japan. At the outbreak of the war, he was the Director of Education for the Royal Navy, helping develop better methods for recruitment and training of naval officers. He had absolutely no professional experience in cryptography, but Rear Admiral Henry Oliver, the Director of Naval Intelligence for the Royal Navy when the war broke out, simply had an intuitive feeling that Ewing was the man for the job. As it turned out, Ewing was an excellent choice.

As a first step, Ewing did what any intellectual would do when faced with such a challenge: he went to the British Museum and began reading books on cryptography. He also began to assemble a staff of quirky eccentrics to help him in his task. Since no one had ever assembled a team to break wireless codes before, Ewing essentially made things up as he went along. Among the men he recruited were mathematicians and linguists, but there was a heavy dose of intellectuals who were well-versed in classical languages and ancient history but had no knowledge of code breaking. Many of them were academics on leave from their universities, and there was a bit of culture shock as these civilians began working with officers of the Royal Navy.

The men recruited by Sir Ewing gathered in the quarters he had found for them in the Admiralty Building, Room 40, which was soon the unofficial name for the operation as a whole. The very existence of Room 40 was a highly-classified secret. Outside of the high councils of the Admiralty, only the top two British admirals, John Jellicoe and David Beatty, were allowed to know about it.

As it turned out, by the end of 1914, the men of Room 40 had a lot of material to work with.  Immediately upon the outbreak of the war, the Royal Navy and its Dominion counterparts had begun the straightforward task of ridding the world’s oceans of German merchant ships. Unless they were lucky enough to find refuge in a neutral port where they could sit out the war, any German steamship was soon to be captured by the British. All German merchant ships, of course, were under strict instructions to destroy their copies of the HVB code the moment it looked like capture was likely.

On August 11, a Royal Australian Navy ship boarded the German-Australian merchant vessel Hobart, whose captain was not even aware that war had broken out. The Australian officer commanding the boarding party presented himself as the head of a quarantine inspection unit, thus gaining control of the ship before the captain had a chance to destroy his codebook. The Australians then tricked the German into revealing the location of the codebook, which was soon on its way to London.

Only days later, Room 40 received another stroke out luck, courtesy of their Russian allies. In the Baltic Sea, the Germans and Russians fought a largely isolated naval war with one another, in which superior numbers and tactics gave the Germans a decided advantage. The Russians restored to the naval equivalent of a guerrilla war, launching occasional hit-and-run attacks, striking only when targets of opportunity presented themselves, and otherwise keeping their ships in well-fortified bases. 

During a sortie against the Russians in the first month of the war, the German light cruiser Magdeburg ran aground in heavy fog. Frantically, she tried to free herself before Russian warships could arrive and attack her in her vulnerable state. When it became clear that she was well and truly stuck, and that the Russians were indeed on their way, the captain of the Magdeburg decided to destroy the ship rather than see it captured. Being aground, it couldn’t be properly scuttled, but charges were set to blow the ship up. Two Russian cruisers soon approached and, as soon as they were in range, began firing at the helpless Magdeburg. In the confusion that reigned as the German crew abandoned ship, the charges apparently went off too soon, killing many of the German sailors while not fully destroying the ship. Some of the Germans were rescued by a nearby German destroyer, while the others were taken prisoner by the Russians.

When the firing died down, the Russians sent a boarding party onto the charred remnant of the Magdeburg. Onboard, they discovered the codebook and current key for the SKM code, and almost immediately recognized their significance. Figuring that the priceless codebook would be of much more use to the British than to themselves, the Russians made a copy of it and then generously sent the original to London, where it soon found its way to Room 40.

The final German code was said to have fallen into Allied hands through a bizarre coincidence. On November 30, in an incredible stroke of luck, a British fishing trawler accidentally hauled up a metal chest that had earlier been dumped into the North Sea by a damaged German destroyer. Upon investigation, it was found to contain the VB codebook. It’s not clear why a humble destroyer was carrying the VB codebook, which was used for communications to overseas naval attachés and consulates, or by Flag Officers, but the British certainly weren’t going to complain. (I have sometimes wondered if this story was cooked up by the British to conceal the fact that they acquired the VB codebook by stealing it from an overseas German embassy, which would have been a massive violation of diplomatic protocol and international law.)

Before the end of 1914, therefore, the British had acquired the three most critical German naval codes. Clearly, Room 40 led a charmed life. But simply having the codebooks did not allow the British to decrypt the German messages, because the Germans were using ciphers as well as codes. A code is basically just another language written down in a codebook, in which combinations of letters are substituted for regular words and numbers. A cipher, on the other hand, is a system of scrambling up those letters so that they appeared to be gibberish to anyone who doesn’t possess the cipher. The men in Room 40 may have obtained the German codes, but unless they could unlock the German ciphers, the messages they were intercepting still were incomprehensible.

The men at Room 40 set to work. There were no established methods and procedures for the work they were doing, so they simply starting building up their operation from scratch. They were helped by the fact that the Germans made excessive use of wireless and did not change their ciphers regularly. By assembling vast numbers of intercepted German messages and comparing them with one another, over time the ciphers began to be broken. By the end of 1914, Room 40 was beginning to read German messages with increasing ease.

One of the mysteries of the First World War is why the Germans never fully realized that their codes had been compromised and that the Royal Navy was, in effect, readings its mail. When the Magdeburg was captured, concerned messages fluttered around the German Admiralty regarding whether the vital SKM codebook had been successfully destroyed. No one could say for sure, but the Germans went right on using the code anyway. In all three of the German codes, ciphers were often not changed for weeks at a time, and as Room 40 gained in experience, each new cipher would be broken within a few days.

When the Royal Navy appeared as if from thin air to attack a German naval unit or intercept a German vessel, rather than consider the possibility that the British had broken the German codes, the German naval commanders ascribed these events to either unlucky coincidence or reports sent to Britain from spies in Germany. Indeed, in the entire German Navy, only Captain Looff of the Konigsberg, hiding in the Rufiji Delta in German East Africa, seems to have realized that the British could read the German codes. Supply ships clandestinely sent from Germany to assist the Konigsberg were intercepted by the British, who could only have known about them by breaking the German codes. But while Looff realized this, no one else in the German Navy seemed to comprehend it.

The first hint of what Room 40’s capabilities came during the Battle of Dogger Bank, when the Royal Navy was able to intercept a powerful German flotilla with an even more powerful flotilla of its own. Only good luck and poor British command and control during the battle allowed the Germans to escape a potential severe defeat. As it was, the Germans had been forced to flee for home with undue haste. The British victory at Dogger Bank was made possible only by the intelligence provided by the men in Room 40.

Eventually, the man who emerged as the guiding spirit of Room 40 and its devoted band of code-breakers was the new Chief of Naval Intelligence, Captain Reginald Hall, truly one of the unsung heroes of the First World War. He professionalized and reorganized the staff of Room 40, transforming the ad hoc group created by Sir Ewing into a proficient unit that not only provided critical intelligence for the British throughout the war, but laid the foundation of the future code-breaking operations at Bletchley Park during the Second World War.

In the middle of 1916, Sir Ewing took his leave from Room 40 and returned to academia, whereupon Hall officially took over Room 40 in his capacity as Director of Naval Intelligence. If the code-breaking operation had one weakness, it was organizational ambiguity, but Hall now cut through the red tape and greatly improved operations.

Room 40 would play a tremendously important role in the war. It would not only help the Royal Navy keep the German High Seas Fleet cooped up in its North Sea bases, but would help them defeat the U-boat threat that posed such a great danger to the survival of Britain. It would also help bring the United States into the war as a member of the Allied powers, for it was via the codebreakers in Room 40 that the notorious Zimmerman Telegram came to be revealed to the public, raising American anger against Germany to a fever pitch in the early months of 1917.

If ever there was proof that the simple power of the human mind, carefully applied, can change the course of history, it was in the work of the men in Room 40.

Ten Good History "Beach Reads" for the Summer

It probably won't surprise any readers of my blog that most of my spare time - the time not taken up in being a full-time teacher, writer, father, and husband, in other words - is taken up with reading history books. My ratio of reading nonfiction to fiction is probably around twenty-to-one. If you ask me, a well-written history book is better than the best novel, with the added attraction of being a true story.

As the summer begins and we all try to relax a bit, I thought I'd offer a few modest suggestions for good history books to read over the summer, perhaps while lounging around on the beach. None of these are overly academic. Each is written by a good historical writer, tells a rollicking good story, and is intended for the general public. They tell important stories, to be sure, but aren't so heavy as, say, books about the Holocaust or the Soviet gulags. It's important to read those books, but maybe not on the beach during summer vacation.

Of course, my first recommendations would be my own books, Shattered Nation: An Alternate History Novel of the American Civil War and Blessed are the Peacemakers: A Shattered Nation Novella. Trust me, I have read both of them very carefully and consider them quite good. But this is not about tooting my own horn. Let's talk about what I think would be the ten most fun history books to read over the summer.

First up is The Neptune File, by Tom Standage, published in 2000. I loved this book, which tells the remarkable story of how Neptune was discovered in the late 19th Century. Mathematicians and astronomers, armed with their understanding of Newton's laws of gravity, had noticed something odd about the orbit of Uranus, the first planet invisible to the naked eye to be discovered, which suggested that an object of enormous mass was "tugging" on it with its gravity. Yet no such planet was known to exist. Much of the drama of the story comes from the controversy over whether English mathematician John Couch Adams or French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier deserves the credit for the discovery. It may sound cerebral, but I can assure you it's a delightful, entertaining book that you won't regret reading. It also leaves one with a profound respect for the ability of the human being to comprehend the universe in which we live.

Next is the wonderful book Longitude, by Dava Sobel, published in 1996. Like The Neptune File, it's a story of a complicated problem being solved by human ingenuity. The problem of finding longitude at sea might seem insignificant today, but it was a matter of life and death to the people of the 18th Century, not to mention extraordinary profits and military supremacy. Parliament offered an astounding monetary reward to anyone who could devise a solution. Amazingly, this task fell to an amateur clock-maker and choir director, John Harrison, a man from rural Yorkshire rather than London. But it was far from an easy task. In this lovely volume, easily read in a single day, Sobel details hows Harrison solved each technical challenge as it came up, as well as how he navigated the corridors of scientific and political power in the British Empire to claim the prize against all odds.

Another wonderful summer read I would recommend is The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk. In prose that flows like fine wine, Hopkirk details the clock-and-dagger struggle that took place in Central Asia between the Russian Empire and the British Empire during the mid-to-late 19th Century. British spymasters in India feared that Russia, steadily pushing down from the north, might one day penetrate through the Khyber Pass and invade Her Majesty's most valuable colonial possession. The stories of daring escapes, secret missions, espionage, and counterintelligence that Hopkirk describes makes one feel as if James Bond or Jason Bourne had been dropped down into the imperialistic age of the 1800s. Honestly, I have no idea why half a dozen different movies haven't been made out of this material.

We now come to Queen Victoria's Little Wars, by Byron Farwell. This book is by one of my favorite authors, who tells stories of soldiers in the British Empire in such an engrossing and entertaining way that one feels less like they are reading a book and more like they are on a rollicking amusement park ride. Yes, war is terrible, yet somehow the gentlemen of the Victorian army made it all seem like a game. With stories of adventure and glory as far afield as Canada, China, India, Africa, and the Middle East, filled with the most colorful characters in all of military history, this book is sure to delight anyone who reads it.

Next up is Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, by Ben MacIntyre. The deception campaign by the Allied against the Germans before the D-Day invasion, leading them to believe that the landing would be at Calais rather than Normandy, is arguably the greatest counterintelligence effort of all time. It had many aspects, but perhaps the most important was the "turning" of literally every German agent operating in Britain at the time, using them to feed false information to Berlin. It's a story of colorful characters and dramatic escapades, masterfully told here in highly entertaining prose.

The next book on my list of recommendations is City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas, by Roger Crowley. There is something about the Republic of Venice that fascinates me and fills me with wonder. It's the story of a small city on an island in the middle of a great lagoon, which through courage, daring, skill and a head for business, comes to dominate the Mediterranean world and become one of the great powers of Europe. It then held the line for Christian Europe against the Islamic power of the Ottoman Turks, engaging in a series of wars that eventually exhausted it. With highly entertaining writing, the story comes alive in the pages of this book.

A Short History of Byzantium, by John Julius Norwich, comes next. It's a one volume abridged edition of a three-volume work. Norwich's witty, always clear and often amusing writing style takes what is often seen as a boring and esoteric subject and makes it easily accessible and hugely entertaining. The history of the Byzantine Empire is a subject deeply fascinating and this lovely volume is a magnificent introduction to it.

Another lovely book to read in the summer appeals to though who, like me, like wine along with their history. It is Passions: The Wines and Travels of Thomas Jefferson, by James Gabler. This book describes in loving detail the travels of Jefferson in Europe, through France, northern Italy, southern England, and the Rhine Valley. Its primary focus is wine, for Jefferson was the greatest wine connoisseur of the late 18th Century, but it also gives attention to the gardens and architecture that Jefferson so loved. Politics is touched on only fleetingly, for this is a book about Jefferson the Renaissance Man, not Jefferson the revolutionary. The last few chapters detail how Jefferson's European experience impacted his time in the White House and in his retirement at his beloved Monticello.

A book I cannot recommend highly enough is Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland. If you're looking for epic drama in history, you can't do better than the collapse of the Roman Republic in the First Century BC. In Holland's skillful hands, the story comes alive in all of its complexity and its astonishing cast of characters. When you come to the end of the book, you'll have been taken on a fantastic ride, yet find yourself shaking your head at the thought that such events were even possible.

We come to the end of the list with Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe, by Laurence Bergreen. I've always loved stories of the great explorers and this one certainly ranks among the best. The story of Magellan's heroic crew and the suffering they endured during the first circumnavigation of the world, it is a gripping adventure story that leaves one astonished. Of course, the one "fact" that everyone knows about this story is false; Magellan was not the first man to sail around the world, because he died halfway through the voyage. Yet a few skeleton survivors did make it back to Spain and the story they had to tell defied imagination. In the capable hands of Bergreen, it comes alive in this wonderful history book that is written like the best novel.

And that's the list. Happy reading, everyone!