Talk:Room 40

Military history: Intelligence / Maritime / British / European / World War I

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Comments

IMHO some mention should be added about the ways in which Room 40 was hampered by Admiralty's internal conflicts and the inability of the higher staff to fully exploit this new method of warfare.

A glaring example of the kind of mistakes that went on in the Admiralty is the start of Battle of Jutland: until the German main battle fleet was actually sighted by ships of the RN, the Admiralty believed they were still in the Jade, while Room 40 knew that the fleet had sailed. Admiralty's personnel did not know which questions to ask the Room 40 staff, and Room 40 staff wasn't allowed to interpret the intelligence it gathered, so intelligence gained wasn't moving out of the room to people who could have used it.

The sinking of the RMS Lusitania is also a good example, although there are two different views on Room 40's role. One side maintains that the Admiralty was so preoccupied with Gallipoli that everyone just forgot to warn the Lusitania of the exact dangers that she would be facing. The other view is that the complete lack of action to protect the ship was a deliberate attempt to get the ship sunk in order to draw the United States into the war. - Pryaltonian 23:36, 3 November 2006

Wikify

I did some work on structure and links, to bring it more in line with other articles. Auntieruth55 (talk) 01:21, 1 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

"interpreting Room 40 information in its own way"

The reference to the "Admiralty's insistence upon interpreting Room 40 information in its own way" is meaningless and odd. All recipients of intelligence reports interpret that "information in its own way"203.80.61.102 (talk) 20:05, 1 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

SMS Magdeburg

The article contradicts SMS Magdeburg which says the Russians captured 3 code books not 2.

Clarification

I note that in the section titled Capture of the SKM codebook, it specifically says "The ship carried more than one copy of the SKM codebook and copy number 151 was passed to the British... ...Copies numbered 145 and 974 of the SKM were retained by the Russians..." Therefore it would seem that the final sentence of the third para of the opening summary is not contradicting SMS Magdeburg; it's simply in error! I will correct it...

2A00:23C4:1105:2600:AC4C:8A83:51D8:B59E (talk) 10:06, 30 October 2018 (UTC) Rædwulf[reply]