Page 103 - Wish Stream Year of 2016

Due to the nature of our subject matter and our expertise and experience, we continue to have a steady stream of people contacting us for advice and guidance with the development of courses, personal research and training in units. We have welcomed to our oor in Faraday Hall the Royal Marines, Royal Navy, Cranwell staff, main build- ing staff, FCO personnel, Field Army reps, Army HQ visitors, university of Reading academics and students, other universities, plus many more organisations. This is testament to the excellent innovative work being produced by the CABS team, and the ongoing professional refreshment
and input CABS can make for the Sandhurst Group and wider defence.
The nal word should go to the Senior Instructor Command and Leadership Royal Engineers who kindly shared this feedback with us in November:
“I have recently interviewed all of our latest RETCC graduates and many of them referred to the excellent CABS package at RMAS. I am therefore extremely interested to learn what is being taught during the CABS module.”
So, they can’t all have been asleep!
In his book “Propaganda for War: How the United States Was Conditioned to Fight the Great War of 1914-1918”, Stewart Hasley Ross describes how the rst aggressive British action of the war was the cutting of the telegraph cables between continental Europe and the Americas by the CS Telconia. In doing so he perpetuates an error that rst appeared in 1958, in “The Zimmerman Telegram” by two time Pulitzer winner Barbara W. Tuchman; in fact, the GPO records show that the ship that should have the place in history was the CS Alert. At a carefully charted posi- tion in the North Sea just off the German port of Emden, the Alert carried out a mission that had been planned by the Committee of Impe- rial Defence, up to two years before. Five cables lay on the Channel’s oor, two of which to New York, the others went to Brest in France, Vigo in Spain and to the Azores. By snagging the cables and bringing them on board, one by one, the crew was able to cut the cables before dropping them overboard again. In a stroke hardly before the declaration of war had reverberated around the world, Britain had cut the United States from mainland Europe and had stopped Germany arguing its case to the American people. During the war, the British continued to cut underwater
By Dr Mike Rennie
cables; in fact the Telconia was one of the ships to undertake such work, but the cutting of those two transatlantic cables by the Alert is arguably one of the most important strategic moves of the Great War. The only remaining transatlantic cable not under British control lay between Liberia and Brazil and this was cut in 1915, which meant that all communication between Europe and the Americas was under the control of London. The propaganda effort in the US had begun.
The ability to control what was reported in the United States was enhanced one week into the war by the passing of the Defence of the Realm Act, or DORA as it came to be known. A rather notorious piece of legislation allowed British authorities to scrutinise any information originat- ing in Britain. This allowed the censors to con- trol what American journalists based in the UK were able to send home, which obviously limited reports in America to those heavily favourable to the Allies. Ross quotes an American correspond- ent as complaining “honest, unbiased news simply disappeared out of the American papers along about the middle of August 1914”. Ross also notes comments by the German ambas-
The First Casualty: Britain’s
propaganda effort in the US
during the Great War
ACADEMICS 101