IN APRIL 1917, Kptlt. Walther Schwieger was given command of a new submarine, U-88, larger than U-20, and with twice the number of torpedoes. A few months later, on July 30, he received the German navy’s highest award, a pretty blue cross with a French name, Pour le Mérite, nicknamed the Blue Max. At the time he was only the eighth U-boat commander to receive one, his reward for having sunk 190,000 gross tons of shipping. The Lusitania alone accounted for 16 percent of the total.
In London, in the Old Admiralty Building, Room 40 tracked Schwieger and his new boat through four cruises, one of which lasted nineteen days. The fourth cruise began on September 5, 1917, and proved to be considerably shorter. Soon after entering the North Sea, Schwieger encountered a British Q-ship, the HMS Stonecrop, one of a class of so-called mystery ships that outwardly looked like vulnerable freighters but were in fact heavily armed. While trying to escape, Schwieger steered his boat into a British minefield. Neither he nor his crew survived, and the submarine was never found. Room 40 recorded the loss with a small notation in red: “Sunk.”
In Denmark, coastal residents continued to visit the shore where his previous boat, U-20, had run aground, and now and then would climb upon the wreckage, until in 1925 the Danish navy demolished the remains with a spectacular explosion. By then, the conning tower, deck gun, and other components had been removed. They reside today in a seaside museum in Thorsminde, Denmark, on an austere stretch of North Sea coastline. Severed from its base and laced with rust, the conning tower sits on the museum’s front lawn with all the majesty of a discarded refrigerator, a forlorn ghost of the terrifying vessel that once hunted the seas and changed history.
CAPT. REGINALD “BLINKER” HALL was knighted in 1918 for his work with Room 40, though the work itself was kept secret for decades. He went on to win election to the House of Commons as a Conservative member and remained active in politics through the 1920s. At one point, during a general strike in 1926, the Conservative party established a temporary newspaper, the British Gazette, and put Hall in charge of personnel. The editor in chief was his old boss, Winston Churchill. Circulation soared to one million copies a day before the strike ended. Hall retired from politics in 1929 and moved to a home in the New Forest, a lovely terrain of pasture and woods in southern England.
He set out to publish a book about Room 40 and his exploits as intelligence chief, but in August 1933 the Admiralty and Foreign Office, sensing a new dark tilt in the world, made clear their displeasure and their wish that the story remain secret. Hall withdrew the manuscript, though his notes and a number of completed chapters reside today in the Churchill Archives in Cambridge, England. In one notation Hall exults, “How simple is intelligence!”
Hall believed that new trouble was indeed soon to come in Europe. He visited Germany and Austria in 1934. Ever the intelligence man, he reported his observations about the National Socialist movement to the government. He also described his experience to a friend in America. “All the young are in the net,” he wrote, “anyone who tried to keep out of being a Nazi is hazed till they change their mind; a form of mass cruelty which exists only in such a country.” He added, “It will, some time soon, be the duty of HUMAN BEINGS to deal with a mad dog; when that time comes your people will have to take their share.”
When the next war did begin, Hall joined Britain’s Home Guard. He became its chief of intelligence. His health, never good, declined as the war progressed. In July 1943 one of his former code breakers, Claude Serocold, by that point a director of Claridge’s Hotel, put him up in one of the hotel’s suites so that he could spend his last days in comfort. At one point a plumber arrived to deal with a problem in the bathroom. In keeping with the dignified character of the hotel, the plumber was dressed in a black suit. Hall said, “If you’re the undertaker, my man, you’re too early.” He died on October 22, 1943.