CHAPTER XXII
RADIO GIRDLED THE GLOBE
IF GERMANS HAD CUT EVERY CABLE, WE COULD STILL HAVE TALKED TO EUROPE—FROM ONE ROOM IN NAVY DEPARTMENT FLASHED DESPATCHES TO ENGLAND, FRANCE AND ITALY—CAUGHT GERMAN AS WELL AS ALLIED WIRELESS—QUEER "NEWS" FROM BERLIN—U. S. NAVY BUILT IN FRANCE RADIO STATION WHOSE MESSAGES ARE HEARD AROUND THE WORLD.
If the Germans had cut every cable—and their U-boats did cut some of them—we would still have been able to keep in touch with Pershing and the Army in France, with Sims in London, Rodman and Strauss in the North Sea, Wilson at Brest, Niblack at Gibraltar, Dunn in the Azores, with all our forces and Allies.
A spark, flashing its wave through the air, would in an instant cross the Atlantic. Caught by the Eiffel tower in Paris or the Lyons station, by the British at Carnarvon, by the tall Italian towers in Rome, it could be quickly transmitted to any commander or chancellery in Europe. That was the marvel wrought by radio.
President Wilson and Secretary Baker in Washington were, so far as time was concerned, in closer touch with Pershing and his forces than President Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton were with the battle-fields a few miles away in Virginia, during the Civil War. It was infinitely easier for me to send a message or hear from our vessels 3,000 or 4,000 miles distant than it was for Gideon Welles, when he was Secretary of the Navy, to communicate with the Federal ships at Charleston or with Farragut at Mobile.
Vessels at sea could be reached almost as easily as if they had been at their docks. Submarine warnings, routings, all kinds of information and orders were sent to them, fifty or sixty messages being transmitted simultaneously. At the same time radio operators were intercepting every word or signal sent out by ships. Sometimes, as the operators remarked, "the air was full of them."
"ALLO! ALLO! SOS!" When that call came naval vessels went hurrying to the scene, for it meant that a ship was attacked by submarines. Sometimes in the war zone the air seemed full of "Allos," for ships approaching the European coast could catch the wireless for hundreds of miles, hearing signals one moment from a vessel off Ireland and the next from some craft being attacked in the Bay of Biscay.
From one room of the Navy Department—the "Trans-Ocean Room," we called it—we communicated with all western Europe. Messages went direct to the high-power sending stations at Annapolis, Sayville, Long Island; New Brunswick and Tuckerton, N. J., which flashed them overseas. At the same time dispatches were pouring in at receiving stations, coming into Washington from abroad without interfering with the volume going out.
Stations at San Francisco, San Diego, Pearl Harbor, and Cavite spanned the Pacific, keeping us in touch with the Far East, with China, Japan, the Philippines, and Eastern Russia. North and south from Panama to Alaska were wireless stations, from Darien, on the Isthmus, to far up into the Arctic. These were the "high-powers." At various points along the coast were shore-to-ship stations that communicated with shipping several hundred miles from shore. And there were radio compass stations, which could determine a ship's position at sea.
The United States Navy not only built up this vast system in our own territory, but it erected in France the most powerful radio station in existence. Located near Bordeaux, at Croix d' Hins, it is named the Lafayette, and a tablet on the main building bears the inscription: