![]() On January 17, 1917, it was presented with its greatest opportunity of the war. territory in exchange for joining the Central Powers against the Allies should the United States declare war. However, once its successes had helped the British navy to bottle up the German fleet, it turned to the breaking of German traffic of a more strategic value. In January 1917, the British intercepted a coded telegram from German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann to Germany's ambassador to Mexico that offered to assist Mexico in reconquering U.S. During the first two years of the war, Room 40 concentrated primarily on tactical naval traffic. ![]() Staffed with extremely capable people and aided by the fortuitous physical recovery by the Russians of the German naval codebooks in the Baltic Sea, it grew quickly in importance and capability. The Zimmermann Telegram In January 1917, the British intercepted a coded telegram from German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann to Germany's ambassador to Mexico that offered to assist Mexico in reconquering U.S. This organization came to be known as Room 40 because of its location in the Old Admiralty Buildings. At the same time, the British government accelerated the development of a cryptographic office whose purpose it would be to read enemy traffic. On the first day of the war, the British cut Germany’s transatlantic telegraph cable, compelling the Germans to send all telegrams to the Western Hemisphere via neutral countries or via cables that actually passed through territory controlled by their enemies. In fact, they could not have been more wrong, because the truth was that the revelation of the Zimmermann telegram was the greatest cryptologic triumph of the First World War. The Germans concluded that their codes had not been broken and attributed the compromise to treason. Inside Germany there was a thorough investigation as to how the top secret, coded telegram came into the possession of the United States government. Naturally, when the German attempt to bring the war to the territory of a neutral United States became known (and Zimmermann inexplicably acknowledged authorship), the American view of Germany was so altered that within five weeks that one message had accomplished what even the earlier German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare had not: the United States declared war. Conflict comes to the entire world as the United States is drawn into the first World War against a foe that would not go away for thirty years, Germany. He further suggested that the Mexican president invite Japan, nominally an Allied nation but of great strategic concern to the United States, to join the German-Mexican pact. In it, Zimmermann secretly proposed to Mexico, then hostile to the United States, an alliance with Germany in which the Germans would provide Mexico with ample supplies that the Mexicans would be free to use to reconquer Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. That event was the publication of what came to be known as the Zimmermann Telegram, so named because its author was Arthur Zimmermann, imperial Germany’s foreign minister. …one supremely significant event early in that year would change the attitude of the entire country toward the war in general and toward Germany in particular. In fact, Wilson had just won reelection under the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” However… The National Archives in Washington DC hosted this event.In 1917, as World War I dragged on in Europe, a neutralist President Wilson and a mostly apathetic American public wanted little to do with the European conflict. News of the correspondence was made public after British intelligence intercepted the communication. Eckardt was also instructed to urge Mexico to help broker an alliance between Germany and the Japanese Empire. Mexico was promised territories in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. That month, the German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann sent a secret, coded message to the German ambassador of Mexico. appeared likely to enter the war, he was to approach the Mexican government with a proposal for a military alliance. The coded telegram, dispatched by Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann to the German ambassador in Mexico in anticipation of further unrestricted submarine warfare, instructed Ambassador Eckardt that if the U.S. By March 1, its scandalous contents were. T17:15:47-05:00 Thomas Boghardt, author of The Zimmermann Telegram: Intelligence, Diplomacy, and America’s Entry into World War One, explained why Germany sent the telegram to Mexico how it was intercepted by the British and how its discovery influenced American public opinion. The British cryptographic office known as Room 40 decoded the Zimmermann Telegram and handed it over to the United States in late-February 1917.
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