Information is power, and more on a battlefield. You just have to look at the current war in Ukraine and how artificial intelligence has been key to preparing some offensives and improving the effectiveness of drones. It is nothing new: the technological advances of the last two centuries, especially in telecommunications, have brought constant changes in the way of directing and perceiving armed conflicts.
Before the 19th century, it could take weeks for a government or the population to learn the outcome of a battle that took place beyond its borders. For example, in 1805, news of the British fleet's triumph at Trafalgar took sixteen days to reach London. In just five decades, this panorama has completely changed. The reason: the irruption of the telegraph.
Curiously, it was in another conflict related to Russian expansionism, the Crimean War (1853-1856), when the war potential of the telegraph was seen for the first time. When the confrontation between the Czarist State, on the one hand, and France, Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire, on the other, began, news from the front on that strategic Black Sea peninsula took five days to reach Paris or London.
Those 120 hours were distributed as follows: a steamer took two days to cross from Balaklava (the base of operations of the Franco-British troops in Crimea) to Varna (in present-day Bulgaria), a port on the Black Sea; from there it took a messenger on horseback three more days to reach Budapest, the nearest place with telegraph lines to transmit a message to London and Paris.
The Russians had better communications at first. To connect Crimea with Moscow and Saint Petersburg, they used the optical telegraph – towers with mechanical arms that could be seen from a great distance. The tsar's generals could transmit their orders to the front-line troops in just two days, less than half the Franco-British capacity.
The allies did not take long to understand the need to shorten these communication times to improve their military results. The French set about erecting telegraph lines between Varna and Bucharest. Meanwhile, the British completed the laying of a 550-kilometre submarine cable connecting the Bulgarian Black Sea coast with Balaklava, the first major underwater work of its kind.
With the line completed, it only took five hours for information about the conflict to reach France or Britain from the Crimea. The telegraphs were of priority use for the military, and the journalists posted to the front could only send a brief headline of what happened to avoid collapsing the lines. The longer chronicles arrived at the newsrooms several days later via steamboat.
This ability of governments and staffs to find out almost instantly caused commanders on the ground to lose the autonomy of action that they had enjoyed in previous campaigns, such as in the Napoleonic wars or in colonial conflicts. Interest in this new channel of communication reached the highest levels: both Queen Victoria of England and French Emperor Napoleon III demanded daily reports from the front.
The controversies on Twitter with hoaxes and errors as a result of precipitation are nothing new, as shown by the problems that the telegraph experienced in its first war. The arrival of news, fast but with a dropper, led to misinterpretations in the newspapers. The causes of these rulings were often in the rush to inform an audience that did not stop demanding news about the conflict.
Even the most prestigious newspapers fell into these errors. The Times announced the false fall of Sevastopol on October 2, 1854. The confusion was due to a very optimistic and exaggerated interpretation of the outcome of the Battle of the Alma River, where the British, French and Ottomans defeated the Russian army. The situation was not clarified until eight days later, when it was seen that, despite the Allied triumph, the strategic city was still under the control of Tsar Nicholas I.
The telegraph was also seen as a spy tool. The freedom with which British newspapers reported troop movements in the Crimea suggested that enemy agents could pass on such valuable data to their ranks. The southern territories of the tsars did not have as many electrical telegraph connections, but such lines did exist in Warsaw, part of the Russian Empire at the time.
Advances in telecommunications during the Crimean War prompted various projects of a civilian nature. The laying of the underwater line in the Black Sea encouraged the British to embark on other larger plans, such as the creation of the first telegraph connection between both sides of the Atlantic. That channel was launched on August 16, 1858 with a message from Queen Victoria to US President James Buchanan.
A message took sixteen hours to cross the Atlantic. In the age of the Internet, it may seem like an eternity, but at the time, it was a sign of speed, since a message on the fastest steamer could take ten days. However, the system was only operational for three weeks, since it suffered a breakdown. For various reasons, the project was slow to get going, and it did not return to operation until 1865.
In addition, telegraph lines became essential tools for the European colonial empires to extend their control over territories in Africa and Asia.
The warfare applications of the telegraph seen in the Crimea were only the first step. The rest of the great conflicts of the 19th century witnessed its use and witnessed its growing influence. The next great war scenario for this technology would be the US Civil War (1861-1865).
President Abraham Lincoln was an enthusiastic user of telegrams to keep in touch with his generals, although, until the outbreak of the war, he had shown no particular interest: in his first weeks in the White House, he usually sent only one message. telegraphed per month.
The US federal government as a whole did not make much use of this technology before the conflict either. Officials in Washington had to queue at the telegraph office like any other citizen when they wanted to send an official message.
That scenario changed radically when the war broke out between the northern and southern states. During the war, the military telegraph corps erected more than twenty-four thousand telegraph lines throughout the country. Lincoln turned the War Department's telegraph office into a kind of headquarters. In fact, it was the place, beyond the White House, where he spent the most time during the war.
In the telegraph office, he was able to act like a true military commander-in-chief, a prerogative proper to the president of the United States. In that sense, he gave orders to his generals in almost real time. The first prominent use of such messages came during the Shenandoah Valley (Virginia) campaign, when he urged his commanders to be more aggressive against Confederate General “Stonewall” Jackson, albeit with little success. In total, the president wrote more than a thousand messages for his generals.
Lincoln spent so much time in the office that he became friends with the officials who worked there. On July 4, 1863, when the news of General Ulysses S. Grant's victory at Vicksburg arrived, one of the decisive actions of the war, the president broke the rule of not drinking alcohol, and invited everyone to beers. telegraph service staff.
Beyond Lincoln's use of it, both sides tried to intercept and decipher enemy messages. Both Unionists and Confederates had spies who knew how to take advantage of the telegraph. General Grant came close to being fired in early 1862 for failing to comply with a series of orders. In the end, an investigation showed that a southern agent infiltrated in the telegraphic services had eliminated the messages destined for the military in order to cause confusion in the northern command.
In turn, a southern cavalry commander, John Hunt Morgan, became famous for intercepting enemy messages that improved the effectiveness of his raids. In any case, the telegraph infrastructure in Confederate territory was not as developed as in the north –interstate connections were lacking–, and President Jefferson Davis could not emulate Lincoln.
The manipulations of telegraphed messages were at the root of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). Indeed, the Ems telegram led to one of the most decisive moments in contemporary European history. In the last third of the 19th century, the Second French Empire and Prussia were immersed in an escalation of tensions, which would have its high point in the dispute over who would be the new king of Spain, after the Revolution of 1868 that had dethroned Isabel II. .
Paris did not want the new monarch of its neighbor to the south to be Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, from the same dynasty as the Prussian Kaiser, Wilhelm I. The latter decided to reduce the tension, despite the protests of his chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and In the end, he withdrew support for his relative. Through his ambassador, the French demanded that Berlin make it clear that it no longer supported this suitor.
The Kaiser informed Bismarck of the meeting through the Ems telegram (known as this because it was the spa where William I was staying). The monarch gave his chancellor freedom to make the content of the message public, and he modified it to increase the tension between the French and the Prussians. The text leaked to the press showed the Prussian leader being pressured by the French diplomat, and him humiliated by the sovereign, as he was ultimately not received.
The telegram gave wings to the hawks of the government of Napoleon III, who demanded to declare war on Prussia. Thus, the Second Empire took Bismarck's bait. France was left as the aggressor, but the clever Prussian chancellor had his army ready, whose crushing victory brought the end of the Bonapartist regime, the outbreak of the Paris Commune, and the advent of the Third Republic.
In the second conflict between Great Britain and the South African Boers (1899-1902) a new technology began to emerge: wireless telegraphy, which would eventually lead to radio. The two sides tried to use it without much success, and it would not be until the First World War when this new telecommunications system would be consecrated.
