Telefunken

Reason For Seizing Wireless

New York Times issue of February 9, 1917

Sayville Wireless Station

Unfriendly operators could have interfered with messages to warships. Although the thirty German employees of the German-owned wireless station at Sayville, L.I. were suddenly forced to leave the plant without operators or mechanics when the United States broke with Germany on Saturdays, officers and enlisted men of the American Navy have already filled their places, so that the transatlantic communication has been interrupted only for a few hours. Only because of poor static conditions has the station not been able to handle, with its new staff of workers, a normal amount of business. It sends to Berlin now about 3,000 words a day, mostly press dispatches, and receives about 4,000 words.

Because it had been demonstrated earlier in the war, when the German squadron under Admiral von Spee defeated Sir Christopher Cradock off Coronel, Chili, that wireless stations in neutral territory could furnish valuable information upon the movements of enemy ships, it was decided to seize the Sayville wireless. Nor was the desire to prevent the sending of information to the ships of any belligerent the only reason

the wireless may be used to communicate with warships.

If German operators had remained at the Sayville keys, they might have prevented American vessels on the seas from communication with one another. Wireless operators are able to tell by the "note" of a call whether a warship of the British Navy is sending. By altering their spark frequencies and pounding on the keys, they might be able to prevent communication, just as von Spee's operators had prevented the British ships from giving their positions to one another.

No code messages are accepted by the censors at the Sayville station now, and the station is not used at all for diplomatic business. Most of the matter sent and received is for newspapers and press associations. The officers there believe most of the Germany Embassy messages are sent to Hamburg through the transatlantic station at Tuckerton, N.J.

Extra guards have not been put around the seventy-five acre station, and it is not difficult to approach the wireless masts, the dynamos and sending apparatus without challenge by a sentry.

Most of the thirty Germans who worked for the Atlantic Communication Company, have left Sayville after being thrust from their quarters at the station with no time to gather their belongings.

QST, February, 1917, page 43:

Wireless Censorship

    Do you know why wireless stations were censored at the beginning of the War and cables were not? Here is an interesting piece from the New York Times which explains the situation:
    The Executive order of the President, Aug. 5, 1914, prohibited radio stations from transmitting or receiving unneutral messages, and delegated to the Secretary of the Navy the enforcement of the order. The Sayville Wireless Station was taken over by the Navy Department July 8, 1915. In explaining why a distinction is made between the wireless telegraph and the submarine cables to Europe as regards the censorship of messages transmitted by those routes, the Department of State quotes the following extract from a letter addressed to the Hon. William J. Stone, Chairman, Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, by the Secretary of State under date of Jan. 20, 1916, relative to the "Freedom of communication by submarine cables versus censored communication by wireless".
    "The reason that wireless messages and cable messages require different treatment by a neutral Government is as follows:
    "Communication by wireless cannot be interrupted by a belligerent. With a submarine cable it is otherwise. The possibility of cutting the cable exists, and if a belligerent possesses naval superiority the cable is cut, as was the German cable near the Azores by one of Germany's enemies, and as was the British cable near Fanning Island by a German naval force. Since a cable is subject to hostile attack, the responsibility falls upon the belligerent and not upon the neutral to prevent cable communication.
    "A more important reason, however, at least from the point of view of a neutral Government, is that messages sent out from a wireless station in neutral territory may be received by belligerent warships on the high seas. If these messages, whether plain or in cipher, direct the movements of warships or convey to them information as to the location of an enemy's public or private vessels, the neutral territory becomes a base of naval operations, to permit which would be essentially unneutral.
    "As a wireless message can be received by all stations and vessels within a given radius, every message in cipher, whatever its intended destination, must be censored; otherwise military information may be sent to warships off the coast of a neutral. It is manifest that a submarine cable is incapable of becoming a means of direct communication with a warship on the high seas. Hence its use cannot, as a rule, make neutral territory a base for the direction of naval operations."

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