James Edward Edmonds
Sir James Edward Edmonds, was an officer of the Royal Engineers in the late-Victorian era British Army who worked in the Intelligence Division, took part in the creation of the forerunner of MI5 and promoted several spy scares.
In 1911, Edmonds returned to soldiering as the chief of staff of the 4th Division, despite being advised that it was a bad career move. In the manoeuvres of 1912, with the 3rd Division, the 4th Division took part in the defeat of I Corps, commanded by Douglas Haig and the only permanent corps headquarters in the army. The 4th Division training emphasised the retreat despite such tactics being barred by the War Office. When the First World War began, Edmonds thought that the division was well trained but lacking much of the equipment provided to German divisions.
The 4th Division fought at the Battle of Le Cateau on 26 August and then participated in the Great Retreat, an ordeal which Edmonds, 53 years old, found most trying, buoyed up only by his pre-war training and belief that it would end in a counter-offensive. Edmonds found that once there was time to rest, that he could not and was transferred to GHQ, the headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force, where he feared being sent home. Edmonds spent the rest of the war at GHQ and in 1918 was made deputy engineer-in-chief. Edmonds retired from the army in 1919 with the honorary rank of Brigadier-General.
Edmonds became the Director of the Military Branch of the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence on 1 April 1919 and was responsible for the post-war compilation of the 28-volume Military Operations section of the History of the Great War. Edmonds wrote eleven of the fourteen volumes titled Military Operations, France and Belgium, dealing with the Western Front. "Military Operations: Italy 1915–1919", the final volume of the series, was published in 1949, just after Edmonds retired. Edmonds spent his retirement at Brecon House, Long Street, Sherborne, Dorset, where he died on 2 August 1956.
Early life and education
James Edward Edmonds was born in Baker Street, London, on 25 December 1861 to James Edmonds, a master jeweller and his wife Frances Amelia Bowler, a family that could trace its ancestry to Fowey in Cornwall. Edmonds was educated as a day boy at King's College School, accommodated in a wing of Somerset House. Edmonds claimed that his father taught him languages at breakfast, to the extent that he was familiar with German, French, Italian and Russian. Edmonds did not learn Latin or Greek at school but studied science and geology. Edmonds visited France when he was eight and saw Napoleon III, then returned two years later, soon after the end of the Franco-Prussian War. In his unpublished Memoirs, Edmonds wrote that he was surprised to see that the Arc de Triomphe had not been demolished and that he became sceptical of the reports of war correspondents for the rest of his life.While Edmonds was in Amiens, still under German occupation, a Bavarian officer said "Ve haf beat de Franzmen, you vill be next". This determined Edmonds's father to teach both his sons German and to put them into the army. Edmonds's teachers encouraged him to study maths at Cambridge but when one of his friends passed third in the entrance exam to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, Edmonds applied. In July 1879 Edmonds took the RMA Woolwich entrance exam, passed first and was accepted for a place. At the end of the course Edmonds achieved the highest marks that instructors could remember, and was awarded the Pollock Gold Medal for Efficiency and prizes for mathematics, mechanics, fortification, geometrical drawing, military history, drills and exercises and exemplary conduct. Edmonds won the Sword of Honour for the Best Gentleman Cadet and was mentioned by the commander-in-chief of the Army, Prince George, Duke of Cambridge.
Military career
Royal Engineers
Edmonds was commissioned into the Corps of Royal Engineers on 22 July 1881. Edmonds spent four years based in Chatham and a year in Malta studying submarine mining, a matter which the Royal Navy could not be expected to undertake. Edmonds's intellect was recognised with the nickname Archimedes. After returning from Malta, Edmonds was posted to Hong Kong with two companies of engineers to garrison the colony after a Russian invasion scare. The 33rd Engineer Company, in which Edmonds served, was one of those chosen. When the orders were received the company commander went sick and his deputy requested to be excused as his wife was pregnant. The two companies reached Hong Kong, one with eight men and the other about thirty; the absentees were either ill, invalid or on attachment and had missed the boat.Edmonds found that rocky outcrops just below the surface in Hong Kong harbour had not been charted and were a danger to shipping, occasionally the cause of serious accidents. Edmonds organised their removal by trailing a rail between two rowing boats and lowering a diver to place an explosive charge on the top. The posting was uneventful; in 1888 Edmonds returned to Chatham after three months' sick leave in Japan and sojourns US and Canada, to join the 38th Mining Company as Assistant Instructor. Apparently Edmonds's main duty was to play golf with the chief instructor in the afternoons. Edmonds was promoted to captain in January 1890 and returned to the RMA Woolwich as an instructor in fortification. During his six years as an instructor Edmonds spent his long vacations abroad learning Russian and other languages.
Staff College
In 1895 Edmonds took the entrance exam for the Staff College, Camberley and passed first again; during the year he married Hilda Margaret Ion, daughter of the Rev. Matthew Wood; they had one daughter. Twenty-four candidates were chosen by application and eight men with near misses in the examinations could enter by nomination, one of whom was Douglas Haig. Edmonds felt intellectually superior to his peers and wrote later that only George Macdonogh was an exception, a man who could also understand some of the more recondite subjects, like the decoding of cyphers. In his Memoirs, Edmonds wrote that he was often paired with Haig because he was good with detail and Haig a generalist. Edmonds passed out in 1899 at the top of his class, one of the most successful and popular students of the era, noted for his conversation which had become even more interesting and appreciated by, amongst others, Douglas Haig, Aylmer Haldane and Edmund Allenby. Edmonds wrote that Allenby was a blockhead, which Cyril Falls later called "an error typical of Edmonds's worst side".Edmonds, promoted to major in May 1899, overheard Colonel George Henderson predict that Haig would become commander in chief. While at the college, Edmonds co-wrote with his brother in law, W. Birkbeck Wood, "The History of the Civil War in the United States 1861–1865". The book was well received by reviewers who wrote that the book would be appealing to soldiers and to students of history alike. The book was full of statistical information, although the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement thought that in this, the authors had gone a little too far. The book gave prominence to novel aspects of the war including the use of cavalry, battles of attrition and the turning of volunteers into disciplined soldiers. The book was in print for thirty years and by 1936 was in its fourth edition and was in use at West Point.
The Intelligence Division
Edmonds was offered a post in the Intelligence Division of the General Staff, commanded by Major-General John Ardagh in October 1899, ten days after the beginning of the Second Boer War. Edmonds became head of the Special Duties Section of the War Office which was established soon after the outbreak of the war. Section H censored cable communications, spied on suspected agents, press correspondents and monitored matters of international law. Edmonds has a staff of one officer and a retired police detective with a budget of £200. The section later took on counter-intelligence and secret service work which entailed the dispatch of a small number of officers to South Africa to study topography, communications and Boer troop movements. The temporary Secret Section 13, with a staff of three, kept watch on messages to South Africa and exports of ammunition. The section managed to intercept Dutch correspondence to South Africa but was prevented from accepting the offer by the captain of a rugby team to vandalise the London offices of a pro-Boer agent.In 1901 Ardagh and Edmonds went to South Africa, at the request of the Foreign Office, to advise Lord Kitchener on questions of international law. From 1902–1904 Edmonds worked for Lord Milner on the establishment of peace. After six years abroad, Edmonds, now a major, returned to England in 1906 and took over MO3, which in 1907 was renamed MO5 and until 1910 concentrated on counter-espionage, intelligence gathering and cryptography. Apart from Edmonds the staff consisted of another major, who spent his time cultivating a parliamentary constituency, where he was elected as a Conservative MP three years later. Edmonds found that the MO3 files contained matters pertaining to the Boer War, a few items about France and Russia but nothing about Germany, which was to become Edmonds's concern with the diplomatic settlements with France and the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. Edmonds devised a code called double Playfair for communications with the Japanese and for British forces engaged in field operations. Edmonds drew up a list of experts in code-breaking and trained junior officers in cypher methods to create a reserve for times of war. Edmonds attempted to establish intelligence gathering by the British as an equivalent of the efforts being made by the French and Germans, who had been spying and counter-spying on each other since before the Franco-Prussian War. Edmonds took the view that in a modern war, old methods would be inadequate and in 1908 gave a lecture on tactical intelligence which compared the tasks of a field officer in a small war to that of their continental equivalents. In a European war, the British Army would need
Field officers would find it far harder to get topographical data in Germany during hostilities and would have to rely on information gained during peace. In the Russo-Japanese War the Japanese had the benefit of agents placed in Russia before the war, which contributed to the Japanese victory. Edmonds advocated intelligence operations in Germany before a war but his efforts were hampered by the usual lack of money and War Office inexperience, whose early efforts were embarrassing failures. Edmonds had most success in changing the Security Service, despite his reasons coming from a fantasy. The growing Anglo-German antagonism had led to a fashion for alarmist literature about German spies and invasion scares, several written by William Le Queux, one of Edmonds's friends. There were some German agents in Britain watching ports and dockyards but no centrally organised system of espionage; Germany was far more interested in France and Russia. Gustav Steinhauer of German naval intelligence ran "poorly paid and clumsy agents".