A bit of background: I have just published a new book, Australia's Hidden Heroes: Crooked Mick of the Speewah and Henry Cruciform, and you can read more about the book here.
Among bush folk, Crooked Mick is still remembered, but even science historians like my friends know little about him, but I have recently gained access to the Cruciform Papers, and shared his stories. This account covers one of his wartime exploits, one which required a gifted pianist, a consummate mathematician and a highly creative mind, all in one person
It reveals for the first time just how complex the secret war was that was waged between 1914 and 1918, when nothing was what it seemed—and the same applied in World War II, when the by-now septuagenarian Cruciform answered his country's call. Sadly, the needs of national security still preclude telling major parts of the story.
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Cruciform's first hoodwink project involved some further
developments on radio transmission, in particular, the use of his previously
developed transmitting piano to send coded messages which sounded like bad
piano playing. This was probably (but not definitely) intended as a hoax to
play against the German High Command.
The scheme succeeded, as the German Intelligence
authorities enthusiastically adopted the scheme and used it with great success.
The ‘music’ which transpired helped to sap the moral fibre and fighting will of
the average German soldier. Convinced that the Allies were using the same
system, the Germans spent a great deal of time trying to decode Cruciform’s
random transmissions.
Sir Edward Elgar’s knighthood was awarded for the work
he did on the Enigma Variations,
which totally defeated the German decoding efforts during the war (with
fiendish cunning, the variations contained no code at all, making them very
difficult to decode accurately). Some incidental evidence suggests that George
Gershwin was performing a similar role for the American forces, while still a
teenager.
Fearful that the same code systems would be used again
in World War II, the Germans developed the Enigma coding and decoding machine
in the 1930s, based on the action of a barrel organ, but playing at supersonic
speed.
Cruciform solved this problem for the Allies in World
War II, recording the German messages on 78 rpm records, and playing them back
on the 33 rpm turntable which he invented for the purpose, but this also will
be dealt with in more detail in the forthcoming second volume of Cruciform’s
scientific papers.
The project backfired to a certain extent when, during
the chaos of post-war Berlin, the memoirs of a German general were mistakenly
coded for piano transmission. This would have caused no problem, except that
his publisher was also a music publisher, and the result was erroneously
released to an unprepared and unsuspecting public, allegedly as the collected
works of Arnold Schönberg and Anton von Webern.
By coincidence, there really was an Arnold Schönberg, a little-known composer of rustic polkas
and lyric love ballads who happily took the credit and royalties for the
cacophony published over his name, although he then needed to compose his
simple and derivative tunes under the pseudonym Karl-Heinz
Stockaitken-Wassermann. This caused him some problems, as the end of his name
invariably fell off the royalty cheques, and he died in poverty, being buried
in the same paupers’ grave as W. A. Mozart.
Anton von Webern was wholly imaginary, and his alleged
existence remained an embarrassment to the whole musical world until his
‘death’ was staged at the end of World War II, with the agreement of all the
Allied and Axis powers, after Eisenhower had asked to meet either him or a
Lieutenant Kije of the Red Army.
The story that von Webern was shot dead by an American
sentry while slipping outside for a crafty cigarette was deemed so unbelievable
that the authorities thought, correctly, that people would believe it. When
Eisenhower was told that Kije had fallen victim to Beria’s thugs, he decided to
enter politics, and was elected President of the USA in 1952. All of this arose
only because of Cruciform’s work during World War I, but we are getting ahead
of our story.
By 1913, as has already been mentioned, Cruciform had
fitted a transmitter to an ‘Ampico’ reproducing piano. The ‘Ampico’ is able to
reproduce every nuance of the original player’s performance, causing Busoni’s
widow to burst into tears when she heard one of her husband’s piano rolls
played after his death. [1]
During World War II, each secret agent’s ‘hand’ on the
Morse key could be separately recognised. If a major deception was to be
achieved concerning the ‘piano coder’, then a foolproof method of reproducing
the agent’s ‘hand’ would have been invaluable. This alone can account for
Cruciform’s work in this area. [2]
Crooked Mick’s main role was to carry pianos into
positions where they could be easily captured by the Germans, but once a few of
the pianos had been transferred to German control, it became easier simply to
allow the rolls of paper to fall into German hands.
[1] Dennis Condon (pers.
comm.)
[2] The notion that the “radio-Ampico” was part of a complicated
diabolical assassination machine, designed to kill anybody sitting during the
German national anthem (i.e., the Kaiser) is, of course, too ludicrous for
words. Those aware of the literature on Cruciform will already know, of course,
that this is another De Choncqui theory.
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