text:
Gerald Nye

Gerald Prentice Nye (December 19, 1892 – July 17, 1971) was an American politician who represented North Dakota in the United States Senate from 1925 to 1945. Nye rose to national fame in the 1930s as chair of the Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, which studied the causes of United States' involvement in World War I and became known as the Nye Committee. Prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was a prominent opponent of United States involvement in World War II.

Early life
Gerald Nye (whose first name was pronounced with a hard G) was born in Hortonville, Wisconsin, the son of Phoebe Ella (née Prentice) and Irwin Raymond Nye. Both of his grandfathers had served in the Civil War: Freeman James Nye in the 43rd Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment and George Washington Prentice in the 3rd Wisconsin Volunteer Cavalry Regiment.

He was the first of four children. In his first year, he and his parents moved to Wittenberg, Wisconsin, where his father became owner and editor of a small newspaper. Three more children were born there: Clair Irwin, Donald Oscar, and Marjorie Ella. Nye's father was a staunch supporter of Progressive Robert M. La Follette, and Nye personally remembered his father's taking him to hear Senator La Follette speak and then meet the Senator afterwards. (Years later, Gerald Nye and Robert M. La Follette Jr. would serve in the U.S. Senate together.) His uncle, Wallace G. Nye, was Mayor of Minneapolis, Minnesota when Gerald was in his teens.

His mother, Ella, had been diagnosed with tuberculosis. Family history indicates that she may have been asthmatic. She made trips to the South for recuperation, but on October 19, 1906, she died. He was thirteen; his brothers, ten and eight; and his baby sister, six. He was comforted by the presence of his four grandparents at the funeral. Nye graduated from Wittenberg High School in 1911, at age 18, and moved back to his grandparents' town of Hortonville, Wisconsin.

Newspaper years
Gerald and his brother Clair had grown up helping around their father's newspaper business and learned the trade. Gerald took the editing end and Clair operated the presses. In 1911, after graduation, Nye became editor of The Hortonville Review. Three years later, he was the editor of the Creston Daily Plain Dealer in Iowa. In May 1916, he bought a weekly paper in Fryburg, North Dakota, The Fryburg Pioneer.

Political years
Nye was a supporter of the agrarian reform movement. His editorials lambasted big government and big business. He took the side of the struggling farmers. In 1924, Nye unsuccessfully sought election as a Democrat to the U.S. House. When U.S. Senator Edwin F. Ladd died on June 22, 1925, he and others gathered in the office of North Dakota Governor Arthur G. Sorlie. The appointment caused controversy as it was unclear that the North Dakota Legislature had given authority to the Governor to make the Senate appointment, a point made by conservative Republicans who were worried about weakening their caucus with the more progressive Nye.

Nye and his young family moved to Washington in December 1925, but because of the above controversy he was not seated in the Senate until January 1926. Nye's youth and lack of sophistication were the talk of the town. He had a bowl haircut that was ridiculed. Nevertheless, he became a very active, popular and outspoken Senator, and North Dakotans elected him to three full terms in 1926, 1932, and 1938, before losing to popular Democrat governor John Moses in 1944.

His isolationism drew the attention of Dr. Seuss who featured him in a political cartoon with Gerald L. K. Smith and Democratic Senator Robert Rice Reynolds.The cartoon portrays Smith riding a horse composed of Nye as the rear end of the horse and Reynolds as the front. Smith is holding a sword labeled defeatism. Additional, Seuss cartoons showed Nye riding a dying creature labeled as isolationism, entitled The End of the Trail. He served on the Foreign Relations Committee, the Appropriations Committee, the Defense Committee and the Public Lands Committee. As Chairman of Public Lands, he dealt with the Teapot Dome investigations and the formation of Grand Teton National Park. He was instrumental in passing legislation to protect public access to the sea coasts. He initially supported Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal, but their relationship soured before the decade closed: for instance, Nye was one of four Senators who voted against the Supreme Court nomination of William O. Douglas. He supported the political positions of Robert M. La Follette, and legislation for agricultural price supports.

Nye Committee
Between 1934 and 1936, Nye headed an investigation of the munitions industry. The Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry investigated profiteering in the munitions and banking industry and the possibility that greed was a significant factor in leading the United States into World War I. The Nye Committee as it was commonly known, drew national and international attention. Nye's appointment to the chairmanship of this committee came from Senator George Norris. According to peace activist Dorothy Detzer, Norris said, "Nye's young, he has inexhaustible energy and he has courage. Those are all important assets. He may be rash in his judgments at times, but it's the rashness of enthusiasm." Senator Norris proposed Nye as "... the only one out of the 96 whom he deemed to have the competence, independence and stature for the task." Although the committee found little firm evidence of active conspiracy among munitions manufacturers, their reports did little to dispel the notion. A leading member of the Nye Committee staff was Alger Hiss. According to the United States Senate website:

 The investigation came to an abrupt end early in 1936. The Senate cut off committee funding after Chairman Nye blundered into an attack on the late Democratic President Woodrow Wilson. Nye suggested that Wilson had withheld essential information from Congress as it considered a declaration of war. Democratic leaders, including Appropriations Committee Chairman Carter Glass of Virginia, unleashed a furious response against Nye for 'dirtdaubing the sepulcher of Woodrow Wilson.' Standing before cheering colleagues in a packed Senate Chamber, Glass slammed his fist onto his desk until blood dripped from his knuckles.

Antiwar movement
Nye was instrumental in the development and adoption of the Neutrality Acts that were passed between 1935 and 1937. To mobilize antiwar sentiments, he helped establish the America First Committee. According to Nye, American involvement in the "war for democracy" could be explained in terms of a conspiracy of arms manufacturers, politicians and international bankers. In common with many conservative isolationists, Nye subscribed to an antisemitic belief in a Jewish conspiracy pushing the US into war. At a 1941 Senate subcommittee hearing investigating "war-mongering" Hollywood films, Nye stated that those "responsible for the propaganda pictures are born abroad". He accused Hollywood of attempting to "drug the reason of the American people", and "rouse war fever"; he was particularly hostile to Warner Brothers.

"Getting into this war is not inevitable for America. It is fair to say that our staying out of the war is inevitable ... Getting into this return engagement of war to Europe is only as inevitable as we, the people of America, will permit it to be. Staying out of this war is inevitable if only the people will continue and multiply their forceful demands upon the Government at Washington to keep its promise to the people to keep our country out of this mess which seems destined to wreck every civilization that lends its hand to it. It would be well at the same time if the people would politely suggest that the same Government at Washington cease its almost daily issuance of engraved invitations to all the rest of the world for trouble and war ... Those millions who have conquered the defeatist complex have brought about magnificent changes, changes in spite of newspapers, fireside chats, cabinet speeches, and a virtual blitzkrieg of propaganda to drive us to war ... in spite of what we see and hear each day, the chance of staying out has been multiplied to a degree that causes many of us to feel that it is better than a 50-50 chance."

Despite Nye's antiwar positions, he supported the Republican faction in Spain and sought to repeal the embargo against selling arms to either side of the Spanish Civil War. He believed that the embargo aided the Nationalists. Nye criticized Marcelino Garcia Rubiera and Manuel Diaz Riestra for illegally shipping supplies to the Nationalists.

After the German sinking of SS Robin Moor by German submarine U-69 in May 1941, Nye said he would be "very much surprised if a German submarine had done it because it would be to their disadvantage" to torpedo the ship.

The day of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Nye attended an America First meeting in Pittsburgh. Before his speech a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette told him about the attack, but Nye was skeptical and did not mention the news to the audience. The reporter passed him a note during the speech stating that Japan had declared war; Nye read it but continued speaking. He only announced the attack at the end of his one-hour speech, stating that he had received "the worst news that I have encountered in the last 20 years". However, the next day Nye joined the rest of the Senate in voting for a unanimous declaration of war.

In April 1943 a confidential report by Isaiah Berlin about the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the British Foreign Office stated that Nye:
 * is a notorious fire-eating Anglophobe Isolationist. His principal claim to fame rests on his committee which investigated the American armament industry a few years before the war, and much popular anti-British feeling stems from publicity which was accorded to that committee. He is a member of the Farm Bloc, and possesses some influence in the Republican senatorial caucus. He has Fascist connexions, and works closely with Wheeler and Reynolds inside and outside the Senate. His bête noire is [Wendell] Willkie, whom he hates even more than the British Empire; indeed, he recently went to the length of defending the latter against the criticisms of the former, since he evidently regards any stick as good enough to beat Willkie with.

Post-Senate years in Washington
In November 1944, Nye was defeated in his re-election attempt by Governor John Moses, a Democrat. Nye chose to remain in the Washington area. He and his wife had purchased 3 acre of pasture land in Chevy Chase, part of a farm on a hill above Rock Creek Park. Their two sons had been born in 1943 and 1944. Nye organized and became president of Records Engineering, Inc., in Washington, D.C. The pre-computer age firm created, organized, and managed records of industrial and government clients. In 1960 he was appointed to the Federal Housing Administration as Assistant to the Commissioner and in charge of housing for the elderly. In 1963, he accepted an appointment to the professional staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Aging. 1966 saw his grand retirement party at the U.S. Capitol. It was attended by senators Robert F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy and hosted by Senator Everett Dirksen, who presented Nye with a typewriter and desk lamp and orders to begin his memoirs. Nye became a consultant to churches and private groups desiring government funds for the building of retirement housing.

According to the State Historical Society of North Dakota, U.S. Senator Gerald Nye helped Herman Stern, a North Dakota German Jewish emigrant businessman, and his wife Adeline, bring more than 125 Jewish refugees to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. Despite his claiming to have "Jewish friends", the Jewish Telegraph Agency accused Nye in September 1941 of making "anti-Jewish insinuations," "anti-Jewish accusations," repeated the New York Post's accusation that he made a "crudely anti-Semitic radio broadcast" and noted his Senate investigations were accused of having "anti-Semitic motives." He received criticism from Jews who worked at the New York Daily News, and former Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie would criticize both Nye and fellow pro-America First U.S. Senator Burton Wheeler's attacks on Jews involved with the American motion picture industry. It was noted that Nye had recently claimed that the American movie industry was run by "foreign-born Jews" and that the wrath of Americans trying to "find the scapegoat responsible for it all" might lead to "future trouble." While a large number of Jewish people were involved with Hollywood, Nye ignored the fact that the Hollywood film industry was not self-financed and had to rely on loans from American banks not run by Jews, such as "Chase National Bank, Atlas Corp., and the Rockefellers.”

Personal life
Nye was a Freemason and attended Grace Lutheran Church in Washington, D.C.

On August 16, 1916, he married Anna Margaret Johnson in Iowa where she lived with her maternal grandparents and had taken their name, Munch. In 1919, they moved to Cooperstown, North Dakota, where Gerald was the editor and publisher of the Sentinel Courier. Anna and Gerald had three children: Marjorie (born 1917), Robert (born 1921), and James (born 1923). His eldest three children grew up on Grosvenor Street in Washington, D.C., and attended high school there. Every summer, Gerald would take the children to Yellowstone National Park where Marjorie and a young Gerald Ford were teenage friends.

In March 1940, Nye divorced his first wife, and on December 14, 1940, he remarried, to an Iowa schoolteacher, A. Marguerite Johnson. They had three children, all born in Washington, D.C. – Gerald Jr. (born 1943), Richard (born 1944), and Marguerite (born 1950).

Death
A lifelong smoker, Nye had arterial disease; the arteries in his legs were surgically replaced with plastic arteries, then state-of-the-art. Close to the end of his life, a blood clot went to his lung. While Nye was recovering from that experience, but still weak, a doctor mistakenly prescribed a drug containing penicillin, to which Nye was known to be allergic. As a result, he died on July 17, 1971, at the age of 78.

title: Gerald Nye


text:
Room 40

Room 40, also known as 40 O.B. (old building; officially part of NID25), was the cryptanalysis section of the British Admiralty during the First World War.

The group, which was formed in October 1914, began when Rear-Admiral Henry Oliver, the Director of Naval Intelligence, gave intercepts from the German radio station at Nauen, near Berlin, to Director of Naval Education Alfred Ewing, who constructed ciphers as a hobby. Ewing recruited civilians such as William Montgomery, a translator of theological works from German, and Nigel de Grey, a publisher. It was estimated that during the war Room 40 decrypted around 15,000 intercepted German communications from wireless and telegraph traffic. Most notably the section intercepted and decoded the Zimmermann Telegram, a secret diplomatic communication issued from the German Foreign Office in January 1917 that proposed a military alliance between Germany and Mexico. Its decoding has been described as the most significant intelligence triumph for Britain during World War I because it played a significant role in drawing the then-neutral United States into the conflict.

Room 40 operations evolved from a captured German naval codebook, the Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine (SKM), and maps (containing coded squares) that Britain's Russian allies had passed on to the Admiralty. The Russians had seized this material from the German cruiser SMS Magdeburg after it ran aground off the Estonian coast on 26 August 1914. The Russians recovered three of the four copies that the warship had carried; they retained two and passed the other to the British. In October 1914 the British also obtained the Imperial German Navy's Handelsschiffsverkehrsbuch (HVB), a codebook used by German naval warships, merchantmen, naval zeppelins and U-boats: the Royal Australian Navy seized a copy from the Australian-German steamer Hobart on 11 October. On 30 November a British trawler recovered a safe from the sunken German destroyer S-119, in which was found the Verkehrsbuch (VB), the code used by the Germans to communicate with naval attachés, embassies and warships overseas. Several sources have claimed that in March 1915 a British detachment impounded the luggage of Wilhelm Wassmuss, a German agent in Persia and shipped it, unopened, to London, where the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Sir William Reginald (Blinker) Hall discovered that it contained the German Diplomatic Code Book, Code No. 13040. However, this story has since been debunked.

The section retained "Room 40" as its informal name even though it expanded during the war and moved into other offices. Alfred Ewing directed Room 40 until May 1917, when direct control passed to Hall, assisted by William Milbourne James. Although Room 40 decrypted Imperial German communications throughout the First World War, its function was compromised by the Admiralty's insistence that all decoded information would only be analysed by Naval specialists. This meant while Room 40 operators could decrypt the encoded messages they were not permitted to understand or interpret the information themselves.

Background
In 1911, a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence on cable communications concluded that in the event of war with Germany, German-owned under sea cables should be destroyed. In the early hours of 5 August 1914, the cable ship Alert located and cut Germany's five trans-Atlantic cables, which ran down the English Channel. Soon after, the six cables running between Britain and Germany were cut. As an immediate consequence, there was a significant increase in cable messages sent via cables belonging to other countries, and messages sent by wireless. These could now be intercepted, but codes and ciphers were naturally used to hide the meaning of the messages, and neither Britain nor Germany had any established organisations to decode and interpret the messages. At the start of the war, the navy had only one wireless station for intercepting messages, at Stockton. However, installations belonging to the Post Office and the Marconi Company, as well as private individuals who had access to radio equipment, began recording messages from Germany.

Intercepted messages began to arrive at the Admiralty intelligence division, but no one knew what to do with them. Rear-Admiral Henry Oliver had been appointed Director of the Intelligence division in 1913. In August, 1914, his department was fully occupied with the war and no-one had experience of code breaking. Instead he turned to a friend, Sir Alfred Ewing, the Director of Naval Education (DNE), who previously had been a professor of engineering with a knowledge of radio communications and who he knew had an interest in ciphers. It was not felt that education would be a priority during the expected few months duration of the war, so Ewing was asked to set up a group for decoding messages. Ewing initially turned to staff of the naval colleges Osborne and Dartmouth, who were currently available, due both to the school holidays and to naval students having been sent on active duty. Alastair Denniston had been teaching German but later became second in charge of Room 40, then becoming Chief of its successor after the First World War, the Government Code and Cypher School (located at Bletchley Park during the Second World War).

Others from the schools worked temporarily for Room 40 until the start of the new term at the end of September. These included Charles Godfrey, the Headmaster of Osborne (whose brother became head of naval Intelligence during the Second World War), two Naval instructors, Parish and Curtiss, and scientist and mathematician Professor Henderson from Greenwich Naval College. Volunteers had to work at code breaking alongside their normal duties, the whole organisation operating from Ewing's ordinary office where code breakers had to hide in his secretary's room whenever there were visitors concerning the ordinary duties of the DNE. Two other early recruits were R. D. Norton, who had worked for the Foreign Office, and Richard Herschell, who was a linguist, an expert on Persia and an Oxford graduate. None of the recruits knew anything about code breaking but were chosen for knowledge of German and certainty they could keep the matter secret.

Prelude
A similar organisation had begun in the Military Intelligence department of the War Office, which became known as MI1b, and Colonel Macdonagh proposed that the two organisations should work together. Little success was achieved except to organise a system for collecting and filing messages until the French obtained copies of German military ciphers. The two organisations operated in parallel, decoding messages concerning the Western Front. A friend of Ewing's, a barrister by the name of Russell Clarke, plus a friend of his, Colonel Hippisley, approached Ewing to explain that they had been intercepting German messages. Ewing arranged for them to operate from the coastguard station at Hunstanton in Norfolk, where they were joined by another volunteer, Leslie Lambert (later becoming known as a BBC broadcaster under the name A. J. Alan). Hunstanton and Stockton formed the core of the interception service (known as 'Y' service), together with the Post Office and Marconi stations, which grew rapidly to the point it could intercept almost all official German messages. At the end of September, the volunteer schoolmasters returned to other duties, except for Denniston; but without a means to decode German naval messages there was little specifically naval work to do.

Capture of the SKM codebook
The first breakthrough for Room 40 came with the capture of the Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marine (SKM) from the German light cruiser SMS Magdeburg. Two light cruisers, Magdeburg and SMS Augsburg, and a group of destroyers all commanded by Rear-Admiral Behring were carrying out a reconnaissance of the Gulf of Finland, when the ships became separated in fog. Magdeburg ran aground on the island of Odensholm off the coast of Russian-controlled Estonia. The ship could not be re-floated so the crew was to be taken on board by the destroyer SMS V26. The commander, Korvettenkapitän Habenicht prepared to blow up the ship after it had been evacuated but the fog began to clear and two Russian cruisers Pallada and Bogatyr approached and opened fire. The demolition charges were set off prematurely, causing injuries amongst the crew still on board and before secret papers could be transferred to the destroyer or disposed of. Habenicht and fifty-seven of his crew were captured by the Russians.

Exactly what happened to the papers is not clear. The ship carried more than one copy of the SKM codebook and copy number 151 was passed to the British. The German account is that most of the secret papers were thrown overboard, but the British copy was undamaged and was reportedly found in the charthouse. The current key was also needed in order to use the codebook. A gridded chart of the Baltic, the ship's log and war diaries were all also recovered. Copies numbered 145 and 974 of the SKM were retained by the Russians while HMS Theseus (1892) was dispatched from Scapa Flow to Alexandrovosk in order to collect the copy offered to the British. Although she arrived on 7 September, due to mix-ups she did not depart until 30 September and returned to Scapa with Captain Kredoff, Commander Smirnoff and the documents on 10 October. The books were formally handed over to the First Lord, Winston Churchill, on 13 October.

The SKM by itself was incomplete as a means of decoding messages, since they were normally enciphered as well as coded and those that could be understood were mostly weather reports. Fleet paymaster C. J. E. Rotter, a German expert from the naval intelligence division, was tasked with using the SKM codebook to interpret intercepted messages, most of which decoded as nonsense since initially it was not appreciated that they were also enciphered. An entry into solving the problem was found from a series of messages transmitted from the German Norddeich transmitter, which were all numbered sequentially and then re-enciphered. The cipher was broken, in fact broken twice as it was changed a few days after it was first solved, and a general procedure for interpreting the messages determined. Enciphering was by a simple table, substituting one letter with another throughout all the messages. Rotter started work in mid October but was kept apart from the other code breakers until November, after he had broken the cipher.

The intercepted messages were found to be intelligence reports on the whereabouts of allied ships. This was interesting but not vital. Russel Clarke now observed that similar coded messages were being transmitted on short-wave, but were not being intercepted because of shortages of receiving equipment, in particular the aerial. Hunstanton was directed to stop listening to the military signals it had been intercepting and instead monitor short-wave for a test period of one weekend. The result was information about the movements of the High Seas Fleet and valuable naval intelligence. Hunstanton was permanently switched to the naval signals and as a result stopped receiving messages valuable to the military. Navy men who had been helping the military were withdrawn to work on the naval messages, without explanation, because the new code was kept entirely secret. The result was a bad feeling between the naval and military interception services and a cessation of cooperation between them, which continued into 1917.

The SKM (sometimes abbreviated SB in German documents) was the code normally used during important actions by the German fleet. It was derived from the ordinary fleet signal books used by both British and German navies, which had thousands of predetermined instructions which could be represented by simple combinations of signal flags or lamp flashes for transmission between ships. The SKM had 34,300 instructions, each represented by a different group of three letters. A number of these reflected old-fashioned naval operations, and did not mention modern inventions such as aircraft. The signals used four symbols not present in ordinary Morse code (given the names alpha, beta, gamma and rho), which caused some confusion until all those involved in interception learnt to recognise them and use a standardised way to write them. Ships were identified by a three-letter group beginning with a beta symbol. Messages not covered by the predetermined list could be spelled out using a substitution table for individual letters.

The sheer size of the book was one reason it could not easily be changed, and the code continued in use until summer 1916. Even then, ships at first refused to use the new codebook because the replacement was too complicated, so the Flottenfunkspruchbuch (FFB) did not fully replace the SKB until May 1917. Doubts about the security of the SKB were initially raised by Behring, who reported that it was not definitely known whether Magdeburg's code books had been destroyed or not, and it was suggested at the court martial enquiry into the loss that books might anyway have been recovered by Russians from the clear shallow waters where the ship had grounded. Prince Heinrich of Prussia, commander in chief of Baltic operations, wrote to the C-in-C of the High Seas Fleet, that in his view it was a certainty that secret charts had fallen into the hands of the Russians, and a probability that the codebook and key had also. The German navy relied upon the re-enciphering process to ensure security, but the key used for this was not changed until 20 October and then not changed again for another three months. The actual substitution table used for enciphering was produced by a mechanical device with slides and compartments for the letters. Orders to change the key were sent out by wireless, and frequently confusion during the changeover period led to messages being sent out using the new cipher and then being repeated with the old. Key changes continued to occur infrequently, only 6 times during 1915 from March to the end of the year, but then more frequently from 1916.

There was no immediate capture of the FFB codebook to help the Admiralty understand it, but instead a careful study was made of new and old messages, particularly from the Baltic, which allowed a new book to be reconstructed. Now that the system was understood, Room 40 reckoned to crack a new key within three to four days, and to have reproduced the majority of a new codebook within two months. A German intelligence report on the matter was prepared in 1934 by Korvettenkapitän Kleikamp which concluded that the loss of Magdeburg's codebook had been disastrous, not least because no steps were taken after the loss to introduce new secure codes.

Capture of the HVB codebook
The second important code used by the German navy was captured at the very start of the war in Australia, although it did not reach the Admiralty until the end of October. The German-Australian steamer Hobart was seized off Port Phillip Heads near Melbourne on 11 August 1914. Hobart had not received news that war had broken out, and Captain J. T. Richardson and party claimed to be a quarantine inspection team. Hobart's crew were allowed to go about the ship but the captain was closely observed, until in the middle of the night he attempted to dispose of hidden papers. The Handelsverkehrsbuch (HVB) codebook which was captured contained the code used by the German navy to communicate with its merchant ships and also within the High Seas Fleet. News of the capture was not passed to London until 9 September. A copy of the book was made and sent by the fastest available steamer, arriving at the end of October.

The HVB was originally issued in 1913 to all warships with wireless, to naval commands and coastal stations. It was also given to the head offices of eighteen German steamship companies to issue to their own ships with wireless. The code used 450,000 possible four-letter groups which allowed alternative representations of the same meaning, plus an alternate ten-letter grouping for use in cables. Re-ciphering was again used but for general purposes was more straightforward, although changed more frequently. The code was used particularly by light forces such as patrol boats, and for routine matters such as leaving and entering harbour. The code was used by U-boats, but with a more complex key. However, the complications of their being at sea for long periods meant that codes changed while they were away and often messages had to be repeated using the old key, giving immediate information about the new one. German intelligence were aware in November 1914 that the HVB code had fallen into enemy hands, as evidenced by wireless messages sent out warning that the code was compromised, but it was not replaced until 1916.

The HVB was replaced in 1916 by the Allgemeinefunkspruchbuch (AFB) together with a new method of keying. The British obtained a good understanding of the new keying from test signals, before it was introduced for real messages. The new code was issued to even more organisations than the previous one, including those in Turkey, Bulgaria and Russia. It had more groups than its predecessor but now of only two letters. The first copy to be captured came from a shot-down Zeppelin but others were recovered from sunk U-boats.

Capture of the VB codebook
A third codebook was recovered following the sinking of German destroyer SMS S119 in the Battle off Texel. In the middle of October 1914, the Battle of the Yser was fought for control of the coastal towns of Dixmude and Dunkirk. The British navy took part by bombarding German positions from the sea and German destroyers were ordered to attack the British ships. On 17 October Captain Cecil Fox commanding the light cruiser Undaunted together with four destroyers, HMS Lance (1914), Lennox, Legion and Loyal, was ordered to intercept an anticipated German attack and met four German torpedo boats (S115, S117, S118, and S119) heading south from Texel with instructions to lay mines. The German ships were outclassed and all were sunk after a brief battle, whereupon the commander of S119 threw overboard all secret papers in a lead-lined chest. The matter was dismissed by both sides, believing the papers had been destroyed along with the ships. However, on 30 November a British trawler dragged up the chest which was passed to Room 40 (Hall later claimed the vessel had been searching deliberately). It contained a copy of the Verkehrsbuch (VB) codebook, normally used by flag officers of the German Navy. Thereafter the event was referred to by Room 40 as "the miraculous draft of fishes".

The code consisted of 100,000 groups of 5-digit numbers, each with a particular meaning. It had been intended for use in cables sent overseas to warships and naval attachés, embassies and consulates. It was used by senior naval officers with an alternative Lambda key, none of which failed to explain its presence on a small destroyer at the start of the war. Its greatest importance during the war was that it allowed access to communications between naval attachés in Berlin, Madrid, Washington, Buenos Aires, Peking, and Constantinople.

In 1917 naval officers switched to a new code with a new key Nordo for which only 70 messages were intercepted, but the code was also broken. For other purposes VB continued in use throughout the war. Re-ciphering of the code was accomplished using a key made up of a codeword transmitted as part of the message and its date written in German. These were written down in order and then the letters in this key were each numbered according to their order of appearance in the alphabet. This now produced a set of numbered columns in an apparently random order. The coded message would be written out below these boxes starting top left and continuing down the page once a row was filled. The final message was produced by taking the column numbered '1' and reading off its contents downward, then adding on the second column's digits, and so on. In 1918 the key was changed by using the keywords in a different order. This new cipher was broken within a few days by Professor Walter Horace Bruford, who had started working for Room 40 in 1917 and specialised in VB messages. Two messages were received of identical length, one in the new system and one in the old, allowing the changes to be compared.

Room 40
In early November 1914 Captain William Hall, son of the first head of Naval Intelligence, was appointed as the new DID to replace Oliver, who had first been transferred to Naval Secretary to the First Lord and then Chief of the Admiralty War Staff. Hall had formerly been captain of the battlecruiser Queen Mary but had been forced to give up sea duties due to ill health. Hall was to prove an extremely successful DID, despite the accidental nature of his appointment.

Once the new organisation began to develop and show results it became necessary to place it on a more formal basis than squatting in Ewing's office. On 6 November 1914 the organisation moved to Room 40 in the Admiralty Old Building, which was by default to give it its name. Room 40 has since been renumbered, but still exists in the original Admiralty Building off Whitehall, London, on the first floor, with windows looking inwards to a courtyard wholly enclosed by Admiralty buildings. Previous occupants of the room had complained that no one was ever able to find it, but it was on the same corridor as the Admiralty boardroom and the office of the First Sea Lord, Sir John Fisher, who was one of the few people allowed to know of its existence. Adjacent was the First Lord's residence (then Winston Churchill), who was another of those people. Others permitted to know of the existence of a signals interception unit were the Second Sea Lord, the Secretary of the Admiralty, the Chief of Staff (Oliver), the Director of Operations Division (DOD) and the assistant director, the Director of Intelligence Division (DID, Captain William Hall) and three duty captains. Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, a retired First Sea Lord, had returned to the admiralty to work with the staff and was also included in the secret. The Prime Minister may also have been informed.

All messages received and decoded were to be kept completely secret, with copies only being passed to the Chief of Staff and Director of Intelligence. It was decided that someone from the intelligence department needed to be appointed to review all the messages and interpret them from the perspective of other information. Rotter was initially suggested for the job, but it was felt preferable to retain him in code breaking and Commander Herbert Hope was chosen, who had previously been working on plotting the movements of enemy ships. Hope was initially placed in a small office in the west wing of the Admiralty in the intelligence section, and waited patiently for the few messages which were approved for him to see. Hope reports that he attempted to make sense of what he was given and make useful observations about them, but without access to the wider information being received his early remarks were generally unhelpful. He reported to Hall that he needed more information, but Hall was unable to help. On 16 November, after a chance meeting with Fisher where he explained his difficulties, Hope was granted full access to the information together with instructions to make twice daily reports to the First Sea Lord. Hope knew nothing of cryptanalysis or German, but working with the code breakers and translators he brought detailed knowledge of naval procedures to the process, enabling better translations and then interpretations of received messages. In the interests of secrecy the intention to give a separate copy of messages to the DID was dispensed with so that only the Chief of Staff received one, and he was to show it to the First Sea Lord and Arthur Wilson.

As the number of intercepted messages increased, it became part of Hope's duties to decide which were unimportant and should just be logged, and which should be passed on outside Room 40. The German fleet was in the habit each day of reporting by wireless the position of each ship, and giving regular position reports when at sea. It was possible to build up a precise picture of the normal operation of the High Seas Fleet, indeed to infer from the routes they chose where defensive minefields had been placed and where it was safe for ships to operate. Whenever a change to the normal pattern was seen, it signalled that some operation was about to take place and a warning could be given. Detailed information about submarine movements was available. Most of this information, however, was retained wholly within Room 40 although a few senior members of the Admiralty were kept informed, as a huge priority was placed by the Staff upon keeping secret the British ability to read German transmissions.

Jellicoe, commanding the Grand Fleet, on three occasions requested from the Admiralty that he should have copies of the codebook which his cruiser had brought back to Britain, so that he could make use of it intercepting German signals. Although he was aware that interception was taking place, little of the information ever got back to him, or it did so very slowly. No messages based upon Room 40 information were sent out except those approved by Oliver personally (except for a few authorised by the First Lord or First Sea Lord). Although it might have been impractical and unwise for code breaking to have taken place on board ship, members of Room 40 were of the view that full use was not being made of the information they had collected, because of the extreme secrecy and being forbidden to exchange information with the other intelligence departments or those planning operations.

Signals interception and direction finding
The British and German interception services began to experiment with direction-finding radio equipment in the start of 1915. Captain Round, working for Marconi, had been carrying out experiments for the army in France and Hall instructed him to build a direction-finding system for the navy. At first this was sited at Chelmsford but the location proved a mistake and the equipment was moved to Lowestoft. Other stations were built at Lerwick, Aberdeen, York, Flamborough Head and Birchington and by May 1915 the Admiralty was able to track German submarines crossing the North Sea. Some of these stations also acted as 'Y' stations to collect German messages, but a new section was created within Room 40 to plot the positions of ships from the directional reports. A separate set of five stations was created in Ireland under the command of the Vice Admiral at Queenstown for plotting ships in the seas to the west of Britain and further stations both within Britain and overseas were operated by the Admiral commanding reserves.

The German navy knew of British direction-finding radio and in part this acted as a cover, when information about German ship positions was released for operational use. The two sources of information, from directional fixes and from German reports of their positions, complemented each other. Room 40 was able to observe, using intercepted wireless traffic from Zeppelins which were given position fixes by German directional stations to help their navigation, that the accuracy of British systems was better than their German counterparts. This was explainable by the wider baseline used in British equipment.

Room 40 had very accurate information on the positions of German ships but the Admiralty's priority remained to keep the existence of this knowledge secret. Hope was shown the regular reports created by the Intelligence Division about German ship whereabouts so that he might correct them. This practice was shortly discontinued, for fear of giving away their knowledge. From June 1915, the regular intelligence reports of ship positions were no longer passed to all flag officers, only to Jellicoe, who was the only person to receive accurate charts of German minefields prepared from Room 40 information. Some information was passed to Beatty (commanding the battlecruisers), Tyrwhitt (Harwich destroyers) and Keyes (submarines) but Jellicoe was unhappy with the arrangement. He requested that Beatty should be issued with the Cypher B (reserved for secret messages between the Admiralty and him) to communicate more freely and complained that he was not getting sufficient information.

All British ships were under instructions to use radio as sparingly as possible and to use the lowest practical transmission power. Room 40 had benefited greatly from the free chatter between German ships, which gave them many routine messages to compare and analyse, and from the German habit of transmitting at full power, making the messages easier to receive. Messages to Scapa were never to be sent by wireless, and when the fleet was at sea, messages might be sent using lower power and relay ships (including private vessels), to make German interception more difficult. No attempts were made by the German fleet to restrict its use of wireless until 1917 and then only in response to perceived British use of direction finding, not because it believed messages were being decoded.

Zimmermann Telegram
Room 40 played an important role in several naval engagements during the war, notably in detecting major German sorties into the North Sea that led to the Battle of Dogger Bank in 1915 and the Battle of Jutland in 1916, as the British fleet was sent out to intercept them. Its most notable contribution was in decrypting the Zimmermann Telegram, a telegram from the German Foreign Office sent in January 1917 via Washington to its ambassador Heinrich von Eckardt in Mexico. It has been called the most significant intelligence triumph for Britain during World War I, and one of the earliest occasions on which a piece of signals intelligence influenced world events.

In the telegram's plaintext, Nigel de Grey and William Montgomery learned of German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann's offer to Mexico of United States' territories of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas as an enticement to join the war as a German ally. The telegram was passed to the U.S. by Captain Hall, and a scheme was devised (involving a still unknown agent in Mexico and a burglary) to conceal how its plaintext had become available and also how the U.S. had gained possession of a copy. The telegram was made public by the United States, which declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917, entering the war on the Allied side.

Staffers
Other staff of Room 40 included Frank Adcock, Emily Anderson, John Beazley, Francis Birch, Walter Horace Bruford, William 'Nobby' Clarke, Alastair Denniston, Frank Cyril Tiarks and Dilly Knox.

Merger with Military Intelligence (MI)
In 1919, Room 40 was deactivated and its function merged with the British Army's intelligence unit MI1b to form the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS). This unit was housed at Bletchley Park during the Second World War and subsequently renamed Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and relocated to Cheltenham.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Room 40


text: File:PSI album cover.jpg

title: File:PSI album cover.jpg


text:
Lake Merritt

Lake Merritt is a large tidal lagoon in the center of Oakland, California, just east of Downtown. It is named after Samuel Merritt, Oakland's mayor in 1867–1869, who had the lagoon dammed turning the tidal lagoon into a salt water lake. It is surrounded by parkland and city neighborhoods. It is historically significant as the United States' first official wildlife refuge, designated in 1870, and has been listed as a National Historic Landmark since 1963.

The lake features grassy shores, several artificial islands intended as bird refuges, and an interpretive center called the Rotary Nature Center at Lakeside Park. There is a fairy-tale themed amusement park called Children's Fairyland. The Gardens at Lake Merritt is also inside Lakeside Park. A popular walking and jogging path runs along the lake's perimeter. The circumference of the lake is 3.4 mi, and its area is 155 acre.

History
The lake was originally an arm of San Francisco Bay, formed where several creeks empty into the bay. It was surrounded by 1000 acre of wetlands when the Ohlone people fished, hunted, and gathered food along its shores. By 1810, the remaining Native Americans were removed to Mission San José, and the estuary and 44800 acre of surrounding land was deeded to Sergeant Luis Maria Peralta to become Rancho San Antonio. After gold was discovered in 1848 in present-day Coloma 125 mi to the northeast, Anglo squatters led by lawyer Horace Carpentier took control of the East Bay area which was to become downtown Oakland, including the estuary known as "San Antonio Slough". In 1856, Peralta fought and won a United States Supreme Court case against the squatters, but further court cases between his sons and daughters would greatly diminish their holdings. The Peralta brothers had to sell much of the land to Carpentier to pay legal fees and new property taxes. Oakland was incorporated in 1852 with Carpentier as its first mayor, and the estuary became the city's sewer. Lake Merritt naturally had tidal flows via a broad 600-foot outlet, but this has been steadily reduced with development of the region after 1869. Currently the tidal flows are limited in size and managed for flood control. For years the lake acted as a waste collector. It was regarded as ideal for sewage because of its chemical contents, which have high acidities that cause it to decompose human feces at very high rates. Sixty miles of brick and wood channeling sent the broken-down sewage to the bottom of the lake to then be eaten by bottom feeders. The stench at the lake during the decomposition of the sewage was a problem for Oaklanders on the west shore and residents of Clinton and San Antonio villages on the east.

Samuel Merritt, Oakland's mayor (1867–1869), who owned property at the shore's edge, was keen to get the body of water cleaned up so that it could become a source of civic pride. In 1868, he proposed and funded a dam between the estuary and the bay by which the flow of water could be controlled, allowing the water level inland to rise higher and become less saline, turning the tidal lagoon into a lake. Sewage was to be redirected elsewhere by two new city projects, though these weren't completed until 1875. The resulting body of water was called variously "Lake Peralta", "Merritt's Lake" and later Lake Merritt.

The lake at that time still had thick wetlands fringing the shores and it continued to attract large numbers of migratory birds. In order to protect the birds from duck hunters and stop the noise and danger of gunfire so close to the city, Merritt proposed to turn the lake into a wildlife refuge in 1869. The state legislature voted Lake Merritt Wildlife Refuge into law in 1870, making it the first such refuge in North America. No hunting of any sort was to be allowed and the only fishing was to be by hook and line.

The ornate Camron-Stanford House was built in 1876 near the lake's western shore. Tax records suggest that Samuel Merritt built the Italianate Victorian as part of his plan to promote and develop downtown Oakland and the new lake. In 1877, the house's title was transferred to Mrs. Alice Camron, a purchase she was able to make due to an inheritance from her father, California pioneer John Marsh. She, her husband Will, and their two daughters were the first residents of the home. Further fine homes were built on the lakeshore by others following Merritt's lead, though none but Camron-Stanford remain today. Beginning in 1910, the house served as the Oakland Public Museum. In 1967, the Oakland Museum moved to other quarters, and the Camron-Stanford House is now a separate museum.

Protection for the wetlands was nonexistent and residences kept being built on reclaimed land around the shore of the lake. Cleanliness continued to be a problem because of incomplete sewage projects, and the lake kept silting up since the natural tidal flow had been interrupted by Merritt's dam. Dredging of the lake began in 1891, with the removed silt being piled along the eastern shore to make a foundation for a road which became Lakeshore Avenue.

From 1893 to 1915, Lake Merritt saw major changes. Inspired by the new City Beautiful movement, which got its start at the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago World's Fair), the lake became a city-owned park. In 1913, an elaborate Mission Revival pergola was constructed at the northeastern tip of the lake. Adam's Point was cleared of houses, planted with lawns and imported trees, and became Lakeside Park. Eastshore Park was created where East 18th Street brought Trestle Glen's watershed to the lake. Oakland Civic Auditorium was built at the south edge of the lake in 1914.

1923 saw Cleveland Cascade spring into life, conceived and assisted by noted landscape architect, Howard Gilkey. This was a three-tiered water feature incorporating multiple waterfalls tumbling sequentially into twenty large collection basins and a pool at the bottom, flanked by twin stairs descending from Merritt Avenue in Cleveland Heights to Lakeshore Avenue. Colored lights in rainbow sequence lit the waterfall at night.

In 1925, the "Necklace of Lights" was turned on.

1929 is the year the luxurious Bellevue-Staten apartments were completed at 492 Staten Avenue in Adam's Point near Lakeside Park. The 15-story blend of Art Deco and Spanish Colonial styles is one of the most prominent sights viewable from nearly every point of Lake Merritt.

Lake Merritt's natural wetlands are long gone—converted to parks, pathways and roads. Some of the wetland vegetation has been restored to five "Bird Islands" constructed of dredged silt between 1925 and 1956, sheltering hundreds of nesting and roosting water fowl. The islands have a fresh water irrigation system to bring drinking water to the birds. A boom and a rope/buoy barrier protects the islands from recreational boaters.

Under the name Lake Merritt Wild Duck Refuge, the site became a National Historic Landmark on May 23, 1963.

Children's Fairyland is a 10-acre park designed by  William Russell Everett and built in 1950 in Lakeside Park. When Walt Disney was planning Disneyland, he visited Children's Fairyland for ideas.

Starting in 1961, Oakland's "Downtown Property Owner's Association" and the "Central Business District Association" repeatedly advocated for extending Alice Street directly through Snow Park, which was then the grounds of the Snow Museum, past the Schilling Gardens and the Bechtel Building at 244 Lakeside Drive, and down to the lake's edge on 20th Street. They purportedly sought to alleviate motorist traffic congestion that might be caused by the closure of Broadway during construction of the nearby BART line. The plan met stiff opposition from Oakland's City Council in October 1964, which, as reported by the Staff of the Oakland Tribune at the time, told downtown property interests to "quit wasting its time."

While celebrations at Lake Merritt have been largely peaceful and lively, several incidents of violence have marred the park during events. A shooting at a 2021 Father's Day event involving two San Francisco factions left two dead and five wounded. An event on Juneteenth 2024 in June left 15 wounded.

Necklace of lights

A "necklace of lights" encircles Lake Merritt. Featuring 126 lampposts and 3,400 "pearly bulbs", the necklace was first lit in 1925. In 1941, the lights were removed to comply with World War II blackout conditions. After a decade-long campaign by the Lake Merritt Breakfast Club, the lights were again illuminated in 1987.

During Oakland's annual gay pride celebration, the city replaces the white bulbs with multicolored bulbs.

Birds
The lake features a healthy year-round population of birds. It sees seasonal fluctuations in the types of birds that call the lake home.

Year round
Year round, the lake is home to many Canada geese and moderate numbers of black-crowned night heron, great egret, snowy egret, cormorant, American coot, and western gull. There are also small mallard duck and pelican (both American and brown) populations.

Rainy season
From November through March, the lake plays host to a very large population of greater scaup and lesser scaup, which spend most of their time floating on the water. The tufted duck, a rare bird from Eurasia, has also been recorded annually. Smaller numbers of canvasback, redhead, common and Barrow's goldeneye, bufflehead, and other migratory diving ducks are also present during the cold season.

Dry season
From June until the end of September, the lake's Canada goose population increases significantly; Canada geese become nearly ubiquitous around the perimeter of the lake. In late summer and early fall, a moderate pelican population also arrives, and Caspian terns can be seen on the lake.

Other
Fish in Lake Merritt include bat rays and gobies. Chinook salmon have also been recorded. Molluscs include sea hares, bay mussels, and oysters. Crustaceans include barnacles and Transorchestia enigmatica, which is a talitridae found only in Lake Merritt.

Plants
Although native trees such as coast live oak and California buckeye are present, most of the park bordering Lake Merritt has been landscaped with plants from around the world. As early as 1910, City Park Commissioners recognized Oakland as a city of immigrants, and felt that "visitors to the park would want to see plants from their native lands". This theme of diversity in the park landscape has continued with landscape renovations. The lake's iconic plant is the New Zealand tea tree (Leptospermum sp.), which grows with picturesque gnarled branches along the water's edge.

One zone of native plants has been established at the restored tidal marsh, located on the channel just south of the Lake Merritt Blvd. bridge. Pickleweed has been planted within the tidal zone, and other native plants such as saltgrass, marsh gumplant (Grindelia stricta var. angustifolia), marsh baccharis (Baccharis glutinosa), Jaumea, and Frankenia have been propagated from local genetic stock and planted on the slope above the marsh. A second native marsh plant zone is planned for the shoreline east of the Sailboat House.

Aquatic vegetation commonly seen within the lake itself include widgeon grass (Ruppia maritima), filamentous green algae (Enteromorpha and Cladophora sp.), sea lettuce (Ulva sp.), dead man's fingers (Codium fragile), and occasionally wireweed (Sargassum muticum). Growth of these aquatic plants reaches a peak in mid-June, and the subsequent die-off and decomposition can result in bad odors, unsightly appearance, and depletion of oxygen in the water column. To prevent this nuisance condition, the City uses a floating mechanical harvester to remove excess growth during the summer months.

A red algal bloom (Heterosigma akashiwo) was detected in Lake Merritt in March 2024, but dissipated within about 2 weeks.

The most common aquatic plants in Lake Merritt are tiny, free-floating phytoplankton. Visitors often do not appreciate the sometimes-murky water in the lake, but the cloudiness represents a water column rich in microscopic life, providing a basis for a diverse and thriving web of animal life at the lake, both marine and avian.

Connecting waterways
Creeks that flow to Lake Merritt include Glen Echo Creek, Pleasant Valley Creek, Wildwood Creek, and Indian Gulch Creek.

Cleanup and restoration
Because storm drains in downtown Oakland and surrounding areas drain directly into the lake, trash and nutrient pollution have become the largest problems affecting Lake Merritt. Increased levels of chemicals like nitrogen and phosphorus cause algae blooms, which deplete the water of oxygen. Aeration fountains, funded by donations, have been installed to help with this problem. "Water quality in an area of about one acre around each unit is improved by the transfer of oxygen from the air, and by mixing the top and bottom layers of the Lake." A proposed aeration system was never approved by the City of Oakland. Trash removal is coordinated by the non-profit Lake Merritt Institute under contract with the City of Oakland. The Institute sponsors clean-ups five days a week during the school year, and four days a week during the summer. Individuals can also work alone using the four "U-Clean-It" boxes maintained by the Institute. One way volunteers clean the lake is by using long-handled nets. About 1,000 to 6,000 pounds of trash are removed monthly. Among the many individual and group volunteers, of special note are those who have been cleaning the trash since 1997: the regular Saturday and Tuesday volunteers, the Peralta Service Corporation (part of the Unity Council), St. Paul's Episcopal School 6th Grade, and HandsOn Bay Area.

Pollution
In addition to nutrient pollution, more toxic agents have drained into the lake from time to time. In 1998, about 20 gallons of diesel fuel leaked into the lake following a "freakish accident" in the basement of the Caltrans building in the 100 block of Grand Avenue.

On June 27, 2011, the Oakland Fire Department and California Department of Fish and Game responded to a diesel fuel spill that covered five acres of the northwest side of the lake. "Because the storm drain connects to other storm drains in the city, and due to the heavy rain, Oakland Fire Battalion Chief Darin White said firefighters were having difficulty finding where the spill originated."

Measure DD improvements

Measure DD, a $198 million Oakland City park bond measure, passed with 80% voter approval in 2002. The measure improved the lake area by adding park space and altering the surrounding infrastructure. One example is on Lake Merritt's south shore, where the previous configuration of 12th Street (six lanes in each direction) was considered a deterrent to pedestrian and bicycle access to landmarks such as Laney College, the Oakland Museum of California, and Lake Merritt Channel. Part of the Measure DD project renovated 12th Street, reducing traffic to three lanes in each direction, adding park space, and adding eleven more necklaces of lights to fill a gap.

The renovation of Lake Merritt, paid for with money from Measure DD, was briefly stalled by an environmental review lawsuit intended to prevent cutting trees around the lake, which was filed in 2006 by a group of concerned residents, "Friends of the Lake". On October 17, 2007, an Alameda County Superior Court judge dismissed a lawsuit, making way for the renovation to proceed.

One of the first Measure DD projects, completed in 2007, was the renovation and rededication of the 1913 pergola at the north end of the lake. Several sections of Measure DD work were completed in 2008, including the renovation of the 1909 Municipal Boat House into Lake Chalet restaurant, the reconstruction of El Embarcadero between Grand Avenue and Lakeshore Avenue, the narrowing of Lakeside Drive from just north of East 14th Street to 19th Street from four lanes to two (with a bicycle lane added), and new landscaping along the west side of the lake from 14th to 19th street and the east side from East 18th Street to El Embarcadero.

The largest part of the Measure DD work was the 12th Street Reconstruction Project on the south side of the lake. Replacement of the Frickstad Viaduct, or "12th Street Dam" (built 1950), and renovation of the roadways and tunnels between the Kaiser Convention Center and the southern end of Lake Merritt began in May 2010 and were completed in June 2013. The groundbreaking ceremony for the 12th Street Project took place on May 6, 2010 near the Frickstad Viaduct.

Another major milestone in the restoration of Lake Merritt was achieved in February 2013, when Mayor Jean Quan and other officials inaugurated a 750 ft-long channel, including a paved trail, a pedestrian bridge, and restored tidal marsh, a major step towards reconnecting Lake Merritt with San Francisco Bay. This stage was expected to double the water volume circulating in and out of the lake. The mayor announced plans for "a big citywide party" upon completion. In December 2016, a culvert under 10th Street was removed to increase tidal movement.

title: Lake Merritt


text:
List of Indian states and union territories by GDP

These are lists of Indian states and union territories by their nominal gross state domestic product (GSDP). GSDP is the sum of all value added by industries within each state or union territory and serves as a counterpart to the national gross domestic product (GDP).

In India, the Government accounts for around 21% of the GDP, agriculture accounts for 21%, the corporate sector accounts for 12% and the balance 48% of the GDP is sourced from small proprietorship and partnership companies, unorganized sector and households.

The following list gives the latest available gross state domestic product (GSDP) figures for all Indian States and Union Territories at current prices in millions or trillions of Indian rupees. No data is available for the union territories of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, Ladakh and Lakshadweep.

Nominal GSDP from 2011–12 to 2022–23
The following table shows the annual growth in nominal GSDP for the financial years 2011–12 to 2022–23, from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. Revised data for the past years differ from the tables below. Figures are in millions of Indian rupees at current prices. No data was available for the union territories of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu and Lakshadweep.

Nominal GDDP from 2001–02 to 2010–11
The following table shows the annual growth in nominal GSDP for the financial years 2001–02 to 2010–11, released by the Planning Commission of India, in the Indian rupees.

Revised data for the past years differ from the tables below. Figures are in millions of Indian rupees at current prices. No data was available for the union territories of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu and Lakshadweep.

Nominal GSDP growth rate
This table shows annual growth rate in each state's or union territory's nominal GSDP. No data was available for the union territories of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu and Lakshadweep.


text:
EXW

EXW can stand for:
 * Elite Xtreme Wrestling, now known as Future Stars of Wrestling. One of the tag team champions was Val Venus.
 * Enlisted Expeditionary Warfare Specialist, a qualification badge of the U.S. Navy
 * Explosion welding, a solid state process where welding is accomplished by accelerating one of the components at extremely high velocity through the use of chemical explosives
 * Ex Works, Incoterm term where the seller makes the goods available at its premises

title: EXW


text:
Lana, South Tyrol

Lana is a comune (municipality) and a village in South Tyrol in northern Italy. It is situated in the Etschtal (Etsch Valley) between Bolzano and Merano and at the entrance to the Ultental. The population rose to 12,566 in 2020.

It is one of the three municipalities of South Tyrol whose name remained unchanged by the early 20th-century renaming programme which aimed at replacing mostly German place names with Italianised versions, the other two being Gais and Plaus.

Coat-of-arms
The emblem displays argent, a Teutonic cross sable, and a lion rampant gules over all. The lion is taken from the arms of the Counts of Brandis who played a role in the development of the village. The emblem was adopted in 1967.

Linguistic distribution
According to the 2011 census, 91.84% of Lana's population speak German, 7.90% Italian, and 0.26% Ladin as first language.

Notable people

 * Father Joseph Ohrwalder (1856 in Lana - 1913 in Sudan) a Roman Catholic priest, who was taken captive by the Mahdists in Sudan
 * Robert Schälzky (1882 – 1948) was the 61st Grand Master of the Teutonic Order 1936 to 1948; he died in Lana
 * Hans Andersag (1902–1955) a scientist who discovered chloroquine
 * Karl Zuegg (1914 – 2005) an Italian entrepreneur, MD of the Lana fruit juice and jam company Zuegg, between 1940 and 1986
 * Armin Zöggeler (born 1974) a retired Italian luger and double Olympic champion, he lives in Lana

Tourism
Lana is a village which is divided into three parts: Oberlana, Mitterlana and Niederlana. It is a popular tourist spot offering sports such as tennis, football, golf, minigolf and ice-skating among others. During summer, locals and tourists alike enjoy swimming, hiking and cycling because there are a lot of good cycle paths.

title: Lana, South Tyrol


text:
FCA

FCA may refer to:

Arts

 * Federation of Canadian Artists
 * Foundation for Contemporary Art, in Ghana
 * Foundation for Contemporary Arts, in the United States

Business and economics

 * False Claims Act, a United States federal law
 * Federal Customs Authority, of the United Arab Emirates
 * Foreign currency account
 * Free Carrier, an international commerce term similar to FOB
 * Full-cost accounting
 * Function cost analysis
 * Farm Credit Administration, active during the New Deal era
 * Fiji Consumers Association
 * Financial Collection Agencies, a defunct accounts receivable management company
 * Financial Conduct Authority, financial regulator in the United Kingdom
 * Fellow of Chartered Accountants, awarded by various bodies:
 * Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants
 * Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales
 * Institute of Chartered Accountants of Sri Lanka
 * A component of FVA - one of the X-Value Adjustments in relation to derivative instruments held by banks

Religion

 * Fellowship of Christian Assemblies
 * Fellowship of Christian Athletes
 * Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans
 * Foundation Christian Academy, in Valrico, Florida, United States

Sports

 * Cuban Athletics Federation (Spanish Federación Cubana de Atletismo)
 * FC Aarau, a football club in Switzerland
 * FC Astana, a football club in Kazakhstan
 * FC Augsburg, a football club in Germany
 * Fellowship of Christian Athletes

Transportation

 * Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, a defunct Italian-American multinational automobile manufacturer now part of Stellantis.
 * Ferrocarril Central Argentino, an Argentine railway company
 * Ferrovia Centro Atlântica, a Brazilian railway company
 * First Choice Airways, a defunct British airline
 * Florida Coastal Airlines, a defunct American airline
 * IATA code for Glacier Park International Airport, in Montana, United States

Other uses

 * Facility condition assessment
 * Family Caregiver Alliance
 * Family Christian Academy (disambiguation), various entities
 * Federal Court of Appeal (Canada)
 * Federal Court of Australia
 * Feline cutaneous asthenia
 * Ferengi Commerce Authority
 * Finnish Cannabis Association
 * Fixed channel allocation, in wireless networks
 * Flood Control Act, a series of US federal laws
 * Flux-cored arc welding
 * Formal concept analysis
 * Fórsa Cosanta Áitiúil, the former reserve force of the Irish Army
 * Framework Convention Alliance, a tobacco-control organization
 * Frontier Closed Area, between Hong Kong and the rest of China
 * French Camp Academy, in Mississippi, United States
 * Freund's complete adjuvant
 * University of Campinas School of Applied Sciences (Portuguese: Faculdade de Ciências Aplicadas)
 * Federated Confectioners' Association of Australia, a defunct trade union

title: FCA


text: File:Deviant album cover.jpg

title: File:Deviant album cover.jpg


text:
Rijsttafel

Rijsttafel, a Dutch word that literally translates to "rice table", is an Indonesian elaborate meal adapted by the Dutch following the hidang presentation of nasi padang from the Padang region of West Sumatra. It consists of many (forty is not an unusual number) side dishes served in small portions, accompanied by rice prepared in several different ways. Popular side dishes include egg rolls, sambals, satay, fish, fruit, vegetables, pickles, and nuts. In most areas where it is served, such as the Netherlands, and other areas of strong Dutch influence (such as parts of the West Indies), it is known under its Dutch name.

Although the dishes served are undoubtedly Indonesian, the rijsttafel’s origins were colonial. The Dutch introduced the rice table not only so they could enjoy a wide array of dishes at a single sitting but also to impress visitors with the exotic abundance of their colony.

Rijsttafels strive to feature an array of not only flavors and colors and degrees of spiciness but also textures, an aspect that is not commonly discussed in Western food. Such textures may include crispy, chewy, slippery, soft, hard, velvety, gelatinous, and runny.

History
The rijsttafel was created to provide a festive and official type of banquet that would represent the multi-ethnic nature of the Indonesian archipelago. Dishes were assembled from many of the far flung regions of Indonesia, where many different cuisines exist, often determined by ethnicity and culture of the particular island or island group — from Javanese favourite sateh, tempeh and seroendeng, to vegetarian cuisine gado-gado and lodeh with sambal lalab from Batavia and Preanger. From spicy rendang and gulai curry from the Minangkabau region in Sumatra, to East Indies ubiquitous dishes nasi goreng, soto ayam, and kroepoek crackers. Also Indonesian dishes from hybrid influences, such as Chinese babi ketjap, loempia, and bami to European beef smoor. And there are many others from the hundreds of inhabited islands, which contain more than 300 regional and ethnic language groups.

During its centuries of popularity in Dutch East Indies, lines of servants or sarong-clad waitresses ceremoniously served the marathon meal on platters laden with steaming bowls of fragrant foods. The first to be served was a cone-shaped pile of rice on a large platter, which the server placed in the center of the table. The servers then surrounded the rice platter with as many as 40 small bowls holding meat and vegetable dishes as well as condiments. During its colonial heyday until Japanese occupation of Dutch East Indies in 1942, the most celebrated rijsttafel in the Indies was served for Sunday luncheon at the Hotel des Indes in Batavia and the Savoy Homann Hotel in Bandung, where the rice was accompanied by sixty different dishes.

Brought back to the Netherlands by former colonials and exiled Indonesians and Indo-Europeans (Eurasians) after Indonesia gained its independence in 1945, the rijsttafel was predominantly popular with Dutch families with colonial roots. On the other hand, when Indonesia proclaimed its independence in 1945, nationalist sentiment promoted the rejection of Dutch colonial culture and customs, including the flamboyant rice table. Today, the rice table has practically disappeared from Indonesia's restaurants and is served only by a handful of fine-dining restaurants in Indonesia. A typical rijsttafel will have several dining tables covered with different dishes; while in some fancy settings in Indonesia, each dish may be served by a separate waitress.

Since about 1990, Indonesian food has become part of a mainstream interest in Southeast Asian cuisine, and there has been a proliferation of Indonesian restaurants in the Netherlands.

Typical dishes
The following is a brief, but not nearly complete, list of examples of foods that may be found on a rijsttafel:
 * Acar – pickled vegetables
 * Babi kecap – pork belly braised in sweet soy sauce common in the Netherlands; a halal Indonesian version often uses beef variant known as semur
 * Babi panggang – roasted pork in a tomato based sauce
 * Bebek betutu – duck roasted in banana leaves
 * Bebek Peking – Chinese-style roasted duck
 * Capcay – stir-fried vegetables
 * Empal gentong – curry-like beef soup
 * Gado-gado – vegetables (cooked or fresh) with peanut sauce (sambal kacang)
 * Gudeg – young jackfruit with palm sugar and coconut milk
 * Karedok – vegetable salad in peanut sauce
 * Krupuk – chips
 * Lemper – rice rolls with spicy filling
 * Lumpia – spring rolls
 * Nasi goreng – fried rice
 * Nasi kuning – Indonesian yellow rice
 * Nasi uduk – steamed rice in coconut milk
 * Opor ayam – chicken coconut curry
 * Pecel – vegetable salad in peanut sauce
 * Perkedel – meat and potato patties
 * Pisang goreng – banana fritters
 * Rawon – blackish beef soup
 * Rendang – aromatic spicy caramelized beef, braised in coconut milk, chillies, and spices
 * Sambal iris – onion, tomato, and chilli paste
 * Sambal kacang – peanut sauce
 * Sambal ulek – spicy chilli paste
 * Satay (sometimes spelled saté, sate, or sateh) – various thinly sliced meats, marinated then broiled on a skewer, such as: sate ayam (chicken); sate babi (pork); sate lilit (seafood)
 * Sayur lodeh – vegetable stew (spicy) in coconut milk
 * Semur daging – a type of stew of beef braised in sweet soy sauce
 * Serundeng – peanuts with sautéed shredded coconut
 * Tahu telur – tofu omelette
 * Telur balado – hard-boiled eggs sautéed in chilli sauce
 * Telur bumbu bali – hard-boiled eggs sautéed in Balinese spice mixture

Today
Despite its popularity in the Netherlands and abroad, the rijsttafel is rarely found in Indonesia. That is probably because most Indonesian meals consist of rice accompanied by only one, two or three dishes, mostly consisting of lauk (fish, chicken, meat, egg, or other source of protein), sayur (vegetable), and other side dishes. To consume more than that number of dishes at once (a rijsttafel might range from seven to forty dishes) is considered too extravagant and too expensive. The closest versions to rice table dishes readily available in Indonesia are local nasi Padang and nasi campur. However, in Indonesian restaurants around the world, especially in Belgium, the Netherlands, and South Africa, the rijsttafel is still popular.

Today only a handful of dining establishments in Indonesia ceremoniously serve elaborate colonial-style rijsttafel. Rijsttafel is commonly found only in select upscale Indonesian restaurants, mainly the ones in Jakarta. In July 2011, the airline Garuda Indonesia launched Indonesian rijsttafel in Executive Class as its signature in-flight service. This Indonesian signature dining was meant to introduce the passenger to a wide array of Indonesian cuisine in a single setting as part of Garuda Indonesia experience. This in-flight Indonesian rijsttafel includes Indonesian signature dishes; choices of nasi kuning or regular steamed rice, accompanied with choices of dishes such as satay, rendang, gado-gado grilled chicken rica, red snapper in yellow acar sauce, fried shrimp in sambal, potato perkedel and tempeh, also with kerupuk or rempeyek crackers.

title: Rijsttafel


text:
Castlepollard

Castlepollard ( or Cionn Toirc) is a village in north County Westmeath, Republic of Ireland. It lies west of Lough Lene and northeast of Lough Derravaragh and Mullingar.

Name
The name Castlepollard comes from the name of a castle or fortified manor built by the English army captain Nicholas Pollard in the early 17th century. The village's official Irish name is Baile na gCros (anglicised Ballinagross), meaning "town of the cross (or crossroads". However, the name Cionn Toirc (anglicised Kinturk), meaning "head of the boar", has also been applied to the village. The townland of Kinturk Demesne covers the southern part of the village.

Transport
Bus Éireann route 111 serves Castlepollard eight times a day (less often at weekends) linking it to Dublin, Trim, Athboy, Delvin, Abbeylara, Granard and Cavan. Route 447 provides a link to Mullingar via Crookedwood on Thursdays only. The nearest rail service is at Mullingar railway station, approximately 22 km distant.

16th and 17th centuries
Nicholas Pollard, an English Army captain from Devonshire, arrived in Ireland in 1597 during the Nine Years' War. He fought under the Earl of Essex's command against the Gaelic Irish forces. After that campaign, Captain Pollard was settled on land in the Mayne area. Cionn Torc (Kinturk), a valley between the lakes, was granted 'in capite' by the ageing Queen Elizabeth I to Captain Pollard. He built a small castle at Rathyoung which he called Castle Pollard.

Walter Pollard, first son of Nicholas, married Ismay Nugent of Roscommon. He received a regrant of the demesne during the restoration period, following the Civil War and Cromwellian confiscations. The grant was made by charter from King Charles II, and approved by the Irish Parliament. In addition, he was granted a permit for a weekly market and a fair which was held four times annually. The Pollard family was reconfirmed in the manorial title by the edict of William and Mary. Serving as Commissioner for Supplies during the War of the Three Kingdoms, Pollard sat in the Irish Parliament, and became High Sheriff of the county in 1692. The family gradually improved the residence and the estate. They rebuilt the adjoining out buildings and developed the village of Castlepollard. They intermarried with the Dillon family of Ladyhill, the Packenhams, the Duttons, the Tuites, and other landed county families. The descendants of Nicholas Pollard lived at Kinturk into the early twentieth century.

Castlepollard Massacre, 1831
On 23 May 1831 members of the paramilitary Royal Irish Constabulary force (which Britain established to police Ireland) arrested a man following a fight at Castlepollard's fair. The crowd surrounded them until they released the man. At approximately 5pm that day, members of the same force returned, this time armed with muskets. These RIC members were then allegedly jeered by the crowd. In response, they lined up and fired shots. By the time they had finished 13 people lay dead, and many others were injured. The names of the dead were: Patrick Dignam, Mary Kiernan, John Slevin, Patrick McCormack, Brian Mahon, Tomas Kiernan, Patrick McDermott, Patrick McDonagh, Mary Neill, James Fagan, Patrick Keegan, Patrick Ledwich and Peggy Leary. 19 police officers were sent to Mullingar jail but at their hearing in Mullingar in July 1831 all 19 were discharged without conviction.

This incident may have been related to the enforcement of collection orders during the Tithe War (1831–1836). Spasmodic violence broke out around this time (particularly in Kilkenny, Wexford, and Cork) when the police entered local fairgrounds to enforce seizure orders on cattle for non-payment of tithes. Order was finally restored by rescinding seizure orders in 1836. The subsequent revision of the Tithe Act commuted the levy. The Church of Ireland was disestablished by the Gladstone government in 1869, and the tithe was abolished.

Built heritage
The original village layout, much of which dates to the 19th century, is preserved and now landscaped in a central triangular green. Surrounded by buildings from the Georgian period, a sculpture on the square depicts a scene from the locally centred legend of the Children of Lir. A plaque outlines the story in several languages. The setting of the legend is Lough Derravaragh. There are several ringforts on the surrounding high ground. Two ancient forts are of archaeological interest. Randoon is located in nearby Ranaghan, south west of Lough Lene, and Turgesius Island, is situated on Lough Lene. Turgesius was a Viking leader who sojourned here with a local lover while on respite from his seafaring. He held sway in Danish Dublin (Dyflin) and Shannon Viking port near Clonmacnoise.

Castlepollard has two churches which serve the Roman Catholic and Church of Ireland Christian communities. Kinturk House, the Georgian period Pollard residence, now serves as St. Peter's Centre. It was purchased by the Sacred Heart Sisters from the family in 1935, who added a chapel wing. A hospital designed by T.J. Cullen (1879–1947) was built c. 1935 and was part of "an extensive hospital construction programme initiated during the first decades of the Irish Free State" financed by the Irish Hospitals' Sweepstake. The sisters operated a Mother and Baby home there for many years; the property was sold to Midlands Health Board in 1971.

In the early nineteenth century, the main village and the Pollard family properties underwent a reconstruction program. The Kinturk Demesne residence and the adjacent buildings were rebuilt in the Georgian style of the period. Some common lands were enclosed. A new Church of Ireland building was erected in the Square, along with the Market house Located on the west side of the green, this was the village's major public building and landmark. The quarterly Court of Petty Sessions convened here.

During the War of Independence the Irish Republican Army (IRA) burned the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) barracks located on the Mullingar Road. The RIC then moved to the courthouse. In 1921, the IRA began a wave of burnings which targeted government offices throughout Ireland. This was a concerted effort to cripple the UK civil service in its day-to-day administration of the country. The Market House was also torched. Two sitting magistrates were kidnapped by the IRA on their way to the court. The men were held hostage locally, reportedly in a cow byre on the Hill of Moal. They were later released unharmed after forty eight hours, and the village was spared reprisals. The Market House was rebuilt in 1926, and served as the village fire station until a purpose-built fire station was constructed. The Market House was also used as the village library for a number of years.

Later additions to the built environment include multiple housing estates, the Area Office of the Westmeath County Council, and the Castlepollard Community College's new school building (2004), both on the Mullingar Road.

Economy
Mergon International, a manufacturer of moulded parts, is one of the main businesses in the village. The village has number of retail outlets, serving a hinterland covering parts of North Westmeath. This includes filling stations, one bank, a post office, council buildings, primary and secondary schools, a number of grocery/newsagent shops, hairdressers, beauty salon's, drapery stores, furniture stores, pharmacies and a hardware store. Castlepollard also has number of pubs.

Sport
Hurling is the major sport in the area. Castlepollard is home to the Castlepollard hurling team, who have won the Westmeath Senior Championship on thirteen occasions. Castlepollard are arch-rivals of the neighbouring Lough Lene Gaels of Collinstown.

Ballycomoyle (5 km away) play in the Junior Gaelic football championship, while Castletown Finea Coole Whitehall (CFCW) (13 km away) play in the Intermediate championship.

Castlepollard Celtic Football Club, founded in 2004, caters for underage soccer in the area with teams ranging from Under 7's to Under 16's for boys and girls. In 2013, the club introduced a senior team to the Combined Counties Football League.

Tullynally Castle
Two kilometres west of Castlepollard on the Granard Road (Pakenham Hall Street) is Tullynally Castle, seat of the Pakenham family, later the Earls of Longford. Also known as Pakenham Hall, the original 17th-century fortified house (c. 1655) was remodelled first as a Georgian mansion in the 1730s, then as a large Gothic Revival castle.

The Irish National Inventory of Architectural Heritage describes Tullynally as "a hugely significant structure of national importance". The castle was worked on by several well-known architects operating in Ireland during the early-to-mid nineteenth-century, including Francis Johnston, James Shiel and Sir Richard Morrison.

A number of other structures are located on the grounds, including the gate lodge which fronts the Granard Road facing Castlepollard. The two-storey limestone building was designed by Shiel (a noted architect of his day and former clerk of Francis Johnston) c. 1820 whilst making renovations on the main house. An integral Tudor Gothic-arched carriage arch to the centre of the main body of the building and a single-bay three-storey tower on polygonal-plan (with slight base batter) attached to the north end of the main façade (east) form "a pleasing vista on a main road leading out of Castlepollard from the west and marks the start of a long tree-lined avenue to Tullynally Castle itself". It is currently in use as private residence.

The gardens, like the castle, are on a large scale, covering nearly 12 ha. Terraced lawns around the castle overlook 18th century parkland. The adjoining woodland gardens and walled gardens date largely from the early 19th century and encompass a grotto of eroded limestone from nearby Lough Derravaragh and two ornamental lakes. The walled gardens have flower borders and an avenue of 200-year-old Irish yews. The gardens are open to the public in the spring and summer.

title: Castlepollard