A missing comment on a recent blog post

I recently wrote review of the recently published WARSHIP 2026 annual. One of my regular blog readers – Toby Ewin – wrote a detailed comment about the article about the capture of SMS Magdeburg's naval code books ... that Blogger somehow deleted before I could approve it. He has now sent it to me again, and I have reproduced it below:

In connection with a posting you made a few days back about WARSHIP 2026. I drew your attention to Stephen McLaughlin's article about SMS Magdeburg and its famous codebook. I added (and have told Steve) that among the secret German documents which the Russians retrieved and shared with us, was the manuscript write-up of a 1913 German Navy wargame, conducted under the auspices of Germany's Torpedo Research Establishment (TVK). The write-up was the work of the game's umpire, Captain Julius Maerker, who lost his life in December 1914 when he was captain of SMS Gneisenau at the Battle of the Falkland Islands.

SMS Magdeburg.

Andy Boyd's epic book on British naval intelligence mentions that several of the captured German documents from Magdeburg were the subjects of Naval Intelligence reports from the Admiralty, but that he could not locate the report about the wargame. I too have not found the NID report, but – with help from the late great Australian naval historian James Goldrick - I have found the original document (at TNA, still in a file cover bearing the Cyrillic stamp of the Russian Naval General Staff).

In due course I hope to publish a translation of the German write-up; the game covers an encounter between German coastal forces and a more powerful British force, and there are similarities with the real-life First Battle of Heligoland Bight of August 1914.

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Toby Ewin is Senior Visiting Research Fellow, Laughton Naval History & Maritime Strategy Unit, King's College London. He has a particular interest in naval history before and during the First World War, especially the Black Sea conflict and Anglo-Russian naval relations. He is also doing extensive research into the use of wargaming by navies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and he has written comprehensively about his research. For example, THE ROYAL NAVY'S FIRST WARGAMES, 1900-1915 (MORS Journal of Wargaming) and his presentation at CONNECTIONS UK 2025.