Each morning about Nieppe and Ploegsteert began in the same grey half-light of winter. Teams of the 4th Divisional Signal Company went out along the narrow lanes and poplar stands with reels of wire to maintain the web that joined infantry, artillery, and divisional headquarters. In those first months of 1915 while under Major Cunningham, the company’s attention lay chiefly on improving the cooperation between the signal service and the guns, experimenting with methods of leading the wires into their offices and batteries to lessen congestion along the roads. Cable detachments rotated through short courses of instruction on the laying and maintenance of wire to refine the coordination of message-centers under fire.
By that time, Aylmer Basil Cunningham was a professional soldier of nearly seventeen years. Born to a wealthy London family, his path to prestige in the service was expected if not easy. He graduated the Royal Military College and commissioned in the Royal Engineers in March 1898 – posted to Malta for four years from August 1900 and then to West Africa. Among miles and miles of jungle, few roads emerge out of the frontier of what is now Ghana.
The colony’s interior was still a wilderness of dense forest and heavy swamp. Head porters moved in long columns along narrow footpaths where no motor vehicle had ever passed. The railway extended only a few miles beyond Sekondi, and the absence of maps rendered much of the territory little more than conjecture. Concessions were already being granted to mining companies keen to exploit the region’s mineral wealth, yet there were no surveys to define their limits. As Assistant Superintendent of the Roads Department, Ashanti, Captain Cunningham and the local Royal Engineers’ task was therefore one of discovery as much as construction as they cut lines through forest where the map showed only a dotted trail, if anything.
Torrential rain could wash away new construction within hours. White ants, sandflies and driver ants made the camps nearly uninhabitable. Survey parties advanced through bush where elephant and lion still roamed. A single storm might drop four inches of rain in an hour, leaving the ground a swamp and the air alive with pestilence. It was in this setting that Cunningham began his first years of practical engineering—laying the groundwork for the Gold Coast’s earliest roads and surveys.
Five years later he had opted for the more technical side of the Royal Engineers and posted to the Signal School at Aldershot, which assumed responsibility for both electrical and visual signalling. As there was no system to prepare non-regulars for war, Captain Cunningham headed the reinforcement training center there at Aldershot for the year prior to his departure to France, and once again he returned to a less explorative but no less adventurous endeavor under significantly more shellfire.
FRANCE & FLANDERS
At Cunningham’s direction, classes were also formed within the company to teach telephone procedure and the art of instrument repair. Selected men learned to “buzz” on the induction sets, while others were lent to the artillery to quicken their handling of telephony. The object, always, was speed and reliability – to ensure that reports, ranging orders, and requests for support could pass between brigades without delay.
Circuits extended from the 32nd, 37th, and 29th Field Artillery Brigades through to divisional headquarters at Nieppe, looping by farmsteads and the outskirts of Ploegsteert. Lateral cables linked the 10th, 11th, and 12th Infantry Brigades with their supporting guns and “fighting headquarters.” Wires were doubled and re-routed west of the town to avoid the congestion that had grown dangerous under enemy shelling. When new observation posts opened, fresh leads were run out. When brigades exchanged sectors, the company reeled the wire back in and laid it anew.
Under a damp fog that lingered over the fields, the work of the signallers was largely invisible and each day they traced their own footprints through flooded ditches and over timber duckboards. March brought little rest and fewer changes. Even in monotony there was pressure, for every line represented a possible failure. The artillery circuits were duplicated for security, and when the 10th Infantry Brigade shifted its headquarters to Armentières, fresh wire followed them along the Rue de Lille, only to be lifted again when their relief was cancelled. On other days, new links were run between the heavy batteries and brigades to preserve independent contact should one route be cut. Each adjustment required men in the open, often under observation, their only shelter the shallow bends of a hedge or culvert.
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That summer, III Corps moved to La Motte with orders for the re-wiring of artillery groups, the duplication of field lines, and the improvement of coordination between Signals and Royal Artillery units. These tasks filled Cunningham’s days as he took on the position of Assistant Director of Signals within the Corps. Men were sent forward in sections, digging through sodden roads to lay cable that would last longer than the next rotation. At La Motte, Cunningham formalized what had begun at Nieppe – a central diagram of communications that standardized Corps practice, and again he established schools to teach fault-finding, telephony, and instrument repair, drawing men from the divisions for short courses before sending them back forward again.
By March 1916, showing his first years’ achievement with a Distinguished Service Order, even though the Corps possessed a communications web capable of handling a scale of operations previously confined to the Army level, the entire system was tested beyond its design. In the ruins north of the Somme, lines were buried and re-buried under shellfire, poles collapsed, switchboards overloaded, and batteries flooded. The Major shifted repair sections nightly, re-routed traffic through temporary trunk lines, and authorized the use of power buzzers and pigeons when telephony failed. For weeks, he operated without the luxury of static headquarters, directing sections by motor dispatch and signal runners as the front altered shape each day.
In the months that followed the Somme’s collapse into stalemate, the work became once again architectural. He re-drew the Corps’ communications plan, absorbing new divisions and supporting the movement of artillery westward for the next stage of the war. By the winter of 1916-17, the headquarters at Villers-Bretonneux had become a technical fortress with rows of switchboards, field batteries charging in sequence, and signalers logging thousands of calls a day.
As the German army began its deliberate withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line, III Corps advanced through the debris of its own past work – cut wires, twisted poles, and abandoned dug-outs that once served as exchanges. Cable sections pushed east through Roisel and Étricourt, constructing temporary trunk routes and restoring contact with the rear. Buried systems replaced open lines and pigeons, power buzzers, and motor dispatch took the place of once-permanent networks.
By the spring of 1917, the signal system under his direction was a model of its kind. From the advanced exchanges near Harvincourt and Roisel, traffic flowed through multiple routes, divided by function – infantry, artillery, and headquarters communications kept distinct while still interlinked. His sections worked alongside tunnelling companies, reclaiming German wire and rebuilding along the buried corridors once used by the retreating enemy. Reports from divisions noted the “excellent communications” of III Corps, even in the days when no advance could be made without repair parties walking the same ground twice in a day.
Until his final days with III Corp, the pattern remained familiar. The final entry in the war diary for August 18th, 1917 read with brevity: “Major A. B. Cunningham, A.D. Signals, III Corps, proceeding to England.” Over two and a half years, Cunningham had shepherded III Corps Signals from improvisation to infrastructure, from lines on paper to a living network of men and wire spanning the battlefronts of France.
SINAI & PALESTINE
Mirage replaced the foggy gray horizon of Europe and now Aylmer, a Brevet Lieutenant Colonel, faced wire strung across empty wadis and miles upon miles of desert. Allenby’s army of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force had broken from the static lines of Gaza and was now advancing at a pace no signaller could have foreseen. Cavalry moved faster than the maps could be redrawn, and headquarters changed their position almost daily. Signals had to keep pace with the cavalry and camel corps and keep connected the Army from Cairo and Kantara to the front before Gaza.
The sun stripped insulation from cable and wind buried poles in drifting sand. Lines laid at dawn could be gone by evening, torn up by transport or swallowed by the torrid desert. Miles of Turkish telegraph route were pressed into service as the enemy fell back. What the retreating Turks could not carry they had destroyed or hacked apart for firewood; what they left standing became the bones of the new British system. Cunningham’s men scavenged poles and wire, repurposing Ottoman lines that ran from Beersheba through Nazareth and on to Damascus. Where the advance moved too quickly for repair, his linemen followed in motor lorries and small Ford vans, carrying reels of captured cable across ground still hot from shellfire.
Repair parties worked through the night, guided by the dull glow of a shaded lamp, testing line after line until they found one that carried a spark. In some places, the Turks’ elaborate desert trunk lines remained intact; in others, only a few blackened stumps jutted from the sand. Within hours these too were replaced, the wire stretched anew along the old enemy routes. By the time Allenby’s forces reached Nazareth, Signals had rebuilt more than fifteen hundred miles of Turkish telegraph route, embracing forty thousand poles and five thousand miles of wire. A telegraph that had once carried orders to Constantinople now carried them to Cairo.
From Jerusalem northward, the work was not merely British. Cunningham’s command extended across a coalition of units – British, Egyptian, Indian, and locally recruited Arabs. When the Desert Mounted Corps pushed past the Jordan and the Arab forces under Sherif Nasir and Nuri Bey Said moved north along the Hejaz railway, it was Cunningham’s network that bridged the gap.
As the Arab and British forces converged on Damascus, communication became a race against time. The Turkish forces fell back in confusion, leaving prisoners, guns, and mountains of telegraph material behind. Cunningham’s signalmen followed, gathering instruments from smashed Ottoman offices – telephones still marked with the Sultan’s crest – and threading them into the Allied system. Within a single day of Damascus’s capture, they had a wire running into the city. From the Serai building, where the Arab flag was raised and the Emirate of Hussein proclaimed, messages passed along a line first laid by the Turks, repaired by British hands, and now serving both.
To the Arab contingents, this unseen architecture of communication was as vital as the guns. The line between Aqaba, Deraa, and Damascus was the thread by which the revolt remained bound to Allenby’s main force. The coordination of cavalry, air support, and Arab irregulars depended upon it, and Cunningham’s mastery of the craft made it possible. When the pursuit finally ended at Aleppo and the Ottoman field armies disintegrated, Cunningham’s men were still at work, splicing together the remnants of two empires’ communications. By the armistice, the E.E.F. network stretched over four hundred miles from Cairo to Aleppo. Wireless stations along the Red Sea linked the campaign to India and Australia, while trunk lines tied the new Arab administration in Damascus to the headquarters at Ramleh. The work earned him recognition both military and diplomatic. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his direction of the E.E.F. Signal Service, and decorated by Egypt with the Order of the Nile. Yet perhaps most emblematic was the Order of Al Nahda, conferred by Sharif Hussein himself upon those whose service had bound the Arab Revolt to the Allied campaign.