ENIGMA WW2 HOW TO
ENIGMA WW2 CODE
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Documents declassified more recently reveal that in fact a conscious effort was made to train British destroyer commanders so that they could extract as much cipher material as possible from captured vessels. When I did the original research for my Enigma book, the available evidence suggested that the seizing of the codebooks was all down to a lucky break. Photograph: Bletchley Park Trust/Getty Images The machine room in hut 6 at Bletchley Park. It is this game-changing capture whose anniversary will be celebrated at the end of this month.

ENIGMA WW2 CODE

The gloom was only lifted after the seizing of a U-boat, U-559, with her codebooks on 30 October 1942, 75 years ago, enabled Bletchley Park to break the code once again. There was a growing fear that Britain might eventually be starved into submission. From February to October 1942 hundreds of thousands of tons of allied shipping was sunk each month. At a stroke this safety net had disappeared. While the naval Enigma messages were being read, convoys could be routed clear of the Nazi wolf packs lying in wait in the Atlantic. This had disastrous consequences for Britain and her allies. The longest blackout occurred following the German order that vessels operating in the Atlantic and Mediterranean after 1 February 1942 should insert a fourth rotor into their machines. Every now and then the Germans, suspecting that their code might have been compromised, altered it, blacking out the codebreaking effort.

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Using the items seized, Alan Turing and his fellow codebreakers were at long last able to work out how to read Germany’s naval Enigma messages. The British capture of a string of German vessels – and their Enigma machines and codebooks – during the first seven months of 1941 changed all that. British intercept stations could listen in to these signals, but because they were encoded, they could not understand what was being said.

It was used to transform normal German into gibberish which was then transmitted using morse code over the airwaves. The Enigma machine did not actually send the messages.

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(For example, a series of decoded messages nicknamed “Weasel” proved extremely important in anticipating German anti-aircraft and antitank strategies against the Allies.) These decoded messages were regularly passed to the Soviet High Command regarding German troop movements and planned offensives, and back to London regarding the mass murder of Russian prisoners and Jewish concentration camp victims.Now extraordinary fresh details can be told of how the Royal Navy seized vital cipher information from captured German boats to make the work of the codebreakers possible. The first breakthrough occurred on July 9, regarding German ground-air operations, but various keys would continue to be broken by the British over the next year, each conveying information of higher secrecy and priority than the next. Now, with the German invasion of Russia, the Allies needed to be able to intercept coded messages transmitted on this second, Eastern, front. The British had broken their first Enigma code as early as the German invasion of Poland and had intercepted virtually every message sent through the occupation of Holland and France. The Germany army adapted the machine for wartime use and considered its encoding system unbreakable. The Enigma machine, invented in 1919 by Hugo Koch, a Dutchman, looked like a typewriter and was originally employed for business purposes. Enigma was the Germans’ most sophisticated coding machine, necessary to secretly transmitting information. On July 9, 1941, British cryptologists help break the secret code used by the German army to direct ground-to-air operations on the Eastern front.īritish and Polish experts had already broken many of the Enigma codes for the Western front.

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