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| The Enigma |
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| The National
World War II Museum displays an Enigma machine
in its exhibit about the deception efforts
surrounding D-Day, entitled A Bodyguard of
Lies. |
Breaking the Code
Years before World War
II began, Germany had developed
and was using a special system to keep their military
communications secret. The army, navy and air force
all encoded their messages using a cipher machine
that came
to be called Enigma. Enigma, a typewriter-like contraption
for encoding and decoding messages, had been developed
in Germany in 1923. By 1939, 20,000 Enigma machines
were in use on German submarines, at army headquarters,
on Luftwaffe bases, and in the hands of German spies
across Europe.
The Germans thought their codes were unbreakable--and
with good reason. The Enigma machine, with its complicated
set of changeable rotor wheels and electronic circuitry,
could produce a code with trillions of variations!
By typing on a keyboard, the sender's message would
be so scrambled that only someone with a similar
machine fixed to the same predetermined settings
could decode it.
The British soon established the Code and Cipher
School at Bletchley Park, a Victorian mansion 40
miles outside London. Within its grounds, many of
Britain's top mathematicians, scientists, and linguists
labored night and day to crack the German's Enigma
code. This operation was code-named Ultra. American
code breakers soon were working closely with their
British counterparts. In all, more than 7,000 men
and women worked in utmost secrecy at Bletchley.
Security was so tight at this installation that
many of their families did not know the nature of
their covert work. Their greatest breakthroughs
came as a result of the capture an early model Enigma
machine from Poland and the recovery of another
from a salvaged German submarine. By late 1940,
the British were regularly decoding German messages.
Ultra became one of the most closely guarded secrets
of the war. Only the highest-ranking officers knew
of its existence.
The ability to read German military communications
gave the Allies an awesome advantage throughout
the war. Although the foreknowledge gained from
Ultra had to be used by the Allies carefully--so
as not to divulge to the Germans that Bletchley
was listening--used it was, and often with impressive
results. Troop movements were observed and countered,
supply columns were tracked and destroyed, and overall
Axis strategy and state of mind were all carefully
monitored. Along with the brawn on Allied production,
the brains of Ultra helped win the war.
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