ENIGMA Machines

[David Dunlop]

Just finished watching another history blurb on TV about the British acquisition of a captured German Enigma machine during the war, which also included some sidebar comment about how the Americans eventually obtained one of their own.

It seems highly unlikely, given the shear volume of communication intercepts coming into British and American hands that just two machines would have had any chance at all in keeping up with the decoding needs for the Allied Intelligence Services. The British must have back engineered the Enigma machine and had others built to meet their needs. I now wonder what company the British might have asked to built Enigma machines, how many were ultimately built, and what ever happened to them all after the war ended.

David

[malcolm erik bogaert]

its not generaly known but in the invasion of poland a small british signals unit were sent into poland and recovered the polish army version...also all developemnt work was done by the GPO best regards malcolm

[Bruce MacMillan]

They didn't use the Enigmas for decoding. That machine was called the Bombe. They built over 200 of them. The captured Enigmas enabled them to find out how the rotors were wired.

Much of the work of Alan Turing went into the Bombe

[Dean (Ajax)]

Thats correct the "Bombe" was the device that decoded the messages at Bletchly Park, I was there in Feb this year and was given a Private tour by Jean Valantine, who was a "Bombe" operator during the war.
They have built a working "Bombe" from scratch, as I had given a couple of their Members a tour of the Camp X Site and the Camp X museum in Whitby a few years ago..they allowed me to start up the "Bombe"

Very impressive!!!

Dean

[Ganmain Tony]

Fascinating thread fellahs, keep the info coming.

Malcolm, pardon my ignorance, GPO stands for?

Very knowledgable people our forum members...good show!!

[Dean (Ajax)]

Check out this site, shows the rebuilt "Bombe" and other goodies at "The Park"

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/cont...whattosee.rhtm

Dean

[cliff]

Originally Posted by Ganmain Tony

Malcolm, pardon my ignorance, GPO stands for?

Tony I believe it stands for "General Post Office"
These are the people who did all telephone, telegraph and most other things to do with communications at the time and were Government owned.

[Robin Craig]

The code work was done at Bletchley Park outside London.

A lot of very talented mathematical minds were recruited from civvy street to work on it.

My mother was recruited as a math whizz early on in the war and worked there and could not tell my father a thing about it.

R

[warren brown]

I'm sticking my neck out here, but I remember reading somewhere there was a commercial version of the enigma machine made in (I think) Czechoslovakia during the 'thirties - even advertised in magazines. It was one of those things that wasn't picked up at the time - but the enigma machine was a derivation of this machine - yet the wartime enigma more spools which increased its 'uncrackability' exponentially... (don't hold this as fact anyone...)

[Mike K]

Not directly related to this thread . But I am reminded of a great TV series SBS ran years ago called " THE RED ORCHESTRA" It was a drama series all about the Russian/Soviet spy network within NAZI Germany.

The Reds were amazing spies. And during WW2, they had a famous woman spy in the UK who sent morse code mesages back to the USSR via a home made transmitter . She did it for many years , into the cold war era .

Mike

[warren brown]

Aha! Found this on a website - the commercial version was apparently German - "The commercial enigma was exhibited at a couple of trade shows during 1923 but soon attracted the interest of the German military. The result was the withdrawal from the market of the enigma machine which then continued to be produced and refined for military use."
Like Monica Lewinski - close but no cigar....

Post Script - Robin Craig : amazing!

[malcolm erik bogaert]

yes GPO did indeed build the bombe which I believe was the first computer..ALAN TURING was a gifted mathimitician not an engineer...also one of my late neighbours Capt Joe Baker-Cresswell was the chap who's destroyer captured the first U-boat enigma machine although he did loose two of his sailors when the sub sank....his son was not best pleased with the USA film of there version of capture of U-Boat Enigma!hope this helps regards malcolm PS a close friend of mine from the R/Sigs has a good collection of Enigma items..he's located in the Western Isles

[David Dunlop]

Thinking about it a bit, I seem to recall sometime in the late 1970's or early 1980's a limited quantity of surplus commercial Enigma machines showing up for sale out of Europe They were ex-Swiss or Swedish and may have had something to do with the banking sector. There were ads in a couple of military history type magazines for a while and then they disappeared. Interesting bit of kit, but very limited Canadian connection. Now a surplus Bombe on the other hand...

David

[Bruce MacMillan]

You may be thinking about the Swiss NEMA unit. This was based on the enigma but redesigned in the early 1940s as the Swiss felt someone was able to read their mail. I can't think of who???

These machines were released for sale to the public in 1994. They still come up occasionally on ebay and usually fairly cheap (by Enigma standards). Most I have seen are in really good shape.

[maple_leaf_eh]

Poland lies between two really despicable neighbours and two variable friends (Germany and Russia [give or take a few republics], and Austro-Hungary and Scandinavia). It is their lot in life - so much that LOT is the national airline. The know more about their region than most of us know about our pockets. They have naturally decided who their true friends are; and they have chosen to share some of what they know with the British. These relationships go back many decades, predating WWII. Apparently very early in the war, they captured an ENIGMA and knew that it could not be used to its fullest advantage in Poland. Hence their sharing it with the British.

[Dennis Gelean (RIP)]

What was in the CMP Computor trucks (correct ww2 spelling)
I have seen references to women as computors, but would you need a big CMP to carry them. They worked on artillery and air force calculations.
So much to learn.

[David Dunlop]

Hi Bruce.

I did a bit of internet reading last night and found the following site where a collection of ENIGMA and NEMA prices were posted.

http://www.eclipse.net/~dhamer/enigma_p.htm

Sure wish I had some spare cash around when the NEMAs first came out, particularly the earlier model which was a near clone of the originals used in Germany during the war.

David

[Mike Cecil]

Gents,

A little known fact: at war's end, many captured/'forfeited' Enigma machines (3 rotor) were distributed by the Brits to countries like Australia for signals encoding-decoding in the years just post-war. Australia's intelligence community (the pre-decessors of DSD: Defence Signals Directorate) received several (numbers are fuzzy) and used them for several years, mostly for diplomatic signals traffic (since only the 'good guys' had the means to break the code).

When the organisation moved to Canberra from Melbourne many years ago, the bulk of them were broken up and destroyed. Two survived - they were incomplete/broken and in the back of a storage cupboard, and escaped the breakers hammers. They are still owned by DSD. One is on display in their foyer (secure area: no public access) and the other is on long-term loan to the AWM, and on display in the WW2 gallery.

There is also an Enigma machine at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, but I don't know its source: it was not acquired from DSD.

Mike C

[Bruce MacMillan]

Here was a pre war Enigma G that just closed. It looks like somebody made a deal behind the scene as the item was withdrawn.
http://www.ebay.ca/itm/RRR-Original-...item35b53e8d1b

[David_Hayward (RIP)]

The General Post Office was a Government department under the Postmaster-General, a Cabinet minister, [employees were civil servants technically until 1969] that was responsible for the mails as well as telephones and telegraphs except for the City of Kingston-upon-Hull, having taken over all private exchanges. They had an experimental workshop/depot in south-east London that contributed to the building of Colossus, the world's first electronic computer that was used by Bletchley Park. They were obviously experienced with valves and circuits.

I think an example of an Enigma machine was first supplied by the Poles as the war started. It was the capture of a German naval Enigma with its extra rotor[s] that was so dramatic for the course of the war at sea.

[Jon Skagfeld]

My claim to fame in this link is that I was born in Luton...my birth certificate lists a maternity home in Battlesden.

Bletchley is a bit west of there.

Perhaps, by osmosis, that's where I where I derive my thirst for knowledge about all things WW11 in war time Britain.

[Marc Montgomery]

enigma story.
http://www.secondworldwar.org.uk/enigma.html

couple things.. you probably are aware but the basic enigma had 3 wheels, the naval version..tougher.. with 4 wheels.
Canada captured an enigma, but it was in 1944 and by then several others had been already been captured.

From what I understand, Turing's "Colossus" is considered to be the first true programmable computer, beating out Eniac which was only working properly by 1946 and which was outdated by then.

The American film of 2000 called U-571, and capture of an enigma was well received by the American public and critics, in spite of the fact it was riddled with ridiculous factual errors.

The film was even brought up in the British parliament as an affront to British seamen..and then Pres Clinton had to write a letter to the Brit PM saying the film was fiction. Although the filmakers were urged to include a disclaimer that the film was entirely fiction, and note the British captures of enigma, they declined the "fiction" note, but did add info at the end about the British captures of engima.

[Marc van Aalderen]

Hi,

A good friend of mine did some diving in Germany at the location of a castle where the German Army Command spent many weekends during the war. Fleeing for the Russians a lot of stuff was destroyed and dumped in the pond. My friend says there is lots more and he will go there again.



Cheers,

[Lauren Child]

Hi,

Just a quick post as I've not got around to an intro yet, but the Bombe was the device that found the possible keys to decode with (once the code had been part broken by the code-breakers themselves).

To decode the messages, a number of British Typex cryptos were modified to operate like Enigma machines. This allowed them to decode the messages even though they only had a small number of actual Enigma machines, using the keys that had been found using the Bombe.

There's a photo of a modified Typex on this site - http://www.jharper.demon.co.uk/typex1.htm

TTFN
Lauren

[alamotex]

It has been revealed in a recent BBC TV documentary...Bletchley Codebreakers, The Forgotten Heroes that the most important German High Command strategic orders were encripted on a far more complex machine than the ENIGMA... called LORENZ. The breaking of codes encripted on LORENZ was a truly amazing feat, intitially accomplished by a young British mathmatician named William Tutte. He later became a professor in the Maths Dept of the University of Waterloo,Ontario , Canada. Only now can his story be told and along with that of Tommy Flowers who engineered the Collosus. It is claimed that William Tutte taught the young fellows who later devised the encription coding system used for RIM's Blackberry.

[John McGillivray]

One would have thought that with all of the British work on breaking the German codes they would have being more careful with their own codes. Throughout the war the Royal Navy was using an antiquated book code which the Germans had easily broken. The British were broadcasting all the details of their Atlantic convoys which the Germans were using to intercept them with their wolf packs. The Royal Navy’s stupidly came very close to losing the war!