ENIGMA Machines

[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!

[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!