The real story of how Enigma was broken - Sir Dermot Turing

I'm jerry mccarthy, I'm a volunteer at the national computing museum in bletchley park and I'd like to introduce our speaker, sir

dermot

turing

, who is the acclaimed author of professor alan

turing

's book that cracked a biography of his famous uncle also more recently. the award-winning I am not a polyglot like our host. I propose to speak in English even though this is a

story

of international cooperation. Let's start with what people expect from the

story

of breaking the

enigma

code. The traditional story, as told by film companies, is that Benedict Cumberbatch cracked the riddle after many years of sweat and toil in a garden shed at the back of Bletchley Park.

Well, let's see, I mean, I'm not looking to challenge much of that, apart from the garden shed or the many years of hard work, but I think that actually the

real

story is perhaps more interesting than the Hollywood version and therefore , I would propose starting in a slightly different location than the garden shed. Start with this document which is located in the National Archives of the United Kingdom and was prepared, if I remember correctly, in 1938 by John Tiltman, who was probably Britain's greatest crypt analyst of all time and replaced Dilly Knox as chief cryptographer. of the government code at the cipher school when knox died in 1942, so what does this say, uh, and you can read it yourselves, but in 1931, friendship provided us with photographs and instructions for the use of the german army

enigma

machine and then Tiltman continues. and says that the photographs show an accessory on the front of the machine that does not appear on the publicly available model, he refers to the socket board that can be seen in the image of the enigma machine and then goes on to say we don't understand what it does the socket panel and then poses a series of questions, please, can the French give us all the information they have about all these things?

The importance of this document is that in 1938 British code breakers were still trying to decipher the actual mechanics of the German army version of the Enigma machine. They were so far away from breaking codes that there was no prospect of them being able to decipher a single message the Germans had sent because they didn't. They didn't know the basics, they didn't know what the internal wiring of the machine was, they didn't know how the socket board fit into the overall mechanism of the thing, they didn't know what the wiring was for the rotors on them in the machine and so on, and so on.

Without that knowledge it would have been completely presumptuous of anyone to start thinking of ways to find the settings of the enigma machine the Germans were using for incitement; In other words, let's face it, the British in 1938 were in a state of almost total ignorance and, what's more, that state of ignorance persisted until six weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War. This seems quite remarkable to me because the next thing that happens quite surprisingly, in fact, let me go back, the next thing that happens quite surprisingly is that by September of 1939, three or four weeks after the outbreak of the war, there are documents In the National Archives they talk about the engineering requirements that the government's code and encryption school has to build bomb machines that would be used to find the settings on the enigma machines.

This is remarkably fast. They've gone from not having the first clue about the inside of the enigma machine to talking about building bomb machines to do precisely what I thought would be very presumptuous to do to find configurations. that the Germans were using in their puzzle machine, how on earth could such an advance in knowledge have happened in such a short time? Well, of course, the standard answer is that Benedict Cumberbatch is a brilliant actor and that's why he made it all up in In the space of just six weeks, I don't think the

real

story is much funnier and it starts with some of my friends who I would like to introduce you.

On the left we have Hans Tilo Schmidt, a German from the World War. a decorated ex-military man, had the iron cross, I don't know what class for his fighting in the trenches after the first world war, like most of the German army, he is demobilized and is basically trying to find a job for him that pays him . to keep him in nice stiff collars and look as smart as he does in that photo that turns out to be his Nazi party membership card photo. He can't find that job, but he is lucky to have been tricked by his brother. in the German encryption office of the Ministry of War and has access to the safe in which the most secret documents are kept and among those documents are the instruction manual and the key configuration instructions for the German army version of the enigma machine and schmidt en He's not stupid so he sees a business opportunity here and walks up to the French embassy in Berlin and asks to speak to the military attaché and he says I have some documents that might be of interest to the French government and me.

I am willing to sell them. This was a pretty good career path for many Germans in the early post-war years, so the French had established a process for dealing with people like Schmidt who came in off the street and had things for sale. getting these walk-ins examined by the man in the middle I don't think I would have wanted to confront this guy, he seems pretty scary and that's how most people reacted to him. Well, it's hard to know what name to give. I give it to him because he had about seven or eight pseudonyms, as befits a spymaster, but at the time he met Hans Tilo Schmidt, his name was Rudolph Lemmon, he was born in Germany, he had spent much of his life traveling through South America. . countries in Europe and his profession before retiring was that of a criminal card shop, he fleeced young people in casinos and tried to avoid being sent to prison, not always successfully and he retired as a rich man in the immediate post-world war period. an era in which the natural career progression of a retired criminal is to be captured by the French security services as a spy.

I mean, frankly, if you can fleece all these innocent bystanders, you're probably not bad. judge of character and it was a good choice because he meets hans tilo schmidt in a secret place and examines him and thinks that it could very well be the real deal, what he cannot do because he does not have the expertise is to see if these documents that schmidt has to the sale are really of some use so call gustav better who is the man on the right is the head of the french section d of the department of military intelligence section d is made up of bertrand and his secretary, so not really It's a very large department, but his role is to buy and sell code books that could be useful to the German or French army, so he is the natural person to carry and the three of them meet.

One day in 1932 in the reception area of ​​a hotel in the Belgian town of Velvie as they and Schmidt drink brandy and smoke cigars and talk about the upcoming German elections that they are trying to send to the upstairs bathroom with a camera and a photographer. and they take these two guys they take pictures of these books that Schmidt has secretly taken out of the safe they take pictures so that Schmidt can put them back in the safe the next day and no one will notice these documents are things like these are In the song Enigma edition of 1930 you will see that the upper right corner has a white square and the reason is that they covered up the copy number of the instruction booklet of uh so that if the photographs were leaked, it would not be possible.

To trace the source back to Schmidt to know that it was he who provided the French with this vital document. The fragment of text in the middle refers to the law of June 3, 1914 against military treason and treason. uh it tells you what unpleasant things will happen to you if this particular document gets leaked, so obviously this is pretty serious stuff and what's more, it's pretty exciting. It is an illustrated document. It has photographs, including the one on the right, which is a The image I'm sure you can instantly see is a picture of an Enigma machine and that's precisely what John Tiltman was referring to when he said, "Well, we received some documents from the French a few years ago and they show an attachment on the forehead that we don't really understand these documents are in the hands of the French, but what they don't contain are the detailed engineering drawings of the inside of the enigma machine It's a user manual. and so it tells you how to operate it.

I don't tell you how it's connected, so there's a problem here. Let me continue with this slide for a second. There's a problem here for Bertrand and his colleagues because Bertrand goes to the code breakers. French military intelligence and tells them, "Look, I've got this." You know what the wiring is, you are not going to break any code. That's why Treason approached Tiltman because he thought the British could do better than his colleagues and they got the same response, so in his third approach he has a third option that he can follow and that is to talk to his. newly established. uh a relationship that's been recently established with the cipher office in Warsaw, so I want to talk to you a little bit about Poland's position between the wars because it's pretty central to our story on this pretty crappy old German map that we have.

I have several things that I have scribbled on it. You can see the outline of interwar Poland in bright green and you can see Poland's current boundaries which are outlined in black. The other lines show you what the history was before the First World War. the pink outline was the border of the German empire, the yellow outline was the border of the Tsarist empire and below, south of the pink and yellow lines, is the Austro-Hungarian empire, so you can see that Poland basically did not exist in the period before World War I, at least it had not existed for about 120 years, as the Poles had reestablished their nation after World War I ended, the position was really crucial because they were caught between the defeated orbit.

German empire of which you can see that there is a little bit not only the little bit to the left which is, sorry, to the west, which is the part of West Prussia, but there is also pressure to the east towards the north of them, as well as their old enemies the russians now in the form of the soviet union in the east now this makes life quite interesting because in what we know is the polish corridor you can see that this is precisely where the germans are We will communicate with each other by radio to receive messages from the west to the east of Prussia and in the middle you will find the city of Poznan which I have marked with the red arrow and it is in Poznan where the Polish military intelligence decided to set up a school for code breakers in the department of mathematics at the university there and that mathematics department was fortunate to have some very bright guys who attended as students in the early 1920s, and these guys were deliberately recruited because of some of the messages that the surveys that have detected from their interception station uh also in Poznan appeared to have been machine-incited and were therefore unlikely to be susceptible to the type of code-breaking techniques that were used for manual ciphers during the First World War that they needed because they were machines.

Ciphers needed a different approach and thought that mathematicians would be well prepared to tackle those problems, so by 1933 surveys had begun to put some of these mathematicians on the problem of the puzzle machine and the messages they were collecting. in the polish corridor in seyford using enigma one of the mathematicians the one on the left here wearing military uniform so this dates from much later in the war years but never mind this is marion ryevsky um he is now separated as a polish hero and The reason for this is that in 1933 they sat him in a small and rather dirty office at the headquarters of Polish military intelligence in Warsaw and gave him a commercial puzzle machine without a plug, gave him a bunch of intercepted messages and gave him the documents copies of the photographic documents that bertrand had brought from vervier and that schmidt had taken from the safe the previous year, what ryewski was able to do by applying the mathematical knowledge he had acquired at the university of poznan was to discover that the problem of the enigma and Its wiring was a problem of group theory, more specifically permutation theory, and could be expressed as mathematical equations and many years later, Ryewski wrote his memoirs and expounded the equation,some of which I've presented during You're on this slide hoping that someone, and I know Jerry, is running for this.

He speaks Polish and also speaks permutation theory and can tell me what exactly it means. I don't speak any of those languages, so I just sit there. and think well, this is quite impressive, however, Rievsky had a problem, it was a classic problem that even non-mathematicians can understand and that is that it had several equations and I think it had six equations and unfortunately it had an additional unknown and you can't solve the equations if you have more unknowns than equations, so his equations would never be solved and without solving them he would never figure out what the wiring of the machine was, but then he had an idea. and i'll just take you back to the map of poland because if you think about where he had grown up in poznan at the time he grew up before the first world war, which was part of the german empire and that's why his teachers taught him in german and he knew everything about the German way of thinking and then he said to himself if I were German and I was connecting a puzzle machine, how would I connect the letters on the keyboard to the place where the electricity enters the three? rotating coding wheels the rotors of the machine I know he would probably use alphabetical order because that's the ordered way Germans think about problems and so he tried it and that was one of the variables he was missing and in trying to get the number correct number of equations and the correct number of unknowns and he was able to start solving things and lo and behold, his guess actually worked.

It turned out that there were 26 factorial guesses and by simply choosing the alphabetical order to test it, he chose the correct one completely by chance. It was both a fantastic psychological achievement and also an amazing mathematical achievement because as a result of that the Polish engineers were able to build fake enigma machines like the one on the right side of the slide and you can see that the plugs on the back and the keyboards in alphabetical order it is definitely not a German enigma machine but it is functionally equivalent it has the three rotors it has the plug board it does exactly the same job and the Poles started making enigma machines for themselves and this is one of the i think there are two, possibly three surviving examples of Polish model Enigma machines that still exist, so the problem is well solved, not really because what they did in early 1934 was create Enigma machines, what they haven't done is devise any technique to find . the configurations that the Germans use to effectively set the key of the day to encrypt messages there are 150 million million million different ways to configure an end machine, just think about it, there are the three rotors, but you can choose which rotors to use and you can Choose what order you put them in the machine.

Not a huge number of permutations at the beginning of World War II, when they had five rotors to choose from. There are only 60 permutations. No big deal, but then there's the question of which rotor. which letter on the rotor will be at the top of the puzzle machine when you start the prompting and there are 26 times 26 times 26 possibilities, that's 17,000 odd, again, that's not a particularly big number, you could do that, it would be painful. It would take a lot of people to try all the possibilities, it could be done by brute force, but the killer was that socket board, that socket board, something like 150 million million possibilities, where you could never do that through of brute force, some intelligent way was needed.

To solve the socket board problem, you needed some clever way to find out through more than just guesswork what settings the Germans used. They kept in mind that they changed frequently during the 1930s. They did not change. as often as they did after the war started and this is probably how the Polish code breakers managed to start finding solutions where they had enough traffic to work with using the same settings to start finding patterns and this is where they trained the other two mathematicians at the same time as ryevsky in poznan comes to the fore, these are yoji rizhitsky and henrik zukowski shown on this slide and these guys are the ones who can come up with really quite innovative techniques for finding ryewski enigma scenarios, i think it was Sorry, Ruzzitsky, I think he was the one who mainly thought of solutions in mathematical and mechanical terms and certainly invented this machine called a cyclometer, which Jerry is the expert in having a built-in cyclometer simulator and this machine exploited duplicate letters, which appeared in the opening sequence of german enigma messages, we can talk a little more about the details of that in the q section if you want, this was absolutely crucial in eliminating the large number of possible configurations because these repeat letter matches were only confined. to a very limited range of rotor positions.

I also think that Ruzicki was probably the dominant force behind the development of a more sophisticated machine, the one you can see on the right of the slide, called a bomb. effectively a fully automated device so they could get it up and running and then go to lunch and then come back and hope that the machine had given them some suggestions as to what rotor starting positions were actually in use at the time. Zagowski's contribution is to uh effectively do the same job but using perforated cardboard sheets and the holes in the perforated sheets which again there is an example on the slide that represents where these duplicate letters appear in the initial sequence of messages um and there is a different sheet for each combination of rotor and um so and the pattern of holes will be different in each thing and the idea is that you place in a light box the sheets that correspond to the messages that you have observed during the day and the repeated letter sequences that you have observed in those messages. and you stack the leaves on top of each other and hopefully when you have stacked enough the light will only penetrate through one or two of the holes when several leaves have shadowed it and that should give you an indication as to which rotors are in use and which letter is highest at the beginning of the encryption process.

These guys have done all this, they have solved the problem of wiring the Enigma machine and they have solved the problem. of how to find the settings and they solved the problem of how to automate that process in 1938, at a time when you will remember that the British still haven't gotten anywhere on any of those problems. I've been rude to the British, it's time to introduce them. They, um, here's Aleister Denniston, the head of the government's coding school, looking pretty dapper and here's their number one cryptologist, Dilly Knox, looking a lot smarter than he usually looked in real life. and it's the team's braincase that Dilly Knox could really crack. enigma, he had techniques for finding settings, but he was only using the commercial machine that didn't have the plug board and he knew the rotor wiring, so he's pretty good, but he doesn't master this particular problem.

These two guys receive an invitation from the French one day. The French are trying, for political reasons, to get the British to cooperate much more closely with respect to the threats that the French perceive on the eastern border, namely that they will make it invaded again by the Germans and a way in which they are trying to do it. that is strengthening intelligence cooperation because they think that intelligence cooperation will also lead to large-scale military cooperation and what they do is suggest to the British that the problem of the intractable puzzle could be solved if the French and the British cooperate together. with the polls and you will remember that the franco-polish alliance was what led to the schmidt documents arriving in warsaw and it is quite clear that gustav bertrand, although he has not been told anything substantial, believes that the polls have achieved some kind of advance which they haven't told anyone yet, so he suggests that they all get together for a conference that will take place in January 1939 in Paris and at this meeting everyone will meet each other, shake hands, have dinner and uh and it's all very good and there are actually some quite positive and practical results which are things like interception of radio messages in the late 1930s is a very difficult business so the British could pick up messages that the polls couldn't and the French could capture. messages that neither of the other two countries could and so on, so they agreed to share their traffic and they agree to share the problems they know about and they also agree to share any progress that anyone might stumble upon in the puzzle.

The problem and this agreement to share is formalized in this document that you have here, which Bertrand says, for greater security and also for greater convenience, I suggest that from now on we refer to each other with these code names x for Paris's wife , London and zed for warsaw and then he goes on and says please number all your documents so we can keep track this is the beginning of the xyz alliance the polls you will notice haven't actually said anything to the other two allies about what they have In Enigma it is still very dangerous for them to go into all those details, but we all know what happened in the spring of 1939 and we also know that the Germans had changed their enigma procedure and, in particular, had added two new rotors to the library. . of rotors that could be placed on the machine chosen to place three on the machine and which had basically eliminated the Poles' ability to use their bomber machines to crack enigma codes due to the elevation of six permutations that are possible with three rotors to choose from. to 60, that is, choosing three out of five meant that they needed 60 bombers and they only had six, they did not have the technological scalability to build the additional 54 bombers and that meant that if they were to maintain their ability to read riddles, they needed to cooperate with another country that could help them with the engineering problem, so what the surveys did was call another conference which took place in Warsaw in the third week at the end of the third week of July 1939. place in this building on this slide you can see that this It is a modern photograph and there is a plaque on the building to the left, just behind the Christmas tree, which actually commemorates the activity of the Polish code breakers who at this stage have been evacuated. from the center of Warsaw and located in this building which is essentially the entrance to a large underground bunker, it is still a NATO military installation so it has soldiers outside protecting it, but it is basically the same building and in that building in July In 1939, surveys revealed everything they knew about Enigma to the French and the British.

Deniston brought a document from that meeting which is again in the UK national archives. It is this one on the right and you can see that it is written in German, which may be curious, but this was the language that the three participating parties had in common, they all spoke German because Germany was the common enemy and people will not be surprised Knowing that basically the British and French fought with the Polish in 1939, some things haven't changed. jerry is an honorable exception to that particular topic, the brits spoke french, the french didn't speak any english and the surveys spoke some french so they could have done it in french but not all, not all spoke french and so it was easier to continue in German and the list of things that the surveys revealed is in German.

If you just take a look, we've got some really cool stuff here. We have the theory of Ruzitsky and Ryevsky. of cycles which is what led to the cyclometer we have a rebuild of the rotors the chiffrier valves we have how to find the cross connections on the plug board alfin uh we have the cyclometer at number 10 and most notably we have we have the new cipher wheels forum five and most notably at number 15 we have d bonban uh and 16 das netscaphar and these are the bomb machines and the perforated sheet theory developed by zygoski. giving away absolutely everything and I think we can now understand how it was that when Knox and Denniston returned from Warsaw at the end of July 1939, literally five weeks before World War II broke out in Poland, they returned with enough knowledge. to be able to develop a new type of bomb, the one we now know is the Welshman Turing bomb, as seen in the national computer science museum and which can be put into development and therefore is something that can be discussed conceptually with the engineers. very soon after the outbreak of war for the pilot, prototype model to be delivered to Bletchley Park in the spring of 1940, before Britain was fully at war because, although Poland was defeated, we must not forget that there was this period of the false. warwhich lasted until April 1940 and it was before the end of the bogus war that that not very good prototype bomb machine was developed and delivered to Bletchley Park, so that is the explanation of how we went from zero to world war winning weapon , I'm sorry.

That's too illustrative, isn't it a world war winning weapon in such a short period? This transfer was absolutely crucial. I'm going to spend the last few slides doing a little sequel because I think part of it was what I wanted. to show you this beautiful photo of the reconstructed bomb at tnmoc and to pay due honor to alan turing and gordon welshman for taking polish concepts and taking them to another level and uh, no, I shouldn't give a talk on enigma without celebrating it, but in Actually what I'm doing is going into the history of Polish code breakers.

The question that immediately presented itself to me was what really happened to them when the war broke out, you know, surely they won't just be erased from history in some way and their story actually turns out to be quite interesting. I'm just going to give you a very abbreviated version because I don't want to waste your time. They escaped to France, as we know that the Germans invaded France in May 1940. And uh, they had to escape a second time, they ended up in North Africa and Bertrand rescued them from there and set up a secret code-breaking facility in this castle, just uh, uh, in pueblas, it's close to Avignon, a lovely tourist part of France.

The weather is very beautiful, it's absolutely stunning and I was working in the shadows, not necessarily in harmony with the goals of the Vichy government, I was still in contact with the British and they were still spying on the Germans from this castle and you can see these photos. that we have polish code breakers doing things, there is one on a bike ride that went to papa avignon palace, we have the beginnings of the european soccer league in the top right corner with uh, i particularly like that photo because ziegowski and others are playing football wearing their suits, which I mean, it's obviously proper football attire for 1942 um they have girlfriends zip code breaker with girlfriend bottom left Beartron is sitting in a stone jar with his wife um and then there are all kinds of the games with the staff castle, there's the teenage girl who hides in one of these, I mean this is kind of funny, it's like it humanizes these people, I think it's absolutely fascinating what they did and then France was invaded for a second.

Just as the torch landings were happening in North Africa in late 1942 and the Polish code breakers had to flee once again, this time the Germans had done some intelligence analysis on the documents they found in Warsaw in 1939 and They had discovered that the Poles had had an enigma code-breaking operation and the names of the Polish code-breakers and mugshots were circulating around France on these wanted lists, these things called fandunks nachface um and this one from March 19, 1943 it has the names of uh rizzitsky rivsky ziegowski and his bosses and a bunch of other polish guys who are also less famous and were trying to track them down the date of march 1943 is actually pretty good for polish code breakers because at this point They already have a three month lead on the Germans, however they are being chased around this part of France shown on the map, the places where Martin with the red dots is where they had close encounters and in some cases arrests and some of The Polish code breakers failed to cross the mountains into Spain.

Ryewski and Ziegowski did manage to cross and arrived at this place. If you look, there is a red dot that is on the Spanish side of the border in a town called. Um and uh they got the Spanish to arrest them there and they were interned for six months until the red cross found them and expatriated them to Britain, that in itself is interesting, so there are photos of uh, there is a post-war photo of zukowski looks like a movie star in britain that building behind him is a barclays bank clearly shows that he is in britain and ryewski is reading a book that is still there while they are in france but these two returned to britain and reported for duty to the polish military intelligence headquarters then established in london who put them to work in this place that if you take the train to bletchley from london, you will actually pass by there, you will be 200 meters from where ryewski and czechowski spent the years from 1943 to 1945 at a polish military intelligence signals intelligence facility in felden and just outside hamilhampton station, which you can see marked on the map there and then you go to Ask yourselves why on earth the demateuring has detached itself from your senses and he's giving a talk on how to crack enigma codes and he has a hammer and sickle flag showing what's going on on earth, well what's going on on earth is that in early 1944, the cracking operation of the Enigma code makes no sense for the polls to continue because it's being done in Virtual Park and it's being done in spades in Bletchley Park, so there's no point in having Ryewski and Ziegowski doing their own little two-man enigma show in felden the big threat to poland in 1944 was what were the russians going to do on poland's eastern border when the war ended, were they going to reestablish poland's 1939 borders and return to the ussr, where they had come from or where they were going to continue the appropriation of the eastern provinces of Poland that they had carried out in 1939, at this stage, of course, Russia is an important ally of the United States, the United Kingdom and Free France and is not politically appropriate for the allies spy on the Russians and certainly the Poles who are most threatened by the Russians cannot trust their allies to do that for them, so Ryewski and Ziegelski are trained intensively in the Russian language and put to decoding Russian messages to find out. what are the Russian intentions and that's what they spent the rest of World War II doing well, so that ends my presentation, the story of x, y and zed, now I'm going to stop sharing my screen and I think, jerry, if you are happy to do so. uh moderate the q part of the session um you should be happy to get started okay I suggest if anyone has any questions put them in the chat box and we'll take it from there and at the moment it's all very quiet , all Martin Killer.

Well, I'll just allow what I need to do is allow participants to unmute themselves as well. Martin, who volunteers at the national computing museum, asks: Do you think the polls expected more help from the French and British by building more bombers instead of the The British are taking full control to break the puzzle in the future. Yes, I absolutely believe that is true. At the time they shared, in July 1939, the Polish calculation, I believe, was that the British would provide the engineering boost they needed and the French. provide the military boost they needed, don't forget the French army, I mean we forgot this because the French were defeated very quickly in 1940, but the French army was the most formidable armed force in Europe at that time and everything that the polls What I wanted to know was that if the Germans invaded, which they were pretty sure would happen very soon, the French would swarm in from the west and subject the Germans to the most ruthless military treatment imaginable, so that was really the deal they made.

They would get Germany into a two-front war at the expense of the secret enigma. I think no one had predicted that the French response in 1939 would be so pathetic and no one had predicted that the blitzkrieg in Poland would be so quick and so decisive. Certainly, on their departure from Poland in 1939, the Poles tried to take with them all the enigma equipment they could and then abandoned it. It was too heavy. It was too bulky. It was too much. so they burned some of it, they buried some of it and if anyone is planning to visit Ukraine, then apparently a big part of it is buried in or just outside the city of um, it should work if I remember correctly, it's true.

So that's the name of the town and there is a town called Vladim Vladimir or something like that, anyway, someone has a metal detector. I'm visiting Ukraine, get back to me and I'll try to give you instructions on where these things might be. buried yeah thanks class what's your opinion on the movie imitation game and what do I think of the enigma and u571 movies and are there others um well let's start with are there others? So, jerry and I have spent many happy hours talking about the famous masterpiece. from late communist Polish cinema, which is a complete treatment of the story I just tried to summarize for you and of course it's in Polish with Adolf Hitler played by a Polish actor who walks into the room and gives a Nazi salute. and he says um jindable to uh to all the generals gathered about him and this is not meant to be a comedic moment but I'm afraid it is, so there's another movie and it's apart from some nonsense that's kind of not historically correct. um fertile subplot for female fans um it's actually quite accurate and, apart from its unintentional comedic moments, it's actually not bad as a documentary as a piece of drama, it's pretty rotten, it has to be said um and it's extremely hard to come by. the other movies you mention, um, let's put them in the box of you go to the movies to be entertained, you don't go to the movies to educate yourself about the history, what do you do, I hope that when you go to the movies to be entertained, you think, oh, it's a story. interesting.

I wonder what the truth is. I'll go and find out. I think if you get too upset about the accuracy of historical names in movies, then you probably won't understand what it means. movies are for um and uh the imitation game has many uh flaws u7571 is a wonderful piece of fiction uh and enigma is not intended to be anything more than fiction so um I mean they're all, they're all good They're all fun, but no take them too seriously, is what I would say on the list. There is a question from John Gilbert. Any information on the Warsaw postal diplomatic interception and wiring map made between 1928 and 1930.

No. For my part, I'm afraid I don't know anything about that. I'm sorry, John. Hopefully someone else on the call is better informed than me and can give you an answer in the chat box, but you. No, no, no, no, no, not for me, sorry, and then we have Chris Miles, do we know how much the Germans knew or suspected about the Allies' ability to crack puzzles just to be safe? Why wouldn't they have added extra rotors, for example, to ruin our methods, yes, this is a very good question, then, and I'm afraid it's worth a whole talk on its own, but let me try to be concise, the German navy, In particular, Dernitz had very strong suspicions about the Allies' ability to crack Enigma and was resisted by his experts, who told him that Enigma was basically unbreakable. the German army had exactly the opposite experience.

German army experts believed that Enigma was unsafe because there was a danger that it would not be used correctly and they spent many hours. time trying to convince the generals of the German army that there were improvements in practice that needed to be implemented, which if they had done so would have been a real headache for the allies, and then secondly, developing the technical adaptations of the enigma machine to improve security, those technical adaptations were finally put in place and began to be used in late 1944 and 1945, but by then it was too late, if they had done it three years earlier, it probably would have been done well.

I'm not going to say that it would have made a big difference because at that time the British and the Americans were so good at technical solutions that maybe they wouldn't have been rejected for a long time, but it could have made it, it could have made a difference, so it's A very complex story but it is a great question. Thanks for asking Dave Harlow. Did the Polish team feel protected, especially after arriving in England? Oh yeah, that's another one, um, and that's another good, good question, um, so basically there's two answers to one is an answer to a question that you didn't ask, which is kind of like the truth of the story of that the polls tried to go to Bletchley Park and were rejected, um, that's half true, that story certainly Rievsky wrote a memo saying I'm bored here in Felden and I want to do real things and can't the British integrate us into their enigma team that didn't go anywhere and I don't think it went anywhere because the British rejected it?

I think it got nowhere because it got lost in the bureaucracy between Polish military intelligence and MI6 and the problem was that in 1944, when Ryesky wrote his application, no one who knew Ryewski was still around, Knox was dead, Deniston had been moved aside to do diplomatic co-breakdown. Alan Turing was not there. at Bletchley Park and these were the only onesBritish people who had actually met the Polish team, so there was no one to speak for them, but to the question you actually asked if they were protected, yes, I think they were protected, I think. They were adequately looked after by Polish military intelligence and it was only after the British government decommissioned the Polish government in exile in favor of the Soviet-sponsored Lublin government that had assumed power at the end of the war that things began. to go badly and it became quite dangerous for Polish people, particularly Polish military intelligence people, to return to their opponents, so it was surprising to me that Ryfsky decided to return.

He is one of the people who says that there were only three political disruptors. Not true, there were at least a dozen. in the UK at the end of the war and I think Ryewski I may be corrected on this so if anyone knows better please speak up but I think he is the only one I know who actually returned to Poland and the others. they all stayed in the UK um or France and um that just shows what the extent of danger they perceived to themselves was if they went to essentially Soviet controlled Poland um from George Baker uh if the Germans knew there was an enigma decoding in 1943 Why didn't they add complexity?

Well, of course they did, but hey, I guess they did. In the Enigma naval machines, they introduced a fourth rotor in 1942, which caused a serious setback for the British and the Americans, and they introduced the Enigma which had some sort of thing where you could basically change the settings every hour. . They didn't like using it, but they introduced it and they also introduced that they were going to release something called "look and thriller valtter." which was a rotor with a variable rotation notch, um, which they were in the process of deploying in 1945, when the war ended, they were just late, they were just too late, that was the real problem, of course there was this.

Which is that they simplified the message headers so that the cyclometer, bomber and zygoski blades no longer worked just in time for the touring Welsh bomb to take over with its slightly different working method, um uh, I'm very Loved, Jerry. Today we are boom coordinators and we both have images of bomb um bomb behind us you, uh, from martin gillo again, do you have your own enigma machine? And if not, is there a model you would love to have? I don't have my own riddle. machine um they're incredibly expensive so I went to an auction in New York City a few years ago and one sold for a hundred thousand dollars so they're not the kind of thing that you know gets put in your shopping basket while You go to Morrisons, is there a specific model I would love to have?

Well, no, I wouldn't be picky, so if you offer me one, I'll take it no matter what. It's um, but uh, I mean, I think I think it's kind of interesting, I think a lot of people, unlike you, Martin, as an expert, unlike you, people wouldn't appreciate if there was a whole family of different types of enigma machines and that not only from the commercial one without the plug board to the standard German army air force model with the three rotor model with plug board and then the German navy model with space for this extra rotor no rotary which is quite strange to have a non-spinning but full rotor machine and then there were the special plugless four rotor machines used in the reflux fair which were very instrumental in providing the British with very interesting intelligence, particularly before the D-day, so I mean all of these things are kind of iconic in their own way, so it's a little hard to choose, so I'm avoiding the question.

Sorry, so we have time for maybe a couple more questions and those, conveniently, are a Couple more questions from Michael for short messages of about 50 characters, what hardware and procedural changes could best improve security even today nowadays or enigma type machines on any type of machines, so the interesting thing is that all the security improvements are well known in the past. 1930s and 1940s the way the bomb machine works is by splicing the plaintext content of the messages with the observed intercepted ciphertext, so if you can disguise the plaintext enough then you'll be in good shape. path to improved security. and the Germans were fully aware of this, the British were fully aware of this and basically everyone screwed it up, so no one gets any awards for good encryption security.

Elementary errors are things like not starting your messages, so if you are a serving French officer the only acceptable way to report to your superior officer is to say more general jaylon, know that I have the honor of presenting my report and no report is militarily acceptable without the polite phraseology at the beginning if you're going to say that send it in plain text don't prompt him then there are things like place names and things like that frankly it's sensible to encode it before you encrypt it and change the code frequently so it's difficult for your opponent to figure it out.

Understand what you're trying to say and let's face it, the Germans were pretty good at this, so they coded the position uh, geographic positions in the North Atlantic. Firstly, they used a system of squares subdivided into small squares instead of longitude and latitude coordinates and then later in the war they used, they had code names for particular locations in the Atlantic that were designed to disguise what the positions were. on their grid, so I think everyone knew the principles, it's really difficult. to put it into practice, okay and now let's have this last question from Rachel Lawson, when all this strange equipment starts showing up, what kind of skepticism regarding its effectiveness did you have to face from people?

Yes, that's good, thank you. Rachel, so I think going back to Klaus' question about the imitation game, I think one of the things it does quite well, from a thematic perspective, is convey the idea that if you're involved in a secret setting high-tech, it's going to be extremely difficult to persuade people who don't know the secrets to give you the resources you need to build this expensive, cutting-edge kit, and while I don't like the way they've done it. that and particularly the way they dressed Charles, danced in a naval uniform and made him a very different character from how he was in real life, what Deniston was like in real life, the right points and I think there was a lot there. skepticism about why this dark place no one had ever heard of should have rights.

I mean, for example, again, there are documents in the national archives where the poor administrator, the staff at Bletchley Park, are complaining because they can't get I can't get enough typewriters. You know that the typewriter is not a particularly sophisticated piece of equipment, but although the mail that arrived at Bletchley Park was so-so, don't you know that there is a war going on about why they should take priority over typewriters? and you know if that's what they get on typewriters, God knows what they get on the other more complicated equipment and then I think behind your question there's also the idea that it's not this stuff that comes out of the coded messages. .

Too good to be true and therefore perhaps we should treat it with some skepticism and I think you see an evolution during the war years with the top brass being very skeptical in 1940 about what was coming out of the intelligence signals and the decoded messages. and at the end of the war being much more receptive to its value and in some cases maybe being too dependent on it, so yeah, you're absolutely right about that too-good-to-be-true idea. Well, I think that brings us to a convenient closing point uh tnmoc reopens physically we hope that on May 28th you come and see the reconstruction of the bomb and test a real enigma machine says uh one of my colleagues um I would also like to thank the sir Derwent for spending an hour and a half with us tonight.

It has been a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. Thank you. I would like to show everyone a list of upcoming conferences below. In a week, a week less, a couple of hours, in fact, I will be giving a talk on the pulsar bomb, the polish bomb, which is the predecessor of the tour version of the bomb, of which I have a simulation in the table right there and then I have Claus May and Ilanka Dunin who will give a second lecture on the famous and not so famous unsolved codes and then we will move on to various lectures after that and in May when there will be more lectures so please come back and take a Look at our calendar, you should find us online pretty easily and I hope to see some of you next week.