Inside Britain's Top Secret Codebreaking Organisation That Cracked Enigma | Station X | Timeline

this channel is part of Network history these people are destroying the evidence erasing every memory of what happened here this was the

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x a mysterious institution buried deep in the English countryside the allies the best kept

secret

of the second world war everything was destroyed, it was' In a fragment that remained in 1940, Britain was alone against Hitler. Defeat seemed inevitable. Her cities were being battered and bombed in the Atlantic. German submarines were wreaking havoc. The surrender was only a few weeks away. Churchill had a

secret

weapon. The most curious military establishment in the world. Crossword Fanatics Chess Champions School mathematicians and teachers, all with a common goal: destroy the powerful German code machine Enigma, the machine that carried all the secret German war plans, unless they could unlock the mystery of Enigma, the war would ensue.

I would lose. What happened here? It was one of the most notable stories of World War II about how a group of untrained young men who had never seen a code in their lives unraveled the Enigma. Never in the history of war has one side learned so many secrets of the enemy. was to remain hidden for 30 years tonight's program revisits Station Tanks and planes brought Europe to its knees Speed ​​was everything and speed of attack meant speed of communication World War II became wireless warfare Every day the skies were filled with radio signals The German high command had trained thousands of wireless operators in preparation for the conquest of Europe the operator's job was to be able to interpret the staccato tones of Morse code in any conditions, but there was still the problem of how to keep the messages secret.

The Germans had developed the most elaborate code-creating device the world had ever seen. The Enigma converted a message into unintelligible gibberish letter by letter when the message was sent in Morse code all the enemy saw was a meaningless string of letters, but when the German operator at the other end typed the coded letters the real message appeared. In this way Vital war plans could be kept absolutely secret The high command never doubted that the Enigma messages were unbreakable to the enemy They were so sure that they used the Enigma throughout the German war machine They never imagined what was about If it happens at Station X this is the machine the German high command believes would protect its secrets.

This is the Enigma. Its complexity is enormous. I mean, if today I sent just one message on an Enigma machine, it would still take a year for a super crazy computer, the fastest in the world, to search for that message without evidence to support what that message could have been. If you love history then you You'll love history Our extensive documentary library features everything from the ancient origins of our earliest ancestors to the daring mission to sink the Bismar History has hundreds of exclusive documentaries with unmatched access to the world's best historians, we're committed to bringing you to history fans with award-winning documentaries and podcasts they can't find anywhere else.

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of the code in the box long before the war began the airwaves were filled with coded messages as Hitler prepared for battle the British knew they would have to break the Enigma in 1938 the British secret service bought Bletchley Park, a gawky mansion 50 miles north of east London was to be the new code-breaking headquarters. A wireless receiver was installed to pick up German messages. Its call sign was Station X and that became the unit's new name.

It would take a code-breaker of sorts to unravel the mysteries of the Enigma that the Secret Service had created. find their people, the interviews started earlier, who a few years before were considered too young and did not know anything important or were not real people, were not significant adults, suddenly, they were the people who had the keys to decipher codes of the Reich, yes. It was a somewhat esoteric profession, but it wasn't clear exactly who would make a good codebreaker. The people who were recruited were asked if they did crossword puzzles and they said yes, that they enjoyed doing them and that they did them well, which was usually enough to get them there. in we discovered that people from a variety of backgrounds did very well anthropologists egyptologists paleontologists and even the occasional lawyer turned out to have the collar

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all that didn't matter the only imperative was to break the Enigma and break it as quickly as possible at that age you can just remove the fire and the half-mad Blaze with enthusiasm and dedication you are not married you don't have to worry about the kids and the rent and so on. , and during that brief period of your life you can live like a madman and you know you hardly sleep and determined to do so, the new technology of the Enigma meant a new approach to breaking codes.

Recruited as the country's brightest, Station X was poised to become the largest code-breaking establishment the world had ever seen. If the Germans ever discovered what was about to happen at Station X, the entire Enterprise would collapse. Secrecy was paramount to the point of obsession. Some didn't even know what they were being recruited for, what I should say, the hoi polloi. The lower grades never knew what happened at Bletchley Park. The only time I realized what we were actually doing was when they showed me a code book that they had just been captured and Bletchley was taken out of a captured plane and of course we didn't have plastic envelopes or anything so I was They handed the poor thing over as he was and I was horrified to see a huge blood stain, blood running down the edges.

It was drying but the blood in the middle was still wet and then I realized that somewhere there was this German this German aircrew bleeding still bleeding while I was decoding he was writing in modern German his new code book and that got really close. war. The German confidence in the Enigma was not without reason, the Enigma was cutting-edge technology. German operators could encode their messages in millions and millions and millions of different ways; pressing a key on a typewriter would illuminate a completely different letter, an electrical current would be sent from the keys to the letters through a series of rotors, each time a key was pressed, a rotor would spin changing the wiring and therefore changing the letter that was produced.

The total number of ways the Enigma machine can be configured for any particular message. is 150 million million, so it was enormous complexity, which is why the Germans thought it was completely safe. Enigma was first developed as a commercial machine in the 1920s and was even patented in London. German banks and railways were among its first customers, but the German army quickly realized that it was ideal for war. German operators in the field received secret instructions from the base on how to configure the machine. Every day they had to make three adjustments to the Enigma so that the sending and receiving machines worked.

First, match which rotors to put on the machine and in what order the rotors contained one of the central secrets of the Enigma machine, which was the cross-wiring inside the wheels. This whole maze of internal wiring changed every time a letter was entered and that's it. which gave the Enigma machine its great complexity, secondly, further confusing the enemy, each of the rotors could be changed every day by adjusting the ring of letters around each rotor, 26 combinations on each wheel, the Third step was the plug board using its secret instructions for the day when the operator could connect each key on the typewriter to a totally different letter, this is what the Germans thought was the killer crypto game.

This plug board allowed you to transpose letters completely, now a pair of letters because there are 26 plugs on the front of the Enigma Machine, you can connect these pairs of letters in an absolutely astronomical number of combinations, approximately one and a half million combinations which you can use on the front, once the machine was set up, the message was encoded letter by letter and then the encoded letters were sent. by Morse to the receiver on the other side, the Germans believed that with the Enigma they had an infallible system. Station were Getting nowhere at the beginning of the war was a great difficulty because, although we had interceptions that we knew were at Seifert using the Enigma machine, we did not know enough details about the machine to be able to even begin to find any method of breaking it. unless you have the exact key, you simply can't get anywhere with it and this is a big difference with any code system before that, that with the Enigma machine there is no sense of closeness, you are not close to a solution.

Either you have the solution or you don't have the solution. The story of how the Enigma was

cracked

began nine years earlier with a spy in 1931, a German army employee, Hans Tilo Schmidt, saw an easy way to make money and sold stolen documents to the French Secret Service abroad he met with their own cryptographers, showed them the documents but got little response. Then the war seemed very far away. Then the Enigma material went to the British. At the time, British cryptographers were not convinced about the creation of mechanical codes and Germany was not. Doesn't seem like much of a threat, the offer was politely rejected, eventually the stolen documents went to the polls with Germany on their backs, their response was very different as soon as the polls saw what was being offered, a deal was made with the stolen documents.

Three brilliant young Polish mathematicians Zigalski Rujinsky and Rayaki set to work on the Enigma. The survey soon realized that they had to discover how the Germans had connected the Enigma's keyboard to the first rotor. The number of possible wiring commands was astronomical, as could any typewriter key. be connected to any letter on the rotor, but if the poles could solve this, it would be a long way to breaking the Enigma. Rayevsky had a flash of inspiration and thought: what if they had been stupid enough to use ABCD as the order around the rotor and had the whole multitude of millions and millions of ways they could have coded the connection from the keyboard to the entry point and they simply chose b c d Mary University, in desperation, they tried to make it work and suddenly got the internal connections of the entire German force machine but then, on the eve of the invasion of Poland, the Germans introduced even more complications in the Enigma and the surveys could no longer read any of the messages they needed help out of desperation they invited the British to In a secret meeting deep in a forest near Warsaw they revealed how they had managed to break the Enigma the British were amazed and Diddy Knox was one of the team members who went there and the first thing he asked Rayevsky was what is this mapping. from the keyboard to the input rotor it said ABCD until it plays, it said oh God, we never thought about that, it's too obvious, why don't we think about that within a few weeks of that meeting, Poland was invaded and war broke out, But the changes that the Germans had had? done to the Enigma meant that even with Polish Information Station own messages from around the world.

The network of intercepting stations was one of the last great achievements of the former British Empire, stretching from Scarborough to Singapore. They were known as stations And wherever the Germans were, we listened when there was a lot of excitement, the wires were absolutely humming in Morse. we would be transmitting everywhere, we would really have cramps in our fingers, sometimes trying to write it non-stop, 24 hours a day, all over the world, thousands of operators writing groups of meaningless but vital letters, the raw material for the station X. in 1940The code breakers had their first breakthrough. The German operators were making a small mistake in the way they configured their machines.

It was known as the double indicator. It was going to be the Achilles heel of the

enigma

that the daily instruction sheets had told them. to the German Operator how to configure his

enigma

the rotors and the ring of letters around each rotor were placed in their given positions the sheets then specified how the socket board was to be connected all the enigmas in a network had to be configured identically for the system to work, but there was more an extra level of security if the enemy captured the instruction sheets, they could read all the messages to prevent this, each and every message had its own secret rotor configuration chosen by the operator himself to do this.

First he spun the rotors with three randomly chosen letters, these would be sent by Morse to the operator at the other end in plain text so he could align his machine similarly, but now the operator had to be able to tell it to the operator at the receiving end. what was the actual message configuration they were going for if we were going to start encrypting the message and that had to be transmitted to the operator on the other end but not revealed to any Interceptor and the way they chose to do it was use the Enigma machine to To hide this message, the operator encodes a second group of three letters as the secret message and suppose that you thought of swj how many keys in s w j do the lamps i d b light up because the Germans felt that radio transmissions could be unreliable they took a step further and in fact they asked the operator at the sending end to enter the message settings twice, so the procedure was to enter swj swj and write down the six lamps that came on and that was a crucial error because the repetition of the message settings message gives a cryptographer a Toe Hold to find out what it really is Repetitions are always bad news in cryptography by encoding the same letters twice the Germans were giving codebreakers their first clue as to how the rotors were placed on the Enigma there was soon A second Track Station The error of sending the message having occurred Adjusting it twice revealed a floor in the machine itself, although it was designed to produce randomly coded letters, there were certain situations in which the Enigma was much less random than the Germans would have expected.

There is no such thing as chance, a truly random sequence that can be generated by a purely deterministic machine that simply cannot be. It is part of the definition of randomness that cannot be explained or predicted in any way. The whole game of encryption design is to design machines that are flawed, as they should be, but in which the floors are as small and inconspicuous as possible. It was precisely such a defect that finally broke the Enigma X station called the repeated letters females there could only be a few configurations that could produce these females if code breakers now made their way through them, they would He discovered that the scenarios of that day produced huge cards known as Jeffrey sheets with holes punched in one alphabetical grid representing the positions of the wheels that could produce females by aligning the leaves on top of each other.

Station X could search through the wheel positions to discover what the Enigma had been like. prepared for that day were John Jeffries, they were really here, there is another special baby and they were on some kind of cartridge paper, not very thick card, they were very worn and as far as I remember there were two alphabets that went that way. It was like solving a very difficult crossword puzzle, you could actually see it happen and Triumph, when you found out it worked, it was fascinating, wonderful, absolutely wonderful, there's nothing like seeing a broken code, that's really the best thing, the only thing that was very interesting was that people were very reluctant to go home, then there was a certain amount of movement, you know, people wanted to hang in there on one occasion, I was on the night shift, but when midnight came, I got stuck in a message that had caught me so much.

I worked hard until breakfast time from four in the afternoon until breakfast the next day simply because this had to be done in the spring of 1941 the naval war was brewing in the Mediterranean Hitler had joined forces with the Italian fascists Mussolini, both dictators, dreamed of New World empires. The code breakers knew that the Germans had given the Italians Enigma machines to encrypt their communications. A 19-year-old girl was trying to access Italian messages. Sometimes you had to spend all night guessing. every position that could be on the three different wheels and where we called them red, blue and green, the wheels I think they did too, so you would have to work on it very, very hard and it was I think maybe a rose. eye and one, after you'd done it for a few hours, you wondered if you'd ever see anything when it was right before your eyes because you were so caught up in it all that Mavis and the other code breakers didn't know. but they were about to have their first big impact in the war, what emerged was really good, the drama today is day minus three, nothing more and of course we knew something was going to happen, the Italians were me.

I'm doing something in the Italian Navy in three days, why did they have to say I can't imagine it's getting dark, but they still did it. The British fleet was based in the Egyptian port of Alexandria under the command of Admiral Andrew Cunningham. a message about to arrive at Station that they really should explain everything Mavis had decoded just the message that Cunningham needed to hit the Italians hard and it was pouring rain when I ran absolutely devastated to take it to Italian intelligence to deliver to Cunningham in a matter of hours. The decoded message was on its way to Cunningham in Egypt.

The Italian fleet was gathering off Cape Matapan on the Greek coast. Their plan was to attack a British convoy at midnight. Alexandria was a nest of spies. The problem for Cunningham was that it was difficult to act on the message without reveal his plans, if he led the fleet out to sea, the Italians would know immediately. Cunningham embarked on an elaborate ruse to fool the spies. He wanted his enemies to believe that everything was calm. He did a real Drake with them and, well, a modern Drake because he played golf and pretended he was going to have a weekend off.

Albert Cunningham was a clever guy and she was able to make the enemy think he was socially engaged doing something else and I have no doubt when that was. That information reached Italy in about five minutes, but in the evening Cunningham came aboard again and led the British fleet out to sea to the precise spot where the Italians had gathered. The ruse worked. Cunningham caught the Italians completely off guard. That night the Italians lost almost 3,000 men, the cream of their Navy, it was the first major victory for Station X in the war and the young code breakers were delighted that the Navy did it again.

Here is the British Mediterranean Fleet preparing for what turned out to be the largest naval engagement fought so far in this war, the Battle of Matapan is further proof that Britain is the undisputed ruler of the Mediterranean waves after the Battle of matapán, the Navy where, of course, the Heroes X station was never mentioned, but they had their own. reward then came Cunningham himself, the first thing he wanted to do when he came was to see the real message that he had broken and he was very kind when we had a drink and we were in this little cabin and the wars.

They had just been whitewashed. Now this will show you how silly, young, and giggly we were, but we thought it would be very nice to be able to talk to Admiral Cunningham and get him to lean on the wet white horse and go away. with a white stern, so that's what we did. You know, it's pretty terrible, isn't it? But you know, on the one hand, everything, so it seems to be very organized and silly. The young people want to catch the admiral, but the station. The joy of Darkness fell, Hitler was determined to crush Britain. presentation the bombing The relentless attacks on the main cities became part of everyday life it was a war of blood and nerves well, it was a very good comment the only good German is dead we felt very, very strongly, we were all bombed that Every day at night with high ankles and donias they had killed many people in London and in the cities they could not have any pity for the Germans in those circumstances what a triumph the life of these battered cities over the worst that fire and bombs can do .

In these days of Grimace's war, Station Enigma Station Ironically, it was the technologically advanced Luftwaffe that was most vulnerable. The German Air Force held itself in high esteem as the new Elite, but they had no hope for security. They were ripe. to break for months Station Dark room and I didn't really know what one was looking for and I thought and I thought I had great confidence. I felt that he was going to find some way to return to the foreign path. He turned his thoughts toward the Enigma operator stationed there. The procedures to carry out to prepare each Enigma for the messages of that day.

The configuration of the rotors and the ring. The alphabet ring around the rotors was vital. If the secret instructions were not followed in exact detail, the security of the entire system would be at risk. but John Harrival discovered that the operators were making a fatal mistake. It became known as the herival council. What the operator must do, of course, is that when they have made a setting on a cipher machine, they must always turn the wheels so that it randomizes the position, but the whole tooltip depended on the German operator being under pressure or If the operator was lazy and didn't do that, the operator would have to send the three random letters by Morse to the person at the other end so that both machines were set to the same initial position, but Herravel realized that if the operator hadn't done rotate its rotors as it should, then the three letters it was sending over the uncoded waves would be the Secret Ring.

Stellon's instructions were quickly sent to the Y stations where German messages were transmitted. were intercepted to pay special attention to the first of each day's messages, that's when the error would appear, if it was going to appear, but six studied the initial letter groups of the intercepts as quickly as they arrived to see if the tip of herravel had worked, sometimes the operator had made only a half-hearted attempt to spin the rotors, so lwz had become lyb just a click or two away or perhaps Lux, but as they were drawn more and more groups of letters, the code breakers began to see groups of letters that revealed the original secret configuration Herville's council was working not one operator but many had made similar mistakes in the end red loofah the code was broken The code breakers could now give you to the RAF vital details of how the Luftwaffe was organized and what it was planning even if they didn't You don't always know exactly where or when you don't get a message that says: we're going to do the next big things in the next six months out of Hitler , there is nothing like that story: we received nothing on a plane as a case of an intercept that consisted entirely of figures random figures someone says I wonder if they are coordinates on a map and they all turn out to be bear fields, in fact you got from that they were preparing and building airfields becauseThey were going to concentrate their forces by attacking Britain.

They broke the Air Force Enigma every day until the end of the war and soon discovered other mistakes the operators were making. Every Morse code message could be intercepted by the enemy, so the Germans had to find a way to transmit the settings for each message that only the Enigma operator would be able to decipher. They thought they had found the perfect solution using Enigma itself. to disguise the configuration the operator had already been told to think of three random letters for the initial rotor configuration now he was told to think of three more and write them into the Enigma, they would be the key to that particular message and since They were encoded, they could be transmitted with complete security on the surface, it seems like an infallible indicator system, the true scenario.

The message is hidden, however, the weakness was leaving the selection of the three random letters to the operator and humans are simply not random. 6 Sun Soul connections between the two sets of supposedly random letters once they got the first three letters that were sent in plain text they could often guess the second three that were in code an operator named valter became legendary on station every day he set his rotors to the first three letters of his name and then he wrote the first three letters of his girlfriend Clara's name, the code breakers loved them, so wonderful, the outside indicator was tan and we thought, oh, time that didn't work out, it was time to mix up the American cowboy actor from the 1920s.

I don't know, I didn't know in Germany, anyone knew who Tom Mix was, apparently he had a following in Germany. Success was almost invariably followed by ler, even Hitler was helping to crack the Enigma. They gave them the manuals. They were told exactly what to do and how to use the machine, but part of it. The problem was the myth that the Enigma machine was completely unbreakable and this was buried deep in the German psyche, so they thought well, why bother? You know, no one can decrypt these messages if we use these keys because they are easy.

He was the second crazy one. was our identification ber was l-i-n In the heat of battle you said dirty words and I am the world's expert on dirty words in German. The worst message that ever came my way was one from the German High Command to someone apathetic, the German Intelligence reprimanded him for using these words because they didn't know that young girls had to go decode them and of course they were a young girl in Bletchley who was devastated that they had done it. They kept doing it. I could say that the reprimand doesn't matter, but.

It was nice to think that the Germans had that side of them that they did think that maybe they opened dirty roads in their camps in 1941. Britain was losing the war despite the success of Station with the German Navy's Enigma and it was the Navy that was the problem now German submarines were wreaking havoc in the Battle of the Atlantic every merchant ship that sank deprived Britain of urgent supplies. Necessary for survival from the start of the war, slow convoys of up to 60 merchant ships regularly crossed the Atlantic to and from the United States; The United States had not yet entered the war, but American supplies were essential to the British war effort; although these convoys were protected by escorts, they were still easy targets for German submarines.

Hitler had entrusted Admiral Karl Donitz with the task of destroying Britain's lifeline only to realize very quickly that he could defeat the Allies by bringing England to its knees with Stavius ​​if he could. break that North Atlantic route then there could be no food and fuel troops. The ammunition would come to this country and he could win that war with Ubers and he almost did during this attempt to build a kind of elite spirit and everyone was proud to participate in that. and we really want to join that Force and of course we had been brought up to the point of taking risks in the National Socialist period when we were children, so we weren't really aware of the risk.

Donuts built giant fortified pens for submarines. on the French coast, from here his submarines could attack the Atlantic. The Germans knew that the British were protecting their ships with convoys to get around this. Donuts organized his submarines into groups, wolf packs as slow-moving convoys crossed the Atlantic. Atlantic wolf packs of 30 ships or more would blank out, there would be losses, they were very cunning, they are the German Uber commanders, they would anticipate our route and often dive in daylight right in front of the convoy and leave for the convoy to pass over them and torpedo to the right. left and center and we wouldn't know where the attack had come from the wolf packs were controlled by dernitz using radio messages coded in the Enigma breaking the Enigma navy was going to be station X's biggest challenge if they failed in the battle of the Atlantic and the war could be lost Alan Turing was the right man in the right place at the right time Alan Turing was unique I mean, he was a genius and what you realize when you know a genius well is the difference between a very intelligent person They were very smart people, you talk to them, they come up with an idea and you say to yourself that if it wasn't for them, I might have had that idea.

You never had this feeling with touring. Authority constantly surprised you with the originality of his way of thinking that he was Alan. Turing was the most brilliant mind of his generation. He had become a Cambridge professor at just 23 years old. His work on intelligent machines was years ahead of his time. Station X suited both his genius and his eccentricity. He had strange manners. He didn't like to wear a tie, he always looked untidy, but he really liked being in the countryside, where he rode his bike with a gas mask during the hay fever period, he didn't care how he looked, he just thought that doing the Work was what mattered.

He was very shy around women, especially girls. I don't think he's ever met any girls before. I once offered him a cup of tea and he backed away as if he were going to be shot and I used to bless his heart. He would reach for the canteen with a curious lateral movement with his head bowed, but he was such a star that we all thought he was the most wonderful thing. Alan Turing set himself the challenge of breaking into the naval enigma in a Bletchley Park attic during the beginning of the unraveling of it. The secrets of the submarine messages, all he had to go on were the incredibly coded letters as he studied them.

Turing was able to discover exactly how the Germans were hiding the key message settings. Unlike the Luftwaffe, the German Navy left nothing to chance. After allowing the operator to choose three letters at random for the configuration of his message, he had to obtain them from a book with virtually no information to continue. Turing identified how Navy operators selected their ciphers from a list for each day and correctly guessed that to hide the cipher, these letters were encoded using secret tables and then, instead of substituting one letter for another, these bigram tables substituted letter pairs. Turing figured all this out and did it absolutely right.

These codes were printed on Rose paper with an ink that would fade immediately. If it got wet, then our orders were, in case of any difficulty, to immediately throw this material overboard or at least soak it in water so that it would not turn red. Oh, Turing had made the first major breakthrough, but he knew that to crack the Naval Enigma they would have to. First he would have to get hold of those secret diagram tables and then came a surprising stroke of luck. Captain Fritz Julius Lemp was a hero of the Third Reich. His submarine, the U-110, had sunk the first chip in the war in May 1941.

In what was to be his last mission, David Baum had just completed 20 years. He was a second lieutenant of HMS Bulldog on escort duty and guarded the 50 ships in Convoy ob-318 from Liverpool bound for America. We were south of Iceland and we knew that they were being followed for reports of the animal and they are being torn apart by you birds and we always knew that we would be attacked in this area, suddenly, two ships were torpedoed, one of them, it's obvious from where the attack came from, he made a A very precise attack on YouTube must have gotten the depth charges just right for the correct depth.

Georg Hugel was the Enigma operator on U-110. He had been with Captain Lemp throughout the war while the philosophers leaked foreign classical depth charges below for you, but he ruined it. a surface, this is a dream for all escort ships that see you planting your surface because they usually just sink when you have a successful attack and go down to the bottom. This was just an opportunity that the tour and Station X had been waiting for. on board the u110 there were the secret bigram tables in the chamber abroad the Germans The abandoned ship left behind the code books but Georg Hugel had a precious document that he had to rescue a book of love poems for his girlfriend is a foreigner David Baum led a boarding party to the stricken submarine, but what if the Germans had left a gunman behind to sink it?

The bomb ship came aboard first. I couldn't imagine the abandoned Germans, of course, floating in the Atlantic without someone below trying to sink it, but the generator turned on. I took out my revolver, the secondary lighting was on, there was a dim blue light and I couldn't see anyone, just an unpleasant hissing sound that we didn't like to this day. I didn't know what it was, the rest of the boarding party began. to search the submarine they had no idea what they were looking for they didn't know about the secret diagram tables David Baum had never heard of station . his own cross was there and I put it in a bag and um there are strange things but I also found a sealed envelope um I didn't open it I wouldn't have understood, you know, I didn't speak German and it was obviously something quite important was a sealed envelope in its desk, so I put it in my pocket at the time David Baum had no idea of ​​the importance of what he and his boarding party had discovered: the capture of U110 was a disaster for the Germans and a treasure for the Germans. station British it was the book of love poems that helped if Georg Hugel had rescued the bigram tables instead things could have been very different thanks when the captured documents arrived at station to be deciphered King George VI of Naval Enigma called this the most important event of the war at sea so far the prize was the background tables and they were magnificent.

Oh, some of them had gotten a little wet and we had to dry them. Jeffrey Tandy had been at the Museum of Natural History he had access to suitable drying paper, which he brought down with a load. We had to dry theirs, clean it, and distribute it as needed almost immediately. The results were evident on June 23, 1941. Station knowledge the admiralty could organize a counterattack the attack lasted five days two of the submarines were sunk and the convoy arrived safely station Defeat seemed weeks away as the Enigma's decoded messages were gradually revealing the full extent of the war.

Hitler's plans but no one anticipated what was to come when Hitler began his invasion of Russia in 1941 certain German signals were being decoded which gave cause for alarm the SS and the German Border Police were reporting mass executions and the systematic killing of Jews Russians. It is now known that this was part of the Holocaust; At the time no one anticipated the full scale of the genocide, but when Churchill saw the decodings he wanted the entire country to share his outrage. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the 16th century, there has never been methodical and ruthless carnage on such a scale, we are in the presence of a nameless crime.

Churchill was risking the Germans realizing that the Enigma had been breached and he would lose Station X. It was a huge gamble, but such was the horror of the crime even Station Britain was desperatearmies had been expelled from mainland Europe their convoys were being sunk in the Atlantic their cities were being battered and bombed Britain's only secret weapon was the Intelligence coming out of Station top secrets. The Germans did not give much importance to intelligence at the beginning, you will doubt if you are winning, they gave importance to the Blitzkrieg and by winning the war we quickly adapted to the Great importance for intelligence because we had our backs to the wall and we had nothing more than we could trust, step by step, Enigma was handing over more and more secrets to the British code breakers and, interestingly, it was the enigma's greatest strength, but it also turned out to be its greatest weakness when an operator typed a message into the Enigma the machine replaced each letter with a different one the letter entered never came out as the same letter in the code the Germans didn't realize it but they were opening another door for station It could never be the actual handwriting, they could use it to begin unraveling the messages.

As the interceptions were analyzed, it became clear that the Germans were using stock phrases. and once again it soon became possible to predict what message a particular phrase contained. Station X called these phrases cribs. I remember nidamika Englander down with the English, of course, Heil Hitler Heil Hitler was huge. I mean, you should never instill them in your army anyway. the tendency to have exactly the same phrase at the beginning of each declaration of a great victory as military bureaucracy became routine the Germans often sent the same message at the same time every day there was a notable one that we used to sometimes use to presiding over us as a kind of university shout because it had such a wonderful rhythm, it went like this: nisht y fliegbar Nick dalf, leave out Dusseldorfonso's gift and you could imagine six or seven adults who had nothing better to do on the shift night reciting this and feeling a lot. better later, maybe two or three times in some cases, I mean the message itself is meaningless, all that was said is that you can't fly from this place, no building has been built, whatever, it would be too much better if they hadn't sent it from their From the point of view, it was simply the path to the code when they decided on their phrase, the code breakers then looked it up in a message and found the correct position for the crib that rested on the floor in the Enigma code.

The codebreakers lined up his crib. against the coded message, since they knew that Enigma would never convert a letter to itself if any pair of letters matched the phrase must be in the wrong position, they slid the cradle along the message until they found a point where none of the letters was the same This could be where the phrase was located, since the Head Start X station could solve the Enigma configuration for the next 24 hours. The code breakers became so Adept that they would create their own cribs and ask the RAF to drop mines on a specific stretch of sea, the Germans would immediately send a message giving a grid reference for mining station the cf97 grid reference would be detailed in the coded german message, so they used caesar fritz noyan zeben as a cradle to find the enigma key.

Station They were rewriting the rules of the Cold War in the deserts of North Africa. A new German general was making a name for himself with his aggressive attacks. in the British Urban Rommel would become an important figure in the history of Station X. My father was what you could call a warrior. He was more of a general of soldiers, not a general of paper. I was very lucky in Africa not to have been wounded, except one day when he had the British splendor of a shell that hit his belt, but he, the splendor was attached to the building, not his body, throughout the 1941 War of the Desert swung back and forth across Libya and Tunisia as the Germans and their allies, the Italians, attempted to capture Egypt with no fixed lines for communications.

North Africa was pure wireless warfare. The Enigma was vital to Rommel. My father never had any idea that the German coat was torn. He couldn't imagine something like this could happen, but Rommel had a major weakness: the German African Corps was totally dependent on its Italian allies to bring in supplies. Rommel's supply lines were a natural target for the British. The RAF knew that Italian supply convoys were crossing the Mediterranean towards Rommel. The Italians sent Enigma messages to make arrangements and the station read the messages, it was almost too easy. I couldn't understand how Rama didn't notice that we were breaking important signals.

I mean, he was an excellent general, he was winning but then he started losing because his supplies were always sunk in the Mediterranean Station X knew which convoys were carrying which supplies and could almost choose their targets to keep Ultra safe; However, it had to appear as if the British knew about the convoys from some source other than the Enigma; there was an absolutely rigid rule that Alta could not be used unless a plane had first been sent to reconnoiter it. Once the Germans had tested the altar by seeing a British plane watching the convoy, then it could be used, but not until they had done so, you might well say.

I wonder how they knew it, but fortunately everyone has been fooled into saying that he must have been an Italian traitor on the docks of Naples. My father ended his life with the suspicion that there was a hole in the Italian High Command through which they escaped and news arrived. and he arrived at British time but in heaven he must apologize to the Italians and say he was wrong but as happened time and time again in the war and advance in one direction was met with retreat in another and through a series of negotiations international. Events Rommel soon found that fate was working in his favor.

The story began several months earlier, in 1941, when a group of American breakers had visited Station share a lot right away, you know that spies take time to get used to each other and even the British and American spies played their cards very close to their chest getting the secret services of two countries to work together was unheard of, but Against All is likely that the visit would be a success from then on, that the Americans would share the secrets of the Enigma, but that was going to play into Rommel's hands. The New Deal meant that Americans would be kept informed of reports being sent to North Africa about the British campaign. in code to Washington from the US embassy in Cairo in August of that year, an Italian working for the Americans, Loris Girardi, seized the combination to the safe where the embassy code book was kept.

Girardi copied the code without the Americans knowing, now Rommel had access. a British Secrets knew what his enemy was doing with the help of American decodes Rommel drove the British back 300 miles in 17 days the reports reaching Churchill spoke of disaster after disaster the situation was critical Churchill was putting enormous pressure on Station Ahead of his time, Turing was developing the idea. of intelligent machines he planned to automate the code-breaking process Turing wanted to build a machine that would strike at the heart of the Enigma - a machine that could discover how the German operators had set up their enigmas for that day's messages once they had a crib in The code breakers could find the rotor configurations, but the process of obtaining those configurations took too long.

Alan Turing's great breakthrough was seeing that discovering the configurations of the rotor in that cradle was something that could be done by a machine that was his, that was the great starting point. point and brought everything to the Modern Age the Turing machine could defeat the Enigma in minutes it was strangely called the bomb, the average execution time of a bomb was approximately 15 minutes. From time to time I heard that we beat the Germans in decryption. This happened when a was sending a message to b. and B almost immediately returned a message, a very short message just saying: I can't read you, we would get the solution faster than the other could decipher, it's a second send and, if it was something interesting, you could get out in the field before The bomb was a giant electromechanical machine that used drums to imitate a series of Enigma machines.

The drums clicked letter by letter testing the thousands of possible Enigma 20 configurations every second until the correct one had been cultivated before going through the perceived wisdom was that you simply had to go around looking for this one solution that would break a particular message. Turing said no, what you do is use the mathematical technique of rejecting all the things that could not be. It was a very powerful search engine, but it worked in a negative sense, as it rejected millions and millions of possibilities very, very quickly and arrived at the correct answer station. X was becoming a vast production line by the end of the war with over 200 links, the code breakers. we were producing 90,000 decoded messages a month, the algorithmic process, as we call it now, by which the crib and the ciphertext were processed in these mechanical systems, where they were the most advanced and complex processes that had ever been used in the history of the world. .

Don't think about anything else when it comes to logical and statistical sophistication, something you should consider years and years ahead of its time. Churchill, still desperate for victory in North Africa, went to the desert to put his stamp on the war, he wanted results and he wanted them. A group of generals quickly left and another entered. Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery became the new commander of the Eighth Army. Now it was his job to defeat Rommel's African Corps. He knew from Ultra that Rommel was about to attack, but where Montgomery predicted The Ridge on Alam Alpha. Monty said looking at the ground that he will go with Alam Alpha Ridge a few days later we weakened the Rumble signal saying that I am going to attack Alam Alpha Ridge on September 30, which is exactly what Monty said, I think from that moment on.

Monty had so much confidence in his own intelligence that he couldn't be defeated. He could not. He knew everything, but Montgomery had another advantage. The American embassy in Cairo had realized that the Germans had read their intelligence reports on the British campaign. immediately changed his code Rommel no longer knew what his enemy was planning Montgomery however was still receiving Ultra from station the information Bletchley Park was giving him because we believed, in our own arrogant way, that we were probably providing a service to the military that no other army had ever provided in the history of war.

On October 23, the British attacked El Alamein oh. The man receives from the Prime Minister only to destroy the Axis forces in North Africa. Let's finish this chapter once and for all. British intercept stations recorded more than 300 messages per day in the ensuing battle. Station Hitler allowing him to retire the anime was meaningless because it had these desperate messages of evil saying that Pan's arm is exhausted with enough gas for 50 kilometers but the ammunition is the ammunition is negligible and so on and we have between 11 and 17 tanks operatives in the Holy Panzer Army Africa Hitler responded the next day by ordering Rommel not to give up a step either.

Victory or death Montgomery read both messages within hours. Montgomery's superior forces crush Rommel, but when HUD 3 learned that Montgomery had allowed Rommel and the remnants of his army to escape, they were furious, we told Monty, and again and again some tanks moved in.They were wrong with God. so Monty could have wiped Omar off the face of the Earth why didn't he do it the same way he didn't wipe him off the face of the Earth I just don't know, no one else knows why those three pieces of information weren't used. It was so full, I mean, there was exasperation at the fact that we were giving Monty all the information imaginable about the status of Roman's troops and the number of operational tanks, which is terribly crucial.

I mean, you know enough, but you could park so many tanks on the lawn at the back of this house and in the desert War no thanks new finished foreigner this is the BBC home and forces program here's some great news that They arrived during the last hour from General Headquarters Carlo says that the Axis forces in the Western Desert after 12 days and nights of incessant attacks by our ground and air forces are now in full retreat, somehow the war seems the natural state of things and, when peace comes, it will take a long time to get used to it In December 1941, the United States entered the war much to Churchill's relief after Pearl Harbor Britain and the United States were at last official allies.

Churchill and Roosevelt knew that the secrets of the Enigma were vital to the success of the Allies. Breaking codes was a high priority. Station that to defeat Hitler the battle of the Atlantic had to be won, the decoded messages from the submarines were sent every day to the British and American navies, if Admiral Donuts ever realized that his messages were being read, everything would be lost on February 1, 1942. Hunt 8 began receiving new ship interceptions that gave them cause for alarm. They had changed the submarine code. Station X couldn't. They no longer read the messages, their allies the Americans were not very happy, unfortunately the British lost control of the Enigma and the United States was left without the type of vital information needed to protect their convoys.

A lot of protests and England were very hesitant to tell us that they had lost control of the code the British were trying to hide the truth The German submarines in the Atlantic could now do their worst station X could no longer find them they had no answer to the new code the Shipping losses began to mount Donuts were not taking risks the German Navy had changed the Enigma they had added a fourth rotor the spinning rotors with their labyrinth of ever-changing electrical wiring the secret of the Enigma the introduction of a fourth dramatically increased the odds of breaking the code station way and would ensure that they gained their own independent capability against the German submarine Menace and its code systems and it became quite delicate whether the two sides would cooperate or not the Americans were threatening to take over station X could become mere spectators of their own game something had to be done the director of station The American code breakers were to be sent to Station X, the British had given away the family silver, and there was still the problem of the fourth rotor. shipping section and the destruction of warships and knowing that if we could only crack this wretch in code we could save so many lives and sink so many submarines in October, the code tables of captured submarines arrived at Station first real opportunity to return to the naval enigma with these tables the code breakers were able to discover a weakness in the four-rotor system.

When the Germans designed the four-rotor Enigma they realized that it might have to communicate with other stations that used a three - wheeled machine, so in one of its 26 positions the fourth rotor did nothing, the new four-rotor machine became an old three-rotor enigma station. X worked out the settings for the first three pump rotors just as in the past. They simply cycled through the 26 positions of the fourth rotor until they found the right one. Soon the day's adjustments were on their way to the United States after 10 months in the cold season. X returned. The foreign books were fantastic.

I was on the night shift and some started working. We came back in a few months and it meant we were going to be able to continue getting on the submarines, so it was fantastic, it wasn't a one-off, he was able to do his detailing which Churchill was told as soon as possible that it was a great moment, a Once again Station X could help protect the convoys and within seven months the Battle of the Atlantic was over. Thank you, what had started as a small gang facing the Enigma was now a city. of ten thousand Station Hitler three thousand miles away in Washington plans were underway for another invasion, the first American officers were being selected to go to Station We were gathered in a room there and the moment we walked in, they were I told you that what you are going to hear today is something you will not talk about and it means that you will never be put in a place where the enemy can capture you and they chose me to be the commanding officer of that team and that's how I got to Bletchley Park, the trip to England involved a strange cover story about being pigeon signal experts and also being vetted by an American unit who had never heard of the station X.

I asked us if we had had the army. General classification proties said they could not find our scores in our records said that they would mind taking the test and we said no, we don't care, we were five and we took the test and this sergeant He qualified there when he ran out he said, holy shit, what school is this? You guys should be smart. I didn't think I had met an English person in my life until that moment. I didn't know it had been full of stereotypes about English people and aloofness and having no sense of humor and these were the most outgoing wonderful people who fed us when it was quite a sacrifice, just enough Screwballs to be really funny.

It was the first time I had ever participated in any serious discussion about war or politics with an American. It was there that I first learned to drink tomato juice. It was the first experience I had with American coffee and American bacon. It says that in a certain way. So I was introduced to America through this Bletchley Prelude Against all predictions, the Americans fit perfectly into the life of Station by Rounders. Of course, we would be delighted for you to meet our honorable allies. The Americans came and we showed them how they could play with it.

They said there is no baseball bat. We said nowhere would we only use this with a handle. So they said, "Well, we prayed it was a beautiful day, we all played well at the end of the game." We've also been lagging behind and the Americans said well we're sorry we beat them and the British captain said I'm sorry we beat them that was a bit instantaneous but like the Americans said they thought we had won and we said we knew we had cattle and they said well, what rules do you play by? We said our rules, but in the days to come the Americans were about to discover a secret even bigger than the enigma.

Station X had discovered that the The Germans were using a mysterious cipher machine much more advanced than anything they had ever seen. Now we knew nothing about this cipher machine. The Germans kept it completely secret and we started intercepting radio transmissions in 1940. It was actually a group of police officers. on the south coast of England and they were listening to transmissions from German agents from within the UK, of course there weren't any because we had captured all the agents, but they were still listening to these and they heard these strange signals and they sent them to the station.

X from Bletchley Park and now faced a new challenge. Hitler had demanded his own cipher machine, something faster and even more secure than the Enigma. Hitler's experts had devised a coding system based on the teleprinter machine. Teleprinters use binary code. It's not a secret, it's used all over the world, but what the Germans had done was connect the teleprinter to a machine that cunningly exploited the teleprinter's own language to produce its code abroad. The secret German coding machine was called Lorenz. It used 12 rotors to encode the message, not just the three of the Enigma. Lorenz's machine transmits a string of letters, each of which is actually a mixture of the actual letter of the actual message and a piece of gibberish produced by a machine.

Being a machine of diabolically complex cunning, in the end what comes and goes. through the ether and transmitted is a single chain of total verbiage. Lorenz relied on a mathematical system called modulo 2 editing, this allowed the string of meaningless letters added to the message at one end to be removed from the other by the same mathematical method. process the operator presses a key on his teleprinter which generates an electrical signal the Lorentz machine then adds an obscuration character to this signal and the result is then transmitted to the other end of the link another Lorentz machine configured with exactly the same settings regenerates exactly the same obscuring character adds it back to the ciphertext and by the magic of modulo traversal arithmetic they cancel it out and leave it with the plaintext.

Lorenz's security depended on the fact that he was adding a string of random letters to hide the real message, but because he is a machine he cannot generate a completely random set of letters, it is what is known as pseudorandom, unfortunately for the Germans it was more pseudo-random and that's how it broke. Station X gave the mysterious code the name of fish, they were able to discover what it was. It was based on the language of a teleprinter, no one knew how to eliminate the obscuration code, but on August 30, 1941 a lazy German operator gave the whole game away when he reached the end of hand-typing his message of almost 4,000 characters.

The receiving end sent it back in German, the equivalent of "I didn't understand that, I sent it again" and then, like idiots, they both put their Laurent Cipher machines back to the same starting position and then he started typing this long message again , ironically, the message never should have made it. sent, the operator was simply running a test, resending the message was allowing station Deciphers could begin to see the different ways the machine added random letters to the same message. For me, the real excitement was this business of getting These two texts from a sequence of gibberish I never found anything that was so exciting, especially since you knew they were vital messages.

Hitler and the German high command never suspected that the Lorentz had been breached; station x had taken three months to break the fish. and surprisingly they had discovered the mechanics of Lorentz himself, a machine they had never seen, they even built their own machine to imitate it, since it was fish messages, they called it tuna, once the Lorenz configurations were found, the station X could use Tani. to convert the messages into simple German code-breaking teams were needed to attack Lorenz, but it still took weeks to decipher a single message and by then the information could be useless, there was a curious life involving mental gymnastics and it might be possible. be very exhausting, especially if you didn't make it, I mean, you could have nights where you didn't get anywhere, you didn't get a single break, whoever just tried, played through this long, gloomy night in complete frustration and your El brain felt literally raw, your psychic or whatever, felt frustrated, but our brain almost literally sent a feeling of war at the end, but the whole process was about to speed up at the station.gpo investigation at dulles hill.

London's X station found a brilliant young man. telephone engineer to help them, he believed that he could build a machine that would do much of the code-breakers' work for them, the machine would be nothing less than the world's first programmable computer. I tried to tell you about this before what my ideas were, but you didn't quite understand the technology I was using because I said that very few people in the whole world knew about flowers. He arrived at Station X and was convinced that the answer was in the valves. Abdomen Flowers began in March 1943 with a blank sheet of paper.

It had been done before, I mean, Flores are thinking about a machine with 1,500 valves, the largest machine ever created at that time had 150 valves, so it was a huge leap into darkness, but Flores was convinced that it could be done. make it work and no one else was but he was and then it started more or less in his own bed, we were just telling people to do things, we had the power, we had the authority to tell anyone, you know, we had the first priority in our country for everything and we could just tell people what we want we didn't tell anyone it was just a few days before the invasion of Europe Tommy Flowers installed the world's first programmable computer before the final Victory there would be ten of them dealing with the secret messages from high command that gave them their name Colossus Colossus could read a coded message at high speed and then look up the tooth patterns and configuration of Lorenz's coded wheels and it could do it in minutes, not weeks.

Tommy Flowers realized that it was possible to read paper tape optically at very high speed and this is going at 5,000 characters per second, 30 miles per hour, that tape goes through there and it's pretty incredible that it can actually read information at that speed. We actually did a test on how fast we could drive it before the tape broke and it went almost 60 miles per hour, so we decided it was a little bit when it broke, it went everywhere, it just disintegrated. Colossus was now ready for Operation Overlord, the largest invasion the world had ever seen, tanks and guns.

They blocked all the main roads and all the streets in the south of England The Allies intended to deceive Hitler about where the invasion would take place They planned to make the Germans think that an attack on Normandy was simply a distraction through double agents the Allies leaked the news to Berlin. It would be up to Station X to see if the deception was working. The Germans were deceived for a long time, much longer than we expected and with much more success, but we also got a black bonus, that is, we knew that they were deceived because from Ultra. we could see that they were not moving troops to Normandy, they had to thank themselves, they will appear coloring, the Germans were not only fooled, it was known that they were tricked into making Overlord work, the Germans had to be fooled by the false messages and even A 24-hour mock army at Station X was looking for the slightest hint of German suspicion.

June 1944, the invasion was about to attack, but then Station defenses and sent this enormously long message, very detailed description of the western defenses where each unit was located and what equipment they had, there were seventy thousand letters that were red when station The Americans were planning to parachute their troops into Normandy. They thought they had chosen a safe landing site. They were going to drop one of the airborne divisions right on top of a German tank car. They would have been massacred. They changed it on June 4. They assured. According to the codebreakers of codes, everything was fine, the massive army began to advance, but there would be other larger forces in action that not even station .

Well, of course, as everyone knows, around four in the morning the weather was so bad that they had to bring them all back, which of course was bad luck for us because then they came and said, "Well, "You can't walk." eventually when you know the invasion is going to be tomorrow night so we had to stay there 24 hours later the allies launched the largest military invasion in history we had dinner and left at 11 o'clock and suddenly I started hearing a The buzzing got louder and louder and I knew what it was about 10 minutes later, the sky was black with planes towing gliders and my friend said and I said, "I have the slightest idea" and around three o'clock I think it was suddenly.

There was a real whisper and very soon word spread that there had been German traffic saying that paratroopers were dropping everywhere, so we knew that we knew this was what proved that the deception plans had worked. Hitler's troops divided between Normandy and Calais were unable to counter the attack on half of the German forces had remained in the north waiting for the Ghost Army at Station X those who knew what was happening had been kept imprisoned for 48 hours even now no one was taking any risk we were amazed feeling the worst to wear but I knew then it was common knowledge and I went home and my lady who I was belittling told me where the hell have you been and I said well I've been working she said that we had missed all the fun and I told him. how funny and she said, well, there was an invasion, it's been on the radio because there's no television, it's been on the radio.

I said, oh, how cute, you know. I went to bed on Tuesday, June 6, 1944. The invasion began at 10 a.m. m., Maureen's breakfast menu, I spent the morning washing. and continue ironing at four, life is quite hectic, it feels more anti-climax now that the second Trump has begun, it is not a bad day, actually, it had not been a bad day for the code breakers, they had not predicted with accuracy the position of all but two of the 62. German divisions Enigma and Fish messages were read throughout Operation Overlord. The German High Command. The troops in the battle had unknowingly been talking to the enemy in the following months.

Station That was extremely interesting because you felt that the war was really over. When the messages began to arrive clearly, then, although all the secrets of the war were really beginning to fade into history, already in the list of those who had achieved Victory, the name of station X would never be mentioned. Britain's best kept secret. was to remain a secret for the next 30 years Churchill was hiding the fact that Station of Chihiro, part of the technology to serve In the Cold War, some of the machines were to be used to crack Russian codes. The technology invented at Bletchley Park was so advanced that it could be used for years to come, as long as everything was kept secret, even Colossus had to be destroyed.

It was going to be destroyed and buried, it was a terrible mistake. I was ordered to destroy all records, which I did. I took all the drawings of the sentences, all the information about the Solutions on paper and put it in the body of fire so that Tommy's burned flowers returned to the post office and were forgotten in all the secret Colossus never received recognition as the the world's first programmable computer, instead the honors went to the Americans, people dispersed, some returning to universities, others to the nascent computer industry, some to the organization that would succeed Station X gchq, the most famous pupil of all the man whose inventiveness had been at the heart of the success of Bletchley Park died tragically in 1954 Alan Turing took his own life after being persecuted as a security risk for being homosexual Alan Turing is one of the figures of the century in the world of computing and Now the world of the Internet arises from the fundamental ideas of Alan Turing.

There were other great men in Pleasure Park, but in the long Hall of History I think Turing's name will probably be number one in terms of consequences for humanity. Station X had changed its face. 20th century the first computers were invented here the special relationship with the United States was born here signals intelligence was created here and would become the way all future wars would be fought in the end, although the station's greatest achievement X will not reside in broken figures, but in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of lives he saved, historians generally agree that he shortened the war in two years, which she thought did not win the war that was won by people with guns and bullets and things on the field, but I think Bletchley Park is a great example, especially for the younger generation, of brains over bullets, you can intellectually defeat an enemy and that was demonstrated here.