page_title: Bombe
section_title: US Navy Bombe
hierarchical_section_title: Bombe / Response to the four-rotor Enigma / US Navy Bombe
caption_attribution_description: Bombe computing device, made by national cash register, used to aid decryption of german enigma cypher, ww2An Enigma decryption machine, called a "bombe." This machine, made by National Cash Register of Dayton, Ohio, eliminated all possible encryptions from intercepted messages until it arrived at the correct solution.
context_page_description: The bombe is an electro-mechanical device used by the British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during World War II. The US Navy and US Army later produced their own machines to the same functional specification, albeit engineered differently both from each other and from Polish and British bombes.
  The British bombe was developed from a device known as the "bomba", which had been designed in Poland at the Biuro Szyfrów by cryptologist Marian Rejewski, who had been breaking German Enigma messages for the previous seven years, using it and earlier machines. The initial design of the British bombe was produced in 1939 at the UK Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park by Alan Turing, with an important refinement devised in 1940 by Gordon Welchman. The engineering design and construction was the work of Harold Keen of the British Tabulating Machine Company. The first bombe, code-named Victory, was installed in March 1940 while the second version, Agnus Dei or Agnes, incorporating Welchman's new design, was working by August 1940.
context_section_description: Colonel John Tiltman, who later became Deputy Director at Bletchley Park, visited the US Navy cryptanalysis office (OP-20-G) in April 1942 and recognised America's vital interest in deciphering U-boat traffic. The urgent need, doubts about the British engineering workload and slow progress, prompted the US to start investigating designs for a Navy bombe, based on the full blueprints and wiring diagrams received by US Naval Lieutenants Robert Ely and Joseph Eachus at Bletchley Park in July 1942. Funding for a full, $2 million, navy development effort was requested on 3 September 1942 and approved the following day.
  Commander Edward Travis, Deputy Director and Frank Birch, Head of the German Naval Section travelled from Bletchley Park to Washington in September 1942. With Carl Frederick Holden, US Director of Naval Communications they established, on 2 October 1942, a UK:US accord which may have "a stronger claim than BRUSA to being the forerunner of the UKUSA Agreement," being the first agreement "to establish the special Sigint relationship between the two countries," and "it set the pattern for UKUSA, in that the United States was very much the senior partner in the alliance." It established a relationship of "full collaboration" between Bletchley Park and OP-20-G.
  An all electronic solution to the problem of a fast bombe was considered, but rejected for pragmatic reasons, and a contract was let with the National Cash Register Corporation (NCR) in Dayton, Ohio. This established the United States Naval Computing Machine Laboratory. Engineering development was led by NCR's Joseph Desch.
  Alan Turing, who had written a memorandum to OP-20-G (probably in 1941), was seconded to the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington in December 1942, because of his exceptionally wide knowledge about the bombes and the methods of their use. He was asked to look at the bombes that were being built by NCR and at the security of certain speech cipher equipment under development at Bell Labs. He visited OP-20-G, and went to NCR in Dayton on 21 December. He was able to show that it was not necessary to build 336 Bombes, one for each possible rotor order, by utilising techniques such as Banburismus. The initial order was scaled down to 96 machines.
  The US Navy bombes used drums for the Enigma rotors in much the same way as the British bombes. They had eight Enigma-equivalents on the front and eight on the back. The fast drum rotated at 1,725 rpm, 34 times the speed of the early British bombes.  'Stops' were detected electronically using thermionic valves (vacuum tubes)—mostly thyratrons—for the high-speed circuits. When a 'stop' was found the machine over-ran as it slowed, reversed to the position found and printed it out before restarting. The running time for a 4-rotor run was about 20 minutes, and for a 3-rotor run, about 50 seconds. Each machine was 10 feet (3.0 m) wide, 7 feet (2.1 m) high, 2 feet (0.61 m) deep and weighed 2.5 tons.
  
  The first machine was completed and tested on 3 May 1943. By 22 June, the first two machines, called 'Adam' and 'Eve' broke a particularly difficult German naval cipher, the Offizier settings for 9 and 10 June. A P Mahon, who had joined the Naval Section in Hut 8 in 1941, reported in his official 1945 "History of Hut Eight 1939-1945":
  The American bombe was in its essentials the same as the English bombe though it functioned rather better as they were not handicapped by having to make it, as Keen was forced to do owing to production difficulties, on the framework of a 3 wheel machine. By late autumn [1943] new American machines were coming into action at the rate of about 2 a week, the ultimate total being in the region of 125.
  These bombes were faster, and soon more available, than the British bombes at Bletchley Park and its outstations. Consequently, they were put to use for Hut 6 as well as Hut 8 work. In Alexander's "Cryptographic History of Work on German Naval Enigma", he wrote as follows.
  When the Americans began to turn out bombes in large numbers there was a constant interchange of signal - cribs, 
caption: The US Navy Bombe contained 16 four-rotor Enigma-analogues and was much faster than the British three-rotor Bombes.[61]
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Windows", "Image DateTime": "2005:12:19 15:47:54", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "9017", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3000", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2400"}