Virtual Bletchley Park Virtual Bletchley Park The Breaking of Enigma by the Polish Mathematicians Poland As German military power increased during the 1920's, the Poles felt threatened and vulnerable, situated as they were between two powerful nations, Germany to the West and Russia to the East. In order to discover the intentions of their potential enemies, they resorted to intelligence gathering. They had a long tradition of this and particularly of code breaking. The modern use of Radio allowed them to intercept enemy Radio transmissions without revealing their intelligence activities. From 1928 onward Polish Intelligence intercepted German Radio transmissions using a new cipher system which was eventually identified as coming from an Enigma machine. Polish Intelligence had obtained examples of the commercial Enigma machine but quickly found that the German Enigma was different in detail from the commercial version. The Polish Mathematicians Polish Intelligence were initially unable to break the German Enigma traffic, however driven by the imperative of finding what the Germans were up to, they, uniquely among other nations at that time, decided to try a mathematical approach. In 1932 a team of young mathematicians was set up.

It included Jerzy Rozycki, Henryk Zygalski and Marian Rejewski (all of whom were products of the notable flowering of Polish mathematics in the 1920s and 1930s). Rejewski quickly showed that mathematical techniques could be used to attack the problem of finding the message key by exploiting the German's cryptographic error in repeating the message key at the start of a transmission. The problem that still had to solved was the internal wiring connections in each wheel. In this Polish Intelligence were helped by the French. The French were very interested in assisting Poland because they also were disturbed by the rise in German militancy and wanted an ally on Germans Eastern flank. In 1931 and 1932 the French cryptographer Gustave Bertrand obtained priceless information about the German Enigma from a spy, Hans-Thilo Schmidt, known by the code name Asche. The French were unable to use this information to break into the German Enigma traffic. It was also passed to the British who were also at this time unable to break into Enigma. Finally Bertrand passed the information to Polish Intelligence who had not revealed how far they had got with their attack on Enigma.

This information, which included German operating instructions for Enigma and two sheets of monthly key settings enabled Rejewski to deduce the internal wheel wiring for all three wheels, but only after he had made an inspired leap of imagination. The problem was the order of the 26 wires connecting the keyboard to the fixed entry disc at the right hand end of the three wheels. In the commercial Enigma, which the Polish team possessed, the wiring order clockwise round the entry disc was the order of the keys on the keyboard, QWERTZUIO... Rejewski had realised that the wiring order must be different on the German Forces Enigma, but had no way of finding out what the order was. The inspired leap of imagination was to suppose the Germans had, in their logical way, just used ABCDEFG... as the order. He tried this and it worked and he could now work out from his equations the internal wiring of the three wheels and the reflector. The deduction of the internal wiring of the wheels was a spectacular feat by Rejewski.

It enabled the Polish cryptographers to build replicas of the German Enigma machine which could then be used to decipher the intercepted Radio messages once the Enigma configuration and the message settings had been deduced. That was the next problem. Rejewski had shown that his "characteristics" could be deduced from a day's radio traffic when the Germans were double enciphering the Enigma message settings. Now the Polish cryptographers had to produce a catalogue of these characteristics for every wheel order and every wheel start position, 26x26x26x6 entries,(no less than 105,456 in all!), in order to deduce the Enigma configuration for that day. They devised a machine which they called a Cyclometer. This consisted of, in effect, two Enigma machines side by side with their right hand wheels offset by three places. Click here to see how Rejewski's characteristics were catalogued and used. Then in September 1938 the Germans changed the Enigma procedures for enciphering message keys.

They no longer started the message key encipherment from one standard set of wheel positions set for the whole 24 hour period, but asked the Enigma operator to choose a different encipherment start, known as the indicator, for each message sent and to transmit the chosen indicator with the double enciphered message setting in the header of the German message. This meant that Rejewski's characteristics no longer worked because they depended on all message key encipherments being from the same wheels start positions. The Zygalski Sheets When they had been studying the double enciphered message settings in order to construct Rejewski's characteristics, cases had been noticed where the same enciphered letter occurred in either the 1st and 4th, or 2nd and 5th, or 3rd and 6th positions in the enciphered message settings. These positions, which were called females, corresponded to positions at which the same letter had been keyed by the German operator into the Enigma machine because of the repeat of the three letter message key.

Zygalski realised that whether this occurred or not depended on the wheel order and the start position, therefore inversely if it did occur it implied one of a set of possible Enigma configurations. If enough of these doubles occurred during a days traffic it might be possible to find a unique configuration for which all of these doubles could occur. Click here to generate a set of intercepts on random indicators and message keys. The settings of the Enigma were: wheels 132 rings QJF and no Steckers. The list of 234 intercepts contains 34 females of which 14 are of the 1,4 type. Zygalski realised that the analysis of the vast amount of information required could be achieved by a grill method using perforated sheets. The sheet procedure involves working through each of the six possible wheel orderings for three wheels and for each wheel order working through the 26 possible left hand wheel ring letters, 156 tries in all, but on average only half before the answer is found. There were sheets prepared for each left wheel letter for each wheel order. Each sheet contained four squares of 26 by 26 ie two alphabets along the top and down the side.

The first decision was which wheel order to try, (in our case 132) and which ring first letter, in this case Q. Next take the first letter of the first indicator that gives a 1,4 female in this case P and get the sheet 123 Q P. Place this on the table offset by the next two letters of the indicator, TJ. Now get sheets for succeeding indicators overlaying them on the table. If the wheel order and the first ring letter are what was used to encipher the message key then one square will line up and let light through from below the table. The original ring setting can now be deduced from the co-ordinates of this lit square. Click here to try overlaying Zygalski sheets. This emulation of the Zygalski sheets calculates the offset of a sheet and recreates the overlaid portion of each sheet at run time. This minimises the downloaded information but takes a little time to recalculate each sheet. Click here for a description of the calculations required to do this. Rejewski's Bomba Rejewski also had the idea for a mechanical method for finding the Enigma ring settings from the females in the double enciphered message settings.

This was called the Bomba. Long after WW II Rejewski drew a sketch of it. The idea was to rotate six sets of enigma wheels in synchronism with each set being one fast wheel position in advance of the preceding one so that the six positions corresponding to the double encipherment of the message setting could be examined simultaneously looking for repeating enciphered letters. Six of these machines were required, each set with one of the six possible wheel order for the possible three wheels in the Enigma machine. The Bombas were not very reliable and Zygalski's sheets produced better results. In interviews after the War, Rejewski was quite clear that the Bombas were designed specifically to attack the double encipherment of the message setting. They were not designed, or ever used, for a general "known text" attack. Successes, Failure and a Priceless Gift Using these techniques the Polish cryptographers were, by 1938, reading some 75% of intercepted German Radio transmissions enciphered using the Enigma machine. They kept this a very closely guarded secret, telling no one of their successes.

Then in 1938 the Germans brought another two wheels into service so that the German operator now had to chose three out of five to put into the Enigma machine. This raised the amount of effort required to find keys way beyond what Polish Intelligence could provide. In July 1939 with the invasion of Poland imminent, the Polish cryptographers decided to share their Enigma results with the French and British code breakers. At a meeting in the Kabackie Woods near Pyry just outside Warsaw all was revealed to the utter astonishment of the French and British. The Polish team gave them copies of the German Enigma machine and revealed the details of the Cyclometers, Bombas and Zygalski sheets. Just before the German invasion, the three Polish code breakers escaped through Roumania and eventualy joined up with Gustave Bertrand and his French team at Chateau Vignolles in France just outside Paris.

This page was originally created by the late Tony Sale the original curator of the Bletchley Park Museum Four movies about the Enigma Machine - Cliomuse.com Cliomuse.com The Imitation Game: a movie about the Enigma Machine, Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park code-breakers Alan Turing did NOT invent the Colossus machine,nor despite the claims of "The Imitation Game", the "Bombe" device featured so prominently in the movie and shown in the above scene. The Imitation Game, the latest movie based on World War II's Enigma machine is the first to acknowledge Alan Turing's crucial role. The Enigma machine was originally a commercial German encoding apparatus developed after World War I. It resembled a typewriter, but used complicated sets of rotors, to change the letters or combinations of letters in a message or document into what seemed to be randomly selected substitutes. The rotors produced billions of possible combinations for the original message. A recipient with another Enigma machine used a key to unlock the code.

During the 1920s and 1930s the German military transformed this commercial encoding device into an incredibly sophisticated encoding system to transmit top-secret orders and messages to German military units on land and sea. However, the Germans were unaware that Poland's Cipher Bureau, with its team of brilliant mathematicians and cryptologists , had not only unlocked secrets of the Enigma Machine's encoding method. They had also made copies of the machine. The significance of the 'Enigma Machine', and the unlocking of its secrets by a team of cryptological and mathematical geniuses at the top secret English location of Bletchley Park remained unknown and unheralded for many years after the end of the war. In the last couple of decades,the general public has become aware of the crucial role that Bletchley Park (and in particular the mathematician Alan Turing) played in unravelling Germany's military secrets and helping win the war. The main target of the Bletchley team was not the German's original so-called 'Enigma' cipher but the more technologically sophisticated version code-named 'Tunny' by the British. Many documentaries have been made about Enigma, Bletchley Park and Turing.

Yet despite the controversial conflicts, issues and personalities surrounding the topic, before 2014's release of The Imitation Game, only two feature films have been based on this richly dramatic subject. The latest attempt, The Imitation Game, is the first to feature the work of Alan Turing, the English mathematical genius and pioneer of artificial intelligence. The movie focuses on Turing's attempts to break the secret of Enigma while at the same time trying to conceal the secret of his sexual identity.However, The Imitation Game is very misleading - or downright inaccurate - about several key issues. Turing and the team at Bletchley was not the first to break the Enigma code; that had been done years before by the Polish Cipher Bureau . And the imposing machine that is a central feature of the movie and which is supposed to have broken the key German naval code was not designed by Turing nor was it built at Bletchley. Nor was Turing ever blackmailed by a Soviet spy working alongside Turing's Bletchley team.

THREE EARLIER MOVIES ABOUT THE ENIGMA MACHINE U-571 (2000) The first of these was an American war movie, U-571, released in 2000, about a U.S. submarine trying to capture an Enigma machine from a German U-boat. Briskly directed and well paced by Jonathan Mostow ( Terminator 3 and Surrogates), a good script from David Ayer, future director of Training Day and Fury. The movie had excellent technical values (it won an Oscar for best sound), finely detailed submarine sets and is throughly entertaining.The scenes inside the U-Boat are convincingly claustrophic, and the seaborne operation to seize the submarine's Enigma is detailed and exciting, culminating in a tense and convincing climax.

Dr.Lawrence Suid,an academic historian of naval warfare has praised U-571 as "probably the most exciting submarine movie ever made." Although U-571 received good reviews and a good box-office reception in the USA, it was viciously received by many naval veterans and journalists in the United Kingdom , who derisively pointed out that in fact British naval units , not American, were the first to capture an intact Enigma machine from from a U-Boat in 1941. (HMS Bulldog forced U-110 to the surface , the German crew abandoned her, believing it was sinking, and a British boarding party entered the submarine, taking the Enigma and German naval codes.) In fact, the final seconds of the film include an acknowledgement that the captruing of the Enigma machine and its codebooks from a German submarine had been achieved earlier by a British naval expedition. So heated did the argument become that the British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed with a questioner in the House of Commons that the film was "an affront" to British sailors. President Clinton tried to calm things down by writing a letter declaring that the movie was fiction, not history.

In the midst of the uproar, Davbid Balme, the British naval officer who courageously led the boarding party that seized the Enigma from the abandoned and presumably sinking U-110, called the movie "a great film." However, six years after the film was made its writer, David Ayer, declared that he "did not feel good" about the movie'sdepiction of Americans, not British, obtaining the Enigma machine in the way shown in the film."It was a distortion." The Allies captured a total fifteen Enigma machines from U-boats during the war. All but two were seized by British units. The Royal Canadian Navy captured one and the American navy took over a Machine from U-Boat (U-505), in 1944. This episode seized the submarine and its crew intact as well. In fact, you can see U-505, a magnificent vessel, on display today at the Chicago Museum of Science and Technology. The Enigma Machine in U-571. U-595 just after capture by U.S. Navy U-505 being taken in tow by U.S. navy vessel.

U-505 on display in Chicago Museum of Science and Technology. Enigma (2001) This movie has an interesting pedigree. It was co-produced by Mick Jagger, [Jagged Films] who apparently owns an Enigma machine and lent it for some scenes in the movie. The script is adapted from Robert Harris's first-rate historical thriller by by the great British playwright Tom Stoppard and it is directed by the reliable and talented Michael Apted. Plus the music is by the great John Barry and its stars Kate Winslet in one of her best performances. It's a pity that her acting talents and those of co-star Jeremy Northam are offset by a listless and unconvincing Dougray Scott as the ostensible hero. One of the movie's most attractive features is the way it evokes John Buchan's classic spy thrillers and class ic Hitchock thrillers of the 1930s. The movie has been criticised because although it's based on the Bletchley park and decoding the Engma encryption, there is no mention of the crucial role played b y Alan Turing. (Although the movie offers some hints: Dougray Scott's character is an emotionally tormented figure recovering from a breakdown.

Although Enigma is about World War 2, especially the Battle of the Atlantic, and the attempts to counteract the Germans by breaking their Enigma codes, the strongest part of the movie focuses on the fictional tensions and intrigues amongst the team at Bletchley Park, where the team has to not only uncover the secrets of Enigma but also try to unmask a possible German spy in their midst as well as investigating the mysterious disappearance of a beautiful female code-breaker who has besotted Tom, the genius mathematician hero [Dougray Scott]. To complicate matters, Tom has to crack the german naval code in order to prevent the destruction of a vital Allied convoy. The film is invigorated by Kate Winslet's character, Hester: dynamic, a bit dowdy, intelligent, and in love with Tom. For the most part, the two halves of the plot - breaking the code and finding the presumed traitor at Bletchley - mesh smoothly until an awkward and rushed conclusion.

An interesting aspect of the movie is that it includes scenes depicting the infamous Katyn Forest massacre (near Smolensk, Russia) of 1940, where over 4000 Polish military officers were executed by Russian NKVD units on Stalin's orders. This scene which is pivotal to the plot and is part of the climax of Harris's novel, is awkwardly placed near the movie's beginning. However, Enigma ignores the crucial role of Poland's Biuro Szyfrow (Cipher Bureau). Polish codebreakers had not only worked out how the Enigma machine functioned years before Bletchley Park . They had made their own copies of the machine and sent two to Britain when the Nazis Poland invaded Poland as well as vital decoded German transcripts. Yet for decades the Polish contribution - which saved the Bletchley codebreakers years of work - was ignored by Britain. Kate Winslett is impressive as a determined Bletchley Park team member dedicated to finding out what happened to a missing colleague and to help the object of her affections crack the German naval code. Although her character is fictional, in fact women were a vital part of the Park's work force.

Most were employed in administrative, transcriptive and secretarial functions, but some, like Joan Clarke and Marion Body, worked alongside Alan Turing and other top decoders. One of the administrative staff was Valerie Glassborow, the grandmother of Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, who had a tedious job in Hut 16 - she and others monitored British listening stations to see that they were sending in regular reports of German radio activity. Above centre, Valerie Glassborow, the Duchess of Cambridge's grandmother in her uniform. Image at left shows the Duchess operating a replica of a listening device at Bletchley park; image right shows her talking to Lady Marion Body, one of the talented women cryptologists who worked at Bletchley. ﻿Excellent documentary about the Enigma machine and Bletchley Park﻿ All the Queen's Men (2001) Both U-571 and Enigma are, in their different ways, thoroughly entertaining and well-made movies. The same cannot be said about the British film All the Queen's Men, made about the same time as these two films. Roger Ebert deservedly assigned to his list of the worst films he had seen in his book Your Movie Sucks.

It's a comedy that also tries to be an action movie, but is neither funny nor exciting. In addition, it contains some of the clumsiest acting ever witnessed - hardly surprising, seeing that its leads are Matt LeBlanc and Eddie Izzard. You have been warned. So what is this disaster of a movie's connection with the Enigma machine? Its plot concerns the efforts of British army unit sent undercover to snatch an Enigma machine from the French factory which makes the devices. The factory is staffed only by French women (the French male workers are unavailable because they're either underground or have been sent as cheap labour to Germany). So the four soldiers dress as women to get into the factory . Unknown to them, they are expected to fail and fall into German hands, thereby convincing the Nazis that the Allies don't have a copy of the Enigma, which they actually do. Did I mention that at one stage they are mincing about Berlin? Or that they stage a drag routine before an audience of appreciative Nazis? The film assumes that the audience will find the sight of four soldiers in drag trying to con Nazi to be incredibly funny.

But unless the actors and the directer are talented and working from a good script (Some Like It Hot), the set-up will quickly become tedious and repetitive. This is the fate of All the Queen's Men. ✕ war and social upheaval: World War II -- country code World War II: Country Code Breaking Efforts Figure 1.-- For years after World War II, the details of Allied cryptographic work was kept secret. It was the Allies that were primarily successful at code breaking, although the Germans had some succeses of their own. This may have been because the Allies at the beginning of the War had a greater need for information on Axis intentions and than gave code breaking a greater priority. This may have been a more important factor than actual capabilities. Histrorians did not know just how much the Allies were able to learn about Germany militaty activities by cracking the Wehrmacht Enigma Machine which the Germans were sure could not be cracked. As far as we know, the Japanese had no success at cracking American and British codes. The cracking of the Enigma Machine is perhaps the greatest feat of cryptology and began in Poland a decade before the outbreak of the war.

[Bury] The British beginning in 1939 mobilized a substantial effort to crack the Enima codes. Some of the most capable and creative mathematicians in Britain were assigned the enormously difficult task of penetrating German military communications. British cryptanalysts, led by Alan Turing, not only had an impact on the course of the War but in the pricess created the first true computer that would so change the modern world. The naval Enigma machines proved a particularly difficult challenge. Nor did we know just why American carriers showed up at just the right time and place in the Coral Sea or at Midway. Now the complete story of World War II code breaking is known. One area of World war II cryptology that remains a dark hole is Soviet code breaking efforts. The Soviets must have obtained Enima machines as a result of the Red Army offensive before Moscow (December 1941). And the Ruusians are renowned mathemiticians. They did not, however, unlike thre Americans and British did not have 'bombs' early computers. As far as I know, the Russians have never released information on their code breaking efforts.

America Historians both during and after the War did not know just why American carriers showed up at just the right time and place in the Coral Sea or at Midway. Neither did the Japanese. The answer of course was Magic. This was the code name for the top-secret code breaking operation which alerted the Ameicans to the Japanese plans. The same American code breaking operation that had learned of the Port Moresby operation, also warned Admiral Nimitz that the next target was Midway. American codebreakers broke into the Japanese Foreign Office's top secret system for sending messages (September 1940). The American cryotolgists named it Purple. The information gained from Purple decryptions came to be called Magic within the U.S. government because the Foreign Office used it for only their most important messages. The location of the Magic operation in Washington meant that information from the decrypts were not sent to Pearl Harbor unless the War Department decided to send some of the intelligence obtained. The Purple machine was a successor to earlier machines used to read Japanese diplomatic mesages. The Navy at Pearl Harbor had its own code breaking operation working on the Japanese naval code--JN-25.

Station HYPO at Pearl finally cracked JN-25, leading to the Battle of the Coral Sea and Midway. Midway was the most decisive naval battlr of the War. After Pearl Harbor, American code breakers in cooperation with the British began to focus on German communications. Britain The Allies were primarily successful at code breaking during World War II, although the Germans had some succeses of their own. This may have been because the Allies at the beginning of the War had a greater need for information on Axis intentions and than gave code breaking a greater priority. This may have been a more important factor than actual capabilities. The British had an active prgram to crack foreign codes, including the Italians, Japanese, and Spanish. The primary effort of course was directed at NAZI Germany. Histrorians for many years after the Warv did not know just how much the Allies were able to learn about Germany militaty activities by cracking the Wehrmacht Enigma Machine which the Germans were sure could not be cracked. As far as we know, the Japanese had no success at cracking American and British codes except for some lower level codes.

The British were working on codes during the inter-War era, but beginning in 1939 mobilized a greatly expanded effort to crack the Enigma codes. The code name for the British effort to break into the the German military Enigma cipher machines was called Ultra . It was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the War. It was primarily conducted at a country estate known as Blechley Park. Some of the most capable and creative mathematicians in Britain were assigned the enormously difficult task of penetrating German military communications. Cracking Enigma was not a single task. Each of the three German services (Heer, Kriegsmarine, and Luftwaffe) had Enigma machines with different codes to crack. The naval Enigma machines proved a particularly difficult challenge. And the Germans gave the Italians Enigma machines. In addition there were other German cides. British cryptanalysts, led by Alan Turing, not only had an impact on the course of the War but in the pricess created the first true computer that would so change the modern world. Canada Canada had its own version of Bletchley Park called the Examination Unit in Ottawa.

They hired American crytologists Herbert Osborne Yardley who ran what he called the Black Chamber before and after World War I for the U.S. Army. Yardley after his unit was closed had a following out with the U.S. Government and published a book detailing his work. [Yardley] This caused an international incident because the Japanese learned for the first time tht their codes had been penetrated. There was also information about British code breaking in the book. As a result, Yardley could not get a job with American inelligence even after Japan and Germany began to move toward war and the need increased for signals intelligence. The Canadians, however, hired him for their cryptographic work in the 1930s. After America entered the War (December 1941), both the American and British Government put pressure on the Canadians to dismiss Yaedley which they did. He was replaced by a Oliver Strachey who had been working at Bletchley Park (January 1942). Strachey had refused to go to Ottawa until Yardley had departed the city. He arrived with with keys to high-level French Vichy and Japanese diplomatic codes.

We are not entirely sure about why Strachey did this, but suspect that Bletchley Park was so focused on the German Enigma Machine that they were farming out work on lesser priority codes to the Canadians. American and British code breakers had been cooperaring before Pearl Harbor, but Strachey in Ottawa initiated much close cooperation brwtweeen American and British cryptologists. He played a role in breaking the Japanese codes despite the fact that he did not speak Japanese. He finished his work at the Examiination Unit (July 1942). Estonia Estonian Military Intelligence Service worked with the Finnish Intelligence Service before and during the Second World War even though they were invaded and occupied by the Soviets (June 1940) and NAZIS (July 1941). Finland The Finnish Intelligence Service succeded in compromising Soviet military communications. Tghey also had some success in compromise the classified transmissions some non-Axis countries. The Finns worked with Japanese cryptologists on Soviet codes. France French code breakers were unable to penetrate the Germn enigma machines. The French effort ws led by Cpt. Gustave Bertrand , head of the French radio intelligence sevice.

The French secret service assisted the Poles by getting some code books from a German trsitor. This enabled the Poles to break into enigma until the Germans upgraded the system judt before the War. The Poles did not tell the British and French about what they had accomplished until it became obvious that Hitler was determined to invade Poland. The Poles finally showed Bertrand and Commander Humphrey Sandwith, the Admiralty's chief official dealing with radio interception and direction finding (July 25, 1939). They were stunned when they saw the enigmas the Poles had contructed , but by this time the Pole were againn in the dark. Some of the Polish code breakers managed to escape to France just before Polish resistance to the Germans and Soviets collapsed (late-September 1939). The French set up a joint French-Polish radio intelligence center at Gretz-Armainvillers near Paris making use of the Polish expertise (October 1939). The operation was code named 'Bruno'--Poste de Commandement Bruno.

The Bruno center set up a Teletype link to the British Code and Ciphers School (BC&CS) the fore-runner of Bletchly Park. The Bruno operation also included an operation to crack the Spanish and Italian ciphers. [Bury] P.C. Bruno as the Germans advanced was evacuated in stages. The Poles were on the run again. The British were concerned about both the Pole and Bertrand falling into German hands because by this time Bletchly Park had begun to break into some enigma transmissions. GC&CS chief Denniston cabeled Bertrand offering to assist in evacuations. Bertrand had, already giot the Poles and some of his staff to Algiers (June 24). He cabeled back and shocked Denniston by telling him that he planned to continue working on enigma. The Franco-German armistace prohibited French military intelligence from working on German codes. Bertrand managed to get permission to continue his work in secret, He set up shop at the Chï¿½teau des Fouzes near Uzï¿½s near to the Meditetteranean coast, a site chosen to facilitate a rapid escape if the Germans moved to occupy Vichy.

The Poles were surepticiously returned from Algiers (October 1940). Poste de Commandement Cadix was in business. [Budiansky, pp. 145-46.] They continued working until after the Torch landings, the Germans occupoied Vichy (November 1942). Germany Germany had considerable successes in breaking into the secure traffic of several countries, although World Wr II historians focus primarily on British efforts to crack the German Enigma Machines. Shortly after World War II, the German military launched a new, expanded crypto-analysis capability. The Reichswehr code unit was especially interested in the British Governmentï¿½s telegraph code. This code was used to advise the British Admiralty about the location and movement of non-British naval shipping. As a result of this effort, the Germans before the NAZIs seized power had broken into British, French and Italian naval communications. Even after the NAZI seizure of power and the formation of the Pact of Steel with Italy, the Germans did not advised the Italian Navy that their secure transmissions had been cracked.

The German began working informally with the Finnish Intelligence Service to break into Soviet secure communications (at least by 1934). After the Spanish Civil War, Generalissimo Francisco Franco permitted Germany which had supported the Nationalists during the War, to set up wireless surveillance posts in Spain. Their primary purpose was to intercept Royal Navy communications in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. Beginning before the War, the Germans exchanged information with the Italian Servizio Informazione Militare on French secure naval communications. Germany, Hungary and Romania exchanged information on Soviet secure communications efforts. The NAZIs had perhaps the most disorganized war effort of all the major combatant countries. There was a great deal of duplication and ioverlapping jurisdiction in security, research and development, industrial manufacturing, and other areas. Code breaking was another example. One study identified nine different NAZI units involved in cryptology and there may have been more. These units not only wasted scarce resources, but they rarely cooperated fully with each other. Germanyï¿½s Naval B-Dienst (Beobachtungsdienst - Surveillance Service) was primarily interested in the British Royal Navy. The Germans had some success in reading coded American naval messages through early 1942.

This was a factor in the considerabkle success achieved by the German U-boats off the coast of America in the first few months of the War. This ended abruptly with the American military intoduced the SIGABA system (April 1942). SIGANA was similar to Enigma in many ways, but infinitely more complex. The Deutsche Reichspost broke the scrambled voice transmission of the American-British transatlantic telephone system. German technicians built a de-scrambling device and after the Western nOffensdive (May-June 1940), operated an intercept faciliy at Noordwijk in the occupied Netherlands (1940-41). As a result the Germans were able to regularly listen to classified telephone conversations between U.S. President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill. After D-Day and the Allied push into Belgium and the Netherlands (September 1944), the Germans located the telephone intercept facility from the Netherlands to Bavaria. This severely compromised the intercept capability. B-Dienst was also successful in breaking into Royal Navyï¿½s secure communications for much of the War. They cracked the 5-digit Royal Navy code.

The British 4 digit naval code proved more difficult to crack, but the Germans did break into it. OKM B-Dienst also sucessfully broke intto five French naval codes and three Danish codes before the outbreak of the the War. Of course a major German target was the Soviet Union. OKM B-Dienst broke four Soviet codes, but the Germans never broke the Soviet diplomatic code. Despite the successes, the Germans never were able to learn about the major Red Army offenses that battered the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. Italy The Italians before the War were reading British and Yugoslavian naval traffic. Japan The Japanese had an active active cryptographic program. The Army and the Navy had separate programs. They did not manage to crack any major Allied codes. The chief of Imperial Japanese Army intelligence, Lieutenant General Seizo Arisue, told American interrogators after the War, "We couldn't break your codes at all." The did, however break sime low-level codes. And with the help of the Finns, they had some success with Soviet codes. Of course until the final week of the War, the Soviets and Japanese were not at war although the border was heavily miitarized.

The two countries fought a major battle along the Mongolian/Manchurian bordr just before the oit break of World War II (July 1939). A faction of the Japanese Army (the Strike North Faction) wanted to attack the Soviet Union, but were undermined by Hitler's decesion to sign the NAZI-Soviet Non-Agression Oacvt (August 1939). After Barbarossa (June 1941), a factiion in the Army wanted to join the the Germans in the war with the Soviet Union, but the commitment to the Pacifiv War persuaded the Gocernment to avoid attacking the Siviets. We have very limited information on Japanese code breaking efforts. As far as we know, their signals intelligence during the Pacific War was limited to traffic analysis, meaning interpreting the volume and direction of signals with out understanding the actual messages. Lithuania Lithuania and Germany after World War I worked closely together on Polish codes and ciphers and achieved some succes. Both countries had territorial differences with Poland. Cooperation with the Germans ceased after the NAZIs seized power in Germany. The NAZIs wanted the return of Memel.

Most of Lithuania hd been part of the Tsarist Empire, but Memel had bee part of East Prussia and transferred to Lithuania as a result of a League of Nations plebecite. Poland Poles declared their independence in the gfinal days of World War I (October 1918). The borders of the new nation were, however contested by its neigbors, especially Germany and the new Soviet Union. In the West, the League of Nations surpervised referendums, but there were also engagements fought with German militias. In the east there was a full-scale war--the Polish-Soviet War (1919-21). The Polish Cipher Bureau achieved considerable successes cracking Soviet secure communications which ensured the independence of the recently created Polish nation and considerable eastern terrotories. The cracking of the Enigma Machine is perhaps the greatest feat of cryptology and began in Poland nearly two decades before the outbreak of World War II. [Bury] Polish cryptanalysts during the early-1920s had begun intercepting and analyzing German military radio transmissions. Those transmissions suddently became impossible to read, going dark as the cryptologists would pputv it (February 1926).

The Poles had no inside information, but they suspected that the Germans had begun to use encrypted (machine generated) codes. [ Budiansky] At the time the new code seemed impossible to crack. We now know that the Germans had begfun using their Enigma machines based on machines developed by the German railways. The Germans had considerable confidence in the security of the transmissions made with the codes generarted by Enigma, lsrgely because of the mathematical complexity. One estimate suggests that the internal rotors of Enigma could be wired to generate a complexity of 10 to the 80th power, meaning 1 followed by an astonishing 80 zeroes. This meant a complexity exponetially greater than ever before faced by code breakers in history. The Polish Cipher Bureau thus began the effort to crack the vaunted German Enigma machines. The Poles set out to crack the code amd managed to do so after Allied intelligence managed to provide them an actual Enigma machine. Right before the outbreak of the War the Germans upgraded their Enigma machine, putting the Poles in the dark.

After the German invasion (September 1939), the staff of the Polish Cipher Bureau had to split up and try to make their ways to the West. This became very difficult when the Soviets invaded from the east. Some were killed before reaching safety. Others were captured. None revealed the work of the Cipher Bureau to the Germans. Some managed to reach France where the work on Enigma continued. The Germans remained totally unaware that the Poles had suceeded in penetrating Enigma or even had an important codebreaking effort. Soviet Union One area of World War II cryptology that remains a dark hole is Soviet code breaking efforts. We have no information on Soviet cryptographic efforts during the War. The Soviets must have had a substantial effort. And they must have obtained Enigma machines as early as the Red Army offensive before Moscow (December 1941). The Russians are renowned mathematicians, a critical skill for code breakers. They did not, however, unlike the Americans and British did not have 'bombs' (early computers). As far as we know, the Russians have never released information on their code breaking efforts. There are tantalizing clues that the Soviets may have cracked the Enigma codes.

Admiral Golokov, the Soviet CinC in the Arctic, wrote in his 1960 memoirs that he knew that Admiral Fraser was planning to send the Scharnhorst to sea (December 1943). One author who has written extensively about Enigma tells us, "No direct evidence but I don't think the Soviets broke Enigma in any quantity." [Sale] We know that the Soviets knew that the Western Allies had cracked both German Enigma and Japanese codes. They knew about Magic in 1941 and passed the information on to the Germans who informed the Japanese. The Japanese apparently dismissed the reports. The British and Americans passed Magic/Ultra information to the Soviets in 1941 both before and after Barbarossa (without an indication of the source). The specificity and accuracy of these communications must have alerted Soviet intelligence that Enigma was penetrated. Cairncross may have provided the first confirmation of this. Cairncross was assigned to work in Bletchley Park. Every week he relayed summaries of British intelligence intercepts which were of the greatest interest to the Soviet Union. Soviets authors have addressed World war II in great detail, primarily the titanic struggle on the Eastern Front.

As far as we know, in the vast Soviet literature, the subject of code breaking is not addressed. Hopefully our Russian readers can confirm this or tell us what has been published on the subject. A Russian correspondent has provided us a review of a Russian book on Soviet cryptology. We are attempting to translate it. It discusses Soviet cryptology in some detail, but not code breaking efforts. Sources Budiansky, Stephen. Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II Bury. Jan. "The Greatest Secret of World War II - The Enigma Code Breach". Sale, Tony. E-mail message, February 24, 2011.

Question: Mathematicians or code breakers from what country were the first to break the codes in the Enigma machines used by the German military from the 1920s to the 1940s?
Answer: Poland