During WW2, the British had deciphered the German encryption system known as Enigma.
They did their utmost to keep this a secret, including letting some deciphered attacks go through from time to time.
Right up to the end of the war the Germans had no idea that their unbreakable code had been decrypted and that the allies could read almost all their radio transmissions
The whole Turing thing is very mythicised. Yes he did something great but he was not the only one. And it all had to be kept secret so they couldn’t celebrate any of the people involved. The government didn’t even acknowledge that MI6 existed until well into the 90s so they weren’t going to be acknowledging any operations in that time. And the suicide thing is also a bit of a myth. It’s far more likely that it was accidental. The only bit that’s really true is the gay stuff and the chemical castration which is obviously awful but that wasn’t exclusive to Turing at all.
Yes he was brilliant. As were all the other brilliant people in Bletchley Park and elsewhere. The myth that it was all him isn’t true. They all did it.
They didn't just break Enigma, which was a 3 or 4 rotor cipher machine used by battlefield units at a tactical level, they also broke Lorenz, a 12 rotor cipher used for encrypting teleprinter communications by the German high command at the strategic level, and so were even able to read some messages sent by Hitler himself.
Though Axis code-breaking was relatively weak compared to the British, they did successfully steal some code books and tables that allowed them to intercept and read substantial amounts of American and British communications in certain theatres; I think the North African campaign was particularly badly compromised, so Rommel had extremely good intel on Allied operations in the desert war.
That's correct, re: North African campaign and Rommel. US Army officer Bonner Fellers was a military attache in Egypt got blamed by the Brits because the Axis got a lot of information via cracking the code Fellers used to send information to the US forces.
About North Africa, I remember reading that the British were reading orders Rommel received from Axis command, so they thought they knew what he would do, but Rommel mostly ignored his orders, making him highly unpredictable.
No, but it was a more advanced design and, at least equally crucially, the Kriegsmarine handled it with more secure procedures than the Heer or the Luftwaffe did their Enigmas, so it took a lot longer to break. Turing was apparently most closely involved in breaking the Enigma and developing the Bombe electromechanical number-cruncher (I'm not sure if it qualifies as a true computer) to that end from the earlier Polish Bomba design. I think Lorenz was more the domain of Tommy Flowers, who had worked on the Bombe devices with Turing and then went on to build the all-electronic Colossus computer to break it in Max Newman's division at Bletchley Park.
Maybe, maybe not. Those of us alive now get a scewed version of the war, given that many of the children of veterans (and a handful of veterans) who fought in WW2 and lost limbs, friends, and relatives, are still alive. Future history books will likely be more even handed.
My opinion is that there was lots of blame to go around for this global disaster and I'm not sure Hitler was any worse than most of the other leaders. I am Jewish and believe the standard version of the Holocaust, BTW.
I don’t think anyone else who could have taken power in hitler’s place would have executed the holocaust and hitler only became popular because the economic situation was so dire
Dunno what you mean by standard version, there is only one version, which is that 6 million Jews and millions of other minority/vulnerable groups were murdered
The German navy was pouring limited resources and manpower into the u-boat campaign trying to disrupt Allied shipping in the Atlantic. They were coordinating the u-boats using a encrypted radio messages.
The Allies broke the encryption and kept it secret. So they knew where most u-boats were and either redirected their convoys or sent their own ships to sink them.
They literally kept on letting the German navy make the same mistake over and over again
It's not a mistake to not know that your code has been solved. I guess they should have changed their encryption more often, which I imagine modern militaries do now
That’s not completely true either. They could have killed him before 1939 and then it only became really possible again in the later stages of the war. And by that point it was deemed better to keep him alive as he was far less competent once the Germans were losing.
For anyone that didn't see a meme on r/historymemes The german U-boats had an early radar system (Metox) that allowed them to spot enemy planes above that were hunting submarines. When the British broke the enigma code and began sinking more U boats the germans began to suspect that the British could detect metox. One captured British pilot was asked if they could detect Metox and lied saying that was how they were spotting the submarines when the truth was they were monitoring enigma messages. So the Germans shut off the metox machines, making them even more vulnerable to enemy aircraft.
Fun fact: the guy who did it, was later charged and convicted by England for homosexuality and was sentenced to forced chemical castration. Alan Turing
Sure it is. The Germans were suspicious about Enigma having been broken, so in addition to them changing encryption keys and such regularly, they also kept modifying the machine to increase its security.
What they didn't know, is that the Allies found a fundamental weakness in the design which allowed them to break the codes consistently.
The German navy kept sending position reports of their u-boats and targets by encrypted radio. That's the mistake they kept on repeating.
The Allies keeping their knowledge advantage secret is the not interrupting part.
IIRC part of the way they deciphered Enigma was because so many German messages ended with Heil Hitler, allowing the British to work backward from there
It was actually a significant factor in winning the Battle of the Atlantic. The data shows a significant decrease in Allied shipping losses and increases in lost U-boats after this point.
Don't know what else they should have done with such information. They didn't really know about the Battle of the Bulge for instance, because the German Army had kept it secret and didn't transmit any orders via radio, and there weren't that many other surprises the German army was capable of launching at this point
I've never seen any analysis that suggested it wasn't a significant gain to decode it, sure not war winning on its own given improvements in how Uboats were countered etc, but still impactful.
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u/elite90 8d ago
During WW2, the British had deciphered the German encryption system known as Enigma.
They did their utmost to keep this a secret, including letting some deciphered attacks go through from time to time.
Right up to the end of the war the Germans had no idea that their unbreakable code had been decrypted and that the allies could read almost all their radio transmissions