Posted on 02/19/2009 1:30:05 PM PST by nickcarraway
In 1943 I was stationed at RAF Brize Norton, working as an electrician on Hen gist gliders among other aircraft. One morning I received a message at a dispersal point to report immediately to the Station Warrant Officer. Within hours I had cleared the Station and was on the train to participate in one of the best kept secrets of WWII.
In 1943 a number of RAF electricians were interviewed for an unspecific task at an unspecific place and I was among those selected. Within a few weeks I joined a group of fellow electricians at RAF Church Green, where we waited several weeks to be positively vetted.
The day finally arrived when we were given our passes and entered the security block at adjacent Bletchley Park where we were told “This is the place where we have a crack at breaking German codes”. So the mystery was uncovered and we learned what our role in the organisation devoted to the breaking of the Enigma cipher and the obtaining of what was called Ultra intelligence.
It was not practicable to recruit a sufficient number of suitable civilians for the work, so it was decided to use the Wrens for the operation of, and RAF electricians for the servicing of what was know as the “bombes”.
“Bombe” was the name given by the original Polish inventors to the machine used to assist in determining the settings of the Enigma enciphering machine., which had been used by the German Army and Navy 9 and later the Luftwaffe) from about 1930 as the principal protection for the security of their radio signals.
Over 30,000 Enigma machines were in use by the German forces and High Command during the war.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Very cool, thanks for posting it NC.
I’ve read several books about breaking the Enigma...Alan Turing was the genius behind Bletchley Park..
In 1976 I became a history student after reading Anthony Cave Brown’s “Body Guard of Lies”. It dealt with the preparations for D-Day and the WWII sig/intel including Enigma. For 9 years after that, I studied this.
The impact on the war was Very significant.
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“It was not until 1974 the secret of Ultra was revealed to the public when GP Capt F W Winterbotham was permitted by the public to publish his book describing the key role in the distribution of Ultra Intelligence. Professor Harry Hinsley who himself worked at Bletchley Park gave his opinion that without Ultra intelligence the war could have gone on to 1948.”
In 1978 I was taught how to do the monthly reset on the American version of the Enigma machine while at COMSUBLANT. At that time it was the ‘back up’ to the systems using IBM ‘encryption’ cards and those card readers.
The strangest thing about the German’s use of the Enigma machine was that it was commercially available for years before WW2. Why they thought it could possibly be “unbreakable” is a mystery to me. OTOH, the Allies, particularly the Brits, knew every move the Germans were going to make, especially after about mid-1941, and they still nearly lost the war.
I was told we kept the mechanical encripters a long time. Because the keyboards of the electronic version emitted plain text and was suspect on security.
Of course in today’s world it is all micro-burst spread spectrum.
Every detail you wrote is accurate. The system as the Navy was using it for a backup in the late 1970’s had...at least six rotars, with 32 strands and 32 pin holes.
Took a couple of hours to do that ‘end of month’ set up...and then of course you would test it, and pray you did all the rotors and all the pin placements correct...or you had to break it down and start over.
Pain in the butt...but it worked.
And yes, the keyboard apparently did give off an electronic signature. We had some odd ‘techs’ checking that out...it wasn’t til several years later while watching the television ‘docudrama’ about the Walker spy ring I realized thats what they were doing there.
I was actually depicted in one brief scene of that tv movie, when a radiation leak was faked by one of our subs, so as to provide a trail to that spy ring. I was working the emergency circuits for the subs in the Atlantic, Med, that day.
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Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. |
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