Posted on 09/18/2009 5:27:03 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Obama has thrown enough folks under the bus so why not two whole countries as well?
A Tokyo Rose from Ireland?
UBOAT Command War Log-18 Sept. 1939:
-U 34 reported that she had started her return passage, the first boat of the 2nd U-Flotilla.This flotilla has orders to remain in the operations area until ammunition and fuel are used up. The equipment has therefore sufficed for 18 war days in positions.
-U 38 and U 40 entered port.
Successes: U 38 sank Manaar 7,200 tons
Inverliffey 9,445 tons
14, 645 tons
U 40 no sinkings.
-The British radio published the sinking of the a/c carrier Courageous (22,500) tons by a U-boat. A wonderful success and further confirmation of the fact that the English defense forces are not as effective as they advertise themselves to be.
-A number of radio intelligence reports received during the last week show clearly that the enemy is introducing the convoy systems in the Mediterranean. Agents’ reports point to English troop transports leaving for France from Channel ports. U 35 has therefore been ordered to occupy area F and operate from there against these troop transports. It is also intended to attack them simultaneously from the North Sea. (War Log F.O. U/B West).
-The inadequate firing of torpedoes is causing grave concern. G7a and G7e torpedoes have repeatedly exploded after a run of about 250 meters, before reaching the target. In one case the boat was slightly damaged owing to this (U 27). The Torpedo Inspectorate does not know the reason at present. Everything is being done to remedy the defect.
-Towards midday C-in-C Navy arrived at Group Headquarters. He enquired into the process of the U-boat war and raised the question of sending U-boats to the Mediterranean to withdraw light Naval forces from the North Sea.
In my opinion it would not be a good thing, with the very few U-boats available at present, to split them up over too many theatres of war. The withdrawal of light Naval forces from the one area can also be achieved by transferring the war against merchant shipping to the areas West of Gibraltar and Portugal. This was already done with the first disposition and it is intended to continue on the same lines later.
Then C-in-C Navy spoke of the conduct of the war in general. He said that the next step he intended to take in the war at sea against England, before declaring unrestricted danger zones, was to declare danger zones only against English ships, not against neutrals. He wished first however, to hear F.O. U/B’s views.
I replied that in my opinion warfare limited to certain nations would not bring the desired results, because:
1) In most cases the U-boat, which has to wait submerged for a suspicious ship, cannot identify the ship’s nationality in time to attack without warning.
2) Presumably the enemy would very soon sail his merchant ships under the protection of neutral markings and flags.
The results would be:
a) either many neutrals would be sunk without warning as supposed enemies, which is just what we want to avoid
b) or many enemy ships would get away as supposed neutrals, which we want to avoid ever more.
The Mosleyites were the British Nazis.
William Joyce would become known as the infamous “Lord Haw-Haw”. He was captured at the end of the war, tried for treason and hung in early 1946.
good. fitting.
Meanwhile we should start calling Jimmy Carter Lord Hee Haw
NAVAL EVENTS-Monday, 18 September
Northern Patrol - light cruiser CARDIFF departed Scapa Flow on Northern Patrol duties, arriving back on the 22nd.
U.35 and other U-boats in Northwestern approaches - U.35 sank British trawlers ARLITA (326grt) 22 miles WNW of St Kilda and LORD MINTO (295grt) off the Butt of Lewis, 30miles NW of St Kilda on the 18th. The survivors were picked up by British trawler NANCY HAGUE (299grt), which was in company and spared by the submarine to rescue the other two crews.
At 0409/19th, U.35 stopped trawler ALVIS (279grt) 29 miles north of St Kilda. She was ordered to dismantle her radio and proceed to Fleetwood. This trawler was erroneously reported in early sources as the RIVER TAY (203grt).
At 0600/19th, trawler NEIL MACKAY (209grt) was chased by an unknown U-boat, 22 miles W by N of the Butt of Lewis.
These attacks put into motion a major anti-submarine operation by destroyers beginning on the 19th.
British northern waters - light cruisers AURORA, EDINBURGH, BELFAST, and SHEFFIELD departed Sullom Voe after refuelling and arrived at Scapa Flow on the 20th.
Anti-aircraft cruiser CALCUTTA with destroyer FOXHOUND departed Scapa Flow for patrol in Fair Isle Channel, stopping Danish steamer MAROCCO (1641grt) on the 18th and sending her into Kirkwall for inspection. At 2029/18th, FOXHOUND attacked a submarine contact east of the Orkneys and on the 20th detached to investigate another contact. During this hunt, FOXHOUND experienced a defect to her depth charge thrower and repaired at Scapa Flow alongside light cruiser AURORA. CALCUTTA arrived back on the 21st.
Light cruiser DELHI arrived at Scapa Flow.
Light cruiser ENTERPRISE departed Scapa Flow and arrived back on the 21st.
British east coast - U.23 laid mines in St Andrews Bay between Dundee and the Firth of Forth.
Convoy FS.7 departed Methil and arrived at Southend on the 20th.
Destroyer JUPITER made an attack on U.21 off Dunbar, but no damage was done. The submarine was also attacked unsuccessfully by aircraft.
Destroyers EXPRESS and ESK arrived at the Humber after escorting convoys off Flamborough Head.
Convoy FN.7 departed Southend and arrived at Methil on the 20th.
North Sea - destroyer BOREAS on patrol was near missed by German bombing, but not damaged.
U.7 departed Kiel for patrol in the North Sea and returned on 3 October.
Baltic - Polish submarine ORZEL, commanded by Lt Grudzinski, escaped internment at Tallin and began a 16 day patrol in the Baltic before heading for England.
Polish submarine RYS, with damaged periscopes and low on fuel, arrived at Stavnas, Sweden, for internment.
English Channel – destroyer JAGUAR with destroyer VANOC in company attacked a submarine contact off St Albans Head, Dorset.
Light cruisers CERES and CARADOC departed Plymouth on escort duties and arrived back on the 20th.
Destroyer VANOC attacked a submarine contact SW of Eddystone.
Destroyer ISIS attacked a submarine contact 20 miles south of the Lizard, Cornwall.
UK-France convoys - BC.3S of 16 steamers including BARON GRAHAM, BARON MACLAY, NEW TEXAS (Cdre), and TREWORLAS departed Bristol Channel escorted by destroyers MONTROSE (SO), VENETIA, and VISCOUNT. The convoy safely arrived in the Loire on the 20th.
UK-Turkey - Polish destroyer BLYSKAWICA departed Liverpool with steamer CLAN MENZIES (7336grt) carrying military stores for Turkey. Both ships arrived at Gibraltar on the 22nd and continued on to Malta. From Malta on the 27th, the steamer proceeded to Istanbul and BLYSKAWICA returned to Plymouth, arriving on 1 October.
Southwestern approaches - destroyer INTREPID attacked a submarine contact 30 miles N by W of Land’s End.
U.32 sank steamer KENSINGTON COURT (4863grt) with gunfire 70 miles SW of Fastnet. The submarine was attacked by British aircraft, but was not damaged. Destroyer KELLY was dispatched to assist, but before arriving on the scene, the crew had been picked up by a Sunderland flying boat of RAF 204 Squadron.
Gibraltar area - destroyers EXMOUTH, ENCOUNTER, ECLIPSE, ESCAPADE departed Gibraltar to return to England after escorting convoy GC.1, and arrived at Plymouth on the 20th.
The French 2nd Squadron of battleships PROVENCE, BRETAGNE, LORRAINE with four destroyers (LE PALME, LE MARS, and TEMPÊTE of the 1st Division, and one other - the other destroyers of the Squadron were with GC.1) departed Gibraltar to return to Oran.
Mediterranean - anti-aircraft cruiser COVENTRY departed Alexandria on patrol.
Destroyers DECOY, DEFENDER, DELIGHT, and DUCHESS arrived at Suez, passed through the Canal and arrived at Alexandria next day to join the Mediterranean Fleet.
Central and South Atlantic – the French instituted a Canary Islands submarine patrol. ARGO and CENTAURE of the 4th Submarine Division departed Casablanca on the 22nd to begin the patrol, followed in rotation by LE CENTAURE, ARGO, PASCAL, HENRI POINCARÉ, also of the 4th Division.
Light cruiser DANAE departed Simonstown on patrol and arrived back on the 21st.
If they keep grinning like that once aloft they are liable to get bugs in their teeth.
Joyce was actually born in the US.
And Joyce’s Friend, Joe Kennedy Senior, was Ambassador to Britan
According to Harvey Klemmer, who served as one of Kennedy’s embassy aides, Kennedy habitually referred to Jews as “kikes or sheenies.” Kennedy allegedly told Klemmer that “some individual Jews are all right, Harvey, but as a race they stink. They spoil everything they touch.”
When Klemmer returned from a trip to Germany and reported the pattern of vandalism and assault on Jews by Nazis, Kennedy responded, “Well, they brought it on themselves.”
On June 13, 1938, Kennedy met with Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador in London, who claimed in Berlin that Kennedy had told him that “it was not so much the fact that we want to get rid of the Jews that was so harmful to us, but rather the loud clamor with which we accompanied this purpose.
“Kennedy himself fully understood our Jewish policy.”
Kennedy’s main concern with such violent acts against German Jews as Kristallnacht was that they generated bad publicity in the West for the Nazi regime, a concern he communicated in a letter to Charles Lindbergh.
Kennedy had a close friendship with Nancy Astor; the correspondence between them is reportedly replete with anti-Semitic tropes. As Edward Renehan notes:
As fiercely anti-Communist as they were anti-Semitic, Kennedy and Astor looked upon Adolf Hitler as a welcome solution to both of these “world problems” (Nancy’s phrase).... Kennedy replied that he expected the “Jew media” in the United States to become a problem, that “Jewish pundits in New York and Los Angeles” were already making noises contrived to “set a match to the fuse of the world.”
Hitler Adjutant Reported Dead - The Ministry of Information announced tonight it had been reporte from Berlin the Ernst Bahls, adjutant to Adolf Hitler, had died suddenly at the front. The Ministry said the report had caused rumors and speculation
I wonder. Ernst was a platoon leader of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, 17th Company prior to being transferred to the Fuhrer's Adjutant Office. Perhaps on of many near misses on Hitler himself?
Oh, and that picture of the Soviet "transport plane" is absolutely terrifying just to look at. One thing it reminded me of though was the droid carriers from Star Wars - The Phantom Menace.
William Joyce , “Lord Haw Haw”, was born in Ireland, but was a naturalized American citizen [not shown on his passport or other papers]. The Brits ignored that niggling little fact after WW II [so did we], so they could hang him for treason [along with a real Brit who tried to raise a British Waffen SS unit, with very limited - read 26 volunteers- to fight for the Germans]
They chose the wrong side. Definitely.
Members of the Lullaby League, perhaps.
That is a great site. My eyes lit up when I saw "My Day" columns for most days in 1939 and, presumbaly, for future years.
Though Stalin has always held western democracy in contempt, he created and kept alive for years the pretense of an alliance with it against fascism; his satellites, tools and dupes in other countries formed their "popular fronts" and their leagues against war and fascism. All these pretenses and lies have collapsed together. The most squirming apologists now will not be able to convince any one but idiots of their sincerity. At least the issue stands clear. Hitlerism is brown communism, Stalinism is red fascism. The world will now understand that the only real "ideological" issue is one between democracy, liberty and peace on the one hand and despotism, terror and war on the other.
Sadly, the Soviet-funded Anti-War movement in America will continuie for another year and a half.
Up until the Invasion of Russia, when they immediately started screaming for NAZI blood.
The Times editorial is dead on accurate. Too bad they would never write something anywhere close to that tone today.
The Collapse of Poland brought about an important yield for the allies: the “Ultra Secret.”
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.
http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/virtualbp/poles/poles.htm
“Backward” little Poland cracked the Enigma Machine!
And despite overrunning Poland and later France, the Germans never had a clue!
Now that is interesting.
Nice post. I found out about the 70 year anniversary from Rushs opening, not all the FR articles on the dropping of the systems.
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