[thegreatbeast]

There is no honor among thieves. This is just sad. What about the firebombing that took place during that war? Is that somehow cruel and unusual now because we know it occured knowingly? What about the torment Churchill went through when he couldn't take a certain action that would have saved lives because it would have belied the breaking of the German Enigma codes? This is just sad.

[Viva Le Dissention]

Hold on. If the claims are true, then the government should be held responsible. If they deliberately prevented these people from leaving the islands for the sole purpose of making political hay against the Japanese, as far as I'm concerned, it amounts to war crimes and ought to be punished.

A bit about the Enigma code, though; the Germans thought the code was unbreakable, and with good reason--it was (is) unbreakable. The sheer volume of different possibilites that exist with each encoded message is something to the order of 150 million million million, and that's just on a standard 3 rotor machine. Multiply that number by 26 (for the additional rotor) on the U-Boats, and you have a number that is so astronomically high that it was, quite literally, impossible to break, especially given the 24 hour period they worked within, seeing as Enigma codes changed daily. To say that Churchill grapped with whether to "expose" that the British had broken the Enigma code is misleading; even if they had broken it, it would have changed the next day, and no doubt the Germans would have dismissed it as a unlikely coincidence. Although at many points the British were able to capture some "keys" to Enigma, with German plaintext next to the ciphered message, the Germans simply changed the weather report codes or what have you.

Although the British had become fairly adept in beating Enigma (mostly through German folly) the idea that Churchill grappled with this moral dilemma is somewhat misleading.