![]() ![]() ![]() Only in 1941 did Enigma decrypts pay dividends. Similarly, Ultra's role in the Battle of Britain was limited: better grade intelligence came from prisoners, captured documents and improved air reconnaissance. Within a wider context, two Luftwaffe ciphers were broken, but the information gained was of little effective use. Although, thanks to the information from the Poles, the British had learned to read parts of the Wehrmacht's signals traffic, regular decrypts only became possible in the Norwegian campaign - and then they were of marginal operational use. Only a select few commanders were made aware of the full significance of Ultra, and it was mostly used only sparingly, to prevent the Germans thinking their ciphers had been broken.ĭespite providing some otherwise inaccessible information, it was some time before Ultra made any significant contribution to the war effort. The British described any intelligence gained from Enigma as 'Ultra', and considered it top secret. The Germans were convinced that Enigma output could not be broken, so they used the machine for all sorts of communications - on the battlefield, at sea, in the sky and, significantly, within its secret services. With German invasion imminent in 1939, the Poles opted to share their secrets with the British, and Britain's Government Code and Cipher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, became the centre for Allied efforts to keep up with dramatic war-induced changes in Enigma output.Ī host of top mathematicians and general problem-solvers was recruited, and a bank of early computers, known as 'bombes', was built - to work out the vast number of permutations in Enigma settings. Helped by its closer links to the German engineering industry, the Poles managed to reconstruct an Enigma machine, complete with internal wiring, and to read the Wehrmacht's messages between 19.įew realised the significance of the work going on at Bletchley Park It was only after they had handed over details to the Polish Cipher Bureau that progress was made. Over the years the basic machine became more complicated, as German code experts added plugs with electronic circuits.īritain and her allies first understood the problems posed by this machine in 1931, when a German spy, Hans Thilo Schmidt, allowed his French spymasters to photograph stolen Enigma operating manuals, although neither French nor British cryptanalysts could at first make headway in breaking the Enigma cipher. The receiver needed to know the exact settings of these rotors in order to reconstitute the coded text. Enigma allowed an operator to type in a message, then scramble it by means of three to five notched wheels, or rotors, which displayed different letters of the alphabet. ![]()
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