Enigma code discussion

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#1

To break the code could be one of the main reason why the allies are able to defeat the Nazi German, do you think it would be better if the German just use some obscure language like the american did against the japanese? After all according to wikipedia, The Enigma was used commercially from the early 1920s on, and was also adopted by the military and governmental services of a number of nations.

And how can the German not realized that their code is broken after numerous of air bombing/navy operations has been failed, and it seems that the British has always known that they were coming, how can they not realized this?

thanks for responding.

#2

Good topic, FW - 190 Ace. I don’t understand either, how the Germans would use such a device that was already being used commercialy pre war. You would think that Hitler may think twice about using it, because possibly someone may have mastered the Enigma, and codebreaking would be easy.

Maybe the Axis could use some obscure German tongue, something similiar to Navajo.

#3

Well Germany probably could of used a obscure language to determine a different ending of the war. Maybe they did not want to do it because of all of the commercialling during the 1920’s and the British and Americans might of caught on to this sooner then they wanted. I wonder where they would get such a language to do this? The Americans had many soldiers that speaked many languages. So I think they were probably scared to do it because they thought the Americans and British would catch on very fast to their method.

#4

Also, if they had been able to use an obscure language…it would be one they most likely racialy profiled and would be too embarressed to use it…

Slobs… >.>

#5

Well it depends on what the condition was for it. If that was the only way I bet you they would have done it. That is if they would have started using languages like that. I personally do not think they would have a problem using this language Wolfgang Von Gottberg. They might be embarressed by it, but that is the only way to MAYBE getting a report to another area without the US or British to copy the message. This is just my thought on this.

#6

And here is a question for you. If you are the British authority, and you know that there are german bombers heading to some England’s non-strategic city (by breaking the enigma code, you can intercept their communication)

Would you alert your citizens and call up the air defence? or let the bombers bomb the city? (notice that if you alert your citizens and call up the air defense, it would indirectly inform the germans that their code has been broken

#7

Well I would alert the city. Because valuable lives are more important then breaking a code and letting the Germans know. It would just make the Germans take up more time of making another language to use. (Which is probably hard to make up after you already made one.) Just my thought on your question.

#8

I agree with German soldier.

But maybe you could use your logic to trap the enemy…for instance evacuating all of the civilians and replacing them with tons of AA guns… :smiley:

#9

Coventry was destroyed, even if the Brits new they were coming…

They took great care in making sure that the flow of information from the various german army, navy and airforce would continue for the duration of the war.
And in the end, it worked. The german military had no idea that everything they communicated via enigma was decoded and analysed.

#10

AA guns would work. I would have to agree with you on that one Woflgang Von Gottberg.

#11

Sir Harry Hinsley is a distinguished historian who during the Second World War worked at Bletchley Park

link to full interview : http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/Historical/hinsley.html

Q. How did you disguise, for example, that a particular submarine was going through a particular area? How could you disguise it so that it wasn’t obvious that you’d intercepted it?

Let me give you an example of how we took the precautions, using it without on the other hand giving grounds for suspicion to the other side. The most dramatic example comes from the Mediterranean where we sank at two or three stages in the war something from 40% to 60% of every ship that left the north shore of the Mediterranean for North Africa. 60% of the shipping was sunk, for example, just before the Battle of Alamein and again just before Gazala when Rommel was stopped.

Every one of those ships before it was attacked and sunk had to be sighted by a British aeroplane or submarine which had been put in a position in which it would sight it without it knowing that it had been put in that position, and had made a sighting signal which the Germans and the Italians had intercepted. That was the standard procedure. As a consequence of that the Germans and the Italians assumed that we had 400 submarines whereas we had 25. And they assumed that we had a huge reconnaissance airforce on Malta, whereas we had three aeroplanes!

But solemnly that procedure had to be followed by the commanders. When they in their little centre in Cairo or, as it was later on Algiers, said we can’t sink all those seventeen ships today, which five are we going to take first and which five will we take second, when they were doing this they had to arrange that procedure before they hit a single ship.

Similar precautions were taken in the Atlantic, but there the problem was different. That is why the Germans got most suspicious about the Atlantic. The great feature there was that the Enigma was used in the first instance not to fight the U- Boats but to evade them. And the problem was how could you evade them without their noticing. You have a situation on the graph in which the number of U-Boats at sea in the Atlantic is going up, and the number of convoys they see is going down!

How do you cover that? We did cover it but it was done by a different system from what I have just described in the Mediterranean. We let captured Germans, people we had captured from U-Boats write home from prison camp and we instructed our people when interrogated by Germans - our pilots for example - to propagate the view that we had absolutely miraculous radar which could detect a U-Boat even if it was submerged from hundreds of miles. And the Germans believed it.

They had an enquiry saying ‘surely it must be possible that it is the Enigma that isn’t safe.’ And the cipher men come back and say ‘it can’t be the Enigma.’ So somebody gets up and says ‘well, it must be this bloody radar that we have heard about.’ And so they decided. But you see different solutions had to be adopted for each particular situation. But these were the kind of precautions that were taken I think with great success. I mean they never really did tumble to the idea that it was unsafe, which is pretty marvellous really.

source: University of Cambridge
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/Historical/hinsley.html

#12

but wouldnt that singal the germans that their codes has been broken?

#13

The Enigma machine WAS a commercially available encryption device from the 1920s. The wheels (used for encryption) were however different. As were the settings, start points and some of the cables.

The way the machine worked was simple. You push a letter on the type writer like keyboard. THis creats an electrical circuit and ligts a letter lamp on the top. The wheels would all turn around one positon.

Depending on the positioning of the start point for the wheels and the cables set and even where the different lights for the letters were arranged would give vastly different codes.

The Kriegsmarine U-boats carried a modified Enigma with four wheels.

The take from Enigma was very protected. People probably did die, that could have been saved, in order to protect these sources.

The AA idea, wouldn’t work. The planes wouldn’t be destroyed (many would turn away as it would be obvious as to the trap) and it would be known that the code was broken. THis would lead tomany more deaths.

It is a hard descision, but 1 death may avert several.

The langauge code is simple. There are no languages in Europe that are as uniquie, and not written down, ina similar way to the Navaho. Only Navahos speak the language (and it was largely bastardised by the addition of new words such as fire eggs for bombs, even Navahos who weren’t code speakers could barely understand the langauge (see the film wind talkers)).

In a way the British used similar methods. Using poems, a poem would be used to encode SOE traffic from Europe. Eventually, it was realised these poems were useless, as the Germans knew them. So a poet and (failed) cryptographer wrote some new ones.

The most famous of which was the (officially unnamed poem) issued by it’s writer Leo Marks, to Violette Szabo, a French agent of Special Operations Executive. It was immortalised in a 1950s film of her life, and death at the hands of the Gestapo “Carve her name with pride”.

The Life That I Have (AKA “Yours”)

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours

The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.

Leo Marks

See more here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poem_code
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Marks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_That_I_Have

#14

The Germans Enigma machines (they were specially constructed for the Nazis and differed from the commercial ones) were recovered from U-boats and from Poland.

The film U-571 not withstanding, the Royal Navy captured several Enigmas starting in 1941.

On the 9th of May, 1941, U-110 had been about to attack an Allied convoy when it was forced to surface by British ships protecting the convoy. The German crew surrendered.

The photograph on the right shows the boarding party from the destroyer HMS Bulldog, rowing out to the half-submerged U-boat. (U-110 later sank while being towed to a British naval base).

The British sailors climbed into the conning tower and began a search of the deserted submarine. The bookshelves still contained books of every description - navigation manuals, seamanship manuals, code books and signal books. The Bulldog’s telegraphist pointed to an interesting piece of equipment that looked like a typewriter. This, along with all the books from the shelves, was transferred with utmost care to HMS Bulldog. It was important that everything was kept dry as the code books and signal books were printed in ink that disappeared if they were dropped in seawater.

On Bulldog’s arrival back in Britain they were met by a representative from Bletchley Park, who photographed every page of every book. The ‘interesting piece of equipment’ turned out to be an Enigma machine, and the books contained the Enigma codes being used by the German navy.

This British Naval message dated 10th May reads: “a) Capture of U Boat 110 is to be referred to as operation Primrose. b) Operation Primrose is to be treated with greatest secrecy and few people allowed to know as possible…”

The British were anxious to make sure that the Germans did not find out that U-110 and its codebooks had been captured. All the sailors who took part in the operation were sworn to secrecy. If the Germans had found out, they would almost certainly have changed their codes. This would have made the code-breakers’ job far more difficult - but by 1943 they had the help of Colossus - the world’s first programmable electronic digital computer.

from http://www.iwm.org.uk/upload/package/10/enigma/enigma12.htm

Colossus was the worlds first programmable computer created in the 1940’s by the British (and only the British). The Americans were far behind in this race. It is unfortuneate the Colossus was destryoed at the end of the war on Churchills orders to maintain secracy.

http://www.cs4fn.org/history/colossus.php

Although 1941 was when the Royal Navy lifted the Kriegsmarine U-Boat enigmas (with four wheels) the land based varients for the Army and Air Force were already captured.

In 1939, just as the Polish were being attacked, a team of Royal Signals disguised as a Rugby team, entered Poland and secured an Enigma captured by the Polish Resistance/Goeriala movement.

They also had the dubious honour of being the ONLY Allied troops in the second world war to be subjected to (a non-effective) gas attack.

#15

The sockets at the front were used to add various pre set variables to the encryption, the wheels on top (there were 7 different wheels to be put in 3 different slots, I think), the U-boats had 9 for 4 slots. THey moved around on each keystroke, and could be hand moved to certain points to begin the coding.

The lights that lit up for the letters could also be moved around, but very rarely.

The coded message was then transmited in Morse code.

More here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine for full explaination of how it works.

The codename of the breaking operation was Ultra, based in Bletchly park.

More here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_(WWII_intelligence)

More about U110, the first U-boat that Enigma was lifted from.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-110

#16

In a way the British used similar methods. Using poems, a poem would be used to encode SOE traffic from Europe. Eventually, it was realised these poems were useless, as the Germans knew them. So a poet and (failed) cryptographer wrote some new ones.

The most famous of which was the (officially unnamed poem) issued by it’s writer Leo Marks, to Violette Szabo, a French agent of Special Operations Executive. It was immortalised in a 1950s film of her life, and death at the hands of the Gestapo “Carve her name with pride”.

I wouldn’t have called Leo Marks a failed cryptographer, quite the opposite, almost a genius. He was a non-conformist though, with a personality bordering on excentrism, thus he was rejected by the main cryptographing office of MI-6 and ended up with the excentrics of the SOE.

Jan

#17

The weak point of the Enigmna were the return wheels. Originally the Germans though they could almost double the number of possible permutations by installing a resturn wheel at the end of the stack of code wheels, which would direct the current back through the stack. The drawback of this arrangement was that a letter could not be coded by itself, e.g. an “A” could not come out in code as an “A”. This actually drastically limited the number of permutations and allowed machines like Colossus to start a brute force attack on the code.

Jan

#18

Didn’t know that Jan, thanks.

#19

Maybe I should have posted this in here. Make for better understanding if you can get a look at how the thing works.

#20

Anyone interested in learning more about how the messages were written. You can join me here http://www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showthread.php?p=104259#post104259

Just started playing around with it and ive learned alot.