Ultra and its importance to winning the war.

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#1

Ultra was the most closely guarded secret of WW2. It was only recently that some of those involved started talking about what they did. But some of its secrets have not been revealed still, and probably will never see the light of day.

I have also heard it commented that Churchill knew about Purl Harbour before it happened. If he tolled Roosevelt or not will never be known. But it would seem that if he told them about the attack from Mexico he probably told him about Pear Harbour.

They continued to decrypt info well after the war, and it would seem that a number of countries, not knowing that Great Britain had broken the code, continued to use Enigma machines as the primary crypto method in their embassies. This enabled Great Britain and probably the US to read diplomatic signals.

Another spin-off from Ultra was the Colossus machine. By the end of the war they had five computers working on the Enigma codes. Churchill had the machines broken up at the end of the war.

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

#2

Any sources to be found about Winston Churchill knowing about pearl habour?

#3

My brother old girlfriend spoke about that much, on how America let Pearl Harbor be attacked so we could enter the war. :roll: I heard somewhere that some information was brought to attention but it was far to sketchy to put 2 and 2 together.

#4

It may be released in forty years or ninety years, but don’t hold your breath. It is probably more along the lines of “if they are reading all this SigInt they should have seen it”. Cactus my be more correct in that they could see something was going to happen but could not say what.

Question. When did the US decide to have an exercise for it’s carrier fleet? Large exercises normally get planned well in advance. If the Navy department had got up one morning and said “Oh lets go for a sail next week” I would be very suspicious about higher level knowledge of enemy future actions. If they had planned to have the carrier fleet out of port on that day some months in advance then maybe they had no warning. Any comments?

#5

I doubt that there was any real conspiracy but Station X apparently did have indications from intercepts that something was up relative to US Pacific interests. The information is supposed to have been passed to the US but discounted by the Americans because they had no corroborating evidence and didn’t trust British sources.