OT The piece of paper that fooled Hitler

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

Off topic I know..but quite fascinating nonetheless

(also click on the header called "Decoding the Note")

 

 

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12266109

Edited January 27, 2011 by UK_Widowmaker

[Flyby PC 23]

I'm not home to be 100% sure of the author, but I reckon you'd enjoy reading a book called Codebreakers or something. It's about Bletchley, where they broke the Enigma codes. Sound a bit nerdy, but I found it fascinating.

 

Early on in the codebreaking, before they'd fully broken the code, one codebreaker was getting Wermacht communications on the German merchant fleet frequencies. They couldn't break the code, but here was still intelligence to be gathered all the same. He reported to his superiors, but was told to check again because he must have made a mistake. He repeated his analysis with the same results but the penny never dropped. He was actually listening to the troops bound for the invasion of Norway being transported on merchant shipping. If they'd just made that last connection, there was time to have sent Royal Navy ships from Scapa Flow to intercept the vulnerable ships. By all accounts, the 'near miss' if you like was a big break for Bletchley, because they were suddenly taken a lot more seriously - and this was before they had an enigma machine.

 

When they really got good with the codes, the intelligence was trully amazing. They called it Ultra, and when fighting North Africa, the intelligence was so good that British Subs in the Med knew the sailing times and cargo manifests, and thus which ships to sink to hamper the Rommels Africa Corps, while leaving other ships alone. Fuel and armour were sent to the bottom, but ships carrying food were unmolested so that British POW's wouldn't be starved. At some stages, Montgomery was even getting Rommels messages before Rommel himself.

 

Ultra was so secret, that sometimes no warnings of impending attack could be given because there was no plausible explanation of how the attack was known, without revealing the German codes had been broken. If there wasn't a credible cover story, the intelligence had to be sat on.

 

Occassionally too, the Codebreakers got a break. By routine, the enigma codes were changed, but occassionally a message with the new code would be passed on using the old code, which like the Rosetta stone, was a massive key to break through the new settings. Otherwise, it could take a few days to break the code once the setting changed. If I remember correctly, the German Navy had very good discipline with their codes and took days to break, but the Army discipline was often very sloppy, and much easier to work out, sometimes even with coded messages accompanied by the same message in clear language.

 

Fascinating stuff. And only possible because the Germans were so utterly convinced their codes could not be broken. I'll post the author so you can get the correct book. ..

 

 

 

Edit : Code Breakers. The Inside Story of Bletchley Park. F.H. Hinsley & Alan Stripp. Published by Oxford University Press.

Edited January 27, 2011 by Flyby PC

[Hasse Wind 46]

If I remember correctly, the German Navy had very good discipline with their codes and took days to break, but the Army discipline was often very sloppy, and much easier to work out, sometimes even with coded messages accompanied by the same message in clear language.

 

I remember reading that it was the Luftwaffe who had the worst discipline in coding. In fact some sloppy work by some Luftwaffe Enigma operators was crucial to the British for breaking the first truly important German messages in 1940. The Navy and the Army did their coding better, usually.

 

Some Enigma messages were never cracked. Gestapo and the SS security service, SD, were paranoid about code security and it seems their operators were never allowed to take the easy way out. But then they usually had less traffic to handle than the major military branches (and less operators), so it was easier to maintain tighter security.

 

The role of the codebreakers to the Allied war effort was absolutely decisive. And yet most people know nothing about them. Alan Turing, one of the brightest minds of history and a great mathematician, had a major role in cracking the Enigma codes, but after the war he was treated like a criminal and he ended up killing himself, just because he was homosexual. It wasn't until 2009 that the British government apologized for his treatment. Turing's work saved countless of lives, and his theories were important for the development of computer technology later in the century.

 

Thanks for the link, Widowmaker. It was a fascinating read.

[Flyby PC 23]

The input from the Poles is often overlooked too, who did a lot of the early work.

 

I'm sure you're correct Hasse Wind too, but another factor with the army discipline was language across so many nationalities. Often orders had to be encoded, decoded, translated into Italian, Romanian, French, Norwegian, etc, re-encoded, then decoded again, and sometimes more than once. When you think about the allies, British, American, Canadian, and even French to an extent, they shared a common language to much greater degree than axis troops.

 

I have to agree, that the success of codebreaking, and the British ability to decieve the German Intelligence services perhaps weren't pivotal in changing the outcome of the war, but did save countless allied lives.

 

Sadly, it seems another British capacity was it's lack of gratitude to such people. There is a long list of people who felt very embittered after the war at their lack of recognition. Robert Watson Watt was another - just a program about him yesterday, - he invented Radar, which was arguably more decisive for the allies than codebreaking.

 

I sympathise with these people, but then again, in war time you are expected to give your all to the cause. Just because you're brilliant doesn't make your contibution any more noble than some poor Tommy ordered over the top. Some people gave everything. Of course it isn't right, and often it isn't fair, but its all relative.

 

I have to chuckle whenever I read about the airborne radar in nightfighters. The growing success in British success shooting down bombers at night was explained by eating carrots which improved night vision. It wasn't true of course, but the story took hold and was believed, and not only that but there was the added benefit that people started to eat more vegetables to top up their rations and have a healthier balanced diet. Even today, people think eating carrots is good for your eyesight. In the early days, radar equipped night fighters weren't permitted to fly over enemy territory in case they were shot down and the technology revealed to the enemy. Given British sneakiness, I wouldn't be surprised if the nightfighters which did venture further weren't required to have a sack of carrots in the cockpit...

[Hasse Wind 46]

Good point about the various languages of the Axis countries.

 

I remembered the book that mentions the poor coding practices of the Luftwaffe. It's John Keegan's Intelligence in War. This is a short excerpt of what Mr Keegan says in his book:

 

"The pattern of breaks was not random. The Gestapo seems, not unnaturally, to have taken great care; the German army and navy, which had long-established signal branches, made use of well-trained and experienced operators; the weakness lay most obviously with the Luftwaffe, a new service founded only in 1935. Its operators were probably younger and less experienced. A Luftwaffe key was the first to be broken by Bletchley, which thereafter broke almost all Luftwaffe keys intercepted, sometimes on the first day they were identified."

 

According to Keegan, not a single Gestapo key was broken during the war. The achievements of the Poles in learning about the existence of Enigma and starting the first code breaking attempts against it are also described in the book. In WW1, there was no independent German air force, only branches of the army and navy, so the new Luftwaffe had no independent tradition of handling their codes themselves.

 

I guess the basic problem the Germans had with the Enigma was that they believed it to be impossible to crack. It's easy to make mistakes when you underestimate the capabilities of your enemies. Fortunately the Nazi military machine so full of themselves that they were underestimating their opponents all the time.