Enigma
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Enigma
Everyone knows the major battles of World War 2, Stalingrad, D-day, and the Battle of Britain. We read about the heroes and watch the movies about the battles but there was a hidden war going on that was more important and in a lot of ways more deadly then anyone could imagine. The main headquarters for this war was known as Station X, its real name was Bletchley Park. What was really happening there was only known to the handful of people who had Ultra clearance. Those that had this clearance were told that this secret was more important then their lives and the lives of millions of there own troops. The reason for this is actually simple to understand. Because of the efforts of this secret war the allies were able to read most of the transmissions that Germany sent by radio. Bletchley Parks job was to crack every code Germany had in order to read Hitlers mail.
Arthur Scherbius invented the enigma machine in 1918 it had many versions. The most prevalent one was the three-rotor model that was used by the diplomats, army, air force, and high command. The Navy, which was more suspicious, used the most complicated one, which had four rotors. The enigma machine was considered the ultimate in encryption devices. I was mobile and the same device could be used to decode the massages you received. The code systems that were developed for them were the most sophisticated the Germans could come up with. The Germans considered it completely impossible to crack and highly unlikely that anyone would be able crack it even if they had the machine. The problem was that from before the war the Polish government had gotten photos of the machine and had built a copy of it. The second thing was that the Germans were so confident that they made mistakes when they encoded the messages, the air force made the most mistakes. The result was that by the time Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 the British were starting to decode the messages and had started to speed the process up to the point that the people at Bletchley Park could decrypt it by the end of the day.
There were several different code patterns that the Germans used with it. The navy codes are what the characters in the movie. The reason it was important is that the Battle of the Atlantic is the most important battle to be fought by Bletchley Park because if the allies lost it Great Britain would have to give up the war or starve to death. The German submarine force was winning the war in the beginning but with changes in tactics and the efforts of Bletchley Park by 1941 the allies started to slow down the loses. This event made the German navy suspicious so they switched to a code called Triton in October of 1941. They became very suspicious of loses they were still having and the fact that they were having an even harder time finding ships to sink. So they changed the enigma machine in February of 1942 to include 4 rotors. This change meant they could no longer read the u-boat traffic they managed to break it for 3 days in December of 1942 and would generally be broken from then to august of 1943. From September 1943 till the end of the war they could break it within 24 hours of receiving it. This change is one of the main plot points in the movie Enigma.
The Battle of the Atlantic happened from the day Britain declared war to just before Berlin fell. Britain relied heavily on imports of food and raw materials. The British navy was the most powerful in the world so Germany relied on commerce raiding ships both surface and u-boats to cut off the supplies that Britain needed to remain in the war. This was why decode the u-boat transmissions were the most important operation of the war. This was not the only things Bletchley Park did they also listened to the transmissions from the eastern front to Berlin. It is known that one set of these transmissions in 1943 carried a peace of news that would have been kept so secret that its transmissions would have been ordered to not be decoded like normal because it carried information that could have affected the course of the war. That transmission came from woods near Solmosk in the Soviet Union. It was called Katyn Forrest.
In September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland they had made a deal with the Soviet Union that when they invaded the Soviet Union could have the other half of Poland. After Polands surrender the Soviet Union they had approximately 25,000 prisoners who were officers, policemen, politic opponents, and political officials. In March 1940 Stalin ordered them executed so the NKVD took them to many locations and executed them one of those locations was Katyn Forrest. This act was kept secret from the outside world but in 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union. These made the rest of the allies by necessity ally themselves with the Soviet Union. In 1943 by accident the Germans stumble across the bodies buried in Katyn Forrest they then dug them up and tried to identify as many of the bodies as possible and reburied them is smaller graves. They recorded every thing by writing and pictures and passed the information to everyone they could but the allies mostly ignored it as propaganda. The list of the dead was kept as secret as possible to keep the Polish that were fighting for the allies from realizing the truth and severing the alliance between the allies and the Soviet Union. It wasnt until 1989 that Michkeal Grobechev released the files listing what happened to the 25,000 Polish prisoners and find out the truth of why it was kept secret.
One of the things that was invented and heavily used was what is called the Bombe which code translate large amounts of code at one time. This was the most important secret weapon of the war in that it cut down the amount of time it took