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NARRATOR: By mid 1940, the German Army had conquered all of western Europe.Hitler was tightening the noose around Britain. In the Atlantic, GermanU-boats were decimating Allied convoys, threatening to cut off Britain's onlylifeline. But Churchill had a secret weapon, the strangest militaryestablishment in the world. Crossword fanatics, chess champions,mathematicians, students and professors, Americans and British, all came herewith one common aim: to unlock the secrets of the Enigma, a machine thatconcealed Germany's war plans in seemingly unbreakable code. If Enigma couldbe penetrated, everything Hitler plotted would be known in advance. AtBletchley Park there unfolded one of the most astonishing exploits of theSecond World War. Many here had never seen a code before, yet it was their jobto find a way to crack Enigma. In the process, they devised ingeniouscodebreaking machines that were forerunners of the modern computer. Buteverything they did remained classified for 30 years. Tonight NOVA reveals the secrets of the men and women who helped turned the tide ofvictory and shape the future.
NARRATOR: In 1939, Germany introduces a devastating new kind of warfare,blitzkrieg. Lightning attacks by tanks and planes bring Europe to its knees.Blitzkrieg depends on surprise, demanding speedy communication. So radio iscrucial to the attack plans. Every day the skies are full of German radiosignals. The German high command has trained thousands of wireless operatorsin preparation for the conquest of Europe. Their job is to be able tointerpret Morse code in any conditions. But there is still the problem of howto keep the messages secret. So the German military has adopted a seeminglyinvincible code-making machine. The Enigma turns a message into unintelligiblegibberish, letter by letter. When the message is sent in Morse code, all anenemy would see is a meaningless string of letters. But when the Germanoperator at the receiving end types the coded letters back into his Enigmamachine, the real message appears. In this way vital war plans remain totallysecret. The high command never wavers from its belief in the security ofEnigma. They are so confident that they deploy the Enigma throughout theGerman war machine. They never imagine what was about to happen at BletchleyPark.
TONY SALE: Its complexity's enormous. I mean, if I sent just one message on anEnigma machine today it would still take a super Cray computer, the fastest inthe world, a year to go through searching for that one message withoutsupporting evidence as to what that message might have been.
NARRATOR: Long before the war began, the airwaves were full of coded messagesas Hitler prepared for battle. Cracking the German ciphers became the priorityof a special British Intelligence unit. In 1938, the unit, known as theGovernment Code and Cipher School, or GC&CS, moved into Bletchley Park, anornate mansion 50 miles north of London. From this rooftop room, wirelessoperators contacted listening stations all over Britain that were interceptingGerman messages. Bletchley Park's code name was Station X. The challenge ofbreaking the Enigma demanded a special kind of talent. GC&CS set aboutrecruiting.
ANDREW HODGES: The people who a few years earlier were regarded as too youngand not knowing anything of importance, of not being real people, not having,not being significant grown-up people, suddenly they were the people who heldthe keys to the Reich.
ARTHUR J. LEVENSON: Codebreaking was a somewhat esoteric profession. But itwasn't clear exactly who would make a good codebreaker. People who wererecruited were asked whether they did crossword puzzles. And if they said theydid and enjoyed doing them, and did them well, that was generally enough to getyou in. We discovered people of a whole variety of backgrounds did very well.Anthropologists, Egyptologists, paleontologists, and even an occasional lawyerturned out to have the knack.
NARRATOR: Bletchley Park evolved into a unique operation in which militarydiscipline, uniforms, and rank no longer mattered. The sole imperative was tobreak the Enigma, and break it as quickly as possible.
DONALD MICHIE: At that age you can just take fire and blaze away, half out ofyour mind with enthusiasm and dedication, you're not married, you don't have toworry about the kids and the rent and so forth. And during that sort of shortperiod of your life you can live like a madman and, you know, take almost nosleep and - determined to do it.
NARRATOR: But youth and determination weren't enough. Mathematicians wereenlisted to take on the daunting complexity of the Enigma. Only a completelynew approach to codebreaking could help to penetrate its secrets. But if thework at Bletchley Park were to succeed, absolute secrecy was essential. Someof the recruits had no idea of the purpose of their work.
GWEN WATKINS: Most of us who were among the - what shall I say, the hoi polloi,the lower grades, never knew what went on at Bletchley Park. The only time Irealized what we were actually doing was when I was shown a code book which hadjust been captured and rushed to Bletchley from a captured plane, and of coursewe had no plastic envelopes or anything then, the poor thing was just given tome as it was and I was horrified to see a huge bloodstain on it, the blood'round the edges was drying, but the blood in the middle was still wet and Irealized then that somewhere was this German - this German air crew bleeding,still bleeding while I was decoding - I was writing out in modern German theirnew code book, and that did bring the war very close.
NARRATOR: The Germans were supremely confident in the Enigma. Its basicprinciple was simple, but it could scramble messages in millions of differentways. Pressing one typewriter key would light up a totally different letter.An electrical current was sent from the keys to the letters through a series ofrotors. Each time a key was pressed a rotor would turn, altering the wiringand so changing the letter that was produced.
TONY SALE: The total number of ways in which the Enigma machine can beconfigured for any particular message is 150 million million million. So itwas an enormous complexity which was why the Germans thought it was completelysafe.
NARRATOR: The Enigma was first developed as a commercial encryption device inthe 1920s and patented in London. German banks and railways were among itsfirst customers, but the German military was quick to see its potential. Eachday German operators in the field received a new set of instructions from baseon how to set up the Enigma. They had to make three adjustments so that boththe sender's and receiver's machines would match. First, which rotors to putinto the machine and in what order.
TONY SALE: The rotors contained one of the central secrets of the Enigmamachine, which was the cross wiring inside the wheels. The whole of this mazeof wiring inside changed every time a letter was entered and that's what gavethe Enigma machine its vast complexity.
NARRATOR: The second step was to change the wiring of each rotor by adjustingthe ring of letters around the rim - 26 combinations on each wheel. The thirdstep was the plugboard. Using his secret instructions for the day, theoperator could wire up each typewriter key to a totally different letter.
TONY SALE: This was what the Germans thought was the killer cryptographically.This plugboard enabled you to transpose letters completely, a pair of letters.Now because there are 26 sockets on the front of the Enigma machine, you canplug these pairs of letters together in an absolutely astronomical number ofcombinations, about one-and-a-half million million combinations that you canuse on the front.
NARRATOR: Once the machine was set up, the message was encoded letter byletter. These letters were then sent by Morse code to the receiver at theother end. The Germans were never shaken in their belief in Enigma'sinvincibility. At first, all the codebreakers had were meaningless groups ofcoded letters and endless patience. And in the first months of the war the newrecruits were getting nowhere.
TONY SALE: At the beginning of the war there was a great difficulty becausealthough we had intercepts which we knew were enciphered using the Enigmamachine, we didn't know enough detail about the machine to be able to evenbegin to find any method of breaking it. Unless you've got the exact key youjust cannot get anywhere with it at all and this is a major difference from anycode systems prior to that, that the Enigma machine, there's no sense ofnearness, you're not nearly at a solution. You've either got the solution oryou haven't got the solution.
NARRATOR: The search for a solution began long before the war. Starting in1931 and continuing for seven years, a hard-up German army clerk secretlyobtained more than 300 documents, including the instructions and settings forthe Enigma machines. He sold them to the French Secret Service, but theircryptographers showed little interest. Next the stolen documents were offeredto the British Secret Service. At this stage, GC&CS was skeptical thatEnigma could be broken and politely declined the offer. Finally the documentswent to the Poles. With Germany breathing down their necks, their response wasvery different. A deal was struck. With the stolen documents in hand, threebrilliant young Polish mathematicians, Zygalski, Rozycki and Rejewski, set towork on the Enigma. The Poles soon realized that they had to figure out howthe Germans had wired the Enigma's keyboard to the first rotor. Since anytypewriter key could be wired to any letter on the rotor, the number ofpossible wiring orders was astronomical. But if the Poles could work this out,it would be a vital first step in breaking the Enigma.
TONY SALE: Rejewski had a flash of inspiration and he thought, what about ifthey've been stupid enough to just use ABCD as the order round the rotor, andthey had, all the multitude of millions and millions of ways in which theycould have scrambled the connection from the keyboard to the entry point, andthey'd just chosen ABCD. And Marian Rejewski in desperation tried that, itworked, and suddenly he'd got the internal connections of the whole of theGerman forces machine.
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