WWII U-110 & capture of Enigma

[a425couple]

WWII U-110 & capture of Enigma

"She survived the first assault but soon the two destroyers HMS Bulldog
and HMS Broadway joined the hunt dropping their own depth charges. U-110
was forced to surface by the attack and Bulldog’s captain set a course
to ram the U-Boat. Lemp seeing this ordered his crew to abandon ship,
mistakenly leaving behind the Enigma Ciphers and Codebooks, he wrongly
assumed the Brits would sink her. Bulldog’s captain realised at the last
moment that they might be able to seize the German Boat and changed course.

Once in the water, Lemp realised U-110 wasn’t sinking and attempted to
swim back to her, this was the last anyone saw of him. HMS Bulldog
prepared and sent a boarding party under the command of Lieutenant David
Balme. They were able to secure the Enigma Machine and the complete set
of codebooks and stripped the boat of anything useful after a number of
trips. William Stewart Pollock, a Radio Operator on loan to Bulldog was
the man responsible for securing the Enigma machine and Codebooks
because he thought they looked out of place in the Radio Room.

The Admiralty realised the significance of the capture and the recovered
equipment and information. In order to preserve the secrecy of the
seizure of the Enigma Information they ordered the U-Boat scuttled and
the crew were sent to Iceland to be interned.

The capture allowed the code breakers at Bletchley Park to crack the
German Navy’s codes and gave them unparalleled insight into the more
secure operations that the Kreigsmarine used with regard to its
encryption. Much work would still need to be done ---"

https://forcesreunited.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/taking-enigma-the-story-of-hms-bulldog-and-u-110/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-110_(1940)

http://www.oldsaltblog.com/2011/05/capture-of-u110-and-the-enigma-machine-seventy-years-ago-today/

I was reading of this incident elsewhere (Quarterly Journal
of Military History) and was surprised by this account of
Sub-Lieutenant Balme who had spent 7 year in Navy,
"I climbed the conning tower, and at the top I took
my Webley revolver out of it's holster. I had never
fired it in my life."
Really!? He was armed with a revolver that he had
never fired??

[Kenneth Young]

In article <oo9sm...@news4.newsguy.com>, a425c...@hotmail.com

(a425couple) wrote:

> WWII U-110 & capture of Enigma

Enigma was broken by the Poles prior to WW2 and this was built on by
British code breakers. What was important was the other material captured
like German operational maps. These were griddle with a random assortment
of box identifiers. Capturing one off these maps allowed U-boat weather
reports to locate a boat. Considering each boat was supposed to make a
daily weather report this was important.

[millssc...@gmail.com]

> Once in the water, Lemp realised U-110 wasn’t sinking and attempted to
> swim back to her, this was the last anyone saw of him.

> The Admiralty realised the significance of the capture and the recovered
> equipment and information. In order to preserve the secrecy of the
> seizure of the Enigma Information they ordered the U-Boat scuttled and
> the crew were sent to Iceland to be interned.
>
> The capture allowed the code breakers at Bletchley Park to crack the
> German Navy’s codes and gave them unparalleled insight into the more
> secure operations that the Kreigsmarine used with regard to its
> encryption. Much work would still need to be done ---"
>

The captain was captured and tortured to give-up ENIGMA intelligence.
There was a day code already placed into the machine captured. Without
this code it would have been impossible to crack the machine.

The question is why would the captain give out the correct day code
even under torture.

In my historical point of view it is possible that the "opened"
ENIGMA was a tool to fool the opponents. The Germans would
think little of sacrificing a whole division to solidify the
Allied use of the intelligence.

The big question is why did Eisenhower barely win the D-day end-game?
He was a full division short. Why??

The Battle of the Bulge was barely won. Somebody made a blitz run
to Hitler's command zone and killed him before the civilian defense
forces could be sent to the armories for rifles. A million rifles
strong was stopped barely. No order got out in time.

Hitler's ending was a "nose-job btw. To upset-able to talk about.

[george152]

On 9/3/2017 9:31 PM, Jeff wrote:

>
> Bletchley was already reading Naval Enigma messages before the U-110
> machine was captured.
>
> What proved to be more use than the actual machine were he code books
> that were captured that allowed 'cribs' to be produced which quickened
> to the process.
>
> Jeff
>
>
No matter what the subject theres an associated conspiracy theory.
The Enigma machine and its coding was already in British hands from the
Poles
See
Poland’s main codebreakers were Jerzy Rozycki, Henryk Zygalski and
Marian Rejewski who joined the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau in
Warsaw.

---
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[Fred J. McCall]

george152 <gbl...@hnpl.net> wrote:

>On 9/3/2017 9:31 PM, Jeff wrote:
>
>>
>> Bletchley was already reading Naval Enigma messages before the U-110
>> machine was captured.
>>
>> What proved to be more use than the actual machine were he code books
>> that were captured that allowed 'cribs' to be produced which quickened
>> to the process.
>>
>> Jeff
>>
>>
>No matter what the subject theres an associated conspiracy theory.
>The Enigma machine and its coding was already in British hands from the
>Poles
>See
>Poland’s main codebreakers were Jerzy Rozycki, Henryk Zygalski and
>Marian Rejewski who joined the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau in
>Warsaw.
>

Actually that's not quite right, is it? The theory behind the bombe
certainly came from the Poles and there may have been an older model
Enigma as part of the deal, but the naval Enigma was different and
seeing how it was different was quite important to Allied decryption
efforts.


--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw

[damdu...@yahoo.co.uk]

On Sun, 03 Sep 2017 18:29:30 -0700, Fred J. McCall
<fjmc...@gmail.com> wrote:


>>>
>>>
>>No matter what the subject theres an associated conspiracy theory.
>>The Enigma machine and its coding was already in British hands from the
>>Poles
>>See
>>Poland’s main codebreakers were Jerzy Rozycki, Henryk Zygalski and
>>Marian Rejewski who joined the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau in
>>Warsaw.
>>
>
>Actually that's not quite right, is it? The theory behind the bombe
>certainly came from the Poles and there may have been an older model
>Enigma as part of the deal, but the naval Enigma was different and
>seeing how it was different was quite important to Allied decryption
>efforts.

Wasn't there something about that at least the early naval ones were
not as dissimilar as may be expected ?
It later being found that some of the information was filed away in
the British and probably other countries patent offices where it had
been for years.

G.Harman

[dott.Piergiorgio]

On 03/09/2017 22:12, george152 wrote:
> On 9/3/2017 9:31 PM, Jeff wrote:
>
>>
>> Bletchley was already reading Naval Enigma messages before the U-110
>> machine was captured.
>>
>> What proved to be more use than the actual machine were he code books
>> that were captured that allowed 'cribs' to be produced which quickened
>> to the process.
>>
>> Jeff
>>
>>
> No matter what the subject theres an associated conspiracy theory.
> The Enigma machine and its coding was already in British hands from the
> Poles
> See
> Poland’s main codebreakers were Jerzy Rozycki, Henryk Zygalski and
> Marian Rejewski who joined the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau in
> Warsaw.

on conspiro nonsense, I can only allow an assessment under the light of
the precedent known as "Zimmerman's telegram", whose decryption need
formally and constitutionally to be done by US gov't.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

[Keith Willshaw]

On 04/09/2017 02:29, Fred J. McCall wrote:

> george152 <gbl...@hnpl.net> wrote:
>

> Actually that's not quite right, is it? The theory behind the bombe
> certainly came from the Poles and there may have been an older model
> Enigma as part of the deal, but the naval Enigma was different and
> seeing how it was different was quite important to Allied decryption
> efforts.
>
>

As I recall the Poles had a commercial enigma but wwere unable to
progress on the military version. The commercial version had the wiring
order on the entry disc in the order of a typewriter keyboard and they
realized that the Germans must have chages this. One of them had the
thought that perhaps being military and logical they had just used
ABCDEFG etc. It turns out they had. That got them into it while settings
were only changed once a day but once the Germans started changing them
after every message in Sept 1938 they could no longer break it in a
useful time period.

What made that possible was Alan Turings Electro Mechanical Bombe that
could exclude all impossible settings then use brute force to get the
correct settings. The Poles had tried to build their own Bomba but
lacking Turings realization that eliminating impossible settings saved
huge amounts of work were unsuccessful. That said the BP codebreakers
reckoned the Polish efforts saved them several months of work.

[Keith Willshaw]

On 03/09/2017 21:12, george152 wrote:
> On 9/3/2017 9:31 PM, Jeff wrote:
>
>>
>> Bletchley was already reading Naval Enigma messages before the U-110
>> machine was captured.
>>
>> What proved to be more use than the actual machine were he code books
>> that were captured that allowed 'cribs' to be produced which quickened
>> to the process.
>>
>> Jeff
>>
>>
> No matter what the subject theres an associated conspiracy theory.
> The Enigma machine and its coding was already in British hands from the
> Poles
> See
> Poland’s main codebreakers were Jerzy Rozycki, Henryk Zygalski and
> Marian Rejewski who joined the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau in
> Warsaw.
>

This is incorrect. The Poles had access to a 3 rotor commercial enigma
machine which was much less secure. The Enigma machne captured from
U-110 was the 3 rotor naval enigma machine. Equally importantly they
captured the Kriegsmarine code books. The British had already captured
at least 2 enigman machines by this time but getting the current code
books and machine settings was a huge advantage.

The Poles certainly made advances which they passed on to Beltchley Park
but it was Turing and hos team that built the machines that could crack
them in a timely manner.

KeithW

[george152]

On 9/6/2017 10:47 AM, Keith Willshaw wrote:
> On 03/09/2017 21:12, george152 wrote:
>> On 9/3/2017 9:31 PM, Jeff wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Bletchley was already reading Naval Enigma messages before the U-110
>>> machine was captured.
>>>
>>> What proved to be more use than the actual machine were he code books
>>> that were captured that allowed 'cribs' to be produced which
>>> quickened to the process.
>>>
>>> Jeff
>>>
>>>
>> No matter what the subject theres an associated conspiracy theory.
>> The Enigma machine and its coding was already in British hands from
>> the Poles
>> See
>> Poland’s main codebreakers were Jerzy Rozycki, Henryk Zygalski and
>> Marian Rejewski who joined the Polish General Staff's Cipher Bureau in
>> Warsaw.
>>
>
> This is incorrect. The Poles had access to a 3 rotor commercial enigma
> machine which was much less secure. The Enigma machne captured from
> U-110 was the 3 rotor naval enigma machine. Equally importantly they
> captured the Kriegsmarine code books. The British had already captured
> at least 2 enigman machines by this time but getting the current code
> books and machine settings was a huge advantage.

No. That is history.
Inconvenient I know but history all the same.
Betchley Park would have gotten nowhere had it not been for this initial
discovery

[Keith Willshaw]

On 06/09/2017 00:13, george152 wrote:

>
> No. That is history.
> Inconvenient I know but history all the same.
> Betchley Park would have gotten nowhere had it not been for this initial
> discovery
>

No it would have howevr taken longer. You seem to be totally uninformed
of the sheer resources that were assigned to the operation at BP. This
was a huge effort which at its peak involved 10,000 people working in
absolute secrecy. This was an amazing accomplishment for any nation at
the time.

In fact the initial information about Enigma was obtained by the French
cryptographer Gustave Bertrand who passed it on to the Poles and the
British who both begun working on it. The Poles were quite successful
in reading messages on the original machine but were simply not able to
read those on the 3 rotor machine when those 3 were picked from a set of
5. They simply could not read German codes from 1938/39. Their system
required a manual process carried out by a group of talented
mathematicians and the sheer number of possible permutations with 3
rotors selected at random from a set of 5 was quite unworkable in a
timely manner

At the same tine Alan Turing had been working on his own method of
decoding Enigma using the German weakness of starting or ending messages
with a fixed set of test. Example start 'From OKW WEST'

He built an electromechanical device to break this by brute force. Now
the Polish information was extremely useful in building that device but
in Febuary 1940 the RN captured a set of enigma rotors from U-33 so they
had the real thing to work with. At best the Polish information shaved 3
months off the project. Probably less as the first Bombe was only
delivered to BP in March 1940. It was built by the British Tabulating
machine company and based on the commercial enigma machine which the
British acquired quite simply by purchasing it.

In short the British had some sucess with the Polish method in 1939 and
early 1940 but the Turing method is what made it possible on the
industrial scale. After a relatively short training period the operators
could process meaages by the hundred

In order to get useful intelligence you need to do the folliwng

1) Have large numbers of radio intecept stations to transcribe the signals

2) Have the facilties to decrpt hundreds of messages per day

3) Translate the decrpted messages from German , Italian Japanese etc

4) Filter them to identify those important in real time and pass them on
for analysis.

This bit is where the real skill came in. An example from a lecture at
BP stuck in my mind. During the Battle of the Atlantic when the
Luftwaffe were going to transfer FW-200 aircraft to a new operating base
they would send a particular officer to inspect it and see if it was
adequate. The Air Force sigint group realized this so when in 1942 he
was reported as having arrived at an airfield near Brest the RAF were
informed. They began operating Photo recon flights over the area and
when the FW-200 detachment arrived they were bombed on the ground a few
nights later apparently by stray bombs from a raid on the harbour at Brest.

5) Pass those up the command chain fro action.

This required thousands of people operating in complete secrecy all over
the world. By the end of 1943 the reality was that a a signal from
German HQ to Rommel was landing on Montgomery desk at pretty the same time.

As talented as they undoubtedly were a dozen Polish Mathematicians could
not achieve this on their own any more than Alan Turing could have.