German reaction to Enigma revelation?
Jim H.
3 decades after the end of WWII. Was there any recorded reaction at
that time to this announcement by former German wartime leaders, and
if so, what was it? Or was it a 'secret' in name only by then?
(I'd like to refine my mental image of an older man smacking his
forehead and thinking, "So _that_ was it!" ;-))
Jim H.
William Black
> I think I've heard that the Enigma secret wasn't announced until about
> 3 decades after the end of WWII. Was there any recorded reaction at
> that time to this announcement by former German wartime leaders, and
> if so, what was it? Or was it a 'secret' in name only by then?
It was in 1974, F.W. Winterbotham's 'The Ultra Secret'
But by 1974 just about everyone with an interest had worked out that
something very odd was going on.
Churchill mentioned his 'most secret source' several times in his books,
the Poles involved had written a couple of books and I think the capture
of a machine on U-110 was public by then.
--
William Black
These are the gilded popinjays and murderous assassins of Perfidious
Albion and they are about their Queen's business. Any man who impedes
their passage does so at his own peril.
SolomonW
> forehead and thinking, "So _that_ was it!" ;-))
WW2 was funny like that everyone was reading other people's coded messages
and everyone thought that their messages were secure.
j...@cix.compulink.co.uk
willia...@hotmail.co.uk (William Black) wrote:
> Churchill mentioned his 'most secret source' several times in his
> books, the Poles involved had written a couple of books and I think
> the capture of a machine on U-110 was public by then.
The Germans were reasonably sure during the war that the Allies had
captured Enigmas, but were officially certain that the most this could
give away was traffic using any keys that had been captured.
The English translation of Doenitz's memoirs has an introduction by the
editor concerning the revelation of Ultra in 1974, with a letter from
Doenitz written just after he heard. He claimed he'd been suspicious,
but had no evidence to argue with the crypto people who claimed a break
was impossible.
The odd thing is that for the scale of attack the German crypto people
studied - a few man-years work, assuming no extraordinary talents or
luck - cracking Enigma was impractical. They didn't seem to appreciate
how much effort others would be prepared to put into it.
--
John Dallman, j...@cix.co.uk, HTML mail is treated as probable spam.
Shawn Wilson
> The English translation of Doenitz's memoirs has an introduction by the
> editor concerning the revelation of Ultra in 1974, with a letter from
> Doenitz written just after he heard. He claimed he'd been suspicious,
> but had no evidence to argue with the crypto people who claimed a break
> was impossible.
Indeed, according to most crypto books I have read, if all the
security features of Enigma had been properly used it would have been
damn near impossible. Problem was, users took shortcuts for
convenience that massively degraded the security.
And, of course, the Germans underestimated how much effort the Brits
would put into it.
William Black
Who read Typex messages who wasn't supposed to?
William Black
And what everyone forgets is that the plot of the novel 'From Russia
With Love' gave it all away in about 1957...
Rich Rostrom
> The odd thing is that for the scale of attack the German crypto people
> studied - a few man-years work, assuming no extraordinary talents or
> luck - cracking Enigma was impractical.
Yes and no. The initial Polish break into
Enigma was made with relatively modest
resources. That was because the Germans
did not see one of their vulnerabilities:
the double encipherment of the text setting.
The Polish success, and the 1940 re-break,
were all based on the knowledge that the
first 6 letters of any Enigma ciphertext were
were three letters ciphered twice.
> They didn't seem to appreciate
> how much effort others would be prepared to put into it.
That too.
Rich Rostrom
> Indeed, according to most crypto books I have read, if all the
> security features of Enigma had been properly used it would have been
> damn near impossible. Problem was, users took shortcuts for
> convenience that massively degraded the security.
The initial break was due to a deliberately
chosen flaw in German procedure: the
double encipherment of the text setting.
The Poles cracked Enigma b knowing the
wiring of the scrambler wheels (which the
Germans knew might be captured) and by
knowing that the first six letters of any
Enigma message were three letters repeated
twice (the text setting).
> And, of course, the Germans underestimated how
> much effort the Brits would put into it.
Let us say - the Allies. The re-break in 1940
was by a substantial effort by British, French,
and Polish cryptanalysts to repeat the original
Polish break against the substantially expanded
set of scrambler wheels.
Then the Germans stopped repeating the
text setting in May 1940. Fortunately the
Allies had already learned enough to predict
German procedure errors that allowed them
to keep breaking Enigma until the bombes
came on line.
But you are right - after May 1940, the Germans
could have rendered Enigma close to unbreakable
by improving their procedures. Not all of the
procedure flaws were operator laziness - the
Herivel Tip was unobvious. And the Sillies weren't
driven by convenience as much as raw laziness,
and the failure of the German crypto service to
make setting choice convenient.
And the Germans failed to enforce the simple
discipline of not resending unaltered messages
on different keys.
euno...@yahoo.com.au
> In article <i02pbc$i9...@news.eternal-september.org>,
>
> william.bl...@hotmail.co.uk (William Black) wrote:
> > Churchill mentioned his 'most secret source' several times in his
> > books, the Poles involved had written a couple of books and I think
> > the capture of a machine on U-110 was public by then.
>
> The Germans were reasonably sure during the war that the Allies had
> captured Enigmas, but were officially certain that the most this could
> give away was traffic using any keys that had been captured.
>
> The English translation of Doenitz's memoirs has an introduction by the
> editor concerning the revelation of Ultra in 1974, with a letter from
> Doenitz written just after he heard. He claimed he'd been suspicious,
> but had no evidence to argue with the crypto people who claimed a break
> was impossible.
>
> The odd thing is that for the scale of attack the German crypto people
> studied - a few man-years work, assuming no extraordinary talents or
> luck - cracking Enigma was impractical. They didn't seem to appreciate
> how much effort others would be prepared to put into it.
The Germans suffered from a decentralization of cryptology and
crytography.
They emphasised decentralised code breaking at a tactical level and
indeed had considerable success.
They routinely broke the US Army M-209 Haglin machine till the end of
the war, reading perhaps 35% of messages.
They were reading British Merchant code till 1943 and may have had
some isolated success with subsequent codes.
During the Battle of Denmark Straight the Bismarks crytologists were
reading Hood and King Georg V traffic and handing it
to the Bridge within mintues.
A sense of sucess in Breaking allied codes seem to have lulled them
into a sense of security that they had similar success in securing
their own codes. Of course the reverse is not true.
The Decentralisation on occaision meant that the OKW (Ober Kommand der
Wehermacht or Army High Command) was struggling to decipher messages
already decoded by the Reichs Post.
This made it difficult to integrate various clues to see the big
picture.
Immagine trying to figure out whether a u-boat was detected by radar,
radio direction finding or emisions from the local oscilator of it own
radar detector. (This false rumour, created by some mysterious
captured airmen was tested and worked to a distance of 2km)
The decentralisation is partilly a left over from the Treaty of
Verailes which made illegal any German Code breaking activity.
Cryptology thus became decentralised and underground with little cross
connection to other fields of study.
A big problem was the segregation of code design with code breaking.
It was often the case that engineers did the code design completely
divorced from the code breakers who might have pointed out flaws.
Some machines such as the Siemens T52e were relatively secure and
properly designed in the sense that code breakers had been consulted
in its design however the process of evolution of the T52a through
T52d had built a huge allied code breaking infrastructure around the
machine that kept pace with Gernan advances. T52e was generally not
worth breaking due to the effort but it could be done mainly through
cribs obtained from enigma.
The compartmentalisation meant the huge potential and art of combing
large number of clues and tracking them was not devoloped.
Hence post war Germans were incredulous when confronted with the
reality.
Lack of resources compounded the problem, inadaquete or no training in
cyrtography, crytoanalysts drafted to the front or forced to harves
potatoes compounded this.
Some vocies pointed to the weakeness of Enigma, but they were not
heard.
The Germans did use Hollerith Punch card machines and I believe one
German crytographer proved that with 50,000 cards enigma could be
broken. (50,000 cards is as much as a stack of encyclopedia pages and
really not that much and no worse than the 'manual methods used at
Blechely Park' of thousands of pages for every rotor setting for the
German word for 'one' (eins)
Konrad Zuse, who designed the first digital computer in the world
suggest with enormous prescience that vacuum tube versions could be
used to decode radio messages and to aim FLAK with great precision.
His floating point relay computers were used for aeroeleastic flutter
analysis and robotic fight control surface measuremeants. As he was a
civilian offering his idea to the Luftwaffe he was rejected.
The DEHOMAG D11 punch card tabulator was in essence a general purpose
computers (for marketing terms it had to be called a tabulator) could
have helped with code breaking. Punch cards machines were used and
post were interrogation suggests that they had been discusiing using
high speed optical readers.
The core problem seems to have been the lack of integration of
intelligence and the build up of expertise this allows, in part for
historical reasons which caused the decentralisation. This would
have lead to a lack of appreciation of what might be possible.
Finally it must be added that the US sigba and UK Typex mid war
machines that were, essentially elaborate versions of enigma with many
more rotors were very hard to break.
In late 1943 the Germans started introducing small numbers of a
rewirable reflector called UKWD, the diversity this provides could
have shut down Blechely Park for 2 years untill elaborate new machines
were designed and built. However production ofm UKWD was low and the
errors it caused when non UKWD and UKWD equiped sites communicated
often provided clues.
The Germans never stopped improving machines and procedures. They
just did it so progressively that things could be tracked.
One of their own cryptologists theories about the inter-relationship
between code development and code breaking, Kerckhoff, indicated that
enigma should have moved to at least 5 rotors with a new set every 3
months in order to keep pace with the likely increase in code breaking
capacities by 1939.
Bay Man
news:47624d44-bd3d-4a1d...@a30g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...
>I think I've heard that the Enigma secret wasn't announced until about
> 3 decades after the end of WWII. Was there any recorded reaction at
> that time to this announcement by former German wartime leaders, and
> if so, what was it? Or was it a 'secret' in name only by then?
1975 was the date. The World at War TV Series has a big gap in it. It should
have been updated while Olivier was still alive.
SolomonW
Several British codes were cracked.
William Black
>
>
> They routinely broke the US Army M-209 Haglin machine till the end of
> the war, reading perhaps 35% of messages.
But that was used only for tactical messages of importance for only a
short time.
> During the Battle of Denmark Straight the Bismarks crytologists were
> reading Hood and King Georg V traffic and handing it
> to the Bridge within mintues.
Reading sighting reports of yourself isn't much good.
William Black
>> Who read Typex messages who wasn't supposed to?
>
> Several British codes were cracked.
>
Tactical codes and codes issued to civilians are always cracked.
What matters is how long it takes...
SEN...@argo.rhein-neckar.de
An interesting question and the answer may surprise you. It was not by all
felt as a very big issue. In the early 1970s the view on the U-Boot war was
already moving. In the 1950s writing on it was dominated by people around
Doenitz. Their line of argument was that a tremendous fleet of allied
bombers controlled the Atlantic. The U-Boots bound this airpower there and
relieved Germany that way from much more bombing. Later it came up that
the crucial mid Atlantic gap was filled first by 16, than by 32 bombers.
RAF Bomber Command lost more in some single nights over Germany.
Then it was the UK radio direction finding (d/f). The U-Boots were very
close controlled by Doenitz and had lot of radio traffic. Germany was
very well in d/f and suspected the same for the UK. For those in the known
it was obvious that the Royal Navy could prepare and keep an actual
position map this way. Some more radio silence may have helped but Doenitz
opposed it by moral reasons. He proudly cited one of his captains who radioed
lyrics around (probably not for long).
In the early 1970s a new argument of the Doenitz people was that the unknown
hf/df system was most crucial for the RN in convoy battles. It was a special
short range (100 km?) d/f on ships with instant visualisation of a nearby
short wave transmission. By that system a convoy could locate a first
contacter U-Boot and press it under water to give the convoy time to change
direction.
The presence of such a system was suspected by U-Boot commanders because
too often they saw an escort coming in direct line after the contact message
was send. But Doenitz strongly denied such a possibility. In the 1970s it
came up that Doenitz was probably well aware of it. Januz Piekalkewicz
found that he got it from a French Admiral.
Bonatz, chief of B-Dienst (Kriegsmarine Radio Intelligence) published in
his memories that his service detected the presence of the hf/df system
by broken RN messages. Worse, in the late 1970s Juergen Rohwer published
German photographs of RN escorts with a well visible special hf/df antenna.
The image was shoot from Gibraltar and for public. To conceal its origine
the background was redacted and the antenna was removed by that process
too. So only high staff around Doenitz did know the new antenna. It was
argued in the 1970s that by knowledge of this system the subs could reduce
its effect by sinking the rear ship of the convoy with the hf/df locater.
The first public news of ULTRA came from a Polish book in the 1960s. By
the general German attitude to the Polish it was easily dismissed as
baseless exageration. After the release of Ultra in 1974 it was just one
more blow on the Doenitz group. Some of his staff was still around and
present at the famous "Ultra Conference" in 1978. It was a public meeting
in Germany of the old contrahents in intelligence.
Here one around Doenitz argued that their concept was to have a big
steamroller of U-Boots in the Atlantic that would overwhelm anything
and therefore Enigma security was thought not to be most important.
Later that argument came around without the steamroller but for the actual
U-Boot operations. Either by Doenitz or by someone close. It was very
strong opposed by one of the surviving Aces, Otto Kretschmer. "Silent Otto"
almost trashed his former chief.
It seems some captains of Kriegsmarine suspected a break in Enigma.
Rogge, captain of the Atlantis ("Raider C", "Ship 16") was sure of it
and wanted to wrote it in his war diary after the operation. Doenitz
forbade it and threatened him with court-martial.
But it seems nobody in the 1970s was aware that Doenitz already during
the war had some knoweledge of Ultra. That the RN broke his Enigma and
used it against him. He got it by the Abwehr from a US traitor but
dismissed it as unbelievable. It was well kept in his secret files and
I first read about it in the late 1990s. I already wrote here about it.
But even without this the 1970s got poor for Doenitz. Buchheim in "Das Boot"
revealed that Doenitz let several of his man shoot for alleged cowardice
or such like. One of those was the U-Boot captain "Thompson" portrait in
the movie. Another the son of Ernst Juenger. And he did not protect one
jewish Kriegsmarine scientist from the holocaust.
In the 1970s it was revealed that he personaly was responsible that the
US top kill weapon against subs could be a success. It was an air droped
acoustic homing torpedo that failed to sink the sub on its first mission.
The U-Boot could surface and report that it was hit in the rear deep under
water several minutes after it dived from an airplane. Doenitz dismissed
it as a hit by chance.
He had to be aware of the German homeing torpedo development. That a
sub could easy avoid such a a torpedo by reducing its speed below
cavitation level. So by the end of the 1970s the best he could do was
to die fast and that he did. For the Kriegsmarine the Ultra revelation
was only one of several embarrassments but not the worst. It seems during
and after the war their main objective was hiding the truth from their
own men.
One further defence argument was that only the US/UK had such unimaginable
resources to create an organisation to break the Enigma. It was not
realised that the Bletchley organistion was rather very small and cheap.
Its cost and manpower was less then one RN battleship.
That nobody could think of the technical possibilities for code breaking
was very wrong too. A German review group on cypher security argued around
1942 that a Zuse computer could be used for breaking. B-Dienst used
Holerits than.
In some way the worst blow got the oldtimers from the German Army at
the Ultra conference 1978. The question came up whether Ultra played
any role at the eastern front 1941-45. A British intel oldtimer answered
it was a big role and there is a whole book about it. But it is secret
and will probably never be published.
## CrossPoint v3.12d R ##
William Black
It was
> argued in the 1970s that by knowledge of this system the subs could reduce
> its effect by sinking the rear ship of the convoy with the hf/df locater.
Doubtful.
Even Flower class corvettes had Huff Duff.
> But it seems nobody in the 1970s was aware that Doenitz already during
> the war had some knoweledge of Ultra. That the RN broke his Enigma and
> used it against him. He got it by the Abwehr from a US traitor but
> dismissed it as unbelievable. It was well kept in his secret files and
> I first read about it in the late 1990s. I already wrote here about it.
Now that is interesting.
What US people with 'ULTRA' clearance were in German hands, and when?
> In the 1970s it was revealed that he personaly was responsible that the
> US top kill weapon against subs could be a success. It was an air droped
> acoustic homing torpedo that failed to sink the sub on its first mission.
> The U-Boot could surface and report that it was hit in the rear deep under
> water several minutes after it dived from an airplane. Doenitz dismissed
> it as a hit by chance.
The 'Mark 24 Mine' wasn't deployed until May of 1943, by which time the
U-Boat was was more or less over. Only 37 U-Boats were subnk using them,
which wasn't enough to make a difference.
>
> One further defence argument was that only the US/UK had such unimaginable
> resources to create an organisation to break the Enigma. It was not
> realised that the Bletchley organistion was rather very small and cheap.
> Its cost and manpower was less then one RN battleship.
Rubbish.
Beltchley park and it's outstations employed about 7,000 people, plus
the Y-Service intercept stations.
Bletchley Park also employed a full battalion of elite level Guards
infantry just on local security duties.
The military distribution network for ULTRA material involved some
30,000 people
> In some way the worst blow got the oldtimers from the German Army at
> the Ultra conference 1978. The question came up whether Ultra played
> any role at the eastern front 1941-45. A British intel oldtimer answered
> it was a big role and there is a whole book about it. But it is secret
> and will probably never be published.
Almost certainly the LUCY network in Switzerland was a covert means of
passing ULTRA material to the USSR
mtfe...@netmapsonscape.net
Interesting thing about all this discussion; the fact that the US had broken
Japanese codes was released almost immediately post-WWII (and the Japanese
immediately changed their codes) but nobody seems to have thought "If they
broke the Japanese codes, maybe the German codes were broken as well".
Mike
j...@cix.compulink.co.uk
willia...@hotmail.co.uk (William Black) wrote:
> Almost certainly the LUCY network in Switzerland was a covert means
> of passing ULTRA material to the USSR
Well, quite possibly. But /if/ that were so, confirming it would reveal
that one of the most important deception operations of WWII was done by
the UK on an ally, either because they didn't trust the ally's security
to keep the Germans from finding out, or because the ally wouldn't
believe the truth if told it by the UK. So it would be best to leave it
ambiguous, rather than upset the Soviets in their day, or the Russians
now.
William Black
I believe that Churchill tried to tell Stalin about the German invasion
and was rebuffed.
This tends to indicate that the USSR didn't believe it and LUCY made a
decent conduit for the information.
Why they didn't believe it is interesting in itself, Blunt certainly
had access to ULTRA at that time.
William Black
They flogged Enigma machines all over the world after WWII
Read the sig...
<nasty grin>
j...@cix.compulink.co.uk
willia...@hotmail.co.uk (William Black) wrote:
> I believe that Churchill tried to tell Stalin about the German
> invasion and was rebuffed.
I have also heard this.
> This tends to indicate that the USSR didn't believe it and LUCY made
> a decent conduit for the information.
Yup.
> Why they didn't believe it is interesting in itself, Blunt certainly
> had access to ULTRA at that time.
Pre-Barbarossa, Stalin saw the British Empire as imperialist, a vehicle
for the wealthy, and opposed to Bolshevism. Those opinions were
basically accurate; he doesn't seem to have grasped just how opposed we
were to Germany, and willing to ally with anyone. He was a totalitarian
personality cultist, but his intellectual context was that of
Bolshevism, and he always seemed to operate in that framework.
Even once we were sending him materiel, he always seems to have feared
that the West would combine with the Axis against the USSR - hence the
heavy undertakings about "no separate peace" - and this opinion was
quite possibly reinforced by intelligence reports of the Germans who
hoped for the same thing. Stalin wasn't a whole lot closer to our view
of reality than Hitler.
As for Blunt, there seems to have been a faction inside the NKVD that
didn't believe that Blunt, Philby, etc. were really working for them.
They thought it was deception, leavened with substantial amounts of
truth for plausibility.
manitobian
> > Who read Typex messages who wasn't supposed to?
>
> Several British codes were cracked.
You did not say which ones!
1934 The first steps towards the development of the RAF "TYPEX" Cipher
Machine
were taken.
Typex is the name of the cypher machine adopted by the RAF and the
Army
before the outbreak of war which gave COMPLETE SECURITY to its users.
It was in fact the RAF which actually developed the TYPEX machine.
One can only marvel at the leisurly pace of research and progress
with such vital matters between the wars.
In 1928 at the Admiralty's instigation, two cipher-machines
marketed by a German company, "Enigma Chiffriermaschinen"
Aktiengesellschaft,
were purchased for examination by the Government Code
and Cypher School.
It did not take long to establish that the Chiffreirmaschinen
company had indeed covered their product with no fewer than three
British
patents, all of them still valid-another irony, perhaps the best.
By the end of 1937 the name Type X had displaced
"RAF Enigma"; 29 machines had been produced with
the original adaptation, and sanction was being sought for production
of 238 sets of a Mk. II for distribution.
So we arrive at the point, in September 1939, where
Typex was in use at all RAF headquarters AND REMAINED COMLETELY
SECURE THROUGHOUT THE WAR.
It is the final irony that the Germans were never able to penetrate
what was in effect their own system.
....................From: THE RIGHT OF THE LINE by John Terraine.
SolomonW
> You did not say which ones!
A simple net search should be able to answer your question
Start here please.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_code_breaking_in_World_War_II
euno...@yahoo.com.au
> On 27/06/10 15:26, eunome...@yahoo.com.au wrote:
>
>
>
> > They routinely broke the US Army M-209 Haglin machine till the end of
> > the war, reading perhaps 35% of messages.
>
> But that was used only for tactical messages of importance for only a
> short time.
Speed of decrption was important, however it gave indication of unit
positions and strengths.
>
> > During the Battle of Denmark Straight the Bismarks crytologists were
> > reading Hood and King Georg V traffic and handing it
> > to the Bridge within mintues.
>
> Reading sighting reports of yourself isn't much good.
Actually it is of enormous benefit if it is in relative real time.
It also greatly helps to locate the enemy and his forces so that he
may be attacked where he is vulnerable and avoided where he is
dangerous.
At the end of the war the Kriegsmarine was introducing two features
which if combined would have defeated both High Frequency Direction
Finding and Blechely Park decryption.
The first was UKWD, the rewirable reflector which technically was
equivalent to a rewireable rotor and could have defeated Blechely park
for some years. With UKWD it is technically possible to still break
the UKWD wirings however it must be understood that the process of
reconstructing a new rotor or reflector involved long cribs obtained
from messages passed in from other code groups. If these also have
UKWD then these cribs become inaccesible asnd the system breaks down.
Having to reconstruct a rotor was a rare thing, having to reconstruct
one sent by UKWD would be quite common.
The secondly was "kurier" which sent up to 7 characters (in an
enagram) in a very short burst. If set into its 3F mode (and it
initially wasn't) the various individual pulses of the baudot
characters were all sent on different deviation frequencies hence a
frequncy would go silent several times. This means that not only the
direction finding system was confounded but also the reception of all
'bits' of the message. Nor was it possible to triangulate. Kurier
couldn't send all messages but it could take care of weather reports,
sightings and location reports.
Kurier casued a grea deal of concern, there appears to have been no
solution to it untill well into the 50s.
ken...@cix.compulink.co.uk
willia...@hotmail.co.uk (William Black) wrote:
> Who read Typex messages who wasn't supposed to?
Well in the Desert war the Germans did not need to. The US
representative was given full access to British plans and communicated
with Washington in code Black which the Germans could read.
Ken Young
William Black
> Kurier casued a grea deal of concern, there appears to have been no
> solution to it untill well into the 50s.
>
Ah, I'm told there was, involving photographing oscilloscope traces.
Do you have a web page about Kurier?
It came up somewhere else recently and I couldn't find one.
Rich Rostrom
> Then it was the UK radio direction finding (d/f).
Huff-duff was very valuable to the Allies, especially
in 1942 when they couldn't read U-boat Enigma.
Without huff-duff, Roger Winn's "working fiction"
would not have been sustainable.
But it wasn't enough.
> But it seems nobody in the 1970s was aware that Doenitz already during
> the war had some knowledge of Ultra. That the RN broke his Enigma and
> used it against him. He got it by the Abwehr from a US traitor but
> dismissed it as unbelievable. It was well kept in his secret files and
> I first read about it in the late 1990s. I already wrote here about it.
I want a cite for this!
For one thing, I refuse to believe that the
Abwehr learned of Enigma breaks, and
told only Doenitz or the KM.
> One further defence argument was that only the US/UK had such unimaginable
> resources to create an organisation to break the Enigma. It was not
> realised that the Bletchley organistion was rather very small and cheap.
> Its cost and manpower was less then one RN battleship.
Um, no. A KING GEORGE V class battleship
had a wartime crew of less than 1,700. Bletchley
Park had several thousand people working there,
plus addition hundreds or thousands manning
the "bombe" installations around the country
(Or to be more precise "womaning" - the bombe
staff were mostly Wrens.) Then there was the
cost of producing the bombes including hundreds
of electronics technicians to build them. (Though
unskilled volunteer labor was applied too - some
eldery Britons may remember assembling
multiwire cables and such in home, school, or
church groups. If there were 26 wires in the part,
it was probably a bombe component.)
euno...@yahoo.com.au
> On 28/06/10 16:31, eunome...@yahoo.com.au wrote:
>
> > Kurier casued a grea deal of concern, there appears to have been no
> > solution to it untill well into the 50s.
>
> Ah, I'm told there was, involving photographing oscilloscope traces.
>
> Do you have a web page about Kurier?
Most of the links are in German, however most contain some tracts in
English.
http://www.cdvandt.org/kurier_enigma.htm
The first has some photographs.
google terms would be "kurier enigma" and/or "kurzsignal"
The "kurzignal" ie "short signal" were codes sent. They were a bit
of a weakness in the sense that they kurzsignal were known and could
help with determining rotor setting.
http://users.telenet.be/d.rijmenants/en/kurzsignale.htm
kurier was the device that sent the 'kurzsignal" in about 340ms.
Blechely Park code named it "squash"
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3926/is_199901/ai_n8847244/pg_18/?tag=content;col1
Kurier in its 3-F form kurier seemed to use a suppresed carrier with
the dots/dashes/spaces of a morse code occuring at different
frequencies and silence when there was no mark or pulse. Most forms
of transmission continue to transmit a carrier even when there is no
data which can then be localised. This means that the signal was very
difficult to detect and succesfull direction finding and signal
recovery unlikely.
SEN...@argo.rhein-neckar.de
> > the war had some knoweledge of Ultra. That the RN broke his Enigma and
> > used it against him. He got it by the Abwehr from a US traitor but
> > dismissed it as unbelievable. It was well kept in his secret files and
> > I first read about it in the late 1990s. I already wrote here about it.
>
> Now that is interesting.
>
> What US people with 'ULTRA' clearance were in German hands, and when?
No, not in hands. I wrote it here just a few years ago. Should be no
problem with Google.
> >
> > One further defence argument was that only the US/UK had such unimaginable
> > resources to create an organisation to break the Enigma. It was not
> > realised that the Bletchley organistion was rather very small and cheap.
> > Its cost and manpower was less then one RN battleship.
>
> Rubbish.
>
> Beltchley park and it's outstations employed about 7,000 people, plus
> the Y-Service intercept stations.
>
> Bletchley Park also employed a full battalion of elite level Guards
> infantry just on local security duties.
>
> The military distribution network for ULTRA material involved some
> 30,000 people
I was not clear enough. I did not mean the whole Ultra organisation but
those part of Bletchley who did the Enigma break. By "break" I mean a
reliable way to get the right cipher in time. The first such break was
by the Polish (with around 10 man?). The second was at Bletchley and
involved some advance in theory and practical machinery (the "Bomba"
calculators). This break was by resources (men and equipment) less then
one battleship. Like a light cruiser? I`m not sure whether the other
breaks at Bletchley had much more resources.
The whole argument was only about the resources to achive that break. To
exploit it on large scale even Germany could put some tenths of thousend
men on it. The big strategic value of broken messages was obvious for
them too.
>
> > In some way the worst blow got the oldtimers from the German Army at
> > the Ultra conference 1978. The question came up whether Ultra played
> > any role at the eastern front 1941-45. A British intel oldtimer answered
> > it was a big role and there is a whole book about it. But it is secret
> > and will probably never be published.
>
> Almost certainly the LUCY network in Switzerland was a covert means of
> passing ULTRA material to the USSR
>
It was the idea of Stalin after he read the first messages from Lucy that
it was fake material from MI6. Later he changed his mind. After Ultra
was reveald it was the idea of some Germans. At the Ultra conference in
1978 one MI6 officer was asked about it. He strongly denied it. In the
early 1980s the idea came up again by a British writer. Again it was
denied by several former MI6 people in the known.
The main problem with this idea is the high danger for the Ultra secret.
The Lucy ring was too close to Germany. The Abwehr/SD was able to penetrate
it and Rudolf Roessler (Lucy) and Alexander Foote (the British radio
operator) came close to be kidnaped by German Special Forces.
Had the Germans known that this very up to date feed of top secret
information came from the British, they would immediately suspected
Enigma. They already had the tip from the US of a Bristish large scale
break in Enigma and several other hints.
Anyway how MI6 changed the message wording to conceal the source, this
time they would believed the break. The success of British codebreaking
in WWI still in mind the British were known to be realy good in brainpower,
unlike Polish or even French. (That was the Nazi view, not mine. I know
of Polish and French successes.) I much doubt that MI6 would have taken
such a risc for western security just to give Stalin a second feed.
Chris
> Interesting thing about all this discussion; the fact that the US had broken
> Japanese codes was released almost immediately post-WWII (and the Japanese
> immediately changed their codes) but nobody seems to have thought "If they
> broke the Japanese codes, maybe the German codes were broken as well".
After the war, the British tried to convince other countries to use
Enigma. So naturally, they kept their breaking of it secret.
'We can't sell you our code systems, of course, but we have so many of
these captured boxes lying around. And it's even guaranteed by the
Aryan supermen to be awesome!'
According to Kahn, _Seizing the Enigma_, the Soviets- who knew all
about Ultra from the Cambridge Comintern- quietly told the nations
about this trick, and so no one used 'em. The result was that they
tended to use Soviet code systems, ones that possibly had backdoors
built into them by the Soviets so they could monitor them. After they
tried to sell them, it would be embarrassing to admit that we'd been
reading them immediately, so they waited a few decades.
Since no intact Purple machines survived (the heart of the system was
recovered from the Japanese embassy in Berlin in May 1945 and is now
on display at the National Cryptological Museum near Fort Meade, but
otherwise they thoroughly destroyed them all) there was no temptation
to try and distribute it. And JN-25 was a basic book code. No point in
trying to spread it around. Hence the immediate announcements that
we'd been reading them. No value to it.
Chris Manteuffel
euno...@yahoo.com.au
> > > But it seems nobody in the 1970s was aware that Doenitz already during
> > > the war had some knoweledge of Ultra. That the RN broke his Enigma and
> > > used it against him. He got it by the Abwehr from a US traitor but
> > > dismissed it as unbelievable. It was well kept in his secret files and
> > > I first read about it in the late 1990s. I already wrote here about it.
>
> > Now that is interesting.
>
> > What US people with 'ULTRA' clearance were in German hands, and when?
>
> No, not in hands. I wrote it here just a few years ago. Should be no
> problem with Google.
>
http://groups.google.com.au/group/soc.history.war.world-war-ii/browse_frm/thread/182245cdfbf98f95/2addd875a0c81599?q=enigma
"Enigma - The Battle For The Code" by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, London
2000
p. 259:
On 10 August 1943 ... the German Intelligence Service in
Switzerland
filed a disturbing report about the Naval Enigma. The report,
which
was sent to Doenitz, stated: 'Over the last few months, Germany's
naval
ciphers, which are used to give operational orders to the U-boats,
have
been successfully broken. All orders are being read currently. The
source
is a Swiss American in an important secretarial position in the US
Navy
Department.'[2]
Doenitz along with many other so called "Nazis" was IQ tested post war
by the allies: as 138. This is quite high.
Yet his actions in rejecting this information certainly are stupid.
It should be noted that in the middle of 1938 the German Navy began
deployment of Seetakt radar FuMO 22 and FuMO 23.
For their time these radars were the best in the world due to their
abillity to opperated at 80cm so that with a 4 meter wide antena it
could form a 6 degree wide beam that was quite capable of detecting a
submarine or its periscope. This frequency was much higher than any
allied radar (UK Naval radar was about 7.5m at the time, though it
quickly improved to 50cm by December 1940)
It had been mentioned to Doenitz that the development of radar should
eventualy lead to radar capable of detecting submarine connining
towers and periscopes.
He seems to have ignored the dangers hence apart from radar detectors
the u-boat force does not appear to have been properly equiped.
William Black
> According to Kahn, _Seizing the Enigma_, the Soviets- who knew all
> about Ultra from the Cambridge Comintern- quietly told the nations
> about this trick, and so no one used 'em.
Reports seem to indicate that some British ex colonies used them until
the mid 'sixties.
William Black
>>> But it seems nobody in the 1970s was aware that Doenitz already during
>>> the war had some knoweledge of Ultra. That the RN broke his Enigma and
>>> used it against him. He got it by the Abwehr from a US traitor but
>>> dismissed it as unbelievable. It was well kept in his secret files and
>>> I first read about it in the late 1990s. I already wrote here about it.
>>
>> Now that is interesting.
>>
>> What US people with 'ULTRA' clearance were in German hands, and when?
>
> No, not in hands. I wrote it here just a few years ago. Should be no
> problem with Google.
Cite please.
>>> One further defence argument was that only the US/UK had such unimaginable
>>> resources to create an organisation to break the Enigma. It was not
>>> realised that the Bletchley organistion was rather very small and cheap.
>>> Its cost and manpower was less then one RN battleship.
>>
>> Rubbish.
>>
>> Beltchley park and it's outstations employed about 7,000 people, plus
>> the Y-Service intercept stations.
>>
>> Bletchley Park also employed a full battalion of elite level Guards
>> infantry just on local security duties.
>>
>> The military distribution network for ULTRA material involved some
>> 30,000 people
>
> I was not clear enough. I did not mean the whole Ultra organisation but
> those part of Bletchley who did the Enigma break.
That's like trying to make a cheese sandwich without any bread or butter.
There no point in breaking a code if you've no traffic to break,
there's no point in breaking a code if you can't exploit the material
you get.
The most important men in a SIGINT organisation working on radio signals
are the aerial riggers...
> The main problem with this idea is the high danger for the Ultra secret.
> The Lucy ring was too close to Germany. The Abwehr/SD was able to penetrate
> it and Rudolf Roessler (Lucy) and Alexander Foote (the British radio
> operator) came close to be kidnaped by German Special Forces.
>
> Had the Germans known that this very up to date feed of top secret
> information came from the British, they would immediately suspected
> Enigma. They already had the tip from the US of a Bristish large scale
> break in Enigma and several other hints.
Your problem here is to find an alternative source for teh LUCY material.
It was analysed some years ago and it was decided then that it couldn't
have come from either a single source or even a single establishment.
Also, nobody has ever explained how the information was got out of Germany.
Logic says there was a single source, and then you have to look for
someone who had the stuff and wanted to give it to Germany...
There's only one serious candidate.
ken...@cix.compulink.co.uk
<12126bf7-5333-49e9...@x20g2000pro.googlegroups.com>,
euno...@yahoo.com.au () wrote:
> He seems to have ignored the dangers hence apart from radar detectors
> the u-boat force does not appear to have been properly equiped.
About the only measure a U-Boat could take on being attacked by
aircraft was to submerge. Fitting extra AA was tried but fighting it out
on the surface did not work. Based on this passive receivers for Allied
radar made a lot of sense. From memory post war tests indicated that the
radar detectors could detect aircraft radar at about twice the range the
aircraft got a usable echo. The principles were responsible for the
effort the Germans put into passive sonar.
Ken Young
SEN...@argo.rhein-neckar.de
> > the war had some knowledge of Ultra. That the RN broke his Enigma and
> > used it against him. He got it by the Abwehr from a US traitor but
> > dismissed it as unbelievable. It was well kept in his secret files and
> > I first read about it in the late 1990s. I already wrote here about it.
>
> I want a cite for this!
its there with all details about the archive too
>
> For one thing, I refuse to believe that the
> Abwehr learned of Enigma breaks, and
> told only Doenitz or the KM.
Agreed. But the only reference I`m aware of is from the secret KM/ BdU
files of Doenitz in a German archive now. What wondered me most is that
it took until 2000 before it got known to historians. It is still such
very unknown that nobody here did know it before I cited it.
This Abwehr info had to be known by OKW and OKH cypher sections. The files
of OKW and OKH went to the USA I think. The KM files were captured by
the British. After microfilming both gave it back to Germany years ago.
I suspect an US intelligence service may have removed this most
embarrassing treason case from the files. But they could not in the
British archives.
Why it is still such unknown (what happened with that guy?) may well
be explained the same way.
manitobian
> Reports seem to indicate that some British ex colonies used them until
> the mid 'sixties.
Another poster has offered the same statement as you just gave us,
or this was your second posting of that statement that I
have encountered.
I asked the poster then for more details.
I think that I also asked why any country as part of the British
Empire
or the Commonwealth would be given, or sold captured Enigma machines
when the British TYPEX machines could be supplied. Canada, while not a
colony
had for their communications the British Typex machine. This was told
to me by an ex-RCAF radar tech who came to work for the same company
as I did in 1967. We didn't discuss the TYPEX machine with any
reference to
the ENIGMA machines used by the Germans and read by the British.
This was before 1970 so neither of us knew anything about the German
Enigma
machine. I was curious about security of messages sent by Canadian
armed forces and the ex-military radar tech told me that the coding/
decoding
devices were secure. And I believed him.
In 1975 I bought the book by F Winterbottom about Enigma and his
association
with it. By this time the ex-military radar tech had moved on, and we
never had
a chance to discuss it! I never connected the two machines similarity
until
I got the book The Right Of The Line by John Terraine.
So why would Canada or any other country that needed secure
communications use the German Enigma, instead of the British TYPEX?
manitobian
manitobian
> Who read Typex messages who wasn't supposed to?
> William Black
I may have missed something, but I have
never read any claim that Typex messages
were read by any body but the person
that the message was sent to!
manitobian
wrote:
> It was in 1974, F.W. Winterbotham's 'The Ultra Secret'
> Churchill mentioned his 'most secret source' several times in his books,
> the Poles involved had written a couple of books and I think the capture
> of a machine on U-110 was public by then.
May 3-21 1940. The Battle for the Code.
Post mortems carried out by the Germans on the
disappearance of POLARES (German ship)
conclude that the Naval Enigma cipher is unlikely
to have been compromised.
June 8, 1940. The Battle For The Code.
Karl Doenitz questions whether the naval Enigma
cipher has been compromised by the sinking of U-13
on 31 May, 1940. He is told that Enigma is unlikely
to have been compromised.
June 4, 1941. The Battle For The Code.
Gedania, a German supply ship, is captured by the British,
along with some Enigma documents; the capture will lead the
Germans to question whether Naval Enigma
has been compromised.
August 27, 1941. The Battle For The Code.
U-570 is captured by the allies along with some Enigma
documents; the Germanjs question whether Naval Enigma has
been compromised,
September 28, 1941. The Battle For The Code.
The British submarine Clyde
attempts to ambush
three German U-boats in the Cape Verde Islands; when all three
U-boats escape, Donitz notes in his War Diary: 'The most likely
explanation is that our cipher has been compromised.'
October 31, 1941. The Battle For The Code.
The Abwehr questions whether the 4 June 1941 capture
of Gedania means that Naval Enigma is compromised. British
witnesses subsequently captured by the Germans had stated that
unspecified documents were taken from the German supply ship.
The Abwehr concluded that it was 'worrying that codes... and sea
maps with secret messages have been seen by the enemy.
November 22, 1941. The Battle For The Code.
After being tipped off by Enigma intelligence, the
Royal Navy sinks the German supply ship Atlantis as it meets up
with some U-boats. The subsequent British ambush of another
supply ship nine days later will cause the Germans to question, yet
again, whether Naval Enigma has been compromised.
November 30, 1941. The Battle For The Code.
The Royal Navy's attack on the German supply ship
Python leads the crew to scuttle the vessal and to report that the
German Naval Enigma cipher might be compromised.
March 18, 1942. The Battle For The Code.
A German post mortem on how Atlantis and Python came
to be sunk in November, 1941 states that Naval Enigma is probably
not compromised; the investigators believe that the Royal Navy
would have caught up with Tirpitz in January 1942 as she moved
from Germany to Norway, and with Scharnhorst and Gneisenau as
they moved from France to Germany in February 1942, if British
cryptographers had been reading German Enigma messages.
August 10, 1943. The Battle For The Code.
German intelligence in Switzerland warns that the
Americans are reading Naval Enigma; although Donitz admits that
Enigma messages might have been read at the end of July, 1943 and
the beginning of August, 1943, he is sure that they have not been
read there after because of a new security measure introduced.
March 7, 1944. The Battle For The Code.
Gwido Langer and Maksymilian Ciezki confess to the
Germans that the Enigma cipher was broken before the war, but they
convince their interrogators that the Polish cryptographers could
not read any messages during the war.
March 12, 1944. The Battle For The Code.
Brake, a German supply vessal, is sunk in the course of
'Operation Covered'. The sinking leads the Germans to conclude
that their Naval Enigma cipher might have been compromised.
'The possibility that this has occurred cannot be excluded,' the
German investigators stated.
manitobian
Well there aren't any!
William Black
>> On Jun 30, 8:23 am, William Black<william.bl...@hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
>
>
>
>> Reports seem to indicate that some British ex colonies used them until
>> the mid 'sixties.
>
> Another poster has offered the same statement as you just gave us,
> or this was your second posting of that statement that I
> have encountered.
>
> I asked the poster then for more details.
>
> I think that I also asked why any country as part of the British
> Empire
> or the Commonwealth would be given, or sold captured Enigma machines
> when the British TYPEX machines could be supplied.
Because they could break Engima...
Some detail here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A6767698
Joe Osman
The web site is probably getting the Enigma machines and the TYPEX
machines mixed up, which is easy to do since the TYPEX is the
descendant of the Enigma developed initially by the RAF in 1934. The
Americans used a similar machine to the Enigma that was the descendant
of a rotor based machine independently discovered in America. The
American SIGABA/ ECM Mark II had more rotors than the British one, but
they were similar enough that the British and Americans were able to
develop a common model for British-US communications called the
Combined Cipher Machine (CCM). The US used rotor based machines into
the 1950s and New Zealand and Canada used them into the 1970s.
Joe
SEN...@argo.rhein-neckar.de
> > > passing ULTRA material to the USSR
> >
> >
> > It was the idea of Stalin after he read the first messages from Lucy that
> > it was fake material from MI6. Later he changed his mind. After Ultra
> > was reveald it was the idea of some Germans. At the Ultra conference in
> > 1978 one MI6 officer was asked about it. He strongly denied it. In the
> > early 1980s the idea came up again by a British writer. Again it was
> > denied by several former MI6 people in the known.
> >
> > The Lucy ring was too close to Germany. The Abwehr/SD was able to
> > penetrate it and Rudolf Roessler (Lucy) and Alexander Foote (the British
> > radio operator) came close to be kidnaped by German Special Forces.
> >
> > Had the Germans known that this very up to date feed of top secret
> > information came from the British, they would immediately suspected
> > Enigma. They already had the tip from the US of a Bristish large scale
> > break in Enigma and several other hints.
> >
> > time they would believed the break. The success of British codebreaking
> > in WWI still in mind the British were known to be realy good in brainpower,
> > unlike Polish or even French. (That was the Nazi view, not mine. I know
> > of Polish and French successes.) I much doubt that MI6 would have taken
> > such a risc for western security just to give Stalin a second feed.
>
Just to get clear what not everyone may know. Lucy would be a second feed
by MI6 to Stalin because MI6 already had a special office in the British
embassy in Moskau to give Ultra information direct to Stalin or STAWKA.
This was mentioned by a former MI6 officer as further response to the Lucy /
Ultra question at the conference in 1978.
I understood it that this official feed had no direct worded Ultra info
but in a concealed way. Besides that Stalin had several UK spies with Ultra
access.
>
> Your problem here is to find an alternative source for teh LUCY material.
>
> It was analysed some years ago and it was decided then that it couldn't
> have come from either a single source or even a single establishment.
That was the conclusion of the German analysis but on a limited sample
>
> Also, nobody has ever explained how the information was got out of Germany.
>
> Logic says there was a single source, and then you have to look for
Lucy had a least one source outside Germany, in the Swiss army
intelligence service. He was some type of "agent" for them.
> someone who had the stuff and wanted to give it to Germany...
to Russia (or Switzerland) you meant.
>
> There's only one serious candidate.
In the known. I doubt that several of those oldtimers of MI6 would
straight out lie on such a historic subject. I see no reason for
a conspiracy here. Some things may still be unknown or secret. Thats
the most simple explanation.
William Black
> In the known. I doubt that several of those oldtimers of MI6 would
> straight out lie on such a historic subject.
I do.
They lie to keep in practice.
Plus 'old men forget'.
But I'd also like to know what went on with the MI-6 men in Lisbon when
the Duke of Windsor ran away...
We're not going to find out about that one either, well, not in my
lifetime...
The whole subject of how the ULTRA information was passed to allies who
were considered either less than friendly or less than trustworthy is a
fascinating one, but I would be very surprised if any of it wasn't
covered by the 100 year rule that covers most sensitive intelligence
material.