With the passing of Gil Hayward, the magnificent British code breaking team at Bletchley Park moves, sadly, further from living memory. We appropriately admire the tremendous risks front-line soldiers took at Dunkirk and Normandy, but should also appreciate that some of the biggest victories of the war were produced by turbo-nerds with thick glasses working through the night to manually break Nazi codes.
The downfall of all the very clever German encryption devices was, unsurprisingly, human error. Regular users of Enigma got into the habit of signing off with stock phrases such as “Heil der Führer”. The Bletchley team recognized these repeated phrases over time, allowing them to painstakingly work backwards to deduce the number and type of coding wheels in the Enigma machine. The even more complex Lorenz encryption machine was undone by a cipher clerk who forgot to change the coding wheels when starting a new message.
Being stuck at Bletchley, the codebreakers played chess endlessly as one of their few available forms of relaxation (Can you imagine playing chess every day against Alan Turing, of Turing test fame?). With no one but supremely good players against which to complete and hone their skills, they likely could have been the world’s greatest chess team if they weren’t so busy winning the war.
Sympathies to Mr. Hayward’s loved ones, and profound thanks all the brilliant boffins of Bletchley.
My sympathy and thanks too, but a few corrections. First, of course, the stock-phrase typos, but in addition the Bletchley team had a huge head-start in the form of a) copies of the commercial enigma machines that had been distributed before the war b) the preliminary crypto work done by the polish mathematical elite before the war started, c) lots of mechanization even before their computers were built, in the form of human calculators who ran through sub-sections of the decryption algorithms in parallel. Kahn’s work on all this is a wonder to read, and thoroughly accessible.
(Arguably, the atmosphere of Bletchley park may also have contributed to Turing’s horrible death — no one there cared that he was gay as long as he could help defeat the germans, and this may have cemented his beliefs about how a civilized society should handle sexual orientation in a way that postwar britain thoroughly failed to live up to. It’s a sad story about isolated elites and the “real” world.)
“Heil die Furher”? Somebody needs to brush up on his German. One grammatical error and one misspelling in the space of three words?
Thank you for remembering, and caring, about the contributions of the Bletchley team. In my mind Turing stands simultaneously among the Great Men of WWII and the Great Men of 20th Century science. The circumstances of his death (murder IMO) at the hands of his own government stand as one of the more poignent and painful chapters of recent history.
Dr. Buzzsaw: Yes indeed, completely shameful treatment of a national hero.
Herschel: I know a little German. Her name is Heidi.
Paul: Yes thank you for adding that, all quite right.
Human laziness was indeed one of the major flaws. When setting up the initial message, an operator needed to generate 6 random letters: 3 for the “indicator-setting” and 3 more (this would be repeated) for the “message-setting”. It was extremely common for the 6 supposedly random letters to be “Berlin” or “Hitler”. Kahn’s Codebreakers has some more explanations of mistakes like these being made.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/how-enigma-works.html
Many of the weather messages were formulaic, and thus could be deduced from length transmitted “clear, wind out of northwest at blah”. Those, while being of little value themselves, would help crack the day settings (which wheel to use, what ring settings and what steckering was that day’s).
If the Germans had chosen to make the 4 wheel naval enigma machine incompatible with the 3 wheel machine, the war would have gone differently (at least until nukes were available). Lots of stupidity, lots of mistakes. Our side just made less of them (or maybe just kept ours secret better).
I deeply admire what was done at Bletchley Park. If I had been around at the time, I would like to believe that I’d be smart enough to work there (you may laugh now).
“Our side just made less of them (or maybe just kept ours secret better).”
I’d propose the baseline level of stupid mistakes was irrelevant. We capitalized on the German/Axis mistakes more profitably than they did ours. Maybe they gave us more to work with, or maybe the Bletchley crew was a truly unique asset.
I’m afraid that even with the corrections, “Heil der Fürher” still contains a grammatical error and a misspelling. It would have to be “Heil dem Führer” (the noun being dative).
I recall reading in Singh’s excellent book (which rivals Kahn’s) that the Polish mathematicians who broke the original Enigma before the war worked for an Army officer (name unrecalled) who all the while had the transcripts of German military messages in his desk drawer, furnished courtesy of a German who had been turned by the Poles. But this officer refrained from sharing these transcripts with his boffins, because he wanted them to do it the hard way — anticipating a time when no defector would be available to provide them with transcripts. These Poles got to England and gave the Brits a huge head start at Bletchley.
Oddly, I don’t recall Turing’s name coming up in the DADT debate.
:: sigh :: I thought about it and quickly decided that a funky, math genius English gay guy was sufficiently far from the model of what a Real `Mericun Soljer(TM) in our Army Of One should be that holding him up as an example we be counterproductive. The anti Gay knuckle draggers have no basis to understand what his real contribution was, they’d just ridicule him.
A little perspective. The Japanese broke every single American code during the Second World War. That never makes the books about espionage and code breaking.
Cite? I know that the US had broken some of the japanese codes, but not v.v. (The US at that point was also at something of a disadvantage in the crypto area, having had their operation disbanded during the 20s by people who believed that gentlemen did read other gentlemen’s mail. One of the most effective US crypto techniques during the war was reportedly the secure radio link between FDR and Churchill, which used an analog equivalent of a one-time pad — unbreakable as long as you maintain operational security.)
Don’t know much about chess it seems. Turing was, for someone of his undoubted intellect, and despite great persistence, a self-confessed staggeringly bad chess player. The best players at Bletchley made up most of the post war English national teams. A few minutes research should be enough to convince you that they were vastly inferior to pretty much any collection of malnourished Slavs of the era.
Thanks A N O’There. My admiration of them as heroes has apparently led me to overgeneralize their gifts. Appreciate the correction (Although beating Turing would not for me make it less cool to play chess against him)