Download U.S. Participation in Enigma and Signal Intelligence

The Round Tablette
October 2007
Volume 16 Number 2
Published by WW II History Roundtable
Edited by Jim Gerber
www.mn-ww2roundtable.org
Welcome to the October meeting of
the Dr. Harold C. Deutsch World War Two
History Roundtable. Tonight’s program is
about code breaking and the use of Enigma.
Our speaker is Hervie Haufler who is a WW
II veteran cryptographer. His book,
Codebreakers’ Victory, is on sale tonight. Be
sure to purchase one and get it signed by our
speaker.
The Codebreakers
The 10,000 or so Allied personnel,
that were assigned to the British
codebreaking program in World War Two,
including about 500 Americans, were, on
being demobilized after the war’s end,
required to sign a pledge that said we would
never discuss or reveal what we had done
during the war. That pledge held for 30
years. Then the British began to allow books
to be published revealing how the
codebreakers, centered in Bletchley Park,
had broken the Germans’ Enigma machine
and had secured secret information that had
a great effect in the winning of the war.
That outflow of new disclosures had
two effects on me. One was that I learned,
for the first time, the full story of what I’d
been involved in. The second, was that I
realized, in reading those English accounts,
that none of them ever mentioned the
American contribution.
The truth was that there were three
American outfits assigned to the British
program. The 6811th Signal Service
Detachment, my outfit, operated an
an intercept station in Bexley, Kent. The
6812th, stationed near Bletchley Park, added
to the British units using so-called “bombes”,
the machines developed to speed the process
of determining the Enigma settings in use for
a given day. Also, the 6812th was an elite
group working on varied assignments
directly at the Park.
That discovery prompted me to write
my own account of the codebreaking – one
that gave true recognition of the Americans’
role. I returned to England and did extensive
research at Bexley, at Bletchley Park and at
Britain’s marvelous archive of World War
Two history at Kew. In 2003, Penguin’s New
American Library published my book,
Codebreakers’ Victory. The book recounts
how three bright Polish cryptanalysts were
the first to break the Enigma. That was in
1929. The Poles were allied with the British
and French against the threat of Hitler’s
Germany. But they kept their triumphs over
Enigma to themselves all during the thirties.
There were times when they were blacked
out by German changes and improvements
in their Enigmas. But the Poles always
recovered and resumed reading the
Germans’ military traffic.
In 1939, two things happened. One
was that it became clear to the Poles that the
Germans intended to invade. The other was
that the Germans made a change in their
system that required a great deal more
equipment than the Poles knew they could
assemble in time.
So they called in their French and
British allies and presented to them their
whole cryptanalytic technology. That was
when the British took over. Geniuses such as
Alan Turing invented machines such as their
own version of a much-improved bombe to
break the systems used by each of the three
German services – Army, Navy and Air
Force. And, as a good-will measure, they
invited the Americans to join the effort.
While researching my book on the
Codebreakers, I became intrigued by the
story of the spy network the Germans
thought they had working for them in
Britain. The Germans never tumbled to the
fact that every one of these spies was actually
under Allied control. That led me to my
second book, The Spies Who Never Were,
also published by Penquin.
I hope that you will enjoy tonight’s
program.
Hervie Hoefller
Bletchley Park
In the summer of 1939, a team of
Codebreakers arrived at the Government
Code and Cypher School’s new home at
Bletchley Park. Their mission was to crack
the backbone of the German military and
intelligence communication, the Enigma
Cypher. The Germans thought that Enigma
was unbreakable. The combinations of
rotating wheels, electrical contacts and wires
meant that the odds against anyone who did
not know the machine’s settings being able to
break Enigma were 150 million, million,
million to one. Bletchley Park achieved a
breakthrough when the Poles passed on their
knowledge of how the machine worked. This
helped codebreakers exploit a design
weakness in Enigma – that no letter could
ever be encrypted as it self.
At the same time, Bletchley Park
mathematician Alan Turing realized that
‘cribs’ offered a way of cracking Enigma. A
‘crib’ is a piece of encrypted text whose true
meaning is known or can be guessed.
German messages contained standard info
with the first line often containing weather
information. Once a crib was known, it was
still necessary to check thousands of
potential Enigma settings. Cracking the
“impenetrable” Enigma code enabled the
Allies to foil Luftwaffe raids, minimize Uboat attacks and secure sea-based supply
routes.
More Reading On Tonight’s Topic
Codebreakers’ Victory
By Hervie Haufler
New American Library
New York 2003
The Ultra Secret
By F. W. Winterbotham
Weidenfield and Nicolson
London 1974
Enigma; The Battle for the Code
By Hugh Sebag-Montefiore
John Wiley and Sons
New York 2000
Station X; Decoding Nazi Secrets
By Michael Smith
TV Books
New York 1998
Capturing Enigma
By Stephen Harper
Sutton Publishing
Gloucestershire 1999
Battle of Wits
By Stephen Budiansky
The Free Press
New York 2000
The American Magic
By Ronald Lewin
Farrar, Straus, Giroux
New York 1982
Don’t Forget The Book
Sale Next Month!