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Page 2
The Germans kept changing the Enigma machine throughout the 1930s. By 1939, the machine was many times more advanced than it had been during the 1920s. It is this machine that I will now describe, since it was the machine that the British ultimately mastered.
The machine had four components: a keyboard, a lampboard, a scrambler unit, and internal wiring. The keyboard looked like that of a typewriter, except without numbers or punctuation. Corresponding to this keyboard was a lampboard, with each letter represented by a lamp. When sending a message one would first type it on the keyboard. A short time later, the message would light up on the lampboard, encoded. The keyboard and the lampboard are, however, at the beginning and the end of the process, respectively. As each key is pressed, an electro-magnetic current is activated. This current is then sent through the scrambler unit, which consists of three removable wheels or rotors. Each of the wheels have knobs on their sides known as Umkehrwalze. These would be set to a particular letter, which would determine the code of the scrambler unit. When the current is finished going through the three wheels, it would go through the internal wiring of the machine, otherwise known as the Steckerboard. From there, it would light up the lampboard with the encoded text. [8] This is a simple explanation of how the machine worked. The Germans did, however, complicate it further. They added two more wheels for a total of five, of which only three were used at any one time. The wheels could be arranged in any order, further complicating things. With all this complexity, the machine was able to create an infinite amount of codes. For perhaps justified reasons, the Germans considered the machine fool-proof. Facing German intelligence with its confidence in the Enigma machine was a British organization equally confident that anything created by man could also be broken by man. [9] During the First World War, the Admiralty's Room 40 had broken a number of German codes, including that used in the famous Zimmermann Telegram. [10] As a result, Room 40 was transformed into the Government Code and Cypher School (GC & CS) in 1920. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, GC & CS recruited heavily from the universities, mainly Cambridge and Oxford, and formed useful contacts with many leading mathematicians and linguists. One month before war was declared [in Sept. 1939], GC & CS relocated from Whitehall [London] to a country estate 50 miles northwest, known as Bletchey Park. [11] From this location it would manage to break the Enigma codes from 1940 until the end of the war. How this was done is an interesting story, one that I will turn to now.
The copyright of the article The History of Ultra - Page 2 in Modern British History is owned by Joseph Sramek. Permission to republish The History of Ultra - Page 2 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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