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The Enigma Machine.

© David Allen

The Enigma Machine.

At the end of the First World War, Germany’s military commanders knew that the wars end was only just round one and not the final battle, though changes in the political arena were the initiator of the Second World War the actual war was inevitable.

During the 1920’s the Germans secretly began to build their war machine, this included espionage and the development of the Enigma Machine, which could scramble messages sent over the radio air waves from one commander to another, this machine the Germans thought gave them the upper hand in communications, and they were right, the Enigma Machine was able to scramble a single message into 150,000,000,000 different combinations, this encryption would take one of today’s super computers one year to go through all the different combinations of code, so it is possible to see why the Enigma Machine was such an asset to the Germans and why it had to be broken.

At an obscure country manor Bletchley Park in rural England around 50 miles north of London a secret monitoring base was set up to listen in to the radio signals, its call sign was “Station X” and so it became called.

Here young men and women who were intelligent and good lateral thinkers were assembled, there was no dress code and no military rules, and these experts in puzzles and crosswords had only one goal to break the Enigma Machine.

Through out the war Station X survived on luck, they were lucky that the German air force operators were lazy and used the letters on the top of the rotors to send as a prefix to the other receivers, they were lucky that the German army had orders to repeat the first set up code, which gave the bletchley park operators a toe hold into breaking the code for that day, but the luck they had would not be any better than that of U-Boat 110. The wolf packs of U-Boats that hunted down the shipping lanes of the Atlantic were hurting the allied war effort, even with Royal Navy protection the U-boats were sinking more ships than could be built and starving Britain of valuable supplies, if this continued Britain would not be able to protect itself let alone defeat the might of the German military might.

On one such convoy HMS Bulldog was alerted to the presence of the U-boats, then suddenly two ships were torpedoed and were lost quickly the Bulldog plotted an intercept course and released its depth charges, these were set just right, they exploded just underneath U-boat 110 raising it to the surface, were the crew abandoned ship leaving the menacing dark figure of the U-boat lifeless on the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. A young officer David Balme was given the duty of leading the boarding party, they entered the darkness, that was filled with steam and gas, an un-nerving hissing greeted them and the only illumination was dim blue lights, like rats they scampered around the ship, they had no idea what they were looking for and so grabbed anything that looked of interest to the war effort. David Balme reached the captains office, where he calmly sat at the desk and had a look around, he noticed that the safe was open and inside papers of all sorts of which he took with him.