Spy vs. Spy
The Enigma machines were particularly valuable to the navy, where hand delivered secret messages were impossible. It made the German submarine wolf packs nearly invincible and supply lines to Britain came close to being cut during the Battle of the Atlantic. Breaking the code became of paramount importance to the British war effort.
The Japanese had also been working on their Enigma machine. It was radically refined and improved and eventually surfaced as the Alphabetical Typewriter 97, also known as The Purple Machine. It worked along the same principles as the German machine, but was a more complex problem for cryptoanalysis as Japanese was based on ideograms rather than a Western style alphabet. The secrets of the Purple Machine were eventually broken, but not until the German Enigma was solved.
The fate of the American owned Enigma is a peculiar tale. The US Signal Corps had acquired it in 1927, and the cryptoanalysis department had been working on it. However, in May 1929 Secretary of State Henry Stinson declared that "gentlemen do not read each others mail" and work on the Enigma was abandoned, as was virtually all cryptoanalysis. Signal Corps Major P.W. Evans had actually seen a German Enigma demonstrated and explained, his report was filed away.
The Poles, however, had been very busy indeed with their Enigma machine. The German threat was overwhelming, and the Poles were very aware that their position was perilous. They had never stopped intercepting and reading German messages and rapidly became expert code breakers. When Germany began using Enigma messages the Polish code breakers began trying to break them. It is estimated that by January 1938 the Poles were about 75% accurate in deciphering Enigma traffic. Part of this success may be attributed to the "Bomba", a sort of high speed calculator with bits of Enigma machines wired into it. It was more effective than anything else that had been developed, but was not really capable of solving the Enigma. When Poland fell in September 1939 some of the Polish cryptographers escaped, first to France and then to England, work on the problem began in deadly earnest.
Enigma was such an overwhelming problem that there was an entire intelligence department devoted to it, with a special designation, Ultra, a department beyond Top Secret. Work was largely carried on at Bletchley Park and eventually involved hundreds of mathematicians, Classics scholars, cryptographers, and others. Much of the success in cracking the
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