ENIGMA Machines

[David Dunlop]

Just finished watching another history blurb on TV about the British acquisition of a captured German Enigma machine during the war, which also included some sidebar comment about how the Americans eventually obtained one of their own.

It seems highly unlikely, given the shear volume of communication intercepts coming into British and American hands that just two machines would have had any chance at all in keeping up with the decoding needs for the Allied Intelligence Services. The British must have back engineered the Enigma machine and had others built to meet their needs. I now wonder what company the British might have asked to built Enigma machines, how many were ultimately built, and what ever happened to them all after the war ended.

David

[malcolm erik bogaert]

its not generaly known but in the invasion of poland a small british signals unit were sent into poland and recovered the polish army version...also all developemnt work was done by the GPO best regards malcolm

[Bruce MacMillan]

They didn't use the Enigmas for decoding. That machine was called the Bombe. They built over 200 of them. The captured Enigmas enabled them to find out how the rotors were wired.

Much of the work of Alan Turing went into the Bombe

[Dean (Ajax)]

Thats correct the "Bombe" was the device that decoded the messages at Bletchly Park, I was there in Feb this year and was given a Private tour by Jean Valantine, who was a "Bombe" operator during the war.
They have built a working "Bombe" from scratch, as I had given a couple of their Members a tour of the Camp X Site and the Camp X museum in Whitby a few years ago..they allowed me to start up the "Bombe"

Very impressive!!!

Dean

[Ganmain Tony]

Fascinating thread fellahs, keep the info coming.

Malcolm, pardon my ignorance, GPO stands for?

Very knowledgable people our forum members...good show!!

[Dean (Ajax)]

Check out this site, shows the rebuilt "Bombe" and other goodies at "The Park"

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/cont...whattosee.rhtm

Dean

[cliff]

Originally Posted by Ganmain Tony

Malcolm, pardon my ignorance, GPO stands for?

Tony I believe it stands for "General Post Office"
These are the people who did all telephone, telegraph and most other things to do with communications at the time and were Government owned.

[Lauren Child]

Hi,

Just a quick post as I've not got around to an intro yet, but the Bombe was the device that found the possible keys to decode with (once the code had been part broken by the code-breakers themselves).

To decode the messages, a number of British Typex cryptos were modified to operate like Enigma machines. This allowed them to decode the messages even though they only had a small number of actual Enigma machines, using the keys that had been found using the Bombe.

There's a photo of a modified Typex on this site - http://www.jharper.demon.co.uk/typex1.htm

TTFN
Lauren

[alamotex]

It has been revealed in a recent BBC TV documentary...Bletchley Codebreakers, The Forgotten Heroes that the most important German High Command strategic orders were encripted on a far more complex machine than the ENIGMA... called LORENZ. The breaking of codes encripted on LORENZ was a truly amazing feat, intitially accomplished by a young British mathmatician named William Tutte. He later became a professor in the Maths Dept of the University of Waterloo,Ontario , Canada. Only now can his story be told and along with that of Tommy Flowers who engineered the Collosus. It is claimed that William Tutte taught the young fellows who later devised the encription coding system used for RIM's Blackberry.