The Story Of Cracking The Enigma Code In 2 Hours

Summary

Discover the astonishing tale of Station X, the British code-breaking hub that cracked the German Enigma during WWII. From early struggles with coded messages to phenomenal breakthroughs, these young code-breakers, including figures like Alan Turing, played a pivotal role in deciphering enemy communications. Their efforts, shrouded in secrecy for decades, contributed significantly to the Allied victory, underscoring the power of brains over brawn amidst the chaos of war.

Highlights

• Station X's groundbreaking achievements in code-breaking helped turn the tide in WWII 91c203;
• Alan Turing became a key figure at Station X, contributing significantly to the development of early computers 4bb203;
• The capture of a German U-boat provided valuable materials that aided in breaking the naval Enigma de93203;
• The work at Station X remained a secret for over 30 years, even though it was crucial to Allied successes 326203;
• Station X's success demonstrated the power of intelligence and technology in warfare 3c1203;

Key Takeaways

• The code-breaking at Station X shortened WWII by about two years, saving countless lives 3f4302;
• Alan Turing's work at Station X laid foundational concepts for modern computing 4bb203;
• Despite the secrecy of their work, the achievements of Station X were pivotal in the fight against Nazi Germany 1ec303;
• The Enigma machine, thought uncrackable, was broken by the brilliant minds at Station X, changing the course of the war 3f4203;
• Cryptography during the war showed the importance of intelligence and data in modern warfare 5ff203;

Overview

During World War II, Station X, also known as Bletchley Park, emerged as a secret powerhouse for deciphering Nazi Germany's encrypted communications. Within its walls, an unlikely mix of scholars—from mathematicians to linguists—worked tirelessly to break the codes encoded by the Enigma machine, a feat many thought impossible.

Central to this effort was Alan Turing, whose groundbreaking work not only helped crack the Enigma but also laid the groundwork for modern computing. His team's development of the Bombe and other machines powered through the thousands of possible configurations, and their relentless effort was critical in deciphering messages that shaped military strategies.

Yet, despite their tremendous success, the work of Station X remained cloaked in secrecy for decades. The insights gained not only shortened the war by up to two years but also paved the way for future intelligence operations. It wasn’t until much later that the contributions of these code-breakers were fully recognized, highlighting the profound impact of innovation and intellect in warfare.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:30: Introduction to Station X This chapter introduces Station X, a secretive institution located in the English Countryside, which played a pivotal role during World War II. It was part of the Allies' most closely guarded secrets. The narrative unfolds with a sense of intrigue as it suggests attempts to destroy evidence and erase memories of the activities that occurred at Station X.
• 01:30 - 05:18: The Enigma Code In 1940, amidst a challenging period for Britain as it stood alone against Hitler, defeat seemed imminent. The country faced intense bombing, and its cities were heavily damaged. The German forces wreaked havoc in the Atlantic, with surrender appearing inevitable. However, Winston Churchill held a secret weapon: a mysterious military establishment that became crucial to Britain's resistance.
• 05:18 - 09:00: Decoding Efforts at Station X The chapter 'Decoding Efforts at Station X' discusses the diverse group of individuals at Station X, including crossword enthusiasts, chess champions, mathematicians, schoolboys, and professors, who share a common goal: to break the German Enigma code machine. This machine is responsible for carrying all the secret German war plans during World War II, and unlocking its mysteries is crucial for the Allied forces to gain an advantage in the war.
• 09:00 - 13:00: The Role of Intercept Stations The chapter titled 'The Role of Intercept Stations' discusses the pivotal contributions and remarkable efforts of untrained youngsters during World War II who had no prior experience with codes but successfully deciphered the Enigma. This chapter highlights how an exceptional level of intelligence was obtained by one side, providing unprecedented access to the enemy's secrets. The program aims to revisit and unveil the concealed stories of station X and the extraordinary individuals involved in the code-breaking endeavors.
• 13:00 - 18:00: Naval Warfare and the U-Boat Challenge This chapter explores the evolution of naval warfare, focusing on the U-Boat challenge during World War II. It highlights how women played pivotal roles in transforming the face of the 20th century and delves into Adolf Hitler's introduction of new war strategies, including blitzkrieg tactics characterized by swift, surprise attacks using tanks.
• 18:00 - 22:30: Alan Turing and the Bombe Machine The chapter titled 'Alan Turing and the Bombe Machine' opens with the strategic importance of speed in warfare, emphasizing how planes and rapid communication became central to military efforts during the Second World War. The era is referred to as the 'wireless War,' highlighting the significance of radio signals which filled the skies daily.
• 22:30 - 27:00: The Bombing of German Supply Lines This chapter discusses the strategic importance of disrupting German supply lines during a particular period in history. It highlights how the German High Command had extensively prepared their communication networks by training thousands of wireless operators for the conquest of Europe. These operators were skilled in interpreting Morse code under various conditions, which was crucial for maintaining supply lines. However, these efforts were targeted and possibly undermined by the opposing forces’ bombing campaigns aimed at crippling German logistics.
• 27:00 - 37:30: American Collaboration This chapter discusses the challenges of maintaining secrecy in message transmission during wartime. It highlights the sophistication of the German Enigma machine, which encoded messages into seemingly nonsensical strings of letters, making interception by enemies futile unless they had the means to decode it.
• 37:30 - 49:00: The Lorenz Cipher and Colossus The chapter titled 'The Lorenz Cipher and Colossus' delves into the coded communications during wartime, particularly the reliance on the Enigma machine by the German high command. It highlights the invincibility attributed to the Enigma as a cipher-breaking challenge perceived insurmountable by the enemy, and the complacency of the German command in its security. However, it foreshadows the significant events at 'station X' that would alter the course of cryptographic warfare.
• 49:00 - 65:00: D-Day and Ultra's Impact The chapter explores the role of the Enigma machine in WWII from the perspective of the Germans. The Enigma was believed to be an impenetrable tool to safeguard German communications. Its complexity was such that, even today, a supercomputer would take an enormous amount of time to decipher a single message without any clue about its contents. This highlights the significance of breaking the Enigma code for the Allied forces.
• 65:00 - 73:00: Conclusion and Legacy of Station X The chapter titled 'Conclusion and Legacy of Station X' provides an overview of the value of understanding history through documentaries. History Hit offers an extensive library of documentary features, ranging from the ancient origins of humanity to significant historical missions. These documentaries provide unique insights with unparalleled access to historians. The platform offers award-winning documentaries and podcasts that are not available elsewhere. The chapter encourages history enthusiasts to sign up for a free trial to explore this engaging historical content.

The Story Of Cracking The Enigma Code In 2 Hours Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 this channel is part of the history hit [Music] Network these people are destroying the evidence erasing every memory of what went on here this was station x a mysterious institution buried deep in the English Countryside the Allies best kept secret of World War War
• 00:30 - 01:00 I everything was destroyed there wasn't a scrap left in 1940 Britain stood alone against Hitler defeat seemed inevitable her cities were being battered and bombed in the Atlantic German OTS were wreaking havoc surrender was only weeks [Music] away but Churchill had a secret weapon the most curious military establishment
• 01:00 - 01:30 anywhere in the world crossword Fanatics chess Champions mathematicians school boys and professors all with one common aim to smash the mighty German code machine the Enigma the machine that carried all the secret German war plans unless they could unlock the mystery of the Enigma the war would be
• 01:30 - 02:00 lost what happened here was one of the most remarkable stories of the second world war how a bunch of untrained youngsters who had never seen a code in their life unraveled the Enigma never in the history of warfare had one side known so many of the enemy's Secrets what went on here was to remain hidden for 30 years tonight's program revisits station X and unlocks the secrets of the men and
• 02:00 - 02:30 women who changed the face of the 20th [Music] [Music] century in World War II Hitler introduced a new kind of warfare [Music] blitzk lightning attacks by tanks and
• 02:30 - 03:00 Planes together brought Europe to its knees speed was everything and speed of attack meant speed of [Music] communication the second world war became the wireless War every day the skies were full of radio signals
• 03:00 - 03:30 the German High command had trained thousands of Wireless operators in preparation for the conquest of Europe the operator's job was to be able to interpret the staccato tones of MOS code in any conditions [Music]
• 03:30 - 04:00 but there was still the problem of how to keep the messages secret the Germans had developed the most elaborate Cod making device the world had ever seen the Enigma turned a message into unintelligible gibberish letter by letter when the message was sent in Mor code all the enemy saw was a meaningless string of letters but when the German operator at the other end typed in the
• 04:00 - 04:30 coded letters the real message would appear in this way vital War plans could be kept absolutely secret the high command never doubted that the Enigma messages were Unbreakable by the enemy they were so confident that they used the Enigma throughout the German war machine they never imagined what was about to happen at station X [Music]
• 04:30 - 05:00 this is the machine the German High command believed would protect their secrets this is the Enigma the complexity is enormous I mean if I sent just one message on an Enigma machine today it would still take a super cray computer the fastest in the world a year to go through searching for that one message without supporting evidence as to what that message might have
• 05:00 - 05:30 been if you love history then you'll love history hit our extensive library of documentary features everything from the ancient origins of our earliest ancestors to the daring mission to SN the bisar history hit has hundreds of exclusive documentaries with unrivaled access to the world's best historians we're committed to Bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else sign up now for a free trial and timeline
• 05:30 - 06:00 fans get 50% off their first 3 months just be sure to use the code timeline at [Music] checkout long before the War Began the airwaves were full of coded messages as Hitler prepared for battle the British knew they would have to break the Enigma in 1938 the British secret service bought bedley Park Park an
• 06:00 - 06:30 ungainly Mansion 50 Mi north of London this was to be the new codebreaking headquarters a wireless receiver was installed to pick up German messages its call sign was station X and that became the unit's new name a new breed of code Breakers would be required to unravel the mysteries of the Enigma the Secret Service set about finding their people
• 06:30 - 07:00 the interviewing [Music] began the people who a few years earlier would regarded as too young and not knowing anything of importance or not being real people not having uh not being significant grown-up people suddenly they were the people who held the the keys to the Reich code breaking was a somewhat esoteric uh profession but it wasn't clear exactly who would make a good code
• 07:00 - 07:30 breaker people who were recruited were asked whether they did Crossway puzzles and if they said they did and enjoyed doing them and did them well that was generally enough to get you in we discovered people of whole variety of backgrounds did very well anthropologists egyptologists
• 07:30 - 08:00 paleontologist and even an occasional lawyer turned out to have the neck station X was becoming a unique wartime institution military discipline uniforms differences between civilians and the forces all that didn't matter the sole imperative was to break the Enigma and to break it as quickly as
• 08:00 - 08:30 possible at that age you can just take fire and Blaze away half out of your mind with uh enthusiasm and dedication you're not married you don't have to worry about the kids and the rent and so forth and during that sort of short period of your life you can live like a madman and uh you know take almost no sleep and uh determined to do it the new technology of the Enigma
• 08:30 - 09:00 meant a new approach to codebreaking mathematicians were Enlisted the most brilliant in the country station X was all set to become the largest codebreaking establishment the world had ever [Music] seen if the Germans ever discovered what was about to happen at station X the whole Enterprise would collapse secrecy was Paramount to the point of of
• 09:00 - 09:30 obsession some didn't even know what they were being recruited for most of us who were among the what shall I say the Hoy pooy the lower grades never knew what went on at Bletchley Park the only time I realized what we were actually doing was when I was shown a code book which had just been captured and rushed to Bletchley from a captured plane and of course we had no plastic
• 09:30 - 10:00 envelopes or anything then the poor thing was just given to me as it was and I was horrified to see a huge blood stain on it the blood ran the edges was drying but the blood in the middle was still wet and I realized then that somewhere was this German this German air crew bleeding still bleeding while I was decoding I was writing out in modern Journal their new code
• 10:00 - 10:30 book and that did bring the war very close German confidence in the Enigma was not without reason the Enigma was state-of-the-art technology German operators could scramble their messages in millions and millions and millions of different ways
• 10:30 - 11:00 pressing a typewriter key would light up a totally different letter an electrical current was sent from the keys to the letters through a series of rotors each time a key was pressed a rotor would turn changing the wiring and so changing the letter that was produced the total number of ways in which the Enigma machine can be configured for any particular message is 150 million million
• 11:00 - 11:30 million so it was an enormous complexity which was why the Germans thought it was completely safe the Enigma was first developed as a commercial machine in the 1920s and even patented in London German banks and the railways were among its first customers but the German military were quick to see that it was ideal for war [Music]
• 11:30 - 12:00 German operators in the field received secret instructions from Bas on how to set up the machine for each day they had to make three adjustments to the Enigma so that the senders and receivers machines would match first which rotors to put into the machine and in what order the rotors contained one of the central secrets of the Enigma machine which was the cross wirring inside the the wheels the whole of this Maze of wiring
• 12:00 - 12:30 inside changed every time a letter was entered and that's what gave the Enigma machine its vast complexity secondly to confuse the enemy even more each of the rotors could be changed every day by adjusting the Ring of letters around each rotor 26 combinations on each wheel [Music]
• 12:30 - 13:00 the third step was the plugboard using his secret instructions for the day the operator could plug up each typewriter key to a totally different letter this is what the Germans thought was the killer cryptographically this plugboard enabled you to transpose letters completely a pair of letters now because there are 26 sockets on the front of the Enigma machine you can plug these pairs of letters
• 13:00 - 13:30 together in an absolutely astronomical number of combinations about one and a half million million combinations that you can use on the front once the machine was set up the message was encoded letter by letter these coded letters were then sent by morse to the receiver at the other end the Germans believe that with the Enigma they had a foolproof
• 13:30 - 14:00 system station X had never seen an enigma all they had were groups of felet code and endless patients and in these first months the new recruits were getting nowhere at the beginning of the war there was a great difficulty because although we had into intercepts which we
• 14:00 - 14:30 knew were enciphered using the Enigma machine we didn't know enough detail about the machine to be able to even begin uh to find any method of breaking it unless you've got the exact key you just cannot get anywhere with it at all and this is a a major difference from the any code systems prior to that that the Enigma machine there's there's no sense of nearness you're not nearly at a solution you've either got the solution
• 14:30 - 15:00 or you haven't got the [Music] solution the story of how the Enigma was broken began 9 years earlier with a spy in 1931 a German Army clerk Hans tilo Schmidt saw an easy way to make money and sold stolen documents to the French Secret
• 15:00 - 15:30 Service the French met with their own cryptographers they showed them the documents but got little response War then seemed a long way off next the Enigma material went to the British at that stage the British cryptographers were not convinced by mechanical Cod making and Germany didn't
• 15:30 - 16:00 seem much of a threat the offer was politely [Music] declined finally the stolen documents went to the polls with Germany breathing down their necks the response from them was very different as soon as the poll saw what was on offer a deal was struck with the stolen documents three brilliant young polish m mathematicians zagalsky retki and rayki set to work on
• 16:00 - 16:30 the Enigma the polls soon realized that they had to find out how the Germans had wired the enigma's keyboard to the first rotor the number of possible wiring orders was astronomical as any typewriter key could be wired to any letter on the rotor but if the polls could work this out there would be a long way towards breaking the Enigma rski had a flash of inspiration and he
• 16:30 - 17:00 thought what about if they've been stupid enough to just use ABCD as the order around the rotor and they had all the multitude of millions and millions of ways in which they could have scrambled the connection from the keyboard to the entry point and they just chosen a b c d
• 17:00 - 17:30 maranesi in desperation tried that it worked and suddenly he'd got the internal connections of the whole of the German forces machine but then on the eve of the invasion of Poland the Germans introduced even more complications to the Enigma and the poles could no longer read any of the messages they needed help after desperation they invited the
• 17:30 - 18:00 British to a secret meeting deep inside a forest near Warsaw they revealed how they had managed to break the Enigma the British were astonished and didy Knox he was one of the members of the team that went there and the first thing he asked rki was what is this mapping from the keyboard to the entry Roto and rki said ABCD and then not went oh God we never
• 18:00 - 18:30 thought of that it's too obvious why didn't we think of [Music] that within weeks of that meeting Poland was invaded and war broke out but the changes that the Germans had made to the Enigma meant that even with the Polish Information Station X was still in the [Music] dark but as the flow of German messages increased at last the code Breakers were beginning to see a way to achieve the
• 18:30 - 19:00 impossible the starting point was the messages themselves the worldwide network of intercept stations was one of the last great achievements of the old British Empire stretching from scabb to Singapore they were known as y stations wherever the Germans were we were listening when there was a lot of excitement the wires would be absolutely
• 19:00 - 19:30 humming with Morse they'd be transmitting all over the place we'd really have cramp in our fingers sometimes trying to write it down nonstop Round the Clock around the world thousands of operators were writing down meaningless but vital groups of of
• 19:30 - 20:00 letters the raw material for station [Music] X in 1940 the code Breakers had their first breakthrough the German operators were making a tiny error in the way they were setting up their machines it was known as the double indicator it was to be the enigma's Achilles heel the instruction sheets for each day had told the German operator how to set up his Enigma the rotors and the Ring of
• 20:00 - 20:30 letters around each rotor were put into their given positions the sheets then specified how the plug board should be wired up all enigmas on a network had to be set up identically for the system to work but there was more one extra level of security if the enemy captured the instruction sheets they would be able to read all the
• 20:30 - 21:00 messages to prevent this each and every message had its own secret rotor setting chosen by the operator [Music] himself to do this the operator first turned the rotors to three letters chosen at random these would be sent by Mor to the operator at the other end in plain text so that he could line up his machine similarly but now the operator had to be able to to tell the operator at the
• 21:00 - 21:30 receiving end what the actual message settings from which they were going to which he was going to start enciphering the message and that had to be conveyed to the operator the other end but not revealed to any Interceptor and the way that they chose to do this was to use the Enigma machine itself to conceal this message setting the operator encodes a second group of three letters as the secret message setting
• 21:30 - 22:00 itself and supposing he thought of swj and when he keys in s WJ the lamps light up I TV because the Germans felt that radio Transmissions might be unreliable they went a step further and they actually asked the operator at the sending end to key in the message setting
• 22:00 - 22:30 twice so the procedure was to key in s swj s swj and to note down all six lamps that Lit and that was a crucial mistake because the repetition of the message setting gives a cryptographer a Toe Hold into finding out what it actually is repetitions are always bad news in
• 22:30 - 23:00 cryptography by encoding the same letters twice the Germans were giving the code Breakers their first clue as to how the rotors were set on the Enigma soon there was a second clue station X noticed a strange quirk in the way the rotors worked in about 1 out of eight intercepts the Enigma was turning one of the letters in the message setting into the same coded letter twice this repeat should never have
• 23:00 - 23:30 happened the mistake of sending the message setting twice was revealing a flaw in the machine itself although it was designed to produce random coded letters there were certain situations in which the Enigma was much less random than the Germans would have hoped there is no such thing as a random a truly random sequence that could be erated by a purely deterministic machine uh that
• 23:30 - 24:00 just cannot be uh it's part of the definition of Randomness that it cannot be explained or predicted in any way whatsoever the whole game of Cipher design is to design machines which are flawed they have to be but in which the flaws are as small inconspicuous as possible it was just such a flaw that
• 24:00 - 24:30 finally broke the Enigma station X called the repeated letters females there could only be a few configurations that could produce these females if the code Breakers now work their way through them they would find that day's [Music] settings the code Breakers produced huge cards known as Jeffrey sheets with holes punched through in an alphabetical grid
• 24:30 - 25:00 representing the wheel positions that could produce females by lining the sheets over each other station X could hunt through the wheel positions to find out how the Enigma had been set up for that [Music] day they were John Jeff they were really his rather special baby and they were on sort of cartridge weight paper not very thick card they got very doggy and as
• 25:00 - 25:30 far as I remember there were two alphabets that way and that way it was like solving a very difficult crossb puzzle you could actually see it happening and the Triumph when you knew found it worked that was fascinating marvelous absolutely marvelous there's nothing like seeing a code broken that is really absolutely be the
• 25:30 - 26:00 tops the one thing that was very interesting was that people were very reluctant to go home at the end of the ship there was a certain amount of move over you know that let me sit down get on with it people wanted to hang in there on one occasion I was on the evening shift but when midnight came I was stuck in a message that was had gripped me so hard I worked right through till breakfast time from 4:00 in the afternoon to breakfast the next day
• 26:00 - 26:30 simply because this had to get [Music] done in the spring of 1941 the naval war was building up in the Mediterranean Hitler had joined forces with the Italian fascist [Music] musolini but both dictators were dreaming of New World
• 26:30 - 27:00 Empires the code Breakers knew that the Germans had given the Italians Enigma machines to encode their Communications a 19-year-old girl was trying to break into the Italian messages sometimes you'd have to spend the whole night assuming every position that there could be on the three different wheels and where we call them red blue and green the wheels I think they did too so that you you would have
• 27:00 - 27:30 to work at it very very hard and it was that I think that made one pink eyed and one after You' done it for a few hours you wondered you know whether you'd ever see anything when it was before your eyes because you were say snared up in it all Mavis and the other code Breakers didn't know it but they were about to make their first major impact on the war the one that came up was real good stuff
• 27:30 - 28:00 drama today is the day minus three just that nothing else and so of course we knew that something was going to happen the Italians were going to do something in the Italian Navy in 3 days time why they had to say that I can't imagine father D but still they did the British fleet was based in the Egyptian Port of Alexandria under the command of Admiral Andrew
• 28:00 - 28:30 Cunningham a message about to arrive at station X was going to make him and Mavis Heroes well then a very very large message came in which was the battle orders how many Cruisers there were and how many submarines were to be there and where they were to be at such and such a Time absolutely incredible that they should uh really spell it all out Mavis had decot Ed just the message that Cunningham needed to hit the
• 28:30 - 29:00 Italians hard it was 11:00 of night and it was pouring with rain when I rushed ran absolutely tore down to take it to the Italian intelligence to get it across to Cunningham within hours the decoded message was on its way to Cunningham in Egypt the Italian Fleet were gathering off cape matapan on the Greek Coast their plan was to attack a British Convoy at
• 29:00 - 29:30 midnight Alexandria was a nest of spies the problem for Cunningham was how to act on the message without giving his plans away if he led the fleet out to sea the Italians would know immediately Cunningham embarked on an elaborate ruse to fool the spies he wanted his enemies to believe that all was quiet he did a real dream Drake on them and well more than Drake because he
• 29:30 - 30:00 played golf and pretended he was you know just going to have a you know weekend off adir Cunningham was a crafty fellow and uh by suo he uh was able to lead the enemy to think he was socially engaged doing something else and I have no doubt when he went to sha Alexander to play golf that information was in Italy within about 5 minutes but at night Cunningham slipped back on
• 30:00 - 30:30 board and led the British Fleet out to sea to the precise spot where the Italians were gathered the rul worked Cunningham caught the Italians completely off guard that night the Italians lost nearly 3,000 men the cream of their Navy it was the first major victory for station X in the war and the Young code Breakers were
• 30:30 - 31:00 delighted the Navy does it again here is the British Mediterranean Fleet preparing for what proved to be the greatest naval engagement so far fought in this war the Battle of matapan is one more proof that Britain is the unchallenged ruler of the Mediterranean [Music] waves after the battle of matapan the Navy were the Heroes station X was of course never mentioned but they had their own reward then Cunningham himself came it was the
• 31:00 - 31:30 first thing he wanted to do when he came was um to see the actual message that that that had been broken and he was very nice and we had a drink and we were in this little cottage and the walls just been whitewashed now this will show show you how sort of silly and young and giggly we were but we thought it would be jly nice if we could get talk to Admiral Cam and to get him to to lean against the wet white wash and go away
• 31:30 - 32:00 with a white stone so that's what we did so I you know um it's rather terrible isn't it that U you on the one hand everything's so seems to be so very organized and um these silly young things are are wanting to snare the Admiral but station a is Joy was to be
• 32:00 - 32:30 [Music] shortlived and then disaster struck the Germans issued a decree no more double enciphering of the message setting just single enciphering catastrophe suddenly the Jeffrey sheets didn't work and so suddenly Darkness fell [Music]
• 32:30 - 33:00 Hitler was determined to grind Britain into submission the blitz Relentless attacks on major cities became a part of everyday life it was a war of blood and nerves well there was one very good remark is the only good German is a dead one we felt very very strongly were they bombed us they' every day every
• 33:00 - 33:30 night with um hles and Dawn years they'd killed a lot of people in London and in the cities you couldn't have any pity for the Germans under those circumstances [Music] [Music] what a Triumph the life of these
• 33:30 - 34:00 battered cities is over the worst that fire and bomb can do in these the grimmest days of War station X was Churchill's one glimmer of hope access to the enemy's innermost Secrets could make the difference between Victory and defeat the code Breakers were working around the clock to break the Enigma station X had divided into Huts to
• 34:00 - 34:30 attack different parts of the German war machine Hut 6 was concentrating on the Air Force [Music] Enigma ironically it was the technologically advanced LOF waffer that was the most vulnerable the German air force had a high regard for itself as the new Elite but they were hopeless at security they were ripe for [Music]
• 34:30 - 35:00 breaking for months station X had been listening in to the secret messages from German airfields to their headquarters in Berlin but without being able to understand a word of them now they must find a way and quickly Hitler was preparing to invade Britain it's like looking for something in the dark room one didn't really know what one was looking
• 35:00 - 35:30 for um and I thought and I thought but I had great confidence I felt I'm going to find some way to break back into the [Music] red heril turned his thoughts to the Enigma operator there were set procedures to be carried out to prepare e Enigma for that day's messages the settings of the rotors and the ring
• 35:30 - 36:00 stellung the alphabet ring around the rotors were vital if the secret instructions were not followed in exact detail the security of the whole system would be at risk but John heril discovered that the operators were then making a fatal mistake it became known as the heral tip what the operator should do of course is when they've uh done a setting on a cipher machine you should always spin the wheels so that it randomizes the position but the hold of the Herold tip
• 36:00 - 36:30 depended on the German operator either being under pressure or lazy and not doing that the operator would have to send the three random letters by morse to the person at the other end so that both machines would be set to the same start position but herl realized that if the operator had failed to spin his rotors as he should then the three letters he was sending over the airwaves uncoded
• 36:30 - 37:00 would be the Secret Ring [Music] stellung instructions were quickly sent out to the Y stations where the German messages were intercepted to pay particular attention to the first of each day's messages that's when the mistake would show up if it was going to show up at [Music] all Hut 6 studied the opening letter groups of the intercepts as fast as they arrived to see if the heral tip had
• 37:00 - 37:30 worked sometimes the operator had made only a half-hearted attempt to spin the rotors so lwz had become lyb just a click or two away or perhaps luux but as more and more letter groups were plotted the code Breakers began to see clusters of letters that revealed the original secret setting herl's tip
• 37:30 - 38:00 was working not one operator but many had all made similar mistakes at last luffa red was broken the code Breakers could now give the RAF vital details of how the Luft buffer was organized and what it was planning even if they didn't always know exactly where or
• 38:00 - 38:30 when you don't get a message saying uh um we are going to do the following great things in the next 6 months of year sign Hitler there's nothing like that at all we don't get anything on a plate there's a case of an intercept which consisted entirely of figures random figures someone says I wonder if they are coordinates on the map and they all turn out to be airfields you did in fact get from that that they
• 38:30 - 39:00 were readying and building up airfields because they were going to concentrate our forces on attacking Britain Hut 6 broke the Air Force Enigma every day till the end of the war and soon they discovered other mistakes that the operators were [Music] making every Morse code message could be intercepted by the enemy so the Germans had to find a way of transmitting the settings for each
• 39:00 - 39:30 message that only the Enigma operator would be able to figure [Music] out they thought they had found the perfect solution use the Enigma itself to disguise the setting the operator had already been told to think up three random letters for the initial rotor setting now he was told to think up three more and type them into the Enigma they would be the key for that particular message and since they were being encoded they could be transmitted in complete
• 39:30 - 40:00 safety on the surface it looks like a foolproof indicator system the true setting of the message is hidden however the weakness was leaving the selection of the three letters to the operator at random and human beings simply are not random Hut 6 soon saw connections between the
• 40:00 - 40:30 two sets of supposedly random letters once they had got the first three letters which were sent in plain text they could often guess the second three which were in [Music] code one operator called valter became legendary at station X every day he would set his rotors to the first three letters of his name and then type in the first three letters of his girlfriend's name name claraa the code Breakers loved them one
• 40:30 - 41:00 wonderful one the outside indicator was Tom and we thought oh Tom Tom we thought that that didn't work it was Tom Mix the the American cowboy actor from the 1920s I don't know I didn't know in Germany anybody knew who Tom Mix was apparently he had a following in Germany H was almost invariably followed by
• 41:00 - 41:30 ler even Hitler was helping to break the Enigma they were given the manuals they were told exactly what to do and and how to use the machine but part of the problem was this myth that the Enigma machine was completely unbreakable and this was buried deep in the German psyche so therefore they they thought well why bother you know nobody can break these messages if we use these Keys cuz they're easy if you saw l n as the first I was almost
• 41:30 - 42:00 certain that d n was the second m a d was r b r was l i n In the Heat of battle you put up dirty words and I am the world expert on dirty German words the worst message I ever had come near
• 42:00 - 42:30 me was one from the German High command to someone in E the Jour intelligence reprimanding them for using um these words uh because did they not know that young girls were having to De to um decode them and of course the young girl at Bletchley was devastated because they how they they went on to it I might say never mind the repr but it was nice to
• 42:30 - 43:00 think the Germans had that side of them that they did think that perhaps they ought to use DS in their [Music] encodements by 1941 Britain was losing the war despite station X's success with the Luft buffer they had got nowhere with the Enigma of the German Navy and it was the Navy that was now the problem German uots were wreaking havoc in the
• 43:00 - 43:30 battle of the Atlantic every merchant ship that was sunk deprived Britain of the Urgent supplies it needed to survive right from the beginning of the war slow moving convoys of up to 60 Merchant ships regularly crossed the Atlantic to and from America the United States had not yet entered the war War but American supplies were essential to the British
• 43:30 - 44:00 war effort although these convoys were protected by escorts they were still easy targets for the German uots Hitler had entrusted Admiral Carl derit with the task of destroying Britain's Lifeline it was durard who realized quite early on that he could defeat the Allies by bringing England to its knees by starving us if he could uh break that North Atlantic route then there could be no food fuel troops Munitions come to
• 44:00 - 44:30 this country and uh he could win that war by ubos and he nearly succeeded D tried to build up a kind of elit spirit and everybody was proud to take part in that and we were very eager to join that Force of course we had been brought up up to a
• 44:30 - 45:00 door taking risks in the the National Socialist period when we were boys so we were not really aware of of the risk derit built giant fortified ubot pens on the French Coast from here his OTS could strike out into the Atlantic the Germans knew that the British were protecting their ships by convoys to get
• 45:00 - 45:30 round this dernitz organized his uots into groups wolf packs as the slow moving convoys crossed the Atlantic wolf packs of 30 boats or more would lie in wait almost every convo there would be losses they were very crafty these German uo commanders they would anticipate our route and of submerge in daylight just
• 45:30 - 46:00 ahead of the Convoy and uh let the Convoy pass over them and torpedo right left and center and uh we wouldn't know where the attack had come from the wolf packs were controlled by dernitz by radio messages encoded on the Enigma breaking the naval Enigma was to be station X's biggest challenge if they failed the battle of the Atlantic and the war could be
• 46:00 - 46:30 lost Alan Turing was the right man in the right place at the right time Alan Turing was unique I mean he was a genius and what you realize when you get to know a genius well is that there's all the difference between a very intelligent person and a genius with very intelligent people you talk to them they come out with with an idea and you say to yourself if not to
• 46:30 - 47:00 them you know I I could have had that idea you never had this feeling with touring at all he constantly surprised you with the originality of his thinking it was marvelous Alan Turing was the most brilliant mind of his generation he had become a Cambridge professor at only 23 his work on intelligent machines was years ahead of his time station X suited both his genius and his eccentricity he had funny manners he didn't like
• 47:00 - 47:30 wearing a tie uh he always looked untidy but he quite liked being out in the country where he cycled around he cycled with a gas mask on during hay fever period he he didn't care what he what he looked like he just thought that doing the job was What mattered he was very shy of women particularly girls I don't think he'd ever met any girls before I did once offer him a cup of tea and he shrank back back as if he was going to be shot and he used to bless his heart walk
• 47:30 - 48:00 down to the canteen in a curious sideways motion with his head down but he was such a star we all thought he was the most wonderful thing Alan Turing set himself the challenge of breaking into the naval enigma [Music] in an attic room at Bletchley Park
• 48:00 - 48:30 churing began to unravel the secrets of the ubo messages all he had to go on were The Scrambled letters incredibly as he studied them churing was able to discover exactly how the Germans were hiding the key message setting unlike the luer the German Navy was leaving nothing to chance instead of letting the operator choose three letters at random for his message setting he had to get it from a
• 48:30 - 49:00 book with practically no information to go on curing identified how the Navy operators selected their keys from a list for each day he rightly guessed that to hide the key these letters were encoded using secret tables and that instead of substituting one letter by another letter these Bagram tables substituted pair of letters Turing worked all this out and got it
• 49:00 - 49:30 absolutely right these codes were printed on Rose paper in a ink that would immediately fade out if it got wet so our orders were in case of any difficulty immediately to throw this material overboard or at least soak it in water so it could not be red
• 49:30 - 50:00 Turing had made the first important breakthrough but he knew that to crack the naval Enigma they would first have to get hold of those secret Byram tables then came an amazing Stroke of Luck Captain Fritz ulius LM was a hero of the Third Reich his uboat the u110 had sunk the first ship in the war in May 19 41 he set out on what was to be his last
• 50:00 - 50:30 mission David Barm had just turned 20 he was a subl liutenant on HMS Bulldog on escort Duty guarding the 50 ships in Convoy OB 318 from Liverpool B for America we were south of Iceland and um we knew we were being shadowed you get reports back from the from the adaly being shadowed by UB boats and we always knew we'd be attacked in this
• 50:30 - 51:00 area suddenly two ships were torpedoed one after another is obvious where the tech come from and um the corvet oisha made a very accurate attack on you must have got the depth charges just for right depth
• 51:00 - 51:30 gor hugall was the Enigma operator on u110 he had been with Captain LMP throughout the war
• 51:30 - 52:00 there a classic attack depth charges underneath you blew it to the surface the dream every every escort esort to see a u blowing to the surface cuz usually they just think when you do have a successful ATT and go down to the [Music] bottom this was just the chance that touring and station X had been waiting for on board the u110 were the secret
• 52:00 - 52:30 byr tables
• 52:30 - 53:00 the Germans Abandoned Ship leaving the code books behind but gor hugall had one precious document he had to rescue a book of love poems to his girlfriend
• 53:00 - 53:30 for David Barm led a boarding party across to the stricken sub Marine but what if the Germans had left an armed Man Behind to Scuttle the boat
• 53:30 - 54:00 Barm went aboard first one couldn't imagine the Germans would have abandoned this U booat floating in the Atlantic without someone down below trying to sink her but anyway got got on Got My Revolver out secondary lighting a dim blue lighting was on and um I couldn't see anybody just a
• 54:00 - 54:30 nasty hissing noise which I didn't like the sound of to this day I don't know what it was the rest of the boarding party began to search the ubot they had no idea what they were looking for they did not know about the secret byr tables David Barm had never heard of station X I sat down at the Captain's desk in his cabin and suddenly amongst all the things I think his arm cross was there and I put
• 54:30 - 55:00 that into a bag and um there odds and ends but also I came across a sealed envelope um I didn't open it I wouldn't have understood it any not speaking German but it obviously um was something fairly important being a sealed envelope in his desk so I popped it into my pocket at the time David Bal had no idea of the importance of what he and his boarding crew had
• 55:00 - 55:30 found the capture of u110 was a disaster for the Germans and a treasure Trove for station X the Cod Breakers now had the secret tables of the naval Enigma Captain LMP died in the attack no one will ever know why he did not Scuttle the OT or why he did not destroy the codes
• 55:30 - 56:00 the only document on the u110 that did not end up in British hands was the book of love poems to Aid it if goog hugall had rescued the Byram tables instead
• 56:00 - 56:30 things may have been very [Music] different when the captured documents reached station X the code Breakers were ecstatic now they could begin to break the Naval Enigma King George V 6 called this the most important event of the war
• 56:30 - 57:00 at Sea so [Music] far the prize were the byr tables and they were magnificent although some of them had got a bit wet and we had to dry them Jeffrey Tandy having been at the Natural History Museum had access to proper drying paper which he brought down by a load and we had to dry those and clean them up and distribute them as
• 57:00 - 57:30 necessary almost immediately the results were evident on June the 23rd 1941 station X decoded a uboat message that would save a [Music] convoy HX 133 was heading for England Laden with supplies the code Breakers revealed that a wolf pack of 10 OTS was lying in wait armed with this knowledge the admiralty could set up a Counterattack the attack lasted 5 days
• 57:30 - 58:00 two of the upot were sunk and the Convoy arrived safely station X had joined the battle of the [Music] Atlantic but Britain was still alone Germany had brought Europe to its knees defeat seemed weeks away the decoded messages from the Enigma were gradually
• 58:00 - 58:30 revealing the full extent of Hitler's plans but no one anticipated what was about to come as Hitler began his invasion of Russia in 1941 certain German signals were being decoded that gave cause for alarm the SS and the German Border Police were reporting Mass executions and the syst systematic Slaughter of Russian Jews it's now known that this
• 58:30 - 59:00 was part of the Holocaust at the time no one anticipated the full scale of the genocide but when Churchill saw the decodes he wanted the whole country to share his outrage since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the 16th century there has never been methodical merciless Butchery on such a scale we are in the presence of a crime without a
• 59:00 - 59:30 name Churchill was taking a chance that the Germans would realize the Enigma had been broken and he would lose station X it was a huge gamble but such was the horror of the crime even station X had to be put at risk [Music] Britain's situation was desperate her
• 59:30 - 60:00 armies had been kicked out of Mainland Europe her convoys were being sunk in the Atlantic her cities were being battered and bombed Britain's one secret weapon was the Intelligence coming out of station X it was given the highest rating of all top secret Ultra the Germans didn't attach much importance to intelligence at the beginning you don't if you're winning they attached importance with the blitz Creek and winning the war
• 60:00 - 60:30 quickly we attached great importance to intelligence because we had our backs to the war and we had nothing else that we could rely [Music] on step by step the Enigma was giving up more and more of its secrets to the British code Breakers and strangely enough it was the enigma's greatest
• 60:30 - 61:00 strength that also turned out to be its greatest weakness when an operator typed a message on the Enigma the machine would replace every letter with a different one the letter typed in would never come out as the same letter in the code the Germans didn't realize it but they were opening another door for station
• 61:00 - 61:30 [Music] X the code Breakers soon worked out that if the coded letter could never be the real letter they could use this to start unraveling the messages as the intercepts were analyzed it became clear that the Germans were using set phrases time and time again it was soon possible to predict which message contained a particular phrase station X called these phrases
• 61:30 - 62:00 [Music] cribs I remember need Englander down with the English and of course H Hitler H Hitler was enormously valuable I mean you should never inculcate in the your military anyway the tendency to have exactly the same phrase opening every statement of a great victory as military bureaucracy settled into routine the Germans often sent the same
• 62:00 - 62:30 message at the same time every day there was one remarkable one which we used to use sometimes to Cher us up as a sort of college yell because it had such a wonderful Rhythm it went as follows um n and flear ni G dor perform and you could imagine six or seven adults who have nothing better to do on the night shift reciting this and feeling a lot better afterwards perhaps
• 62:30 - 63:00 two or three times in some cases I mean that message in itself was pointless all this said was you cannot fly from this place no building has taken place signed off whatever it would been much better if they hadn't sent it from their point of view it was it was simply the way into the code when they had decided on their phrase the code Breakers then looked for it in a message finding the correct position for
• 63:00 - 63:30 the crib relied on the floor in the Enigma the code Breakers lined their crib up against the coded message as they knew the Enigma would never turn a letter into itself if any pairs of letters matched the phrase must be in the wrong position they slid the crib along the message until they found a point where none of the letters were the same this could be
• 63:30 - 64:00 where the phrase was located given that Head Start station X could work out the Enigma settings for the next 24 hours the code Breakers became so Adept they would create their own cribs they would ask the RAF to drop mines in a specific stretch of sea the Germans would immediately send a
• 64:00 - 64:30 message giving a grid reference for the mines station X knew the grid reference cf97 would be spelled out in the coded German message so they used Caesar Fritz no zeben as the crib to find the Enigma key station X called this [Music] gardening by now the code Breakers were not just learning about the Enigma but also the whole system of War communication they were rewriting the
• 64:30 - 65:00 rules of the code [Music] war in the deserts of North Africa a new German general was making a name for himself with his aggressive attacks on the British Iran Rommel was to become a major figure in the story of station X my father was what you could call a warrior he was more soldiers general not
• 65:00 - 65:30 a paper General he was very lucky in Africa not having been wounded except one day when a British splinter from a shell hit his belt but he the Splinter was sticking in the belt and not in his
• 65:30 - 66:00 body throughout 1941 the Desert War was swinging backwards and forwards across Libya and Tunisia as the Germans and their allies the Italians tried to capture Egypt with no landlines for communications North Africa was pure Wireless War the Enigma was vital to roml my father had never an idea that the German code was broken he could not imagine that something like this could
• 66:00 - 66:30 happen but roml had one major weakness the German Africa Corp totally depended on their Italian allies to bring in supplies rl's supply lines were a natural Target for the British the RAF knew that convoys of Italian supplies were crossing the Mediterranean to roml the Italians sent Enigma messages to make the arrang ments and station X read the messages it was almost too
• 66:30 - 67:00 easy I could not understand how roml failed to realize that we were breaking important signals I mean he was a superb General he was winning but then he started losing because his supplies were always sunk in the Mediterranean station X knew which convoys were carrying what supplies they could almost
• 67:00 - 67:30 pick and choose their targets to keep Ultra safe however it had to look as though the British knew about the convoys from some Source other than the Enigma there was an absolutely rigid rule that we could not use ultra unless first of all an aircraft had been sent out to Recon once the alter had been proven by German seeing a British airplane looking at the Convoy then you could use it but not
• 67:30 - 68:00 until they may might very well say I wonder how they knew it but fortunately they always deluded themselves by saying it must have been an Italian traitor in the Naples docks my father ended his life with a suspicion that there was a gap in the Italian High command through which news escaped and and arrived that the British died but in heaven he must apologize
• 68:00 - 68:30 towards the Italians and say I was wrong but as was to happen time and time again in the war an advance in One Direction was met by a retreat in another and through a series of international events rml was soon going to find fate working in his favor the story began several months earlier
• 68:30 - 69:00 in 1941 when a group of American Cod Breakers had visited station X Churchill was luring the Americans into the war by offering the secrets of Altra spies are not uh prone to share a great deal straight away you know it takes time uh for for spies to to warm up with one another and even British and American spies they played their cards very close to their
• 69:00 - 69:30 chest getting two Count's secret services to work together was unheard of but Against All Odds the visit was a success from then on the Americans would share the secrets of the Enigma but that was going to play right into rl's [Music] hands the New Deal meant that the Americans would be kept informed about North [Music] Africa reports on the British campaign
• 69:30 - 70:00 were being sent in code to Washington from the US Embassy in Cairo in August that year an Italian working for the Americans Lis gerardi got hold of the combination of the safe where the embassy's code book was kept gerardi copied the code without the Americans ever
• 70:00 - 70:30 knowing now roml had access to British Secrets he knew what his enemy was up to with the help of the American decodes rumel pushed the British back 300 mil in 17 days the reports going back to Churchill told of disaster after disaster the situation
• 70:30 - 71:00 was critical Churchill was putting enormous pressure on station X to break the Enigma faster getting the rotor settings from The Cribs was taking too long speed meant lives one man had the answer Alan Turing the leading codebreaker at station X had achieved International recognition before the war ahead of his time juring was developing the idea of intelligent machines he
• 71:00 - 71:30 planned to automate the codebreaking process Turing wanted to build a machine that would attack the heart of the Enigma a machine that could work out how the German operators had set up their enigmas for that day's messages once they had a crib the code breaker could find the rotor settings but the process of getting those settings took too
• 71:30 - 72:00 long alen's great breakthrough was seeing that finding out the rotor settings from that crib was something that could be done by a machine that was uh his that was the great starting point and brought it whole thing into the Modern Age turing's machine could defeat the Enigma in minutes it was called strangely the
• 72:00 - 72:30 bomb an average bomb run was about 15 minutes occasionally I heard we beat the Germans to the decryption this happened when a would send b a message and B would almost immediately send back a message a very short message was just said I can't read you we would get the solution faster
• 72:30 - 73:00 than the other guy could decipher for second sending and if it was something hot it could get out in the field before the German Commander got it the bomb was a giant electromechanical machine which used drums to imitate a series of enigma machines the drums clicked round letter by letter testing the thousands of possible Enigma settings 20 every second until the correct one had been
• 73:00 - 73:30 found before churing the perceiv wisdom was you just got to go around searching for this one solution which will break a particular message juring said no what you do is you use the mathematical technique of rejecting all things that it couldn't possibly be so it was very powerful search engine but working in a negative sense in that
• 73:30 - 74:00 it rejected millions of millions of possibilities very very quickly and arrived at the correct answer station X was becoming a vast production line by the end of the war with over 200 bombs the code Breakers were turning out 90,000 decoded messages a month the algorithmic process as we'd call it Now by which the crib and the cipher text were processed on these
• 74:00 - 74:30 mechanical systems were they were the most advanced most complex processes that ever been used in the history of the world I can't think of anything else with its logical and statistical sophistication something you should think of as years and years before its time Churchill still desperate for victory in North Africa went to the desert to put his stamp on the war he
• 74:30 - 75:00 wanted results and he wanted them fast out went one lot of generals and in came another leftenant General Bernard Montgomery became the new eighth Army Commander it was now his job to defeat rl's Africa Corp he knew from Ultra that roml was about to attack but where mon Montgomery predicted The Ridge at Alam Hala Monty said looking at the ground
• 75:00 - 75:30 you will go with the Alam Hala Ridge some days later we decoded a signal from Rumble saying I'm going to attack on the 30th of September the Al Hala Ridge which is exactly what Monty had said I think from that moment on Monty was so confident of his own intelligence that he couldn't be beaten he couldn't he knew everything but Montgomery had another Advantage the American Embassy in Cairo had realized
• 75:30 - 76:00 their intelligence reports on the British campaign were being read by the Germans they had immediately changed their code roml no longer knew what his enemy was [Music] planning Montgomery however was still receiving Ultra from station X soon the German forces were under enormous pressure but station X was beginning to have reservations about
• 76:00 - 76:30 Montgomery we felt that Montgomery did not trust the intelligence information that bletchly Park was providing him with because we believed in our own arrogant way that we were probably providing a service to the military that no other military had ever had in the history of Warfare on the 23rd of October the British went on the attack at L Alam our mandate from the prime minister
• 76:30 - 77:00 is to destroy the AIS forces in North Africa we are going to finish with this chap Ral once and for all British intercept stations logged over 300 messages a day in the battle that followed station X knew rl's plans his forces and his losses this was the intelligence War Montgomery had promised to finish roml off station
• 77:00 - 77:30 X was providing the information that would allow him to do that on the evening of the 2nd of November rumel signaled Hitler for permission to retreat alaman was marvelous because you had these desperate messages from R saying penam is exhausted we enough petrol for 50 kilm ammunition is ammunition is cont temptable and so on and we have between
• 77:30 - 78:00 11 and 17 operational tanks in the whole of penser army Africa Hitler replied the next day ordering roml not to yield a step either Victory or death Montgomery read both messages within hours at hel Alain Montgomery's Superior for forces Crush roml but when HUD 3 learned that Montgomery had allowed roml and the remnants of his army to get away
• 78:00 - 78:30 they were Furious We Told Monty over and over again how few tanks R had got so Monty could have wiped RL off the face of the Earth why he didn't do so why he didn't wipe it off the face of the earth I simply do not know nobody nobody else knows why is the Hut three information not used it was so full I that was that was our exasperation we were giving Monty every
• 78:30 - 79:00 conceivable information about the state of R's troops the number of operational tanks which is terribly crucial I mean you know enough but as many tanks going be parked on the lawn at the back of this house and in desert Warfare no tanks you're finished this is the BBC home and forces program here's some excellent news which has come during the past hour from GHQ Caro
• 79:00 - 79:30 it says the axis forces in the western desert after 12 days and nights of ceaseless attacks by our land and air forces are now in full Retreat somehow War seems the Natural State of Affairs and and peace when it comes will take a hell of a lot of getting used
• 79:30 - 80:00 to in December 1941 America entered the war to Churchill's great relief after Pearl Harbor Britain and America were at last official allies chel and Roosevelt knew that the secrets of the Enigma were vital to the Allies success Cod breaking was a major priority station X was to be completely open to the
• 80:00 - 80:30 [Music] Americans but as the war moved into 1942 and more and more messages from station X were being sent to Washington the new relationship was about to face its first real test the Allies knew that to defeat Hitler
• 80:30 - 81:00 the battle of the Atlantic had to be won the decoded uboat messages were sent every day to the British and American navies if Admiral dernitz ever realized that his messages were being read all would be lost on February the 1st 1942 Hutt 8 began receiving ubo intercepts that gave them cause for alarm dernitz had changed the ubo code
• 81:00 - 81:30 station X could no longer read the messages their allies the Americans were not pleased well unfortunately the British lost control of the Enigma and America was left without the kind of Vital Information needed to protect its convoys there were an awful lot of protest us and England was very hesitant to tell us that they had lost control of
• 81:30 - 82:00 the code the British were trying to conceal the truth German OTS in the Atlantic could now do their worst station X could no longer find them they had no answer to the new code Allied Shipping losses began to
• 82:00 - 82:30 rise dernitz was taking no chances the German Navy had changed the Enigma they had added a fourth [Music] rotor the revolving rotors with their Maze of constantly changing electrical wiring were the secret of the Enigma introducing a fourth one increased the odds against breaking the code dramatically station X called the new
• 82:30 - 83:00 code shark after 6 months without any breakthrough the Americans were getting restless it got to the point where by mid 1942 the Americans declared that no matter what they would go their own way and make sure they get a their own independent capability against the German submarine men and its code systems and it became quite touchy as to
• 83:00 - 83:30 whether or not the two sides would cooperate the Americans were threatening a takeover station X could become mere Spectators in their own game something had to be done the director of station X traveled to Washington for a tough meeting to keep the Enigma Cod breaking at Bletchley Park there would inevitably be a
• 83:30 - 84:00 price a deal was hammered out American Cod Breakers were to be sent to station X the British had given away the family silver and there was still the problem of the fourth rotor what I think bothered us most was the destruction of the merchant shipping and the destruction of the naval ships and knowing that if only we could break this wretching code we could save so many lives and sink so many
• 84:00 - 84:30 OTS in October captured uboat code tables arrived at station X and provided the first real chance of getting back into the naval Enigma with these tables the code Breakers were able to uncover a weakness in the four rotor system when the Germans designed the four rotor Enigma they realized that it might have to communicate with other stations which
• 84:30 - 85:00 used a three-wheel machine so in one of its 26 positions the fourth rotor did nothing the new four rotor machine became in effect an old-fashioned three rotor [Music] Enigma station X worked out the settings of the first three rotors on the bombs just in the past then simply run through all 26 positions of the fourth rotor until they found the right
• 85:00 - 85:30 [Music] one soon the day settings were on their way to America after 10 months in the cold station X was [Music] back the excitement when we got back into the uots was terrific that was on night shift and somebody came running said we're back into the UB
• 85:30 - 86:00 boats and it was the one that was meant we were going to be able to go on getting into the uots so that was terrific it wasn't just a oneof it was we were going to be able to do it steadily Churchill was told as soon as possible it was a great moment [Music]
• 86:00 - 86:30 once again station X could help protect the convoys and within 7 months the battle of the Atlantic was [Music] over what had started as a small band pitted against the Enigma was now a city of 10,000 station X was readying itself for the decisive battle by 1943 Hitler was on
• 86:30 - 87:00 the run in Russia the Atlantic and North Africa the tide of War had turned it would only be a matter of time before the Allies would invade Hitler's Fortress [Music] 3,000 M away in Washington plans for another Invasion were underway the first
• 87:00 - 87:30 American officers were being selected to go to station X the price exacted by the United States for its cooperation I remember vividly a group of us were convened in a room there and moment we came in they were told what you're going to hear today is something you will not discuss and it means that you will never be put where you can be captured by the enemy and I was picked to be the commanding officer of that outfit and
• 87:30 - 88:00 that's how I got to Bletchley Park the journey to England involved a bizarre cover story of being pigeon experts in signals and also being checked out by an American unit who had never heard of station X they asked us whether we had the Army General classification test they said they couldn't find our scores on our records They said would you mind taking the test and we said no we don't mind
• 88:00 - 88:30 there were five of us and uh we took the test and uh the sergeant graded them and he came running out this is Holy mackel what scores you guys ought to be in intelligence [Music] I don't think I'd ever met an Englishman in my life until that point I don't know
• 88:30 - 89:00 I had been full of stereotypes about the the English you distant and have no sense of humor and these were the most outgoing wonderful people fed us when it was quite a sacrifice just enough screw balls to be real fun it was the first time I'd ever been involved in my life in any serious discussion both about war or politics with an American it was there that I learned for the first time to drink
• 89:00 - 89:30 tomato juice it the first experience I had with American coffee and American bacon so in a way America was introduced to me through this bletchly Prelude against all predictions the Americans fitted seamlessly into the life of station X the only ranker was to come on the field of sport when the Americans challeng the British to a game of rounders we said of course we'd be delighted you know our honored allies so
• 89:30 - 90:00 the Americans came and we showed them how they could play with it they said what no baseball bat we said no we we would just use this BR handle so they said fine we played was a lovely day we all played well at the end of the game we all sort of clapped each other on the back and the Americans said well we're sorry we beat you and the British captain said I'm sorry we beat you that was a little bit of an incident
• 90:00 - 90:30 because the Americans said they thought they'd won and we said we knew we'd won and they said what rules do you play by and we said our rules but in the days to come the Americans were about to learn of a secret even bigger than enigma station X had discovered that the Germans were using a mysterious Cipher machine far more advanced than anything
• 90:30 - 91:00 they had ever seen now we knew nothing about this Cipher machine it was kept completely Secret by the Germans and we first began to intercept radio transmissions in 1940 there's actually a group of policemen on the south coast of England and they were listening for uh for German agents trans missions from within the UK of course there weren't any because we'd captured all the agents but they were still listening for these and they heard these
• 91:00 - 91:30 weird signals and they sent them to Bry Park Station X now faced a new challenge Hitler had demanded his own Cipher machine something faster and even more secure than the Enigma Hitler's experts had devised a coding system based on the teleprinter machine teleprinters use binary code it's not
• 91:30 - 92:00 secret it's used worldwide but what the Germans had done was to connect the tele printer to a machine which cunningly exploited the teleprinter language itself to produce their code the secret German coding machine was called the [Music] Loren it used 12 rotors to scramble the
• 92:00 - 92:30 message not just the three of the Enigma the Loren machine transmits a string of letters each one of which is actually a mix of the real letter of the real message and a piece of machine crafted gobigo that a machine being of a diabolically complex craftiness so at the end of it what comes out and goes over the ether and is transmitted
• 92:30 - 93:00 is a single string of total calig the Loren relied on a mathematical system called modulo 2 addition this allowed the string of meaningless letters added to the message at one end to be removed from it at the other by the same mathematical process [Music] the operator presses a key on his teleprinter that generates an electrical
• 93:00 - 93:30 signal the Laurence machine then adds an obscuring character to this signal and the result is then transmitted at the other end of the link another lorence machine set to exactly the same configuration regenerates exactly the same obscuring character adds it back to the s a text and by the magic of modulo 2 arithmetic they cancel out and leave you with the
• 93:30 - 94:00 plain text the security of the laoren depended on the fact that it was adding a string of random letters to hide the real message but because it's a machine it can't generate a completely random set of letters it's what's known as pseudo random unfortunately for Germans it was more pseudo than random and that's how it was
• 94:00 - 94:30 broken station X gave the mysterious code the name fish they could work out that it was based on teleprinter language how to strip off the obscuring code was anybody's guess but on the 30th of August 1941 a lazy German operator gave the whole game away when he got to the end of keying in this nearly 4,000 character message by
• 94:30 - 95:00 hand the operator receiving end sent back in German the equivalent of didn't get that send it again and then like idiots they both put their Laurent Cipher machines back to the same start position and then he began to key this long message again ironically the message need never have been sent the operator was simply doing a test resending the message was allowing
• 95:00 - 95:30 station X to break Loren the code Breakers could begin to see the different ways that the machine was adding random letters to the same [Music] message for me the real excitement was this business of getting these two texts out of one sequence of chipperish was marvelous never never met anything that was quite as exciting especially since you knew these were vital
• 95:30 - 96:00 messages Hitler and the German High command never suspected that the lorence had been broken it had taken station x 3 months to break fish and remarkably they had worked out the mechanics of the lorence itself a machine they had never seen
• 96:00 - 96:30 they even built their own machine to imitate it as it was dealing with fish messages they called it Tanny once the Lorent settings had been found station X could use tan to turn the messages into plain German teams of code Breakers were needed to attack the Lorent but it was still taking week to break a single message and by then the information could be useless it was a cous life involved
• 96:30 - 97:00 mental gymnastics and it could be could be very wearing particularly if you didn't succeed I mean you could spend nights in which you got nowhere at all you didn't get a single break you just try played around played around through this Bleak long night with total frustration and your brain felt literally raw your psycho whatever it is felt
• 97:00 - 97:30 frustrated but our brain almost literally felt raw at the end of it but the whole process was about to be speeded up at the gop's research station in dolles Hill London station X found a brilliant young telephone engineer to help them he believed he could build a machine that would do much of the code
• 97:30 - 98:00 Breakers work for them the machine would be nothing less than the world's first programmable computer I uh tried to tell py Park what the uh what my ideas were but you was understand that the technology that I was using was said only just known to very few people in the whole [Music]
• 98:00 - 98:30 world flowers came to station X and was convinced that the answer lay in valves Tommy flowers started in March 1943 with a blank sheet of paper never been done before I mean flowers was thinking of a machine with 1,500 valves in it the biggest machine ever at that time had 150 vs in it so this was an enormous leap into the dark but flowers was convinced it he could make it work and nobody else was but he was and so he
• 98:30 - 99:00 started more or less off his own bed we just told people to do things we had the power we had the authority to tell anybody you know we had the first priority in the whole country for everything and we could just tell people
• 99:00 - 99:30 what we want and not tell what it was [Music] for just days before the invasion of Europe Tommy flowers installed the world's first programmable computer before the final victory there would be 10 of them dealing with the secret messages of the high command they were given the name
• 99:30 - 100:00 Colossus Colossus could read a coded message at high speed and then search for the teeth patterns and settings of the Loren code wheels and it could do this in minutes not weeks Tommy flowers realized that it was possible to read paper tape optically at very high speed and this is going at 5,000 cars a second 30 m an hour there the tape goes through there and it's quite incredible that it can actually read information at that
• 100:00 - 100:30 speed in fact we did a test on how fast we could drive it before the tape broke and uh we got up to near 60 M an hour so so we decided that was a bit when it did break it it went all over the place it just just just IND ready Colossus was now ready for Operation Overlord the biggest Invasion the world had ever
• 100:30 - 101:00 seen tanks and guns choked every main road every street in Southern England the Allies were intending to deceive Hitler about where the invasion would take place they planned to make the Germans think that an attack on Normandy was simply a diversion through double agents the Allies leaked the word back to Berlin it would be up to station X to
• 101:00 - 101:30 see if the deception was working the Germans were deceived for a very long time far more than we expected far more successfully but we also got a Bonus if you like that is we knew they were deceived because from Ultra we could see that they were not moving troops into Normandy they had to say to themselves they'll pop over to C the Germans were not only deceived
• 101:30 - 102:00 they were known to be deceived for Overlord to work the Germans had to be fooled by the false messages and even a dummy Army Around the Clock station X was hunting for the mest hint of German [Music] suspicion June 1944 War the invasion was poised to strike but then station X received a
• 102:00 - 102:30 message just before the day Marshall ruml The Desert Fox was appointed Inspector General of the western defenses and he sent this enormously long message very detailed description of the western defenses where each each unit was located and what equipment they had was was 70,000 letters which was red when station X decoded the fish
• 102:30 - 103:00 message it contained alarming news for the Americans they were planning to parachute their troops into Normandy they thought they had chosen a safe landing site they were going to drop the one of the a div Visions right on top of a German tank division it would have been massacred they changed it June the 4th reassured by the code Breakers that all was well the massive
• 103:00 - 103:30 Army began to move forward but there were to be other greater forces at work that even station X could not predict we went on duty that night and they said well tonight is The Invasion and they're going across and so we slaved away well of course as everybody knows by about 4:00 in the morning the weather was so bad they had to bring them all back which of course was bad luck for us because they then came and
• 103:30 - 104:00 said well you can't go walking about eventually when you know that the invasion is going to be tomorrow night so we just had to stay there 24 hours later the Allies launched the biggest military invasion in history we had dinner and we came out at 11:00 and I suddenly started to hear a
• 104:00 - 104:30 hum and it got louder and louder and louder and I knew what it was and about 10 minutes later the sky was black with aircraft Towing gliders and my friend said I wonder what that is and I said I haven't the f
• 104:30 - 105:00 idea and about 3:00 I think it was suddenly there was a real rustle and very shortly the word spread that there had been German traffic saying that paratroopers were dropping all over the place so we knew we knew this was it
• 105:00 - 105:30 messages coming into station X were showing that the deception plans had worked Hitler's troops split between Normandy and Cal were unable to counter the onslaught over half the German forces had remained in the north awaiting the Phantom [Music] Army at station X those in the know about what was going on had been kept incarcerated for 48 hours even now nobody was taking any
• 105:30 - 106:00 chances we were staggered out feeling rather the worst for where but knew it was then general knowledge and went home and my lady I was bitted on said to me where the bloody hell have you been and I said well I've been working she said well you've missed all the fun and I said what fun and she said well it was the invasion it's been on the radio cuz no telis it's been on the radio I said oh lovely you know I went to
• 106:00 - 106:30 bed Tuesday 6th of June 1944 Invasion began 10:00 a.m. breakfast letter from Moren spent morning washing and ironing on at 4: life quite hectic feel somewhat anticlimax now the second round has begun H not a bad day
• 106:30 - 107:00 really it had not been a bad day for the code Breakers either they had accurately foretold the position of all but two of the 62 German divisions Enigma and fish messages were read throughout Operation Overlord the German High command The Troop in the battle had all unknowingly been speaking with the enemy in the months that followed
• 107:00 - 107:30 station X would continue to Chronicle the disintegration of the Third Reich right till the end of the war finally at the cost of millions of lives the second world war came to an end [Music]
• 107:30 - 108:00 [Music] when the final signal came through from derit surrendering it was in clear and not in code and that was extremely interesting because you felt the war was then really over when messages did begin to come through in clear uh then the so all the secrets of the war really were beginning to fade into history [Music]
• 108:00 - 108:30 already in the roll call of those who had brought AB Victory the name of station X would never be mentioned Britain's best kept secret was to stay a SE secret for the next 30 Years Churchill was hiding the fact that station X had cracked the Enigma codes
• 108:30 - 109:00 the German machines were now in use around the world and Britain wanted to go on eavesdropping Churchill even Spirited Away some of the technology to serve in the Cold War a few of the machines were going to be used to break Russian codes the technology invented at Bletchley Park was so Advanced that it could be used for years is to come as long as everything was Kept Secret even Colossus was to be
• 109:00 - 109:30 destroyed it was to be smashed up and [Music] buried that was a terrible mistake I was instructed to destroy all the records which I did I took all the drawings and pads all the information about philus on paper and
• 109:30 - 110:00 put it in the uh in the boil fire so it burn Tommy flowers returned to the post office and was forgotten in all the secrecy Colossus never received recognition as the world's first programmable computer instead the honors were to go to the
• 110:00 - 110:30 Americans the people dispersed some back to universities some into the fledgling computer industry some to the organization which was to succeed station X gchq the most famous alumnus of all the man whose inventiveness had been at the center of Bletchley Park's success died tragically in 1954 Alan churing took his own life after being persecuted as a
• 110:30 - 111:00 security risk because he was homosexual Alan Turing is one of the figures of the century the world of computing and now the world of the internet stems from alen turing's fundamental ideas there were other great men in uh blly Park but in the long long Hall of History I think turing's name will probably be the number one in terms of consequence for
• 111:00 - 111:30 mankind [Music] [Music]
• 111:30 - 112:00 station X had changed the face of the 20th century the first computers had been invented here the special relationship with America had been born here Signal's intelligence was created here and would become the way all wars would be fought in the future in the end though station X's greatest achievement will lie not in broken
• 112:00 - 112:30 ciphers but in the hundreds of thousands perhaps millions of lives it saved [Music]
• 112:30 - 113:00 historians generally agree that it shortened the war by 2 years ly Park didn't win the war that was won by people with guns and bullets and things out in the field but I think Bletchley Park is a great Exemplar particularly to the younger generation now of brains over bullets you can defeat an enemy
• 113:00 - 113:30 intellectually and that was shown here [Music]