Thesis
How did the Enigma code change history and how did it impact the outcome of WW2?
The breaking of the Enigma code changed history by speeding up the conclusion of the war by two years therefore saving countless lives.
I picked the Enigma for my topic because I love coding and WW2 history. They made a movie about the enigma and how the British broke the code to find what the Nazis secret messages were to other German soldiers during the war. The movie was called The Imitation Game explaining how they broke the code. The enigma also is extradentary because my great, great grandfather was a British soldier during WW2 and he used to tell his son about the stories of the enigma which then was passed down towards my family and it was amazing to hear that my great, grandfather knew about it.
The most useful source I used was brilliant.org/Enigma Machine. This website shows all the codes during the wars through 1939-1945. The website also gives me a brief explanation how they built the coding machine and how it was used to send messages. This website has helped me tremendously during times when I couldn’t figure anything out with the Enigma. The website has videos of the Germans using the Enigma and building it.
For my project I chose website because I can put an abundance of information in one area and can organize each page with different parts about the Enigma. I can input one page about how it was constructed and coded with videos to describe it. The other page could have the Enigma picture and how it was solved and how Alan Turning, and his team cracked the code of figuring out what the messages said. I will provide videos on the enigma during WW2.
My project relates to the 2019 History Fair by theme communication because they would use a coding like language to speak to each other across the world. The Enigma code made the Germans superior during WW2 and gave an advantage over the rest of the world including the British, United States, and its Allies. The British were able to beat the Germans at their cipher games, and in the process shorten the war as much as 2 years. During the war the Germans changed the code daily and that forced the code breakers to fight back swiftly. What that meant was big significate devices like what was known as Bombe, which broke the Enigma code and Colossus, a machine that was purposely built to take on the daily key changes made by the Germans high command and solve the codes they sent using the machine called the Lorenz.
The German Enigma Machine
An Enigma machine is a famous encryption machine used by the Germans during WWII to transmit coded messages. An Enigma machine allows for billions and billions of ways to encode a message, making it incredibly difficult for other nations to crack German codes during the war — for a time the code seemed unbreakable.
How it Works
When a plaintext letter was typed on the keyboard, an electric current would pass through the different scrambling elements of the machine and light up a ciphertext letter on the "lamp board". What made the Enigma machine so special was the fact that every time a letter was pressed, the movable parts of the machine would change position so that the next time the same letter was pressed, it would most likely be enciphered as something different. This meant that it wasn't possible to use traditional methods to try and crack the notorious cipher.
To make things even more difficult, different parts of the machine could be set up in different ways, with each setting producing a unique stream of enciphered letters. Unless you knew the exact settings of the machine, you couldn't decipher the messages.
Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park was a converted private house which was taken over by the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6 to you and me) in 1938. There was a small code-breaking organization between the wars called the Government Code & Cypher School, which was part of MI6, and they moved in just before the war began. In the months before then, GC&CS had been out recruiting extra staff to put on their ‘emergency list’—effectively a reserve list. On the list were 24 academics from Cambridge and 13 from Oxford, and a handful of others, but it gives you an idea of the sort of people they thought would be useful. Alan Turing was one of these academics: he was recruited in 1938 and sent on a training course to learn about codes (and the Enigma machine) early in 1939.
Alan Turing
Alan Turing was a brilliant mathmatician.
Born in London in 1912, he studied at both Cambridge and Princeton universities. He was already working part-time for the British Government’s Code and Cypher School before the Second World War broke out. In 1939, Turing took up a full-time role at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire – where top secret work was carried out to decipher the military codes used by Germany and its allies.
The main focus of Turing’s work at Bletchley was in cracking the ‘Enigma’ code. The Enigma was a type of enciphering machine used by the German armed forces to send messages securely. Although Polish mathematicians had worked out how to read Enigma messages and had shared this information with the British, the Germans increased its security at the outbreak of war by changing the cipher system daily. This made the task of understanding the code even more difficult.
Turing played a key role in this, inventing – along with fellow code-breaker Gordon Welchman – a machine known as the Bombe. This device helped to significantly reduce the work of the code-breakers. From mid-1940, German Air Force signals were being read at Bletchley and the intelligence gained from them was helping the war effort.
The Bombe Machine
In March 1940, Turing's first Bombe, a code-breaking machine, was installed at Bletchley Park; improvements suggested by British mathematician Gordon Welchman were incorporated by August. This complex machine consisted of approximately 100 rotating drums, 10 miles of wire, and about 1 million soldered connections.
The standard services Enigma contained a set of three rotors, each of which could be set in any of 26 positions. The bombe worked by trying each possible rotor position and applying a certain test.
The test would eliminate most of the 26×26×26=17576 positions of all three rotors, and the few remaining settings could be examined by hand. However, in order to use a bombe, a cryptanalyst first had to produce a so-called crib — a section of the ciphertext where he knew (or could guess) the corresponding plaintext.
At its peak this operation enabled some 4000 messages to be broken every day and provided the Allies with unprecedented levels of intelligence about the intentions of the enemy.
Impact on World War II
Once the Enigma machine was cracked, 211 Bombe machines were built and ran around the clock. They were stationed at different locations across Britain, in order to reduce the threat of bombings wiping out these highly complex and expensive pieces of kit.
Because of a shortage of captured Enigma machines, British cipher machines called Typex were converted into working Enigma machines. Fully deciphered messages were then translated from German to English before being passed on to British intelligence.
At its peak, the Bombe was able to help crack 3,000 German messages per day. By the end of the war that amounted to 2.5 million messages, many of which gave the Allies vital information about German positions and strategy.
It’s estimated that this knowledge played such important roles in key battles that the work of the Bombe and the team at Bletchley Park shortened the war by two years.
Though it's impossible to quantify the exact impact of Turing's contributions, some military historians estimate that the war would have continued for at least another two years, and two million more lives would have been lost.
The Bombe was especially crucial to the Allies' victory in what Winston Churchill called the Battle of the Atlantic, in which German U-boats laid siege to Allied naval forces in an effort to cut off supply lines to Great Britain. Without the ability to break German codes to determine the locations of U-boats, the Allies may very well have lost the Battle of the Atlantic, and quite possibly the war.
Conclusion
My website about the Enigma machine which was made by the Germans in 1919 and used during WW2 for communication to other troops during battle. The Enigma machine was very undetected during that time. The mechanics that were in the machine were very complicated and difficult to solve. Until a man named Alan Turing solved the Enigma in 1943. It took Alan Turing only two weeks with his team to cipher the Machine. By solving this machine, he saved over 14 million lives and resulting in the Allies winning the war over the Germans.
Pics
- All
- The Allies
- The Germans
Primary Sources
Articles
“What Von Neumann Knew of Turing in 1937-39,” June 1, 1937.https://www.turing.org.uk/sources/vonneumann.html This talks about how Alan Turning got into Princeton University and how his mathematical ideas were extraordinary and unlike anyone has ever seen. Turning found a solution for the grouping. Von Neumann knows he is incredibly special in the work he does.“Report on Enigma Decipherment, 1 November 1939.” Enigma report, November 1939, November 1, 1939. https://www.turing.org.uk/sources/nov39.html This talks about how allies were solving alongside with Alan Turning to code break The Naval Enigma Machine. They would divide the Enigma into two separate parts. They would solve 1 message a day, if they solve 1 message a day so they can use the message to find out other things on how it can be used.
Document Alan Turing's Dayton Report, 1942. (1942, February). Retrieved February 04, 2021, from https://www.turing.org.uk/sources/dayton123.html This report showed how Turing monitoring the production of his own machine from the USA. This gave me better understanding of his thoughts on his own machine.
Alan Turing's report from Washington, 1942. (1942, November 28). Retrieved October 04, 2004, from https://www.turing.org.uk/sources/washington.html This report by Turing himself shows his reaction to the cryptologic machinery developed in the US available for use. Many people were happy that he solved an extremely hard puzzle.
Alan Turing's DELILAH Report, 1944. (1944, June 6). Retrieved February 04, 2021, from https://www.turing.org.uk/sources/delilah.html This report shows how one time pad subtractor cipher was cipher that could be used to solve the Enigma in a way which no one could ever see coming. That would predict the balance of code breaking
Computers and minds, Manchester 1949. (1949, October 27). Retrieved February 04, 2021, from https://www.turing.org.uk/sources/wmays1.html Turing emphasizes the importance of the universal machine, capable of turning itself into any other machine. This document helps me understand what it means to save lives.
Operation ruthless, October 1940. (1940, October). Retrieved February 04, 2021, from https://www.turing.org.uk/sources/ruthless.html Turing was unable to make effective use of his methods for deciphering naval Enigma. These methods required (i) enough familiarity with the traffic for cribs to be guessed and (ii) some knowledge of the bigram table used for the indicator system.
Conference on information Theory, London 1950. (1950, September 26). Retrieved February 04, 2021, from https://www.turing.org.uk/sources/info50turing.html This document shows how Turing on how Machine v Brain and how him and the machine could solve the enigma in a way that could benefit the lives of many people across the world.
Book -- YILDIZELİ, F. B. (2018). The expansion of the British Empire in the Middle east after the Ottoman heritage (1882-1923)". History Studies International Journal of History, 10(6), 215-224. doi:10.9737/hist.2018.644
This shows how development of Enigma, the Polish "bomba,' and its evolution into the Turing-Welchman "bombe" together with the Heath Robinson and Colossus machines, which the British used to decipher the Lorenz SZ42 teleprinter codes.
Secondary Sources
Baker, J. (2018, September 03). Forgotten heroes of the Enigma story. Retrieved December 16, 2020, from https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06149-y> This talks about the people who used the Enigma Machine. The source is reliable because it was written by a respected historian. This helped, it explains to me how it was used and the people who used it.Paperback. (n.d.). Retrieved December 17, 2020, from https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691164724/alan-turing-the-enigma This reflects on how Alan Turning grew up and how he became a savior to world when he figured out how to solve the Enigma Machine. The source is reliable because it goes to tell you that this man became an expert at solving problems. This article explains to me how Alan Turing saved the allies from the Nazis during WW2.
Hern, A. (2014, November 14). How did the Enigma machine work? Retrieved December 17, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/14/how-did-enigma-machine-work-imitation-game This talks about how the Enigma Machine was used it was like a typewriter but only more complicated and coding it had encrypted output and boarding lights that when you would type the message it was morse code. The source is reliable because it was explaining on how to use it. This helped because it shows how it was built with an encrypted message system.
History - Enigma (pictures, video, facts & news). (n.d.). Retrieved December 17, 2020, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/topics/enigma This talks about Enigma worked and why it was so difficult. The source is reliable It gave me a basic understanding on the importance of Turing’s machine to decrypt the Enigma code. This helped because it allowed people if they ever wanted to decrypt An Enigma Machine, they could.
The Turing Digital Archive. (n.d.). Retrieved December 17, 2020, from http://www.turingarchive.org/h This talks about the archives of Alan Turing and his notes and photographs. The source is reliable because it explains to me what Alan Turning looks like and where he is from and his friends. This helped the new world because they got a chance to understand who the man of WW2 that saved lives.
(n.d.). Retrieved December 17, 2020, from https://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/bombe/ This talks about the Bombe it was used to help the German Enigma codes during WW2. The source helped me understand the improved efficiency of Turing’s Bombe and work. This gain information on Enigma that allowed it to help against the Enigma Machine.
Copeland, B. J. (2014). Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This talks about Copeland’s book, this allowed me to understand the motivation and inspiration of Turing’s work. This source helped me because it shows that Alan Turning never gave up on himself or others. This helped because it changed a balance in history.
Teuscher, C. (2011). Alan Turing: Life and legacy of a great thinker. Berlin: Springer. This talks about a plethora of information regarding Turing’s impact in various fields. This source shows how basics of his impact in computer science, artificial intelligence, and computing through his works. This helped understand that this man is history.
Sebag-Montefiore, H. (2007). Enigma: The battle for the code. New York: Barnes & Noble. This talks about how they would use the works of secret agents and spies who worked to retrieve copies of Enigma and the codebooks. The source explains how Alan Turning need that information to crack the code. This helps it explains you always need sources from inside people to help you.
Turing, S. (2015). Alan M. Turing. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. This talks about his childhood and understanding his family relationships. This source explains the skill that Turing had at arguing his opinion on intelligent machinery and teaching and leading others in the field. This helped because this allowed be to understand what he did to become what he is now, a masterpiece.
Winder, D. (2020, July 21). The Rarest of WWII Nazi Enigma Encryption Machines Just Sold For $440,000. Retrieved January 30, 2021, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2020/07/21/the-rarest-of-wwii-nazi-enigma-encryption-machines-just-sold-for-440000-christies-auction-technology/?sh=4481af971fe8 This Talks about how rare The Enigma Machine is present day and the cost. There were less than 100 to exist, The Enigma was sold for a very high price for $800,000 in 2019 for a world record for the most expensive Enigma Machine to be sold at an auction.
Divers discover Nazi WW2 enigma machine in Baltic Sea. (2020, December 03). Retrieved January 30, 2021, from https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-war-enigma/divers-discover-nazi-ww2-enigma-machine-in-baltic-sea-idUSKBN28D25F This talks about how after the war the Nazi needed to get rid of information including the Enigma even if they were underwater. Present day German divers found an Enigma Machine at the bottom of the Baltic sea. It was found because during WW2 the U-Boots threw off The Enigma Machine into the sea after the war so Americans couldn’t find it.