WWII Bombe operator Ruth Bourne: I'd never heard of Enigma until long after the war

Good report!

We have to preserve what those people did, suffered through, know. Eyewitnesses are getting rare.

It makes me thankful that we in Western Europe have not been at each others' throats for so long. Let's hope we can keep that up.

As I understand it, the Germans received a couple of hints that codes might have been cracked. At one point they went back and interviewed the polish codebreakers they captured who had cracked Enigma before the war but the poles were able to convince the Germans that changes in procedures meant the same cracking shortcuts they used were no longer possible.

On more than one occasion I think they reviewed the information they had and convinced themselves that it was still uncrackable , rather than erring on the side of caution as the allies often did.

Did the Germans ever got clued up that their supposedly encrypted message system have been compromised?

Apparently their techies always believed that it was impossible.

Other people had their suspicions. That's why Doenitz - head of the Navy, including U-boats - changed the Naval Enigma in February 1942, from a 3-rotor to a 4-rotor machine, with the result that BP was unable to decrypt the crucial U-boat traffic for nearly a year afterwards.

Curiously, the Italians believed the Allies were reading Enigma traffic during the North African campaign. They found that a single scout plane spotting supply ships consistently in the Mediterranean Sea was too big a coincidence.

The German Navy was worried about decrypts after suffering from the UK successes in WWI. German naval cryptologists added a 4th wheel to Enigma and tightened up operating standards.

One of the hardest decisions was what to do with the decrypted information.

If they acted on all the information, the germans would have known the codes were cracked.

So they had to let some information go, allow some ships to be sunk etc to maintain the advantage in the long run.

You obviously didn't see the film about Alan Turing...

They (at least the code breakers) were aware that keeping the operation secret was priority #1, many soldiers died not because they couldn't be saved but because it would compromise the operation.

British wartime intelligence went to great lengths to keep the secret. The high command even (as mentioned above, and downvoted for some reason) sometimes refused to act on Ultra intel, because they felt it could blow the gaffe.

There were some close calls, and the Germans must have had suspicions from time to time, but never to the point of acting on them, at least not concertedly and effectively.

Heck, if they'd just stopped saying "Heil Hitler" in every other message, that alone would have made the job significantly harder.

well,

I've heard a rumour that, as the newly formed DDR continued to use the Enigma rotor system, it was in the best interests of British Intelligence NOT to 'let on' that they knew how to read it!

can anyone verify this?

Did the Germans ever got clued up that their supposedly encrypted message system have been compromised?

Apparently not...

Re: Standard German and Dialects?

I think I read somewhere that elements of "personalisation" in the source messages did come into it. Each operator had their own keying style, so the interceptors knew who it came from, and certain operators would have little quirks in their message content.

Real needle-in-a-haystack stuff though, nevermind the complexity of the encyphering of the message.

I've read a few books and watched a few documentaries about this subject over the years, so in theory I kind of understand the principles....but of you gave me an Enigma-encoded message I honestly wouldn't know where to start. Very much hats off to everyone involved at Bletchley Park.

Re: Standard German and Dialects?

Would there have been other messages -- banter between operators -- in dialect or vernacular German?

I know that as well as looking for "Heil Hitler", details of the weather, and similar stuff - one look-out post sent "Nothing to report" day after day, using different keys, a godsend for the codebreakers - some of the operators used to talk about their girlfriends. So the codebreakers would look for the girlfriend's name - and I'm sure that some of these messages would certainly have used the vernacular!

Re: Standard German and Dialects?

I remember seeing one documentary, and it mentioned that they noticed that one encrypted message had no "L"s in it. As the machine always changed the letters type in, they came to the conclusion that the message sent was something like -

LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

- or similar

To pretty much all of the people that did those things, they were just doing their job.

At the end of the day, they didn't have much choice in the matter, if they didn't do it then there was a good chance the country would have been invaded, and besides, if you're called up then your only choice is doing the work or going to jail (and having to do worse work).

>She never really got into detail about what she did and whose codes she worked on, <

The IEEE published memories from a Washington WAVE ('we joined the navy to see the world, but all we saw was DC'). She reported that after a strict security introduction, another man got up. They expected the good cop after the bad cop. Instead they got the worse cop: "DON'T EXPECT THAT YOU WILL BE TREATED ANY DIFFERENTLY BECAUSE YOU ARE WOMEN. IF YOU TALK ABOUT YOUR WORK, YOU WILL BE SHOT."

These stories from people who were there are now, sadly, almost impossible to get.

So true, I found out just last year after he had died that my father-in-law was one of the intercept operators stationed just outside of Loughborough in the midlands.

Real shame as I would have liked to know more.

"Second, my late mum did this in Washington as a WAVE. She never really got into detail about what she did and whose codes she worked on, and we didn't think to grill her, but she could recite the alphabet backwards and always did the crossword in the morning with her coffee."

If you've not yet seen it, you might enjoy both series (seasons) of The Bletchly Circle, a sort of detective story where the heroines are Bletchly almumin using their skills to solve the case, the second series being set when two of them follow a lead to the US and meet one of their opposite numbers who they only knew through a code name and telegraph messages.

It's not really directly related to this story of course, but shows a little of how women who were important and doing vital war work were often "pushed back into the kitchen" after it was over.

Women code breakers in the U.S. during the Cold War

Women in code breaking efforts during the Cold War

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/women-code-breakers-unmasked-soviet-spies-180970034/?no-ist

Re: Cribs from touch

There are actually two types of "personalization." The first has been mentioned a couple of times, the habits of certain individuals to compose messages the same way. I especially enjoyed the "Nothing to report" standard message as being a good crib.

The other type of personalization was the Morse code sending itself. (Being an old ham radio operator, I speak from experience.) Every Morse code operator has his, or her, own rhythm. The weight (length) of the dots and dashes vary from person to person. With practice the interceptor learns to recognize the rhythm, sometimes called "the fist," of certain operators. Joe's code sending definitely sounds different than Mike's, etc. Then, couple Joe as the guy who always sent Jim's messages, and you have valuable meta data on beginning to decode messages.

Re: Cribs from touch

There was also the method of generating cribs which was known as "gardening".

BP would get the RAF to drop ("sow") mines into the sea at a specific location. Later, they would "reap" the benefits by looking for reports which contained the word for "mines" and specified the location.

Re: Cribs from touch

I hadn't realised until recently that the Soviets tried to get cribs on an industrial scale in the 1940s. Guy Burgess was one of the Cambridge spies and at the time was working at the BBC. He lobbied to be given access to non-secret Foreign Office cables, in order for the BBC to be able to better report foreign news. The real reason the KGB wanted this info was to have the actual clear content of enciphered FCO cables, that they could then use as a crib so they could read everything in that cypher. Of course more important messages might be using a different code, but the more you can read of the other guy's messages the better.

At the Beeb he wasn't getting much info. Apart from making good contacts (he was the original producer of the Week in Westminster on Radio 4 - that's been going ever since) - so he was desperate for more. Sadly the Foreign Office gave him a job, before the Beeb got round to sacking him for being drunk too often.