Enigma - World War Two
World War Two, Second World War, W.W.II
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ENIGMA, code name for the cipher machine, developed from a design patented by a Dutchman, H. A. Koch, in 1919 from which ULTRA intelligence was derived. Dr Arthur Scherbius, a Berlin engineer, marketed it in 1923; by 1929 he had been bought out by the German Army and Navy, which used different versions of it. So, in turn, did the Luftwaffe, the HISS, the Abwehr, and the Reichsbahn (German state railways). The machine seemed to the Germans wholly unbreakable: even in its simplest form, for every letter it sent there were hundreds of millions of possible solutions. They forgot how few letters there are in the alphabet; they forgot that no letter could stand for itself; and they forgot that the machine had no number-keys, so that figures had to be spelled out. These gave their potential opponents toe-holds enough. The Poles were reading some ENIGMA tragic as early as 1932, the French in 1938, the British in 1940; with startling results. Courtesy of The Oxford Companion to World War II |
