https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/enigma-key-broken
Saturday, November 30, 2019
The Enigma Code
The Enigma Code was a code used by the Germans in WWII to secretly transmit messages without fear of the allies intercepting the messages and understanding them. The Code was made by a machine called the Enigma Machine, which was invented by Hugo Koch in 1919. The Enigma Machine visually resembled a typewriter and was considered unbreakable by the Germans. The first person to successfully decipher the Enigma code was a Polish mathematician named Marian Rejewski in the early 1930s. When the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, the polish transferred their code breaking progress to the British. Once the British got their hands on this progress, a code breaking group called "Ultra" under the lead of Alan M. Turning was created with the intent of deciphering Enigma. This group was successful in their code breaking, which helped the allies achieve victory in not only Europe, but also in the pacific because the Japanese used Enigma as well as the Germans.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Enigma-German-code-device
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/enigma-key-broken
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/enigma-key-broken
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This post was very interesting and well written! I would guess that the Germans began using Enigma Code in World War II as a precaution after what happened in World War I. The Zimmerman Telegram was sent to Mexico from Germany in 1917 proposing a military alliance between the two countries, and Germany promised to help Mexico gain back territory they had lost to the US. However, the telegram was intercepted and deciphered by the British, and angered the US. Based on this history, I think it's safe to say that the Germans didn't want a repeat of WWI, so they developed the Enigma Code to prevent that from happening. However, since Poland and Britain were eventually able to decipher it anyway, it still didn't work out too well in the end for Germany.
ReplyDeleteSource: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/zimmermann-telegram-published-in-united-states
It's really interesting how the Germans built complex encrypting machines, and yet the U.S. simply recruited bilingual Navajo speakers to serve in their standard communications units called the Code Talkers. These Code Talkers memorized a special code so that even when the Japanese kidnapped Navajos, the chance of them being a Code Talker and knowing the special code was low. They provided a secure and error-free line of communication. Unlike the Germans, the Code Talkers created an unbreakable code which played a significant role in the U.S. victory.
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https://americanindian.si.edu/education/codetalkers/html/chapter4.html
I think it's really fascinating how the Axis powers created these machines to create codes and shared the codes. The machine works by scrambling the alphabet (26 letters) and correlating it to a different letter through the machine. A military as well as commercial Enigma was developed by the Germans. Once the British cracked Enigma and learned its principals, they actually used the technology to go on to create their own, which the German military considered unsolvable. The British called theirs Typex. The fascination with these codes has continued well into our lifetime, with lots of movies being made about the men and women who dedicated their lives to cracking these codes. One I liked in particular was the Imitation game which was made in 2014. It follows the lives of the team that cracked Enigma, specifically the life of Alan Turning.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.imdb.com/title/tt2084970/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/14/how-did-enigma-machine-work-imitation-game
http://jproc.ca/crypto/typex.html
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-alan-turing-cracked-the-enigma-code