Wartime Wednesday: Collaborative Code Breaking

Wartime Wednesday: Collaborative Code Breaking

With the 75^th anniversaries of WWII occurring over the last several years, Hollywood has produced multiple movies highlighting everything from efforts on the U.S. home front (“Hidden Figures”) to battles (“Dunkirk”) and key leaders (“Darkest Hour”). Some of the films are better than others, but all have served to bring history to the general public, and to many who might never explore the past.

Disappointingly, none of the movies and few of the books I’ve read talk about collaborative efforts made among the Allied forces. But without the passing of information and discoveries to each other, progress would not have been achieved as quickly and perhaps even hindered.

One area that seems to be skewed is code breaking. Most people are familiar with Bletchley Park and the strides the British made in breaking the Enigma code from this location in the English countryside. From the outside, it appears the British succeeded single-handedly, but as with nearly every aspect of the war, they had help.

Recently, I was surprised to find out that Polish cryptanalysts were working on codebreaking long before the Germans overran their country. In fact, they had managed to construct an Enigma machine complete with internal wiring. Polish mathematicians and cryptologists hosted a meeting in a bunker-like building in Pyry, Poland (outside of Warsaw) with French and British colleagues. Turns out the Poles’ cipher bureau was running out of money, and they realized cooperation was the only way to complete the project.

Plans made to work together were cut short with the German invasion of Poland. Members of the cipher bureau escaped into Romania where they went to the French embassy in Bucharest. Given travel visas, they made their way to France where they would ultimately be caught in the German occupation.

Unable to do much from Vichy France, these Polish scientists waited out the war, but Bletchley certainly benefited from their early work.

 

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Mystery Monday: The Mystery of Codebreaking

Some scholars differentiate between codes and ciphers, with codes requiring a code book and ciphers using mathematical algorithms. For the purposes of this blog I will be lumping them together into the single concept of secret messages.

Unfortunately mankind has been fighting each other since the beginning of time, and the use of codes has been an integral part of war from early on. One website spoke of the “Caesar Code,” named because Julius Caesar used it himself. It is a fairly easy code to break, but is the basis for many more complex codes. Other codes are: public key, transposition, scytale, steganography, book cipher, and playfair cipher.

Code breaking is much more difficult than code writing. According to Charles Latham, an instructor stationed in Arlington, VA during WWII who taught U.S. Army correspondence courses, there were “two courses in cryptology and four in cryptanalysis, each with ten lessons. In the advanced courses, one lesson could take a couple of months.” He went on to say “solving was a process of trial and error, and when a message finally began to ‘break,’ it gave you a real sense of accomplishment.”

Britain’s central site for code breaking during the war was located at Bletchley Park, located in Buckinghamshire about fifty miles outside of London. The mansion sits on nearly sixty acres and by the end of the war the property held nearly two dozen wooden huts and eight brick “blocks.” U.S. code breaking did not seem to be centralized as there were locations around the country.

There have been numerous books and movies about code breaking during WWII, the most recent being The Imitation Game which is about Alan Turing. As important as Mr. Turing’s accomplishments were, it is equally important to remember the number of unheralded, unnamed staff who worked at Bletchley Park, and other similar locations during the war.