Quiet naval hero who rescued Enigma machine dies aged 95 | Hacker News Reader

Quiet naval hero who rescued Enigma machine dies aged 95

royalnavy.mod.uk

160 pointsCarolineW44 comments

FWIW, there is another captured german Uboat at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, U505, where they also captured an Enigma machine. This mission was also secret, and this was actually captured by American sailors, not british ones.

http://www.msichicago.org/whats-here/exhibits/u-505/

The tours are absolutely fascinating. Anyone visiting Chicago who is a history buff should check it out.

Actually they captured two. I posted about this in this thread earlier only to find my comment at -2. Not sure why the sudden downvotes, especially considering I posted about the U505 before you did. Regardless, here is the link:

http://www.msichicago.org/whats-here/exhibits/u-505/the-exhi...

Yes, MSI has one of the Enigmas on-premises and can be viewed if you pay for the tour (U505 tour is not part of standard admissions and sells out everyday). I'm something of an MSI junkie and can't recommend this enough. Its an incredibly under-appreciated museum. If it was in LA or NYC it would probably be world famous. Being 25 minutes south of Chicago's downtown seems to have hurt its prestige. Its too far for tourists to go without a car unless they really want to hoof it via public trans, which takes almost an hour from downtown.

Interestingly enough, its on the site and housed in a building (The Palace of Fine Arts) built for Chicago's infamous Columbian World's Fair from 1893 where guys like Edison, General Electric, Tesla, Westinghouse, and others showed off the new technology of various electrical innovations (neon light, long distance power transmission, powerful electric motors, etc) for home and industry.

This is the location of the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. This was one of my favorite family vacation destinations as a child (around 1960).

The 1893 Columbian World's Fair is written about in the fascinating book by Erik Larson, Devil in the White City.

I grew up in Chicago, and I must second this. The tour is amazing.

The U505 initially was outside the museum, but a few years ago they moved it into its own beautifully done concrete hall [1]. I highly recommend it if you're in town and have the time.

[1] http://www.msichicago.org/fileadmin/Exhibits/permanent/u505/...

Wow this looks great, I'd love to visit if I came to Chicago some time. Here in Liverpool we have a U-Boat but it's cut into cross sections with transparent panels so that you can see inside. I think actually being inside the thing would give you a better idea of the atmosphere and what it would have been like.

http://www.u-boatstory.co.uk/

It is a shame Hollywood has a tendency to portray the successes of the Allies in general as being conducted purely by American citizens.

Of course it doesn't help that the other nations don't actively promote their forces in the same manner the Americans do - perhaps good, perhaps bad.

There are some splendid UK films about the Battle of the Atlantic - my favourite being The Cruel Sea.

NB The author of the novel on which the The Cruel Sea is based, Nicholas Monsarrat, wrote a moving account of his own service - Three Corvettes - which is one of the few books that has reduced me to tears. Funnily enough I happened to read the book while flying over the North Atlantic...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Monsarrat

> NB The author of the novel on which the The Cruel Sea is based, Nicholas Monsarrat, wrote a moving account of his own service - Three Corvettes - which is one of the few books that has reduced me to tears. Funnily enough I happened to read the book while flying over the North Atlantic...

Alistair MacLean's HMS Ulysses is another of those. I read it as a teenager and a couple of scenes are as sharp in my mind as the day I read it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Ulysses_(novel)

That is a fantastic book indeed. It's on the Combat Studies Institute reading list, and rightly so.

The serie Foyle's War has excellent details about the impact of the war on normal citizens of southeast UK. I grew up in Normandie, on the other side of the channel, and heard the same stories from my grand-parents.

That narrative worked 50 years ago but not anymore.

While he was still alive, a crew member of U505 actually did the tours. Talk about surreal...

the story of how they got the craft indoors is pretty neat too.

"The story of the seizure of the machine by Balme and his shipmates was kept secret until the mid-1970s". I've always been intrigued by this fact. Does anyone know why this was kept a secret for so long?

Interestingly from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine#History

"An estimated 100,000 Enigma machines were constructed. After the end of World War II, the Allies sold captured Enigma machines, still widely considered secure, to developing countries".

I'm sure they were quite happy to sell Enigma and also decrypt their communications for nearly another 30 years.

Another interesting thing to note is that the Soviets knew fine well that the UK could decrypt German codes from their spies at Bletchley Park.

If the Enigma machines were operated properly, they could never be broken. Breaking them were a result of German lack of discipline and irresponsibility, not machine's weakness (maybe a simple inscription on the cover of machine in the bold letters would help though, machine designers just expected too much from their enlisted, barely literate operators).

Not never. One of the "features" of the Enigma was that a plaintext letter could never be encrypted to itself. An 'A' going in could come out as any other letter, except 'A'. German information security policies were generally pretty good. There were lapses, of course, and some of these were used to form cribs for a known plaintext attack on encrypted messages. But Enigma was/is not invulnerable.

People found a couple encrypted Enigma messages after World War II. Here is a note from a group of people using modern computers and brute force to decrypt them:

http://www.enigmaathome.net/forum_thread.php?id=318

yes of course, by 'never' i mean 'not in the WWII timeframe'.

Just as during WWII, during WWI, the British had a very sophisticated interception and decryption program[1]. Its capabilities were also kept secret for long after the war and the Germans remained largely ignorant of how thoroughly their codes had been broken. I think if the work during WWI had been revealed earlier, the Germans would have been more careful and would have avoided repeating some of the mistakes of WWI. It was shown to be a wise policy after WWI, so I'm not surprised that they continued it after WWII, especially with the start of the Cold War.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_40

I can't speak about the relative sophistication of British cryptanalysis during WWI, but Bletchley owed much of its sophistication to the Poles. The Polish Cipher Bureau was responsible for bringing mathematical and computational techniques into cryptanalysis while the French and the British were still largely employing linguistic analysis. Few realize that the Enigma was actually broken and reverse engineered by the Cipher Bureau before two new rotors were added by the Germans less than a year before the War, or that Turing's bombe was developed from Rejewski's bomba.

The Poles certainly got the ball rolling (see http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/virtualbp/poles/poles.htm), but the organization at Bletchley Park took decryption and analysis of Enigma traffic to an industrial scale. By the end of war Bletchley employed around 10,000 people. See Alan Turing's and Gordon Welchman's biographies for more details.

Many countries used Enigma and its derivatives after the war; the UK and US did not want those countries to know they could read their messages.

This is true.

That sounds like the 30 year rule in action. At the time it was done, it would have been extremely secret, and secrecy was not abandoned simply because the war was over.

Bletchley was kept secret for even longer.

England keeps secrets for a long time. GCHQ have only just recently released stuff that Turing wrote.

Yeah, they developed the equivalent of RSA in 1973 but only declassified it in 1997 so no-one knew about it and the RSA patent held.

Amazing bravery. How many lives did his action save? This is the kind of person that makes you proud to be British. Selfless.

Fun fact, two M4 Enigmas were retrieved from the U-505 in June 1944. This sub can be toured at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

http://www.msichicago.org/whats-here/exhibits/u-505/the-exhi...

So did Allen Long get anything?

"Telegraphist Allen Long quickly located the coding device which looked like a typewriter. Long “pressed the keys and. finding results peculiar, sent it up the hatch”."

Yep - he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal which was the other ranks version of the Distinguished Service Cross which Lt Cdr Balme was awarded.

The Daily Telegraph usually does good obituaries: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/12078997/Lieutena...

I avoided watching "U571" because of the fictionalization. Should I go back and watch it?

I don't know if you should watch it...

But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-571_(film)#Historical_events : "David Balme, the British naval officer who led the boarding party aboard U-110, called U-571, "a great film"[9] and said that the film would not have been financially viable without being "Americanised"."

And there's a bit more of his opinion and recollections in a BBC article from when the film was released: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/774427.stm

If you want a fictional account of an American obtaining crypto material from a sinking U-boat I'd recommend the one included in Cryptonomicon....

Do you like WWII based movies? It's decent enough.

The story of the Enigma is quite complex. But by 1941 the Allies knew how the machine worked (there were commercial Enigmas sold before the war). The Naval Enigma was somewhat more secure (more rotors to choose from) and obtaining the daily setting book would be the most important thing, not the machine itself.

Polish mathematicians broke the early Enigma in the late 1930s (http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/virtualbp/poles/poles.htm), they passed their information to the British in 1939 and that was used as a starting point of the work at Blechley Park.

If you are interested in the details, check out the book "The Hut 6 Story" by Gordon Welchman. He was a peer of Turing who worked on the Army and Air Force Enigma, while Turing worked on the Naval version.

Of course Turing's biography by Andrew Hodges also has a lot of details how the Engima was broken.

I was always wondering if Neal Stephensons "Cryptonomicon" is historically accurate when he writes about the enigma and its background.

In an interview in the BBC Special about Bletchley Park 'The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs' David Balme is interviewed and the focus is on the bigram tables that he captured intact. There is no mention of actually capturing an Enigma machine. This is not to say that one wasn't included in the capture of U110.

Rather, I get the sense that the capture of the bigram tables was a Big Thing, possibly more important than the acquisition of a physical Enigma in the breaking of the Naval Enigma code, as Turing had engineered much of the machine conceptually.

N.B. Would post the link to the BBC special - it's part 2 of 4, and quite interesting - but I don't have a strong enough sense of what is netiquette in the posting of links yet.

Thanks, Lt. Balme.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Codebreakers-Comprehensive-Communi...

A good read about the crypto behind the Enigmia and other encryption approaches. A fun read.

"The Codebreakers" cited above, is a massive history of cryptography. The same author, David Kahn, has written a book focusing on the Enigma called "Seizing the Enigma".

http://www.amazon.com/Seizing-Enigma-German-U-Boats-1939-194...

Thanks, I'll have to read that one.

A sad loss, so many people made so many silent sacrifices for Engima.

Worth mentioning the other pretty unsung sacrifices made by crew members of HMS Petard; which can be read in the book "Fighting Destroyer".

They should at least posthumously bump his DSC to something higher.

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