WWII Bombe operator Ruth Bourne: I'd never heard of Enigma until after the war
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
She couldn’t even tell her mother what she worked on as the news would be “all round town within minutes”.
Up to July 25, 1939, the Poles had been breaking Enigma messages for over six and a half years ...
The Poles' gift of Enigma decryption to their Western allies, five weeks before the outbreak of World War II, came not a moment too soon .. Gordon Welchman, head of Bletchley Park's Hut 6...writes: "Hut 6 Ultra would never have gotten off the ground if we had not learned from the Poles, in the nick of time, the details both of the German military version of the commercial Enigma machine, and of the operating procedures that were in use."
..French and British military intelligence,...had been unable to make any headway against Enigma. This Polish intelligence-and-technology transfer would give the Allies an unprecedented advantage (Ultra) in their ultimately victorious prosecution of World War II.
Also the name bombe is explained:
The first machine was built by the Poles and was a hand operated multiple enigma machine. When a possible solution was reached a part would fall off the machine onto the floor with a loud noise. Hence the name "bombe".
There is a Polish movie about that story, Sekret Enigmy (1979), but I haven't been able to get hold of it yet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomba_(cryptography)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biuro_Szyfr%C3%B3w
Sekret Enigmy: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079878/
I did find places to purchase the DVD, which has English subtitles. [1][2]
I also found a very detailed plot summary, if you want to watch it without understanding the language. [3]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Secret-Tadeusz-Borowski/dp/B00...
[2] https://www.rarewarfilms.com/Secret%20of%20Enigma%20%201979%...
[3] http://www.vernonjohns.org/snuffy1186/enigma%20secret%201979...
There's also a part on how the secret on Enigma's breaking has been kept for decades after the war, supposedly because Enigma machines had been distributed to British colonies (and ex-colonies) and British intelligence wanted to be able to decrypt their communication.
The only problem I have is that the part regarding current encryption are a little outdated. But the rest of the content is good, I've found.
How do you figure? The book ends with public key cryptography, PGP, and quantum code. Those seem about as relevant as they were in 99.
In terms of specifics like PGP it would today make more sense to describe Signal which you can relate to an ordinary user by telling them that's how WhatsApp works.
Not to mention any units captured by the Soviets - GCHQ wanted to make sure any use of the units by them would be decryptable as well.
I am not surprised that people working on the Bombe did not know about the Enigma: this was a huge undertaking, with many sections. The Bletchley Park "Roll of Honour" lists all people known to have worked at Bletchley, or other locations on Signals Intelligence - there are well over 12,000 names on that roll.
It treats the actual facts of history as a worthless and inconvenient irrelevance. At every turn, reality is sacrificed, not even out of a necessary requirement to streamline the narrative, but because the truth fails to conform to the writer's prejudices, and the clichés of contemporary drama.
When presented with this dishonesty, writers usually issue some lame defence about reaching for a greater truth, but what they really mean is they lack the imagination or ability to distill the truth into a compelling story, or they simply don't care enough to try. So instead they feed their audiences warmed-over garbage, and win awards for it.
Turing wasn’t even depicted as gay in the movie (apart from a couple of random comments).
And incredibly, they didn’t cover any of the details of his death. Apparently he was obsessed with Snow White, hence the apparent suicide (or experimental mix-up) with a poisoned apple. How could you make a Hollywood movie about his life and not even touch on his connection with one of the key Hollywood milestones? It’s very strange.
Apart from that, it persistently gave the impression that Turing was a lone genius and minimized the contributions of everybody else. That’s a mis-service to everyone, including Turing, who comes across as a very poor team player.
And apart from all that, I simply didn’t think it was a very good movie, taken as pure entertainment. I know people who loved it, though, so I realize opinions vary. It’s hard to separate my opinion from my biases around the treatment of the subject matter.
The movie dances gingerly around the subject in a manner that’s the exact opposite of Turing himself, who seems to have been “out” to a dangerous degree (for the 40s and 50s). His friends warned him to be careful. None of that is in the movie.
Honestly though I see your point, because they did show the flashbacks to his childhood as some sort of vague attempt at character development. Might it have been best to just not discuss it altogether? You could argue the story is "dramatic" enough without it (winning a war!). To try to do both in 1.5 hours or whatever is asking a lot.
There is precedent for all of this...it can be done and done well. The obvious comparison is "A Beautiful Mind" which takes a similar sort of framing story (brilliant academic's personal and professional life). They pulled it off there IMO and just weren't able to balance both here.
Anyone wanting to know more should read "Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence"[1]
Which the movie script is alleged to be based upon.
> What if Alan Turing, founder of the modern computer age, escaped assassination by the secret service to become the lover of Beat author William Burroughs? What if they mutated into giant shapeshifting slugs, fled the FBI, raised Burroughs’s wife from the dead, and tweaked the H-bombs of Los Alamos? A wild beatnik adventure, compulsively readable, hysterically funny, with insane warps and twists—and a bad attitude throughout.
Hollywood is in the business of telling stories, not teaching history. If you get offended by lack of realism or accuracy, then don't watch Hollywood movies. I can't think of any Hollywood movie you couldn't criticize for twisting reality to further the narrative.
"Based on a true story" should always be taken with a large grain of salt and Hollywood itself have often satirized it - e.g. Fargo slapping a "Based on a true story" sign on a wholly fictional story, or American Hustle stating "Some of this actually happened!"
It doesnt have to be accurate but the script was just bad. It was basically the most typical misunderstood genius against the evil military industrial complex, with a woman lead who understands him.
Also a good adapted screenplay should adpot the most interesting unique parts, and not.just creat a generic new story with some of the same names.
I'm not disputing the movie is cliched oscar-bait. That is the kind of movies the oscars awards.
1. The Poles won a decisive victory in the Polish–Soviet War (1921) a war in which the Soviet's had a clear advantage because the Polish forces were able to intercept and read Soviet communication during the Battle of Warsaw [0]. This reinforced the value of such intelligence to the Polish government.
2. Poland understood it was only a matter of time before Germany or the Soviets/Russia attempted to occupy them again. They made the breaking of German and Soviet codes and ciphers a priority.
3. The Polish cryptographers understood the importance of their work. They had the shared national trauma of Germany and Russia's many attempts at exterminating Polish culture during over several hundreds years of foreign occupation. They were the best cryptanalysis in the world and they had the full support of the government and intelligence services and were dedicated to their mission
The wikipedia article on the Cipher Bureau "Biuro Szyfrów" [1] is worth reading.
>During this period, until the collapse of France in June 1940, ultimately 83 percent of the Enigma keys that were found, were solved at Bletchley Park, the remaining 17 percent at PC Bruno. Rejewski commented: "How could it be otherwise, when there were three of us [Polish cryptologists] and [there were] at least several hundred British cryptologists, since about 10,000 people worked in Bletchley... Besides, recovery of keys also depended on the amount of intercepted cipher material, and that amount was far greater on the British side than on the French side. Finally, in France (by contrast with the work in Poland) we ourselves not only sought for the daily keys, but after finding the key also read the messages.... One can only be surprised that the Poles had as many as 17 percent of the keys to their credit"
{0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War#Batt...
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zdzis%C5%82aw_Krygowski
Rejewski was aided by a French spy, though. It's not clear how far he would have gone without that. It's neat to try and play this game of "who was first" but I think ultimately you have to give credit to the team: it was Poland, England, and France, and they each had some contribution in the early days of Enigma. However, critical to note, this work had been going on before Turing got involved with GC&CS. The alliance began around 1931, and Turing got involved with GC&CS in 1938.
The entire signals problem was also not constrained at all to Enigma. Turing worked extensively on that problem, but there were other cipher systems, like Tunny, that Turing had a much more limited role in, which was mostly a crypotanalysis result from Tiltman (the "1+2 break") and engineering work by Flowers, to create an almost-entirely-electronic vacuum tube computer (which he personally funded because Bletchely thought it was impossible).
"Colossus" by Jack Copeland
"Between Silk and Cyanide" by Leo Marks
Germany was considered a threat (Piłsudski even proposed preventive invasion of Germany in 1935 to France and UK, which declined).
They also had some luck guessing the rotors arrangement in early military versions, and noticed some regularities caused by German operators being lazy (repeating common phrases etc). That gave them something to start with.
What the Germans did at the start was to increase the complexity (by how they wired it, etc), and the "only" problem the Poles had was that they had only 6 of their own Bombe, and they would need many more. They didn't have the resources to build them.
Edit: To my utter surprise I found there was a real Enigma machine in a tiny volunteer-run military museum in my home town.
As another Engima related example, the film U-571 decides that presenting the real British capture of a U boat and its Engima machine won't do at all, so it was the Americans what did it. How else to perpetuate the Hollywood idea they win all wars single handed? ;)
Most of the history books after Nigel West's in the late 1980s cover the major Polish role in the story properly with more details. Until West, and the coverage after his book, histories essentially presented the official GCHQ authorised history. They omitted huge details, and enormously significant events and people like Tommy Flowers and Colossus remained almost completely unknown, even in Britain. A couple of Colossuses were sent to GCHQ at the end of the war, everything else was smashed to pieces and officially "forgotten about".
Which is why Tommy Flowers and others received little to no acknowledgement of their role during their lifetimes. Which is a fine way to thank people who played such a huge part in winning the war, and creating the post-war world.
I just think we prefer to talk about the parts we played, just as any country would.
u110 in 41 provided a breakthrough in that it provided warning of 4 rotor naval Engima long before their introduction. It meant Bletchley had already started preparing for 4 rotor by the time it was introduced. It was the trigger for work on the 4 rotor bombes. There were other U boat captures.
American involvement is impossible to play down - convoys were critical to our survival, and there were tens of thousands of Americans based here for much of the war. I'm often just as disappointed when Hollywood plays fast and loose with mainly US operations like Guadalcanal or Midway. Even so Hollywood movies rarely attract the outcry U571 did at the time of release.
Gordon Welchman, another of the little known geniuses, moved to the US after the war to teach MIT's first computing course. He later worked on encryption for the US military. He wrote the Hut 6 Story in the 80s, the NSA didn't approve of his book, so he lost security clearance and was forbidden to talk about his own book or his involvement. There is a fascinating interview somewhere out there on the web, with some of his relatives, about him having a surveillance tail in his late seventies!
However... The Polish codebreakers are without doubt the first true heroes of the Enigma story during the war. Their genius, bravery and dedication opened up breaking enigma and saved a lot of time for the British codebreakers early on. As Welchman says, the Polish provided details of the machines that helped immensely in breaking into the military enigma. That said, the British were already working on it and had in parallel come up with some of the same methods as the Poles. The Turing-Welchman Bombe was designed from the ground up to attack the military enigma and used different principles than the Polish Bomba.
This is not to underplay the Polish role in all of this. They are without doubt in my mind as much the hero's in this as Welchman, Turing and the others at Bletchley. Without them the allies would have been way behind the game at the start of the war and therefore many additional lives would have been lost. The Polish codebreakers need more acknowledgement in this story. Glad to see the new Dermot Turing book out on this subject: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-Story-How-Enigma-Broken-ebook/...
Thanks, James
TL;DR The Germans also built their own cipher analysis machines and were able to decode a substantial amount of Allied message traffic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_code_breaking_in_World_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cipher_Department_of_the_High_... [3] http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/ETO/Ultra/SRH-009/SRH009-6.h...
Donitz was one exception. He suspected the allies were breaking enigma and hence the security of the naval enigma's was increased. I believe he advocated for more changes but was stopped or ran out of time.
After the war the allies sent in teams of intelligence operatives to assess how much the Germans knew about allied codebreaking and intelligence efforts. What they found was that the secrecy of Ultra worked and held throughout the war.
James
Here's a review of the book at Nature News and Comment [1]
But, she's gone through the OWL training a number of times, which helps prepare her for life.
I really want to share Diamond Age with her, but think she needs a couple years. Not because of the sex, but because of the abusive parents Nell has.
They captured a Uboat without the Germans finding out and kept the sailors hidden away in prison camps so the Nazis didn't know we'd captured an Enigma and codebooks for it. Another fascinating story about how all Allies came together to defeat the Axis.