Bletchley Park Codebreakers

[W4HAY]

BLETCHLEY PARK, England — During World War II, the best brains in Britain cracked Germany's encrypted secrets but never broke their own code of silence...

..."Do you know what Churchill called us?" said Jean Valentine, 84, her blue eyes flashing. "He called us 'the geese that laid the golden eggs but never cackled.'"

..."The great thing is that the Germans never realized we'd broken their code," he said. "Otherwise they would have done something about it. They thought it was unbreakable."

British WW II Code Crackers Never Broke Code of Silence

[K5RCD]

It's a good thing the New York Times didn't know about it.

[M3ONL]

Proud member of MKARS based at bletchley park but Sssh it's a secret

Adrian

[WB8MKV]

The famous Enigma code machine designed by the germans was captured by a Polish officer and sent to Bletchley for the Allies to read what codes were being sent. The English town of Coventry was listed as a hugh bombing target..the English decided not to intercept for fear the German would know the Allies had access to the code machine. Coventry as you may know was fire bombed to death.

As a humorous side to Bletchley one of the code supervisors had a very nervous eye twitch that the code team nick named him "blinky" and swore that he could do 30 wpm with his eyes

[K8ERV]

Thru all the histories of codes that I have read, every country that made up a code thot it was so unbreakable that they never bothered to see if their own codebrakers could crack it.

Some of the high-ranking Japanese suspected we were reading their messages (purple) but had no way to send new codebooks to their far-flung island empire so could not do anything about it.

TOM K8ERV Montrose Colo

[NA0AA]

An interesting take on this is "The Man Who Knew too Much" by David Leavitt. It's about Alan Turing, arguably the man who invented BP.

I'm sure the Germans never thought anyone would be able to come up with the needed numercial combinations given how many combos you had with a 3-rotor machine - when you could also change the rotors.

Let's face it, for a portable code machine it was darn good.

The only reliable codes are one-time pads, but they can be intercepted themselves.

[AC0FP]

Thru all the histories of codes that I have read, every country that made up a code thot it was so unbreakable that they never bothered to see if their own codebrakers could crack it.

Some of the high-ranking Japanese suspected we were reading their messages (purple) but had no way to send new codebooks to their far-flung island empire so could not do anything about it.

TOM K8ERV Montrose Colo

Interesting theory!

Maybe you can find some former member of that notoriously alleged "electronic intelligence gathering network of English speaking countries", or at least that's what the French like to call it, I'm sure they might talk to you.

[K8ERV]

The only reliable codes are one-time pads, but they can be intercepted themselves.

I see you have read Kahn.

TOM K8ERV Montrose Colo

[KL7AJ]

I see you have read Kahn.

TOM K8ERV Montrose Colo

There's another aspect of this that isn't mentioned too much in the story.....how you KNOW you've actually decripted the message. It might LOOK like plain text when you're done, but that itself could be a product of a previous encryption. Or the plaintext itself could be so obscure that it could be meaningless. So there's a lot more to this than just getting something back that looks like plaintext.

Eric

[G0GQK]

That's right, they never broke the code of silence. However they did have to sign the Official Secrets document which would have put them in prison or face being hanged. That was when there were true British, a straight back, honest, stiff upper lip and reserved. There are still people like this in GCHQ but the rest of 'em, like our members of parliament are as leaky as a collander and a bunch of self servers. Just like bankers.

G0GQK