Enigma and Bletchley Park Codebreakers Quiz

Answer: Arthur Scherbius

The Enigma code machine was first patented as a commercial encryption device in 1918 by a German inventor named Arthur Scherbius, but wasn't sold commercially until 1923. German banks and railways were among its first customers, but the German military was quick to see its potential and modified it for military use. They added a plugboard (similar to an old-fashioned telephone switchboard), which allowed an operator to plug pairs of letters together in an absolutely astronomical number of combinations. Karl Dönitz, Joseph Goebbels and Albert Speer were all significant German figures in World War II. Scherbius died in 1929.

Historical note:
Karl Dönitz was the top commander (Grand Admiral) of the German Kriegsmarine (Navy) during most of WWII. Just before Hitler committed suicide on 30 April 1945, Dönitz was named by Hitler as his successor as Head of State. Germany's surrender to the Allies on 7 May 1945 was signed by Alfred Jodl (acting as Dönitz's representative). Joseph Goebbels was the German Minister of Propaganda during WWII, and he had a huge influence in shaping German public opinion through speeches, staging spectacular public assemblies, and censoring the daily news. He and his wife Magda committed suicide on 1 May 1945, after first poisoning their six young children. Magda had said she didn't want her children growing up hearing their father branded a war criminal. Albert Speer served as Hitler's Minister of Armaments and War Production during WWII. He was convicted at the Nuremberg war crimes trials for his use of slave labor and spent 20 years in Spandau prison.

Answer: Poland

Just prior to the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Polish mathematicians worked on breaking the Enigma code. Helped by some documents stolen by a German clerk, the mathematicians were able to partially break the code. Realizing the looming danger of impending war with Hitler, the Polish High Command decided to share the closely-guarded secret with her allies--Britain and France. This happened during a meeting of Polish, British and French military cryptology experts, which took place 24-26 July 1939 in a secret meeting in a forest near Warsaw.

Historical note:
The fighting in World War II in Europe started when Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. It was then the world was introduced to the German tactic of blitzkrieg (lightning war). Three of the top Polish mathematicians (Marian Rejewski, Henryk Zygalski, and Jerzy Rózycki) just barely managed to escape Poland when the fighting started, and they then continued their Enigma work with French cryptoanalysts. After the fall of France, many of the Polish Enigma team members eventually worked at Bletchley Park.

Answer: Station X

The name "Station X" came from a from a secret radio reception post established in 1938 at Bletchley Park to intercept German radio messages. The formal name for Station X was the Government Code and Cipher School, or GCCS. It moved into Bletchley Park, an ornate Victorian mansion 50 miles north of London. Today, Bletchley Park has been converted into a museum open to the public.

Historical note:
One of the exhibits at the Bletchley Park museum is a 12-rotor cipher machine built by Lorenz called a Geheimschreiber ("secret writer"). Hitler used this to communicate (he thought in confidence) with his battlefield commanders. Six operators were needed to manage 501 settings for Geheimschreiber message encryption and radio transmission.

Answer: Ultra

The codebreakers at Bletchley Park were able to quickly decode tens of thousands of intercepted messages and made a huge contribution to the Allied victory. This intelligence, code named Ultra, was kept secret until the mid-1970s, when the 30-year rule allowed its release.

Historical note:
An oft-repeated WWII story is that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill knew in advance of the planned German bombing attack on Coventry cathedral on 14 November 1940, but let the attack occur in order to prevent German awareness that the Enigma code had been broken. According to Churchill's biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, this is not the way it happened. According to Gilbert, Enigma had revealed on 12 November 1940 the prospect of a German raid, but not the target. At the last moment on 14 November the target was finally revealed. This last-minute information was acted on without delay, but the lateness of the information prevented effective countermeasures.

Answer: Colossus

A brilliant young telephone engineer at the Post Office Research Station in London named Tommy Flowers designed an electronic computer named Colossus to aid in the decoding effort. Colossus used 1,500 valves (vacuum tubes) and an optical paper tape reader operating at a read speed of 5,000 characters a second (which was about 30 miles an hour) and began operating five months before D-Day. A total of 10 Colossus computers were built, the design being improved and upgraded throughout the rest of the war. The Ultra project was kept secret until the mid-1970s, when the 30-year rule allowed its release. This secrecy is why many people think the American Eniac was the first electronic computer. Although Colossus was definitely a computer, some computer historians point out that it was a special purpose machine (as opposed to a programmable, general-purpose machine).

Historical note:
The electromechanical IBM Mark I computer was delivered to Harvard University on 7 August 1944 and is considered by some to be the first *fully automatic* computer. The Eniac was built by the University of Pennsylvania and was delivered in 1946. It is considered the first *general-purpose* electronic computer. The Cray I was an innovative super-fast computer produced in 1976 for huge projects that required considerable "number crunching."

Answer: Kriegsmarine (Navy)

The three-rotor model Enigma (M3) initially used by all branches of the German armed forces was capable of producing more than 150 thousand trillion variations of a single character. Shortly after German forces seized Poland and France, the German navy adopted a more complex version of Enigma. In 1941, selected German capital ships were equipped with a four-rotor model Enigma (M4), which vastly increased the ratio of possibilities for enciphering alphabetical characters.

Historical note:
Karl Dönitz became suspicious of an intelligence failure when the British became inordinately successful in preventing German U-boats from attacking British convoys. As a result, he ordered addition of the fourth rotor to Enigma machines in mid 1941 to increase the complexity of coded messages. Unfortunately (for the Germans), in December 1941 a U-boat sent the same message on both the four-rotor and three-rotor models. The differences in the coded message and the capture of codebooks from sub U-559 in October 1942 in the Mediterranean Sea allowed the analysts at Bletchley Park to break this new complexity. However, it was not until 1943 that the four-rotor Enigma code (U-boat code) was broken on a regular basis.

Answer: U-505

On 4 June 1944, the USS Guadalcanal task group captured the German submarine U-505, retrieving her codebooks and an Enigma machine. Unlike some previous captures, the U-boat crew was aware of the failure to destroy Enigma material and its capture, and as a result, they were denied access to the International Red Cross or any contact with their families. Kept in isolation in the U.S., they were not released until 1947.

Historical note:
British sailors on HMS Bulldog captured the first Enigma machine captured at sea from U-110 in May 1941. The 2000 movie "U-571" shows the crew of a disguised American submarine in WWII capturing an Enigma coding machine from German submarine U-571. Although there was an actual U-571, no Enigma machine was captured from it. That was a screenwriter's blending of several other actual captures.

Answer: Lorenz

Hitler had demanded a cipher machine for the German high command that was faster and even more secure than the Enigma. His experts devised a coding system based on the teleprinter machine. They connected the teleprinter to a machine that cunningly exploited the teleprinter language itself to produce a very complex code. The Lorenz machine transmits a string of letters, each one of which is actually a mix of the real letter of the real message and a piece of machine-crafted gobbledygook. What comes out and is transmitted is a single string of total gobbledygook. At the other end of the link another Lorenz machine set to exactly the same configuration regenerates exactly the same obscuring characters, adds them back to the cipher text, and by the magic of modulo two arithmetic (in Boolean terms, that's exclusive NOR) they cancel out and leave you with the plain text. Fokker, Sopwith and Messerschmitt were all names of manufacturers of military airplanes.

Historical note:
The Sopwith Camel was widely used in World War I and is featured in the famous "Peanuts" cartoon strip (this was Snoopy's name for his doghouse in his imagined tangles with the Red Baron). Messerschmitt produced the Me-262, one of the first German jet fighter in the waning days of World War II. Although the British Gloster Meteor jet first flew in early 1943, no jet-to-jet dogfight ever took place during WWII. Fokker produced various German aircraft used in both World War I and World War II.

Answer: Fish

The codebreakers worked out that FISH was based on the teleprinter language, but at first couldn't figure out how to strip off the obscuring code. But on 30 August 1941, a lazy German operator gave the whole game away. When he got to the end of keying in a nearly 4,000-character message, the operator at the receiving end sent back in German the equivalent of, "Didn't get that, send it again." And then they both put their Lorenz cipher machines back to the same start position, and the sending operator began to key this long message again. When the operator began to encode the same message a second time, he grew impatient and abbreviated parts of it. The resulting slight changes enabled the codebreakers to strip off the random letters that were cloaking the message.

Historical note:
Market Garden was the codename for a failed airborne invasion (this story was told in the 1977 movie "A Bridge Too Far"). Fat Man was the codename for the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan on 9 August 1945. Wolfpack was the tactic where several German submarines would use radio signals to converge on a target and coordinate attacks.

Answer: All 10 of them

Although all 10 Colossus computers and all the technical drawings and diagrams for them were ordered (by Winston Churchill) to be destroyed at the end of the war to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Russians during the Cold War, only eight of the 10 Colossus machines were destroyed immediately at the end of the war. The remaining two were moved to British secret service headquarters, where they may have played a significant part in the codebreaking operations during the Cold War. In 1960, the order finally came to destroy the last two Colossus machines.

Historical note:
One Colossus computer has been rebuilt from photographs, memories of the former staff, and scraps of schematics (kept illegally!) and is currently located at Bletchley Park. To learn more about this rebuild, search for "Tony Sale" Colossus.