Re: U-505 The Initial US Navy boarding party was a total of 9 not 1. Re: Engima and who really "broke the code"
The whole "Enigma" story is very interesting and complex In 1927/28 the Poles acquired a commercial german cypher machine but it was unlike the more complex military version, and for all intents and purposes, near useless to them. The only benefit was it planted the seed as to figure out how the military version might work. French intelligence later acquired a copy (from a german traitor) of a military enigma machine operation manual and some settings that were used. The French and British couldn't do much with the info so they gave it to the Polish cryptography team. The Poles then developed and built a mechanical computer, (the bombe) which enabled them to crack the original military Enigma code in 1933. When the war broke out, they handed the info, and two Enigma clone machines to the British and French. Alan Turing and others, then built a more advanced "bombe" (of which a functioning replica is at the Betchley Park museum) and eventually a 'Colossus' . A Colossus Mk 2 machine was also recently rebuilt to operational condition. As time went on, the Germans changed the encryption Because the cryptography was a MOVING target, it required constant work to decypher each increasingly complex code system. The naval enigma machines where the most complex. This is why there was no single event where some group "solved" the engima encryption once and for all. A series of captures of actual machines, settings sheets, and other documents, along with the work of cryptographers helped the Allies to decrypt the different codes. The Polish cryptographers were instrumental in the work. Just like the U-571 movie totally distorted history and implied "hollywood style" that the USA was the 1st to capture a german naval engima machine (that was done by the British from U-110 in 1941)… nationalistic BS and hype, insured the Poles got little credit in the public eye for their work. Fortunately that is being rectified in recent years. The simple fact is that it took a team of people of many nationalities to "break the code" To keep on topic…. What type of Engima machine should I use on a sailboat and why ? ;-) Cheers ! Roy _______________________________________________ Liveaboard mailing list [email protected] To adjust your membership settings over the web http://liveaboardonline.com/mailman/listinfo/liveaboard To subscribe send an email to [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] The archives are at http://www.liveaboardonline.com/pipermail/liveaboard/ To search the archives http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected] The Mailman Users Guide can be found here http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-member/index.html
