Secrets of World War II episode 7: By early 1940, British codebreakers at Bletchley Park, working with information from the Poles, had begun to crack the German military codes produced on the Enigma cipher machine. Once this had been achieved, the challenge was how to prevent the Germans from finding out their codes had been broken. It was transmitted on a top-secret device capable of scrambling a message millions of different ways. The German high command was absolutely certain it was impossible to break. But the Allies did crack the enigma code, helping to shorten the war by years and save countless lives. How did Allied code-breakers decipher the unbreakable code? And why did their amazing accomplishment, “Cracking the Enigma Codes,” remain classified for thirty years.
Find out how a tool originally designed for business became the world’s most sophisticated military coding machine. Meet the mathematicians, chess masters and eccentrics of Britain’s top-secret Bletchley Park — and see how they overcame incredible odds to break Enigma. Examine a re-creation of the first electronic programmable computer and find out how it was able to read Hitler’s most closely guarded commands. And learn how Allied code-breakers were crucial to victories in the Pacific, North Africa and on the beaches at Normandy.
During World War II, Bletchley Park was the main site for British codebreakers. The Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) was located there, and it was responsible for breaking German and other Axis powers’ encrypted military communications. The work done at Bletchley Park is credited with significantly shortening the war and saving countless lives. The most famous codebreaker associated with Bletchley Park was Alan Turing, who made significant contributions to the cracking of the German Enigma code.
Secrets of World War II episode 7
You probably know the History, now discover the incredible SECRETS OF WORLD WAR II. Rarely has a war produced such clear cut reasons to fight as World War II. On the one hand were the totalitarian Dictators – Tojo, Hitler and Mussolini. On the other were the great democracies of the Western World which were gradually regaining their feet after the Great War of 1914-18 and the Wall Street Crash. Suddenly, ordinary men and women from all walks of life found themselves thrown into fearsome, nerve-tingling situations worthy of any Hollywood movie. The only difference in this series is that every story is true. Real people emerge as the Heroes of Telemark. Ordinary GIs and US Airforce and Navy personnel suddenly find themselves flying against the Japanese in China, jungle fighting in Burma and being dropped by submarine on enemy coasts at midnight.
These untold stories can now be examined in great detail with the benefit of hindsight, newly-discovered archive film, maps and computer graphics which can complete the picture for today’s viewer. Each fifty-two minute story covers the background to the main action. It will give the viewer a clear view of the historical context, the strategic objective and the tactical effort made by flyers, sailors and foot-soldiers – often in the most oppressive and life-threatening situations – to win victory from the enemy.
This is an inspiring series with a giant canvas including much never before seen colour film. Over 300,000 hours of archive material have been searched for its compilation. Specially orchestrated music and compositions from the great composers all contribute to the excitement and drama of some of the world’s greatest stories of bravery under fire.
It is the largest series of its kind ever produced and with recently released secret footage will give the viewer a new insight into the great untold war stories of World War II. In many cases, this series gives the true stories for the first time this Century.
Enigma machine
The Enigma cipher was a type of encryption machine used by the German military during World War II. The machine used a series of rotors to scramble letters in a message, making it difficult to decrypt without the proper settings and key. The Enigma machine was considered to be highly secure and its encryption methods were thought to be unbreakable. However, the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, led by Alan Turing, were able to crack the Enigma code, which was a major factor in the Allies’ success during the war.
The ability to read encrypted messages helped the Allies to anticipate German military moves and make more effective strategic decisions. The Enigma machine continued to evolve during the war, but Bletchley Park’s codebreakers were able to stay ahead of the changes and continue to decrypt the messages. The Enigma machine is a cipher device developed and used in the early- to mid-20th century to protect commercial, diplomatic, and military communication. It was employed extensively by Nazi Germany during World War II, in all branches of the German military. The Enigma machine was considered so secure that it was used to encipher the most top-secret messages.
The Enigma has an electromechanical rotor mechanism that scrambles the 26 letters of the alphabet. In typical use, one person enters text on the Enigma’s keyboard and another person writes down which of the 26 lights above the keyboard illuminated at each key press. If plain text is entered, the illuminated letters are the ciphertext. Entering ciphertext transforms it back into readable plaintext. The rotor mechanism changes the electrical connections between the keys and the lights with each keypress.
The security of the system depends on machine settings that were generally changed daily, based on secret key lists distributed in advance, and on other settings that were changed for each message. The receiving station would have to know and use the exact settings employed by the transmitting station to successfully decrypt a message.
While Nazi Germany introduced a series of improvements to the Enigma over the years, and these hampered decryption efforts, they did not prevent Poland from cracking the machine as early as December 1932 and reading messages prior to and into the war. Poland’s sharing of her achievements enabled the western Allies to exploit Enigma-enciphered messages as a major source of intelligence. Many commentators say the flow of Ultra communications intelligence from the decrypting of Enigma, Lorenz, and other ciphers shortened the war substantially and may even have altered its outcome.
Alan Turing – Secrets of World War II episode 7
Alan Mathison Turing was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. He is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.
Born in Maida Vale, London, Turing was raised in southern England. He graduated at King’s College, Cambridge, with a degree in mathematics. Whilst he was a fellow at Cambridge, he published a proof demonstrating that some purely mathematical yes–no questions can never be answered by computation and defined a Turing machine, and went on to prove that the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable. In 1938, he obtained his PhD from the Department of Mathematics at Princeton University. During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. For a time he led Hut 8, the section that was responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Here, he devised a number of techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bomba method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Turing played a crucial role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Axis powers in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic.
After the war, Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he designed the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), one of the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948, Turing joined Max Newman’s Computing Machine Laboratory, at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he helped develop the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, first observed in the 1960s. Despite these accomplishments, Turing was never fully recognised in Britain during his lifetime because much of his work was covered by the Official Secrets Act.
