11 Feb
2015
11 Feb
'15
4:04 a.m.
On 02/10/2015 12:31 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:
OK, thanks for clearing that up. I didn't
know.
Ugh,
I've been reading up on this stuff for more than a
year, now, and did not keep
links.
Yes, but they might assume the Brits were just using
hand-operated copies of Enigma to
try to decode one message at a time. If they had an idea of
the scale of the Bombe machines,
and some of the tricks the B.P. guys were exploiting, they
would have realized
the Enigma was badly compromised.
From: Jon
Elson
such as to not evacuate Coventry when they knew
it was next for getting
blitzed.
Ah, this is alas an urban legend ('bogo-meme', to coin a nice neologism);
started, IIRC, by Winterbotham. there are some descriptions that the actual
wiring of the rotors was
done AT Bletchley
I'd love to read about that - do you know/recall where you saw it? If a German spy was to get his hands on the
drawings for even one
(wired) rotor, they would have realized how thoroughly the British had
penetrated the Enigma system
I am less certain of this. I seem to recall (alas, too busy to look it up,
unless someone's really interested) that the Germans had something of a
modern concept of code security, where it's assumed that the actual ciphering
machine is compromised, and security depends on the security of the keys.
Given the wide deployment of Enigma at the tactical level, the odds were good
that the machine itself had been compromised. So for them to have found out
that the British had the rotor wiring would not have been a big surprise, I
would expect. However, had they gotten any kind of detailed
description of the Bombe, it
would have not been that hard to work out that its use was to break into
Enigma. In that sense, the Bombe's overall design was in fact a bigger secret
than the fact that they had the rotor wiring.
Yes, for sure.
And of course as a result of the XX system, the
British were fairly sure that
there were no German spies in the UK at the time, anyway.
The XX system?? What's that?
Jon