Enigma

Enigma

I am not a huge fan of saying someone is “singularly responsible” for the results of something. Especially in this instance because we are talking about World War Two. When someone is said to be “singularly responsible” chances are there are quite a few unlauded people involved. Many people say that Alan Turning can be considered singularly responsible for the allied victory over the Nazi’s. Again I would say that the millions of soldiers and civilians that died during the war might have something to do with victory. However, what I will say is that once you learn about Enigma and Alan Turing, it is certainly easy to conclude that he played an enormous role in expediting the conclusion of the war in Europe.  

The Machine

During the night on May 9th 1941, three British sailors boarded a sinking U-boat off the coast of Egypt. Their Royal Navy destroyer hunted down the submarine and began circling the crippled vessel. Most of the sailors on the U-boat were dead. Water poured in from a crack in the hull created by a British torpedo. The men began searching the ship they weren’t looking for survivors they were looking for the Enigma machine and its corresponding codebooks. They led survivors to safety all while desperately searching. The submarine was flooding rapidly and sinking faster and faster. The sailors searched, now swimming in a steel tube filled with dead bodies, plunging towards the ocean floor. They desperately wanted the machine and those code books, it could change the tide of the war. Finally one of the soldiers called out that he found the code books and a machine. They rushed to retrieve as much as they can, and emerged from the submarine mere seconds before it finally disappeared never to be seen again. The survivors were taken prisoner and the Germans assumed the ship was sunk. If they had found out that the ship was captured they would have changed their plans and the entire mission would have been for nothing. 

Let’s take a step back and discuss why Enigma even existed in the first place. Even today communications that are transmitted can be intercepted. Back during World War Two intercepting communications was as much a part of the war effort as any branch of the military. Figuring out where the enemy was going and what they planned used to be fairly simple. However everything changed due to the invention of the Enigma machine. Because most communications during the war were transmitted wirelessly using morse code. Enigma would scramble a planned transmission, the scrambled message would be transmitted, and then the receiver would type in the scrambled transmission into the machine and the message would be translated. This machine made it impossible to predict or know where or what the Nazi’s were planning and for a long time the Germans were able to sink British ships with impunity. This made it difficult to ship supplies, soldiers, and vehicles to the frontlines. To understand how complicated Enigma was, there were one hundred and fifty nine million million million possible combinations that could be entered into the device. A device not much larger than a type writer. 

Bletchley Park

Again, Alan Turing gets the lion share of the credit for deciphering Enigma. To be clear his revelations and modifications to a polish decoding machine called “Bombe” are critical to breaking Enigma. However, Turing was in charge of an incredible team of engineers and mathematicians. Together they built the “Bombe.”

The Bletchley version of the Bombe, was a much better design than the Polish machine it was based on. An issue with both machines however is that it took a very, very long time to decipher any code. The problem is that by the time the machine would decipher a code, they would become useless because the Germans would change the codes every twelve hours. The “eureka” moment that Turing discovered was extremely ironic and somewhat satisfying.

De-coded

Turning and his team agonized over different ways of speeding up the machine. Weeks and months they tried different computations and configurations to help the machine decipher the code faster. The good news was the machine was capable of cracking the code but the extraordinary flaw in Enigma wasn’t the machine but the users and the fascism of Hitlers reign. Turning noticed that many of the communications would end the same way. Each communication would end with the phrase “Heil Hitler”. Once Turning realized that he could limit the letters that the machine had to discover, it would dramatically reduce the amount of time it would take for the machine to decipher the daily code. So “Heil Hitler” ultimately lead to the downfall of the Axis. 

Ending the War

From all accounts the cracking of the Enigma code accelerated the allied victory by 2-3 years. If Turning and his team at Bletchley Park didn’t do what they did, by weakening the German stranglehold on the North Atlantic the D-Day invasion would have never been possible. The Allies would have never been able to supply troops, land troops, and vehicles easily and most likely the Allies might have lost the war. If the war had lasted for 2-3 more years, its estimated that 14-21 million more people would have been killed and the allies victory over Germany certainly wasn’t assured.

Alan Turing 

Alan Turing was a homosexual and in 1952 was arrested for indecency. The judge gave him a choice which was serve a two year prison sentence or go through “hormonal readjustment therapy” a.k.a, chemical castration. Turing chose the hormone therapy and based on every single account from people that knew him best, he was never the same man. He committed suicide two years later. Because of Turing’s personal life, his story and contributions were never fully told. Only recently, people outside academia and the scientific community are learning about his incredible contributions not only during the war but to modern mathematics and computing. Alan Turing was posthumously pardoned by the Queen in 2013. 

After the war Turing continued to expand his research on machines that solve problems, or “thinking machines.” In this new field that Turing pioneered, the machine’s came to be known as “Turing Machines.” Simply put, a Turing machine accepts simple inputs, you input commands of what it can do, input a program that tells the machine what to do with the input, and finally what it should be thinking and doing with that input. Turing and this field of research led directly to the development of the computer age. Turing machines are now known as computers. Between 1945 and 1952, Alan Turing managed to change the course of human history. Imagine what he could have done, had he not been driven to suicide.