10 Biggest Mistakes Germany Made In World War 2

Codes, cyphers and the men and women that construct and try to break them have been at the forefront of war, espionage and general subterfuge for all of recorded history. The second world war was no exception to this and produced one of the most well-known and renowned piece of encoding machinery every envisaged.

The Enigma Machine itself was devised at the end of the first World War and consisted of a keyboard which had each of the 26 letters of the alphabet on it, a plugboard at the front which allowed each letter to be paired to another and a set of three rotors. If the exact settings were mimicked on a second machine, the produced text would translate back to the message that was encoded originally.

If used correctly and without any shortcuts being taken, it was an extremely effective piece of encryption technology, but due to laziness of the encrypting clerks, Polish codebreakers were able to crack the cypher given enough time. Even though they were hampered by the introduction of two additional rotor wheels prior to the outbreak of war, they were still able to decipher messages, albeit at a slower rate.

Through ground-breaking and painstaking work, Alan Turing amongst a team of others worked tirelessly to crack the codes and yield vital military information to the Allied forces. Breakthroughs came with his development of a computer that could run the analysis far faster than a person, albeit still slow. This was helped again when a code book was captured from a German vessel and most critically, a working Enigma machine and code book from a U-Boat.

There is barely time or space here to even begin to scratch the surface of the hard work, extraordinary challenge and intriguing backstory of the battle between codebreakers and machine and if you have any sort of interest at all, there is a lot of detailed information available.