A bombe
On September 1, 1939, Nazi troops invaded Poland. Three days later, Alan Turing came to Bletchley Park, a Victorian Tudor-Gothic estate northwest of London where the British cipher service had secretly relocated. He and other code-breakers arrived at Bletchley to face the seemingly impossible task of breaking the enigma code. When Turing arrived at Bletchley Park, no work was being done on the naval Enigma, which many considered to be unbreakable.
Turing set about devising a machine that would automatically search for logical consistency and eliminating chains rapidly so the code-breakers could narrow down the options for the settings used on the Enigma machine. The result was a giant machine with rotating drums that had numerous colored wires attached to it, and the people at Bletchley began to call it a Bombe. |
A Bombe could figure out that day’s Enigma settings in as little as an hour, and by 1941, eighteen Bombes were up and running. With the Nazi naval communications rendered, the British could pinpoint the position of U-boats, and could safely steer convoys around them and send destroyers to sink the U-boats.
However, the German High Command refused to believe that the Enigma could have been broken, and instead they suspected treachery. By 1942, the United States was ready to throw its vast resources into the code-breaking effort, so Turing was dispatched to Washington, where he helped the U.S. build their own Bombe. |