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Old 09-20-2015, 08:45 PM   #9
NN5I
Carl, nn5i
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by wa8yxm View Post
As someone pointed out the messages were encrypted RTTY for the most part.

Germany stole the technology or purchased it before the war.

Germany had an unbreakable code.. To this day the code is, as far as I know unbreakable.

The British Code Breakers... Managed to liberate one from the Germans so they had the key.
Perfect score. Not one of those statements is correct.

If the technology you're talking about is the Enigma, it was commercially marketed after WW1, without much success, and was repeatedy sold to a series of companies before 1925, which is about when the German military began using it (as did Italy, Switzerland, and a number of other countries).

Though some German traffic was RTTY late in WW2, most of it was Enigma-encrypted text transmitted by hand using CW. Many police and SS units used hand-enciphred codes of various types, all rather easily broken. Enigma was much harder, especially after the introduction of four-rotor Enigmas in the German navy. But essentially all were broken by the Allies.

Germany had a few codes that in principle ought to have been unbreakable (one-time-pad systems), but these were badly used and most were broken by GC&CS and some by the US Army. Enigma was broken by Poland in about 1932, and Polish cryptographers built "Enigma analogues" that duplicated the function of German Enigma machines. That was a result of the astonishing brilliance of the Polish team's Marian Rejewski, a mathematician. The Poles gave the French and English complete information and examples of their Enigma machines. Later, intact German Enigmas of various models were captured, but weren't much use (except that the French and English cipher bureaus used captured Enigmas to communicate with each other after the fall of France).

Having the machines and knowing how they worked was the easy part. The hard part was knowing which of the many thousands of starting positions and steckering [read Budiansky to find out what that means] was in use when each day's traffic was encrypted by Enigma. This changed daily, and continuous extreme effort was required by the codebreakers to keep up. Different German units used Enigma very differently, and each had to be solved separately for each day.

Japanese encryption systems were much different, and some (especially the Army codes) weren't broken until about mid-war. Italian systems were mostly simpler (unsteckered) Enigmas, or sometimes easily-broken Hagelin machines somewhat similar to Enigma, and were easily broken.

Russian coding systems were often childishly easy. The English and Americans chose not to break them, mostly, because after all the USSR was an ally; but they knew from broken German messages that the Germans were reading Russion codes without much trouble or delay. That posed a dilemma: Whether to tell the Russians or not. If the Russians learned that we were reading German codes, they might say so, in their own easily-broken messages, and within days Germany would know too. That would be fatal, for Germany would then make and use better systems and lock us out.

You really ought to read up on this. Battle of Wits is inexpensive and is usually easy to find on eBay. And there are other books too, none quite as good as Budiansky.
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