[NN5I]

Originally Posted by ke0me

wow, that's great info to know.
I've read about the British code crackers, quite interesting.

I recommend Battle of Wits by Stephen Budiansky, as the most comprehensive, yet most readable, of the histories of code breaking in WW2.

Originally Posted by ke0me

PS - since I assume that all the messages intercepts were CW

Many were enciphered RTTY and a few other codes too, though most were CW.

Originally Posted by ke0me

does the German language have any special characters that English doesn't? Just curious, since I haven't seen any special characters on cw code sheets.

You've been looking at code sheets for English. German has many characters not used in English. Üü Öö Ää ß, for starters. But German CW allowed substitution of English letters for each of these (ue, oe, ae, ss). The Enigma machine used the English alphabet and didn't have any of these, so the substitutes were always used for Enigma encryption (in addition to using q for ch, which was optional in all German military practice).

Many European languages have various characters not used in English; I can't think of a single exception, even among those (like German, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, etc.) that use alphabets based on that of ancient Rome. Each of these languages has its own version of the CW alphabet. Taking Icelandic as a (non-European) example, we find a 33-letter alphabet, based on the Roman, but containing letters like ð æ þ and what look like accented versions of English vowels but are not (for example, á looks like an accented a but is actually a wholly separate letter with wholly different pronunciation).

Then there are Greek ΑΒΓΔ, Russian авшщзфылд, and let's not leave out Arabic and Japanese.

Japanese CW is an interesting case. The language of Japan has four separate official writing systems: Kanji which uses Chinese ideograms; Hiragana which is a phonetic syllabary in which each symbol stands for a syllable like "ka" or "shi", used for Japanese words; Katakana which is a parallel phonetic syllabary used for writing foreign words borrowed into Japanese, and Romaji which is phonetic spelling using English letters. Written Japanese in Japan is usually a mixture of Kanji and Hiragana.

Japanese CW had special CW characters for hiragana, but occasionally used Romaji. But Japanese military traffic also used a commercially-available code (the Chinese telegraph code) to represent Kanji.

I'll bet your "code sheets" had none of that, either.