Read more about: WW2 What if D-Day had failed? The Poles, on the other hand, realised they needed to change tack. These efforts proved fruitless, but the British in particular carried on regardless. When Enigma messages started to be picked up by the British, the French and the Poles, linguists were set to work decoding them. A plugboard attached to the front of each military version of Enigma further complicated matters by changing each letter typed into the machine before it was altered by the rotors. This operator would then enter the garbled message into his machine and a reflector inside his Enigma would reverse the rotor process, lighting up the original letters that had been entered into the first machine.
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Each letter was then written down and once the whole message had been scrambled, it was sent via morse code to the operator of a second machine. When a message was typed on the Enigma’s keyboard, three rotors inside the machine changed each letter of the message into a different one, which would then light up on a display above the keyboard. Resembling an oversized typewriter, the purpose of the Enigma machine was to encrypt messages by scrambling them into supposedly indecipherable strings of random letters.
Designed at the end of the First World War by German engineer Arthur Scherbius, the Enigma was a commercial cypher machine that would later be adapted for military use by all branches of the German armed forces. It would later emerge that the Navy had switched to encrypting and sending messages by the German-invented Enigma machine.Įnigma was a whole different ball game. Where the Russian messages had been crude and easy to decipher, these new messages appeared impenetrable. In 1924, the German Navy began broadcasting a new type of encrypted message that baffled the Poles. Read more about: WW1 Native American Code Breakers of WW1 After their victory, it was clear to the Poles that successful interception of enemy traffic was one key to securing success in any future conflict. As a result, the Poles were able to keep one step ahead of their enemies and eventually emerge victorious from the conflict after the decisive Battle of Warsaw. It became very adept at intercepting the Russians’ rather creaky encrypted signals, which had not advanced from the system they used in World War I. The section soon proved its worth during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921. The section was the precursor of what would eventually become the Polish Cypher Bureau. To this end, Lieutenant Józef Serafin Stanslicki of the Polish Army was charged with setting up a new cypher section in May 1919. One way to ensure it did was to intercept and decode encrypted messages. Its military leaders knew the country had to stay one step ahead of its potential enemies if it had any hope of keeping that independence. Poland was a young country that had only gained its independence after World War I. The find, made by divers working on behalf of WWF aiming to find abandoned fishing nets that endanger marine life, will be given to the archaeology museum in Schleswig.Read more about: Women's history The women of the Battle of Britain They sell at auction for tens of thousands of euros. The Enigma device, which looked like a typewriter, consisted of a keyboard and wheels which scrambled messages.Īlthough several hundred thousand machines were produced, only a few hundred are known to exist. Overall, Germans sank more than 200 of their submarines in the North and Baltic Seas at the end of the war. "We suspect our Enigma went overboard in the course of this event," said Dr Huber, of the company Submaris which leads underwater research missions. Shortly before Germany's surrender in May 1945, the crews of about 50 submarines, or U-Boats, followed an order to scuttle their ships in Gelting Bay, near the Danish border, to avoid handing them to the Allies.ĭestroying encryption devices was part of the order. ( Reuters: Christian Howe)Īt Bletchley Park codebreaking centre, a British team led by Alan Turing is credited with unravelling the code, shortening the war and saving many thousands of lives. Underwater archaeologists Christian Howe (left), Florian Huber (middle) and Uli Kunz pose with their discovery.
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