Reading "The U-Boat Hunters " by Anthony Watts, I was amazed to learn, that just before the war, British Intelligence had been presented with the German military cypher machine "Enigma", stolen by Polish Inelligence 0perators. I always thought it had been discovered and stolen by our naval forces after the capture of a German submarine. Cheers Keith DCXVIII
IIRC The poles actually received an enigma machine in the post from Germany in 1938. They stripped it down and copied it in 24 hours. They worked on it, cracked the code and got their findings and material to the British. Funnily their people were not allowed to work on it at Bletchley Park as they were thought to be a security risk. Cheers Geoff
Hi Geoff, Thanks for that, little snippets keep coming up where the info we thought we knew proves false. I thnk in this case I was taking the silver screen as the my trusted informant, not the most reliable source!!!! Hope you and your mates are OK and not having barbies in the bush at this time of the year, we are knee deep in snow. If you can catch Malcolm MacKintyre on Tele down there, makes his "chaos" bus joke a liitle bitter. Cheers Keith DCXIX.
Hi Keith. Jokingly, once a gunner always a gunner! I was Royal Artillery 3.7 ack ack. Three months after demob I signed on in the Royal Air Force 617 Squadron on Lincolns and then the Canberra. Did 6 months detachment dropping thousand pounders on the terrs. Ken
Interestingly the Enigma Machine was a commercial encripting machine that was available on the open market for a few years before WW2. The commercial version was apparently somewhat simpler because it did not have the plug board that the German military had. I have also heard that various contries used Enigma machines after WW2 because they were considered better than their own encripting devices. The story goes that Blechley Park were reading all of the traffic from these countries, a good scam if you can get away with it.
