During World War II, Germany believed that its secret codes for radio messages were indecipherable to the Allies. However, the meticulous work of code breakers based at Britain’s Bletchley Park cracked the secrets of German wartime communication, and played a crucial role in the final defeat of Germany.
The Enigma story began in the 1920s, when the German military – using an ‘Enigma’ machine developed for the business market – began to communicate in unintelligible coded messages. The Enigma machine enabled its operator to type a message, then ‘scramble’ it using a letter substitution system, generated by variable rotors and an electric circuit. To decode the message, the recipient needed to know the exact settings of the wheels. German code experts added new plugs, circuits and features to the machine during the pre-war years, but its basic principle remained the same.
The first people who came close to cracking the Enigma code were the Polish. Close links between the German and Polish engineering industries allowed the Polish Cipher Bureau to reconstruct an Enigma machine and read the Wehrmacht’s messages between 1933 and 1938. In 1939, with German invasion looming, the Poles shared their information with the British, who in turn established the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. Mathematicians and intelligence experts, with the help of primitive early computers, began the complex and urgent task of cracking the Enigma code.
The Germans, convinced their Enigma messages were unbreakable, used the machine for battlefield, naval, and diplomatic communications. Although the experts at Bletchley first succeeded in reading German code during the 1940 Norwegian campaign, their work only began to pay off meaningfully in 1941, when they were able to gather evidence of the planned invasion of Greece, and learn Italian naval plans for the Battle of Cape Matapan. In the autumn, the Allies gained advantage in North Africa from deciphering coded messages used by Rommel’s Panzer Army. Information obtained from such high-level German sources was codenamed ULTRA.
The Germans also enjoyed some noteworthy code breaking successes. The B-Dienst (surveillance service) broke British Naval code as early as 1935, which allowed them to pinpoint Allied convoys during the early stages of the Battle of the Atlantic. Although the US altered its naval code in April 1942, the change came too late to prevent the havoc wreaked by Operation Paukenschlag, the German U-boat campaign off America’s east coast early that year. The Germans also managed to crack Soviet and Danish code systems. But their efforts – fragmented and divided between rival cryptology departments – lacked the consistent success achieved at Bletchley Park.
From 1941 onwards, Bletchley’s experts focused upon breaking the codes used by German U-boats in the Atlantic. In March 1941, when the German armed trawler ‘Krebs’ was captured off Norway complete with Enigma machines and codebooks, the German naval Enigma code could finally be read. The Allies could now discover where U-boats were hunting and direct their own ships away from danger.
The German Navy, rightly suspicious that their code had been cracked, introduced a fourth wheel into the device, multiplying the possible settings by twenty six. The British finally broke this code that they called ‘Shark’ in December 1942. Using ULTRA always presented problems to the Allies, because any too blatant response to it would cause the Germans to suspect their messages were being read. But neverthless Bletchley Park and its staff made a crucial and groundbreaking contribution to the defeat of the Axis.
The Navajo Tribe was extremely important to the United States. Their code was so relevant to our military, that every Navajo traveled and voyaged everywhere with a personal bodyguard. They were expected to memorize their sacred language and code to ensure that no one would ever be able to understand it besides those authorized. 800 errorless messages were sent during the war. Japanese cryptographers were never able to decipher the code that the Navajos thought up. It is to this day known as one of World War Two’s biggest secrets.
The Navajo Tribe:
The Navajo Tribe had a huge impact on the United States history. But, their way of life is quite confusing. For example, children were born into their mother’s clan (Iverson 3). Also, once young women hit puberty, they were at the age to be married (Iverson 3). The Navajos and their families lived in what seemed to be a little shack called a Hogan (Iverson 3). The tribe was also very creative and intelligent in many possible ways. They developed a ceremonial system that included many rituals that were sacred to their tribe (Iverson 3). One researcher explains, “They were the largest group of Native Americans in the U.S.” (Navajo Code Talkers- WWII.’s Biggest Secret 2). Because of this, the tribe benefited greatly to all of the people.
This is a picture of a Hogan.
Their Part in the War:
The Navajos had one of the most relevant roles in WWII and helped with numerous battles. 400 Navajos eventually served, and they spoke a secret code (Secret Radio Codes 9). The first 29 Navajo men were chosen to create and test their code ( The Navajo Tribe 2). They used encoded versions of their language to transmit messgages, information, and instructions over radio calls (Secret Radio Codes 9). They could do this in a small amount of time between ships in the Pacific Ocean (Secret Radio Codes 9). It is told that, “Each talker was so valuable, he traveled everywhere with a personal body guard.” (Navajo Code Talkers- WWII.’s Biggest Secret 2.) Therefore, these Navajos part in the war was secretive and sacred to the United States for the outcome of winning the war.
This is a picture of two Navajo code talkers.
The Code:
The code was built off of the Navajo language. Some believed it served an easy basis for a code (Seceret Codes 9). And to this day, the names of some original code talkers, such as Chester Nez, are still known (The Navajo Tribe 2). The Navajos sent 800 errorless messages over the radio (The Navajo Tribe 2). There were also 411 terms that the Indians had to memorize (The Navajo Tribe 2). Chester Nez explains, “Everything we used in the code was what we lived with on the reservation every day.” (Navajo Code Talkers- WWII.’s Biggest Secret 2). The code allowed communication between ships.
This is a picture of Cliff Palace, a place where the Navajos lived.
Japanese Cryptographers:
The Japanese had another tough time trying to decipher the Navajo’s code. They even had trained masters in Tokyo working on it (The Navajo Tribe 2). But, they were never able to crack the code (Iverson 3). They had also never heard the language or anything like it before (The Navajo Tribe 2). That did not even help them try to decipher the well thought out code. Since the secret was kept, it was known as one of the twentieth century’s best known secret (The Navajo Tribe 2). A researcher describes, “Throughout the war, the Japanese were repeatedly baffled and infuriated by the seemingly inhuman sounds.” (Navajo Code Talkers- WWII.’s Biggest Secret 1). The code made the United States and the Allies victorious.
Pigeon’s WW2 Code Is ‘Unbreakable’
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If only Alan Turing was still alive! The story of the dead pigeon via Reuters:
A World War Two code found strapped to the leg of a dead pigeon stuck in a chimney for the last 70 years may never be broken, a British intelligence agency said on Friday. The bird was found by a man in Surrey, southern England while he was cleaning out a disused fireplace at his home earlier this month. The message, a series of 27 groups of five letters each, was inside a red canister attached to the pigeon’s leg bone and has stumped code-breakers from Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Britain’s main electronic intelligence-gathering agency. “Without access to the relevant codebooks and details of any additional encryption…
How Anything May Signify Anything: William Friedman And The Biliteral Cipher
Cabinet Magazine has a fascinating and mysterious article on William F. Friedman, perhaps the greatest code-breaker in modern history. Friedman became a hero of World War II by breaking Japan’s PURPLE code and inventing the Army’s best cipher machine. He did it all using the ‘biliteral cipher’, a simple but powerful encoding technique invented in the sixteenth century, which allows for hidden messages to be conveyed by anything from flower petals to musical notes to faces in a photograph:
It is unlikely that Bacon’s cipher system was ever used for the transmission of military secrets, in the seventeenth century or in the twentieth. But for roughly a century from 1850, it set the world of literature on fire. A passion for puzzles, codes, and conspiracies fueled a widespread suspicion that Shakespeare was not the author of his plays, and professional and amateur scholars of all sorts spent extraordinary amounts of time, energy, and money combing Renaissance texts in search of signatures and other messages that would reveal the true identity of their author. Even after the recent publication of James Shapiro’s comprehensive history of the authorship controversy, Contested Will, it is difficult for us to appreciate the depth of conviction — among writers as diverse and as distinguished as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Henry Miller, and even Helen Keller — that Shakespeare’s texts contained the secret solution to what was widely considered to be “the Greatest of Literary Problems.”…
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