You would never guess that this was the most influential man in Europe at that particular time. While not very comfortable in company and certainly a shy man, he was on very good terms and sociable with other mathematicians of his kind. He would walk along the corridor in one of the huts with his gaze averted from other people, looking at the bottom of the wall and flicking the wall with his fingers. I used to see him from time to time at the Park a man of medium height, 29 at that time, dressed in a sports jacket and rather baggy grey trousers (a bit like mine). He was already quite well known when I first went to Bletchley Park in autumn 1941. Turing played a vital role in deciphering the messages encrypted on the naval Enigma. He also invented the Bombe machines to greatly speed up the breaking process on Enigma – but not on Lorenz. A fourth wheel was later added, but even so Turing managed to break the naval Enigma in June 1941. In the early years of the Second World War, the Germans already had great confidence in their Enigma enciphering system, which Bletchley Park nonetheless had broken. As a result, the German Army entrusted their most important communications not to Enigma but to Lorenz. They had reason to be: the number of letters before a setting would be repeated was enormous, because the number of combinations generated by ten of the twelve wheels was a prime number and their combined multiplication reached a staggering sum. It can be imagined how confident the Germans must have been in something as complex as Lorenz. Once the message was broken, we could break the rest of the traffic for that day. The codebreakers in the Testery had to break the message daily by hand, in order to find out all the patterns and wheel settings at the time. The Lorenz pattern could be changed very easily and frequently. Lorenz had more wheels than Enigma so the pattern was quite different and more complex. From January 1944, the wheel patterns changed every single day, on the five major links. The wheel settings were changed every day by the Germans, although they were changed less frequently in the early stages of the war. It was a miracle that Bill Tutte was able to break the Lorenz system without ever having seen the machine. Arguably, Lorenz was even more significant and far more complex than Enigma. Thus, the Lorenz could send out a code with around 1.6 quadrillion different start positions. Enigma messages often contained fewer than 300. Enciphered messages sent by teleprinter used 5-bit punched paper tape, where a message often contained thousands of ‘places’ (characters, letters or spaces). The Lorenz SZ40/42, however, was much more sophisticated, with twelve wheels and 501 pins. It could send out a code in 150 million, million different start positions. Enigma, with its three wheels, created messages using the twenty-six-letter alphabet. Bill Tutte’s breaking of the Lorenz system without having ever seen the machine was a phenomenal achievement, but many people have never heard of Tutte.Įnigma and Lorenz were two very different cipher systems and had very little in common. Lorenz decrypts made a major contribution to winning the Second World War. Lorenz was used for transmitting the highest grade of intelligence messages at the top levels of German Command. His work on Enigma is widely remembered for its significance in tackling the threat from German U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic in the middle of 1941. Alan Turing broke the Enigma code as used by the German Navy. Lorenz decrypts helped shorten the Second World War in Europe.Įnigma was used on lower-level messages from the field, in the air and at sea.Bill Tutte broke Lorenz system in spring 1942 (without ever having seen the machine).More advanced, complex, faster and more secure than Enigma.Used by Hitler, his high command and top generals.Used from 1940 onwards by the German Army.
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