The Enigma code machine was first thought up before world war two started, so
that German's could send information back and forth without enemies being able
to see what they were saying. The Enigma code machine could send 150 million,
million, million, different messages. And with that many different ways of
sending codes, the Germans believed that no one could crack the Enigma code.
The Enigma writing machine looked very much like a typewriter in a wooden box,
with a keyboard at the top.
The Germans were able to keep changing the types of codes by changing the
order of the rotors, and there positions. If anyone wanted to crack the code for that
day they would have to find out the exact positions of the rotors, which takes lots
of time and skill. The code breaker's might work all day and try all different
positions and still not find out what the code they intercepted meant. It took very
talented experts to be able to crack these codes , with great skills in mathematics
and linguists.
They intercepted more than 3,000 codes a day in these special code breaking
stations called "Y" stations. These codes were then taken to different houses called
"HUTS". The codes would be taken to different "HUTS" depending of if the code
came from the air force, navy, or any other communication. The code breakers
would look at the codes and try to break each one by trying to find the proper rotor
positions, if the positions of the rotors weren't perfectly the same they code would
be wrong.
If they were lucky some messages would begin with the same word,
so they would have letters to start with. And this would give many clues
thoughout the message, and make it much easier to crack the code. When they did
fine a lucky start to a message or found a kind of key, they would try it out on a
BOMBE, it was a big noisy machine that could try letters much faster than any
human could, the machine...