The wardroom chef collapsed and died during one simulated exercise. His order was only countermanded after a senior officer refused to obey his instructions on the ground that compliance would be tantamount to committing suicide. On another occasion he ordered his officers to climb out of a wardroom porthole during a gale so that they could swim around the stern of the ship and climb in through a porthole on the other side of the room. On one occasion he let off a firecracker in the men’s sleeping quarters and then had a fire hose trained on his men as they rushed from their hammocks to their action stations. However to ensure they complied, he would climb up into the ship’s crow’s nest and pelt those he saw slacking on the deck below with pebbles, pieces of chalk and sometimes even with teacups. It was perfectly reasonable for him to insist that his crew should always be on the lookout for submarines. He backed up his promise to protect them by introducing training methods which, while effective, might have been described today as abusive. He told his assembled crew that his war experience to date had proved that his methods made him indestructible, and that while he was their leader they must adopt them too. It was Mark Thornton, a 35-year-old lieutenant commander, who had become obsessed not only with making his ship, HMS Petard, one of the best run in the Navy, but also with the desire to capture a U-boat and its codebooks.Ī thickset, stocky man with a huge head set on powerful shoulders and the features of a boxer, the seeds of his fearsome reputation were sown on his very first day as the commander on the Petard. The only luck involved on the British side when a U-boat was finally cornered was the identity of the commander of the destroyer on the spot. Documents declassified more recently reveal that in fact a conscious effort was made to train British destroyer commanders so that they could extract as much cipher material as possible from captured vessels. When I did the original research for my Enigma book, the available evidence suggested that the seizing of the codebooks was all down to a lucky break. Photograph: Bletchley Park Trust/Getty Images The machine room in hut 6 at Bletchley Park. It is this game-changing capture whose anniversary will be celebrated at the end of this month.
Enigma ww2 code#
The gloom was only lifted after the seizing of a U-boat, U-559, with her codebooks on 30 October 1942, 75 years ago, enabled Bletchley Park to break the code once again. There was a growing fear that Britain might eventually be starved into submission. From February to October 1942 hundreds of thousands of tons of allied shipping was sunk each month. At a stroke this safety net had disappeared. While the naval Enigma messages were being read, convoys could be routed clear of the Nazi wolf packs lying in wait in the Atlantic. This had disastrous consequences for Britain and her allies. The longest blackout occurred following the German order that vessels operating in the Atlantic and Mediterranean after 1 February 1942 should insert a fourth rotor into their machines. Every now and then the Germans, suspecting that their code might have been compromised, altered it, blacking out the codebreaking effort.
Enigma ww2 how to#
Using the items seized, Alan Turing and his fellow codebreakers were at long last able to work out how to read Germany’s naval Enigma messages. The British capture of a string of German vessels – and their Enigma machines and codebooks – during the first seven months of 1941 changed all that. British intercept stations could listen in to these signals, but because they were encoded, they could not understand what was being said.
It was used to transform normal German into gibberish which was then transmitted using morse code over the airwaves. The Enigma machine did not actually send the messages. Now extraordinary fresh details can be told of how the Royal Navy seized vital cipher information from captured German boats to make the work of the codebreakers possible.
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