One of the most prolific topics to come up when discussing World War II Dynamics is the Enigma machine. In a human war fought with human lives, technological advancements tend to dominate a fair amount of the discussion aside from the soldiers and leaders. Weapons and vehicle advancements are well regarded and have museums dedicated to them as they were a large part of what made this war so hard fought. It is important to make light of the somewhat hidden truth that behind every technological leap there were hundreds if not thousands of humans slaving away behind closed doors pushing to help their country. While attending a tech school may lead one to focus solely of the machines of the war, I believe it is important to pull the curtain back
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Important information was sent along the battlefield and could change the tide of the war if battle positions or future plans were leaked. As messages needed to be spread across long distances, chances to intercept them were abundant. The Enigma Machine was brought in to alleviate some of the worry because even if the messages were intercepted, they couldn’t be read. The encryption placed on the message of the user by the Enigma machine was said to be unbreakable, even if you had your own machine. The machine consisted of four main parts including lamp board, keyboard, plug board, and rotors and was used with a specific configuration by the user(Lycett ,2011). That configuration was then sent to an ally along with the encoded message and was decoded when the receiver implemented the correct configuration. The reason the Enigma Machine was so hard to crack was because it scrambled user input at three points, with the three rotors, and at a fourth point with the switching of the plug boards making it mathematically more complex than the general ciphers used at the time(Lycett ,2011). The machine provided a polyalphabetic cipher that would even output a different letter following the input of two of the same letter; For example, the input ‘hh’ could potentially output ‘eh’(Lycett ,2011). The Enigma …show more content…
Turing is widely regarded as the father of modern computing for his efforts at Bletchley Park. As the war pushed on, The British realized the importance of deciphering the enigma’s code without knowing it’s specific configuration. Increased efforts in this direction lead to the assembly of cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park. The assembly at Bletchley Park was an acknowledgement of the threat that the Enigma machine as even the location of the assembly was meticulously selected, “This was selected because it was more or less equidistant from Oxford University and Cambridge University and the Foreign Office believed that university staff made the best cryptographers” (Simkin, 2014). The existence of Bletchley Park itself was a well-kept secret because the British did not want the Germans or their allies to know that they were trying to solve the code. Alan Turing, along with other scientists and workers would eventually devise a machine, calling the Turing Bombe, that would decipher the Enigma machine’s code ultimately saving millions and shortening the war. The efforts at Bletchley Park are seen in history as an imperative step for the allies but that fame did not directly apply to those who worked there. Despite his paramount contribution to cracking of the Enigma machine, Alan Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952. His love of mathematics and computing would show in
Important information was sent along the battlefield and could change the tide of the war if battle positions or future plans were leaked. As messages needed to be spread across long distances, chances to intercept them were abundant. The Enigma Machine was brought in to alleviate some of the worry because even if the messages were intercepted, they couldn’t be read. The encryption placed on the message of the user by the Enigma machine was said to be unbreakable, even if you had your own machine. The machine consisted of four main parts including lamp board, keyboard, plug board, and rotors and was used with a specific configuration by the user(Lycett ,2011). That configuration was then sent to an ally along with the encoded message and was decoded when the receiver implemented the correct configuration. The reason the Enigma Machine was so hard to crack was because it scrambled user input at three points, with the three rotors, and at a fourth point with the switching of the plug boards making it mathematically more complex than the general ciphers used at the time(Lycett ,2011). The machine provided a polyalphabetic cipher that would even output a different letter following the input of two of the same letter; For example, the input ‘hh’ could potentially output ‘eh’(Lycett ,2011). The Enigma …show more content…
Turing is widely regarded as the father of modern computing for his efforts at Bletchley Park. As the war pushed on, The British realized the importance of deciphering the enigma’s code without knowing it’s specific configuration. Increased efforts in this direction lead to the assembly of cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park. The assembly at Bletchley Park was an acknowledgement of the threat that the Enigma machine as even the location of the assembly was meticulously selected, “This was selected because it was more or less equidistant from Oxford University and Cambridge University and the Foreign Office believed that university staff made the best cryptographers” (Simkin, 2014). The existence of Bletchley Park itself was a well-kept secret because the British did not want the Germans or their allies to know that they were trying to solve the code. Alan Turing, along with other scientists and workers would eventually devise a machine, calling the Turing Bombe, that would decipher the Enigma machine’s code ultimately saving millions and shortening the war. The efforts at Bletchley Park are seen in history as an imperative step for the allies but that fame did not directly apply to those who worked there. Despite his paramount contribution to cracking of the Enigma machine, Alan Turing was prosecuted for homosexuality in 1952. His love of mathematics and computing would show in