Enigma and the Bombe

[ljcox]

I've been reading about the breaking of the German military codes during WW2 by the British and later American code breakers.

Polish mathemeticians first broke the codes before the war and invented a machine they called a Bomba to assist. The British improved upon the Polish design and called it a Bombe.

During the war, the Germans added extra complexity to their Enigma cyper machine and so the allies needed a faster Bombe.

The Americans designed an electronic Bombe that was much faster than the electromechanical British one. I have been trying to find out how it worked. The only info I have found so far by doing a Google search was very brief.

Does anyone know where I may find extra details please?

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

A quick google finds plenty of info:

https://www.turing.org.uk/turing/scrapbook/ww2.html

 

[ljcox]

A quick google finds plenty of info:

https://www.turing.org.uk/turing/scrapbook/ww2.html

Thanks Nigel, I had found this site and a wealth of other sites, but I missed the link to the American info. I've dowloaded it now so I'll read it and see if it has any circuits.

 

[ljcox]

Nigel, I looked at the link and it is a US navy report on how to use the British bombe copied by Tony Sale while in the US. I am looking for info. ideally a circuit of the electronic American bombe. I'm curious to know how they managed to make a bombe without metallic contacts with 1940s technology. I assume it was by capacitive coupling to the grid of a valve.

I'll try and do a refined Goolge search in order to eliminate the myriad of irrelevant hits.

 

[Styx]

just a quick correction the Polish did not crack the Enigma, they found a crucial design flaw in how it encoded messages (would never encode a letter as itself) and that flaw could be leavered to crack that days cypher

 

[ljcox]

just a quick correction the Polish did not crack the Enigma, they found a crucial design flaw in how it encoded messages (would never encode a letter as itself) and that flaw could be leavered to crack that days cypher

I was under the impression that they did more than that. They invented the bomba which I would assume would not be possible without an intimate knowledge of the Enigna machine.

I'm just about to start reading "Enigma - Th battle for the code" by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore which has 37 pages devoted to the prewar work by the Poles and others. So I'll add more to this thread after that.

 

[ljcox]

just a quick correction the Polish did not crack the Enigma, they found a crucial design flaw in how it encoded messages (would never encode a letter as itself) and that flaw could be leavered to crack that days cypher

I have just finished reading "Enigma - The Battle for the Code" by Hugh Sebag - Montefiore.

It is an authoritative reference as he interviewed many of the people involved and studied the official records in the UK, USA and elsewhere.

He claims that the Polish code breakers were able to read the German military Enigma traffic (with assistance from the "bomba" they invented) from 1932 until 1938 when the Germans introduced improvements. The Poles did not have the resources to break the codes from that time. However, they passed their info onto the French who gave it to the British.

 

[mkh]

try the book called "the code book";by simon singh....

 

[Styx]

try the book called "the code book";by simon singh....

Great book, I have it