In the 1930's Polish cipher experts secretly began to try to crack the Enigma codes as they were getting worried about Hitler’s and his plans. They were able to understand the rotor settings but couldn’t solve how the wiring worked. Just before war broke out in 1939 they managed to pass information and models of Enigma to British and French code breakers. Although the poles were captured and taken as prisoners they never exposed anything about Enigma to the Germans. The help from the Poles was extremely important, they provided Britain and France the jump start they needed and gave them a chance in the battle against Enigma.
Throughout the war German operators made many mistakes when sending messages, they assumed that the Enigma was unbreakable and became overconfident and lazy, occasionally the German operators would not reset the machines, sometimes messages would be under 26 letters long therefore the middle rotor was never used which meant that there were less combinations and less combinations meant that the settings were much easier to crack. The German mistakes helped the British by giving them clues which made breaking the codes easier.
Although many people worked at Bletchley Park, without the role of certain individuals the Enigma codes would have never been broken during the course of the war. Such individuals as Turing, Herival and Rejewski made an enormous difference at Bletchley Park.
Alan Turing was the inventor of the bombes which were early computers that speeded up the process of decoding enigma messages. Herival had an ingenious idea, his theory was that the German operators would not be too careful when they sent there first messages nor would they reset the machines and did not send random messages, he suggested that they would simply choose the three letters that they could see when the lid of the Enigma machine was closed. Fortunately his theory was correct and therefore if enough messages were intercepted the settings for that day would be revealed.
The bombes were electric machines that tried to speed up the decoding of messages by going through all the possible combinations of an Enigma machine.
Colossus was a development from the mechanical Bombes. It was computer that was as big as a room (5 metres long, 3 metres deep and 2.5 metres high). It was the first ever programmable computer. Colossus worked by 'reading', through a photoelectric system, a teleprinter tape containing the letters of the coded message. It read 5,000 letters a second. All possible combinations of the coded message were checked with the cipher key generated by Colossus. A teleprinter typed out the results of Colossus's search, revealing the settings which had been used by the Germans to send their messages.
Without the role of certain individuals such as Turing and Herival or certain machines such as the bombes and colossus, the task of cracking the enigma would have taken many more years and years were what the British didn’t have considering that the British were weeks from surrendering.
Luck also played an important role in breaking the Enigma, without luck you wouldn’t get German mistakes, without the German mistakes there wouldn’t be the role of individuals, without the role of individuals, there wouldn’t be machines or technology such as the bombes or colossus. The most important reason for why the Enigma codes were broken would be luck because luck was the trigger that started the chain reaction and therefore eventually broke the Enigma codes.
