Extracts from this document...

Introduction

Why was Bletchley Park able to break the German enigma codes? There were many contributing factors that helped the team at Bletchley Park to break the enigma code, all of which were needed to break it. The first thing that started them off was some help from the Poles. A polish spy has been in the German army and in 1931 stole documents relating to the enigma machine. Polish mathematicians, one of which was Rejewerki, built 2 replicas of the enigma machine and then gave it to Britain. This was a great help as we now knew what it looked like and how it worked. ...read more.

Middle

The plug board swaps, selection of the rotors and where to put the rotors. So they had to have an extra security method in case a book was stolen. They would select three random letters and send them in plain text. The rotors would then been spun to the three letters sent e.g. T O M and both machines where set up with TOM at the top. Then the operator would select three more random letters and type them in the enigma e.g. H I T and then would send what came out of the enigma machine e.g. J U T. The operator at the other end puts the letters J U T in the top and then gets out HIT. ...read more.

Conclusion

Alan Turing was also a great help to the breaking of the code. He was the designer of the bombe which was 10 enigmas on top of each other. Also "Cribs" which was a piece of text that was known to be correctly deciphered and could be used to help break that days codes. This is why Bletchley Park was able to break the enigma code. There was a lot of hard work put into it, with people working long hours and even after their shift was over. As well as some luck in finding the German enigma code books and intuition was used a lot when breaking the codes. Matthew Clark ...read more.

This student written piece of work is one of many that can be found in our GCSE International relations 1945-1991 section.