- Why was Bletchley Park able to break the German Enigma Code?
Bletchley Park was able to break the German Enigma Code for many reasons which include some of the following. Firstly all the staff and workers at Bletchley Park worked extremely hard and dedicated towards there job and trying to crack the code. Without the hard work that was put in, Enigma would not have been broken at all.
Bletchley Park as well as being highly skilled and dedicated but with the enigma machine being able to be configured one hundred and million million million different ways Bletchley Park didn’t just need skill and dedication but also a extremely large amount of luck. Which Bletchley Park would be granted?
The first step to cracking the Enigma code was taken in 1931. The Polish made important breakthroughs including finding the internal connections of the entire German machine. They began to start cracking the code. This gave the allies and Bletchley Park a lot of help and eventually led to Harry Hinsley discovering you could detect when activity was going to take place because there would be serge in the code. The effects of Hinsley’s work were more lives were saved and he was taken more seriously.
As with many things in life, it's all about luck. Bletchley Park was no exception the second key and one of the main breakthroughs made. It was found that the Enigma machines major flaw was it was not totally random and they sent a double indicator
So when the people at Station X received the same message twice (a double indicator). Someone noticed it was the same message. Although it didn’t break the codes it saved a lot of time for the workers of Bletchley Park. Jeffrey Sheets were able to be made which allowed some of the German Enigma to be broken and were very useful for the workers. The Jeffrey sheets required a lot of hard work and dedication from the workers of Bletchley Park but it wasn’t before long for no apparent reason that the Germans changed from double indicator and made a single indicator therefore the Jeffrey Sheets became useless and Bletchley Park was unable to read the Enigma Code.
Although, Hut six concentrated and eventually was beginning to get somewhere.. Hut six was so important in the early years of the war because they concentrated on the air force. Due to the fact that the German air-force was hopeless at security, they were now able to give vital information to the RAF.
The next key step though that Bletchley Park made to break the German Enigma Code was the “Herivel Trip”. This was a fatal mistake that the Germans made. As prompted to spin the wheel before typing a message many of them forgot to and therefore the letters were not random..
Another key factor that also helped Bletchley was that the German Enigma machine operators were so predictable because humans are not random. They began to use known codes such as first three letters of there name and the first three letters of their girlfriends name. Also they used swear words and common German words.
Furthermore, although Bletchley Park had gained all this information and knowledge by 1941 the German U-Boats were winning the Battle of the Atlantic. Fortunately a man named Alan Turing was the right man in the right place at the right time. He began to unravel naval messages. He discovered the key message setting. The key difference between the Luftwaffe and the Navy enigma codes were that the codes were not chosen by the operator but were written in a book. Turing’s work was vitally important in breaking the Enigma codes. The other key factors were the capture of the code book.
A vitally important resource in the code breaking was technology, especially as the codes were getting more and more difficult to break every single day. Even after the Enigma was cracked it could take several days to decode a message, by hand that is, and by then it was probably too late. Alan Turin, one of the people at Station x, came up with the idea for a programmable computer. It was named the "Bombe". You would pass a message into the machine and the bombe would go through all the possible settings until it found the one that would translate the message into clear German. The bombe could do this in a matter of minutes. This meant that messages were decoded very quickly and were used to the advantage of the British. There were many other minds that created new technology, when bigger challenges were to be faced.
Bletchley Park was producing 90,000 decoded messages per month by 1945. Bletchley Park workers felt active and proud about their contributions to the war. There were 500 people working at Bletchley Park by 1945 and 10,000 by the end of the war
All of the points mentioned had a very big effect on the code breakers being able to break the codes. In my opinion the main reason as why they were able to break the codes was the hard work and extreme dedication of the Bletchley Park workers.. Despite the Poles giving us a step in the right direction that’s all it was. During the war the people at Station x worked incredibly hard and in the end they were rewarded with the knowledge that they had broken the supposedly unbreakable.
- In what ways did the work of Bletchley Park influence the out come of the Second World War.
The work that was being done at Bletchley Park had, in my view, had quite a large influence on the out come of the Second World War due to the fact that it had quite a large influence on many major battles in the Second World War. The invasion of Crete was a great victory for Bletchley Park even though it was a defeat for the British forces it showed what Bletchley was capable of. But not all victories for Bletchley Park meant the defeat of the British Armed Forces, the sinking of the Bismarck, the pride of the German Navy was because of Bletchley Park as they were the one's that found that the Bismarck was headed to France instead of Germany Despite loosing Crete the secret of Bletchley Park was able to be kept a secret and was kept an extremely good secret throughout the war. This as a result meant that Bletchley Park was able to act through the whole war. Bletchley Park helped win the war in Africa because they were able to prevent supply lines. They got the RAF to drop bombs in pacific places. Bletchley Park was also able to help the D-day. Bletchley Park helped with D-Day by decoding a very long and important message about where the Germans were situated and were going to be. The Americans were going to parachute troops into Normandy but because of this information they were able to change there plans and save many lives. This meant that many allied lives were saved and also meant that plans could be made to help win the war. Bletchley Park was very successful in decoding messages and because of this German plans were able to be flawed and countered. Eventually thanks to Bletchley Park, one of the Germans greatest tools would become something which would ruin and destroy them. If it was not for Bletchley Park then man more men would have been lost and it may have been possible for the Germans to have won the war.
