Engma Machine Dbq

“We are not makers of history. We are made by history” (Martin Luther King Jr). It all began when Polish intelligence gave France and Britain each one Enigma machine, to continue the code breaking operations. What made it more challenging was that the Germans changed the cipher code settings daily for top security. Even after all the security measures, Enigma was still cracked and had a huge impact on World War ii. The Enigma machine is a code making and scrambling machine that was broken by Alan Turing that helped win the second World War.

Arthur Scherbius invented the Enigma machine as a way to communicate in code. The Enigma machine has a board with 26 keys each containing a letter from the alphabet. It also has a following board with the same 26 letters but with a light under the board. Pressing the letter ‘A’ on the first board will light up a different letter ‘V’ on the second board, therefore scrambling the letters. In order to send and receive the same correct message the controls have to be set at the same setting or else the message would be ciphered incorrectly. In fact the Germans would switch up the settings every

single day to ensure security. The way the letters are scrambled is by the three rotors inside the machine. The rotors each have 26 contact points each changing the letter when a letter key has been pressed. As if Enigma wasn’t hard enough to break, the Germans added another board labeled “plug holes,” creating another 1,000,000 possible combinations. In all there were about billions and billions of possible combinations to choose from.
As war was going on, mathematicians at Bletchley Park tried everything to their common knowledge in trying to cipher codes given from Enigma.

Alan Turing was a very intelligent man who attended Bletchley Park the main site for code breaking. Alan Turing invented “bombe,” an electromechanical device. “Bombe” helped decipher encrypted messages given by Enigma. Later Gordon Welchman made significant improvements to “bombe.” The information received from Enigma, known as “ultra” was used in every step of the decoding process (O’Neill 160). Ultra was considered as ‘top secret’ and only few knew about the whole operation. Turing’s impeccable intelligence helped break Enigma. As well as develop a technique, “banburismus” that later helped read naval messages. Thanks to Turing and the “bombe” German codes were broken and prevented many

attacks.
The time during the second world war was a difficult time with many ups and downs and pros and cons. The decryptors and decoders had to work in a timely manner or else “ultra” wouldn’t be as valuable. In fact, Enigma was quite the challenge, the Germans would change their cipher codes and settings daily for top security. Breaking Enigma was huge, but Britain had to be careful using the ciphered messages. If Germany found out that Enigma had been broken, they would immediately abandon the work and find a new way to communicate in secret. A pro to the whole situation is that Ultra played an important role in the Battle of the Atlantic by enabling allies to divert convoys from areas to which U-boats had been ordered. Not only that but “Ultra also enabled allied planners to tell whether the elaborate deception plans designed to draw German attention away from Normandy prior to D-Day were working” (O’Neill 160). Also Ultra proved to be mostly useful in North Africa and at sea since Germans could not communicate by secure land lines.
Code making and scrambling has Enigma all written over it. From how it works to Alan Turing and the downfalls and up high’s. History has made us learn new things and given us the chance to make corrections. The Enigma machine has forever changed our world. “A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human” (Alan Turing).