The Enigma Machine (WWII)

The changing landscape of the Second World War heralded and required new, technological methods of warfare that would alter the course of history forever. But none were as influential as cryptic intelligence. The creation of covert intelligence was crucial to maintaining order within ranks and strategic planning. However, discovery of this intelligence could just as easily reveal dire secrets to one’s enemies. Because the Enigma cipher was so widely used and trusted in by the Germans due to its mechanical nature, the solution to the cipher posed by Alan Turing provided the Allies with invaluable information that changed the course of the war.

Although military intelligence obtained through decoding enemy messages had been used widely in WWI,

The Enigma was created in 1918 by Arthur Scherbius, a German who wished to update cryptography by using twentieth century technology. The machine was designed to facilitate complex and secure transfer of information. Each machine consisted of three rotors that could be set to 26 starting positions, which determined how the letters would be enciphered. Scherbius boasted that the Enigma was impenetrable because it would be incredibly difficult to discover its "key" settings, even when given both plaintext and cipher text. Due to the vast number of initial starting positions of the rotors and the unknowable arrangement of the letters on the rotors, the possibilities as to how the letters appeared endless. The only way to read the messages was if the recipient knew the initial settings of the machine. Unlike the ciphers of the previous war, the messages protected by this machine would not be discovered so

Germans quickly dominated the western front in the radical and detrimental practice of Blitzkrieg, German for "lightning war,” which was intended to be a rapid conquest of Europe by the Nazi army supported by the air force and navy. Messages sent with the Enigma had facilitated covert communication and strategic planning between sections of the Nazis. To prepare against this threat, Britain was mobilizing for war, and so too was its cryptography division. War cryptography was under the command of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), stationed in a Tudor-style manor that came to be known as Bletchley Park. But the staff at Bletchley, primarily made up of linguists, was proving ineffective against the Enigma. As a result, the GC&CS decided to “balance the staff with more mathematicians and scientists” which they recruited from the nearby universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The most prominent of these would be none other than Cambridge professor Alan