Gay Man Breaks Enigma Code Saving Thosands Can't Be Saved

[cdnmatt]

Engima machines were captured by British and Canadian forces but not the US Navy. There was a movie,U 571, which was a fictionalized version portraying the US Navy as capturing a U boat .

Apologies, I didn't even know that. Why does it not suprise me though? I actually spent a year of high school in Texas, and according to what they teach, basically the premise is WWII didn't *actually* start until 1941/2 when the US entered it, and saved the world. Not much mention of UK, Russian, Canadian, or Australian troops of course.

Same as I remember my World History teacher saying the US actually won the Vietnam war, because after all, the US destoryed loads of Vietnamese land, but Vietnam didn't destroy any US land. According to him, that meant a win for the US I guess.

[Nirish guy]

Same as I remember my World History teacher saying the US actually won the Vietnam war, because after all, the US destoryed loads of Vietnamese land, but Vietnam didn't destroy any US land. According to him, that meant a win for the US I guess.

Just as well he wasn't comparing the number of helicopters flying emergency evacuation missions, non stop, night and day, from the roof of each Countries Embassy to get his result. Or which Country had to push their costly aircraft off the decks of their aircraft carriers decks just to make space for more fleeing "victors" or he might have had to rethink his overall score card there as I somehow don't remember seeing too many North Vietnamese aircraft departing the White House front lawn that I can recall !

And as has already been mentioned it was forces from HMS Bulldog who captured the German Enigma machine from a German submarine U-110 in May 1941 ( and not from U-571 as the film would have you believe as this was TOTAL fiction) and this all happened MONTHS before the USA even entered the war - but hey, lets not allow facts to get in the way of a good old (US) war story where they blatantly try to steal the credit for something they didn't do eh.

It should also be mentioned that the Polish were also instrumental in helping with a lot of work at the start of the war which went towards cracking the engima code.

[Khor tose]

Engima machines were captured by British and Canadian forces but not the US Navy. There was a movie,U 571, which was a fictionalized version portraying the US Navy as capturing a U boat .

Actually there were several versions of the enigma machine. Turing did deserve a lot of credit, and yes, he did build what is the first real computer to break the code. Irish is right, the code on the earlier models was first broken by the Polish using a mathematical formula. Francois, 15 enigma machine were captured during WWII, we did get one off U505 in 1944

[Forky123]

Breaking the code was insufficient as the data contained in the messages is only useful for a certain amount of time. What Turing did exceptionally was to industrialise the code-breaking using a machine he devised, Bombe. Also note that the original Polish breaking was based on an error in German encryption which was repeated in each message. Once that error was eliminated, breaking enigma daily required a brute force approach in addition to certain messages, such as weather signals, were always in the same form.

No, the US did not capture enigma and much of the breaking work occurred prior to the uS entry into the war. Hollywood movies, enjoyable as they may be, are a very bad way to learn history.

[Khor tose]

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No, the US did not capture enigma and much of the breaking work occurred prior to the uS entry into the war. Hollywood movies, enjoyable as they may be, are a very bad way to learn history.

Yes, all the code breaking was done by the time the US got their hands on an enigma machine, but they Did capture one of them, but not from U571 like the bad movie, but U505 in 1944. You can view this Uboat and see the machine at Chicago's Museum of Industry.

[Forky123]

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply the US hadn't captured one at all, simply that they didn't capture one until the very large part of the code breaking had been completed and Bombe had been operational for some years.

I was lucky enough to handle and use one of the 3 rotor machines during my trade training in the RAF in the 80's. I wish I'd known more of the history at that time as much of my fascination came much later.