A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma

Code has always been about hiding a message. Whether a command of war or the information that forms a person's identity. Today we worry about people spying on us in our homes, looking through our internet history and hacking into our Facebook. In 1926, the worry was far more severe. Enigma had arrived. The threat of further wars after the First World War had become greater.


The unbreakable code had broken the resolve of the Allied cryptanalysts. Even with Hans-Thilo Schmidt, a disaffected German, providing information about the Enigma machine, the English and French cryptanalysts were unable to push towards a solution. Yet, the adversity of the Polish, as they were flanked by the powers of Russia and Germany, meant they could not stop trying to break the Enigma. Mathematicians were the new cryptanalysts of the time and Marian Rejewski, a timid Polish man in his early twenties, was to place the first pieces in the puzzle on the way to breaking the Enigma code. He found links and chains in the intercepted messages, which eventually led to finding the particular day key that the scrambler setting were set to. Rejewski spent only a year compiling his catalogue of chain lengths and with the few identifiable phrases, such as "arrive in Berlin", he had cracked the code!




In 1939, the Enigma code became invulnerable once more as the Germans used new scramblers and extra plugboards. Rejewski and the Polish cryptanalysts did not have the resources to cope. Hitler's blitzkrieg strategy was directly associated with the Enigma - "speed of attack through speed of communications."
But Rejewski's work had proven the Enigma was breakable and the British increased their efforts, again with a focus on combining the efforts of linguists with mathematicians and scientists. Bletchley Park was taking over from Room 40 as the home of code-breaking in the UK. It was there that Alan Turing, with the help of others, developed the bombe. The bombe was a electromechanical machine and with it the Allies could translate the Enigma code. Turing is now famous as the father of computer science as after the war he developed the Turing machine, considered the first model of a general purpose computer.

It is interesting to think that code-breaking ultimately comes down to the ingenuity of man and the battle of machines. Without Rejewski and Turing's brilliance, war and blitzkrieg could have been even more devastating. It was a case of Enigma vs bombe, the coding machine vs the solving machine. Nowadays the situation is not much different - people come up with coding techniques and encryption formulae, then machines carry out the process. The modern-day war is still filled with numbers, it just takes place on a digital platform.