The Enigma Machine: The Totally, Definitely, Absolutely Unbreakable Sequence of German War Codes

this video is brought to you by surfshark safety and security online are critically important you can protect yourself online with surfshark get 83 off and three months for free through the link in the description [Music] below [Music] when we think about the defining locations that help shape world war ii we're almost sport for choice normandy north africa okinawa midway pearl harbor stalingrad and dunkirk all names that will be forever associated with the most brutal conflict that the world has ever seen but for all these cataclysmic theaters of conflict there were many more locations we simply don't know about where hundreds of thousands worked tirelessly for the greater good on one side or the other from the factory employees churning out bullets and tanks to radar operators and the dock workers on the u.s east coast frantically filling ships destined for europe and this is a story of one such location a place set in the calm undulating hills of middle england a place called bletchley park at first glance today bletchley park looks like many of the other stately homes dotted around the uk grande well kept and more than a splash of downton abbey to the place but this was also the site of one of the most extraordinary feats of world war ii and one which undoubtedly helped tip the tide of war in the favor of the allies it was here that the previously thought unbreakable enigma machine finally met its match [Music] almost all communication sent back and forth during world war ii was coded to some degree or another after all what could a secret tactical maneuver is if the enemy already knows what's coming some nations were more adept at this than others but almost everybody slipped up at some point while commanders like to imagine their tactics were closely guarded secrets the reality was that through spy as enemy reconnaissance misplaced maps and of course code breaking many missions were known about in advance but the germans were pretty good at keeping their secrets close to their chest and pivotal to this was the enigma machine what looked like a glorified old-fashioned typewriter the enigma machine was the scourge of the allies for many years like a typewriter it came with 26 keys corresponding to the letters of the alphabet with a set of 26 lights again with the letters of the alphabet above also included was an electromechanical rotor mechanism located between the letters and the lights this included three separate rotors a fourth was later added which could be rotated into a position that corresponded to the letters beside them so rota 1 had 26 possibilities as did rota 2 and so on now i could spend many hours going through the mechanical process of the enigma machine but well we've got a lot to get to so let me just summarize the germans changed the rotor settings daily but if you had the correct rotor positions you could type in encrypted messages that would sound like gibberish and the enigma machine would translate it into readable text but alas that was only half of it on the front of the enigma machine was the plug board which looked a bit like one of those old-fashioned switchboards that telephone operators used to use the plug board contained small holes with the letters a to z and a typical enigma code would use 10 different randomized pairs that needed to be connected via small wires on top of the rotors that needed to be in the correct position the result is a difficult to comprehend 159 quintillion possible combinations the enigma machine was considered unbreakable by the nazis so much so that even the most top-secret communications were often sent via the enigma but with odds like that you can understand their confidence [Music] alright to start the story we need to backtrack a bit because while the enigma machine rose to fame during world war ii it was invented shortly after the first world war it was quite rudimentary at that point but was commonly used across the german armed forces throughout the 1920s and 1930s as we know things started to go a little aryan nation in germany in the 1930s and many of its neighbors began eyeing it a bit suspiciously one of these was poland where they were able to build their own enigma machines based on german cipher materials obtained by a french spy hans celio schmidt with these machines they were able to break some nazi codes but with war looming the germans added more rotors to their enigmas and the poles simply couldn't keep up just two months before the invasion of their country the polls gave a crash course to members of the british and french intelligence services in their enigma breaking techniques very few people knew about the exchange of information that took place on the 26th and 27th of july 1939 in piri near warsaw but it was a meeting that would have a profound effect on world war ii not a whole lot went well for the allies in the early stages of the war scores of german military successes saw them roar across europe and by mid-1940 most of the continent lay under the control of the nazis but at bletchley park which housed the government's code in cypher school gc and cs there was some early success alan turing a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist had arrived at bletchley park in 1939 the very day on which britain had declared war on nazi germany he had been working part-time for the gc and cs since 1938 but with the outbreak of the war his genius was called upon full-time he may not have always been the easiest person to work with but turing was a man who made an enormous impact on world war ii now if you want better encryption capabilities than the nazis it's time to check out today's video sponsor surf shark do you use the internet well of course you do you're on the internet right now do you have personal information that you'd rather remain private well who doesn't let me tell you something the internet is all kind of weird there are people out there who want to ruin your 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and three months for free through the link in the description below or just use my code mega a check out let's get back to the enigma machine [Music] much of the code-breaking magic that happened at bletchley park began at least in hut 8 little more than a small shack where the secrets of nazi germany were slowly uncovered just weeks after arriving at bletchley park turing decided that the best and perhaps only way to beat the enigma machine was to build another machine that could match it the idea to build an electromechanical machine called the bomb based on the polish design which had been built before the war raised some eyebrows while machines were certainly being used they were still in their infancy and much of the hard code breaking work was still done by the good old human brain but turing correctly reasoned that to break the thousands of german messages quickly and efficiently british intelligence would have to go automatic by march 1940 the first british bomb ambitiously named victory was up and running at bletchley park this machine didn't actually decode the messages themselves but rather shifted through the countless potential possibilities for the adjustable rotors and plug board to find the appropriate key for that day once the key was found in theory all the messages received on that day could then be decoded the problem was that different enigma codes were used across the german armed forces these were big machines measuring 2.1 meters wide 1.98 meters tall and .61 meters deep and weighed about a ton each had space on the front for 108 small drums arranged in three groups of 12 triplets each triplet corresponded to the three rotism and enigma scrambler and essentially these drums would mimic a human testing every possible option but in a fraction of the time on the first bombs the drums rotated at a speed of 50.4 rpm while the later versions tore around at 120 rpm and were able to test all 17576 possible positions for one rotor order in just 20 minutes the second bomb named agnes day later shortened to agnes or aggie was installed in august 1940. in 1940 alone the two bombs successfully broke the german codes 128 times while bomb-out stations were established at ad stock gayhurst and weavenden or close to bletchley park in case it was hit during a bombing raid [Music] while things were progressing nicely at bletchley it was still a painstakingly slow process what would really speed things up was if the allies could capture enigma keys from their german foes without the germans realizing and changing the keys it sounds far-fetched but actually happened several times the first came on the 26th of april 1940 when a german patrol boat disguised as a dutch trawler was captured by the hms griffin off the norwegian coast perhaps taken by surprise the german crew on board failed to destroy their crypto information and suddenly the british were in possession of some of the enigma keys from the 23rd to the 26th of april these keys were rushed back to bletchley park where they were utilized along with the bomb machines over the next two months turing and those working with him were able to break six days of naval traffic between the 22nd and the 27th of april 1940. of course at this point the information was well out of date but this represented the first time bletchley park had broken the kriegsmarine german navy messages and it's probably worth pointing out here that the german navy was by far the biggest threat to the allies as it continued to decimate the merchant fleet moving between the united states and britain the second capture of enigma material came on the 9th of may 1941 in the icy waters of greenland and has come to be known as operation primrose the u-boat u-110 had traveled north-west from france to intercept convoy ob-318 moving from the u.s to britain the german submarine successfully sank the esmond and bengal head but it faced a fierce barrage from the convoy's escort ships and the yubo was eventually forced to surface the ocean surface when you're surrounded by enemy ships with all their guns pointed at you is just about as bad as it gets for a submarine and that's exactly what u110 faced as it broke the surface as the crew gathered on the deck they came under fire from the british boats who believed that the deck gun was about to be used once it became clear that the german sailors were surrendering the shooting stopped and those on the deck began swimming towards the waiting boats one of those in the water was captain fritz julius lemp now we have to speculate a little here but it seems as if lemp had been sure that the u110 was about to sink but as he paddled away from the stricken u-boat he apparently realized that the submarine was very much still floating and no doubt his second thought was of the top secret crypto information still on board lembas said to have turned around and headed back to the u-boat but he never made it and he was never seen again the british boarded the u-110 and stripped it of everything worthwhile including the submarine's kurd signal code book and its enigma machine the allies couldn't believe their luck and once again the information was rushed back to the small shack at bletchley park as in poker sometimes you just need to go all in and that was exactly what turing and his code breakers did in 1941 with a carefully worded letter to the right man by the summer of 1941 there were four to six bombs at bletchley park with a total of 24 to 30 in the local area but this was still not enough the torrent of information coming in was enormous and the allocation of funding and personnel was seen as inadequate by the code breakers in order to keep up military rules are fairly explicit about the chain of command you never go above your direct superior but in october of 1941 the code breakers did and not only that they went to the very top in their letter to prime minister winston churchill the code breakers bluntly stated that their work was being held back and sometimes not being done at all because of a lack of resources it was an audacious move but one that paid off churchill had visited bletchley park shortly before and was already convinced of the team's excellent work from then on budget issues and a lack of personnel were things of the past just to give you a quick idea of how quickly they were built in december 1943 there were 87 bombs a year later at the end of 1944 152 and by the end of the war the number had peaked at 155. these bombs were operated by a legion of women from the women's royal navy service known as wrens but while this might give the impression of smooth sailing it really wasn't the huge increase in bomb numbers was partly because in 1942 the german high command ordered that a fourth row to be added to all the enigma machines this threw a real spanner in the works and led to the longest information blackout since those at bletchley park had began breaking the enigma codes the role of the bomb machines proved invaluable to breaking the enigma codes but it was human input that began to fill the gaps while an enigma message may have appeared to be nothing but gibberish there were patterns if you looked hard enough the code breakers knew the german sent weather reports every day which meant that the word weather was included frequently most german messages also ended with the phrase heil hitler and once the british discovered that all numbers were being spelt out rather than simply stating the numerical number they were able to go back and look at past messages and begin seeing similarities this was by no means enough to read a whole message but little by little their understanding of enigma grew another quite obvious fact when you think about it but one that was missed for a while was that no letter was ever encrypted as itself an a couldn't be encrypted as an a for example which when combined across a whole message began to lower potential possibilities [Music] the work done at bletchley park and the countless satellite stations surrounding it had a staggering impact on the war the only argument it would seem was just how much of an impact even as early as 1943 the code breakers were cracking 84 000 enigma messages a month equal to two each minute the information gathered by the code breakers was referred to as ultra intelligence and the powers that be guarded the information carefully even top commanders were often kept in the dark regarding the source of select information the quite obvious problem was how do you exploit the information without revealing that you've cracked the code time and time again german suspicions led to a change in keys or as i mentioned the installation of a fourth rotor there were several instances where the allies had prior knowledge of events or attacks and chose not to pass on the information to troops on the ground or at sea the painful reality was that code breakers often knew that soldiers or merchant sailors were about to be attacked but for the greater good no action could be taken but that's not to say it wasn't carefully utilized information regarding irwin rommel's intentions in north africa was passed on to commanders on the ground and proved invaluable in finally defeating the most feared commander in the german wiermacht the formidable german vessel bismarck was finally sunk using information from broken enigma machines while the allies were able to use them to assess german defensive capabilities before d-day enigma was also used to plot u-boat patterns in the atlantic ocean which unquestionably saved many ships and countless lives in the process by 1945 almost all enigma codes being sent across the three german military arms were being decoded within a day or two the allies were able to read direct communications between german commanders as the allies swept across the continent to breakneck speed the question of whether the work of the enigma code breakers shortened the war is one that historians come back to time and time again some say a year others say two and when you put it like that what happened in the leafy tranquility of buckinghamshire just north of london may well have been some of the most important work across the entire war now it's easy to focus on the bombs and their relentless search for the enigma codes but this is a story that has quite extraordinary human actions throughout inexplicably the role of the polish code breakers is often overlooked simply put much of this may never even have happened if the poles had not had the foresight to construct their own enigma machines and pass on everything they knew to the allies just months before poland was overrun the work of marion rajewski henrik zagalski and jersey russitsky which began in 1932 a year before hitler became chancellor of germany laid the foundations for everything that was to come while there were thousands of unsung heroes working to decipher enigma we often come back to gordon welchman and of course alan turing two men with vastly different personalities and temperaments and who experienced two very different post-war experiences welchman who had been instrumental in the further developments of the bombs eventually moved to the u.s and became a professor at mit before passing away at the age of 79. the story of alan turing is altogether darker in 1952 he was charged with gross indecency relating to a homosexual act which was still a criminal offense in the uk at the time he pled guilty and escaped jail term on the condition he undergo chemical castration to reduce his libido and cure his homosexuality two years later his housekeeper discovered his body amid his messy apartment he had committed suicide by taking cyanide at the age of just 41. it wasn't until 2012 that the british government officially pardoned alan turing nearly 60 years after his death for a long time his full involvement with the enigma code breaking wasn't known the operation wasn't declassified until the 1970s but today turing is rightly revered as one of the most extraordinary british mathematicians and computer scientists one man can't win a war but one man can certainly make a truly remarkable contribution so i do hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe and as always thank you for watching you

Channel: Megaprojects

Views: 381,831

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Id: mHy6sdHHtDI

Length: 18min 4sec (1084 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021