Using an Original WW2 Enigma Machine! With Mat McLachlan

[Music] [Applause] in the darkest days of World War two Britain's brightest and best gathered in this country estate to do battle with the Nazi war machine led by cryptographers including Allen cheering and Gordon welchman their challenge was to crack Germany's impregnable decipher machine in England and their prize nothing short of victory in world war two come with me as I walk in the footsteps of the men and women who made history at Bletchley Park this coding enigma and it's a remarkable building what is this well and why is this the focal point of Bletchley Park this is a building we know as the mansion it was built in the late 19th century by local businessman Sir Herbert Leone and was bought by the government within the 1930s as a wall station as they called it for the the codebreakers the government code and cypher school so why why was Bletchley chosen as the focal point for the Cobre well it was a opened to have somewhere outside of London because of the risk of enemy bombing to a lot of government departments and organizations did exactly the same thing but actually was very convenient because it was by her very good connections with London the rail with both road and rail also with Oxford and Cambridge where some of the first recruits like Alan Turing came from and thirdly there was a very good telecommunications line so all the electronic communications at Bletchley needed to receive the intercepted enemy messages and to send out the intelligence reports they were already the infrastructure to be able to do that so when did this building become part of the the code-breaking 1938 it was bought by the the head of mi6 who was also the head of government code and cypher school it was used during the Munich crisis in 1938 when there was the risk of war with Germany and it was used as a sort of like a rehearsal almost for what happened a year later after the Munich crisis the code breakers moved back to London but then came here again in the middle of August 1939 when it looked fairly obvious that war he was looming and at that time as well as the existing 150 or so people start from London that's when people like Alan Turing Gordon Welshman who were on this list of clever people who could be used in time of war started to arrive how many people worked at Birchley Park over the course of the war in total by or the greatest number towards the end of the war was nearly 9,000 and that's why they had to build all the huts that you'll see later all the brick blocks as the place expanded so much but I should also stress it wasn't just at Bletchley Park that the code-breaking activity happened because you needed sites where enemy signals were intercepted so you needed wireless operators what we're known as why stations you needed the the teams to transmit Bletchley parks products to the political and military leaders who needed to be able to read the intelligence so they were probably with all these other tasks they were about fully about another 9,000 people so getting on for 20,000 people working either either at or for Bletchley Park by the by late 1944 just extraordinary sure you go and have a look inside let's do that yes it's a beautiful building it is Wow what was this building used for Jonathan before it became this central area for code-breaking well it was a it was a private house a big private house belonging to Sir Herbert Leon a local businessman and briefly in the very early years for 20th century liberal MP I'm just going to pull the house down and build houses new houses on on it but it was bought instead by the government and as you can see it's set up as it would have been an office during the Second World War probably it's supporting the very senior people like commander Denniston the head of government code and cypher school preparing his his reports that he was then sending to Churchill from decrypted enemy communications we're now going to commander denniston's office tomorrow Denison was the head of government code a cipher school at Bletchley Park for the first few years of the war and he'd been working for the organization since the first world war in signals intelligence and he was the man responsible for the idea that we should with more approaching the organization should recruit people of with the skills that we needed for for code breaking so that's why people like Alan Turing were recruited it was planned and well planned before the war so that's on the I think I think Alan Turing arrived on the 4th of September the day after we started was that because that's like an operation so some of the key decisions will affect the of the war we have been made in this room I was saying I'm right now certainly the decisions as far as the people we need to do this the organization that needs to be set up the scale of it you know all the decisions about that would have been had their origins in discussions probably in this room with the senior people who worked at like Alan Turing Gordon welcome and some of the well-known names of story here at the center of the efforts to break the German codes was a single truly remarkable piece of technology the Enigma machine Wow so here it is this is an original Enigma machine an authentic original one that was used by the Germans in the Second World War so what's in this box would have been used by a German messengering the second jurors send toted in English totally they were about 85 90 thousand of these made in the Second World War because every division of the German Army Air Force and Navy would need an Enigma machine to be up to encipher and decipher messages so this is one of those original 85,000 machines Wow can I have a look you can indeed that's just the catch on the front ok Wow is an amazing piece of technology which will work for but yeah if we pull down the front as well you'll see that these these wires on the plugboard they also play an intrical part in how complicated and how advanced this cipher machine was that the Germans developed throughout the 1920s and 1930s and you were saying feel this is the actual machine that was used in the imitation yeah it was this is a film star this is it we do make a joke laughter it's a Hollywood film star but the egg seems a little bit wouldn't but yes does it work I can't save me the rare privilege of actually using an Enigma machine yeah how do I even begin Oh let's break it down first we've got obviously the rotors of the essential engagement of decoder yeah yeah then the visit the plugboard like word on the front and it's the combination of the plugboard the wire settings and the rotors and which rotors being used in what setting position produces the fantastically huge number of different possibilities you need to know to be able to read the ciphers so that the operator would type on this keyboard that's right and then these lights would light up that's right that's what that's what they would write down this was so the the the plaintext went in here and the coded message came out depending on which light it feds flew yeah so every single letter changes every single time so ifs a so you press a key on the keyboard the electron routing within the machine changes it into another letter and that letter is as I say signified by the bulb that lights up okay so we should we give it a go yeah absolutely absolutely we turn it on first of all like all machines it needs a power source I guess if you should press any key press it nice and firm and hard to the bottom opera's s and you'll see if that's changed it to s okay press s again for me yeah and let's see what happens this time and that's a P so X star P okay so actually because another if you notice that one of these rotors moves if you'll impress another key you'll see a way to lose I see okay and it's just W and it's come on and now 4sw again and out to be announced be so the way to move on each time he's changing the direction of electrical current that goes through the machine okay and therefore that's producing the cipher the key to this is as you say that work that normally the operators work in pairs one person would be typing the letters and a colleague would be writing down the letters that light up so they always work in pairs you cannot read it's impossible to bear to read or decipher that message unless your machine which might be 700 miles away the other side of Europe is set up in their identical fashion to the sending machine so fill the variables that required to make this work the rotors firstly can be removed can't they and they've got to be put back in in the correct order they do have to be set on the right starting position we have to know that what order to put to plug the plugs in on the front board indeed we have a look inside we can yes and as we said we've seen you can see there that we've got three waiters within the machine but in fact for the majority of nibel machines there were more than three writers there were five so if we we go to this box this is be the the supporting case we've got two more rotors here so hey let me get this straight so there's the three rotors that go in the machine that's what you can choose from five and H one is configured differently and they had to change every day at midnight that's okay so what we've got here we've got a code sheet and these sheets a key sheet these were disputed once a month to that particular key and for each day and you see the dates of the month go from 1 up to 31 for each day they would have to reset the machine normally at midnight each day because they need to correspond the time of the change otherwise during those intervening hours they would not be able to read each other's messages or duties these are as messages so the example there if we start they start the top on the 31st we've got Roman numerals here and four three five and for what that actually means is within the machine can we put in rotors three five and four guys Roman numeral system exactly and there's Remington was here so we've got a Roman numeral people see that but we've got Roman a number two on that one so we put in three five and four in the holder and that was the first challenge because rarely did Bletchley Park have access to these caches these were heavily protected by the German forces so three five and four as we've said that the total number of combinations for those rotors is sixty because any three in any order from a total selection of five means there are sixty positions they get increasingly more difficult because if we look each of these writers have got twenty six different settings or twenty six numbers on there which represent the letters of the alphabet you know what I love about all this I've gotta say but it's so fantastic it's all mechanics there's their computers there's no microchips it's all mechanics and I'm looking here at this rotor and I see that it's the the basic composition is these electric contacts on this side and then the contracts are the contacts on the side and then the I assume a very complicated system of wires in the middle to make Rand and so that's a threat so every one of those 26 numbers which representing 28 close to that bet inside this each of these individually it will change it from one letter to another so really what we're talking about is an electrical wire that is run through a very complicated system exactly to make a signal the other end to lead to a light bulb coming on when you prosecute its thanks it's incredibly simple and incredibly ingenious at the same time it's simple and complicated at once undoubtedly it is basically yet as you're quiet it's an electrical circuit bares the most difficult electrical circuit I can imagine how many possible combinations are they after all of this after plug boards rotors putting the rotary in and setting the rotor positions adjusting these starting positions okay what are the odds that I would be able to sit down if I walked out of this room now you did it and I came back in what is the chance that I could look down and just guess we can explain it in a couple of ways and I've both both of them are mind-boggling but the total number of different combinations taken into taken into account all of the factors you've just mentioned there's over 103 sextillion different possible combinations I've no idea never eyes exactly exactly 136 Dylan it's actually got 24 characters in it so it's got just 24 digits long this is how difficult it was if we were to do a brute-force attack and that's modern-day language for tests and every single possibility so if I was to do a Broadway stack at the speed of 1 per second it would actually take and this is a mind-boggling length of time it would actually take well put this way the universe is 13.8 billion years old 103 quintillion seconds is 240,000 times the history the universe you're not gonna guess it's not gonna be a suitable ploy to sit here and there try recombination you're not gonna guess and obviously I only checked them every day and they change them every day and there wasn't just one key we didn't have to break in nygma once every day they're up to 20 different keys the german luftwaffe used a separate key to the Navy they used a separate key to different divisions of the army the Panzer divisions used separate keys so we weren't breaking enigma once every day we were attempting to break it dozens of times every day feel I understand as well that some human error crept into the system to do with the initial settings of these rotors which was really important to to the integrity of the cipher was in the deep it was indeed and there was human error and I guess laziness or a lack of awareness of why it was important from the German operators which would gave us another breakthrough because they were meant to randomly scramble these wheels every day every single day to create a unique start position for the messages for that day but John haribol a Code Breaker came up with a theory that maybe they didn't do that maybe they were lazy maybe they didn't realize the consequences of it so maybe they only moved them one or two places so by using that information and testing that theory we began to recognize patterns of behavior for certain operators and indeed some operators used the same password every day or the same three letters of famous stories and an operator who uses girlfriend's name and the girlfriends name was CIL short for Celia CIO they became known as the sillies and that's actually reference we talked about the imitation game earlier that's referenced in the imitation game because once we recognize as certain operators were using specific glyphs ain't part passwords in modern day no is using specific ones and not changing them again that was another opportunity to circumvent the massive number of combinations that the voters and the Wolves developed so each little bit of information brought together was another step in breaking enigma yes the mathematicians were fantastic and the scientist from potato but a lot of it was behavioral science as well it was understanding that mistakes to Germans might made but but above all it was picking up as you quite rightly said that it was picking up on the mistakes and the commonalities and the shortcuts that many of the job at a German opera is used to and during the war and by by picking up a nose we were able to find such a big difference to the outcome of the second world war should we do a message let's do this Lester yes so we'll close it back down again we see how this works my mystery identifier was just going to use this because it's in this state it could be anywhere we've got 25 I'm just gonna do this name 2506 17 and we said they use passwords but that 2506 17 actually is just the position in the alphabet so the Germans actually have kindly quite a nice little guide for us so 25 that's what the letter y o 6 is the sixth letter in the alphabet which is F and 17 is the 17th level F that which is Q so my unique password for today is yfq and obviously remembered that I should change this every time I've every day of every message but as we said before the Germans didn't change them every day so we didn't have that complication but what should we send we listed a fairly short word or a name what would you like to let's do Normandy Normandy yeah thank you Evans defending for d-day okay so we'll write down Normandy one thing I would say about this machine is it can be fairly temperamental he's 80 years old and particularly the letter O might not light up but that's fine because actually that would be exactly what happened during the Second World War maybe a bulb was broken maybe there was a loose connection maybe as they were typing the message a bomb went off and they didn't quite get it so quiet and there would be gaps in the message but we could still work out what that message says so we're gonna get if you're gonna create for me the word Normandy we're working pairs like they would have done in the Second World War if you mention our shout to me what let lights happen will halt right that's not gonna hit this encrypt this message yeah so we could be okay we've got before - in that happens occasionally yeah our is x e I yeah right - yeah again Oh again okay yeah did he it's cute okay so we've received the message we've intercepted this message and we've got B one's been destroyed so we put a dash in there we've got B dash XE o oq s so that's no relevance whatsoever what does that mean we don't know what that means but if we can break the cipher and we can know the original start positions for those three writers we can read that message so for the Germans as long as they know the message identifier and they've got that communication because that is part of the message that's been censored it's double encrypted so it is disguised within the message but they've got it they can reset the machine so if we reset the machine we've now got the same setup at the other end we've got the same message identifier now if we type in fingers crossed on this one if we type in these letters we'll get but actually this communication is about Normandy so if you want to do the honors again let's press B we get n again obviously we didn't know where slit was but we need to keep the sequence going so you press any letter and I'll put a dash in there anyway yeah so now X is an extra X and no sorry M oh this might be where we have a problem because this machine can be temperamental now press over again and we get an end this time excellent okay yeah there we go Q yeah we've got B yeah yeah yeah and now if you press s and your Y we get Y so even looking at that even with a couple of letters missing and this would happen quite often the Second World War this for the intelligence services as well as breaking the ciphers would also have to I guess decipher military German decipher words that have been shortened work out what the message might be although maybe the frequency when you know they couldn't tune into that message properly but they would still be able to work out what the words that so even now if we look at that what does that say that's Normandy I feel I can't tell you what a what a rare thrill that is that little experiment we just did knowing the millions and millions of combinations that go into this machine and we've just seen in action it's not absolutely one wonderful piece of engineering they say it's amazing they said it's a pleasure to be working with these machinery and this location every day is it's a privilege which I really enjoy glad you've enjoyed it as well Phil we're walking next to these quite impressive World War two hero huts and this is really the heart of Bletchley Park isn't it the work that was done to decode these messages to break enigma took place in these rather nondescript buildings didn't it did once we realized that the war was going to continue for more than a few months than these wooden huts were built and they were added to throughout the war we went from initially 70 70 code breakers up to an industrial unit of code breaking of over 9,000 people 3,000 people every eight hours coming through the front door so so it was 24/7 operation but lots of the jobs were actually quite routine and mundane the operation of the bomb machines which a mrs. Alan Turing and good emergent design was a mainly task people putting him wires and brushes and for hours at a time lots of the codes coded messages weren't so broken they had to be indexed manually on paper index cards cross-indexed so that we would end up with thousands and thousands of cards a day and some people of estimated there was over six tons of paper every couple of weeks of paper index cards recording the information so that it could be referred to in a few weeks time well I suppose that's crucial isn't it because decoding the message didn't mean much if it wasn't a system for disseminating that information and making sure it reaches the people that made it quite right and that's why you've got this some of the house had different functions because even once the message was broken that would then be passed on to another part of military intelligence those messages once broken were in German so we need translation teams we also did Japanese codes here and the Italian codes so you need people translating it then you need military experts to interpret that information and then cross-index it so it was a huge task nine thousand people working for what six years to get those small little snippets of information to then bring those all together it's actually made the contribution that was made here at Bethel Park probably the most famous of the code breakers was Alan Turing in fact about a scene the imitation game the movie the told his story from your position as someone who knows this place going inside now how accurate was that really in telling the story of enigma yeah we just could discuss it quite a lot certainly the South the genuine tenant of it and that probably the opening 20 minutes of movie very accurate but then Hollywood days actually got into a little bit shall we say so we tend to say it's about 4045 sent okay there have been some poetic license added to the spy in the movie as being a code breaker there wasn't any coke breakers that were spires there would people work to and he ended up we identified as being spires but they never actually found out we were breaking trying to say they never knew that the the general ISIL I suppose the code breaking suggests we had the Germans don't know no and in fact only found out in 1974 thirty years after the war would have finished that was essential as well wasn't it secrecy that thinking again if you break the codes and they know you know nobody changes again so say so you know the Marvel spot the stories Alan Turing the code breakers but for me in many ways thankfully was kept secret for so long it was a combination of those two factors there's they made lists apart such a success [Music] you

Channel: Mat McLachlan History

Views: 43,710

Keywords: bletchley, ww2, war, military, history, enigma, imitation game, codes, encryption, cypher, world war 2

Id: JDlda6K_XmI

Length: 25min 31sec (1531 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 13 2019