Britain's Salvation: Cryptography At Bletchly Park
Britain's Salvation:
Cryptography at Bletchley Park
In the beginning of World War II, Britain set up an intelligence agency on the outskirts of London to be used as the center of intelligence operations during Britain's battle against Germany. The agency consisted of a group of small houses, dubbed "huts", within a large estate called Bletchley Park (Kahn 32). Here Britain's best scientists, teachers, chess champions and other great minds stayed for the majority of the war obtaining information that would help Britain win (Hinsley 4). The main focus of Bletchley Park was cryptography, the decryption of enemy transmissions. In the beginning of the war a new encoding system had been developed by Germany making it nearly impossible for Britain to decrypt intercepted messages. Using new technology and Britain's greatest minds, Britain was able to decode messages from the Germans, Japanese, and Italians. This breakthrough eventually led to the defeat of Germany in World War II. Though many people may contend that Bletchley Park did not significantly aid the British in defeating Germany, it in fact contributed greatly in obtaining information that eventually lead to Britain's victory of Germany. The contributions made by those at Bletchley Park in cryptography significantly aided the British in their defeat of Germany in World War II.
At the very beginning of the war, Germany developed a new encrypting system that perplexed British cryptographers for more than a year. It was known as the Enigma. Using a combination of three rotating wheels and changing the order of these wheels daily made it nearly impossible for the British cryptographers to decipher. The code changed every day and none of the intercepted messages were longer than a couple hundred letters (Sebag-Montefiore 57). Since the wheels rotated slightly for each character that was typed, the code had over 17,500 different codes on a given day. Because the code did not repeat...
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