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    Who Broke the Wartime Codes?
    Who Broke the Wartime Codes?
    Who Broke the Wartime Codes?
    Ebook101 pages51 minutes

    Who Broke the Wartime Codes?

    By Nicola Barber

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    About this ebook

    How do we know about the men and women who broke important World War II military and diplomatic codes? What were the challenges, and what happened to them? This book shows how we know about the Allied codebreakers and their experiences from primary and other sources. It includes information on some historical detective work that has taken place, using documentary, archaeological, and oral evidence, that has enabled historians to piece together the fascinating story of those who provided top secret information known as Ultra and Magic.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCapstone Young Readers
    Release dateDec 21, 2015
    ISBN9781484635599
    Who Broke the Wartime Codes?

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      Book preview

      Who Broke the Wartime Codes? - Nicola Barber

      CONTENTS

      A DARING RAID

      WHAT WERE WARTIME CODES?

      WHO WANTED TO BREAK THEM?

      WHAT KIND OF PEOPLE WERE THEY?

      WHAT DID THEY DO TO BREAK THE CODES?

      WHO USED THE INFORMATION THEY FOUND?

      WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CODE-BREAKERS AFTER THE WAR?

      WHY WAS THEIR WORK SIGNIFICANT?

      TIMELINE

      GLOSSARY

      FIND OUT MORE

      INDEX

      Some words are shown in bold, like this. You can find out what they mean by looking in the glossary.

      A DARING RAID

      It is spring 1941, in the midst of World War II (1939–1945). At a secret location in the United Kingdom, thousands of men and women are working desperately to intercept and understand the wireless messages transmitted every day by the German armed forces. The Germans use a secret code—Enigma—to protect the information in their messages. Breaking this code allows the Allies to know what the Germans are planning—it is invaluable information. However, it is also very difficult to do.

      RAIDS

      The British code-breakers need to crack the German navy’s codes, because the German U-boats (submarines) are a deadly threat to Allied merchant ships in the Atlantic Ocean. One of the code-breakers comes up with a plan to seize the settings sheets and one of the machines used to generate the code—an Enigma machine. These trophies would give them the clues they desperately need. In May 1941, in a highly secret operation, the Royal Navy manages to capture a German weather ship and seizes its settings sheets. They sink the weather ship, to avoid letting the Germans find out that the setting sheets have been taken. Then, only a few days later, British destroyers force a U-boat (U-110) to surface. Believing the U-boat to be sinking, the commander does not destroy his Enigma machine or its codes. They, too, are seized by the British.

      HISTORY DETECTIVES: KEEPING SECRETS

      The activities of the code-breakers remained secret far beyond the end of World War II. It was only in the 1970s that the true story began to emerge. Thousands of people kept their wartime jobs a complete secret from everyone, including friends and family. This book looks at how and when those secrets began to come out, and the story of what has happened since.

      This Enigma machine was used by the German military during World War II to encode wireless messages.

      ULTRA SECRET

      These are just two episodes in the secret world of code-breaking in World War II. Of course, all sides used codes, and all were trying to break each other’s codes. This book, however, mainly examines the work of the Allied code-breakers in the two most significant operations. The first of these was Ultra, the name given to information obtained from the messages intercepted and deciphered by the British. The second was Magic, which was information gained by American code-breakers by intercepting and unscrambling Japanese signals. The huge value of both operations was that Germany, Italy, and Japan remained unaware that their codes were being broken. The name Ultra suggests this—it was considered even more secret than top secret! This was important and, as we will see, the Allies went to huge lengths to disguise and protect their code-breaking activities.

      WHAT WERE WARTIME CODES?

      Codes and ciphers have been used since ancient times. We know of secret codes used by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. The oldest known military cipher was the scytale, which dates back at least 2,500 years. Imagine a long piece of leather (or papyrus), which is wrapped around a piece of wood. A message is written on the leather along the length of the wood. Then the leather strip is unwound. It contains a meaningless jumble of letters—until it is wound around a piece of wood of exactly the same width, when the message is suddenly revealed.

      The advantages of not giving away your plans to your enemy were also well understood by the ancient Roman military leader Julius Caesar. The Caesar cipher substituted letters by shifting the whole alphabet along, often by three places. So a became d, b became e, and so on. We know about this cipher and about the scytale from descriptions by ancient writers.

      HISTORY DETECTIVES: WHAT IS A PRIMARY

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