In August 2012 Jani and Rick Rosen travelled to London and among the reasons was to attend a conference of Hams from around the world. Rick is an avid Ham radio operator and is involved with the Mt Airy VHF radio club whose web page can be accessed clicking here. The club calls its members the Pack rats and in 2012 the pack rats sponsered a trip to England to apparently visit ham radio oriented locations there.

Among the places visited was Bletchley Park. You may have heard of this location in England - in Buckingham Shire somewhat ot the west of London. This is where, during World War II, the German Enigma codes were broken. Rick and his wife, Jani, took a tour of the location and this is the pictures indicated below taken by them.

A little history for you, the reader. Early in the 20th century the British government had created Y branch whose duties were to intercept radio signals generally coming from Europe. As radio signals became coded, Y branch expanded to attempt to break the code. Codes started to become quite complex: not the traditional cryptogram where one letter replaces another. Starting sometime after WWI, a German company created a cypher machine for commercial use. This concept, which involved a series of cylindrical (rounded) rotors that were staggered to create unique codes given a starting position of the rotors generally called a key. Because of a lack of manufacturing capacity, the enigma machines were many times manufactured in Poland and were available for the right price in that country. As the German military started to become interested in the machines for military use, the Polish government services interested in German military activities began the process of trying to decode the Enigma messages. These Polish intelligence service attacked the codes mathematically.

When the Germans invaded Poland this work was surrepticiously moved to France where the attack on the codes continued. When France was attacked by the Germans, the work, with several Polish and French mathematicians and intelligence officers, ended up in Bentchley Park. The location soon became filled with mathematicians (Alan Turing being one of many), German speaking military officers, Crossword and puzzle aficiandos (in fact the authorities put spotters onto English transportation systems to find crossword and cryptogram puzzle enthusiasts who might be recruited into this attempt at breaking the German codes).

After a while, led by Turing and others, what we know today as computer technology was in essence invented there to provide the throughpower to crack the equations necessary to read the codes. To efficiently read such, the initial settings of the rotors had to be determined. The German's estimated that a random message might need a billion attempts to crack it. With Turing supplying the mathematics, the British got this down to thousands to one odds and this disadvantage against time efficient decoding was overcome by these early computers which the British designated as Bombes. And, especially, by the first prototype, of what eventually became known as Colosses. Today, Colosses is considered by many experts to be the world's first computer although for many years, given that information on these British machines were hidden from the public, The Eniac designed by Mauchley and Echart at the University Of Pennsylvania was given these honors.

German rotor settings, which were the initial positions of the rotors and made decoding such a difficult and arduous chore, were changed often - daily in fact - and so was to some degree the configuration of the Enigma machines. During the war the machine configuarations became more complicated with additional rotors (and type of rotors in terms of number of cylindrical turns) added. Most people think that the decoding was started every day from scratch. But, quite a bit of cloak and dagger activities aided the code breakers. Several German embassies around the world were broken into to surrepticiously copy/recover code books and rotors. But primarily sinking German submarines - abandoned by the crew yet not successfully scuttled - and attacked German weather ships were a valuable source of codes and machinery.

Much of the US attempts at code breaking was aided by the knowledge of British attempts and to some degree cooperation between the codebreakers of both countries started before the US entered the war. Since the German's had extended the enigma technology concepts to the Japanese, US navy (the Navy took the lead in this) codebreakers were able to use British examples to break "purple" as the Japanese naval code, officially designated as JN25 at the time of Pearl Harbor, was called. Eventually NCR started to build bombe and "colosses" machines for both countries and it is said that by the end of the war Allied commanders had the decoded translated German orders before their German counterparts.

The German's used at least 6 different variations of Enigma throughout the war. The three services, Wehrmacht, Kreigsmarine and Luffwaffe used separate versions it is believed and certainly different starting keys. Add in the diplomatic corp and the Nazi party and this makes five. At least one more, involving the weather ships positioned surrepticiously in the Atlantic were a sixth. At Bletchley park separate tents were established for the different Enigma codes and appropriate service members manned the various tents. Very specific and tight methods of distributing the information gleaned from the decrypted codes were established to deny knowledge of this decrypting from the Germans and therefore radical changes in code creation by the Nazis occurred but was limited which was a good thing as any major change this would black out this source of information for a varying amount of time.

When the war ended Winston Churchill gave the order to destroy everything on the British side associated with breaking the Enigma code. The original equipment, not to mention the original Colosses machine - and its knockoff(s) by NCR - were physically broken up into smitherines. It was not until the late 70's that this part of history became known generally as British historical documents were released as black out periods expired. Today, as Jani and Rick found out, you can visit a museum at Bletchley park dedicated to the decoding of the German enigma machine recognizing that much of the exhibit has been rebuilt and is not original.

You can see why Jani and especially Rick and his compatriots from the Mt Airy VHF club would be interested in visiting the Bletchley park site. And the pictures below show their visit to the museum. Why this web site would be interested will be discussed below the pictures.

Apparently this is one of the few Israeli dance web sites with its own history editor. To be fair, he has a lot of interests and they have shown up at random on various scripts. The latest as this is written on July 1, 2015 is a history of KYW radio and television. Even more interesting is that this script on KYW involves Israeli dancing in a fashion. One thing he has not been able to do is encompass Israeli dancing with his interest in Ian Fleming and James Bond. The Rosen's 2012 trip occurred after the Fleming centennial celebrations of 2008 and one assumes that Bletchley park museum presentation as displayed in 2012 was affected by the recent Fleming centennial. Fleming's position as the assistant to the Chief of British naval intelligence during the war surely gave him knowledge of the naval decoding occurring at Bletchley park. Jani and Rick were able to see references to Fleming while touring the museum. We've asked our editor to add a few words about this and this is indicated below

Fleming always showed tangential interests to his actual work assignments so it's not surprising that when a naval liasson was needed, he would have voluntered assuming he wasn't so ordered. What's interesting is how cryptography and coding machines are used in his James Bond books - or perhaps the lack of use in his body of work. There are two James Bond books that deal with cryptography. Specifically in 1957's "From Russia With Love" Bond attempts to steal a Russian Spektor decoding machine not realizing that this is part of an elaborate Russian plot to strike a blow against the British "secret service". Seven years later, in 1963, Bond is sent to Japan to facilitate the transfer of decoded information - designated as Magic - that the Japanese are acquiring from Russian transmissions. In this book, "You Only Live Twice", Fleming, voiced through Bond's chief M, describes the Japanese as the world masters in decryption although this ability certainly wasn't shown during World War II as Fleming certainly knew.

One would think that his inside knowledge might have allowed decryption to be an added component of plot line in other books but a possible explanation was that Fleming was writing his stories before the 30 year period of secrecy that Britain imposed on such discemination after the war would have ended and perhaps Fleming was worried about prosecution for this type of violation. Fleming had found a loophole in the official secrets law by taking real events that he was aware of at that time and fictionalizing them. Our reading on this subject indicates that there were several instances where he was investigated, although not prosecuted, as to a violation of the then existing law.