Maggie's Farm

re: typo ends WWII

This article is misleading. While the discovery and salvage of the cryptographic keys and cribs from U-559 was an important discovery in the short term, it was only one of several major hauls of code books and German naval Enigma equipment, and wasn't the center mass of the decryption effort. The capture of the U-559 was very helpful, but it probably wasn't that important in the end. The reason there was no naval decryption going on in hut 8 at Bletchley when U-559 was captured, was that the German Navy had recently switched to a long rumored four rotor Enigma machine, rendering the prior naval code decryption efforts void. Fortunately, there was a crib book - captured in both U-559 and from the earlier seizure of U-110, that explained how to convert four rotor enigma code into a format compatible with the older three rotor machines. With the help of that crib book, and of course confirmation of the suspicion the Germans had switched to a four rotor system for naval code, decryption could continue.

At the same time the Army Enigma machines were regularly getting captured and exploited, helped in part by the rote nature of German daily tactical reports, which all included a "Heil Hitler" in the same place, contained identically formatted paragraphs with identical titles, and so forth. All this decryption was built on top of a huge foundation of math and game theory pioneered by Polish mathematicians, and the famous decryption machines - essentially analog computers that would systematically test for all possible combinations of letters within a range using the same mechanical logic as the Enigmas - were based on "bombes" built by the Poles pre-war and improved upon at Bletchley. Although it helped, in no way did the capture of U-559 shorten the war by 2-4 years. That is pop history nonsense.