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During
World
War II, Germany wreaked havoc in Europe and the North
Atlantic by taking over sovereign nations such as Poland and France,
and were at the doorsteps of invading England. In order to maintain
such a campaign, the German high command had to secretly communicate
with remote commanders by encrypting their messages. The device
that predominately enabled this was called the Enigma
Machine.
With
help initially from Poland
and France, the English
and eventually the Americans
became relentless in their pursuit of cracking German encoded
messages. This operation of the flow of decrypted messages by
the English and Americans at Bletchley Park (BP) was code named
Ultra. Around the clock operations consisted of many men and women
armed with paper, pencils and makeshift mechanical devices. Since
the Enigma
Machine had more configurations than the number of
conceivable atoms in the known universe, the German's became over
confident in its strength. So, during the middle of the war when
allies were winning battles in northern Africa and German U-boats
were sinking rapidly, the Germans did become suspicious and made
their ciphering process even more difficult to crack by adding
additional rotors to their Enigma
Machine. Germany brought Great Britain to within a
few weeks of available resources by sinking ships across the Atlantic,
convoy after convoy, within the supply lines coming from the U.S.
and Canada.
So,
desperate times required the most critical minds to figure out
a solution to this creeping problem. Max Newman, who became a
mathematics professor, Alan
Turing and other English mathematicians and scientists
built the first programmable and electronic digital computer out
of vacuum tubes called Colossus.
This computer sped up the process for cracking the continuous
stream of German enciphered messages and led to the successful
coordination of the D-day, Normandy invasion and a quicker end
to the war. Altogether, many thousands of people worked on cracking
enemy codes at BP. A combination of brilliance, espionage, mathematics,
hard work, operator error, and technology led to this secret victory.
This entire process undoubtedly shortened the war by many months.
Moreover, these events resulted in a pivotal moment in the history
of computing with the birth of the modern
day computer.
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