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00:02Next on Secrets of War, throughout the 20th century, great nations and ideologies have battled in every corner of the
00:09globe in a secret war in the minds of men.
00:13In World War II, one of Germany's best kept secrets was an enigma.
00:17But this covert weapon would also become one of the greatest tools the Allies used against the Third Reich.
00:24The story of the Ultra Enigma is next on Secrets of War.
00:42The third Reich is next on Secrets of War.
01:10The third Reich is next on Secrets of War.
01:36Secrets of War
01:37After the First World War, Germany was a nation surrounded by former enemies.
01:43The Versailles Treaty limited the Germans to a standing army of only 100,000 men, no tanks and no combat
01:50aircraft.
01:53Germany had to come up with a way to mobilize so that fewer men could do the job of a
01:57much larger army.
02:00The German leadership was forced to rely on things that could not be limited by treaty.
02:06Engineering, design, automation, and the internal combustion engine.
02:18In World War II, the German military was forced to move forces to move forces from one side of the
02:23country to the other.
02:25An obscure German officer, Heinz Guderian studied British and French theories of armored warfare.
02:32While most generals believed the tanks should be dispersed along the front and used only in infantry support, Guderian devised
02:43a new doctrine.
02:44The Panzer Corps, a radical new idea to employ high-speed tanks and mechanized infantry combined with mobile artillery and
02:54close air support.
02:57And all the units would have the same speed in the field as the tank.
03:04Guderian became known as a tank commander, but he was first a signals officer.
03:09To coordinate his revolutionary doctrine of rapid tactical maneuver, every tank was outfitted with radio.
03:19The dive bombers will form a flying artillery directed to work in harmony with ground forces through good radio communications.
03:29The real secret is speed. Speed of attack through a speed of communications.
03:35General Gerhard Milch, Secretary of State for Air.
03:40At sea, radio was even more indispensable.
03:44The German Navy realized that it couldn't win any future war against Great Britain by beating them at sea with
03:51battleships.
03:52It had to strangle Great Britain and it could only do this with submarines.
03:57Then a young officer, Karl Dönitz, took over command of the U-boats.
04:02Dönitz realized that the only way in which the U-boats could work effectively against the convoy was in concerted
04:12action.
04:12U-boats would transmit reports.
04:18Dönitz would coordinate the naval campaign from land using radio.
04:24With all units under radio control, commanders could exploit the changing battlefield.
04:30The secret weapon of the blitzkrieg, the lightning war, would be radio.
04:37It was also its secret weakness.
04:40The enemy would be listening.
04:47The Germans had paid dearly for cryptologic failure in the past.
04:53Early in World War One, the German light cruiser, the Magdeburg, ran aground in the Baltic Sea.
04:59The Russians, near whose territory this was, captured this ship and found in it the German Navy's secret code book.
05:09A Russian destroyer was dispatched to bring the book to London to the first sea lord, Winston Churchill.
05:17The British used it to decode German naval messages throughout the war and bottle up the German fleet.
05:26In the battles of Doggerbank and Jutland, the British exploited their secret knowledge.
05:34The unexpected presence of the English leads to the conclusion that the encounter was not a matter of chance,
05:41but that our plan in some way or other had got to the knowledge of the English.
05:47Admiral Scheer, commander in chief of the German high seas fleet.
05:52In 1925, Churchill published his history of World War One and made a blunder he would later regret.
06:01He gave away the secret that the Allies had broken the German codes.
06:06The Germans, upon reading this, realized that code books were too vulnerable to use in modern warfare.
06:16To command the Wehrmacht, the war machine, at machine speed, they needed a code machine, a truth-protecting machine,
06:25a machine to obscure, a machine to puzzle.
06:32In Berlin, the German engineer, Arthur Sherbius, demonstrated an encoding machine available on the commercial market.
06:41He'd named it after a haunting composition by the British composer, Sir Edward Elgar, the Enigma Variations.
06:50The Enigma cipher machine had a row of typewriter keys which you pressed to put the message into code.
06:57It ran through a current and emerged as lit up letters on a screen.
07:02So you pressed an A, out would come a Q, you'd press an A again, out would come an X,
07:06and so forth.
07:07The heart of the machine was a wired code wheel.
07:12It continues turning 26 times.
07:14Each time you're pressing A, a different letter will come out.
07:17Next to this wired code wheel, you have another one.
07:20So that when this one, like the odometer on your car, turns over one turn for one revolution,
07:25then the next one turns over one space.
07:28You can then have 26 times 26 times 26 times 26 is 17,000 and change number of combinations before
07:35those sequence of letters repeats.
07:39The problem for the decoder is not just finding the original wiring here, but determining which rotors are in which
07:48position and what starting position.
07:50And there were a number of other combinations.
07:52So this is an enormously complicated and very wide-ranging problem.
07:58You can keep changing these cylinders and keep changing the codes constantly so that even if the enemy managed to
08:07start to crack a message,
08:09by the time the enemy has cracked the message, the purpose of the message is all gone.
08:14The power of the Enigma was in the vast number of crypto variables or different combinations of encoding possibilities
08:22that it could generate with only five variable components.
08:26a plug board, three ordered rotors, each with 26 starting positions, a movable ring on each rotor, and a reflector
08:37half rotor.
08:38The number of these possible configurations was a figure so large that it had no name, except 3 times 10
08:46to the 114th power.
08:48By comparison, it is estimated that there are only 10 to the 79th power atoms in the entire observable universe.
08:59This gave the Germans confidence in their machine.
09:03As the Nazis gained power, this common enemy drew British and French intelligence together.
09:10But the Poles, surrounded and outnumbered, had a special need to know German intentions.
09:16Polish intelligence went on high alert.
09:19It monitored all forms of German communications, including the mails.
09:25About 1930, there was a parcel sent from Germany to Warsaw to the German consul there.
09:35That was Saturday, parcels were not delivered, so the Polish intelligence was informed about this.
09:42It was a code machine, an enigma, and they only had it for 48 hours.
09:49They make all possible copies, photographs, etc., packed this, that the Germans will not know that the package was opened.
09:57And it was delivered to German consul on Monday morning.
10:02The Poles had the insight that machine codes could be broken by mathematicians.
10:08They asked a promising young student, Marian Rajewski, to look into the enigma.
10:14A decoding job seems to me one of the most difficult, laborious, and both boring and thrilling things that you
10:24can do.
10:25You're looking at a sea of numbers or letters.
10:28They make absolutely no sense.
10:30What you're trying to do is find little patterns there.
10:35German messages were often transmitted on the same radio net.
10:40Each command had different keys.
10:42Before encoding, the sender set his three rotors to a setting from the key list,
10:47chose a wheel setting at random, and encrypted the key.
10:52He then sent the three letters.
10:54To avoid confusion, he sent these key letters twice.
10:58Rajewski saw quickly that they were the key.
11:01This knowledge set up harmonics, mathematical relationships he could exploit.
11:07The first potential break into enigma.
11:10Three Poles, cryptanalysts, Ruzitsky, Rajewski, and Zygarsky.
11:17They were young and full of ideas.
11:19Because to break something like enigma, you have also a vision.
11:24You have to have imagination.
11:26The greatest was Marian Rajewski.
11:29He produced some very elegant mathematical theories
11:31which enabled him to work out which rotors were actually in the machine
11:35for a particular transmission.
11:37But they couldn't decipher the messages,
11:40because the Germans, not being stupid, had used different wirings inside the rotors
11:44to do with those available on the commercial enigma.
11:48It looked hopeless despite their best efforts.
11:51The Poles couldn't crack the code.
11:54Then the Polish code breakers got a break from an unlikely source
11:59in the very shadow of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
12:07In 1931, a man walked into the French embassy in Berlin.
12:11He claimed to be an officer in the Schiffrierstädter, the German coding office.
12:17He offered to sell secrets.
12:20The French were suspicious.
12:23The man claimed to have documents relating to the Enigma machine.
12:29The bait was vital.
12:31Enigma could give them a window into the innermost secrets of the German command.
12:42The German officer was Hans Thielerschmitt.
12:46But what were his motives?
12:49It could be a provocation.
12:52A trick.
12:53He might be there to mislead them, or deceive them, or to entrap them.
13:01Why would a German officer betray the most closely held secrets of his nation?
13:07The answer was basic.
13:09The motive was money.
13:11The French assigned an agent, Colonel Bertrand, to look into the man's background.
13:17They found that Schmitt had an older brother, Rudolf, who commanded the code office.
13:26World War I had a little bit corrupted the young Schmitt.
13:30He was lazy.
13:31He was not interested in making an honest living.
13:35He preferred chasing girls to anything else.
13:40His brother, Rudolf, found a job for him in the cipher center.
13:46Hans Thielerschmitt was a sordid guy who realized that he had access to the most secret secret.
13:57He received about 10 million in today's francs, an enormous amount.
14:04It is certain we were dealing with a tough and intelligent man, and once he got the money, he wanted
14:12to quit.
14:14We had to make him understand that he had entered a world from which there was no escape.
14:25Bertrand quickly photographed the documents.
14:27When he returned to Paris with the negatives, he realized what he had.
14:31He had the key to Enigma.
14:34Bertrand went to his own people in the cipher office and studied the documents and said,
14:41well, it's a machine, it's impossible to do anything.
14:45Bertrand offered the secrets to the British, but had no more success.
14:51And the French at that time, as said the British, had got nowhere with breaking Enigma.
14:56They were trying linguistic attacks, which were bound to fail.
14:59And so the French, as a gesture of goodwill, gave this information to the Poles,
15:04not knowing what the Poles had been up to.
15:07Schmidt handed over two sets of keys for two different quarters,
15:11the last month of the third quarter and the first month of the fourth.
15:15This gave Rajewski what he needed.
15:18He compared settings in two quarters and found there were three rotors set in different order each quarter.
15:24With this information, for the first time, Enigma could be broken.
15:29But then, of course, the problem was they had to have the keys in order to put the...
15:33to set up the machine to break the messages that they would receive.
15:38In the next years, Schmidt met 34 times with the French.
15:42He handed over 25 keys.
15:46His handlers suspected his motives were changing.
15:49He had studied the Nazis and had joined the Nazi party to work against it.
15:55The originals went back into the Schifriersteller safe.
15:59The monthly keys found their way to Poland.
16:02Now Rajewski could work out the wiring.
16:05And this was one of the greatest feats of cryptography,
16:07and it raises Rajewski to the top of the pantheon of code breakers.
16:11So, by the beginning of 1932, the Poles had actually got the wiring of the Enigma rotors.
16:16They then manufactured copies of the Enigma machine.
16:21Rajewski then designed a machine he called the Bomba,
16:24which used 18 rotors to test the variations.
16:28The Poles had got so good at all this that they were actually breaking 75% of the messages they
16:34were intercepting.
16:35And they kept very, very quiet about it.
16:38What the Poles decrypted was terrifying.
16:43In November 1937, Schmidt informed us that a secret meeting had just taken place at the Reich's Chancellery.
16:52At this meeting, Hitler revealed his ambitions.
16:56In 1938, I want the Anschluss.
16:59After the Anschluss, I want Czechoslovakia, then the Sudetenland.
17:05After the Sudetenland, I want Poland.
17:08After Poland, I want to eliminate the Western threat by going to Belgium and the Netherlands and to France.
17:15He's also drawn a map that shows the territory he wants.
17:19And this map, we've got it thanks to Schmidt.
17:22We knew it in 1937.
17:25What have we done with this information?
17:28Nothing.
17:29The Germans were preparing for war.
17:32They turned their attention to the machine.
17:35They added new keys to the Enigma.
17:38And then in 1938, the Germans changed the system,
17:42which stopped Marian Rajewski's original mathematical calculations working.
17:46But then Zagalski produced some things called the Zagalski sheets.
17:50And these were perforated sheets with the grill method.
17:54By passing light through multiple stacked sheets, constants in the code were instantly recognized.
18:03But then the Germans introduced two more rotors.
18:07It was too much for the Poles.
18:09Suddenly, they realized they needed help.
18:14Delegation from France and delegation from Great Britain was invited to the small village Piri, not far from Warsaw.
18:22And there, Polish cryptanalysts presented each delegation with one Enigma built in Poland.
18:30As the British and the French spirited the Enigmas out of Poland, Hans Thilo Schmidt issued a final warning.
18:42One of the last messages he sent was in the form of a map with invisible ink.
18:47In June of 1939, he wrote,
18:50Watch out at the end of August.
18:55It's true.
18:57It's true.
18:58It's true.
18:59At daybreak on September 1st, 1939, Blitzkrieg was no longer just a theory.
19:07Tank divisions exploded into Poland.
19:10The Luftwaffe pounded airfields and supply lines.
19:19Britain and France declared war on Germany.
19:24The Polish cavalry attacked German tanks.
19:28Warsaw fell.
19:38Spring 1940.
19:40As Blitzkrieg threatened Europe, the enigmatic battle was joined in England, in a small railway junction town midway between Oxford
19:49and Cambridge.
19:51Bletchley Park, known as Station X, was secret headquarters for the Government Code and Cypher School.
19:57The members of GC and CS also called themselves the Golf Club and Chess Society.
20:04The British approach is to gather in Bletchley Park, outside of London, everybody they can think of who might be
20:13able to contribute to code breaking.
20:14They're going to get mathematicians, people who know how to break the crossword puzzle in the times.
20:21They are going to get daffy kind of people who are eccentric and wander around, but they've got good brains.
20:28So, in a sense, you've got the two cultures, one of the machine that's distrustful of human beings, and you've
20:35got the British society saying, hmm, well, we'll get these funny guys from Oxford together and they'll come up with
20:41something.
20:42They had put aerials all around and started listening to German radio transmissions.
20:46But they soon realised it wasn't a pretty bright idea to have aerials all over a site you wanted to
20:50keep secret.
20:51So they moved the listening out to the so-called Y stations, the intercept stations, all over the country.
20:57A young mathematician, Gordon Welchman, studied the intercepts.
21:02Different keys suggested different radio webs, different command structures.
21:09He charted the intercepts, started to find context to build a picture of the nets and keys.
21:16Meanwhile, Harry Hinsley, a young Cambridge student, analysed the traffic.
21:23Once the German radio network had had to extend itself along the Norwegian coast, you see, after the occupation of
21:32Norway, it became much more volatile.
21:35You know, its behaviour began to vary much more than previously.
21:41I began to be able to forecast naval movements because the behaviour of this great signal system was so strange
21:51that I had no doubt that it meant the movement of big ships out of the Baltic.
21:57And nothing so startling had happened before.
22:00I spoke to a man in the Operational Intelligence Centre and said,
22:05Do something. There is something going to move out of the Baltic. Big stuff.
22:11Hinsley was a 21-year-old undergraduate.
22:14Bletchley wasn't supposed to do intelligence work, only cryptanalysis.
22:20And he listened very patiently, wrote my comments in their war diary.
22:25But he wouldn't take it further.
22:29Anyway, they took no action.
22:32Two battlecruisers, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, went up the coast, sank the Glorias without any warning.
22:40He didn't have time to make a signal.
22:41No.
22:42And the first we heard about it was from a German radio broadcast.
22:45Well, you can imagine the results of that on the relations between us and the Admiralty.
22:51Bletchley was learning to combine signals intelligence with traffic analysis and with what they called cribs.
22:59It's not the cipher system, it's the humans around the outside that caused the problem.
23:04And this was very much the case with the Germans.
23:05They were very slipshod and they used very slap-happy ways of sending messages.
23:11In particular, of selecting message keys.
23:14One of the favorite people of Bletchley Park here was some poor German.
23:17Every week, he set his Enigma rotors to the letter start position, W-A-L, and then turned them to
23:24the message key, K-L-A.
23:27And after a while, they worked out this was Walter, and his girlfriend's name was Clara.
23:32That's how he remembered it.
23:33Every major command would send a birthday greeting to Hitler.
23:38Suddenly, several hundred air, ground, and naval commands would be sending encrypted messages to Berlin congratulating Hitler on his birthday.
23:49This gave them fantastic numbers of cribs.
23:53Now, a crib is known plain text in modern terms, where, from other inferences, you can guess pretty well what
24:01the text was, which was used to incifere this particular message.
24:08Crip hunting was a major exercise here.
24:11And it started as soon as you began to get traffic in.
24:14It was a continuous race against time.
24:17Every second counted.
24:19A hundred percent accuracy.
24:20Couldn't make any mistakes.
24:23I remember, for example, working for 36 hours at a stretch on one or two occasions.
24:29And being unaware of any fatigue, I found it enormous fun.
24:35The Germans changed the key every night at midnight.
24:38And if you could break one or two messages on that key, then you were in to the whole of
24:44the transmission for the rest of those 24 hours.
24:47A crib was a glimpse into the enigma, a crack in the armor.
24:53Now they must throw all their forces into the breach.
24:57And what they come up with is, we've got to get a machine that will crack that machine.
25:04The machine the British set out to build was first imagined by an eccentric mathematical genius.
25:12In 1936, Alan Turing wrote a paper on the computability of numbers and created something new.
25:21Turing was the first to bring scientific method into it at all.
25:26And that he followed through with the whole theory of probability and statistics,
25:29which was applied to all the aspects of the high-level work.
25:32He was brilliant. There's no question about that.
25:34And, of course, he had these eccentric behavior like a lot of people.
25:38But it was a bit extreme in him.
25:40There are certain things that Turing did which did annoy people.
25:43Like, he didn't say hello to people when he saw them first thing in the morning.
25:47On the basis, they'd actually said hello to them the day before.
25:49And he didn't seem to reason why it made any difference because the sun had broken again.
25:53Turing wandered around Bletchley wearing his gas mask.
25:57It aided his hay fever but added to his eccentric legend.
26:01He would see to the heart of a problem.
26:05That's a great gift, to be able to get right to the heart of a problem.
26:08It was the Entscheidungsproblem, the question of whether there is some mathematical method to learn the truth, to break a
26:17code.
26:18Cribs and breaks had reduced the practical possibilities generated by Enigma to 10 to the 23rd power.
26:25Only 100,000 billion, billion.
26:30The problem is, in this enormous range of 10 to the 20 possibilities, to find the one which gives you
26:37the solution.
26:38And you've got to find that quickly.
26:39He needs some very clever logical ideas to eliminate huge numbers of those possibilities.
26:44He came up with a very, I think, very brilliant idea.
26:48And that was that from a contradiction, you can deduce everything.
26:55Turing's idea is not to find the right answer, but the wrong ones.
27:00A wrong answer would give an infinite number of solutions.
27:04If you've got infinite solutions, the answer must be wrong.
27:08One could identify these and eliminate them.
27:13If you imagine this as being a search tree, where you have a peak and you go down to 10
27:19to 20 leaves at the bottom of this.
27:21The prior best knowledge was to work your way down this tree, looking for the one solution which gave the
27:26answer.
27:27Turing said, no, that isn't the way to do it.
27:29What you do is, you prune off all the branches that it can't possibly be.
27:34Right?
27:35And then you're left with a possible number of solutions which you then got to investigate.
27:39With human brain power, the idea of first eliminating wrong answers was useless.
27:45It would take years.
27:47But Turing attempted to model the mind as machine, in which thoughts could be broken down into small tasks
27:54and attacked step by step in machine logic.
27:58This obscure revolutionary thought would not only have the greatest effect on the war,
28:03but in ways not yet imagined on future civilization.
28:08Turing then took the idea of the Polish Bomba and developed it into the Turing bomb with dozens of rotors.
28:16This machine rapidly churned through all key possibilities.
28:21Wrong ones would churn on and on.
28:25Possible keys that couldn't be proven wrong, the bomb would stop.
28:31Crypt analysts set this potential key into the Enigma machine and typed in the intercepted code.
28:38If plain text decrypt came out, they had broken the key.
28:43They were in.
28:45And they reckoned in Hut 6 and Hut 8, they hadn't done very well if they hadn't broken it by
28:503 o'clock in the morning.
28:52And the bogey time for breaking the Enigma key was 14 minutes.
28:56When you combine Nazi stupidity with the German love of good order, you again get something which is very vulnerable.
29:07Because it meant not only did they send out these great statements of their marvellous victories each day, but they
29:17sent them out at the same time each day.
29:20So we could identify them.
29:23Not only did they send them out at the same time each day, but they sent them out on every
29:27channel.
29:28So if we were reading one cipher, we would get the clear.
29:33And we would use that clear to obtain key for another cipher.
29:40In the spring of 1940, the Allies were starting to break the codes, but without the ability to act on
29:46what they'd learned, there was little they could do.
29:51Although they declared it, the British were not prepared for war.
29:56On land, Blitzkrieg paused.
29:59Soldiers settled down to the Sitzkrieg, the phony war.
30:04At sea, the war was not so phony.
30:09Death and destruction stopped the North Atlantic.
30:19In the longest battle of the war in the Atlantic, Admiral Karl Dernitz's U-boats threatened the lifeline of the
30:26Allies.
30:29Churchill was always aware that this was the critical issue.
30:34If Britain had lost the battle of the Atlantic, we would simply have had to resign.
30:40We just would have to give up.
30:44In this critical battle, the naval enigma with a special keying system could not be read.
30:52And the idea that Turing constantly pressed on me, you cannot get into this naval enigma unless we can get
30:59some external material.
31:02That was enough. That was enough.
31:04Hinsley himself came up with the answer.
31:08The Germans kept two little trawlers on station in the Arctic.
31:14One off Greenland, one off Northern Iceland for weather reporting.
31:18I discovered their patrol positions, which were always the same,
31:22that they were on station for seven, eight weeks, and that they carried the enigma.
31:28Believe it or not, even in those little trawlers doing nothing but report weather, they had the enigma.
31:36And I guessed, I knew, that if they were out for eight weeks, they had to have more than one
31:43month's setting sheet.
31:46The current setting sheet would be on the operator's desk, and he had a bucket of water next to his
31:52desk.
31:52If he was boarded, he put the setting sheet in the bucket, and the ink ran.
31:59But the next months would be in the safe.
32:04Hinsley called the Admiralty.
32:08Destroyers steamed out of Scapa Flow.
32:12Just when the sun was coming out.
32:15Boarding party on board before the boys are awake.
32:19Our man down to the signalling office and the captain's cabin.
32:23Engineer breaks the safe.
32:25Up they come.
32:27Tow the trawler back to Scapa Flow.
32:29Put the German crew in Canary in very secure premises where they won't be able to report that they'd been
32:37boarded.
32:37You see.
32:38Beautiful job.
32:40Nice, sweet operation.
32:45Every morning, eight o'clock in the morning.
32:48Regular as clockwork.
32:50He would come up.
32:51This is weather station Brest.
32:53Reporting at 0800.
32:55You put that on Turing machines and out comes the setting for the day.
32:58They were in to the naval enigma.
33:03Using it now offensively, we simply hammered the U-boats.
33:08Their life was a misery.
33:18We were informed by Schmidt about the German command's intention to penetrate Belgium
33:24and advance to France right through the Ardennes.
33:35French intelligence reported Schmidt's warning to the high command.
33:39The response was disbelief.
33:44They said it is not possible that an armored force, the Wehrmacht, could cross the Ardennes.
33:51It is not possible.
33:57But it was.
33:59For tanks and mechanized Panzer forces, the hills and valleys of the Ardennes presented no barrier.
34:06The Nazi blitzkrieg advanced in two pincers into the low countries in France.
34:11The British Expeditionary Force was cut off on the Channel Coast.
34:15It would take only a few days to destroy the British forces.
34:20Then Bletchley broke an intercept.
34:24With operator mistakes in the German Air Force, which was very badly trained as signalers,
34:31we broke the German Air Force.
34:34On the radio net, an argument raged.
34:38Field Marshal Hermann Goering boasted that his Luftwaffe would destroy the enemy.
34:43Panzer generals pleaded for permission to attack.
34:46But hoping for a negotiated peace, Hitler ordered his generals to hold.
34:56Through enigma intercepts, the British knew they had time.
35:00Time to mount Operation Dynamo.
35:02Time to evacuate Dunkirk.
35:13Now the Germans were poised for Operation Sea Lion.
35:17The invasion of the British Isles.
35:20But first, they must gain control of the skies.
35:23First, they must defeat the Royal Air Force.
35:34Churchill spoke to the nation.
35:37Never in the course of human endeavor has so much been owed by so many to so few.
35:44Not so few as was thought.
35:46The Battle of Britain was the RAF's finest hour.
35:50But Churchill knew and could not disclose that the secret army at Bletchley was growing.
35:55Nearly 10,000 people were now hard at work breaking enigma.
36:02With the fall of France, army messages went to more secure ground lines.
36:07But Luftwaffe intercepts revealed German thinking.
36:11On the Channel Coast, the Germans were lengthening runways for an air assault on Britain.
36:16In August, Goering's message to his troops decrypted as Adlertag, Eagle Day.
36:22Something was up.
36:26But what?
36:31Then, on August 13th, a Luftwaffe bomber stream appeared roaring down the Thames.
36:38Eagle Day, an all-out assault on London, was designed to break the will of the British.
36:45RAF fighters swarmed the first wave of bombers, then re-armed to meet the second.
36:51The bombers broke off the attack and fled.
36:54To the surprised Germans, it appeared that the number of British fighters was inexhaustible.
36:59The Germans lost heart.
37:01In September, Enigma broke a momentous message.
37:05Hitler had ordered the removal of invasion support craft.
37:09Britain had held off the vaunted Luftwaffe.
37:14Decrypted Enigma intercepts, now codenamed Ultra, started to play a part in an offensive strategy.
37:21And as you can imagine, Ultra, which was the product of the Enigma, had to be distributed and used with
37:29immense care.
37:31At every command post, there was a bletchly trained signaller and decipherer.
37:37It was they who did the signalling, took the decrypt across to the intelligence staff,
37:44stood over it till he was finished with, collected it back, burned it.
37:49It was very important that the field commanders understood, and they were expressly commanded by Churchill,
37:55that they were to take no action which could give away to the Axis forces that the information had come
38:02from Ultra.
38:06If you knew from Ultra that there was a ship in an area you wanted to sink,
38:09you would try to have an airplane show up near that ship that they would see drop out of the
38:15clouds,
38:15so that look out, say, oh, we've been spotted by an allied aircraft.
38:18So when it got torpedoed or attacked later, they didn't know it was because we had broken an encrypted message.
38:26In North Africa, signal security was critical.
38:29Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was reading a broken American code which revealed British plans.
38:38Informed by Ultra and by captured documents of the breach, the Americans changed their code.
38:47Rommel's legendary intuitive strategy waned.
38:52We got the Army Ultra enough of it just in time to enable General Orkinleck to keep Rommel out of
39:02Cairo.
39:03Every time Rommel planned or get through there, you see, Orkinleck could get his forces just in time.
39:11If it hadn't been for that ground intelligence, plus the resources that we were destroying, the Germans would have occupied
39:21Cairo.
39:23Montgomery used Ultra in a grand deception at El Alamein, which led Rommel to attack into a British trap.
39:40Part of the British objective was to supply them with false information about the nature of strategy, that magic word.
39:48The misleading mind of Hitler became a major industry in Britain.
39:53A very elegant industry, too.
39:56Churchill depended on Ultra, and he demanded daily decodes.
40:01While beneath the London pavement at Story's Gate, near the secret underground cabinet war rooms, a new covert organization was
40:09formed.
40:11The London controlling section was created to coordinate planning.
40:17Interception of Enigma, propagation of Ultra, and deception would be integrated into one grand strategy, summed up in words attributed
40:26to both Churchill and to Joseph Stalin.
40:30In war, the truth is so precious that it must always be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies.
40:46In 1942, in North Africa, the Allies battled back, but suddenly, without warning, the sea war turned against them.
40:59First of February of 1942, we lost the U-boats.
41:06Admiral Dernitz had introduced the four-rotor naval enigma and a new system of keys.
41:12He starts the second phase now with even more U-boats, with bigger range.
41:20The losses start going up to absolutely stupendous levels, higher than ever before.
41:29Bletchley named Dernitz's new key, Shark, and his losses mounted attacked it desperately.
41:36For eight long months, they failed.
41:39Then, in September 1942, the British destroyer Petard found a German sub in the Mediterranean.
41:51Death charges brought it to the surface.
41:55As the crew abandoned ship in the U-559 foundered, three British sailors dove into the sinking sub and grabbed
42:03the codes.
42:04Only one sailor got out.
42:07Anthony Fasson and Colin Grazier went down with the boat, but the British had the keys.
42:14In November, Bletchley broke back into Enigma, into Shark.
42:22But in 1943, yet another cipher machine appeared, which encoded and transmitted simultaneously by teletype.
42:31It was much faster and used at the highest level of Nazi command.
42:36The machine was called Geheimschreiber, secret writer.
42:40The British called the code, fish.
42:43The British used their experience with Enigma.
42:46They attempted to break fish.
42:50Again, it was serious procedural errors on the part of the German operators.
42:59Inadvertently, enciphering two messages using the same key.
43:05Turing's bomb was electromechanical.
43:08To break the new codes, they would have to build hundreds of bombs.
43:13They needed something faster.
43:15They needed the speed of electrons.
43:17They needed an electronic device.
43:21To break the secret writer, the Bletchley group created the world's first electronic computer.
43:29Colossus.
43:30It came online just in time for D-Day.
43:33With that cipher available, as well as the Enigma, we gradually were able to build up knowledge about the German
43:43forces opposing landing.
43:47We had the whole strategic and tactical picture of the German plans and dispositions for throwing off the invasion.
43:58Eisenhower embraced Ultra and made deception a key to his D-Day strategy.
44:05A phantom army under General George Patton was created to convince the Germans that the invasion would come at the
44:12Pas de Calais.
44:14The fact that we knew what the Germans were thinking and what they were saying and how many of these
44:19messages were being accepted enabled us to very much better plan this operation and carry out the deception.
44:44Persuaded that the Normandy landing was only a feint, Hitler held back his forces until it was too late.
44:53Ultra aided in the breakout at the Falais pocket in Normandy.
44:57Some Germans were suspicious.
45:00The Allies were too prepared, too intuitive, too lucky.
45:06The Germans were reluctant to face reality.
45:10The coding officers found it difficult to admit to themselves, to their chiefs, and to the Führer that everything they'd
45:17done was worthless.
45:21Instead, they believed the more obvious, that the Allies had penetrated the high command.
45:29To the Nazis, humans could be weak, but their war machine was infallible.
45:35Because of this arrogance, because they despised us so much, they held us in such content, they couldn't think that
45:45we, the Untermensch, the sub-race, could possibly be deciphering messages enciphered by the Ãœbermensch, the super-race.
45:56I mean, it was just contrary to their whole philosophy, and thank goodness for that.
46:03To the end of the Thousand-Year Reich, which lasted 12 years, the Germans entrusted their most secret plans to
46:12Enigma.
46:13They never caught on.
46:23The Enigma of Enigma is why the Allies were able to break it.
46:29The machine cipher was considered unsolvable.
46:32The Germans devoted great organizational skill to safeguarding their secrets.
46:37Yet the safeguard itself, and the supreme faith placed in it by its creators, became one of the most powerful
46:45weapons in the Allied arsenal.
46:48Many factors combined to break Enigma.
46:52Desperate poles created new mathematical theories.
46:56A German officer turned traitor.
46:58Tired soldiers gave out keys.
47:01Brilliant minds came together at Bletchley Park.
47:04But perhaps the most important element was the character of the Nazis themselves.
47:11TheÆ°Æ¡ng 3
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47:39Nazi tyranny did not encourage free thought.
47:44The Allies were able to identify and to put their best minds into cryptology.
47:50In Germany, the best minds did not go into cryptology.
47:56Many of the best minds went into concentration camps.
48:00To get rid of so many of your leading intellectuals if you want to conduct a high-tech war is
48:09absolutely stupid.
48:11The Nazis stifled thought and demanded allegiance to a race of supermen themselves.
48:19The Nazis were at war with the intellect.
48:23The best minds worked against them.
48:26The best minds broke the unbreakable enigma and, at the very least, shortened the war.
48:35People sometimes say that Ultra won the war.
48:39This is an exaggeration.
48:40The war was won by the men in the trenches, by the men flying the airplanes, by the men manning
48:46the ships.
48:47These were the people who won the war.
48:49What Ultra did was save an awful lot of lives.
48:53It did so by shortening the war.
48:56If Hitler had won the war, he would have dominated the entire Earth.
48:59That was his idea.
49:01And then his system would have lasted as he had hoped for a thousand years.
49:06That's what he was after.
49:07I think people just want to be modest in their claims.
49:11So they make a claim that is very reasonable, that he shortened the war by two years.
49:15But it might have saved civilization.
49:21After the war, Winston Churchill wrote a multi-volume history of the conflict.
49:26He'd learned his lesson well.
49:29He never mentioned Ultra.
49:32Marian Rajewski fled to England during the war.
49:35After the war, from the Polish government, he received a few minor medals.
49:40From the Allies, he received no medals, no rewards.
49:46Hans Thilo Schmidt was betrayed by a French agent.
49:49In 1943, he died in Gestapo hands.
49:55In 1954, after a conviction related to his homosexuality, Alan Turing committed suicide.
50:02His ideas, and the ideas developed by the Poles and the cryptographers at Bletchley Park
50:09in the heat of a desperate war, from the Bomba, to the bombs, to Colossus,
50:16were the archetypes for perhaps the most important invention of the 20th century, the computer.
50:40The
50:40The
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