Enigma Machine and Its U-boat Codes

The Germans had already invented the Enigma machine that was an electromagnetic device used to encode and decipher messages. Unbeknownst to the Germans, one had fallen into the hands of a Pole who escaped to Britain. British military shared knowledge of the machine with the U.S. military. Few Allies knew of its existence, and it was classified top secret. The 28 WAVES were sworn to secrecy for life about their duty on the Navy's Top Secret Ultra Project. If they told anyone, they would be shot for treason. The secrecy of breaking the Enigma codes was second only to the Manhattan Project - the development of the atom bomb.

British ships picked up many of these vital supplies at Halifax Harbor in Nova Scotia and sailed across the Atlantic in convoys protected by escort warships. But the German U-boat "wolf packs" owned the North Atlantic Seas. They were devised to defeat the convoy system by positioning themselves for a mass attack that undermined the convoy's defense by causing confusion and disarray. There were heavy losses from the submarine attacks, and tonnage reached an all-time high. America was finally forced to enter the war, and the wolf packs also took their toll on U.S. ships. It became imperative that the Allied cryptographers break the German U-boat codes.

The majority of the men at the top secret headquarters in Washington, D.C, were mathematics professors from Yale and Harvard, all top scholars working to break the mathematical and alphabetical codes. A few male Navy officers were on hand to supervise the women.

Work went on around the clock, with three 8-hour shifts. However, if a WAVE was in the process of breaking a code, she worked until it was completed, turning shifts from eight to 12 and 14 hours. They worked to establish patterns in the codes that were fed into room-size computers that sorted the thousands of possibilities until the final combination emerged to read the code. The Germans used yearly, monthly, and daily codes, which the cryptographers decoded in relative fashion. Once the yearly code was broken, they moved onto monthly and daily   each step making the next easier.

One of Ruth's brothers-in-law served in the Coast Guard on a ship that was part of a destroyer escort. During one maneuver, the escort captured a German U-boat off the coast of Florida and with it, its codebook.

Questionnaire:

• Who invented the enigma machine?