Essay On The Enigma Machine

2099 Words9 Pages

What impact did the Enigma machine have on the outcome of the second world war?
The successes in breaking Enigma codes at Bletchley Park contributed greatly to the defeat of the Axis powers and is suggested to notably have shortened the span of the war. Enigma became a crucial tool in the code breaking activity during the Second World War. The innovatory Enigma was initially introduced in the German military in the 1920’s, as a product aimed at the business marked created by the German Engineer Arthur Scherbius. It provided its maneuverers with a system competent transmitting confidential content. In 1923 he set up his Chiffriermaschinen Aktiengesellschaft (Cipher Machines Corporation) in Berlin to manufacture his product. Within three years the German navy was producing its own version, followed by the army in 1928 and the air force in 1933. Over the years the basic machine became more complicated as German code experts added plugs with electronic circuits. The complex creation operated by transforming …show more content…

Along the lines of breaking Enigma, the Allied cryptologists broke the Purple machine but the Japanese continued to use this identical code during the course of the war. The United States likewise worked on German encryptions and the construction of decoding machines, within the American “Ultra”, as they also named themselves.
While Great Britain shared details of Ultra with The United States and France, the project remained unrevealed to the Soviet Union, despite their alliance in the war. The Soviet intelligence did indeed know of the existence of Bletchley Park, but were not informed about the breaking of the Enigma code. Information from important messages such as German battle plans and troop positions was masked and hidden as collected from Resistance groups in Switzerland and France. The Soviet military intelligence concluded that it originated from operatives in the Communist spy

Open Document