Why did the allies win? For a good deal of WWII the allies were on their heels, fortress Europe appeared to be lost. A good many fine men and women gave the ultimate sacrifice, meeting their end by a bullet. The bravery and ultimate good of these soldiers in defeating the German and Japanese threat is well know and unquestioned. What many people do not realize is just how important the code breakers of Bletchley Park were to the success of the allied effort.
Bletchley Park and its main mathematician-Alan Turning- figured out methods to decode the NaziEnigma machine and later other high level Nazi and Japanese codes. Early on the codes were decoded by the brute force method of hundreds of ‘decoders’ working of every possible variation. While this worked it was hardly ‘real time’ and the information could be irrelevant by the time it was fully decoded. The site received thousands of coded messages a day. Imagine trying to find what was important and what was old news!
Alan Turning designed a machine to decode the messages in ¼ the time. Bombe was something of a difference engine- only its purpose was the salvation of the world.
President Obama has asked (we Americans anyway) to thank a soldier, I have done so at today’s Hastings on the Hudson memorial day parade, I also plan on a moment of silence for the code breakers of Bletchley Park- for without them it would be uber alles baby, uber alles.
If you are into this sort of things like Enigma I highly recommend the book
"The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy ...."by Simon Singh.
It is a very good read indeed for getting you started into codes in general!
Harald
Posted by: Harald Steindl | May 26, 2009 at 04:36 PM
Harald - Excellent suggestion, looks like a good read. The Amazon link is http://bit.ly/XkNfI
Posted by: George Tucker | May 26, 2009 at 05:15 PM