BOOKS
It is strange that the name of Dr Arthur Scherbius should remain so completely unknown. The other great innovators of the Weimar Republic during the 1920s, people like Gropius in architecture, Planck in physics, Brecht in theatre, still command instant recognition. Even lesser lights like the director Fritz Lang or the psychologist Max Wertheimer continue to shine within their own disciplines. But Scherbius, as influential a figure in cryptography as the others in their fields, a man whose work had a critical effect upon the shape of the second world war and swayed the outcome of battles at land and on sea around the world, has been condemned to obscurity. Even in this book, devoted though it is to his work, his name is not mentioned, yet the fact is that without Scherbius there would have been no Enigma ciphering machine. And without the machine, there would have been no Enigma industry.
From the moment that the details began to emerge in the 1970s of the critical strug- gle in the second world war to decrypt and read messages sent via Enigma, books, plays, television documentaries and films, not to metnion innumerable sites on the Internet, have been devoted to the story. Apart from the more or less factual accounts, the 1980s gave rise to Hugh Whitemore's play Breaking the Code, later televised by the BBC, the 1990s produced Robert Harris's novel Enigma presently being filmed, while this decade has so far given us Hollywood's recently released U- 571 loosely based on the heroic achieve- ment of Sub-Lieutenant David Balme in retrieving Enigma files and machinery from a sinking U-boat in 1941. In this book, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore weaves together the two strands of the battle against Enig- ma, the efforts of the ayptanalysts at Bletchley Park and the repeated attempts by people such as Balme to capture the cipher-books and Enigma parts without which decryption would have been impossi- ble.
Such a concentration of interest so long after the event suggests that there is some- thing in the nature of the story that exerts a particular hold on the imagination. In his magisterial history, The Codebreakers, David Kahn refers to ciphers as the protec- tive carapace that valuable information requires as much as the tortoise its shell, and from Julius Caesar on they have been regarded as one of the weapons of war. Essentially any cipher, however sophisticat- ed, disorders the pattern of a message so that it becomes unreadable without a key, and part of Enigma's appeal undoubtedly lies in the voyeuristic pleasure of reading
The heroics of Hut 6
Andro Linklater
ENIGMA: THE BATTLE FOR THE CODE by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore Weidenfeld, £20, pp. 403 what was intended to be secret.
The machine that Scherbius developed from a Dutch invention was effectively an electric typewriter, but instead of the power running directly from keyboard to keys so that a tap on the A key produced an A on the paper, the current ran through a number of rotating wheels each of which scrambled the sequence ensuring that the A key produced any letter but an A on paper. Its original purpose was commercial, and industries including German railways and Swedish steel-makers used it for send- ing sensitive information, but it was the adoption of Enigma by German and Japanese armed forces in the 1930s that transformed it into a weapon of critical importance.
This strategic significance is the most obvious reason for the fascination it contin- ues to exert. It was Enigma that enabled Admiral Doenitz to gather his U-boats into deadly wolf-packs undetected, and to wreak such havoc on Atlantic convoys that Britain was almost strangled into submis- sion. It was the Americans' restricted abili- ty to read Purple, the Enigma-derived cipher machine used by the Japanese, that allowed Admiral Yamamoto to assemble his fleet in secrecy for the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. By contrast, when Bletch- ley Park cracked the German army's use of Enigma, it gave British commanders the critical advantage of knowing Rommel's intentions in advance throughout the North African campaign. And on the other side of the world, when Purple was broken it allowed the aircraft carriers of the United States navy just enough time to arrive in strength and destroy the cream of the Japanese fleet at Midway in 1942. The prize, in short, could hardly have been greater. As George VI commented on Balme's great contribution towards break- ing Enigma, it was 'perhaps the most important single event in the whole war at sea'.
What clearly emerges from Sebag-Mon- tefiore's book is the dependence of the code-breakers on such help. It is a useful corrective. The intellectual contribution to the struggle is familiar enough — the bril- liance of mathematicians like Alan Turing and Hugh Alexander, the hours of intense concentration in Hut 6, the repeated frus- trations and the barely understood mathe- matical formulae which eventually uncovered patterns in the seeming chaos of letters produced by Enigma — but the physical bravery which brought them the cipher-books and rotor-wheels they needed in order to know how to attack the prob- lem, that side of the story has been less often told. It was a problem that had to be solved from scratch almost monthly. Although a version of Enigma was broken by Polish intelligence as early as 1933, the nature of Scherbius's machine enabled it to be constantly upgraded, using more com- plex electrical settings. Sebag-Montefiore provides a good account of the Royal Navy's repeated raids on German weather- ships and naval vessels to secure their cipher-books.
The real secret of the Enigma appeal surely lies in this drama of man against machine. By a neat coincidence, in the 1920s while Scherbius was working out how to scramble the patterns of written commu- nication, a few miles away in the University of Berlin, Max Wertheimer, one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, was devel- oping the theory that the capacity to recog- nise patterns is hot-wired into the human brain. This ordering capacity is not only innate but integral to civilisation and sanity itself. Indeed some of the most compelling evidence for Wertheimer's theory comes from the mental breakdowns suffered by code-breakers who could not stop their minds trying to worry sense out of the chaos. Thus the defeat of Enigma is more than a partisan triumph, it is the victory of a uniquely human capacity over unhuman disorder.
Unfortunately, despite meticulous research, the author struggles to bring the drama to life. He has interviewed most of the leading Bletchley Park survivors, dis- covered new information including a Ger- man traitor who sold Enigma secrets to the French in 1931, and familiarised himself with the working of every crib, bigram, bombe and banburismus employed by the cryptanalysts in their task. But the rustle of the anorak distracts from the story he has to tell.
This is a pity, for what happened at Bletchley Park was a remarkable moment in intellectual history, the point when the capacity of the machine first began to out- strip the complexities of the mind. For it was in 1943 that the Post Office's Dr Tommy Flowers constructed Colossus, the world's first electronic computer, to auto- mate the decoding of both the Lorenz and Enigma ciphering machines. Today when every bit of computer information is elec- tronically coded, from the basic American Standard Code for Information Inter- change (ASCII) to sophisticated encrypting systems using secret-key algorithms which can generate uncrackable ciphers, we depend totally on the machine to make intelligible the most trivial message. Nos- talgia makes us yearn for the human hero- ics of Bletchley Park.
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