The Spanish Link In Cracking the Enigma Code

peetm sends this quote from the BBC: "When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, both Hitler's Germany and Mussolini's Italy sent troops to help the nationalists under Franco. But with the conflict dispersed across the country, some means of secure communication was needed for the German Condor Legion, the Italians and the Spanish forces under Franco. As a result, a set of modified commercial Enigma machines were delivered by Germany. ... A key figure in trying to understand it was Dilly Knox, a classicist who had been working on breaking ciphers since World War I. He was fascinated by the machine and began studying ways in which an intercepted message might in theory be broken, even writing his own messages, encrypting them and then trying to break them himself. But there was no opportunity to actually intercept a real message since German military signals were inaudible in Britain. However, the signals produced by the machines sent to Spain in 1936 were audible enough to be intercepted and Knox began work. ... Within six or seven months of having his first real code to crack, Knox had succeeded, producing the first decryption of an Enigma message in April 1937."

Comments

One Fatal Enigma Flaw

[Nom du Keyboard]

Enigma had at least one fatal flaw, that being that a ciphered letter != its plain text letter. That, at least, made it quick to eliminate incorrect solutions, which can be a difficult problem to solve when cipher breaking.

Re:False claim?

[MobileDude]

QFT

See also:

"Battle of Wits (The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II)" by Stephen Budiansky 2000
"Seizing the Enigma (The Race to Break the German U-Boat Codes 1939-1943)" by David Kahn 1991
"Code Breakers (The Inside Story of Bletchley Park)" by F.H. Hinsley & Alan Stripp 1993
"Code Ciphers & Other Cryptic & Clandestine Communication" by Fred B. Wrixon 1998

You can help preserve Bletchley Park by visiting http://www.bletchleypark.org/ and donating your time/money.

Re:April 1937

[clodney]

nobody expects the spanish inquisition!

Come now, I think this is an opportunity for "In other news, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead"

Re:False claim?

[boaworm]

There were multiple versions of the Enigma, the basic version had only three wheels, and gradually they added a switchboard in the front and finally also a fourth wheel. So even if the machine had the same name, it became much more complex to break over time.