WW2 Hero Who Captured Enigma For Allies Has Died (express.co.uk)

An anonymous reader writes: Breaking the Enigma code is rightfully assessed to have significantly shortened World War Two by as much as two years. The genius of Alan Turing played a large role in building on the early successes of Polish mathematicians in continuing to pry messages out from Enigmas encryption. But Turing's genius might very well have counted for naught had it not been for the actions of Lieutenant-Commander David Balme, Royal Navy. On May 9, 1941, Lt-Cmdr Balme led a boarding party from the destroyer HMS Bulldog across freezing waters to storm Nazi U-boat U-110 where they seized the submarine's Enigma encryption device, along with the documents containing the top secret settings and procedures for sending messages. Under the greatest secrecy the Enigma and the accompanying documents were taken to Bletchley Park where they paved the way for breakthroughs in the efforts to defeat Enigma. Lt-Cmdr Balme was presented with a Bletchley badge and a certificate signed by British Prime Minister David Cameron in March. Local MP Dr. Julian Lewis said of him, "He played a crucial role in the winning of the Battle of the Atlantic at a very young age and I am proud to have counted him as a friend."

Comments

Re:Enigmatic

[allcoolnameswheretak]

A hero for Germany as well, obviously for shortening the war, which however might have spared Germany from atomic bombing like Japan.

Bletchley Park indiscriminantly spied on all

[mi]

Bletchley Park listened to all radio traffic they could capture. Today we sneer and jeer at the NSA for doing (or attempting to do) that. Yep, today's all is much bigger than it was then, but still...

Re:Hyperbole much?

[jeremyp]

No.

Balme's heroics were related specifically to Naval enigma which was more complex than the Army and Luftwaffe enigma (a bigger choice of moveable rotors and an extra fourth rotor that did not move whilst keying the message) and operational discipline was much better. In 1941, the British couldn't read Navy traffic without knowing the daily settings for the enigma machines. The daily settings is what Balme recovered that was so important.

In fact, the British never reliably broke the Navy enigma until the Americans got involved. Because of the extra rotors, they didn't have enough bombes. After they gave the designs to the USA, the Americans were able to build many more bombes (and make them faster) so we could reliably break the keys without needing to lift codebooks off U-boats.