How did codebreakers at Bletchley Park crack the Enigma machine?
A mathematical genius shortened World War II by two years.
The answer
The German Enigma machine could produce 158 million million million possible settings, making it seemingly unbreakable. Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park built electromechanical machines called 'bombes' that exploited structural weaknesses in Enigma messages - such as the fact that no letter could encrypt to itself. By 1943, they were decrypting up to 4,000 Axis messages daily. Historians estimate this intelligence shortened the war by at least two years, saving an estimated 14 million lives.
Source: Imperial War Museums
- World War II
- cryptography
- Turing
- Britain
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