December 26 movie: Enigma. This was a WWII thriller about, you guessed it, the Enigma machine. Starred Kate Winslet, Jeremy Northram, and some guy and woman I didn't recognize. It was a decent movie, hung together well and it was interesting to see a movie set at Bletchley Park. Although I think I might have had trouble following the plot at the end if my dad hadn't been there to explain the historical events the movie referenced. According to my dad they changed the ending a lot and added the romance between Winslet and Guy I Didn't Recognize. I guess they had to have a romance in there somewhere. He lent me the book (my dad, not Guy I Didn't Recognize) so I can find out for myself.
There's a very brief scene where the two main characters visit the facility where women are intercepting and recording German transmissions. I'm reading a really good nonfiction book about those women, called The Enemy is Listening. The book is a memoir by a woman who worked in the "Y Service," and their role was a lot bigger than I had realized. I had imagined what you see in the movie, a roomful of people writing codes down with no idea what it is they're transcribing. The woman in the book takes a much more active role. Her group helps with code breaking, logging and analyzing not just the transmissions but their context (i.e. who sent the transmission and what were they doing at that moment) and she gets good enough to decode on the spot, making her an invaluable resource for immediate information. Granted, the woman in the book (at least the part I've read so far) worked mostly on transmissions to and from German fighter pilots, who did not use Enigma. She wrote that the women working on Enigma transmissions were dealing with what you see in the movie: countless hours of transcribing random gibberish, never learning what any of it meant. What an incredibly tedious and difficult job that must have been.
As you know Bob, Enigma is a ciphering machine, not an encoding machine, so, yeah, learning to decode on the fly would be a very different thing.
The Germans were legendary for coming up with bad code names--there were several German inventions and military operations where the code name revealed the nature of the thing encoded. The most notable was "Sea-Lion", the never-undertaken invasion of England by sea which might as well have been called "The Secret Plan for the Invasion of England by Sea". There was also "Barbarossa", the invasion of the Soviet Union, named after a Germanic king best remembered for . . . invading Russia.
One of the fundamental problems with dictatorships is that dictators often do really stupid things and no one can stop them.
The author of The Enemy is Listening mentioned the German tendency to use obvious code names. For instance she said their code for "altitude" was something like "tall tower." Unfortunately I can't remember the exact code word & don't have the book at hand, but that was the sense of it.
She (the author) also said several times that the German love of organization was a boon to the codebreakers, as they tended to do things in consistent and predictable ways. My favorite example was when she was working in North Africa. Every day the British air service would send out instructions to their pilots, which instructions the Germans would intercept, decode, recode and send verbatim to their convoy. The British would intercept this transmission and knowing the exact wording of the plain text message, this allowed them to easily break the German code every day. Once in a while German intelligence would miss the initial transmission, and the British would have to come up with an excuse to resend it more clearly, because otherwise they couldn't break that day's code!