Ultra, Station X, How much did Britain know?

A documentary series called 'Station X' has just finished being shown on Channel Four in Britain. It documents the work of the Enigma code breakers at Bletchley Park.

Something which surprised me was the huge scale of the work down there. 10,000 staff were cracking 90,000 German cipher messages a month. This seems a huge amount of material but was wondering what percentage of German signals world-wide this represented? Is it 10%, 50%, 90%?

I was also shocked by the arrogance of America towards Britain. The US got extremely agitated with Bletchley when they failed to decrypt U-Boat messages for a period of 10 months in 1942 because the German Navy had added a fourth code wheel to the Enigma machine making it many more times difficult to crack. The US wanted to take over and run Ultra because of this. The Battle of Atlantic was won because of Ultra, without it few of the Atlantic convoys would of made it.

It's a shame the incredible work done by all the people there wasn't recognised until 30 years later. The fact that they built the first ever programmable computer is still disputed!

Hello at the beginning of this thread I would like to point out one thing which is constantly being overlooked in many documentaries. The essential work to decode enigma-coded messages was done by polish mathematicians. After the end of polish campaign and the collapse (cowardly collapse I might add) of France these mathematicians went to England. It is another additon of Poland into the victory of the 'Allies' (I wonder Poland's achievements in the II world war are mentioned so rarely on western documentaries. It's an expression of guilt they feel IMO). So Poland had not only valiant soldiers but also great minds (like Sikorski probably murdered by the 'Allies' Marcin B.

This documentary did go into quite a lot of detail about Poland, how they bought an Enigma from a German traitor and how they made the first important decrypt breakthroughs. Without the Poles Station X would not of

Yes what a cheek! After all, a the same series showed, when Britain gave the US Navy information derived from Ultra that U-boats were to mount a campaign on the eastern seaboard of the US 'operation Drumbeat', the US Navy chose to do nothing about it because of their feelings towards the British and about 300 ships were lost.

John Hickey

It's also a shame that Turin was hounded to his death by the police.

On the order of 50%, and probably somewhat less. It depends on whether you count as 'signals' every radio conversation between pilots or tank commanders, for instance.

BP read a _lot_ of signals, but not all signals were intercepted, and some of those were garbled.

Also, BP did not read _all_ the Enigma keys. There were only so many codebreakers, translators, and analysts, only so many bombes, only so many hours in the day.

Manpower and machine power was allocated by BP to the keys and networks that a) could be broken (i.e. the operators made enough mistakes, the traffic had lots of cribs in it) and b) carried useful information.

Of the several dozen Enigma keys in use by the Germans at the peak in 1944, only about half were read on a regular basis by the Allies.

Based on intelligence provided by a French spy.

The French killed more Germans in 1940 than the Poles did in 1939; they also had more soldiers KIA. Neither nation fought effectively in this period. It is not necessary to label anyone as cowards

No, in fact they were reassembled at a site in Unoccupied France, where they continued breaking German cipher messages for the French intelligence service, even though 'Vichy' was a nominal satellite of Germany. This continued until the rest of France was occupied.

After that, some of the Poles escaped to Britain, while others were captured by Germany (which never realized they were other than ordinary Polish soldiers).

Hmm that maybe so. However just stop for a minute and compare the armies of France and Poland. If Poles had as many tanks, soldiers and as good geopolitical situation Hitler would never defeat Poland. Poland inflicted such heavy cassaulties on German army (outnumbered by them in every statistics) that Hitler had to postpone his attack at the West. That bought the west some time which they weren't able to use properly. They ignored advice from polish soldiers about the new tactics of german army saying it will never happen here since we have more tanks, planes etc. But it did. France surrendered. Well Poland never surrendered as a country and open cities concept was always alien to us. France has discrased itself in WWII and is still so. Marcin B.

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I am not sure what 'discrased' means, but, the French did that, I am sure, and more.

But, when given a chance to fight on something like even terms with the Germans, in some plan that they could relate to, both the Fench and the Poles fought like demons.

In seperate actions in the collapse of the 'pocket' in Normandy one can find examples of both.

Even the Italians, the fighting qualities of whom have been much slandered, performed heroically on occasion.

The captain of a British battleship sunk in the harbor at Alexandria made a big point fo going to the (post war) ceremony to honor the swimmer that had placed the charge under his ship.

You don't get much more respectful of your opponent than that.

Henry Hillbrath

I totally disagree.

Many French died in WW1.

Here is an SAS report from Operation RUPERT from Aug 1944, 'At this time the SS Battalion in Troisfontaines killed all the civilians they could find and then withdrew, firing villages on the way.'

Here is a letter from the Royal Air Force Assoc. to the people of the area, 'We can not speak highly enough of the great spirit and heroism which was found throughout the entire German occupation.'

These quotes are from the book 'Massacre Over the Marne'. They are in reference to the assistance given by the French to Allied aircrew shot down in the summer of 1944. I'm not talking about the Normandy area. These men were shot down on deep penetration raids into eastern France as the strategic bombing offensive was put on hold. Many French put their lives on the line helping Allied airmen.

I would like to add to the fire that one of the reasons that there was friction between the British and US over ULTRA was the plain fact that the computer 'BOMBES' could be made quicker andmore of them here than in Britan. Irwin