Liza Mundy Breaks the Code and Misses the Message

Write about what you know. Write from your experience. Those two mandates are easily given to anyone who wants to write for a living. They apply to fiction and non-fiction. The rules were too easily ignored by Liza Mundy. Granting that Liza Mundy recorded well what people told her, it is obvious that before she wrote this book, she knew nothing about codes, the military, or World War II. 

 Languages change. I was born in 1949 and in my first grade classroom one of our phonics charts spelled waggon in the old British style, just as Abraham Lincoln wrote shew for show. I mention that because on page 112, Mundy says that Ruth Weston was “olive complected” and I learned “complected” to be regional American dialect and not proper American English. Whatevs.

Code Girls by Liza Mundy 
(Hatchette 2017)

More consequentially, Mundy does not understand why military people salute each other, who salutes whom, and the differences in rules for the customs and courtesies as followed by the Army versus the Navy. She says: “… but Bea Norman felt the Marines guarding each room ‘took pernicious pleasure’ in making the women salute over and over.” (page 169) 

But she also notes later that by the rules, as officers, the WAVES were entitled to salutes from enlisted men (page 191). They would be entitled to the courtesy from all enlisted personnel, regardless of sex, but that aside, the Marines may have been pushing some regulations. One fine point is that by Navy customs, you only salute the first time you see an officer because on board a ship you will see her a hundred times a day. Sailors and Marines would all be waving their arms all the time and in confined spaces. Also, unlike the Army, the Navy does not salute again after coming on deck (or inside a building). That being as it may, the bottom line is easy: If someone salutes you, you return the salute; it is that simple. But clearly, the salient facts are not military customs and courtesies but how many insults and injuries Mundy could find to curry sympathy for the women in the story. 

The irony compounds because in the Index, the women are listed by their married names despite the fact that we worked with them for three, four, or five years when they were single. Among the many people buried in the Index was Genevieve Grotjan who was instrumental in breaking the Japanese Purple cipher. After we follow her work as a cryptanalyst for five years, she is listed as Feinstein, Genevieve Grotjan because she got married on page 344.

 

The English and Americans broke the Enigma cipher machine in part because an early version of  a cracking machine was delivered to British intelligence by Polish intelligence agents after the German invasion. It was called a “bombe” or sometimes “bomba.” Mundy does not say this, but one story had it named after a chocolate cake because that was what the Polish mathematicians were eating at a restaurant when they outlined their theoretical solution to the German cipher back in 1932. Anyway, on page 135, it appears as a “bomby”—gratefully just that one time. It is an example of the many empty files in Mundy’s knowledge warehouse. 

 

Mundy says three times that making codes is “the best possible training for learning how to break them.” (page 75) That is not true. It is true that learning the history and application of codes and ciphers is basic to cryptology. But making up arithmetic problems will not teach you how to solve them. The fact is that experts break the codes and ciphers of amateurs specifically because tyros are inept at cracking. Mundy had never done the work herself. This was all new to her. 

 

So was World War II. We all commonly see this as the three Allied powers against the three Axis powers. We also accept the USSR as our ally and still consider the French to have been in “the free world” (page 308) even though French reactionaries had spent four years helping the Germans to round up Jews. Mundy never questions it, even in the context of a war in which the British and American intelligence groups did not always trust each other. As a recent ally of Germany, the USSR was never to be trusted. She mentions the America First movement only in passing. Therefore, Mundy does not explore the motivations of the women who asserted themselves to join the civilian government defense efforts before Pearl Harbor. 

 

I accept as an assumption that Mundy is not comfortable with firearms and she has never flown an airplane. So, she quickly passes over the firearms qualifications that several women earned, among them Louise Pearsall, (page 273), and Fran Steen (page 191) who also earned a private pilot certification while working as a cryptanalyst (page 191). The author just does not appreciate those accomplishments.

 

Unlike the reviewers for the mainstream media I spent two weeks with this book. Despite the many reasons to put post-its on pages, this was not painful. Mundy writes well. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that among the cryptanalysts were philosopher William Van Orman Quine, actor Tony Randall, classicist Richmond A. Lattimore, and contract bridge mavin Oswald Jacoby (page 181). It was also interesting to get the backstory on William Friedman. I always accepted his being the master cryptanalyst who singlehandedly broke Purple. In fact, Mundy says (and my wife concurs) that Elizabeth was the brains. She introduced him to crypto. And, of course, this book is the story of the women who really broke Purple. So, there is a lot here. 

 

But the untold story of the Code Girls was always hidden in plain sight. In 1996, when I was working for the US DoD back home in Cleveland, Nida Glick, my mother’s Latin teacher (who had been the language department chair when I went to the same high school), passed away. Her obituary in the May 6 Plain Dealer showed her in her Coast Guard uniform from World War II when she served as a codebreaker. 

 

Mundy’s experience with Politico, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post, and her work on behalf of Michelle Obama reflect her engaging and compelling narrative style. However, pop culture books and magazines are different from history books. I know from personal experience that as painful as it can be, a newspaper can always print a correction or even a retraction. With books, the errors and omissions are more permanent and revealing. 

Also, even if the New York Times and Kirkus were not pre-disposed to ladle praise on this work, the fact is that professional reviewers also bang out copy on deadlines. So, fact checking is not always possible, even if it is wanted by the editors.

 

Historians labor under a special conflict of norms different from the other sciences. (My Marxist professors easily convinced me that history is a science.) If a historian judges the people of the past by the standards of the present, no one looks good. If you accept the cultural standards of another time and place, then you fail to be objective. In anthropology that is called the error of going native. 

 

Mundy acknowledges that many of these women were born in or around 1920 when American society was changing. The social revolutions in norms of behavior were more dramatic than the material progress of the 19^th century. These women left their old world in 1940 and then left it behind irretrievably in 1945. Some did well. Ann Caracristi became the first woman deputy director of the NSA. After years of peak experience, and then dumped into an environment where the only pressure was to conform, others suffered the same PTSD as other combat veterans and never reintegrated completely to civilian life. Some took the hard road down. Others recovered. It is a complex story and Mundy tells it well enough.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Second World Wars by Victor Davis Hanson 

Codes and Coins 

A Successful Imitation of Alan Turing 

2^nd Lt Frances Slanger: American Nightingale 

World War II Sweetheart Dance 

The Wise Men 

Turing Never Said That

“I think that sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.” The line is spoken twice, first by Knightley qua Clarke and then by Cumberbatch qua Turing. But they never said it. It should be attributed to a different genius, the screenwriter, Graham Moore.

I never accepted the quote as genuine, but it came up again when a colleague used it in their signature block. I wanted to warn them about that; so I did another Google search for an authoritative reference to debunk the false citation. I found the work of Sir John Dermot Turing.  

Dermot Turing – like his celebrated uncle Alan Turing – was educated at Sherborne School and King’s College, Cambridge. After doing a D.Phil in Genetics at Oxford, he concluded that scientific research was not for him, and moved into the legal profession. … His specialism was financial sector regulation, particularly the problems associated with failed banks, and financial market infrastructure.  -- More at https://dermotturing.com/about/dermot-turing/

In a blog on his website, Sir John explains: “Fake quotes - July 30, 2019 - We all know about fake news, but only recently I discovered fake quotes. I was asked where Alan Turing’s famous quotation ‘Those who can imagine anything can create the impossible’ had come from. After a lot of digging, the answer was ‘It didn’t.’ Not in his broadcasts. Not in his published papers. Not in his unpublished speeches.” 

The statement is insightful, powerful, and empowering. It deserves repetition and popularization. The author was Graham Moore. Moore received an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for his screenplay of Imitation Game. He understood Turing. 

“I had been this huge computer nerd my entire life. I went to space camp and computer programming camp. I was that kid. From a very young age, I knew about the legend of Alan Turing - among awkward, nerdy teenagers, he is a patron saint. He never fit in, but accomplished these wonderful things, as part of a secret queer history of computer science. And so I always dreamt of writing something about him, and I thought that there had never been a proper narrative treatment of his life, that he deserved. I by chance met the producers of the film at a party, and one of them told me they had optioned a biography. When I asked who it was, they said, 'it's a mathematician that you've never heard of.' When they told me it was Alan Turing, I almost tackled them, and I told them I'd do anything to write this film, I'd write it for free. It was all about luck and passion. That is how it started, and I felt that everyone else involved was just as committed to the story.” -- Graham Moore via IMDB at https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2441699/

 

Dermot Turing has developed an interest in his uncle’s work, publishing several books about the wartime projects at Bletchley Park. I bought two of them through Amazon UK. For myself, that was evocative on several levels. 

First, I am a globalist and I love global commerce. Unlike my conservative comrades who have fallen into the abyss of nationalism, I find an overarching  vista in Ayn Rand’s warnings against the Balkanization of western society. (See the Ayn Rand Institute here.) To be able to buy a product from across the Atlantic ocean with a few clicks is a tribute to human ingenuity in a open market.  

Second, my money was exchanged from dollars to pounds automatically and at a trivial cost. On the one hand a global society needs a global currency. On the other hand, an open market allows a plethora of monetary media. Friedrich A. Hayek called gold “the wobbly anchor.” (On NecessaryFacts here.) At the American Numismatic Association convention in Chicago in 2019, I spoke on the future of money and predicted a world coming soon with personal currencies. (See a version on Necessary Facts here.) During the Middle Ages, bankers rationalized the variegated fabric of local coinages with an abstract system of “pounds-shillings-pence”; and when they met at great fairs, using the new Arabic numbers and algebraic methods, they cleared their books without ever touching a coin.

 

Third, the transaction was secured with public key cryptosystems. Software agents shook hands and established trust in order to safely carry my money and order the transport of the seller’s product. 

 

A final note on Turing from Turing: “One scene in the movie which had puzzled me is the one where a young Alan Turing is pinned beneath the floorboards at his boarding-school and jumped on by his schoolmates. That’s bizarre, in many ways, not least because there is no evidence that Turing was bullied at school, and certainly none in Hodges’s book. Oho, it turns out that this scene is lifted from another book altogether – A Madman dreams of Turing machines, a novel by Janna Levin. So what started as fiction has been recycled as biography.” – Sir John Dermot Turing.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

A Successful Imitation of Alan Turing 

Turing’s Cathedral 

Variations on Enigma 

BASIC: Turing’s Truth 

The Code Book 

Coins and Codes 

CODES AND COINS

Coins were invented about 600 BCE, about 3000 years after money (as we understand it) was invented. Within three generations, by 500 BCE, coins had acquired most of the attributes that associate with them today. Perhaps first among them, both in time and importance, was carrying a message. As signifiers or semata, coins paralleled the ascendance of writing over speech to extend the width and depth of communication. 

During World War II, Canada included a patriotic message on its 5-cent coins: We win when we work willingly. The slogan was in Morse code, flush along the rim of the reverse. While not obvious, neither was it intended to be secret. Rather, the message was an element of the propaganda effort. Another wartime effort was Canada’s use of tombac, an 88-12 alloy of copper and zinc to replace nickel on the 5-cent coins of 1942 and 1943.

WE WIN WHEN WE WORK WILLINGLY

In the United States, the 5-cent nickel became one-third (35%) silver from 1942 to 1945. The story was that we needed the nickel for armor plate. In truth, we got our nickel from Sudbury, Ontario, and it was plentiful. The new nickels had a large Mintmark over Monticello on the reverse.  The fractional coinage (“small change”) of the United State and Canada delivered constant reminders to the general population.

Canada 5-cent nickel (left) and 5-cent tombac (right)
war time issues with Morse code message at rim.

In our time, the US “Native American” (Sacagawea) dollars for 2016 honor the Code Talkers. At first, during World War I, Native American soldiers worked as telephone operators because it was unlikely that Germans (who did know English) would know their languages. In addition, the Americans quickly adopted slang of their own to add a layer of obfuscation. 

World War II was a much larger and longer engagement. In 1943, the total population of the USA was 136.7 million, of whom 9.2 million were in the armed forces. Although American civilians who were ethnically Japanese were placed in concentration camps, their sons were allowed to join the armed forces (and fight in Europe). So, of course, the military tapped a new generation of Native American Code Talkers.

Although the Navajo are best known from books and a recent movie, in fact, they came from over 30 communities and societies: Cherokee Nation, Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, Choctaw Nation, Comanche Nation, Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, Crow Nation, Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Tribe, Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes, Ho-Chunk Nation, Hopi Tribe, Kiowa Tribe, Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, Menominee Nation, Meskwaki Nation, Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Oglala Sioux Tribe, Oneida Nation, Osage Nation, Pawnee Nation, Ponca Tribe, Pueblo of Acoma Tribe, Pueblo of Laguna Tribe, Rosebud Sioux Tribe, Santee Sioux Nation, Seminole Nation, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate (Sioux) Tribe, St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Tlingit Tribe, Tonto Apache Tribe, White Mountain Apache Tribe, Yankton Sioux Tribe. (See the US Mint sales pages for special medals and medallions here.)

Reverse of US Mint 2016 Native American Dollar
honors the Code Talkers from two wars.

On the other side of the Atlantic the British were engaged in a “wizard war” against the Germans. Among their “boffins” were the codebreakers of Bletchley Park. The Imitation Game told the story of Alan Turing and his failed romance with Elisabeth Lowther Clarke (later Murray). Clarke was a brilliant mathematician, and an accomplished codebreaker. After the war, she took up a numismatics, largely as a result of her husband John Kenneth Murray’s collection of Scottish coins. In particular, several series of silver groats and gold “unicorns” were not well identified or sequenced as the weights and finenesses had changed during the reigns of James III and James IV. She figured it all out, publishing and delivering papers. (See “The Early Unicorns and the Heavy Groats of James III and James IV” in the British Numismatic Journal, Volume 40, Number 8, 1971 online here.)

For that work, the British Numismatic Society granted her a John Sanford Saltus Gold Medal in 1986. You can find a brief biography in Wikipedia, of course, but as Joan Clarke.  Lord Stewartby (Bernard Harold Ian Halley Stewart), one of her collaborators in the coinage of Scotland, wrote her obituary for the British Numismatic Journal Vol. 67 No. 13, pages 162-167, online here.)    

(See, also, my review of The Imitation Game with pictures of two computer security challenge coins in the E-Sylum newsletter of the Numismatic Bibliomania Society here.)

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

A Successful Imitation of Alan Turing 

Charles Babbage: Code Breaker 

Variations on Enigma 

The Code Book 

Charles Babbage: Codebreaker

Few names stand out in the history of computing as do Charles Babbage and his Difference Engine. The Difference Engine was only a demonstration model in his lifetime. Larger more complete engines have been built in our time by museums. He also proposed a more complex and sophisticated Analytical Engine, again, never built at all in his own time but constructed in our time by museums from his plans. You may also know about his work with Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace. The daughter of George Gordon, Lord Byron, she was arguably the first computer programmer. What you may not know is that among Babbage’s hobbies were cryptology and lock picking. He said that lock picking and cryptology were very similar pursuits intellectually. 

(This is based on a presentation to the Austin OWASP Crypto Party held at National Instruments Bldg. C, January 23, 2018.)

At this time – we are talking the middle third of the 19^thcentury, say 1823 to 1868—codes and ciphers were all the rage. In America, Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” laid bare for public consumption the means for breaking any mono-alphabetic substitution cipher. 

Newspapers ran columns known as “Miseries.” They were Lonely Hearts messages by which lovers set up rendezvous, and they typically relied on some kind of encryption, most often single alphabet substitutions, sometimes transpositions. 

This is where Babbage comes in and wherein lies some mystery about his work. The polyalphabetic cipher goes back to the late Renaissance. We call them Vigenere ciphers. They are commonly attributed to Blaise de Vigene in the year 1585. However, the first publication can be attributed to Gian Battista Belaso in 1553. In fact, the means of breaking monoalphabetic ciphers also goes back to this time, but was not widely known outside of the black chambers of governments.

This is a 26x26 Vigenere Table. German with its umlauts would have 29 letters. Greek would have 24 letters. You encipher your message down the rows, the 13th letter being encrypted against the 13th row.

As you can see, the two Es are enciphered differently. The consecutive Rs in MARRY are enciphered to different outputs.

The man sees the end of the line.

The most common letter in English is E. The most common trigraph is THE. As you can see, the letters E all are encrypted differently. The three instances of THE have different outputs. It is for this reason that for 300 years, the Vigenere cipher was called the indecipherable cipher. It could not be broken.

But there was a war on.  The Crimean War saw Russia pitted against the UK, France, and the Ottoman Empire. Secret codes were essential to military communication. 

Enter Babbage.

First of all, Babbage promised but never published his treatise on cryptanalysis. That was unusual because he had an ego big enough to fill this room. Babbage was one of a handful of liberal scientists who purposely and purposefully restructured their society. Among them were Lady Ada Augusta Lovelace and Charles Darwin, William Herschel, and William Whewell. It was Whewell who coined the word scientist in an ad hoc debate with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the first meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science on June 24, 1833. 

Several scholars today theorize that Babbage was working for the War Department. So, he did publish some insights and suggestions in his autobiography of 1864. But he never let the cat out of the bag.

Babbage created a massive set of dictionaries of the English language organized by word length and then sorted by initial letters and then printed up by their second letters. He made tables of common digraphs and trigraphs. He listed all of the words with repeated letters. He could do this because he was independently wealthy, having inherited from his father an estate valued at £100,000, call it $50 million in our money. All of that just prepared his mind to attack the unbreakable cipher, which he did.

Not Babbage but a hacker at DefCon 512

Like all codebreakers, Babbage attacked the human element. We say in hacking that amateurs target systems while professionals target people. Babbage’s study of language and cryptography opened the door … and we do not know for sure just what door that was. He kept it secret. But he did mention it in passing in his autobiography. As big as his ego was, he was a man of his word. He meant what he said and proved it with mathematics. He held the same Lucasian Chair at Cambridge as Sir Isaac Newton.

The way the Vigenere worked in practice is that each agent, each minister or other user would be given a word, preferably a long word, and ideally with no repeating letters.

In the example above…

The message was I LOVE YOU. MARRY ME and the key word was UNPREDICTABLY which gave us 13 different ciphers. However, the longer the message the more likely that you will cycle through the key and eventually encipher the same words or at least the same letters with the same keys. 

Babbage figured out that you do not need to find the key of you can find the length of the key.

 

 “It may have been as efficacious as it is formidable,
but neither an index to its symbolism,
nor any clue to its purpose exist.” – 
David Kahn, The Codebreakers, Chapter 6,
“The Contributions of the Dilettantes,” pg. 207

Babbage had a lifelong interest in cryptology and cryptanalysis. He and his friends William Whelwell and William Herschel among other savants of the day all dabbled in it. Babbage and his nephew exchanged challenges, which Charles Babbage deconstructed to its table based on the word SOMERSET by guessing that it began with DEAR UNCLE and ended with NEPHEW HENRY. That was in 1846. Babbage later took apart another small Vigenere that a dentist, John Thwaite, was attempting to get patented in 1854, shortly after the start of the Crimean War. Babbage broke that cipher, and though he promised to publish fully, he never did.

Passages from The Life of a Philosopher
Edited autobiography of Charles Babbage

Unfortunately, all we have is tantalizing scraps from his personal notes and notebooks. He never published a definitive treatise.

I read through about a dozen books – 14 in all, I think – by and about Babbage. You can get lost in his work. Because of his wealth and station, he was involved in almost every aspect of this revolutionary time from the most advanced mathematics to the most advanced manufacturing. Of all those books, The Philosophical Breakfast Club by Laura J. Snyder (Broadway Books, 2011) is the one volume that I recommend as the best overview. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

The Philosophical Breakfast Club 

Passwords 

The Unremarkable Origin of Species 

Austin Security Alliance 

Variations on Enigma

Verifying secret information is a challenge.  After enjoying the movie Imitation Game, I went to the library for books on Bletchley Park and Enigma. I found Enigma by Wladislaw Kozaczuk. Kozaczuk tells a story completely different from the one offered by F. W Winterbotham in The Ultra Secret.

I had read Andrew Hodges’ biography, Alan Turing: the Enigma back in the early nineties.  I am pretty sure that I read F. W. Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret fifteen years earlier because it was sold by Loompanics Unlimited, who paid me to write The Code Book: All About Unbreakable Codes and How to Use Them. (On NecessaryFacts here.)

Discussing Imitation Game online, I read from others several twice-told tales that just were not so. I wrote several myself before I read Kozaczuk’s book.  I now regard it as the correct version – if the truth can have “versions.”

It is true that the Polish device for mechanically attacking the Enigma ciphers was called a “bomba.”  It was named for a large spheroid chocolate cake.  It was not shaped like the cake at all.  According to their story, it was only what they were having for dessert at a restaurant when they discussed the code name for their project.

 “The bomb was an electro-mechanical aggregate based on six Polish Enigmas, combined with additional devices and transmissions.  An electrically driven system of rotors revolved automatically, creating in each bomb, successively, over a period of about two hours (100-120 minutes), 17,576 different combinations. When the rotors aligned with the sought-for position, a light went on, the motors stopped automatically, and the cryptologist read the indications.   Thus, by setting in motion the bombs (six were built at once in November 1938), the daily keys could be recovered within two hours. “ (page 53)

 Mathematicians working for Polish intelligence had been attacking Enigma with some success for over ten years.  They had their own Enigma machines.  Built by reverse-engineering, they were variations on the commercial model. That was essentially the same foundation as the German devices that had been modified for military use.

Mathematician Marian Rejewski developed a theoretical model of the German Enigma. His work achieved realization in the construction of the Bomba.  That device depended on electronic elements created by AVA Radio Manufacturing, a small firm in Warsaw which had been working for their government since the firm was launched in the winter 1929/1930.

The story of AVA in particular and the Polish cryptanalysis project in general should be familiar to Americans today.  One of the founders of AVA never completed school beyond the fourth grade, but started out as an apprentice locksmith.  The company’s key to government work came via another founder who worked in the Cipher Bureau.  At heart, AVA was a small shop run by two brothers who were amateur radio operators.  After high school (“gymnasium” in Europe) they built and sold cheap little radio receivers.  But they were pretty good at their craft.

Also diligent were the young mathematicians from Poznan University: Marian Rejewsky, Henryk Zygalski, and Jerzy Rozycki.  (The book has a pronunciation guide up front:  Rejewski is “Rey EF ski”.)  Recruited specifically to work on German communications, Rejewski spent a year in Göttingen studying advanced statistics.  It was his judgment that Germany’s mathematics programs had fallen behind, and were not producing leading edge ideas.  Moreover, as would be borne out later, the German military did not trust mathematicians because they would get lost in theory instead of producing immediate results.  From our viewpoint today, that choice was evidence of the failure of their philosophical assumptions. 

By 1934, the Polish mathematicians and radio hams had collaborated to build four Enigma duplicates.

None of that appeared in Winterbotham’s book. Neither did Alan Turing have a place in the book.  In the movie, Imitation Game, Commander Alastair Denniston was portrayed as a martinet of limited vision.  Unfair as that may well have been, it is recorded independently (or at least repeated often), that Denniston considered Enigma to be unbreakable.  It is hard to find success at something you regard as impossible.  Nonetheless, Winterbotham gave Commander Denniston full credit for running the group—headed by Alfred Dillwyn “Dilly” Knox, who received one mention only—that broke Enigma.   

In fact, Winterbotham said of Knox that he was “quite young” when working at Bletchley Park.  Knox was born in 1884. He had been with the UK’s “black chamber” in World War I; and he is credited with delivering the decryption of the Zimmerman Telegram.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

A Successful Imitation of Alan Turing

Astronomical Symbols on Ancient and Medieval Coins

The Sokal Affair

Reflections on the Sokal Affair

Science versus Common Sense

A Successful Imitation of Alan Turing

“Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”  The take-away line from The Imitation Game states the theme.  The plot is the quest to build a computer that can decipher enemy communications and win a war.

 

Even with the Bombe, much work was done manually and brainually.
This grid shown in the movie is not the Banburismus of Turing.

Scholars complain about the historical inaccuracies. It is easy to do.  This is not a documentary. The film is a drama about one man’s achievement of what experts considered impossible.  That much is absolutely true. Commander Alistair Denniston held neither expectation nor hope for success.  The film dramatizes his disdain for the codebreakers. And it is drama, rather than the unemotional grinding out of intellectually difficult, yet ultimately routine, work. 

 

10,000 people worked there,
80% of them women.

Contrary to the movie, Joan Clarke’s team working on the Naval Enigma had early successes.  In the movie, by mid-1941 Denniston was not the only one enraged by Turing’s lack of progress.  In real life, by then, decipherment of Naval Enigma traffic allowed fleets to be redirected around U-boat packs. Lost tonnage shrank. But it is true that not all intercepts could be acted on. The Ultra Secret by F. W. Winterbotham (Harper & Row, 1974) broke that story long ago. 

Writing in Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age (Oxford, 2012),  B. Jack Copeland acknowledges that Cmdr. Denniston built Bletchley in the early years 1937-1939, though he proved unsuited to the task of managing 10,000 and getting their needs met by arguing for more money and more people. Also, it was late in 1941 when Turing and many others wrote to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, not Turing alone in mid-year. Such quibbles satisfy historians, but do not change the impact of the story.

You can buy a real one.
Some fetch a 6-figure price.
(They also sell replicas - and are not alone in that.)
http://enigmamuseum.com/

In real life, although the Turing-Welchman “Bombe” could and did reveal the settings of the Enigma machines, much of its output had to be checked by hand. In fact, Clarke and Turing spent long hours working together in Hut 8. They continued to do so after they broke off their engagement. And they met each other's parents after they announced their engagement. Turing apparently did not meet them before, as in the movie. 

Moreover, different than the portrayal, it was common for all of the cryptanalysts to continue work on the previous day’s cipher traffic until the next round of communiqués arrived.  They knew of stock phrases - such as ending each message with "Heil Hitler" - because that was long since a basic tool of diplomatic and military cryptanalysis: date at the top; "Your Excellency"; etc.

Turing called his manual labor “Banburismus” after the long sheets of paper made in Banbury.  But Turing called Clarke’s method “Dillyismus” after Dillwin Knox, the World War One cryptologist who revealed the Zimmerman Telegram.

 

Soon to be an eBook from
http://www.bletchleyparkresearch.co.uk

Before going to the theater, I intended to watch the film as a story in the abstract, not as a documentary.  That was very hard to do.  I read Andrew Hodges’s booklet biography of Turing when it came out in 1999.  (The film is based on his recent and greatly expanded biography, Turing: The Enigma; Princeton, 2014). Ahead of seeing the film, I researched Joan Clarke and wrote about her for the E-Sylum maillist of the Numismatic Bibilomania Society.  My research into her work continues. Having her numismatic bibliography, from an obituary in the BNJ, I submitted a proposal to the ANA.

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk

From Wired, “How Designers Recreated Alan Turing’s Code-Breaking Computer for Imitation Game,” by Angela Watercutter, November 21, 2014 here. 

"Turing produced the design for the Bombe, building on the design of the original Polish Bomba which had been produced by Marian Rejewski in 1938. The Bletchley Park Bombe designed by Turing, was refined by another Bletchley Park codebreaker Gordon Welchman and actually built by engineer Harold Keen who was based at the British Tabulating Company, not at Bletchley Park."

 

A snippet of what displays on
the devices given to visitors to
perhaps the most computerized park in the UK.

Among those who complain about the film is Dr. Sue Black whose blog is "Cheeky Geek" here.

In a scene stolen from the future,
a tank crushes an (empty) Tommy helmet.

A biography of Joan Clarke's work is this article by Lynsey Ann Lord which is extracted from a University of St Andrews honours project. (Clarke finished all three triposes examinations and qualified for an M. Sc. in addition to her B.A. in mathematics.  She received neither because Cambridge did not grant degrees to women back then.)

      

Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray [nee Clarke] (1917—1996) cryptanalyst and numismatist is listed in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography here. 

Lord Stewartby (Bernard Harold Ian Halley Stewart), one of her collaborators in the coinage of Scotland, wrote the obituary for the British Numismatic Journal Vol. 67 No. 13, pg 162-167. (Online here.)  In 1986, Joan E. L. Murray was granted a BNS Sanford Saltus Medal for her research. 

He is not really Turing and it is not really his Bombe
but it was still a good movie.

The Secret Lives of Codebreakers: The Men and Women Who Cracked the Enigma Code at Bletchley Park by Sinclair McKay. New York: Plume (Penguin Group), 2012. (Originally published in the UK as The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (Aurum Press).) This retelling of the capture of Enigma wheels from the U-110 has some inaccuracies. The book says very little about Joan Clarke, though quite a bit about Mavis Lever (later Batey), who also worked on the Naval Enigma.

The Ultra Secret: the first account of the most astounding cryptanalysis coup of World War II – how the British broke the German code and read most of the signals between Hitler and his generals throughout the war by F. W. Winterbotham, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1974. This book broke the story. It is not from the viewpoint of Bletchley Park, and has no mention of Turing.

Engima: How the German Machine Cipher was Broken, and How it was Read by the Allies in World War II  by Wladyslaw Kozaczuk, edited and translated by Christopher Kasparek, University Publications of America, 1984 (Warsaw: Ksiazka I Wiedza, 1979).  Polish mathematicians had begun a theoretical analysis as early as 1932. The Turing-Welchman Bombe was an extension of the Polish Bomba; it was not Turing's universal machine.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Turing's Cathedral

BASIC: Turing's Truth

The Code Book

Before Email