British Free Corps

[paranoid marvin]

Regarding keeping sources of intelligence secret: The reason why the breaking of Enigma was a secret for so long is that Britain distributed captured Enigma machines to Commonwealth governments after the war assuring them that they were uncrackable. For years the U.K. was reading the diplomatic signals of multiple foreign countries.

Really? That's incredible!

 

[Vladd67]

its mentioned in many books on Enigma so either its a well-known fact or all the author were quoting the same source.

 

[paranoid marvin]

Regarding Enigma, I hadn't heard that one, but I had heard that the Russians scooped up Enigma machines through Eastern Europe and we listened in on those until they were phased out, I think it was sixties.

This sounds quite plausible, and you can imagine that British intelligence helped for more Enigma machines to fall into the hands of the Warsaw Pact.

 

[Ursa major]

but I’m left with the impression that he was a real stickler for the rules and the processes around them

This wasn't necessarily confined to him.

I recall, though not in enough detail, watching the episode of Who Do You Think You Are? concerning Marianne Faithful and the almost comical (if it wasn't so tragic) administrative process that one of her ancestors (or it might have been an associate of one of her ancestors, I can't recall which) went through while in Germany.

In any case, it's an episode of that series that's well worth a watch, as there's also relevant content when dealing with her ancestors in Austria (post-Anschluss).

 

[BigBadBob141]

The first Enigma machines were meant for purely commercial use, sending coded telegrams which your business rivals could not read, then the German military adopted them and made them far more complex.
The Polish Secret Service did a lot of the ground work in breaking their encryption (details of the machine were passed to them by a German officer for money) which they then passed on to the British and French just before the war, miraculously the Germans never found out about this, the boffins at Bletchley Park, including Turing developed even better ways of cracking the cipher, this worked out so good that towards the end of the war they were decrypting messages before the German high command did.
The only exception to this were the u-boat machines which had four rotors instead of three which made them much, much harder to crack, but even these succumbed in the end, the one fault that the Enigma machines had was they never encrypted a letter as itself, you could keep pressing the letter E forever and it would never be encrypted as E, it also helped that it's human operators could be lazy in the way that used it and would use the same opening phrase over and over.
An even harder cipher was developed called Lorenz based on teletype protocols, Alan Turing helped to developed one of the first programmable computers to decipher Lorenz which was then built by telecom engineer Tommy Flowers, just another unsung hero in the war.
The machine was code named Colossus and it worked with thousands of thermonic valves, the room it was housed in would get really warm, so it was not unusual to see the personal laundry (underwear) of the WRENS who operated it hanging up to dry in the heat, sadly after the war Colossus was scrapped with just a few small elements surviving.
And yes a certain amount of Enigma machines were passed on to what would become commonwealth countries for their use, so we could keep an open ear on them.
Other unsung heroes in this saga were the wireless interception service, some would have been army but a lot of them in Britain were volunteer civilian radio hams.
Also Bletchley did a lot of work along side the Americans breaking the Japanese codes and ciphers, amazing work by a great bunch of people!
P.S. Admiral Donitz head of the U-Boat arm of the German Navy realized that the Enigma code was being broken, but he always thought this was due to a highly placed spy somewhere in the navy ranks, he always thought that the machine itself was totally invulnerable.

 

[Vladd67]

When the British intercepted a ship etc using intelligence gained from enigma they went to a lot of trouble to make it look accidental, however when the Americans assassinated Yamamoto there was doubt he was located by radio intercept and the British worried the Americans had given the game away.

 

[CupofJoe]

I didn't know that the Poles had recreated an Enigma pre-war...

Polish Enigma double - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I think I've see one of those that were given to the British... It was in a Library display case in the 70s in a university where my dad worked...

 

[BigBadBob141]

The Americans had a lot of luck breaking the Japanese codes and ciphers.
They knew the Japanese were coming at the Battle of Midway, the turning point in the Pacific war as the second battle of El Alamein as in the west.
At one point just to confirm the target they sent a clear message from Midway saying the were running short of fresh water and please send a tanker, the Japanese then signaled to their fleet in code that their target was running short of fresh water, thus confirming that American Intelligence was on the nose!

 

[Dai]

If anyone remembers that old prisoner of war show from the sixties, Hogan's Heroes, there were several episodes upon "flipping" soldiers from other armies and there were a few about the German attempts to conscript P.O.W. aid for the German forces. Very interesting reasons were given as to why a prisoner would work or labour for the enemy. Added food or access to medical care or improvements in living conditions were often given. Sometimes work or Labour was forced, the men were assigned and were not given a choice, excepting death, or torture or death by execution or death by exposure and so on and of course for the real trouble makers who wouldn't cooperate they would be sent to the death camps along with other undesirables.
Remember that the two maxims given upon capture were to stay alive and escape, and to confound and confuse all enemy efforts if escape was not possible.
A seeming acquiescence could in fact be an elaborate escape attempt or attempt to infiltrate and confound enemy efforts.

This book is worth a look if you are interested in pursuing this subject: Hitler's British Slaves: Allied POWs in Germany 1939-1945 (English Edition) eBook: Longden, Sean: Amazon.de: Kindle-Shop