World War II from #AtoZChallenge #NaPoWriMo – B is for The Bombe

WORLD WAR II FROM A TO Z

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No it is not a misspelling.  Most of us when we think of the bomb in World War 2, we think of the Atomic Bomb.  My post today is not about that bomb.  The Bombe, also known as the Turing Bombe is the computer used to solve the Nazi Enigma Code during the war.

 So many messages can’t be solved, Germany’s writing all in code

Turing’s computer, it’s the Bombe

The Nazi war machine must be slowed

So many messages can’t be solved, Germany’s writing all in code

Nazi aircraft dropping bombs, they explode

Brilliant Bletchley scientists must keep calm

So many messages can’t be solved, Germany’s writing all in code

Turing’s computer, it’s the Bombe

Enter the Bombe. Designed by Alan Turing, the Bombe took the form of emulating several hundred Enigma rotors, as well as functioning as a logical electrical circuit to automate the deductions needed

The bombe was an electromechanical device used by British cryptologists to help decipher German Enigma-machine-encrypted secret messages during World War II.

 

The US Navy and US Army later produced their own machines to the same functional specification, but engineered differently from each other and from the British Bombe.

The United States Bombe

The initial design of the bombe was produced in 1939 at the UK Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park by Alan Turing, with an important refinement devised in 1940 by Gordon Welchman.

Alan Turing

Gordon Welchman

Bletchley Park, then and now and the women who worked there.

The engineering design and construction was the work of Harold Keen of the British Tabulating Machine Company. It was a substantial development from a device that had been designed in 1938 in Poland at the Biuro Szyfrów (Cipher Bureau) by cryptologist Marian Rejewski, and known as the “cryptologic bomb”.

Marian Rejwski

Jerzy Rózycki

Henryk Zygalski.

The bombe was designed to discover some of the daily settings of the Enigma machines on the various German military networks: specifically, the set of rotors in use and their positions in the machine; the rotor core start positions for the message—the message key—and one of the wirings of the plugboard.

A three-rotor Enigma with plugboard (Steckerbrett)