OVERVIEW

ADDRESS: 120 Wooleys Lane, Great Neck NY 11023 USA.

This paper was presented for discussion at the Baltimore-Washington German History Seminar, 8 November 1980, Towson State University, Towson, Maryland. It is a slightly revised form of a portion of "Codebreaking in World Wars I and II: The Major Successes and Failures, Their Causes and Their Effects," The Historical Journal, 23 (September, 1980), 617 639, which lists all sources. The technical reasons given below owe a great deal to the kind help of Dr. C. A. Deavours.

A spate of books, articles and reports at historical conferences has made it widely known that the Allies solved the high-level German cipher machine called Enigma during World War II. The Germans, on the other hand, did not solve the equivalent Allied cryptosystems, with the exception of Royal Navy codes up to about 1943. The Allies thus had considerable insight into enemy plans and capabilities that the Germans did not have, and these insights greatly contributed to the Allied victory.

Why were the Allies - meaning the western Allies - so much better than the Germans in this field, which proved so important? In investigating this question, we might begin by clearing away two theories that at first seem plausible but do not in fact apply.

One is that German codebreakers were chosen for their political reliability as good Nazis instead of for their ability. This did not happen with the German cryptanalytic agencies. The civilian technical heads of the agencies...