I had a long read on the Bismarck. At each engagement it was outnumbered. By the time it sank it took 400 hits. And it sunk not because of those torpedoes but because it's crew scuttled it. What a ship.
I feel sorrow for the loss of its and Hood's crew. Their crew's valiance and courage and ingenuity used for their own deaths.
I am grateful for many who survived the war and lived the course of their lives like the woman in this article. They built the world we live in today.
Sounds like that poor Luftwaffe general/concerned father "doomed" the Bismarck more directly than someone who happened to transcribe a broken code. I wonder what his obituary was like.
Nah, he just made a mistake. People make the occasional mistake. Crypto has to cover that, because it happens.
Another general during WW2 made the mistake of always including the same stock paragraph in every transmission. That's bad. That's an O(n) mistake, not an O(1) mistake.
And I suppose someone made an O(n) mistake if the British knew the names of a significant number of Bismarck crew.
Another mistake, which had serious consequences to the Germans, was that a German weather ship in the North Atlantic accidentally transmitted their weather report using the Enigma key reserved for naval operations rather than the key used for routine information, noticed the mistake, and then immediately retransmitted the identical message using the routine key. Since weather forecasts have predictable content and format (and are thus easier to decrypt), this error allowed the Bletchley Park people to crack the operations key much more quickly than they otherwise could have.
This episode is described in the book Alan Turing: The Enigma[1], which was the basis for "The Imitation Game" film. I highly recommend this book if you're interested in Turing, cryptography, or the early days of computing. While Turing is best known today for his work on the theoretical underpinnings of computer science (due to the Turing Machine that bears his name), he also worked on the design of one of the early general purpose computers (the ACE[2]) after the war, on voice encryption hardware, and other interesting stuff.
> Since weather forecasts have predictable content and format (and are thus easier to decrypt),
You can't tell the format from the encrypted data though, right? Would you not have to know apriori what this message was in order to make use of this particular weakness?
Metadata. In this case, the broadcaster's general location and the timing and (I suppose) size of the messages. And perhaps known/guessed plaintext attacks: if you too have a weather ship in the same area you can guess at the content.
At least its an interesting lesson in InfoSec: even secure replicas reduce the security of the total system. As well as all the social vulnerabilities implicit.
Also, there's a good few books about the role of women in the development of Computing in general. I've been enjoying one called Artificial Knowing by Allison Adam.
Also, if you move in the right circles you might see a couple of ex-WRENS who worked with Turing and Colossus making a public appearance, they're sharing their stories of the contributions they all made.
AFAIK, BBC Radio is not blocked outside the UK, perhaps because a TV Licence is not required for radio, and/or possibly because the BBC may control more distribution rights for the content of its radio productions than its TV output.
> The message, passed instantly along the chain of command, was instrumental in finding the Bismarck, which was first spotted from the air by a seaplane...
My wife's great uncle, Tuck Smith, is the person who spotted the Bismarck. Since the US had not yet entered the war, his being in the air that day was, literally, and act of war.
It was years before the truth came out.
He was patrolling in the Pacific on 7 Dec 1941. Looking for the Japanese fleet.
I feel sorrow for the loss of its and Hood's crew. Their crew's valiance and courage and ingenuity used for their own deaths.
I am grateful for many who survived the war and lived the course of their lives like the woman in this article. They built the world we live in today.
Edit: Apparently it is Memorial Day.