Using an Original WW2 Enigma Machine! With Mat McLachlan

Join Historian Mat McLachlan as he explores Bletchley Park and tells the story of a hardy group of cryptographers who cracked the German Enigma codes and changed the course of World War 2. And see how an original WW2 Enigma machine works!
Join us on a battlefield tour and walk in the footsteps of heroes! Visit battlefields.com.au/ for full details.

[@london_james]

The amount of work that went in by the French and the Polish often gets missed

[@DrDeadleg]

Brits are too proud to admit that without our and French help they won't do shit.

[@london_james]

@@DrDeadleg I'm British

[@sonjaglass7443]

Absolutely! Thx, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski!!😊

[@terrimitchell-whatdoyouthink]

Oh, wow! That Enigma machine is amazing! What a mind boggling process! I've watched the Benedict Cumberbatch movie about it and this episode has just shone such a light on how fascinating and complex the Code Breaking skill was.

[@mrgraham9007]

I did much of my telecommunications training at this location, with all that history around me.

[@janekk578]

Shame ...Almost nothing about who did made the decoding. In September 1939, British Military Mission 4, which included Colin Gubbins and Vera Atkins, went to Poland to evacuate code-breakers Gwido Langer, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski from the country with their replica Enigma machines. The Poles were taken across the border into Atkins' native Romania, at the time a neutral country where some of them were interned. Atkins arranged for their release and onward travel to Western Europe to advise the French and British, who at the time were still unable to decrypt German messages

[@user-ky5dy5hl4d]

Absolutely correct. Alan Turing was just a little helped by the Polish geniuses.

[@jtc1947]

I had a pen-pal of long ago who was ADAMANT that ALAN TURING "INVENTED" the ENIGMA DEVICE. I checked the history of ENIGMA & TURING and figured out that TURING would have had to have been 15 years old at the time of the invention. SO? I am doubtful that the 15 year old GENIUS invented that machine?

[@jandejong5307]

Great presentation with excellent explanations. Thank you.

[@MatMcLachlanHistory]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@minkymoo4794]

Thank you, great vid.

[@PacoOtis]

Bravo! An excellent documentary so very well presented! Thanks for sharing and the very best of luck from here in the States.

[@MatMcLachlanHistory]

Thank you!

[@user-ky5dy5hl4d]

@@MatMcLachlanHistory It was NO(!) ‘’genius’’ of Alan Turing that cracked Enigma. It was Polish mathematical geniuses Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski who cracked Enigma. No American nor British did that. Get your history straight.

[@user-ky5dy5hl4d]

It was NO(!) ‘’genius’’ of Alan Turing that cracked Enigma. It was Polish mathematical geniuses Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski who cracked Enigma. No American nor British did that. Get your history straight.

[@michaelbruce5415]

Odd but true - The only working Bombe (that broke Enigma) and Colossus machines (that broke Lorenz) are not at the Bletchley Park museum, but are in fact next door - at The National Museum of Computing

[@jtc1947]

FASCINATING DEVICES!

[@krisvdmeij]

Great, thanks a lot!

[@dubliner1100]

Great video and expose. Thank you

[@MatMcLachlanHistory]

Thanks!

[@michelangelobuonarroti916]

Thanks. I had not known that the machine connected a complicated electrical circuit.

[@mohammadahmedragab837]

this video made my really understand how engima worked and how it was cracked. thank you so much

[@MatMcLachlanHistory]

My pleasure!

[@sweetpeachbellini8245]

Amazing! If it hadn't been for Alan Turing; everyone on the "Enigma" staff as well as all the hardworking men and women at Bletchley Park, the war could've gone on longer at the expense of many lives. As the previous poster noted, Mr. Turing was vilified by the Court system of his own country because he was gay and was chemically castrated. As seen in the film, he couldn't go on living like that and sadly, we lost a great person. Thank you, Mr. Turing and all at Bletchley Park.

[@MatMcLachlanHistory]

Well said.

[@jimme1982]

Very interesting. Came here after reading "The Rose Code" by Kate Quinn. One question. They had the sheet for the month with how to setup the enigma machine. How does that line up with the fact that the germans had to chage the settings every day and how does that lazyness come into play? If there there was a set schedule, how then does the lazyness of the operator (the girlfriend name) come into play with only changing it a little bit so it wasn't actuelly random. Why would he change it randomly? Then the german on the other end wouldn't be able to read it right?

[@denvan3143]

Trying every combination of rotors, ring settings, rotor order and plugboard settings would take a supercomputer longer than the age of the universe; that makes the Setec Astronomy black box in the Robert Redford movie _Sneakers_ sheer fantasy.

[@frankwilkinson6328]

It's a film! you dipstick.

[@denvan3143]

@@frankwilkinson6328 “It’s a film“; thanks for the revelation. I’ve worked with computer for more than three decades, what have you done?

[@iplanes1]

A question crossed my mind. All this about Enigma and how it was decoded is very interesting but I am sure that the allies also had some pretty fancy ways of encoding messages as the axis powers would undoubtedly be listening. However, I have not read or seen anything about the methods used by the allies. Did they build a machine similar to the Enigma? Is it all still secret? I would like to know more along these lines.

[@jtc1947]

Supposedly, Great Britain and the U.S. invented code making machines SIMILAR to Enigma but with differences that made the English and US machines unhackable. The German army captured a BRITISH device at the DUNKIRK FIASCO but SUPPOSEDLY could NOT figure it out. You will need to check.

[@iainmacmillan5997]

Brilliant and informative Mat, watching the vid on Boxing day enjoying a dram of Whisky, all the best for 2010 when it comes.

[@MatMcLachlanHistory]

Cheers mate.

[@Oliwia-hu8of]

Interesting.

[@davidf0071]

Brilliant documentary. I understand that each rotor has twenty six different settings, one for each letter of the alphabet. German, like English, has twenty six letters, but what allowance, if any, was made for umlaut?

[@user-zs9bk5ef6j]

très très intéressant .

[@davidjames1881]

Alan Turing...Unsung hero in wartime and vilified in peacetime .....Read his story ...All that he did for his country and he was quickly forgotten because of his sexuality ...This country still treats its hero,s exactly the same today in one form or another .

[@MatMcLachlanHistory]

Well said David.

[@Pfsif]

Glorified in this age?

[@mrgraham9007]

O so true. The world makes heroes of its fools, and fools of its heroes.

[@christianpatriot7439]

So the Hun who was sending an Enigma message had to scramble the rotors in the machine and then transmit the position of each rotor in the message he sent so the receiving Hun would know how to prepare his machine for decoding? What would have happened if the initial setting of the rotors for each message sent had been truly random?

[@denvan3143]

Ground settings could be chosen randomly with a single six-sided die and a chart with the alphabet divided into six groups: 1 ABCDEF 2 GFHIJK 4 LMNOPQ 5 RSTUVW 6 XYZ The first roll of the die would select the group for the first letter. The second roll of the die would select the actual letter for the initial ground setting. All of the letters would be selected this way. If group 6 was selected randomly and the roll for the actual letter was greater than 3 then the die could be rolled again for a 1, 2 or 3. Or 4 could be considered to be X, 5 as Y and 6 as Z. Alternatively one could simply use any sort of text (from a book or even an instruction manual) and select three letters from any word for the ground settings: the letters ORS From the word “horse” for the initial ground setting and the letters ARP from the word “'carpenter” for the final ground setting. One could circle selected letters that had been selected so as not to repeat them.

[@benquinneyiii7941]

Ultimate principle

[@Gitarzan66]

Wow! How lucky you are to be able go to such places! How would you like to be the German that made the mistakes that gave up their code? What load that would be to bear. Do historians have any idea who the culprit/s were?

[@MatMcLachlanHistory]

I believe it was more a systematic failure of a number of operators, rather than a specific individual.

[@railwaymechanicalengineer4587]

ENIGMA - WAS SUPERCEDED BY "TUNNIE" Everyone seems to babble on about ENIGMA ! But these electro-mechanical machines had been superceded (by everyone) before WW2 was over. Replaced by early Digitised systems which in the case of the Germans was called "Tunnie" (Tuna - as in the fish !). Tunnie sent high speed digitised messages by radio, not good old & slow Morse based signals ! Making it hard to even read the actual message, never mind decode them. The Worlds first Computers would now be needed to read & decode such messages !!!

[@stevenvanhulle7242]

Actually, cracking codes is done by cryptanalysts, not cryptographers, but whatever...

[@williamhoughton2945]

It is often said that an Enigma can't encode a letter to be itself. Please consider the following. Say, e.g., that the rotors and reflector are configured in such a way that when the "A" key is depressed, the returned code is a "T" with no patch cords installed. Now install a "T" to "A" patch cord. The "A" is now returned as itself. I see nothing to prevent that from happening. The wiring diagrams I have seen suggest that if the "A" key is depressed, the "A" light circuit is opened so it cannot light. So, it seem that a letter CAN be encoded to itself, but it just can't be seen. Thus, the operator's aide cannot record a letter. But if this is so, there must be times when a key is depressed and no light lights. Does the operator just depress the "A" key a second time and depend upon the advancement of a rotor to return a new code? I have watched many hours of KZbin videos on the Enigma but have never heard mention of a "no light" phenomenon which must occur occasionally.

[@craigpeterson7953]

No, that won't work. Once you install the patch from A to T, pressing the A key will send a T through the rotors. Which will result in something other than A coming back. The rotor stack is not reciprocal.

[@helanren]

In the video, it looks as if you never touch the rotors after 'sending' NORMANDY. But that means the rotors are no longer at the YFQ start setting, since at least one of them moved. So you shouldn't have been able to decipher the message back to Normandy???

[@MatMcLachlanHistory]

As I recall, we noted the start position of the rotors and reset them between coding/decoding.

[@larryrobinson6914]

Today seems easy but back then life or death literally

[@jtc1947]

I guess (LOL!) that there is no way to repair that ENIGMA DEVICE to like NEW so that the "O" key works as it should?

[@MatMcLachlanHistory]

I'm sure it's possible, but I doubt they want to tinker with history!

[@jtc1947]

@@MatMcLachlanHistory VERY TRUE! And I would imagine that the parts would have to be hand-made? BE WELL & SAFE!

[@amberfranklin4499]

Alan Turing helped brake the naval enigma

[@dinerouk]

break!

[@amberfranklin4499]

@@dinerouk. I did spell it break but my tablet autocorrected it to brake

[@markfryer9880]

@@amberfranklin4499 Damn autocorrect!

[@danielhayton9438]

Someone forgot Lorenz and Colossus?

[@MatMcLachlanHistory]

Didn’t forget. Just not enough time to include everything in a 20 min program!

[@danielhayton9438]

@@MatMcLachlanHistory It does reinforce the myth that Enigma was the only project at Bletchley Park. The network analysis of radio operators, identified by their keying style and processed on punched cards, was also a vital part of knowing which forces were where.

[@stevenvanhulle7242]

@@danielhayton9438 Is that a "myth", though? Like in "a repeated false story"? I think most people who are aware of (at least some of) the history of Bletchley Park will also know that they did much more than work on the Enigma cipher.

[@danielhayton9438]

@@stevenvanhulle7242 Hi, There was more than the German codes. I interviewed one of the "Parkies" who was, in typically British fashion, a little dismissive of the received wisdom. He worked on Japanese Naval Codes.

[@rustycherkas8229]

The Bletchley Park "bombe"s were built to determine initial rotor settings, not decipher messages... As portrayed in the now-famous movie, once the 'hard part' was cracked for a particular day (from one branch of the German military) the codebreakers knew the configuration settings in use for that day by that branch of the German military. Deciphering any intercepted cyphertext would then require an Enigma machine (or a replica.) How many working Enigma replicas were built by the British and used at Bletchley Park during the war to do the work of deciphering messages once initial configurations had been found? Were there actual machines built? Or were there "sliding bits of paper" like the "Pringles Can Enigma Machine" that people can print and play with at home these days?

[@postmanlondon]

Oh no not wow!

[@Cadcare]

You didn't show us the Harrier. ;-)

[@gowdsake7103]

I never understood this wierd way of explaining Enigma. I understand how it works so the more understandable description would be. The rotors have wires that re direct the voltage to another letter indicated by a lamp. Every press of a key moves the first rotor 26 times when it moved the second rotor 1 position which re routed the voltage again

[@katharinavandewinkel7506]

I Need this topic in German language .cause i Not so good in understand all in english .cause this topic is Important to know we are Germans and wath the Methode was wich to destroy ouer country wich was Not fair at all

[@maartjewaterman1193]

Nicht fair?? Hätte Hitler kapituliert, als klar wurde, dass er sich nicht halten konnte, hätte ein Großteil Deutschlands heute noch stehen und unzählige deutsche Leben gerettet. Also hören Sie auf, die Schuld am deutschen Unglück denjenigen zu geben, die die Enigmamaschine benutzt haben, um die deutschen Militärgeheimnisse herauszufinden.

[@rustycherkas8229]

I'm not a historian, but... The story we're told is that those who sought to establish the Third Reich for a thousand years of German domination also exterminated any of their countrymen who stood in their way... Perhaps if more Deutschevolke stood up for their fellow Germans in opposition to Hitler & his crew there'd not have been a "world war" that killed millions... English expression: "All is fair in love and war..." Either work to ensure there is no war, or else get used to it...

[@clarenelson9437]

Very nice, if only you could get rid of the music.