Within each of us are the seeds of our own destruction, so it is said. But that same warning applies not just to individuals, but to societies and to cultures. And to military endeavors.
1.While many of us are familiar with the cryptographic miracle, the Enigma Machine, first offered to the Imperial German Navy in April of 1918, the story begins in 1914 with the German light cruiser SMS Magdeburg, a ship of the Baltic Fleet, during the war with Britain, France and Russia.
2. The German navy, as was the method of the times, used coded and enciphered German messagesā¦
āGermany had been forced to rely almost exclusively on wireless communication after Britain, in the first days of the war, had followed through on its 1912 plan to cut Germany's undersea cablesā¦. [using] code books governing German naval and diplomatic communications. By far the most important, and secret, was the German navy's SKM code, short for Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marineā¦. Only holders of a cipher "key" could divine the underlying text,ā¦ā
German SKM Code
3. The Magdeburg had four of the codebooks to decipher the messages they got, and the ship was sent to the Gulf of Finland, to sink any Russian ships they found. Due to a heavy fog, the Magdeburg ran aground. Unable to free the ship, with Russian ships coming, the Germans blew up the Magdeburg, and destroyed the codebooks.
So they thought.
4. One crewman threw a codebook overā¦..another dove in with one of the codebooksā¦and drowned.
The following day, a Russian ship sent divers downā¦.and recovered two codebooks.
āā¦the Russians recovered the latter two from the sea and the fourth from the captainās safe. They later scrapped Magdeburg where she lay.
The Russians retained two of the codebooks for themselves and offered the third to the British, provided that a British ship collected it. This did not happen immediately, but the Admiralty received the codebook on 13 October.ā
Allied Capture of German Naval Code Books
5. āThe capture of the code books proved to provide a significant advantage for the Royal Navy. The Admiralty had recently created a deciphering department known as Room 40 to process intercepted German wireless signals. With the code books and cipher key, the British were able to track the movements of most German warships; this information could be passed on to the Admiral John Jellicoe, the commander of the Grand Fleet.[9] This allowed the British to ambush parts of or the entire German fleet on several occasions, most successfully at the Battles of Dogger Bank in January 1915 and Jutland in May 1916.ā SMS Magdeburg - Wikipedia
Pretty good luck for the Brits?
Andā¦.the Germans never caught onā¦.and, as a result, turned down the offer of the Enigma Machine when was offered to them in 1918.
Thenā¦..Britain suffers from hoof-in-mouth disease.
Next.
1.While many of us are familiar with the cryptographic miracle, the Enigma Machine, first offered to the Imperial German Navy in April of 1918, the story begins in 1914 with the German light cruiser SMS Magdeburg, a ship of the Baltic Fleet, during the war with Britain, France and Russia.
2. The German navy, as was the method of the times, used coded and enciphered German messagesā¦
āGermany had been forced to rely almost exclusively on wireless communication after Britain, in the first days of the war, had followed through on its 1912 plan to cut Germany's undersea cablesā¦. [using] code books governing German naval and diplomatic communications. By far the most important, and secret, was the German navy's SKM code, short for Signalbuch der Kaiserlichen Marineā¦. Only holders of a cipher "key" could divine the underlying text,ā¦ā
German SKM Code
3. The Magdeburg had four of the codebooks to decipher the messages they got, and the ship was sent to the Gulf of Finland, to sink any Russian ships they found. Due to a heavy fog, the Magdeburg ran aground. Unable to free the ship, with Russian ships coming, the Germans blew up the Magdeburg, and destroyed the codebooks.
So they thought.
4. One crewman threw a codebook overā¦..another dove in with one of the codebooksā¦and drowned.
The following day, a Russian ship sent divers downā¦.and recovered two codebooks.
āā¦the Russians recovered the latter two from the sea and the fourth from the captainās safe. They later scrapped Magdeburg where she lay.
The Russians retained two of the codebooks for themselves and offered the third to the British, provided that a British ship collected it. This did not happen immediately, but the Admiralty received the codebook on 13 October.ā
Allied Capture of German Naval Code Books
5. āThe capture of the code books proved to provide a significant advantage for the Royal Navy. The Admiralty had recently created a deciphering department known as Room 40 to process intercepted German wireless signals. With the code books and cipher key, the British were able to track the movements of most German warships; this information could be passed on to the Admiral John Jellicoe, the commander of the Grand Fleet.[9] This allowed the British to ambush parts of or the entire German fleet on several occasions, most successfully at the Battles of Dogger Bank in January 1915 and Jutland in May 1916.ā SMS Magdeburg - Wikipedia
Pretty good luck for the Brits?
Andā¦.the Germans never caught onā¦.and, as a result, turned down the offer of the Enigma Machine when was offered to them in 1918.
Thenā¦..Britain suffers from hoof-in-mouth disease.
Next.
