Code Breaking in World War II

1926 - The German Navy adopted the German Enigma machine developed in 1918 by Berlin engineer, Arthur Scherbius. But Hans Thilo-Schmidt sold it to Gustave Bertrand of the French espionage service, who gave it to Marian Rejewski in Poland. "By 1933 the Poles were solving Enigma messages. They built their own copies to speed up the work. Then they improved on these with a cyclometer, which in effect joined two Enigmas, and then by 1938 their so-called bomba, which linked six Enigmas" (bomba was the name of an ice-cream dish eaten by the code-breakers). "All of this enabled them to run through rotor combinations far faster than the Germans had thought possible, and so to solve Enigma messages. On July 25, 1939, at a secret meeting in the Kabackie Woods near the town of Pyry, the Poles gave their allies, the British and the French, one copy each of their reconstructed Enigmas."(


1939 - In August, the British moved codebreaking operations to Bletchley Park 40 miles northwest of London between Cambridge and Oxford, later renamed Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS also referred to as the "Golf, Cheese and Chess Society") commanded by Alastair Denniston, including geniuses such as Ian Fleming, later author of the James Bond novels, and Alan Turing who developed a theory of the electronic computer.