A very short history of Enigma, Battle of the Atlantic and wolf packs
March 6th 2007 08:33
Hello again
This will be a very short history to give some background information regarding the title topics although due to the vast amount of info available on each subject, I will leave it upto the individual reader, if they want to find out more?
First up is the Enigma machine:
The Enigma cipher machine was first patented by Scherbius in 1918. It was initially designed to be used by commercial companies to keep their communications secret. When Germany began rebuilding its military in the 1930s, the government took over the Enigmas and began using them for all of their secret communications. (Note: the word cipher is also spelled cypher which is a primarily British variant.)
Poland was aware that Germany would probably invade them first and built a cipher bureau to try to read enciphered German messages. The Poles were the first to determine how the Enigma machine worked and how to go about decoding its messages. When Poland was invaded, the Polish mathematicians were already helping the Allied forces develop strategies and machines which allowed them to read many important German messages during the war.
A team of codebreakers working at Bletchley Park in England and initially using a replica Enigma machine supplied by the Poles was able to decode most of the enigma-coded messages used by the German military even though the Germans changed the settings of the machine. The code name for the deciphering operation and the intelligence derived from it was "Ultra".
Each letter typed into the enigma machine's keyboard was converted to some other letter of the alphabet and displayed in a lighted window. Since the entire mechanism rotated each time a letter was entered, pressing the same letter three times could produce three different encodings. The encodings were produced by hard-wired code wheels and patch panels. The three code wheels could be mounted in a variety of positions and each one could be set to any letter of the alphabet. In addition, a patch panel on the front of the machine could be set up in many ways, making a vast number of combinations of cipher keys possible.
Enigma machine
The Battle of the Atlantic:
On September 3, 1939, Britain declared war on Germany and immediately initiated a naval blockade. To counter this, the German navy, under Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, refused to confront the Royal Navy and focused solely on commerce destruction. The subsequent conflict between Allied merchant ships and the German U-boats was proclaimed to be the Battle of the Atlantic by Winston Churchill on 6 March 1941.
This engagement, the longest battle of World War II, could be considered the most decisive campaign of the entire conflict. England was heavily dependent on imports of food, fuel, and raw materials from overseas. If the British succumbed to the German stranglehold, the western Allies would be denied a vital base of operation for future air and land offenses. In addition, with Britain under Nazi control, Hitler could concentrate the majority of his resources in the east against the Soviet Union.
The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest campaign of the Second World War. In a hard-fought and intense struggle to cut off Britain's maritime supply lines, Germany mobilized submarines (or U-boats), battleships, battle cruisers, aircraft and mines against Allied merchant shipping. Substantial British, Canadian and American naval and air forces were deployed to defeat this challenge. By far the greatest threat came from the U-boat.
For the first nine months of the war, U-boats operated in British waters and surface ships in the Atlantic. There were few U-boats available and not all had the range to be ocean-going. The Royal Navy, which introduced the convoy system at the outset, was short of escort vessels. Therefore, many merchant ships still had to sail independently and losses from this category, as they would be throughout the campaign, were much heavier than from convoys. Mixed results were achieved; by the end of April 1940 the Germans had sunk 800,000 tons of shipping, but lost 22 submarines.
The fall of France in June 1940 gave the U-boats bases on the Atlantic coast, increasing their range and the threat they posed to the sea lanes. Over the autumn, Allied losses rose sharply. A significant growth in U-boat production from spring 1941 allowed Dönitz, the U-boat commander, to exploit new tactics whereby his submarines attacked in groups or "wolf packs". In response, the Royal Navy, with the help of the Royal Canadian Navy, extended the convoy system right across the North Atlantic. Intelligence successes allowed evasive routeing of convoys away from danger and reduced losses for the rest of 1941.
After America's entry into the war the unpreparedness of the US Navy allowed the Germans to wreak massive destruction amongst shipping on the American eastern seaboard during the first half of 1942. When the situation was stabilised by the introduction of a convoy system, the wolf packs returned to mid-Atlantic. The massive success of their onslaught was helped by the Allies' temporary loss of ability to read U-boat signals. By the end of 1942, Allied shipping was in crisis.
Losses reached devastating levels again in March 1943 but, thereafter, very effective Allied counter-measures including the introduction of escort support groups, some with aircraft carriers, and Very Long Range aircraft to close the air gap in mid-Atlantic quickly brought a decisive end to the U-boat threat. Although U-boats would continue to operate until the end of the war, the Germans had lost the Battle of the Atlantic by the end of May 1943.
Atlantic convoy in rare good weather
U Boats and wolf packs:
By the beginning of 1942, the U-boats were using the Rudeltaktikwolfpacks consisting of as many as 40 submarines to attack Allied convoys. While this tactic helped minimize the losses of experienced crews, it also pitted the U-boats against Allied escorts. Over the next 18 months the escorts will steadily improve their submarine fighting capabilities.
U Boat shadowing a convoy during the day! This has to be in the early years of the WW2, for a U boat to be on the surface this close to a convoy, as at this time apart from maybe the odd catapult ships, there wouldn't have been air cover and not sure where if any the escort ships might have been?
Typical U boat of the era.
When a oil tanker went up, it was very rare for any of the crew to survive, for even if you jumped over board, the flaming oil would spread across the surface of the water very quickly(not good).
The hunter becomes the hunted!
If you want to see two very good movies that tell both sides of the battle in a non glorified way then you shoud see Das Boot (The Boat) 1981, an excellant movie from the German side of things, well worth seeing and the other movie is the Cruel Sea 1953:
The Cruel Sea is a powerful film that puts you in the battle of the Atlantic. The black and white photography unintentionally conveys the gritty reality of a grim war.(Somebody has said that World War II was a war fought in black and white.) And although the special effects are primitive by today's standards, they are still pretty impressive. The film is an prime example of the post war school of British cinema before it was subsumed by Hollywood. It is a fine film, a fine war film and a fine piece of accurate history.
This movie has a special meaning for me as the ships in it, Corvettes are the same in which my grandfather fought in and he always said they were so bad that they would 'roll on wet grass'. not what you wanted in winter in the Atlantic!!
Hal
This will be a very short history to give some background information regarding the title topics although due to the vast amount of info available on each subject, I will leave it upto the individual reader, if they want to find out more?
First up is the Enigma machine:
The Enigma cipher machine was first patented by Scherbius in 1918. It was initially designed to be used by commercial companies to keep their communications secret. When Germany began rebuilding its military in the 1930s, the government took over the Enigmas and began using them for all of their secret communications. (Note: the word cipher is also spelled cypher which is a primarily British variant.)
Poland was aware that Germany would probably invade them first and built a cipher bureau to try to read enciphered German messages. The Poles were the first to determine how the Enigma machine worked and how to go about decoding its messages. When Poland was invaded, the Polish mathematicians were already helping the Allied forces develop strategies and machines which allowed them to read many important German messages during the war.
A team of codebreakers working at Bletchley Park in England and initially using a replica Enigma machine supplied by the Poles was able to decode most of the enigma-coded messages used by the German military even though the Germans changed the settings of the machine. The code name for the deciphering operation and the intelligence derived from it was "Ultra".
Each letter typed into the enigma machine's keyboard was converted to some other letter of the alphabet and displayed in a lighted window. Since the entire mechanism rotated each time a letter was entered, pressing the same letter three times could produce three different encodings. The encodings were produced by hard-wired code wheels and patch panels. The three code wheels could be mounted in a variety of positions and each one could be set to any letter of the alphabet. In addition, a patch panel on the front of the machine could be set up in many ways, making a vast number of combinations of cipher keys possible.
Enigma machine
The Battle of the Atlantic:
On September 3, 1939, Britain declared war on Germany and immediately initiated a naval blockade. To counter this, the German navy, under Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, refused to confront the Royal Navy and focused solely on commerce destruction. The subsequent conflict between Allied merchant ships and the German U-boats was proclaimed to be the Battle of the Atlantic by Winston Churchill on 6 March 1941.
This engagement, the longest battle of World War II, could be considered the most decisive campaign of the entire conflict. England was heavily dependent on imports of food, fuel, and raw materials from overseas. If the British succumbed to the German stranglehold, the western Allies would be denied a vital base of operation for future air and land offenses. In addition, with Britain under Nazi control, Hitler could concentrate the majority of his resources in the east against the Soviet Union.
The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest campaign of the Second World War. In a hard-fought and intense struggle to cut off Britain's maritime supply lines, Germany mobilized submarines (or U-boats), battleships, battle cruisers, aircraft and mines against Allied merchant shipping. Substantial British, Canadian and American naval and air forces were deployed to defeat this challenge. By far the greatest threat came from the U-boat.
For the first nine months of the war, U-boats operated in British waters and surface ships in the Atlantic. There were few U-boats available and not all had the range to be ocean-going. The Royal Navy, which introduced the convoy system at the outset, was short of escort vessels. Therefore, many merchant ships still had to sail independently and losses from this category, as they would be throughout the campaign, were much heavier than from convoys. Mixed results were achieved; by the end of April 1940 the Germans had sunk 800,000 tons of shipping, but lost 22 submarines.
The fall of France in June 1940 gave the U-boats bases on the Atlantic coast, increasing their range and the threat they posed to the sea lanes. Over the autumn, Allied losses rose sharply. A significant growth in U-boat production from spring 1941 allowed Dönitz, the U-boat commander, to exploit new tactics whereby his submarines attacked in groups or "wolf packs". In response, the Royal Navy, with the help of the Royal Canadian Navy, extended the convoy system right across the North Atlantic. Intelligence successes allowed evasive routeing of convoys away from danger and reduced losses for the rest of 1941.
After America's entry into the war the unpreparedness of the US Navy allowed the Germans to wreak massive destruction amongst shipping on the American eastern seaboard during the first half of 1942. When the situation was stabilised by the introduction of a convoy system, the wolf packs returned to mid-Atlantic. The massive success of their onslaught was helped by the Allies' temporary loss of ability to read U-boat signals. By the end of 1942, Allied shipping was in crisis.
Losses reached devastating levels again in March 1943 but, thereafter, very effective Allied counter-measures including the introduction of escort support groups, some with aircraft carriers, and Very Long Range aircraft to close the air gap in mid-Atlantic quickly brought a decisive end to the U-boat threat. Although U-boats would continue to operate until the end of the war, the Germans had lost the Battle of the Atlantic by the end of May 1943.
Atlantic convoy in rare good weather
U Boats and wolf packs:
By the beginning of 1942, the U-boats were using the Rudeltaktikwolfpacks consisting of as many as 40 submarines to attack Allied convoys. While this tactic helped minimize the losses of experienced crews, it also pitted the U-boats against Allied escorts. Over the next 18 months the escorts will steadily improve their submarine fighting capabilities.
U Boat shadowing a convoy during the day! This has to be in the early years of the WW2, for a U boat to be on the surface this close to a convoy, as at this time apart from maybe the odd catapult ships, there wouldn't have been air cover and not sure where if any the escort ships might have been?
Typical U boat of the era.
When a oil tanker went up, it was very rare for any of the crew to survive, for even if you jumped over board, the flaming oil would spread across the surface of the water very quickly(not good).
The hunter becomes the hunted!
If you want to see two very good movies that tell both sides of the battle in a non glorified way then you shoud see Das Boot (The Boat) 1981, an excellant movie from the German side of things, well worth seeing and the other movie is the Cruel Sea 1953:
The Cruel Sea is a powerful film that puts you in the battle of the Atlantic. The black and white photography unintentionally conveys the gritty reality of a grim war.(Somebody has said that World War II was a war fought in black and white.) And although the special effects are primitive by today's standards, they are still pretty impressive. The film is an prime example of the post war school of British cinema before it was subsumed by Hollywood. It is a fine film, a fine war film and a fine piece of accurate history.
This movie has a special meaning for me as the ships in it, Corvettes are the same in which my grandfather fought in and he always said they were so bad that they would 'roll on wet grass'. not what you wanted in winter in the Atlantic!!
Hal
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