Bletchley Park in crisis

Not sure if this is the right place to post this, given that it's about a building rather than a person. Den, please do move this post if it's inappropriate.

For those who don't know, Bletchley Park held Britain's code-breakers & intelligence analysts during WWII. The work of those there in cracking the Enigma Code was instrumental in winning the war.

The buildings at the park are now a museum, run by a charity dedicated to maintaining them and to educating visitors about wartime history, codes, ciphers, & intelligence work. They're running out of money, as they receive no external funding, & the upkeep costs on the buildings are very high.

You can sign the petition to the Prime Minister to get him to fund the place here:

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/BletchleyPark/

Alternatively, support the place directly by paying it a visit:

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

No problem Ia, I'm 100% behind this petition.
Cheers,

I still don't understand how they managed to do it. I've just read an article about the enigma coding-machine - seems to be impossible to crack.

Stan

Stan,
There was a flaw in the design of the Enigma, in which no letter could be encrypted as itself. This tiny crack allowed the start of a mathematical attack.
Military messages followed a standard format, including salutation and date, which allowed educated guesswork as to parts Enigma intercepts.
Operator error, for example in choosing initial settings which could be guessed, such as BER and LIN.
It was believed by the designers of the Enigma that the calculations needed to break the encryption were beyond human ability, using pen and paper. The Bletchley experts constructed a machine based attack, which speeded up the process enormously.
It is a fascinating story of a collection of various brains working under great stress to defeat a seemingly impossible puzzle. It was, literally, war winning work.

Dennis wrote:

Stan,
There was a flaw in the design of the Enigma, in which no letter could be encrypted as itself. This tiny crack allowed the start of a mathematical attack.
Military messages followed a standard format, including salutation and date, which allowed educated guesswork as to parts Enigma intercepts.
Operator error, for example in choosing initial settings which could be guessed, such as BER and LIN.
It was believed by the designers of the Enigma that the calculations needed to break the encryption were beyond human ability, using pen and paper. The Bletchley experts constructed a machine based attack, which speeded up the process enormously.
It is a fascinating story of a collection of various brains working under great stress to defeat a seemingly impossible puzzle. It was, literally, war winning work.

Somehow great, an Englishmen explains a German the flaws of the German encryption machine.
Shows how stupid it was, to shoot at each other.

Also instrumental in cracking the code was an error by a German radio operator. He sent a message, but the person receiving it asked for it to be repeated. He did so without resetting the code wheels, and sent it in truncated form, leaving out connecting words like 'and' and 'the'. Comparison of the two messages gave the team at Bletchley a way in.

Bletchley Park is a fantastic day out. I'd recommend it without reservation.

IanO wrote:

Also instrumental in cracking the code was an error by a German radio operator. He sent a message, but the person receiving it asked for it to be repeated. He did so without resetting the code wheels, and sent it in truncated form, leaving out connecting words like 'and' and 'the'. Comparison of the two messages gave the team at Bletchley a way in.

Bletchley Park is a fantastic day out. I'd recommend it without reservation.

The next time I,m in England I'll try to vist it. My problem is I always get stucked in your Imperial War Museum ( we have absolutely nothing comparable) and your Museum of Natural History.

Horst