Who cracked the Enigma Code?

While most of you know World War II for being won by courage, honour and great determination to beat the Germans, I bet none of you knew computer and mathematicians actually saved us a lot of the work!

Now bare with me while I tell you about the crackers of the code and how this helped the Allies win the war, because I'm not a genius at enigma.

In the 1920's, an German engineer named Arthur Scherbius created the first enigma machine, capable of sending and writing messages faster then pen & paper. They were commercially released in the 1920's, but when the tension in Europe began; German deployed the enigma machine into modern war communications.

I don't know too much about how the enigma machine would work - I believe that when communications were to be sent, a operative would simply type away at the machine, then the rotors inside the machine would turn, thus changing the message. The German who received the message would know what way the machine was and how many words they're behind/ahead in the alphabet. Three rotors were on the first model, but later the Germans placed a fourth.

The code would all be known to the reader by way of a dictionary of coding. This would tell them what every letter would mean. The other side would not know how to intercept these communications because they didn't know which way the rotors were; it was their job to look through all possible letters to try and find a clue - which would then lead to another clue - and so forth.

There are other more complex ways the enigma machine would work, but I think if we leave it with moving rotors, then we shan't get lost while divulging who cracked the code.

Just five weeks before the invasion of Poland, a team in Poland told Allies that they had cracked the enigma code; confirming an invasion was due. The Polish man head of the team was Marian Adam Rejewski, a Polish mathematician. He escaped from Poland to France, to keep up the work decoding. He did this by understand the enigma code, and how Germans had bad communications and often used their wives names; dogs names; houses; favourite sports and other nonsense. Once he noticed which way they would turn their rotors daily, it was only a matter of decrypting the messages and sending them to higher authorities.

He spent all his war years cracking the codes, while continuously being moved around the world because of German invasion. He left France when the full occupation took place, but returned after a short time fleeing, awaiting D-Day. He cracked German communications underground France with a team of elite crackers.

The Polish were never thanked enough for the real decisive proof it could be cracked. Marian never came out about his success until later life, way after the war was finished.

After being told about this decryption, many wanted to find out more ways to crack the enigma code and quicker ways of doing so. This is where England's Alan Turing comes into the picture, he created the 'supercomputer', a way of finding codes quickly.

The Bombe was a powerful wave of technology, it basically decoded most of the message for the allies. It is said that the Bombe saved the world about a year or two of war - because it stopped major attacks and destruction from happening. It has also been said that Turing's idea of a supercomputer may have lead to the actual, commercial computer being created.

Around 1942, the Germans decided to put a fourth rotor on the naval enigma, as too many boats were being took down by communication crackers and the allies better naval teams. With America's support in the war, they were able to take many samples of the naval's new enigma, and it was cracked before too long.

While we must commemorate every soldier who fought in the war, we must also thank all the mathematicians and inventors, who put their minds into new ideas, and created every possible opportunity in cracking the code. Winston Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower have both said that, without the Ultra's (name given to code breakers), the war would not have ended. Theorists believe the war would have went on for another two, to over seven years (according to some).