automatic decryption using the hole punched cards. The French contribution matched its war efforts and performance at the Maginot and previously at Trafalgar utter capitulation. After Poland's invasion the Allies assumed command of the spy Thilo who by now had reached higher and higher in military command. Anglo-French Allied intelligence activities around Thilo nearly damned us all to Bratwurst everyday by attempting to use Thilo strategically rather than just getting the all important Enigma settings from him. About as daft as building a flank of subterranean forts the length of France (called the Maginot line) only to see them marched across using French soldiers as human shields. Weak and pathetic - French Intelligence was more concerned with internal politicking as officers jockeyed for titles of office in the propaganda battle in wartime amid Paris's Vichy Government. Meanwhile British code breakers started work on the Polish Enigma machines during the advent of WWII. Enigma technology like all things German was constantly evolving into something even better with the addition of additional tiers of complexity and extra encryption wheels inside the typewriter, most likely inspired to do so by the sieve of Anglo-French Gentlemen's Intelligence club. By the time we needed enigma it could no longer be readily decrypted at the highest levels of German command using the semi-automated hole punched card method.

Enter the Genius Alan Turing, later jailed after the war for homosexuality, he pioneered the automation of the decryption process using a machine conceived of by the Poles called the Bombe. The technology used telephonic exchange components and stood 6 feet proud and were around a dozen in use in number during the height of Bletchley. There were undoubtedly several major contributions to code breaking by the British by the time we worked out that our bacon really did rest on figuring out Hitler's next move, especially the movement of his Wolf Packs of subs in the Atlantic which decimated the supply chain from UK's greatest WWII ally the USA who were busy doubling the size of their economy during the War Years. Several methods built on the Polish solution which used their Bombe to calculate all of the possibilities. Essentially they involved guessing what the message might be so as to reduce the number of calculations required and therefore the time to break the code. There were two methods; one involved the acquisition of messages of no consequence duplicated in plain text and across the Enigma network. The second was the production of crib's-calculated guesses based on experience about various messages including radio transmissions from German weather ships to supplement Wolf pack actions. Know the weather-know the text- guess the code - that kind of thing.

Even more startling is the amount of time during WWII during which we were just plain locked out of enigma. Once locked out there was no way in until brave British seafarers risked their lives with mixed success to scramble aboard scuttled German ships and submarines to scrabble through the diesel and the incoming Atlantic to recover Enigma wheels and parts of code decryption documents. Eventually, the Admiralty, Winston's old office, targeted the weather ships in the Arctic Circle such was their desperation in risking revealing to the German's our interest in their modified banking typewriters. One of the most adventurous raids was penned by none other than Ian Fleming who later became the master of this form of fiction. Doenitz always suspected his Wolf Packs could be monitored through their radio comms despite enigma but could do little about it such was the confidence in German engineering. The confidence was well-founded and remains so for it was the foresight and brilliance of the Polish Secret Service that laid open Enigma before us.

Enigma did so much for us during the war, from starving Rommel out of the Middle East to eventually breaking the Wolf Packs which ruled the Atlantic, which had during the first half of the war inflicted terrible fatalities and material losses on the Allied Command. Some notable examples amongst them all were the identification of the V2 rocket base location from an enigma encrypted communication about the transfer of a single person from that base. That allowed Werner's team to eventually defect in the right direction in the post-war aftermath as the race to find the rockets and their inventors was played