A DARING RAID It is spring 1941 in the midst of World War II 1939 1945 At a secret location in the United Kingdom thousands of men and women are working desperately to intercept and understand the wireless messages transmitted every day by the German armed forces The Germans use a secret code Enigma to protect the information in their messages Breaking this code allows the Allies to know what the Germans are planning it is invaluable information However it is also very difficult to do RAIDS The British code-breakers need to crack the German navy’s codes because the German U-boats submarines are a deadly threat to Allied merchant ships in the Atlantic Ocean One of the code-breakers comes up with a plan to seize the settings sheets and one of the machines used to generate the code an Enigma machine These trophies would give them the clues they desperately need In May 1941 in a highly secret operation the Royal Navy manages to capture a German weather ship and seizes its settings sheets They sink the weather ship to avoid letting the Germans find out that the setting sheets have been taken Then only a few days later British destroyers force a U boat U-110 to surface Believing the U-boat to be sinking the commander does not destroy his Enigma machine or its codes They too are seized by the British
HISTORY DETECTIVES KEEPING SECRETS The activities of the code-breakers remained secret far beyond the end of World War II It was only in the 1970s that the true story began to emerge Thousands of people kept their wartime jobs a complete secret from everyone including friends and family This book looks at how and when those secrets began to come out and the story of what has happened since
This Enigma machine was used by the German military during World War II to encode wireless messages ULTRA SECRET These are just two episodes in the secret world of code-breaking in World War II Of course all sides used codes and all were trying to break each other’s codes This book however mainly examines the work of the Allied code-breakers in the two most
significant operations The first of these was Ultra the name given to information obtained from the messages intercepted and deciphered by the British The second was Magic which was information gained by American code-breakers by intercepting and unscrambling Japanese signals The huge value of both operations was that Germany Italy and Japan remained unaware that their codes were being broken The name Ultra suggests this it was considered even more secret than top secret This was important and as we will see the Allies went to huge lengths to disguise and protect their code-breaking activities
