Crucial parts of a Enigma machine, once key to the Nazi war effort, will today be reunited with the device they were at the heart of 70 years ago.
The rotor dials were found in a store room at HMS Collingwood and are being presented to the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth, which already holds a captured machine.
THESE three lettered dials were once key to the German war effort – and today they will be reunited in Portsmouth with the Enigma machine they used to drive.
Seventy-one years to the day the bravery of Royal Navy sailors captured one such machine from a crippled U-boat in the North Atlantic, the rotors will be presented to the National Museum of the Royal Navy – having been discovered, forgotten in a cupboard for nearly three decades at HMS Collingwood.
Senior ratings CPO Craig ‘Blood’ Read and PO Dan Powditch were cleaning out their store in Mercury building at the Fareham establishment when they found a box containing three rotors for an Enigma machine.
Not convinced they were original, they put them back in a cupboard, but when a colleague came to get some flags from the same store, CPO Read showed him the box of rotors.
The three rotors with a captured German code book
They decided they were probably Enigma machine rotors and after a few searches on the internet they discovered that the box was original – and that the senior rates mess at the old communications school HMS Mercury (now part of Collingwood) had donated a machine with the same number to the museum, but the box of rotors had not gone with it.
Nearly 30 years later, that’s being rectified with Cdre Mike Mansergh, Collingwoood’s Commanding Officer, presenting the rotors and their box to Professor Dominic Tweddle, Director-General of the National Museum of the Royal Navy.
The machine was donated to the museum in 1983 and was probably used by the Norwegian Harbour Police – the country was under Nazi rule for five years – but is missing the reflector. The first rotor, therefore, has been adapted to enable it to do the reflector’s job. This makes the machine an unusual specimen.
An Enigma machine with its four rotors in place
“The number M15653 on the machine matches the number on the box of rotors and the box is stamped withKommando der Marine Station Der 021 albeit smudged and difficult to read,” explained Richard Noyce, Curator of Artefacts at the National Museum of the Royal Navy.
“With both items originating from HMS Mercury I think there can be no doubt the Enigma Machine and its spare rotors were originally together. We are thrilled to be reuniting them again as they are a key part of our history.”
The Enigma machine used a series of rotating ‘wheels’ or ‘rotors’ to scramble plain messages into incoherent text. The settings allowed for many billions of combinations – each generating a completely different message. Only if sender and receiver had identical settings could a message be deciphered.
An example of an undeciphered Enigma message
The Germans considered Enigma uncrackable and it was used by all three of its Armed Forces. But with the help of Polish mathematicians who had managed to acquire a machine prior to the outbreak of WW2, British code breakers stationed at Bletchley Park managed to exploit weaknesses in the machine and how it was used and were able to crack the Enigma code.
They were aided in their efforts by the capture of various machines, machine parts, code books and other documentation, as well as an embryonic computer, the Bombe. Breaking Enigma has been estimated by some historians to have shortened the war by up to two years, saving hundreds of thousands of lives in the process.
The most famous capture took place exactly 71 years ago – May 9 1941 – when a boarding team from HMS Bulldog searched the crippled U110 off Iceland after the boat was brought to the surface. They returned with an Enigma machine and code books.
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