Colossus , the Bletchley Park computer

[Piethagoram]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67997406

[Robbie]

British ingenuity & inventiveness at its best.

The codebreaking at Bletchley Park was arguably one of the top 3 reasons why Germany was defeated in World War 2 & we owe our freedom today to all those who worked at Bletchley Park.

[liampie]

i watched the film with benedict cumberbatch where he portrayed alan turing in the the imitation game.

we have a lot to be thankful for with the computer and alan turing.

the war could have turned out a lot different and ultimately it proved to be a game changer, this and churchills relentless desire to fight for our freedom.

[super_ram]

I'm still learning amazing facts about ww2.There have been loads of films made about the lives and involvement of so many people. Churchill, Montgomery,Barnes Wallis being just a few and also about many various,daring raids.Even now secret details are being made public involving people behind the scenes ,as it were.One thing,apart from dedication and persistence of those involved,that I find even more amazing is the amount of pure good luck that the allies experienced and the inexplicable arrogant and stupid decisions made by enemy.

[Piethagoram]

But the Poles cracked the Enigma code first

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/dec/20/the-pole-who-first-cracked-the-enigma-code

 

[Robbie]

'Alan Turing invented a number of short cuts that made breaking it and re-breaking it when the settings changed every day possible. The Poles, who had the original Enigma machine, worked out how to break it. But as they left it, breaking one day’s code took weeks, by which time the information was too old to be worth much. What Turing and others did at Bletchley Park was work out how to speed up and automate that process so that more days than not they could break the code on the same day, allowing decrypts to be less than 24 hours old when sent to the relevant military handlers. Sometimes they didn’t manage it, and a whole day’s worth would not be decrypted'.

(Source Google)

[Chris]

4 hours ago, liampie said:

i watched the film with benedict cumberbatch where he portrayed alan turing in the the imitation game.

we have a lot to be thankful for with the computer and alan turing.

the war could have turned out a lot different and ultimately it proved to be a game changer, this and churchills relentless desire to fight for our freedom.

It's a very good film. I can't really stand Benefict Cumberbatch, but he did a fantastic job in it.

Until the release, I didn't know anything about this and due to it - I learned that we had some incredible people trying to do what seemed to be the impossible by breaking the German's communication. I think it's a stroke of genius, too, how they worked out which vessels to target without attacking them all. By not giving it away that their code was indeed broken, it allowed us to become more strategic. It also saved many lives!

Also, how we took hold of Iceland in order to stop the Germans from having one of the best advantage points to deal with the US ad ourselves was a master-stroke.

I watched a video on YouTube that explained the importance of this and how basically, we just turned up one day and took over.

Well, we set up bases without asking or being bothered about what Iceland would say, but it did help.