Just seen this interesting story on the BBC. Three German messages have finally been broken after been sent some 64 years ago. Just goes to show the importance of the capture of the Enigma machine. Incredible.

BBC Story

Pretty interesting.....
Now I wonder what the others say?

That's really very interesting. Not only about how they broke the code, but how many people were interested in doing it and helped out.

The article didn't really make clear why only these three messages weren't decoded. I know from some other reading on similar subjects that messages were classfied based on how important they were thought to be. I wonder if they pretty much figured these were just position reports and didn't work on them as hard as others.

Interesting story, but what's missing is why these particular intercepts were not decoded. The implication is that they were too difficult, but the story doesn't really make that clear. The Germans did increase the complexity of their codes during the war, and for a while the allies had a difficult time "reading the mail", but eventually were able to capture another new machine, and got back in the game.

Given that these messages were sent in 1942, it is doubtful that they were not decoded because they were too difficult. Had that been the case, the Germans most certainly would have continued to use this code, and we wouldn't have been able to maintain our intellegence advantage.

I'm guessing that these were simply left uncoded because they were intercepted at about the same time the new codes and 4 wheel machines were introduced and by the time the allies got that problem resolved, these specific intercepts were not felt to be important enough to run through the decoding process and were left uncoded all this time.

Cryptology is certainly a fascinating science.

Tom